Tom Salinsky

Boyhood is certainly the most distinctive film in this year’s Oscar line-up, and in a year which includes Birdman, that really is saying something. In many ways, the two movies are polar opposites. Iñárritu’s film appears to have been shot in a single take, lasting the running time of the movie (although in fact there are numerous hidden cuts). Linklater’s appears to have been (and in fact was) shot over an extended period, lasting the amount of story time covered in the movie. Iñárritu’s film is stylised, surreal and metaphysical. Linklater’s is grounded, mundane and realistic. That they are respectively the most-nominated movie and the favourite for Best Picture says a lot about what a bold slate the Academy has put forward this year, in this category at least.

Before I sat down, I had some misgivings about Boyhood. A feature film cannot hope to sustain interest on the strength of its quirky mode of production, after all, and American coming-of-age sagas are not things which I generally rush to embrace. It’s not as if countless American sit-coms haven’t already given us the experience of watching young actors mature into gawky adolescents dozens of times before. The success or failure of Boyhood will thus rest on how interesting the individual segments are, and how well they cohere into a narrative – not on the fascination I might have with the decade-plus production schedule nor simply murmuring “my haven’t you grown,” each time we skip a few more months.

Strikingly, almost the first thing we see our three central characters doing is moving house. The family (six year old Mason, his mother Olivia and sister Samantha) moves three or four more times over the coming years/minutes and this gives the film a restless quality, always moving forward and rarely looking back. Early on Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) is the most engaging figure – quirky, precocious and funny. But she gradually cedes the film to Mason (Ellar Coltrane) who morphs from saucer-eyed little brother to shy pubescent to rangy, cynical young man while Mom (Patricia Arquette) tries to keep the family together.

Dropped into the mix is absent father Mason Snr (frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke) who initially seems like a pretty standard-issue deadbeat dad, but as future stepfathers will confirm, actually has a bit more compassion and smarts about him than first appears. Linklater is amazingly adept at picking out items of early-2000s technology which perfectly date the film without any need to explicitly mark the passing of time.

Of course, as the chapters go by, it becomes impossible to entirely forget about the mode of production, but as well as gaining the opportunity to see characters gradually mature and change without a sudden and jarring change in actor or inch-thick prosthetic make-up appliances, the nature of the shoot also dictates how the story will progress. The impossibility of keeping a large cast together means that whenever the Mason family moves, they almost always leave the entire supporting cast behind, never to be seen again. This is disappointing, since the opportunity to reintroduce forgotten characters, now transformed by the passage of time, would provide not only more structure but marvellously truthful moments, inaccessible to other films.

The gradually evolving screenplay also makes it hard for Linklater to plant elements which will pay-off later on, and this manifests itself in part in a reluctance to let the human drama become too dramatic. When Mason and his buddies are messing around with dangerous weapons, or when his step-grandparents give him a shotgun, we already know that there won’t be a fatal accident, because it isn’t that kind of movie. When Olivia’s second husband flings a whiskey glass across the room, it almost feels like a scene cut in from a more conventional melodrama.

The pay-off for this soap opera is all Linklater, however. Following Olivia’s desperate rescue mission to remove her kids from drunken Bill’s sadistic control, Mason complains bitterly about being sent to a new school rather than thanking her for her selfless bravery. And this is one of the things which elevates the movie. As well as most of the individual episodes being interesting enough to sustain the interest (while mundane enough to suit the tone), the issue of point-of-view is fascinating. Arguably, this is Olivia’s movie. Sure, Mason Snr also does some growing up, but mainly it’s the tale of how an aimless single Mom working a dead-end job and bickering with her ex about child support, grows to become a much-loved and well-respected psychology teacher with two grown up kids who adore her and no need for a man to define who she is. But we keep missing bits of this move because we at least mainly see it through Mason’s eyes, and so when she unexpectedly bursts into tears towards the end, we realise that we’ve only been on the edges of this story – and that’s really what childhood is like.

I have to be honest, though, I didn’t fall in love with Boyhood the way a lot of critics did. If you took the events of the film and wrote a novel instead, you’d have little more than a rather thin and uninteresting short story. Mason and his family are just barely individual enough to be interesting. Take away the fascination with watching the cast grow older and you do still end up with something which is frustratingly generic. A less “scorched earth” approach towards plotting might have helped, but as noted I think that may have been inevitable.

What remains however was almost never boring (only when Olivia’s third partner also turns out to be a drunk who is mean to her kids did I feel as if the movie was repeating itself), and so even if this isn’t one of those films I will keep going back to, I am certainly pleased to have seen it and delighted that Linklater and co were able to pull it off.

Warning – this review contains some potential spoilers

There’s no denying that Whiplash is an extraordinary film. What’s most extraordinary about it is how very, very close to being ordinary it comes. Here’s the set-up. Music student and aspiring jazz drummer Miles Teller, newly enrolled at a prestigious (fictional) music academy in New York hopes to be and is talent-spotted by martinet band-leader and conductor JK Simmons. Through his sometimes brutal tutelage, Teller develops his talent, but suffers mightily in the process.

I have to say, this set-up, neatly laid out in the trailer, did not inspire me with confidence. This is pretty familiar stuff. The older man whose ruthless and sadistic game-playing (while simultaneously firing off zippy one-liners) ultimately leads the callow youngster he takes under his wing to a greater understanding and eventual a rapprochement between the two. Off the top of my head, I can think of Scent of a Woman, every episode of House MD, Full Metal Jacket (only with a different ending), House of Games, and many sports movies including Million Dollar Baby, Rocky and (sort-of) A League of Their Own. You can probably think of more. Plus Shine sets the bar pretty high for musicians-who-push-themselves-to-breaking-point movies for me.

But if we must have another entry in the collection of demented mentor figures, let us at least have one played by JK Simmons who seizes the material with delirious glee – with a lesser actor in this key role, the whole thing might fall apart. He shifts effortlessly from laconic encouragement to full-on physical abuse, constantly keeping his young protégée off-balance, while continuing to manipulate, encourage and punish him to greatness. Teller, likewise, holds up his end of the bargain, giving poor Andrew just enough steel that we continue to root for him, and enough vulnerability that we fear he might fail. Teller’s Brat Pack good looks allow him to be laser-focused on his goal without losing too much audience sympathy. It’s a good job in a much less showy acting role, although his contortions behind the drum kit are amazing to behold.

But to understand what makes this film so extraordinary, it is necessary to consider (pace Julian Barnes) all the things which writer-director Damien Chazelle did not do. Anyone who has heard the set-up or seen the trailer will understand that the main conflict will be between charismatic but possibly loopy teacher and talented but possibly too feeble student and that the interest lies in seeing how each deals with the other, and who will end up on top.

Plenty of films would have built up at least one, if not both characters, before they first meet. They would show us Teller’s first day at school, establish his desire to be one of the great jazz drummers, clue us in on this school works, what power JK Simmons has (maybe his reputation precedes him), what competitions his band will enter and what the rewards are for doing well in them, and ease us into the story. Whiplash has no truck with any of that. Seconds after the company logos are off the screen, we get the two men’s first meeting, and already Simmons is playing mind-games with Teller. This is what you came for? Well, here it is, front and centre.

This ruthless efficiency certainly smacks of confidence in the material and the cast, and it largely pays off. There’s a pleasing lack of pedantry which, especially after the clunking Theory of Everything, is very refreshing. He picks the players. They play in competitions. It’s important. You got that? Okay, we can move on. But what’s also fascinating is that the nature of their interaction all centres on technical ability. Just like in a sports movie, Teller pushes his body beyond what it can bear, plunging bloody hands into ice water and then picking up the drumsticks again. But whereas you will hear the dread passive-aggressive phrase “Not quite my tempo” from Simmons’ terrifying conductor more than once, you hear hardly anything about the music and nothing about soul or inspiration.

