Tom Salinsky

There’s a lot to enjoy in Conclave – no, not enjoy: savour. It looks magnificent and Edward Berger continues his productively discordant partnership with composer Volker Bertelmann whose strident foghorning helped make All Quiet on the Western Front so evocative. We have some of this generation’s finest Old Men of Acting giving it everything they’ve got. And who wouldn’t want to peek behind the curtain of decision making at the Vatican? Decision making is one of the keystones of storytelling, whether it’s Chaplin being forced to eat his own shoe, Michael realising only he can take out McClusky or Han Solo coming back to save Luke Skywalker.

But this time, Berger isn’t adapting a classic German novel born out of the pain of a generation-defining conflict. This time, his source text is a Robert Harris page-turner – maybe not quite an airport thriller, but definitely aiming to build suspense and pass the time rather than leaving the reader pondering great questions about the nature of humanity and goodness. And if the characters in Conclave spend any time at all pondering such questions, they do it off-screen, as when they’re in front of the camera, they’re scheming and plotting in a way much more befitting Francis Urquhart or Malcolm Tucker. We know Ralph Fiennes’s earnest and studious Cardinal Lawrence is experiencing a mild crisis of faith because he tells us so – not because it’s dramatised in any particularly interesting way.

Yes, the plot did keep me guessing, but this is also sometimes to the film’s detriment, as the rules of the thriller to which it’s so wedded mean that the clearly-telegraphed penultimate twist must needs be topped by a final somewhat ludicrous twist. To be clear, this is partly the fun of what is a very entertaining and engaging film. It’s endlessly charming and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny to see these pompous clerics in their ornate robes sneaking a crafty ciggie, fiddling with an iPhone or hacking into someone else’s email. But the actual storytelling couldn’t be less interested in the philosophical debates about the future of the Catholic church, and is only just interested enough in the personalities of the main players to make the plot work.

That leaves us with the actors, and here Isabella Rossellini is effortlessly commanding, Fiennes and Tucci elevate the thin material they’re given and Lucian Msamati – whose Cardinal Adeyemi actually is given a little bit of depth and nuance – is very impressive. What baffles me slightly is why John Lithgow took the gig. I’m certain he doesn’t need the work and his character exists solely to wax his moustache and cackle evilly. A missed opportunity.

In terms of character depth, A Complete Unknown is sort of the opposite. Monica Barbaro manages to mine the flimsy screenplay and comes up with a complete character with a rich interior life seemingly from nowhere. Everyone else seems satisfied with doing impersonations and moving through the relevant Wikipedia entries until 140 minutes is up. Maybe that’s because Elle Fanning looks so completely lost – because her character is the only one that’s invented.

I came to this knowing nothing much at all about Bob Dylan, which meant on the one hand that I wouldn’t be huffing and fuming and nit picking as the inevitable artistic licenses were taken. On the other hand, that means things need to be explained to me to make the story work, and various things seemed to happen which were given profound significance without paying off in any meaningful way. Dylan’s first album is all covers. Why? Did they sell? How did he persuade the record company to let him record originals? Who are these two different round men who smoke cigars both of whom seem to be something to do with his management but neither of whom is ever introduced or seen to be making decisions which impact his life or career. Who’s this guy bullying his way into the recording session and ending up playing the organ? What, to be blunt, is the point of any of this, other than to check off events in the life of a famous asshole?

But I could have stood a bit of confusion about the finer points of the music industry if the character work had been stronger. Timothee Chalamet is a fine talent and has clearly worked incredibly hard to summon up Dylan’s manner and musical abilities. But if we aren’t given any insight into who he was and what he wanted, then the entire exercise seems futile. Early on, I appreciated the measured pace and there were some nice moments between Chalamet’s puppy-dog 20-year-old Dylan and Edward Norton’s avuncular Pete Seeger. But after the first half hour, this turns into Folk Hard: The Bobby Dylan Story with a dedication that seems almost demented.

Eight down, two to go.

And they’re off. The starter’s gun has been fired for this year’s Oscars race, and while it wasn’t hard to predict most of the films appearing in most of the categories, there were still some surprises. Chief of these is that the most nominated film is Jacques Audiard’s bonkers transgender Spanish language gangster musical redemption fantasy Emilia Pérez which can count thirteen mentions. This is to a certain extent artificial, but even if you discount Best International Feature and ignore one of its two Best Original Song mentions, it would still top the list with eleven, just ahead of The Brutalist and Wicked, both with ten.

