Review: Doctor Who 9.4: Before The Flood

Rita Repulsa will be along after this and he'll have to fight
him with a MegaZord.

The Doctor is not going to die. Let us all accept this, consign it into the ledger of time, and move on with our lives. And, most importantly, stop writing stories in which the tension of the story derives from the idea that the show's main protagonist is going to die for good in the fourth episode of a twelve episode series. There was a lot to love in this week's outing, but after the tight tension of last week's Base-Under-Siege, this more traditionally Moffatish episode lost a lot of what made last week fun. After last week's pleasant surprise, I was so disappointed in the show's return this style - especially as being the second half of a two-parter sullied the first half by association.
     The Doctor and two of the members of the Base travel back in time to 1980s Scotland, the titular Lake of the previous episode being held back by a dam. The town is abandoned and covered in Soviet Propaganda - apparently the town was a training ground for Western operatives. They find the Spaceship, and the Tivolian undertaker who has brought it here, while in the future Clara notes that The Doctor's "ghost" is simply speaking the names of each member of the group in the order in which they are going to die. The occupant of the spaceship soon turns out to be a huge Power-Rangers-esque villain known as The Fisher King, a former occupier of Tivoli who wishes to use the "ghosts" to call an invasion fleet to anihilate Earth, for whatever reason. The Doctor, having until this point being adamant that the existence of his ghost means he must die here, decides to fuck that and blows up the damn, killing the Fisher King. He makes his way back to the future and saves the day. Oh, and lots of the crew declare their love for each other, or something.
     Last season the show liked to mess around with its opening credits. This is nothing new, and it was common in the Classic Series to have the title card of the story be thematically matched to its contents. This week was... not at all like that, in fact. We began the episode with a long sequence in which The Doctor, directly addressing the camera, explained a Bootstrap Paradox to us, which was later then namechecked at the episode's conclusion as an explanation (or rather an analysis) of the episode's events. He then proceeded to play the Doctor Who theme on an electric guitar, which formed the episode's titles. There didn't seem to be any reason thematically for this to be here - it was almost as if the producers heard Capaldi playing electric guitar at some point over the Summer and just decided to throw it into a bunch of episodes. The breaking of the fourth wall took me out of the excitement I had for the episode, and broke the cardinal rule of visual media - show, don't tell.

There has been more or less no signs that these two had anything
other than a professional relationship, and yet they're bunged
together at the end in a way which feels like they'd only just read
that part of the script.

     The explanation of the mythology behind the events of last week felt quite underwhelming. The Fisher King was kept in the shadows quite a lot, and I think the shadows was where he should have stayed - there have been some naff monsters on Moffat Who, and this was another of them. The anticlimax the Fisher King provided acted as a metaphor for this two-parter as a whole - tense and brilliant in its first appearance, and less than impressive once it actually reveals itself. The wishy-washy time travel element of the plot didn't add anything to the story, and the somehow rushed conclusion at the end threw together the mixed evils of "it wasn't me who died it was a robot/tessalecta/hologram" and "let's pair people together despite no romantic chemistry."
      Last week, I was singing Whithouse's praises as the last of the Doctor Who "old guard" who wasn't writing crap. I don't know how much influence Moffat had on this week's episode, but it seemed such a departure from last week that I felt a little disappointed. I'm still enjoying Doctor Who at this point, and I'm very glad that's still the case, but the show's creative engine is spluttering at the moment. The oil needs changing, the engine needs a refit. The relationship between The Doctor and Clara doesn't feel naturalistic because it's essentially been tacked-on to the end of last season's arc, too many plots this season have revolved around "ooh ah they gonna die", and each episode keeps making these disparate, "subtle" hints forward to the end of the season. Things were so close to being great, but yet again the arrow just missed the mark.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Arya Stark helps The Doctor fight Vikings in the past. Apparently.

Overview: How I Met Your Mother

This was originally going to be an entry into the "Shows I Watched In 2015" article I'll be releasing at the end of December, but it sorta spiralled off into an article of its own. Enjoy. :D

---

Note: the woman on the bottom left doesn't appear until the
ninth season. Of nine. And she's the title character.
From indecisivelyrestles

