Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Moonbase (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story. Although, tbh, I'm not sure I'd actually watched the serial when I wrote that. I literally don't understand where I was coming from.

The Moonbase's DVD replaces the missing episodes with
animation, like last week.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Six - The Moonbase
Written between 21st and 23rd September 2015

It is not surprising that a show spanning 26 years of continuous programming through three distinct decades managed to end up following certain archetypes when it came to writing stories. What is surprising about the Second and Third Doctor's era is how often the same one comes up. Yes, I am indeed talking about "Base-Under-Siege", a plot template with the same circumstances and character archetypes which defines many of the stories across Doctor Who - but especially in the Second Doctor's era. Troughton didn't, of course, originate this - The Tenth Planet from last week was one of these stories. But it's more important here because last week, the whole world was being invaded, while this week we're focusing on a small tiny base. On the Moon.
     While attempting to land on Mars, something drags the TARDIS off-course and they end up on Earth's moon in the year 2070. There they enter the Moonbase, staffed by a small scientific team in charge of the Gravitron, a device used in the future to control the Earth's weather. The Doctor and his three companions (Ben and Polly from last week, and Two's favourite companion, Jamie McCrimmon) discover that the base has been inundated with an epidemic, causing staff members to become comatose with black veins. The director, Hobson, is immediately suspicious of The Doctor and his friends - especially when people start going missing. As we see, this is down to the Cybermen, something which The Doctor immediately suspects. Soon the base is being sieged by an Army of Cybermen, intent on using the Gravitron to kill everyone on Earth. Using the help of the remaining crew, The Doctor manages to direct the Gravitron towards the Cybermen and their ships, expelling them from the moon, as Polly and Ben despatch the remaining few with a solvent cocktail.
     This is the fourth story of Troughton's era, but, thanks to the missing episodes, it contains only his third and fourth surviving episodes. Half of The Moonbase is missing and has been for years - this is another DVD release (brought out in 2014) where the remaining episodes have been animated. I really like this selection of stories because it shows both sides of the problem - next week's Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in its entirety and didn't live up to expectations, but The Wheel In Space the week after contains only two of its six episodes. When I first watched The Moonbase and reviewed it (as can be read in the link at the top of this article) those animations hadn't been done, and I distinctly didn't remember the first episode being gone. I must have started on the second episode, not had a clue what was going on, and judged it from there.

These Cybermen are much more into subterfuge.

     So, what is "Base-Under-Siege"? The Doctor and companions enter a remote, claustrophobic base. It's being run by a small (emphasis on small) team of people who usually follow a set of archetypes. Among others, there's the suspicious and hardline leader, the medic who speaks as the voice of reason, and the plucky one with lots of technical knowledge. People start being picked off when the alien enemies slowly start to pick people off, making their way closer and closer to our heroes and their defences. What story am I describing? It's definitely a description of The Moonbase. It's also a description of dozens of other Doctor Who stories. Dalek is Base Under Siege. Flatline is Base Under Siege. It is ubiquitous. The problem with Troughton's Base Under Siege stories being a lack of variety caused by repetition of the plot and not a lot of budget to separate them from one another.
     The turnaround between the broadcast of The Tenth Planet and filming for The Moonbase was apparently only two weeks. Despite this hasty schedule, the new Cyberman design is both simpler and slightly more effective, and the fact that a hefty accordion has been replaced by a boiler suit with handles means that they were able to create a fairly convincing "army". As I put rather nicely in my previous review, the new design is a trade-off which would go on to define the design of the Cybermen in all later incarnations. The robotic boiler suit men have much less of the humanoid design of their predecessor - their hands are three-fingered pincers, their voices now a harsh electronic buzz that requires subtitles to understand. Although The Doctor does mention their history, it's not immediately obvious that these things are human beings - but when that history is brought up, their inhumanity becomes all the more terrifying.
     Of course, like last week, and like some time to come, there is an air of pronounced sexism which often gets brought up around The Moonbase. Polly is given quite a nice scene where she works out a way of discovering a way to defeat these Cybermen - using a combination of solvents to erode the plastic coating on the Cybermen's chest apparatus. But apart from that, she doesn't get much else to do but scream at the Cybermen, be disbelieved about having seen the Cybermen, and be told by three different people to make coffee. Often there's a counter-argument that The Doctor asking her to make coffee is an attempt to diffuse the tense situation that had arisen amongst the staff of the base. But one thing that is never brought up is the fact that at one point Ben literally says, "Not you Polly, this is Men's work." I suppose it's historical accuracy, however unpleasant it may be.