You don’t even hear anything about improvisation, and this is a movie about jazz! The expected conflict between technical proficiency and playing from your heart simply fails to materialise. Good is good if Simmons says it is. It’s like being able to jump high or run fast or bowl a 300 game. When you can do it, everybody knows it. Okay then. And yet, the music itself belies that. Justin Hurwitz does an amazing job with the (entirely diagetic) score and Chazelle shoots the shit out of the practising, rehearsing and playing sequences which are edited with razor-accuracy by Tom Cross.

But while this lean approach pays dividends (the supporting cast is pared to the bone too – none of the other band-members really register, Paul Reiser is in maybe four scenes as Teller’s pleasingly rumpled Dad, and Teller gets a girlfriend only to dump her immediately to focus on drumming) it also has drawbacks. Finding the shapes so familiar, even though I was enjoying the bright colours used to fill them in, I pretty quickly constructed a road-map of the movie in my head, right the way up to the eccentric mentor’s eventual humbling followed by his little speech of self-justification.

However, removing all unnecessary material means the films burns through story pretty quickly and so we reached that point only around 70 minutes in. It’s in its final act – not so much a plot twist as an elegant narrative curlicue – that the movie finally did what I think it had been trying to do all along: it surprised me.

This is fine film-making, a little less adventurous in its construction than maybe its writer-director would like to admit, but rooted enough to feel real, brash enough to feel arresting and shot with real verve and brio. I somehow doubt it will last the ages, but it’s tight, exciting and grown-up cinema.

Black marks to my local Odeon (Camden) who allowed me to book online and pick my seats in their spacious, but misshapen Screen 1, and then without notice moved the film to their broom closet of a Screen 4 and stuck me in the back row, far left. However, kudos for politely and promptly refunding my money when I complained.

The Oscars are almost upon us. The BAFTA nominations were announced yesterday, the Golden Globes are on Sunday and the cinemas are full of beautifully framed suffering and gurning, which will shortly give way to the usual fare of explosions and solid jawlines.

In the last week I’ve crammed in three movies, at least of two of which I confidently expect to see in the Best Picture nominees come 15 January, all three of which I shall review here.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

After the slightly tedious An Unexpected Journey and the unexpectedly elegant and engaging The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson’s sixth and final Middle Earth film is a rather ho-hum affair. Beginning almost immediately where the previous film left off (almost as if the material had been shot without anyone imagining there would a break of a year in between), the focus is all on Luke Evans’ anodyne Bard the Bowman who proceeds to almost immediately slay the fiery Smaug in exactly the way he said he would.

This brutally efficient, by-the-numbers style is the watchword for most of the film. After Gandalf is finally released from his “holding pattern” at Dol Guldur and after sufficient chat to bulk the thing up to a reasonable running time, the titular battle finally gets underway. Bonkers dwarf-king Billy Connolly is a bit of a treat and Richard Armitage’s mano-a-mano show-down with Azog works well, but the gigantic battle scenes contribute nothing we haven’t seen before and crucially none of the character drama really resonates, with Thorin’s re-emergence from “dragon sickness” disposed of in a few minutes with little more than a CGI pool of gold and a furrowed brow.

What’s particular disappointing is how little Martin Freeman gets to do. His performance was the saving grace of part one, the heart and soul of part two and his side-lining in the climactic instalment leaves the film without a happy centre. Still, I’d rather be him than, say, James Nesbitt who I swear gets two lines in the whole thing. A bit more Freeman and a lot less clumsy comic relief from Ryan Gage’s Alfrid Lickspittle would have gone a long way.

Birdman

One of the most bracing and exciting films I’ve seen in a very long time, Birdman deserves all the praise which is being heaped upon it. In a neat bit of self-referential casting, Michael Keaton leads as Riggan Thompson, Hollywood actor once well-known for his starring role in a series of extravagant super-hero movies, now attempting to show snooty Broadway theatre-goers that he is still relevant, talented and vital with a self-penned, self-directed adaptation of a (real) Raymond Carver story starring himself.

He is joined on-stage by his girlfriend Andrea Riseborough, a Broadway first-timer (Naomi Watts) and volatile supposed genius Ed Norton, gleefully following in Dustin Hoffman’s footsteps by playing up to his reputation as a difficult and demanding star. What sets this tale of desperation and personal need for fulfilment apart from the crowd is its casual attitude towards reality and the innovative shooting style deployed by director Alejandro González Iñárritu (that’s easy for you to say). Riggan is haunted by the voice of his musclebound alter-ego and appears to be able to – or believes himself to be able to – or fantasies that he is able to – alter reality with a single thought. Our first shot of him is floating in mid-air in the lotus position. He later apparently causes a light to fall on a recalcitrant fellow actor and later visits all manner of physical impossibilities on himself and objects around him.

While we watch these fantastic actors explore these great characters in this pressure cooker situation (I haven’t even mentioned brilliantly restrained Zach Galifianakis, an ice cold turn from Lindsay Duncan and a delightful cameo from Amy Ryan), Iñárritu’s camera swoops and circles and darts and dollies and never, ever (apparently) cuts.

The discipline of shooting the entire movie in a single take (although not in continuous time) makes it even harder to be certain about what is real and what is not, but this carefully calibrated ambiguity locates us inside Riggan’s head, as the camera crawls over Keaton’s panicky face, its sharp Batman contours now crinkled with a network of fine lines.

It’s not a perfect movie. I’ve had about enough of the cliché of real-acting-is-doing-it-for-real so when Norton starts drinking real gin on stage I rolled my eyes a bit – although, to be fair this is certainly on-theme. What’s much less satisfactory is Emma Stone as Riggan’s daughter who adds very little to proceedings, and when she and Norton start playing Truth or Dare on a balcony, the whole movie suddenly descends into after school special faux-profundity.

For the rest of its running time, however, the film remains bracingly original, constantly kept me guessing and even managed to pull off an obscure ending which doesn’t seem like a cop-out (it also includes a wonderful visual pun). Hardly stands a chance of getting the big prize, but surely it must be nominated – unlike the amazing percussion score by Antonio Sánchez which the Academy won’t even consider on the entirely spurious basis that the movie also includes some classical music.

The Theory of Everything

I don’t really like biopics. They’re very, very hard to pull off. Most non-biopic movies cover relatively short spans of time and those that attempt to work over longer periods need a great deal of discipline to find a central theme and hang on to it. When you are telling a true story of somebody’s life, there’s an apparent need not to leave anything out, so most biopics go from cradle to grave, with the result that we whip through key incidents and the overall effect is like reading a Wikipedia entry rather than being caught up in the reality of somebody’s life. Chaplin is possibly the worst example of this tendancy, The Social Network a particularly elegant way around the problem.

The Theory of Everything is blessed with an absolutely outstanding performance by Eddie Redmayne. Physically contorting himself like no other actor since Daniel Day-Lewis, he doesn’t so much impersonate Hawking as possess him. It’s sensitive, compassionate, funny, detailed, heartfelt and will surely win him Best Actor this year. It’s also a performance which the rest of the movie entirely squanders.

Telling the story of Hawking’s life means tackling at least three different narratives. The brilliant mind grappling with impossible problems of reality; the love story between young academics who don’t expect their marriage to last more than a few years; and the triumph-over-adversity story of a vital young man suddenly crippled by a life-threatening illness. It’s hard to pick just one of these and so my hope going in was that scriptwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh would find a way of braiding these strands together which would somehow elevate all three of them.

In practice, the first story is all but ignored. There is maybe two minutes of science in the whole thing, most hilariously when a troupe of Cambridge post-graduates make a road trip to hear Christian McKay’s Roger Penrose deliver a lecture which would be elementary to a GCSE physics class, based on the thirty seconds we are allowed to hear. The life-threatening illness, brilliantly realised by Redmayne, is often the main focus but this is the least interesting strand being over-familiar in general from many, many similar movies and TV movies prior to this, but also because the details of Hawking’s condition are so well known.