Written 15/8/15

I've been watching this show for about four years, all told. Since Channel Four lost the rights to Friends, their student channel E4 has been filling its schedules with other US shows - which, since at least 2012 (probably before) has included How I Met Your Mother, the story of a 30-something New York architect and his group of middle-class friends, told through the framing device of the protagonist in 2030 telling his kids the story of "How I Met Your Mother". Unlike its obvious spiritual predecessor Friends, HIMYM relies a lot more on storytelling quirks like flashbacks, flashforwards, the Unreliable Narrator and, most notably, a large collection of running gags.
     The show spans 2005 to 2014 in-story, as well as maintaining storylines in flashbacks across several episodes. Ted Mosby and his college friends Lily and Marshall live in spacious New York apartments. Lily and Marshall have been in a relationship for seven years at the story's beginning. They also have a "friend" in Barney Stinson, a genius womaniser with abandonment issues. In the Pilot, Ted meets and falls in love with the beautiful Canadian Robin Scherbatsky, who becomes a member of the group. Among a nearly endless string of temporary relationships, there are two besides Marshall and Lily which define the plot - Ted and Robin, which lasts for two seasons and then has Ted's obsession with Robin starting up again in the last few seasons, and Barney and Robin, which the last season and a half focuses on.
     A lot of the characters undergo arcs as time goes on, but the main important ones are in the central love triangle, which for once isn't tedious and tiring. Barney goes from a serial womaniser incredibly sensitive about actual emotional issues into a mature, kind and caring adult, and his development (combined with his heavily meme-worthy dialogue) leads to his nature as the stand-out character of the show. On the other side of the coin is protagonist Ted Mosby, who starts the series as a sweet if naive young idiot and over time develops into an obsessed, delusional jerkass who still can't get over Robin despite them both getting married, him having kids with someone else, and 16 years having passed.

The two most heartless kids in all television. Assholes.
From screenrant

     The show's finale is its worst point (as has been the case on this blog before.) Written seven years prior, the show's evolution over time meant that the original ending they had planned (and filmed) made no sense. In the final episode, Ted finally meets The Mother (Tracy), a character flashforwarded to for the entire season. We then fast-forward, and discover that the couple the show has spent a season following around divorces very quickly. Tracy lasts long enough to have two kids and then dies, and, at the end, the kids Ted has been telling this story to actually encourage him to go out and get together with Robin, because it was all about her.
     HIMYM was a very fun show, especially in its earlier seasons. While it loses its way a bit around Season Five, it still remains entertaining and a lot of my favourite episodes are from those later seasons. The writing is great, and storytelling is clever (until the finale, as said) and over the course of my binge-watch I really got to connect with these characters, for their blessings and their faults. It's just a shame that such good moments are tinged with that finale, the overall messages of "don't give up on your obsessive crush", as well as the unfortunate implications that go along with Tracy's essential existence as a plot device to make the show's format make sense - or, using in-story terms, have the kids Ted always wanted and then die so he can go after Robin.
     Even the Lost finale was better than this crap.

Thanks.

Review: Voyager 3.13: Fair Trade

Aaand roll credits.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Thirteen - Fair Trade
Written 12/09/15

It's that time again folks, the holiday bigger than Easter, Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's the Neelix episode, the time when the writers of Voyager decide to focus an entire forty-five minutes of your life around the show's most hated character, usually managing in their concentrated efforts to actually portray him as a character worth giving a shit about. While at times this episode felt like a cheaper version of a Season One DS9 episode, Neelix was given a coherent enough arc to make it entertaining, even if he does still have a few ridiculous lines. In context, this episode is far more important for the changes it makes to the plot - introducing the minor character of Vorik and plunging Voyager into the Nekrit Expanse, a region of space which Voyager travels through in one of Season Three's many "mini-arcs".
     The main thrust of the story followed Neelix's desire to be important on the ship. Despite having forced himself onto the ship under false pretences and taken executive control of a kitchen that shouldn't have been his to command, he suddenly starts to feel unwelcome, and upon reaching the Expanse he is terrified that he will get kicked off the ship, his usefulness as a guide ending here. They board a trading station and Neelix attempts to barter for a map, eventually running into old friend Wixiban, who tricks him into dealing narcotics. After consulting Paris about his crime (thanks for rubbing that in, Neelix, I'm sure he needed that), he decides to tell the truth, and he manages to coordinate with the station's commanders to save both he and Wixiban from imprisonment by arresting the narcotics dealers.
     One of the problems that Neelix has, amongst many, is that the writers never really decided on a limit to his abilities. Much like Tom Paris, the ace-pilot-biochemist-historian-doctor-engineer, the writers kept giving Neelix collections of new roles on the ship depending on the writer - except that with Neelix, they kept bringing it up. Neelix is the chef, he's the "Ambassador", he's a guide, he's the stupid made-up title of "Morale Officer". Cynical me found this episode's attempt to make Neelix feel worthless about himself a little hard to believe, seeing as he so readily intrudes outside his area of expertise, but I can also see this as an attempt by the writers to provide something which Neelix has been lacking - flaws which he identifies and works to change. This was attempted by his jealousy arc back in the first production season, but that was resolved almost by accident, and I think that's why this actually works - Neelix thinks about the issue, and decides that honesty and truth are the best way to go about things. He chooses the right thing over what's easy for him. And that's a quality that genuinely stays, which is why I think this episode does actually work. Not to mention Neelix's surprisingly badass turn near the end of the episode - that came out of left field and delighted me immensely. Well. Delight and confusion.

You literally deceived Voyager and led them
into a dangerous situation in the first episode.