Together with strong showings in the directing and editing categories, that suggests that the contest for Best Picture is between those three, but I think Emilia Pérez will struggle to convert a lot of its chances and I also wouldn’t rule out Conclave, which might not have as many pluses as some of its rivals (and only garnered eight nominations, tying it with A Complete Unknown), but it doesn’t have any negatives – it isn’t weird, it isn’t a musical, it isn’t TikTok friendly and none of its characters were revoiced by AI.

Let’s rundown the Best Picture nominees and I’ll give you some further thoughts.

Anora was a delightful surprise when I took myself off to see it earlier this year. Sean Baker is a very fine filmmaker indeed and the promise he showed with The Florida Project is fully flowering here (I didn’t see Red Rocket but I’ve heard good things). I don’t think this has much of a chance of winning Best Picture, but it’s the kind of movie which could pick up a screenplay award as a sort of consolation prize.

The Brutalist is about as compelling as a 200-minute movie about architecture could possibly hope to be. Adrien Brody is amazing and the guest cast almost uniformly strong. I wasn’t always convinced by Felicity Jones, AI or no AI, but this is a huge and very Oscar-friendly achievement, and currently the bookies’ favourite. I just wonder whether it’s a bit too weighty to have lots of people putting it at the top of their ballots. Full review here.

A Complete Unknown looks great, provided it can avoid enough Dewey Cox clichés, and Timothée Chalamet can usually be relied upon to elevate weaker material. I’ll try and see it very soon.

Conclave likewise has passed me by and looks like hand-milled Oscar bait, but I think that voters who want serious and meaningful will prefer The Brutalist and those who want something with a bit more flair and dash will go for Emilia Pérez – but then maybe Conclave will come through the middle? Against that, Edward Berger hasn’t been nominated as Best Director, which must hurt the film’s chances.

Dune: Part Two feels like it’s here to make up the numbers. I don’t have any particular fondness for the Duniverse, but I went to see both movies on the big screen and I had a good time. I don’t entirely know if the effort required to create them is appropriate to the entertainment value I derived from them, but I don’t have any real complaints about either. The chances of a science-fiction sequel winning Best Picture however are slim to say the least.

And you might think that a similar calculation applies to Emilia Pérez but with nominations for two of its cast, its director, its screenplay and its editing, it must be in with a shout. The bookies have it just behind The Brutalist which sounds right to me – and there’s quite a jump in price, so you could clean up if you got it right.

Of I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys I know almost nothing, but I will – as usual – attempt to see them on a big screen before the first Sunday in March. The Substance I’m delighted to find on the list, as it is already one of my favourite films of the year, and I found it utterly compelling. Full review here.

Lastly, we have Jon M Chu’s Wicked (shorn of its “Part One” suffix) which I thought was one of the best stage-to-screen musical adaptations I’ve seen recently (not quite as good as Matilda though). And yes, a lot of the set-ups will have to be paid off next year which isn’t ideal, but as vastly elongated first acts of musicals go, this is exemplary. Review here.

In other categories, Best Actor looks like a straight fight between Adrien Brody and Timothée Chalamet, Best Actress looks nailed on for Demi Moore, likewise Kieran Culkin is getting a lot of attention for A Real Pain, and Zoe Saldaña will surely win for Emilia Pérez even if that film is shut out elsewhere. Likewise, Conclave must have a good chance at winning Best Adapted Screenplay even if it is not given much love in other categories.

And speaking of films not given much love, it’s a double Guadagnino shut-out with no nominations at all for either Challengers or Queer, and it looks like Nicole Kidman humped all those rugs for nothing as Babygirl has been completely overlooked. Some Academy watchers also expected to see mentions for Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, and Denzil Washington for Gladiator II, which only gets a nod for its costume design. There was also a lot of enthusiasm for Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, but not from the Academy.