And so, the love story forms the bulk of the movie, which is when the frantic skipping from scene to scene does the movie so few favours. Everything is trivial, glib, tick that box and move on. Why do we have to hear about Hawking bluffing his way through his viva at Oxford instead of taking the time to let that scene play out? Why do we jump from his first date with Jane to their wedding in the space of about ten minutes? Why do we never get a sense of who these two people are to each other, let alone as a couple? Hawking’s family is drawn efficiently and vividly, thanks in part to a lovely turn by Simon McBurney as his dad, but elsewhere the writer seems to be hoping that the cast will fill in the gaps and the cast seem to be hoping that the editing will fill in the gaps and the director seems to be hoping that enough stirring music will see him through.

How is it that a single film manages to be simultaneously so pedantic and yet also so coy? When we need to introduce possible cuckoo-in-the-nest Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox, instantly forgettable), we can’t just show him giving piano lessons to one of the Hawking offspring, we first have to wheel in Emily Watson as Jane’s mum to laboriously explain to her that singing in the church choir is a Good Idea, then we have to have Jane creep mouse-like into the church just as the singing practice is conveniently finishing, then we have to have a lumpen conversation between the two of them – and so we exchange one telling, detailed, measured scene which would bring verisimilitude and texture to the story for three box-ticking snippets instead.

And yet at the same time, the film keeps eliding what’s actually interesting. The Hawkings’ sex life is included only by having Stephen and Jane embrace and then a cut to Eddie Redmayne cuddling a baby – not once but three times. And the potentially fascinating debates about the role of God in the universe are reduced to two quick mentions and one dinner table conversation in which C of E Jane is largely side-lined. That’s the other major problem with this film. Based on a book by Jane Hawking, it fails to realise that the story can’t be what is it like to be Stephen Hawking?, that’s largely unknowable in any case. But it could be what is it like to be married to Stephen Hawking? except that the filmmakers can’t bring themselves to cut away from their big-ticket item, the floppy haired one in the wheel-chair.

One particularly striking example is the diagnosis sequence. Hawking stumbles in the college quad, is taken to hospital where they perform a variety of tests and the young man is given his grim diagnosis. He returns to Cambridge and breaks the news to his bunk-mate Brian but when his then-girlfriend Jane tries to see him he refuses to talk to her. She is eventually given the news by Brian in a pub (we are not permitted to hear the dialogue).

But whose story is this? By never tackling this question, the movie is only ever able to give us the animated Wikipedia version, while steadfastly ignoring the colossally obvious point that every single fucking movie-goer is going to know the diagnosis before the characters do. If they had had the wit, the perspicacity – the fucking balls – to realise that this was Jane’s story, the whole sequence could have been played from her point of view. Her boyfriend has a mysterious fall in the quad but instead of just being patched up by the college nurse, he is taken away in an ambulance. In this pre-mobile phone age, she can’t get any information from the hospital, no matter how often she calls from the payphone at the bottom of her staircase. When Stephen eventually returns, apparently fit and healthy, he barricades himself in his room and refuses to talk to her. Imagine the confusion, the horror, the anger – and of course the ghastly dramatic irony because we, the audience, know all too well what’s coming.

What compounds all of these structural problems is just how fucking saintly everybody is. Hawking is unfailingly charming, funny, self-effacing and good natured – with the aforementioned brief strop the only moment where his disposition is anything less than sunny. Felicity Jones’s doe-eyed Jane is warm, supportive, patient, wise and deadeningly sincere, only leaving Hawking when he’s found flirty Maxine Peake to pal about with instead, and Charlie Cox’s Jonathan is essentially a tweedy martyr, tediously putting everyone else’s feelings ahead of his own. Where’s the vinegar? Where’s the tension? Where, for pity’s sake is the story?

At the fairly full cinema we saw this in, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a damp eye in the house. When a film dealing with a wheelchair bound genius whose marriage is falling apart can’t even be bothered to be mawkishly sentimental, let alone attain any real insight, power or emotion, you know it’s really in trouble. Lazy, boring and trite, if it were not for Eddie Redmayne, this would have been utterly ghastly. As it is, it’s just dull.

The Marx Brothers are probably the most important comedy team in history. That isn’t to denigrate any of their peers, antecedents or successors, but just to acknowledge that they revolutionised comedy on stage and on film and their influence is still felt today.

Leonard, Arthur, Julius, Milton and Herbert Marx were born to German Jews in New York at the turn of the century. Their mother, Minnie, turned the four oldest boys into a singing act called the Four Nightingales, but when a touring gig went badly wrong, the four young men took their frustrations out on the theatre manager, tour booker and anyone else they could find to blame. The audience fell about laughing and so Minnie enlisted their uncle Al Shean (of Gallagher and Shean) to construct a comedy routine for them. Four distinct comedy personalities emerged and with them four nicknames which they eventually took on stage – Italian piano-playing Chico, mute harpist Harpo, fast-talking Groucho and now-forgotten Gummo.

The team hurled through vaudeville, took Broadway by storm and eventually arrived at Hollywood. Gummo at some point left the act and so baby brother Herbert was drafted in his place and given the arbitrary soubriquet “Zeppo”. They eventually made around 13 films (depending on how you count) from 1929 to 1949. The BFI is showing a selection of their best. Here’s a rundown of the complete Marxography.

1929: The Cocoanuts

Filmed version of their first Broadway hit play, made less than two years after Warner Brothers up-ended the motion picture business with The Jazz Singer. It’s almost impossible to say if the original stage version would have held up, because the film is so beset with technical problems. The probably-hilarious prison break is shot so poorly it’s almost impossible to see what’s actually going on. Even for the dedicated Marxist this is tough going, with a lot of the running time dedicated to an even more than usually tedious real estate / stolen necklace / young love sub-plot but Harpo is sublime throughout and there are some wonderful moments, including the fastest door-slam / adjoining room scene you’ll ever see.

1930: Animal Crackers

Their second Broadway play makes a much more confident screen outing, with Groucho in particular seeming much more at-ease. The first half contains a number of classic routines including Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the Bridge Game, Harpo Drops Knives and Take A Letter, all of which are absolutely hilarious but the plot takes grim hold for the last half hour which is almost a laugh-free zone during which everyone (except me) seems terribly interested in the fate of a stolen painting. It seems churlish to complain however when the first hour is so often so joyful.

1931: Monkey Business

Their first original and the only film in which they play “themselves”. Stowaways on an ocean liner is the perfect situation for the Marxes and neatly identifies what made them so unique. In the same situation, Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd would emerge from hiding because a pretty girl had to have her honour defended, Laurel and Hardy would be unable to stay hidden out of sheer stupidity, but the Marxes want to get caught because being rude to authority is so much more fun than staying hidden. The Passport routine is just possibly the funniest thing ever put on film – but where is Margaret Dumont? And why does the film keep going after the Marx Brothers get off the ship?

1932: Horse Feathers

Groucho as a college president is a much less interesting situation than stowaways and TV censors have chopped to ribbons what was probably the highlight of the film – all four brothers trying to romance Thelma Todd. Even without the help of the censors, some very good scenes peter out with a whimper of a fade-out instead of ending on a good strong punchline. And the supposed climax is, again, a problem, being a very conventional football game with not enough Marx madness to distinguish it. On the other hand, the Speakeasy scene is fantastic and the film has some of Harpo’s best-ever gags.

1933: Duck Soup

Their most highly-regarded film, possibly correctly, certainly it’s their most concentrated with barely a hint of a romantic comedy sub-plot and with any number of wonderful scenes. Groucho has gone from hotel manager to feted explorer to college professor to running an entire country and – hurrah! – Margaret Dumont is back! But the traditional harp and piano solos are missing and much of the Harpo/Chico stuff with Edgar Kennedy owes more to Laurel and Hardy’s brand of tit-for-tat violence than the Marxes’ own style of mayhem. No doubt director Leo McCarey’s influence is at work – he was the guy who had the bright idea of pairing Stan and Ollie in the first place. Even the justly famous mirror scene is an old vaudeville routine given a thin Marx gloss. That said, the classic scenes when they come are amazing and no Marx film will make you laugh more consistently. It’s perhaps typical of this most perverse of all comedy teams that their best film is also in many ways their least typical!