     I often wish that Neelix was written this way all the time. Episodes like these make a lot of the same Voyager excuses when it comes to plot silliness, but when the character development is as focused as this, it doesn't really matter. Jetrel and Tuvix, the two previous Neelix episodes, are absolutely brilliant episodes of Voyager and this one joins its ranks at least in spirit. The pacing is great, no part of the script is wasted, everything goes towards developing this deranged hedgehog of a man into a believable and sympathetic character. And then next week he'll go back to being his old annoying self again. Would it kill you to have a little consistency, Voyager?
    And why the hell did you put a Kim episode next week?

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Kim adds to his harem of unrequited lovers when he falls in love with a hologram. It's Alter Ego.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Time and the Rani, The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

This eighth volume of articles from Celebrate, Regenerate! covers stories from the Seventh Doctor.(See here for more on this project.)

Time and the Rani
(Main article.)

When I first sat down to watch Time and the Rani, I was caught up in the fan opinion that it was one of the worst things this side of the Iraq War, but like my reaction to the Sixth Doctor’s stories, I was pleasantly surprised. So surprised, in fact, that I would go so far as to call Time and the Rani one of my favourite stories of the Seventh Doctor’s era, behind only the wonderful The Happiness Patrol. The reason? Time and the Rani doesn’t just break the So Bad It’s Good barrier in the way that a story like Time-Flight does. It smashes that barrier into bits, and leaves you to try and rebuild it while throwing all it can at you. Time and the Rani is not in any way a story; rather, it is an exhilarating and endlessly entertaining experience that never gets old.
     Sylvester McCoy’s early portrayal of the Seventh Doctor is very different to his later more manipulative persona, but that doesn’t make it worse by default. Instead, it’s fresh, vibrant, and unassumingly mad – it takes the bravado of Colin Baker’s Doctor and channels it into a fluid wit. The Rani, while not as unique in her performance as in her introductory story, still balances the new Doctor perfectly. Her scheme is completely mad and fifty shades of scientifically impossible, but it’s the sheer convoluted lengths to which she goes (kidnapping Albert Einstein, etc.) that make the story what it is.
     Fans lambaste Time and the Rani for being too silly, putting an emphasis on goofy humour over plot, characterisation and common sense. But the rejection of the latter is what makes it unique. Doctor Who’s primary feature is variety, and it’s a simple law of probabilities that a story this silly would pop up sometime. And what do the fans do? They have the guile to complain, to complain about this beautiful, nonsensical thing. Time and the Rani doesn’t try to preoccupy itself with the serious stuff, and instead simply tries to let the audience have fun. And at the end of the day, isn’t that just what Doctor Who is about?

The Happiness Patrol

(Main article.)

Despite trying to not get involved with politics, my kinder friends have called me “a liberal”. This, perhaps, is the catalyst to my incredible enjoyment of The Happiness Patrol, a story which takes a metaphor for Margaret Thatcher’s regime and twists it in a deliciously demented way. Even though the Iron Lady herself was described by Sylvester McCoy as “far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered”, Sheila Hancock’s Helen A is a portrayal that is both hilarious in its send-up of the former Prime Minister and frightening in the way it represents certain aspects of Conservative policy.

     It could have been awfully dry, but the addition of just a few ounces of absurdism makes The Happiness Patrol into a complete and total classic. Most memorably, The Kandyman is a villain that does exactly what good Doctor Who villains do best – they scare the kids, and make the adults think. On the one hand, it’s been suggested that the sucrose-composed robot was designed as an attack on the indulgence and power of the capitalist system, while others simply regard it as a demonstration of just how insane Helen A is.

    And sometimes the story actually puts you under the regime’s spell. So many detractors tell of how they can’t take the villains seriously: they paint the Tardis pink, walk around with frilly hairdos and drown people in strawberry sauce. That’s the whole point! The Happiness Patrol isn’t just a satire of a specific political regime, it’s also a wider warning about the power of appearance over ideology in politics. Of course you couldn’t take Helen A’s happy clappy approach seriously at first, in the same way that people voted for good old Maggie because she looked better than Jim Callahan. 

     Plus, this is where we really see the peak of the Seventh Doctor’s powers of manipulation. Sure, we’d seen him plot to blow up Skaro in the previous story, but that had been set up back in the Pilot episode; here, the Doctor waltzes onto a planet and deposes a tyrannical regime in a single night. He seems to understand everyone he meets instantly; he talks down the Sniper who’s never had to face a man’s eyes, defeats the Happiness Patrol by showing them a smile and then introduces Helen A to the concept of negative emotions. He is not just a faceless hero, but a character in his own right, and one that is prepared to go to any lengths to defend justice, truth and freedom. 

     The Happiness Patrol isn’t just a silly exercise in 80s camp. It’s one that has a dark political undertone that has a lot to say to both the kids of the era and their parents. It's scary, disturbing, funny, melancholy, and exciting. And it’s my favourite story of the entire Seventh Doctor era.