Right, time for me to book some movie tickets. See you back here soon.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Doctor Who Christmas special is a relatively recent invention – by which I mean it didn’t happen in the first 26 years of the show’s existence. The revived show is now getting on for twenty years old, which feels profoundly unlikely, but when the first series was a success, news rapidly came that we were getting two more series and a Christmas special. The Christmas Invasion saw new incumbent David Tennant take on the Sycorax and it had a lot to accomplish if it was going to succeed, but it did so brilliantly.

Now, for whatever reason, fandom is divided and disgruntled, as culture wars and general internet-led entitlement lead to furiously toxic pronouncements across all parts of social media. After the mixed reception that the rebooted reboot got earlier this year, Joy to the World needed to do almost as much as the 2005 special in order to be even a qualified success.

I haven’t seen an awful lot of general chatter about this one, but I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was excellent. Ncuti Gatwa, who made a very bold debut, now seems to be brimming with confidence, giving us a lonely, isolated Doctor who hasn’t even noticed that the TARDIS doesn’t have any chairs. He’s joined by a cracking guest cast headed by luminous Nicola Coughlan, but let’s not forget Joel Fry, Stephanie de Whalley, Jonathan Aris and many more. The opening is almost Moffat parodying himself, but explanations are quickly forthcoming and the Time Hotel is a lovely concept, both fresh and instantly-graspable.

Joy’s self-sacrifice isn’t a huge surprise, but that means it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and Coughlan sells the hell out of it, but my favourite bit was the entirely self-contained sojourn in that grim hotel. Structurally, this is not needed at all – it’s the kind of “closed loop” plotting which Terrance Dicks admitted to falling back on to pad The War Games out to ten episodes, which is what allowed Benjamin Cook to prune it back to 90 minutes without significant injury. But it’s the clearest expression of the episode’s theme. Sit down. And play a game with someone you like. Amen to that.

Strongly plotted with lots of good twists and turns and a resolution that actually makes sense, it looks gorgeous (even if there wasn’t quite enough cash left for a really good T-Rex) and Alex Sanjiv Pillai keeps it all moving. I was rapt throughout and can’t wait to watch it again.

Note – spoilers throughout.

I always said it was a bad idea.

To be fair, I also said if anyone had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sean Foley, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, so I was prepared to give Dr Strangelove a chance. Plenty of beloved properties have been successfully reinvented over the years. The stage version can’t be the movie, arguably shouldn’t be the movie. Could it be successful on its own terms?

Ehhh… not really.

It’s not a failure, not by any means and Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George’s plot is still absolutely bomb-proof (pun intended) so if you’ve never been told this story before, there’s a good chance you’ll be in its spell, have a good time with the ripe performances and admire the bravura staging. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the original – or possibly even if you don’t – it’s hard to look past a series of surprising shortcomings. I think of these as forced errors, unforced errors and tonal blunders.

On screen, Peter Sellers plays three roles. Neurotic about his ability to summon up the Texan accent for Major Kong, he got himself signed off the picture after a minor accident on his first day in the cockpit, and Slim Pickens magnificently took over. That leaves one Peter Sellers on the air force base and two in the war room, which Kubrick achieves entirely with cutting and body doubles, never even trying to show both faces in the same frame. That luxury isn’t available to the stage team, and so various holes are introduced in the war room scenes where Coogan has to nip off stage, replaced on a spurious pretext and the change covered by a fairly unconvincing stand-in.

These pretexts distract from the action, the scenes lose momentum, and the fact that two key characters can’t talk to each other in the story’s final moments is a huge problem, but these are all forced errors. I don’t have any better solutions, and it wouldn’t make commercial sense to have another actor play the president, the least showy but most central of the Sellers parts.

We actually first see Strangelove via an early 1960s Zoom call, and when the Germanic scientist agrees to come and join him in person, Coogan as the president comments that that would make life easier “in some ways”. That’s a lovely joke, pressingly lightly on the fourth wall where others might have stampeded through it. It’s a rare moment of restraint, in a script which elsewhere feels like a child has gone through the movie screenplay, scribbling silly comments in the margins. In the movie, Mandrake bristles at Keenan Wynn, clocking his name badge and tartly observing “Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name.” Here Coogan just goes ahead and says “Guano? Like bird shit?” It’s such a good joke that we get Turgidson repeating the exact same words some moments later.