1935: A Night at the Opera

Duck Soup flopped on its first release and cost the brothers their Paramount contract, but MGM snapped them up. Zeppo at this stage quit, fed up of being the under-appreciated straight man. This prompted the studio to ask if the three of them wanted to be paid as much as the four of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Groucho shot back, “Without Zeppo, we’re worth twice as much.” Wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg convinced the boys that removing the romantic comedy subplot had been a mistake (sigh) but he also spent months getting the comedy scenes for their new movie just right, and had the brilliant idea of sending the comedy scenes out on the road so the team could get the timing and the lines just-so. The result is that pretty much every comedy scene is a classic but – as with the earlier films – they now occupy only about half the running time. To be fair, now when the guy-that-nobody-cares-about sings a love song to the girl-that-nobody-cares-about, it’s with the full backing of the 80-piece MGM orchestra and looks gorgeous, but you’d still be tempted to hit fast-forward to get to The Contract Scene or The Stateroom Scene or The Bedroom Scene. Harpo’s presence is a little muted which is a shame.

1937: A Day at the Races

Opera was a smash hit and it was inevitable that MGM would try and get lightning to strike twice. The previous film suddenly became a template to be followed, and most of the films that came after it would try and recapture what made it work so well, including putting the comedy scenes out on tour before filming began. Allan Jones and Sig Ruman both return and the plots are eerily similar. A Day at the Races is fine, but many of the routines are not-as-good versions of previous scenes. Tootsie-Frootsie Ice Cream is good but not as good as The Contract Scene. Groucho’s introduction to the sanitarium is good but not quite as good as his introduction as President of Fredonia. Margaret Dumont’s examination is good but quite as good as the Passport Scene, and so on. The musical numbers are even longer and more boring than ever (the lavish water carnival sequence goes on for about a week – on the DVD I’ve got, even the film historian providing the commentary checks out while it’s on) and when Harpo gets mistaken for the angel Gabriel by a gang of Hollywood 1930s negroes, it’s enough to make you wish you’d never put the movie on in the first place. On the other hand, the twenty minutes in the middle with Esther Muir trying to frame Groucho is as good as anything they’ve ever done. Irving Thalberg died before the movie was complete and some say the Marxes’ enthusiasm for making movies died with him.

1938: Room Service

A real curio. A “straight” stage farce rewritten for the Marxes and the tension between the source material and the comedians playing it often shows. Why would Groucho Marx care if his play gets a backer or not? Isn’t there an authority figure he could spend his time insulting instead? Some of the blacker comedy plays oddly against the Marxes sunny pandemonium as well. The scene which gives the film its title is probably the best and – hey, look – it’s Lucille Ball. Their only film for RKO.

1939: At the Circus

Back under contract at MGM, they rattled off three films in three years. Each one contains at least something of note, but all three are depressingly ordinary most of the time. At the Circus is the least interesting of the three because what stuffy pomposity can the Marxes undermine when at a circus for chrissakes? Groucho now has to join his wig-wearing brothers to conceal his receding hairline, and those awkward negroes from Races are back. Margaret Dumont pretty much saves the film in the last third but before then we do get Lydia the Tatooed Lady which is a real gem.

1940: Go West

Somewhat of an improvement, with a crackerjack opening (albeit another riff on the Tootsie-Frootsie scene) and an amazing train chase at the end, but little that comes between is really worthy of comment. Harpo, who was once an invincible demon from another reality, is here mainly reduced to a doofus who just does silent imitations of whomever is talking, Groucho looks mainly bored and Chico ends up playing straight man far too often.

1941: The Big Store

All three brothers look a bit old and tired now – they were all in their fifties. Harpo and Groucho have a nice scene with Margaret Dumont at the beginning but most of the rest is pretty by-the-numbers. My favourite scene is the piano duet with both Harpo and Chico at the keys. They would reprise this act in their live show for years afterwards. Groucho has abandoned the toupee at least, for what was announced as their final film.

1946: A Night in Casablanca

But Chico’s gambling debts meant that when UA offered them a deal, they had to accept. Casablanca is quite a lot better than anything since Races and in a neat piece of symmetry sends Groucho back to running a hotel just like in The Cocoanuts. Sig Ruman from Opera and Races also returns (no Dumont alas) and Frank Tashlin adds some great gags for Harpo. If you can overlook the constant talk of death and injury, and try not to notice that Chico is now nearly 60, there’s some great stuff here, as well as some stuff obviously reprising earlier, better routines. What a great film to finish on.

1949: Love Happy

Planned as a Harpo film, Chico inveigled his way into the production and then the producers insisted on Groucho taking part too so they could market it as a Marx Brothers movie. He acts mainly as narrator, and nothing in the film is really that interesting, except an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe for five minutes towards the end.

If you really want to, you can count the very strange The Story of Mankind (1957) which includes all three Marx brothers but in different sketches, or the made-for-TV The Incredible Jewel Robbery (1959) which is a wordless Harpo-Chico story for 29 minutes and then has a surprise appearance by Groucho at the end – plus lots of TV appearances by one or two brothers at a time.

Which is the best?

If you want to watch a movie which is very funny all the way through with no longeurs, it has to be Duck Soup. If you want a professionally-made movie with lots of classic scenes, pick A Night at the Opera. If you want to know what the Marx Brothers were all about, watch Animal Crackers. If you want to understand them as a phenomenon, watch all three. And then all the others.

Now, that’s more like it.

Once again, with hindsight, what’s remarkable about Star Trek II is not so much that it set the template for the billion-dollar franchise which followed (although it undoubtedly did), it’s that Paramount was willing to make another movie at all. Actually, on paper that’s not so surprising. The film did make money – around three times what it cost to make – but it was hugely expensive. Disney’s The Black Hole, released the same year cost half what Star Trek The Motion Picture cost and it was Disney’s most expensive movie ever. But the reception from mainstream media and die-hard fans alike had been luke-warm. Did it really make sense to risk another forty million dollars to try again?

Enter TV producer Harve Bennett who confidently told Paramount bosses he could make five movies for the budget of the first one. After a year or two of script development going nowhere and staring down the barrel of a release date, Bennett sent for Nicholas Meyer who compiled a list of the bits-and-pieces people liked from the dozens of Star Trek II draft scripts and sat down to write the final screenplay, stitching all these disparate bits together, before beginning work on directing the movie, days later. These two men, neither of them familiar with Star Trek before they started work, saved the franchise, largely by completely and utterly ignoring the first film.

Meyer knew nothing about spaceships and future technology, but he saw the Enterprise as a sailing ship and Captain Kirk as Captain Horatio Hornblower. Ironically, Gene Roddenberry – who had by now been kicked unceremoniously upstairs – hated the naval paraphernalia and militaristic feel which Meyer gave to the Enterprise, but had himself used Hornblower has a frequent touch-point for the character of Kirk. Generally, Meyer’s reimagining of the Enterprise and Star Fleet through a naval lens works very well to create an impression of a colossal ship, manned by an enormous and active crew. Occasionally, he goes too far, such as when Kirk is literally piped aboard, or when photon torpedoes sit under hatches which have to be manually levered open, but these are tiny and easily-overlooked transgressions.

The whole look-and-feel of the film is vastly improved. The new uniforms strike the perfect balance between the colourful sixties jerseys and something which does actually resemble military garb, as opposed to pyjamas. They would still be in use for Star Trek Generations, a dozen years later. The bridge feels more like a submarine and less like the lobby of a futuristic hotel. The plot has the kind energy and drive so lacking in the first film, and the charm and humour of the characters returns, most noticeably in the early birthday scenes, but also throughout.

Despite – or possibly because of – the script’s mongrel heritage, it’s pretty much iconic scene after iconic scene. Playing into rumours of Spock’s death, Meyer apparently kills him off in the first five minutes as new crew member Lt Saavik struggles with the Kobyashi Maru scenario. Before long, Captain Chekov is facing down Ricardo Montalban’s fearsome Khan Noonien Singh, reincorporated from the original series, but that hardly matters.

Saaviki is also notable for actually making it to the end of the movie, but Paul Winfield as Terrell fulfils the usual role of doomed new cast member – in fact he does double-duty being both revealed as traitor and dying at the half-way point. Few of the rest of the cast get very much to do, but Bones gets a few choice lines and of course Leonard Nimoy gets to play a very real death scene at the end.