The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

(Main article.)

The much-mocked BBC Quarry has had to stand in for a whole variety of planets, with varying results. In the McCoy era there was a move away from the bland rocky faces of Destiny of the Daleks and Time and the Rani to what has been referred to as “a high-class quarry.” Segonax, the planet currently being inhabited by the Psychic Circle, does as Enlightenment does and provides a visual treat to go alongside one of the most metaphorically profound scripts in McCoy’s era. The Circus has many guests of many different flavours, and the secret at the heart of its’ core reflects the state of the program at that late time in its existence.

       The Circus, having moved about a bit but now firmly in one spot, is the perfect metaphor for Doctor Who. Desperately reaching out to foreign markets, it tries to attract writers and fans to please their audience, the British public (here lovingly rendered as the Gods of Ragnarok.) The Whiz Kidd represents the core fanbase, with their constant admiration for stories broadcast before their birth (“I’ve never seen the old stuff, but I know it’s not as good as it used to be.”) and how their interaction with the show only caused more problems than it solved. The three who run the circus represent various figures in the show’s production team, all of them desperately trying to pull together a show so they’re not devoured by the public’s disinterest. The Doctor, stepping in and destroying the Gods of Ragnarok (or at least ending their influence), is a profound statement by the show. It is the statement that it is ready to move on and do whatever it wants to do, no matter what the executives say. 

     Of course, the joy of the story comes not only with the various metaphorical readings, but also with the story’s aesthetic, which helps to satisfy the children blissfully ignorant of the serial’s undertones. The clowns and robots in black limousines, skating across a acrid desert; Mags transforming in the arena; Ace being locked in the robot room – this is the stuff of nightmares. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is intelligent, and manages to say a lot more than other stories can without spoiling it for the kids. And that’s just how we like it.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 9.3: Under The Lake

One last nitpick - the Black Guy Dies First in this episode.
Not sure whose fault that is.

And on gilded wings the angel came. One of the few writers in this present era of the show who doesn't make me collapse into thorough despair is Toby Whithouse, former writer of Being Human and the writer of The God Complex and A Town Called Mercy, two Eleven episodes which I genuinely love. This is because his stories tend to be about things, with themes and stuff, as well as managing to deliver quick, witty dialogue that doesn't devolve into lewd jokes. Some of his character work can be a little out of turn with the rest of the show's writers, and he's not immune to mistakes, but if this week meant anything to me, it was as proof that Toby Whithouse can write this show a hell of a lot better than its showrunner - even if Under The Lake went over a lot of old ground.
     The Doctor and Clara arrive at an undersea base an unspecified amount of time in the future, in which a group of terrified scientists and soldiers have been attempting to avoid the ghosts of an ancient alien and their former commander. The ghosts silently mouth the same phrase over and over again, are attempting to kill and resurrect the crew, and vanish when the floodlights come on. The Doctor and Clara choose to stay and investigate, even after another crew member joins the roster of the dead. With the help of the leader of the group, Cass, and her interpreter, The Doctor realises that the words spoken by the ghosts are in fact riddle-like co-ordinates pointing to the church in the sunken town the base is adjacent to. As The Doctor chooses to go back in time to before the flood to find out what was in the church, Clara is left behind - and is shocked to find the ghost of the Twelfth Doctor.
     So, standard NuWho variation on a Base-Under-Siege story - largish group of secondary characters, following several archetypes - harsh but fair leader, scientist voice of reason, cowardly guy, traitor guy (although in this case he only turns traitor because he dies) and, in this case, we also have Cass' sign interpreter. I like the inclusion of a deaf character, both for the way it provided representation and for the way it worked into the story seamlessly. Cass' ability to lipread was a crucial point in the story, and I loved the fact that her deafness was so completely normal. It also didn't hurt that the team wasn't wonderbread this week, which is sometimes a problem in BuS stories.

The Doctor helps a team of well-developed scientists.

     Say what you want about the "meat-and-potatoes" nature of the Base-Under-Siege story, it does help to provide a lot of tension and mystery which come inbuilt into that format. Whithouse built up the mystery and suspense in this story across the entire runtime, and it was the first episode in a while where I really felt like the show was filling its 42 minutes. This brilliant use of the tension provided by the format of this story is not something I think will transfer to next week - the way that these two-parters are being told has them much more loosely connected to one another than in prior series. This made the cliffhanger - the groan-worthy cliffhanger of "The Doctor's going to die", which I'm really sick and tired of by now - feel more irritating in its appearance than the tension bomb it should be.
     Aside from a few nitpicks, I was able to watch Under The Lake and easily, unironically enjoy it. This format has, in the past in NuWho, been the undoing of some other writers - Chibnall never developed his "base" members enough, and RTD's attempt at the genre in Voyage of the Damned went as well can be expected. I perhaps wish that Whithouse would step outside the bounds of this genre, and it looks in fact like that's what he's about to do with this story's conclusion, but either way he's still a fantastic writer and I really enjoyed this episode. Which makes a nice change.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The thrilling conclusion, in Before The Flood.
   