Now, stage and screen are very different animals, and there is an argument that the gag rate needs to be higher and the jokes need to be broader if the audience is there in person. And if the whole room had been rocking with laughter, I would have to admit that even though the vulgarity doesn’t seem to me to be an improvement on the elegant wit of the original screenplay, the piece was doing the job it set out to do. But only about one joke in five ever really landed the night I was there, with most punchlines met with soft chuckles, or total silence. If you’re committing to making this a wall-to-wall gagfest, then it needs to be Book of Morman funny, not middling student revue funny.

And these tonal lapses extend to the performances too. Coogan is quite bad as Mandrake, the part where you’d imagine he’d be most at home, playing him as a rubbery cross between Prince Charles and Alan Partridge, the script decorated with sub-PG Wodehouse British-ism like “Bally bingo bollocks” and other such drivel. That’s a shame as John Hopkins’s General Ripper is one of the highlights of the play, with just a little Donald Trump mixed into Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chomping lunacy. Coogan also struggles with Merkin Muffley, which is a better performance, but the comedy value in the president’s egg-headed earnestness seems to elude him and he badly muffs the hilarious phone call with Moscow, such a highlight of the original movie.

Once again, he’s paired with a brilliant performance from one of the supporting actors. Giles Terera, the original UK Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is terrific as Turgidson, effortlessly finding the tone which seems to be eluding so many others. Tony Jayawardena is pretty good as Ambassador Bakov too (but what was wrong with de Sadski?). Coogan is best by far as Strangelove himself, and here for once all of the pieces seem to come together, as the actor’s performance is neither a rendition of what Sellers did, nor a reaction against it, the new backstory adds rather than detracts, and Iannucci and Foley find a new way for this character to be funny.

If this was where we ended up, with some tonal lapses and some forced errors, I’d be happier to recommend this, but the unforced errors are completely confounding. Chief among these is the stuff on the B52. This is the least successful element of the whole evening. The projections are pretty, but by presenting the whole plane onstage, the production never puts us inside the cockpit, so there’s never a feeling of claustrophobia. And the two other pilots are woefully underwritten. But far more damaging are the plot changes introduced here.

A good screenplay is a piece of architecture and it’s hard to make one change without introducing problems elsewhere, and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get lost. Here, the function and the purpose of the doomsday device is muddled, with the first half making it clear that the machine has to be triggered manually, and the possibility existing of a deal to be struck whereby America destroys one of its own cities to stay the Premier’s hand (shades of Fail Safe). Only in the second half is it made clear that the whole purpose of the device is that it triggers itself automatically. And for no good reason, they cut the line “The Premier loves surprises.” This introduces confusion and gains us nothing.

But worse is to come, as the role of the OPE/POE “recall code” also gets garbled during the interval. In the first half, we’re told, in lines repeated verbatim from the movie, that the plane’s radios won’t receive at all unless messages are preceded by the appropriate three-letter-sequence (known only to the pilots and General Ripper). However, when we’re in the cockpit, this is changed to the sequence “POE” is a coded order to turn back, and rather than have the CRM discriminator destroyed when the plane is hit by the missile, it’s working fine, but Major Kong elects to ignore the order. And that change is fatal.

The American military was so worried by what the movie might do to American morale that they insisted a disclaimer be placed at the beginning. In my eyes, that only makes what follows more convincing. The nuclear deterrent is vulnerable to a single person making one bad decision and the weapons at our disposal are so devastating that the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.

Except here, where is takes two people to make bad decisions. And that isn’t as potent. Not by half.

Elsewhere, the character of Faceman adds very little, and Mark Hadfield is working way too hard. A laborious and relentlessly unfunny subplot about the Ambassador wanting fish does eventually lead us to a pretty great visual punchline, and – as noted – the production design is amazing. Most effective are probably the scenes between Ripper and Mandrake, as the physical effects and sound design really do summon up the bullets flying and Hopkins and Coogan play off each other very well. But time and again, the changes made to the script detract rather than add, sometimes in minor irritating ways, sometimes in major fatal ways.