There are just a few moments where the film’s joie de vivre shades into smugness. On second viewing, it’s a little hard to understand just why Captain Kirk lets Carol and the rest continue to believe that they are trapped in the Genesis Cave with no hope of rescue, and the gag of the Reliant not bothering to look up or down in the final space battle in the nebula is a little hard to take seriously, but overall, this movie give us the space adventure we had so missed in the first film, and yet manages to be about something at the same time. Themes of age, decay, responsibility and obsession reverberate pleasingly throughout but never upstage the blood-and-thunder action and Montalban of course is an exceptional villain, gleefully chewing on Meyer’s theatrical dialogue.

What adds to the power of the film, and almost certainly secures its crown as the very best of the series, even thirty-odd years later, is that Kirk’s victory is so hard-won and comes at such a terrible cost. Spock’s death is meaningful, poignant and apparently permanent – three things it’s very hard to say about its karaoke re-enactment at the clumsy hands of Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and JJ Abrams recently.

Meyer might have cut back on the super-expensive transporter and warp drive effects, but he puts the money on the screen, re-using a few models and even model shots from the first film, and using then cutting-edge computer graphics to show the effect of the Genesis wave – a sequence which would become very familiar not only from its use and reuse in this film and its sequels but also as the iconic images for early eighties CGI in the movies in countless documentaries and behind-the-scenes TV specials.

Of course, as production neared its close, the whole cast and crew began to suspect that they might be on to a winner, and so rather than being the film that would shut the door on Star Trek, there was every chance that it might be only the beginning, and so Nimoy and Bennett hatched a plan to leave just enough of a thread to pull on if Spock needed resurrecting in Star Trek III – should that ever be made. This is done just gracefully enough that it doesn’t spoil the ending, and even that shot of Spock’s coffin on the Genesis Planet which enraged Meyer doesn’t bother me too much.

Pretty much perfect in every way, Star Trek II gave the series a future – without the Great Bird of the Galaxy who would soon turn his ambitions back to TV.

Facts and figures

Released: 4 June 1982
Budget: $11.2m
Box office: $97m
Writers: Harve Bennett, Jack B Sowards, Nicholas Meyer
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Producer: Harve Bennett

“You have your necessary illusions as well. But in your case they involve science. You don’t believe in magic but you believe in machines. So when he explained himself to you, he used your terms of reference. That’s the way a sorcerer behaves.”

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Opinions differ wildly about how much the current series of Doctor Who should be viewed as a continuation of what was started by Verity Lambert, William Hartnell et al in 1963 and how much it should be viewed as an entirely new series, like the Ron Moore version of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly this last point of view can only be taken so far, but it can’t be denied that structurally, tonally and in terms of its cultural impact, twenty-first century Doctor Who is a rather different beast than, say, the episodes produced at the end of the 1980s.

One way in which this difference is felt is at Christmas. While Christmas specials were a regular feature of UK TV, the nearest “old” (sorry “classic”) Doctor Who ever got was the misbegotten episode The Feast of Steven in 1965, sitting awkwardly in the middle of the lavishly bloody Daleks Masterplan. From 2005 onwards, however, Doctor Who has been the centrepiece of BBC1’s Christmas Day schedule, and these episodes are particularly tricky for whomever happens to be the show-runner.

Consider the constraints. First, it seems necessary to include Christmassy material. Second, it seems necessary to throw the tone lever away from “dark” and towards “romp”. Lastly, because the episode will have a wider and more diverse audience than usual, there can’t be too much mythology stuff – even when the episode has to introduce a new Doctor (The Christmas Invasion), write out an old one (The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor) or just tease us with the possibility (The Next Doctor).

Russell T Davies generally just threw the kitchen sink at the screen, an approach which sometimes paid off (Voyage of the Damned) and sometimes didn’t (The End of Time) but there’s no doubt that we allow greater leeway at Christmas. Steven Moffat has come at the problem from every conceivable angle. A Christmas Carol literally and avowedly glossed a festive classic, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe tried to do the same with Narnia and then fatally bottle it, The Snowmen attempted to reintroduce a new companion and an old adversary and of course The Time of the Doctor had to write out Matt Smith, and pretty much abandoned all the tinselly trappings after the first ten minutes and the name of the planet.

Now, with the whole series rejuvenated, a new leading man with an appealingly anti-Christmas demeanor, it was with some excitement, but also a little anxiety that I settled down to watch Doctor Who Meets Santa Claus.

What we actually got is on the one hand a mash-up of quite a lot of familiar ideas. Not just the Troughton-esque based-under-siege stuff, also referencing Alien, but also lots of Inception, a fair bit of Total Recall and quite a lot of previous Moffat scripts including Silence in the Library, The Empty Child and Asylum of the Daleks. But on the other hand, the most assured, sleek, uncluttered Christmas episode in years. Maybe since The Christmas Invasion.

The opening with Nick Frost’s genial Santa Claus is charming and funny, with great supporting work from Dan Starkey and Nathan McMullen – but entirely baffling and confounding. The sudden post-titles cut to the Arctic base doesn’t clear up very much, but quickly it becomes obvious what kind of game is being played here.

When the words “dream state” are uttered in a Steven Moffat script, it surely can’t be very long before some serious narrative rug-pulling begins, and its entirely to the credit of this excellent piece of storytelling, that the rug is pulled from under us again and again and yet we are never in any doubt about what the threat actually is. All that’s missing (and I wonder if it was ever considered) is a Back to Reality style episode in which Clara is made to believe that her entire adventure with the Doctor was all an absurd dream. The Doctor’s comparison of his own ludicrous mode of transportation with Santa’s magic reindeer is the nearest we get. Danny Pink returns, still adding very little and that bizarre, pointless double-lie at the end of Death in Heaven is written-out in a quick exchange, rendering it even more unnecessary.

The four members of Arctic Base Nameless are sketched in briefly but are well-differentiated (in the way that, say, the inhabitants of the acid mine in The Rebel Flesh weren’t) with only Michael Troughton not quite registering (why is he the only one not to make it “home”?). And the trick of having not to think of or look at the Mind Crabs is another in Moffat’s line of childhood games made horrific (bringing to mind not only “I’ll give you a pound if you don’t think of pink rats,” but also Douglas Adams’ Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal “A mind-bogglingly stupid creature which assumes that if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you”).

The whole thing clips along very merrily indeed with Shona’s attempts to undermine Santa’s reality (“I got a second sled”) a particular highlight. Moffat also proves himself again to be a master of the show’s meta-narrative with the elderly Clara a perfectly plausible exit for the character, even if neither the make-up department not the actor could quite pull off the transformation.

So, after the derivative A Christmas Carol, the half-baked The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, the impossibly saccharine The Snowmen and the flimsy nonsense of The Time of the Doctor, this is easily my favourite of the Moffat Christmas episodes. It’s easily worth four stars, but I’ll give it four-and-a-half because, well, it is Christmas after all.

Agh! So close!

Finales are tough, there’s no question about that, but after the lean, purposeful drive of part one, I had very high expectations for part two. Sad to say, while it delivered some excellent moments, Death in Heaven didn’t really work for me as a narrative, falling as it did into a pile of largely unrelated episodes; and it didn’t really work as drama because so little of it really resonated or indeed made sense.

Some of Steven Moffat’s recent work on the series has stretched the boundaries of narrative sense past visual poetry and into Dada-ist absurdism. The events at the end of The Name of the Doctor are basically incomprehensible nonsense, but everyone sounds so committed and the pictures keep whirling past the viewer’s eyes so fast, it seems inescapable that it all must mean something terribly important. I fear that this is an illusion and what we are actually watching isn’t storytelling, it’s – to appropriate a phrase from linguistics – image salad.

This has been largely kept at bay under Capaldi’s realm, with really only In The Forest of the Shite dipping into this kind of pretty-pictures-and-funny-lines-doesn’t-have-to-mean-much-just-let-it-wash-over-you montage effect. In the finale however, while nothing is quite as bad as the gibberish of the later Matt Smith stuff, there’s an awful lot which just doesn’t quite hang together.