Review: Heroes Reborn 1.1 and 1.2: "Brave New World" and "Odessa"

Mohinder voice: Heroes is back, after all these years. You could that that it's Heroes... Reborn? Actually, no, why would you name it something different? The storyline follows on from Heroes, the first "volume" of this show has the same name as the last, aborted "volume" of Heroes and it revolves around many of the same characters and all of the same themes. The only thing majorly different is the direction and the soundtrack, and that's because hey, it's not 2006 any more. They even have the pretentious opening narrations...

There have been some pretty contrived powers on this show.
But "enters video game when withdrawing the sword of
Takeo Kensei" is the most contrived of all.

You may remember back in 2013/14 when I reviewed each "Volume" of Heroes, the superhero show from NBC with a famously good first season and an infamously mixed-to-bad everything else. Me, I loved the show - despite the myriad plot holes and stupid character decisions, I ended up falling in love with the characters and the Universe the show is set in, especially characters like Clare Bennett and Sylar. They number among a number of characters not returning for this show, ostensibly a revival "event" series which uses a few of the same characters from Heroes but puts most of its focus on new characters in a slightly "evolved" world. Pun not intended. This opening, two-part pilot did a lot of things I enjoyed, but it also fell into a lot of traps that Heroes did back in its day and doesn't really seemed to have learnt anything about the way storytelling is told in modern TV.
     Inching closer to Heroes roots in the X-Men franchise, the word is now out about Evolved Humans, now referred to as Evos. Whereas in Heroes these were a loose diaspora held back by fear and superstition, now they're a fully-persecuted minority held back by fear and superstition, the world still reeling from a terrorist attack at a Human-Evo peace conference in 2014. However, there is a great something coming in the near future, and a conspiracy in which even "unregistered" Evos are being killed en masse. Amongst the cast of characters are: Heroes' Noah Bennett, who along with a "fun" comedy sidekick is attempting to discover what happened to his daughter Clare, and why he appears to have erased his own memory of the day of the Incident; Luke Collins (Zachary Levi, Chuck) who is an Evo hunter with his more determined wife; Carlos Gutierrez, who is forced to take on the mantle of a Mexican-wrestler inspired superhero upon his brother's death; teenage Tommy, who has the power to make people disappear, and Miko Otomo, who has the power to... enter a video game.
     The thing you immediately notice about the main cast is how wonderbread it is - the three main storylines are about Noah, Luke and Tommy, all white guys with complicated motivations. Noah is Noah so I'll leave him alone, but Luke's storyline in particular is a sign of the overall issue here - he is portrayed as being brooding and unsure about his merciless slaughter of an entire race of people, while his black wife is portrayed as a violent sociopath. He is given the development, she is given anger. This is particular egregious given the current events in the States, in which the stereotype of black people as more innately violent than white people is leading to the wholesale murder of African Americans by the police. And the rest of the show isn't better in its complete lack of complexity and understanding of non-white cultures. The only Latino characters live in a crap, run-down neighbourhood and their hero wears a Mexican Luchador mask. The only two Japanese characters exist in a world entirely composed of nerd-culture and video-games. At least Heroes gave a slightly wider insight into the overall Japanese culture outside of Hiro's obsession with comic books - Miko has so much potential to be an interesting and well-developed character, but her entire agency is expressed either through the admiration of her male companion or by her badly-animated exploits as a "badass samurai girl".

We're meant to be rooting for the white guy to have a
redemption arc and get away from his emotional, violent
black wife. In 20-fucking-15.

     But of course, this is still Heroes, and there's a lot to love. The whole plotline of a series of disconnected people banding together with extraordinary abilities they don't entirely understand worked back in Season One of the main show, and it's probably going to work here. The main problem, ignoring the stuff with race, is that I really doubt that a newcomer to this show would have any reason to be invested. I'm sticking with the show because I watched 64 episodes of this universe, I like the background mythology, I'm a big fan of Noah Bennett. But it's not doing anything new or interesting, the show is too built upon its older sister for any of the little hints and callbacks to mean anything to newer viewers. Heroes Reborn can't take in new viewers and make them stay, and the old viewers coming back expecting to find a rejuvinated show will only find more of the same.

Thanks.

Review: Voyager 3.12: Macrocosm

As an alternate Janeway will once say, "When diplomacy fails,
there's only one alternative: violence."