I think the real missed opportunity here is the original ending. As written and initially shot, when the bombs began falling, the war room was to break into an enormous custard pie fight. Kubrick cut this (and destroyed the footage), feeling that it didn’t quite work to escalate from nuclear annihilation to prat falls – and he was very likely right. But onstage, the calculus is different. The bombs don’t feel as viscerally real – but the custard pies would. The actual ending isn’t bad, as a ghostly Vera Lynn transports us to a musical afterlife, but I can’t help but imagine what a more slapstick finale might have looked like. A little bit of sweaty messiness might have helped this very slick but often sterile production gain a bit more intensity.

I said it last time, and it bears repeating: the build-up is easy and the payoff is hard. One of the best ways of making the payoff really land is to have our hero achieve victory at some personal cost. The first two RTD season finales achieved this with considerable style. In Doomsday, the Doctor loses Rose and in The Parting of the Ways, he loses his life (he got better). Subsequent finales didn’t have the same power, with David Tennant’s exit undermined a little by his rather self-indulgent pre-expiry victory lap.

But we knew, or I guess we knew, that Russell wasn’t going to kill Ruby, murder Mel or have Ncuti make an early exit. So the nearest we get to a squeeze of vinegar to help the triumph over adversity feel a bit more earned is the reunion between birth mother and daughter, which felt real and complicated in the best tradition of nu-Who, but came after the villain was summarily despatched and all of the dusted citizens of the universe popped back into life again.

The other problem for finales is you have to answer all of those niggling questions. So, yes, we find out that Ruby’s mother was just a girl young in trouble, but her significance to those travelling in the TARDIS – a TARDIS with a malevolent quasi-Egyptian god wrapped invisibly around it – created a weak point in time. That’s a fair enough explanation as far as it goes, but I can only assume that the Time Window was using a hefty dose of artistic license as it depicted her pointing out a signpost to nobody with such melodramatic flair.

And of course, as soon as the world turns to sand, the spectre of a reset button rears its head. That’s the problem with bringing the apocalypse as opposed to merely threatening it. But the world stayed dead for an appreciable amount of time, and – thanks to that heartbreaking scene with Sian Clifford – we felt it as opposed to were merely informed about it. The journey also contained much that was worthwhile, with Bonnie Langford doing wonderful work, whether roaring through “London” on a Vespa, tenderly fondling Colin Baker’s old tie, collapsing in near-exhaustion on the floor of the TARDIS, or possessed by Sutekh and giving us magnificent claw-hand-of-evil acting.

Ncuti and Millie showed their class here too, with Millie’s fake-out “God of nothing” moment being a stand-out – and if you thought the secret of her mum was pure bathos, then here’s the Doctor saving the day with bungee cord, a whistle and a spoon. Detailed explanations of the whistle and the spoon were apparently both written and then discarded in favour of more showing-not-telling. It’s fine to cut pedantic explanations if they aren’t needed, but this walks a fine line between “It’s a neat trick, I’ll explain later” and “Details are boring, on with the adventure.” I think it’s on the right side of that line, but it’s a close one.

So, this is an episode of moments rather than a truly cohesive hour of storytelling, but many of the moments are fabulous, with Kate Stewart’s sign off, the Remembered TARDIS, Mrs Flood cos-playing as Romana/The White Guardian/Mary Poppins/Jackanory and Ncuti’s howl of despair into the echoing void. It’s clear this is a TARDIS team for the ages, but I hope next year Russell remembers that he doesn’t have to end the entire universe for us to care – sometimes just seeing two characters holding hands in adversity is enough.

I made the mistake of posting an eye-rolling Tweet about how the season’s mysterious big bad isn’t going to be the Valeyard – a villain associated with a charismatic performer, which looks to devoted fans like a dangling loose end in the series’ mythos, but whose backstory doesn’t really make any coherent sense in the broadcast episodes, let alone invites further forensic investigation. With the passing of Michael Jayston, the already thoroughly remote prospect of this complicated enemy being returned to receded further into the darkest recesses of possibility. Replying to another fan, I agreed that it was equally unlikely that we’d be seeing Fenric, or the Rani, or Harrison Chase, or the Drahvins. Ha ha ha. Well done to me.

Except that I started that list with Sutekh.