Let’s start with that bizarre pre-titles sequence with Clara claiming to be the Doctor, which then segues into the titles, now sporting Jenna Coleman’s eyes in place of Peter Capaldi’s and putting her name first. With all the opportunities Clara has had to attempt the role of the Doctor recently, especially in the excellent Flatline, and given her dementedly absurd back-story, it’s clear that this is far more than a feeble lie intended to stall a plodding cyber-assassination. It would be gamesmanship of the most poisonous kind to redo the titles just for the sake of a completely pointless plot feint.

Well, it was a completely pointless plot feint, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a “fuck you” from Steven Moffat to the fans. The Next Doctor played the same stupid games but at least Jackson Lake’s mental confusion was integrated into the main plot a bit. Clara’s pretence is abandoned almost instantly and now it just feels like a retread of Flatline instead of a fascinating development of it.

Next, evil villains need an evil plan. Death in Heaven brings us two evil villains who presumably, between them, can muster at least one evil plan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. All the cybermen seem to want to do is plod around and cos-play at Iron Man (when they aren’t re-enacting the end of Carrie) and all Missy/The Master seems to want to do is make speeches. This is a significant drawback in what is supposed to be the great big dramatic culmination of 12 episodes of rollicking science-fiction adventure.

Outside St Pauls, things start briskly enough with Kate Stewart and Osgood marching up and taking control in a very pleasing way, and the notion of the Doctor on board Moffat One, forced to be President of Earth and take decisions for the whole human race is very striking and a logical progression from UNIT’s relationship with the Doctor in recent years. So – what will the Doctor do with this terrible power? Absolutely nothing. The Cybermen blow up the plane and the whole idea is completely forgotten about forever. You can essentially remove everything from Kate’s entrance to the Doctor’s arrival at the graveyard and you will have missed nothing essential to the plot.

It’s really not clear to me what is happening at these and other graveyards. Missy has amassed a collection of minds of the deceased (“software”) which she now proposes to turn into decant into waiting bodies in graves on Earth. But cyber-conditioning generally removes what makes people individual so the minds cannot be especially valuable, and they replace most of the flesh with metal, so the rotting corpses are going to be of little use. What they need is the great hunks of steel which make up most of the body, which Missy doesn’t supply and which just mysteriously finds itself six feet under after a brief downpour. So, anyway, Missy has created her metal army of obedient killers, who generally aren’t disposed to killing anyone today. But one is not so obedient. Danny Pink has come back in cyber-form but he still has his human memories and emotions, and apparently he’s the only one.

Why is this? Something to do with a button that should have been pressed, or not pressed, or sonic-ed or – I don’t know, look this is pretty unforgivably sloppy. To the extent that anything here makes sense, everything that happens once our four main protagonists are together in that graveyard depends on cyber-Danny’s disobedience, yet there is not one line to account for why he, out of countless billions of resurrected chrome corpses is the only one still in control of his faculties. Nobody else in love died in the last 48 hours across the entire world? C’mon, this is lazy, lazy stuff.

The Doctor is desperate to know what the cyber-army’s instructions are, and his moral dilemma with Danny’s emo-button is interesting, but when the light in Danny’s eyes goes out, he mysteriously fails to fall in line with the others and maintains his independence. Still, at least the Doctor now has the vital information he needs, so the horrendous sacrifice of Danny’s emotional life was worthwhile. No, it wasn’t. Danny doesn’t know anything and in any case, Missy is about to explain the entire plan anyway. All the Doctor had to do was wait two minutes.

And what is her ghastly, season-finale, earth-shattering plan? To give the Doctor an army. To make him the most powerful man in the… wait, what? First of all this is pretty thin stuff, dramatically. I do prefer my evil villains to have a rather more grandiose plan than simply Making A Point. And if their plan is just to Make A Point, it should at least leave a medium-sized trail of destruction in its wake (see The Dark Knight). But not only is Missy’s plan feeble, it’s redundant, because the Doctor was in the exact same position twenty minutes ago on-board that sodding plane.

Danny’s final speech contrasting the orders of a general with the promise of a soldier is, I suppose, the culmination of all this relentlessly repetitive soldier-talk we’ve had to put up with, but – and maybe this is just me – it didn’t feel like it resonated. The ending of The Big Bang is at least as nonsensical as the ending of The Name of the Doctor but the notion of the TARDIS being something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue is so beautiful that I just don’t care. Danny’s speech by contrast is less than the sum of its parts, an exercise in joining-the-dots, nothing more.

Better that I suppose than the ghastly necrophiliac resurrecting of the poor old Brigadier for a final Doctor Who hurrah. When you’ve got Jemma Redgrave on the payroll, you don’t really need to be constantly sticking her in Nicholas Courtney’s shadow – let her be her own character for christ’s sake and let us remember the Brig by watching Inferno or The Invasion.

Danny Pink, now inexplicably back in the Nethersphere, has the opportunity to resurrect himself with the aid of a magic bracelet, whose properties again make next-to no sense but I can’t bring myself to plod through the problems it presents. He selflessly offers the Iraqi sprog whom he shot in the face another chance at life instead, which is a scene which did have some power and resonance, finally. But this Noble Act Of Self Sacrifice strongly suggests that Clara is already pregnant with Orson Pink’s ancestor – either that or something is seriously screwed-up with the timelines. And then, finally we get the chance to resolve the ongoing Doctor/Clara relationship drama.

In an episode full of bizarre, incomprehensible plot muddle, this scene might just be the strangest. Both of these two people who have suffered so much, who have gone through so much together, are just purposelessly lying to each other for the sake of a cutely ironic bittersweet ending. Light years away from the power and raw honesty of their confrontation at the beginning of Dark Water, this is hard-to-follow, obscure and rooted in a psychology which I cannot begin to relate to or understand.

And then, Santa Claus shows up.

Well, what did I like? Actually, there is some good stuff here, among the debris. Once again, everything looks fantastic, with the colour grading in the graveyard scenes working particularly well to remind us of those oppressive clouds. Even though nothing that happens affects the rest of the story in any way at all, a lot of the stuff on board the plane works well, with Missy’s murder of Osgood probably a highlight, if you can stomach just how dopey she was to go over there. Not that it made a difference, as Missy was already free of her bonds at this point.

In fact, Michelle Gomez as Missy is pretty much the saving grace of this episode – funny, scary, mercurial and “bananas”, she’s a wonderful addition to the roster of actors to play the Doctor’s nemesis. I’m very keen for a rematch, hopefully this time when she’s thought of an evil plan.

And amid the whirl and flurry and nonsense of it all, Capaldi stands fiercely tall, a remarkable casting coup which has created an indelible version of this most flexible and yet most constant fictional character. For the season as a whole, I’m hugely pleased. For the final episode, I’m baffled and bitterly disappointed at the missed opportunity. The combination of Capaldi, Gomez and Coleman, plus a handful of stand-out moments means that this episode scrapes in with three stars.

So, here’s my run-down of Series 8.

Deep Breath, 3.5 stars, a bit bumpy but enjoyable enough

Into the Dalek, 4 stars, pushes all the right buttons

Robot of Sherwood, 2.5 stars, smug and silly

Listen, 4 stars, very well done, but a bit empty

Time Heist, 4 stars, less ambitious, but probably more successful than Listen, so it’s a wash

The Caretaker, 3 stars, shoddy production values and clumsy humour weigh it down

Kill the Moon, 5 stars, epic but divisive

Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, 4.5 stars, both basically perfect, but neither has a scene which can match the end of Kill the Moon

In the Forest of the Night, 1 star, even the title is wrong

Dark Water, 4.5 stars, fantastic take-off…

Death in Heaven, 3 stars, wobbly landing.

If anyone wants to know how in-line this is with fandom at large, readers of Gallifrey base who voted put these 12 episodes in a very narrow band of average marks out of ten from 6.89 (Robot of Sherwood) to 8.48 (Flatline) with In the Forest of the Night a significant outlier on 5.68.