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twelve - Macrocosm
Written 9/9/15

The 1979 film Alien had a profound effect upon science fiction, establishing a darker genre in which alien hostility took on a personal nature, and space is populated by dusty-skinned space marines and women in vests. Our woman in a vest this week happens to be Captain Janeway, and this episode is a lengthy, if not entirely direct, tribute to Alien and its influence. Funnily enough, this was completely unintentional, the Voyager writers simply wanting an "action" episode without any moralising. I think it's a testament to both Alien and to Kate Mulgrew's biceps that Ellen Ripley is the first thing that comes to mind.
     The plot, while very good at building suspense and drama, ends up feeling a little askew due to the ridiculousness of the aliens attacking Voyager. While Janeway and Neelix were away on a diplomatic mission, The Doctor attempted to play nurse to an alien colony crippled by a virus. He discovered that the virus is able to absorb the growth hormones of the host, increasing its size to a macroscopic level, first into irritating flies and then floating, stabby basketballs. Janeway and The Doctor end up the only two members of the crew unaffected, with The Doctor's cure fixing Janeway's initial infection upon entering the ship. Jacket off and gun in hand, she fights her way to environmental control, where she floods the ship with cure-gas and the day is saved.
     In the real world, of course, viruses don't work that way. Most viruses are nothing more than a few strands of genetic information (RNA) surrounded by a protein shell, and absorbing a growth hormone intended for a multi-celled organism would do diddly-squat. I could have accepted a bacteria forming a multi-cellular organism, but viruses aren't even that complex; they're the simpletons of the microscopic world. This doesn't really harm the episode's effect, because the average viewer isn't assumed to know that much about microbiology, and this stuff is alien after all. Who knows, we might find something like this one day.

Janeway splats one of the macro-viruses.

     As for the stated aim of being an action plot and nothing more complicated... a 100% success! Janeway looks rather strapping in just her grey under-vest, and Mulgrew really seems to take to the Ellen Ripley soldier look, as she shoots and rolls her way around the ship like a bowling skittle with a tommy gun. The scenes of her exploring the ship upon her return and discovering the crew's sick bodies, placed before The Doctor's reveal about the disease's origins, would of course have been far more effective if I hadn't seen the episode before and knew about the Macro-viruses. I really enjoyed the Doctor's expository flashback half-way through the episode, as it gave The Doctor a chance to use his mobile emitter and it also gave the first and last thirds of the episode the well-needed tension they deserved.
     The word Macrocosm, by the way, refers to the entirety of a system, as opposed to individual parts within it. Like many Voyager titles (Parturition, Parallax and Cathexis come to mind) it has a paper-thin connection to the actual episode itself. Which is an unfair connection, because for once the Voyager writers did exactly what they set out to do - a fun, tense action plot incorporated into Voyager's surroundings, giving Kate Mulgrew a chance to do something other than be the ship's captain/mother/inquisitor. So what if the science behind the macroviruses isn't right? Didn't anyone tell you that this was Star Trek? They let Neelix near food.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Neelix gets in trouble when he meets an old friend... wait, Neelix has friends? That not a Fair Trade.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Revelation of the Daleks and Mindwarp

This seventh volume of articles from Celebrate, Regenerate! covers stories from the later Sixth Doctor.(See here for more on this project.)

Revelation of the Daleks
(Main article.)

Even by the standards of Dalek stories, Revelation is just weird. Named after the frankly insane final book of the New Testament, the final story of Season 22 puts the focus on Davros for the first time since Genesis, giving Terry Molloy's version of the character the room to breathe. The result is a performance that invokes the power of the original, and is infinitely more fun and slimy. The same can be said for the rest of the story, which is brave in the way that it celebrates the grotesque parts of human nature. If Genesis of the Daleks was a BBC documentary, then Revelation of the Daleks is Horrible Histories.
      And yet it’s still funny, in a really sick way. Saward manages to perfectly balance a mix of horror, disgust and dark humour, making us reflect upon the less palatable aspects of human nature. Particularly striking is the scene in which Natasha has to kill her father -  a scene where music, lighting and the script come together to create a moment of genuine tragedy. (Made worse, in fact, by the realisation that she shares her name with Saward’s own daughter.)  And then there’re the little things; Jobel’s dismissal of the President’s wife as a foaming nuisance, the guard who picks his nose, Jobel’s death due to injection of embalming fluid.
     Sure, it’s not something that you perhaps want over your Saturday teatime, but the story itself is undoubtedly a work of genius. By sticking the Sixth Doctor and Peri on the outskirts, it gives the impression that the world of Who works fine without them, that there are forces of good and of evil, that this is a living world rather than one that only comes alive whenever the Good Doctor makes an appearance. We get colourful characters like the exceptional Orcini, or the creepy Jobel, or the tragic Tasambeker. Revelation is in itself a revelation, a revelation that a story doesn’t have to be focused on the Doctor to be good as long as the writing is up to scratch. Perhaps no one expected it to be Eric Saward that was delivering this message, but regardless of the writer, Revelation of the Daleks is a story to be celebrated – not just for its quality, but for its creative audacity too.