Now, on reflection, Sutekh is one of the few badguys from the classic series whose return does make sense. Pyramids of Mars is a very well-remembered story (not least because it was one of the very first released on VHS), from the most highly-regarded era of the show, but there’s nothing about him which particularly needs to be explained to the new viewer. Partly because he wasn’t invented by Robert Holmes, who was riffing on Hammer Horror versions of the Mummy’s Tomb and flipped through the Big Boys Book of Egyptian Mythology to find the right name. Partly because everything you need to know is right there on the screen.

And, yes, this does feel like the Russell T Davies Stolen Earth/Army of Ghosts/Bad Wolf playbook, with a certain amount of narrative vamping in the early going, and then an acceleration into a mind-blowing reveal at the end. That isn’t a particularly difficult bit of writing, but neither is it trivial, and while this makes it look easy, let’s not overlook some of the grace notes in the writing and the directing. The Time Window is a wonderful device, brilliantly executed. The agony of not quite being able to see the face of Ruby’s mother is exquisite (and just how far away were those security cameras?). The Su-Tech gag is delightful, as is UNIT’s casual dismissal of the S. Triad anagram. All the characters pop – maybe except for Rose who doesn’t get much to do here. But I loved the new 13-year-old scientific advisor and I adored Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together.

But, of course, and by design, this is all build-up and no payoff. And build-up is easier. If this doesn’t all come together next week, that could well tarnish this episode’s reputation. I liked Dark Water a lot more before I’d seen Death in Heaven. But for now, for the ascent to the top of the rollercoaster, this is faultlessly done, with all departments firing on all cylinders, so once again, it’s the full five stars from me.

Weirdly, as I watch toxic parts of the internet melt down in a froth of racism and homophobia (“Two men kissing, urgh!” “My Doctor would never dance to Kylie” “Does he have to say ‘honey’?”) what I loved about this episode was how unashamedly traditional it was. It takes real craft, and skill, and care, to take a solid science fiction run-around and really make it work, ramping up the stakes, pulling surprises on the audience and have it all (or almost all) make sense. This isn’t a galaxy-ending catastrophe, or a rewriting of everything we thought we knew about the Doctor’s history. It’s some malevolent monsters whose fun means innocent people suffer, and our hero is going to stop them – hurrah!

As is rapidly becoming the norm, we don’t waste time with tedious TARDIS scenes in which the leads ponderously decide to go to the environment we already saw in the teaser – the Doctor and Ruby are just there. But while Ruby is having fun soaking up the atmosphere, Ncuti has spotted an “evil leaper” watching from the balcony. With the exception of Captain Jack, who shares some DNA with the titular Rogue, it’s rare in Doctor Who to see a dark version of the central character. The Master is just another villain, but Rogue has a mission, and he thinks he’s the good guy, which makes him fascinating. And it makes perfect sense to me that this most open, empathetic and warm-hearted of Doctors would be attracted to him. I’m sorry, did you prefer David Tennant wholesomely falling for Madame Pompadour? You do remember that that love affair began when she was a child, right?

One of several brilliant story devices is that Rogue thinks there’s only one Childer at the party, whereas we know there are two – but our smugness doesn’t last very long, because there are actually three! No, five! No, six! And, yes, I was completely hoodwinked by the Ruby switcheroo at the end (not least thanks to Millie Gibson’s wonderful evil bird acting), and I briefly considered that this might be a Face the Raven-style situation where the companion’s seeming death sets up the season-ending two-parter.

So, this has wonderful costumes, solid plotting, great guest stars (Indira Varma is sensational), it’s got a strong emotional core, and it kept me guessing all the way to the end. Are there niggles? Yeah, a couple. Jonathan Groff has charisma to burn, but he seems so determined to create a contrast to Ncuti’s exuberance that he ends up underplaying to a fault. Revealing a few more layers towards the end would have been nice – we know he has the range. And on a rewatch, I’m not super-convinced about the Doctor glimpsing the unconscious Childer in her turquoise dress and somehow coming to the conclusion that Ruby in her yellow dress is therefore dead. Why didn’t he examine the body? I also think that the details of how the trap worked, and just what allowed Rogue to substitute himself for Ruby, could have been set up a little more clearly.

These are definitely niggles though, and very far from fatal flaws, because this was hugely entertaining, and certainly a more reliable model for stories going forward than the more outré offerings which we began the season with. Just one more thing – is he going to cry in every episode? It doesn’t have nearly as much impact fifth time round.