The final ranking of stories according to this group is as follows (from best to worst)…

Flatline
Listen
Dark Water
Mummy on the Orient Express
Into the Dalek
Deep Breath
Death in Heaven
Time Heist
Kill the Moon
The Caretaker
Robot of Sherwood
In the Forest of the Night

And there’s almost nothing between the top four. So, my own views are broadly in-line with fan consensus, but I’ve availed myself of a wider range of marks and I’m considerably more enthusiastic about Kill the Moon and a bit less excited about Listen.

That’s it for Doctor Who until Christmas, see you then. Next week – Star Trek.

Dark Water brings up two themes which I’ve touched on before – two parters and plot twists.

The “aha” moment a viewer experiences when plot elements suddenly and unexpectedly collide is delicious. It’s one of the most exciting things which narrative can offer. I’m not talking about surprises, and I’m certainly not talking about shocks. Those can be fun too – the head under the boat in Jaws is justly famous – but that empty startle is not as rich an experience as the plot turn which suddenly causes a re-evaluation of everything that’s gone before.

So a twist is more than a surprise. You can surprise a viewer simply by withholding information. Nothing could be easier. A twist has to give you the feeling that you could have worked it out for yourself, and so the art that the writer constructing the twist has to, ahem, master, is to provide all the clues needed, but somehow disguise their true meaning.

Steven Moffat, for all his many and various faults as a writer, has always taken a particular pleasure in doing this, and no wonder for he is supremely able. But a really, really good plot twist doesn’t depend absolutely on catching the viewer out. Really, really good plot twists stand repeated viewing – and not just because you can experience again the visceral thrill of mainlining the shocking information, but because watching the pieces assemble is as interesting as seeing them snap together, and because the twist deepens and enriches what the story is really about – rather than sitting on top of the rest of the narrative, serving as mere decoration.

This episode includes three plot twists, deployed with varying degrees of success and spoiled in various ways before the episode aired. The death of Danny Pink, falling under the wheels of a stray automobile while having a telephonic heart-to-heart with Clara, does not count. Surprising, yes. Shocking, certainly. But using the term as I’ve defined it above, not a plot twist.

Clara’s next actions are nothing short of astonishing, almost psychotic. This most thinly-drawn of all major Doctor Who supporting characters since the revival somehow seems to develop an identity only when pitched in violent opposition to the Doctor. Look how quickly she formulates her plan, look how efficiently she puts it into action, look how well she knows the TARDIS and the Doctor’s habits. If Turlough had been this single-minded, Mawdryn Undead would have been one episode long and ended the series in 1983.

What follows is possibly the most dramatic, tension-filled, eye-popping Doctor and companion seen we’ve ever had – except possibly for the end of Kill the Moon of course. And when the last TARDIS key is gone, and it seems as if Clara has killed the series, or at least stalled it for a good long while – then we get plot twist number one. And in some ways, this is the feeblest plot twist of them all: it was all a dream. The lazy cop-out of lacklustre writers who paint themselves into a corner and then try and cliché their way out. But, a familiar device can still be made fresh. The ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil essentially uses this same cliché but in a way which is bone-chilling rather than cosy.

And the choice here does not – as we say in improvisation – cancel the events of the scene on the rim of the volcano. In fact, those events, as imaginary as they may have been, drive the entire narrative as well as providing us with another one of the great Doctor and companion scenes, this one full of compassion and tenderness. No, Clara, betrayal is hardly enough to turn even this chilliest of Doctors against you. Even I’m growing accustomed to your face.

It’s of course not even a surprise that Danny Pink ends up in the same version of heaven which we have been visiting periodically, although Moffat’s tendency to play fast-and-loose with logic returns here. Missy’s (we’ll come back to Missy) Nethersphere seems to be simultaneously in Victorian London, the command ship Aristotle in the far future, where and whenever Doctor Chang is from, and St Pauls in 2014. I hope that will be cleared up tomorrow night, but I frankly doubt that it will.

After a bit of narrative vamping which was not uninteresting, but could have moved a bit more briskly (we’ll come back to pacing) we get plot twist number two. The Dark Water of the title provides the perfect cover for an army of Cybermen. Now, this had been comprehensively spoiled by most of the print and on-line media, but I confess it still caught me out. Near the beginning I was wondering where the Cybermen had got two, but I wasn’t quick enough to put the skeletons in their display cases and the power of Dark Water together. And by having them bust out of their tombs and then march down the steps of St Pauls, Moffat manages to reference two classic Troughton stories in the space of five minutes, and director Rachel Talalay frames it all beautifully.

So then, finally, we get the identity of Missy. I don’t know if I would have worked this one out for myself or not, but lots of other people did and I’d already seen their guesses on-line, so the revelation wasn’t scrambling my brain, it was more – okay, fair enough. And it is fair enough in my view. Michelle Gomez is an excellent actor with just the right kind of nutso malevolence to make a classic Master. I have no problem whatever with her standing alongside Delgado, Pratt, Beevers, Ainley, Jacobi and Simm (don’t worry Roberts, we’ll call you). Does it open the door to a female Doctor? Yes, kinda, but the series has been referring to regenerative sex-change for a while now, so it’s not that big of an upset to me.

Sidebar – I am in general opposed to the idea of a female Doctor, but I reckon I could be convinced by the right casting. As Steven Moffat has said before, the way that writers deal with the fact that the story they want to tell is contradicted by an earlier episode, is by the powerful and secret ploy of Making Something Up. You can do what you like, ultimately. I can’t off-hand think of a woman who could do the job, but I don’t think I could have conceived of a 24-year-old pulling it off before Matt Smith was cast. You do have to get the right person for the job, and because I don’t think a black, 70-something, French, wheelchair bound actor would make a good James Bond doesn’t make me racist, ageist, Eurosceptic, disablist or anything else. Actually, now I come to think of it – Emma Thompson would probably silence a lot of doubters. As Doctor Who, not as James Bond.

And the episode builds to the traditional cliff-hanger ending – our first in quite a while. Moffat’s bean-counting proved that two-parters didn’t save any money and so he axed them after The Almost People. But the real problem for watchers of the show was never that stories were too short, it was generally the case that two-parters either had about enough material for 60-75 minutes of story, and so episode one was a lot of padding; or there was enough material for a full 90 minutes of story, but it was felt necessary to keep all the good stuff for part two, which was consequently rather frantic while episode one, again, was a lot of padding.

And the pace does slow once we reach the Nethersphere, but not disastrously so. And the finale has a luxurious 60 minutes to play out its secrets. So – it’s very hard to judge at this stage because a disappointing dénouement can sour happy memories of a suspenseful built-up. But in general, this series has been so strong – one or two ghastly lapses aside – that I’m going to go ahead and award it four-and-a-half stars and sit back and watch part two in a spirit of giddy optimism.

Oh dear, what went wrong?

It’s a pretty good test I think of any narrative work of art to ask yourself – what would happen if the lead character was not present? The answer here is: absolutely nothing. The Doctor and Clara are stripped of all agency and just left to spectate as the plot sorts itself out. It’s a dramatically inert climax to a tedious and impoverished episode which brings the recent strong run of stories to a grinding halt. I may not have liked Vincent and the Doctor – another script from a celebrity writer attempting to do something different with the format – but I recognised that that was a matter of taste and I could appreciate the craft in Richard Curtis’s script. This is insultingly poor as a piece of writing and the production creaks under the weight of the visuals that the script requires, just as reality creaks under the weight of those which are omitted.

To be fair, the central idea of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script is a cracker. Overnight a dense forest has sprung up and covered the entire Earth (including the oceans it seems, judging by the shots of the planet from space). To be equally fair, however, the veteran writer seems to have been so pleased with this that he’s knocked off early and gone down the pub.

Nothing about this works on any level. An idea as striking, as simple, as bizarre as this needs to be grounded thoroughly in reality for it to work as a piece of television airing in 2014. But right from the beginning, everything is a little “off” – and by the way, saying “fairy tale” with a hopeful expression doesn’t turn a badly thought through and poorly executed concept into a gem. First of all, school sleepovers in museums. Is that a thing? I don’t remember it ever happening to me. What’s the point of it exactly? Other than to surround the Doctor with yet another troupe of adorable moppets?