Mindwarp
(Main article.)

The second part of the Trial of a Timelord season, Mindwarp’s four episodes are characterised not only being very confusing, but for being deliberately. Where its spiritual prequel Vengeance On Varos sought to attack the use of excessive horror in television, Mindwarp takes it one step further by being deliberately manipulative in itself. On its own, its plot and story may make very little sense, but in the context of the Trial arc and considering the Valeyard’s manipulations, it quickly becomes one of the cleverest stories of the season.
     The standout of the cast is BRIAN BLESSED’s first and sadly only appearance in Who. While Blessed can do subtle performances, such as in the lauded I Claudius, I think he simply enjoys the more boisterous roles that he’s famous for. Mindwarp is no exception to this; Blessed gets to scream, shout and monologue, and he provides the story’s best line by far – “"Ok. Today prudence shall be out watchword; tomorrow we will soak the land in blood." He also allows the story to cement its theme of human brutality in all its different forms – the scientifically-driven evil of Dr. Crozier; the physical beast of Dorf; the banal commercialism of the Mentors; the uncontrollable actions of the cave-creature and the blood-thirst of Yrcanos. It’s all about the difference between evil actions committed because one wants to commit them, or as part of their immediate nature, and it asks the audience the simple question: which scenario describes The Doctor’s actions here?
     And, for the first time, Doctor Who uses the Unreliable Narrator trope. It’s actually really interesting to see the way in which the serial lets the Valeyard play to the audience’s expectations; we know now that The Sixth Doctor’s portrayal in the flashback as a heartless torturer was a manipulation of the evidence on the Valeyard’s part, but to an unforgiving public who already disliked the character, this would be perfectly believable. The serial, through the Valeyard’s manipulation, challenges the audiences’ view of the Sixth Doctor, ultimately trying to send him on the road to public acceptance. Not that Mindwarp succeeds in that aim. What it does do, however, is provide a really interesting piece of TV, and a brilliantly tragic end for one of my favourite companions.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 9.2: The Witch's Familiar

It's nice to see the older Daleks after the whole
"Every Dalek Ever" fiasco, but what's the point of them?

This is really frustrating. Really, really quite frustrating. Because it wasn't necessarily the case this week that I thought that the episode was bad - Moffat is continuing with this whole thing of getting better at some elements and just as terrible at others. This week I wasn't cringing at insensitive lines so much as I was cringing at the more twist-and-turn aspects of the plot which have become so idiosyncratic of Moffat's style. While the episode was so filled of terrible Moffat cliches, I think I'm just so tired of them that I saw past it to the genuinely good moments, of which there were myriad. It keeps coming back to this point with Moffat scripts that even if I enjoy the more recent ones, I still wish they were better and that they were something I could call "good Doctor Who."
     The episode immediately negated the cliffhanger of the previous episode with a lengthy cold open which used technobabble to excuse it away, as well as explaining why The Master survived being shot in Death In Heaven. The episode followed two subplots, one with The Master and Clara making their way through the Dalek "sewers" (an interesting concept where the sewer consists of the still-living rotten remains of dead Daleks), and another with The Doctor and Davros discussing his fate. Davros claims to be dying, and offers The Doctor congratulations at the knowledge that the Time Lords are alive. He even goes so far as to open his real eyes for the first time in the show's history, just to be able to watch one last sunrise. The Doctor, being compassionate, decides to give some of his new regen. energy into the Dalek's hivemind, which apparently is a trick by Davros to rejuvinate himself and the Daleks. This is discussed for a while but then turns out to be another trick by The Doctor, with the living sewers rising up against the Daleks. And at one point Clara ended up inside a Dalek casing and it was weird.
     Ignoring for now the question of whether it was a good Doctor Who story, let's ask - was this a good Dalek story. Everyone has their own criteria for what that means - for me, it means that we got a story where the Daleks were not only good villains, but which showed us something new about them. Like the rest of the episode, there is good and bad. On the bright side, a lot of the scenes where Clara's voice was translated through the Dalek speech modulator, and The Master explained how a Dalek thinks. Julian Bleach's Davros is still an amazing addition to the show, and the scenes where Davros is pretending to be dying had me on the edge of my seat. The downside was that a lot of the episode's concepts for the Daleks are either derivative of other Dalek stories, or directly contradict previous stories.

Julian Bleach is the best Davros since Michael Wisher,
hands down.