Well, this seems to have delighted, shocked, disappointed and enraged people in equal measure. As is typical for this iteration of the show, it’s a wildly atypical episode, again sidelining the Doctor – and this time Ruby too – giving us a thoroughly unlikeable leading character; and then rather than giving her a redemption arc, revealing further despicable layers as the story unfolds.

The opening is pretty standard sub-Black Mirror, isn’t-social-media-awful stuff. Russell T Davies’s writing across all genres is typified by big operatic emotions and hard-to-miss social commentary. There isn’t a lot of subtlety in most of what he does – and yet, there is a detail about the world of Finetime which it is at least possible to miss, and that’s the monochromatic nature of the cast.

In the classic era of the show, this was just the way of things. You tended not to see non-white actors in British television unless there was some very specific reason. And sometimes that didn’t seem like it was helping overmuch. Season 25 features one Black man per story – a descendent of slavery, a blues musician, a jazz musician and a rapper. Yikes. Casting even one non-white actor just because that’s what modern Britain looks like doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone until we get to Battlefield and Survival and that’s arguably too late.

When tall, posh, white men are the default, it doesn’t look like identity politics to only centre them. But casting only white actors is also a choice, it also makes a statement. Casting Jodie Whitaker meant that the possibility existed that some characters might think differently of the Doctor, even compared to beta-males like Troughton or McCoy, but this wasn’t something which Chris Chibnall felt like exploring. I would say this was because he worried about weakening the character, but his version of the Doctor was almost uniquely panicky, inept, cowardly and immoral, so I dunno what he was worried about. So far, Ncuti Gatwa’s ethnicity has yet to be a plot point. Until the hammerblow ending of this episode.

I kind of wish that Lindy Pepper-Bean and her ghastly crew had spelled out their objection. Their dialogue in the climactic scene is almost coy. There’s a really thought-provoking question being asked here – do you try and save the irredeemable? But it’s undercut slightly because the script can’t bring itself to actually say what the characters are clearly thinking. Not that I think this story needed a rewrite by Quentin Tarantino you understand, it just didn’t sound entirely natural. And Ncuti Gatwa – on his first day on set for this season – is spectacular as first he can’t comprehend what he’s being told, and then, suddenly, horribly, he can.

The bigger problem with the episode is that by telling the story so rigidly from Lindy’s point-of-view, we’re forced to spend most of the running time with a vacuous, selfish, self-centred character. I get why the structure is necessary to make the ending work, but it felt like the tail wagging the dog a bit to me. So, this was another bold stroke from a series which is determined to experiment in every way it can, but a slightly awkward viewing experience for me. Not because I was being forced to confront my own prejudice, just because Callie Cooke was doing such a good job of creating such an unlikeable lead, and I’d rather have spent more time with the Doctor.

Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, and to everyone’s surprise, George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max and brought us the astonishing Fury Road, which hoovered up dollars, acclaim and awards in pretty much equal measure. Since, by all accounts, a detailed backstory for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa had already been written, the surprise this time around is that it took a further nine years for the prequel to hit our screens. But, while the new film is still a wildly entertaining, beautifully shot, thrill-ride, it doesn’t have the ice-water shock of the 2015 film, and nor does it have anything new to say, despite being a good half-hour longer.

What it does do is split its narrative into individually-named chapters, a gimmick I always appreciate. But while this lends a welcome feeling of a sure hand on the tiller – “I know you aren’t sure what the story is quite yet, but sit back, you’re in safe hands” – I came away feeling I’d seen half-a-dozen very exciting but rather samey short action films. Fury Road didn’t have this gimmick and didn’t need it. It was stripped to the bones. The first half is running away and the second half is going back again. Nothing else is needed.

Here, it’s all a bit more complicated and convoluted. We don’t even see Anya Taylor-Joy (taking over from an absent Theron) until about an hour in, because we’re seeing the adventures of a prepubescent Furiosa first. And it’s all very well done, with a nice turn from Tom Burke in the middle, and there’s no shortage of demented action set pieces, eye-popping visuals and the familiar rogues gallery of badguys and misfits. Miller even seems to be aping Sam Raimi with his bonkers push-ins through the windscreens of various vehicles, and there’s almost as much undercranking here as in a 1960s James Bond movie.