Once the first shoe begins to drop, we really start to confront the two different problems which this story has to contend with. The first is that neither on the script, nor the production level, is anyone really trying to make me believe this. What very few people we see react with mild puzzlement, or keep their focus on what’s right in front of them – or not, as in the case of Maebh’s mum. Surely, if this were to happen for real, there would be panic, outrage, pandemonium. At the very least, in the middle of central London there would be people. But the casting money having all been splurged on moppets this week, we are denied even token extras, and the dialogue doesn’t even try and hide this fact. All poor director Sheree Folkson can do is plonk some road signs down on location and keep doing lens flares and hope for the best.

Just on the basic level of individual incidents, nothing really works. It’s bad enough that between emerging from the museum and watching the plot sort itself out from orbit, the Doctor, Clara, Danny and the moppets just sort of aimlessly traipse from the TARDIS to the forest, back to the TARDIS, back out in to the forest again and so on. This kind of narrative vamping is fair enough in episode four of a 1970s six-parter, but in a 44 minute episode it’s just appalling.

But even when the story stumbles across a good idea, like having all the animals from London Zoo released and roaming the woods, the production can’t really make it work, and the script can’t be bothered to think it through. Once Danny has shone a light in a tiger’s eyes, we’ll never ever be troubled by any of those animals again. Yeah, and Guy Crayford has never looked under his eyepatch before today either.

The resolution when it comes makes no sense and is very easy to see coming. Both of these statements require caveats. I let Kill The Moon off the hook (controversially in some quarters) for its nonsensical science for two reasons: firstly, the rest of the episode was gangbusters and secondly, it did make sense on its own terms, just about. But the idea that a bunch of magic trees will protect Earth from a gigantic solar flare just like an air bag makes no sense at all on any level. It doesn’t make sense when I say it, and it doesn’t make sense visually. An air bag absorbs a force, because the air is in a, well, a bag. Bagless air doesn’t work nearly so well. That’s why cars don’t come equipped with safety air. But unburnable trees will just sit there as the fire rages around them. Just how will they prevent the local air temperature from shooting up. By creating excess oxygen? Like when you blow on the embers of a fire you mean? It doesn’t sound like it’s going to work and it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. And it’s very far from clear from whence the trees came – moppety voices? Tinkerbell sparkles? Homework doodles? Um, did I miss something?

And I saw it coming, which might just be luck. Any good plot twist needs to be hidden in plain sight or what’s the fun of it, and if you hide something in plain sight, a few people will be lucky (or unlucky) enough to see it coming purely by chance. But I can’t be the only one who noticed that with an enormous solar flare on the way and magic trees suddenly appearing, we seemed to be playing a game of Double Mumbo Jumbo. Isn’t it rather more likely that one of these things is the solution to the other? I got there about twenty minutes in.

And, as noted, the Doctor has nothing to do in the climax. Yes, he issues some sort of dementedly childish warning to the people of Earth to let the trees alone, which would have had a great deal more impact had it not been comprehensively shown how indestructible they were mere minutes earlier. Then he and Clara just sit back and enjoy the show – rather more than I did, it seems.

Of course, if a planet-killing solar flare were on the way, astronomers would have noticed and the world would already be in crisis mode. This is hinted at, but never properly explored when Clara says she knew but didn’t tell the kids. So – the end of the world is coming, and you aren’t going to prepare in any way, or discuss it ever, or mention it to your space alien wizard friend, you’re just going to carry on doing your job because… I don’t know how to finish that sentence, I’m sorry.

Clara’s “trick” of packing the Doctor away to life and freedom when it becomes clear that the end is nigh (because of the flare or the trees, or the sparkly forest fairies, or magic Maebh, or some other damn thing, I was past caring by this point) falls utterly flat as drama, because I just didn’t buy a single moment of it, having checked out from the reality of the programme some time earlier.

And then finally, just when this impoverished production of a tissue-thin story looked like it couldn’t get any worse, we get the final kick in the nuts. The utterly unearned, unbelievable, treacly, reappearance of missing sister Annabel. This moment is meaningless because I was absolutely not invested in that loss, and false because that’s not what happens when family members go missing, and it certainly isn’t what would happen if they were to suddenly and shockingly reappear. The brilliant French drama The Returned worked incredibly hard to show us what would really happen if a daughter or a sister, long thought dead, turned up out of the blue. To “season” an already over-sweet story with this extra dollop of syrup is utterly misjudged and pointless.

I really am struggling to find any redeeming features, but this is easily the worst of the season so far. Capaldi does what he can with the limited material (stripped not only of agency but good jokes – even the naive and sloppy Bobbins of Sherwood gave him a couple of decent one-liners), and Jenna Coleman continues to do good work, but the relationship story with Danny is starting to feel unnecessarily drawn-out now, and Samuel Anderson is hitting the same notes over and over again. Missing the sweet spot of grounded drama with a hint of fairy tale magic by absolutely miles, this was a story which Doctor Who’s budget could never have made work, which doesn’t entirely excuse all concerned from trying so little in its execution. Certainly the poorest effort since Journey to the Nadir of the TARDIS and maybe poorer than anything in the Moffat reign to date. One star. Bugger.

Another monster-of-the-week story, another Jamie Mathieson script, a further exploration of the Doctor/Clara relationship and – I have to say – another triumph for all concerned.

It seems as if the reduced episode count hasn’t resulted in the obviation of a Doctor Lite episode, and this was it, with Capaldi filming just one day on location and one day on the TARDIS set. But the rationale is amazing and created some of the episode’s best moments, from the enormous sledgehammer Clara pulls out of her handbag, to the delightful Addams Family routine on the train tracks. Only in a couple of shots of the Doctor’s face peering out of the tiny TARDIS did the effects fall in any way short. Ironically for an episode so devoted to the difference between 2D and 3D, I suspect this is because 2D shots of Capaldi were inserted into existing footage of the TARDIS prop, instead of having the actor actually shove his face through a set of tiny doors, but other than that, the effects are lovely.

And scary too. The various scenes of Clara and Rigsy menaced by drawings are properly exciting, and if the budget can’t quite stretch to the hanging chair crashing through the window, the pace of the editing and Murray Gold’s music just about manages to bridge the gap.

Of course, this episode can’t help but call to mind the lamentable Fear Her, a feeble cough of an episode which dragged down the average of an otherwise pretty solid season. In both cases, animated drawings come to murderous life, but Flatline has atmosphere, jokes, and a cast of supporting characters to spare where Fear Her just lies there, begging for euthanasia.

In fact, the supporting cast put me more in mind of Midnight, one of my favourite Tennant episodes, wherein we see how petty, short-sighted and selfish people can be if you put them under enough pressure. That nasty side of human nature is here represented by Christopher Fairbank as the odious Fenton – who naturally has to survive, while bright, good-hearted folk like PC Forrest get slaughtered by The Boneless.

Clara’s audition as The Doctor is an interesting twist and with the revelation that the she has been lying to Danny about her “break-up” with her Timelord chum, it now becomes possibly to see the run of stories from The Caretaker to this as a very clear and logical progression of the relationship.

Niggles? Yeah. A few. As well the iffy Doctor/TARDIS shots, the train whizzing through the tunnel looked very digital to me, and I didn’t quite buy Rigsy’s Noble Act Of Self-Sacrifice (although I was amused to see him substituted with a scrunchie). Clara’s use of Rigsy’s artistic talents to Road Runner The Boneless into regenerating the TARDIS was a great twist, but it was a shame that when the Doctor emerged, all he had to do was Sonic them away.

A bit like its immediate predecessor then, Flatline gets high marks from me, not because it dared to do something extraordinary, but because it did what Doctor Who is supposed to do and did it to a very, very high standard. Funny, scary, weird, arresting, original and exciting, it’s Saturday family viewing at its best. Four-and-a-half stars, and we are really on a roll now.