     There are elements of the show which still really don't work going forwards, and it's the kinds of things which prevent me from fully enjoying the episode. Moffat had the first female Master call herself "the bitch" in this episode - not a word unique to Moffat, RTD used it twice in reference to Cassandra, but the word rings differently coming from The Master because he has spent the majority of his life (as we've seen it) as a male persona. Ignoring for now the relative absurdity of an alien race that can completely rearrange its DNA having the same concept of gender as we have, this history means that all of "Missy"'s lines come from the mouth of a man. Gomez is brilliant in the role and there are a lot of moments her character brings which are genuinely enjoyable villainy. But there was no reason for Gomez' Master to be here for anything other than popular demand, and she seems to be being employed in the same way that River was a few seasons ago.
     When I watched Dark Water last year, I had some hope that Moffat had maybe learnt to tone down some of his old habits. That story had some brilliant buildup, slow and menacing, alongside an interesting sci-fi idea. It avoided Moffat's old traits - bizarre posturing, women being used as devices, "wacky" moments that had no effect on the plot. This episode was so on the edge of being brilliant - Julian Leach is amazing, the Davros moments were phenomenal, and the scenes with The Master and Clara in the sewers were making my day. But the fact is, they were sharing the stage with so many of those old moments: the weird effing "sonic sunglasses", this claim about a "great prophecy" of a Time-Lord/Dalek hybrid when the same thing happened in Evolution of the Daleks eight years ago. I don't expect perfection in TV - I couldn't be a critic, otherwise. But this episode was blisteringly close to that perfection, and that makes the bad moments sting all the more.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Underwater mayhem in Under The Lake.

Review: Voyager 3.11: The Q and the Grey

Star Trek, never afraid to push the dick joke.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Eleven - The Q and the Grey
Written between 5th and 6th August 2015.
"My crew and I will get home. We're committed to that. But we're going to do it through hard work and determination. We are not looking for a quick fix." Katheryn effing Janeway, everyone.

From the somewhat sublime to the totally ridiculous. Of all the story arcs in Voyager's predecessor, The Next Generation, the most complete and satisfying was that of Q, the omnipotent being who in that show's premiere and finale sets out to judge Humanity in the 24th Century, with several visits inbetween in which his character developed from a trickster god into a benevolent caretaker. Voyager rather questionably decides to continue this arc further, in a trilogy of episodes focusing on change in the Q continuum. The first of these episodes was last year's Death Wish, and this is the second, incredibly disappointing, follow up.
     Q appears on the ship and starts pursuing Janeway, asking to mate with her and conceive a child, which of course she would look after. She is completely bemused by this, even as Q starts asking around the ship as to how to woo her. Eventually a female Q arrives, claiming to be our Q's eternal mate. Q whisks Janeway off to the continuum and explains that, since the death of Quinn in Death Wish, the Q have been in a violent civil war started by Q himself, which is having repercussions in the rest of the universe, demonstrated back on Voyager by a series of supernovae in quick succession. This Civil War, in Janeway's terms, is being expressed as the American Civil War, except with the muskets in fact being inter-dimension weapons capable of killing a Q. The female Q takes Voyager into the Continuum and they save Q and Janeway from being executed, with Q and Miss Q procreating with a touch of the fingers.
     The episode's first fifteen minutes are a total farce, with Q chasing Janeway around the ship and borderline sexually harassing her. The reasons for Q's desire to "mate" with Janeway aren't explained until half-way through the story, and so we're left to believe that the omnipotent protector of humanity simply has the horn. The way Q's request travels around the ship like schoolyard gossip irked me quite a bit, and it also highlighted the main issue with this whole thing: Q's treatment of Janeway would not happen if she were a man. Q tested Picard, and attempted to fight Sisko. The Q are an omnipotent race of beings who live in an ethereal space inconceivable to us, why would they have a concept of gender? And why must we straddle Star Trek's only main female captain with a plotline where Q wants to make babies with her?

You're only saying that because you played the
first named Klingon female on Star Trek.

     What's even more bizarre than Q's behaviour on Voyager is the whole thing going on within the continuum. The idea of the Q Civil War is an interesting one, and granted there are a few decent conversations regarding its origins and its solutions, mainly using ideas carried over from Death Wish. But the use of the US Civil War as an extended metaphor robbed the whole idea of its significance. The flimsy excuse of the "muskets" which are weapons powerful enough to harm a Q but which can be easily operated by humans shatters suspension of disbelief, and the fact that the entire plot is resolved by two people touching fingers is quite frankly insulting, rendering the whole thing a waste of time. Not to mention the further treatment of women - Janeway and the female Q are both rendered in the Continuum as wearing cumbersome, flowing dresses, because God forbid a woman actually be capable of doing useful things.
     There were a few fun moments in this episode, mainly surrounding the J/C ship which always tickles my pickle. But the humour missed the mark often enough that it really didn't feel like a worthy return for such a cool character. In fiction we often avoid omnipotent characters because their powers rob the plot of all tension or drive, and they are boring as people. Q subverted this, and managed to be one of the franchise's stand-out guest stars. Unfortunately, here he is wasted, his story being far too silly and just plain odd to make and sense. That's a commonality in Season Three, as we'll find out in the coming weeks.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Giant microbes make Janeway lose her shirt and turn into Starfleet's answer to Rambo. It's Macrocosm.