Saving grace of what could have been a fine, rather exhausting, over-familiar affair is the amazing performance of Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, and it’s greatly to the film’s credit that the climactic scene is all about him and Furiosa as people, rather than as ballistic objects.

Speaking of ballistic objects, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers sees a profoundly odd trio of actors (Spiderman’s girlfriend, Prince Charles and Riff from West Side Story) hashing out their complicated romantic feelings via the medium of tennis. I wouldn’t have seen this coming from the director of Call Me By Your Name, who’s always proven to be a keen observer of human nature, but who hasn’t previously struck me as much of a visual stylist. Here he goes to town on the material, slamming Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score into ordinary dialogue scenes, shooting arguments like tennis matches and tennis matches like video games.

Too much of this stuff and you’d get the impression that the director doesn’t trust the material, a feeling emphasised by the free-floating timeline with early scenes turning up in what almost feels like a random order. But the playing of the three leads holds it together and when a should-be low-stakes tennis match in a no-name tournament starts to become the spine of the story, the central trunk to which all the other scenes connect, then it comes fully into focus. Just as I was beginning to get exasperated at it, the pulpy soap-opera plotting pulled me back in, and then I surrendered to the beguiling excess of it all.

I didn’t know we were getting a Doctor-lite episode.

I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers – I didn’t know that Boom was about the Doctor spending the whole episode standing on a landmine until about a day before the episode aired – and so it came as quite a surprise when we followed Ruby away from the TARDIS. It came as an even greater surprise when the “Welsh Folk Horror” aspect of the story turned out to be one of several narrative feints. It’s easy to get fed up with a tale in which nothing is ever what it seems because sometimes the audience stops trusting the storyteller. But this is such a beguiling installment, built around such a chilling image, that that never bothered me.

And it’s about something. It’s not a puzzle to be solved – we’ll come back to that in a minute – it’s rather a deep, sad, meditation on loss and loneliness and the fear of abandonment. Ruby’s mother locking her out and telling her that the woman who gave birth to her didn’t want her either is savage in its ferocity. How does anyone bounce back from that? Well, in a typical edition of a fast-moving science fiction adventure anthology show, they kill a monster or defeat a badguy and then it’s all smiles. But in reality, you just keep on living.

And amazingly, that’s what happens to Ruby. UNIT can’t help her, the Doctor can’t help her, she can’t help herself, and so she just lets the years roll by. And sure, after the first time jump, the prospect of a reset button at the end of the episode looms very large, and by the time she’s an elderly woman, it’s pretty much guaranteed. But a reset button need not render the entirety of the preceding action moot – even if none of the characters can remember anything. Sometimes the journey is worthwhile. And this was so creepy, so suspenseful, so heartfelt, so bleak and yet so sunny, that it really was.

Various people are complaining online that the ending didn’t make sense or wasn’t resolved, but I was thrilled not to have to wade through endless turgid minutes of science fiction plot admin. Ruby loses the Doctor when they break the circle which trapped Mad Jack. Ruby has to neutralise Mad Jack to have any hope of putting things back the way they were, but she still has to go the long way round. When future Ruby stops the circle from being damaged, the cycle is broken and she and the Doctor can go on their way. If you wanted to be told that the was all due to the Galactic War between the Zagbars and the Zoobles and that the old lady was the Zagbarian Ambassador caught in a temporal flux and trying to stop Earth from being caught in the crossfire, I understand your frustration, but I think you have to accept that that wasn’t what this story was trying to be. This was something much more allegorical, much less literal.

And so, no, I don’t think threads from that ending will be returned to. Clearly there’s a lot going on already – even Ruby has started to notice that Susan Twist keeps cropping up – but the ending of the episode didn’t give me the impression of a writer saying “And here are some unanswered questions that you need to keep in mind for next time.” It felt final, complete and for me at least completely satisfying. Much of this is due to the extraordinary work done by Millie Gibson who makes every aspect of Ruby’s bizarre journey totally believable. As sad as I was not to see more of Ncuti this time round, this was an exceptional episode of Doctor Who which kept me guessing right to the very end.