Two's characterisation takes it's most well-known form here.

     The Moonbase ends up being lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. It doesn't have to spend as much time explaining itself as its predecessor did, and so it gets to add a bit more tension and suspense. The story was meant to capitalise on the new Cybermen, and it did that, while at the same time finally calming Troughton's more clownish tendencies and allowing the more serious side of his character to come out. Despite how we may be able to categorise and scrutinise it, and despite some of the more distasteful idiosyncrasies of its era, The Moonbase is a very enjoyable story for fans of this era.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The Boy Wonder of the Troughton era, which just happens to be a Cyberman story. Join with us as we defrost The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Review: Doctor Who 9.8: The Zygon Inversion

Peter Capaldi delivers the best performance so far in his era.

For some reason, this week's episode felt a lot shorter than the first half, even though I know that that can't be the case. Perhaps it was to do with the pacing or simple nature of the story - resolutions always run faster than build-ups. But there was something else working in this story's favour - it more or less fixed a lot of last week's problems. Curiously enough this week Peter Harness' writing credit was joined by one from Moffat, and opposed to being a negative influence he seemed to balance out some of Harness' harsher methods. Whereas last week seemed hell-bent on causing paranoia and superstition, this episode ran a hard-line message about pacifism that really hit home.
     Clara, stuck inside a Zygon pod, finds herself able to influence her doppelganger's behaviour, and uses this to have her spare The Doctor and communicate with him without her knowing. Kate, who wasn't killed last week, rendezvous with The Doctor as he and Clara guide her doppelganger to The Black Archives, the room where the original ceasefire was built and the "Osgood Boxes" supposedly can mean oblivion or revolution for both Zygons and Humans. Everyone gathered in one room, The Doctor tries to convince Bonnie that war is pointless, and does so using a brilliant speech. When Bonnie finally changes her mind, The Doctor reveals that the boxes were both empty - he removes this information from Kate's mind, but keeps it in the mind of Bonnie, who calls off the revolutionaries and becomes one of the Osgoods.
     The episode focused a lot on pacifism and the victims of war, rather than the previous episode's focus on the paranoia of foreign terrorism. In the first half of the episode we see the painful fate of one of the integrated Zygons, and it strikes all of the crap about "don't bomb them, you'll radicalise the rest" from the first half into painful ignorance. That was then followed by the amazing climax of the episode - I have not heard a speech that good in Doctor Who since The Eleventh Hour, honest truth. Capaldi is a fucking fine actor, and he gave so much to this scene - a genuine sadness, anger, frustration, but also a glimmer of hope that things might become good. He feels genuinely caught up in the moment, and that carried through to me - I empathised with The Doctor more in those few seconds than I have for this entire season thus far. This is how these speeches should be delivered, and how this message should have been from the beginning.

Zygon!Clara (Bonnie) deliberates over the Blue Osgood Box

      Of course, this episode's single-mindedness to race for the resolution did mean that I don't have much else to talk about. Osgood carried on her role from last week as The Doctor's temporary, surrogate companion, eventually becoming a nice personification of a sci-fi idea. After clowning around last week, this week gave Jenna Coleman a lot more beefy stuff, both as Clara and Bonnie, both in and out of her mind. There were moments where Bonnie felt a little cheesy, but we can maybe put that down to her being a big tentacled monster living as a human being. Thinking on it, it's a little too convenient that convincing the terrorist leader to stand down will stop the entire movement - we know from real life that eliminating the head means nothing to radical organisations - but it worked for the story and felt very satisfying.
       I think this is possibly the first time in a while that I can say Moffat saved an episode, but here we are. Doctor Who keeps pulling this nonsense with me where every time I despair about the direction it takes, there's a sudden left-turn and it does something I really enjoy. The Zygon Inversion, true to its name, felt like a reversal of last week. And that was 100% for the better. Now I just wish this whole silly season works its way out right.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The first single-parter of the season, Sleep No More.

Review: Voyager 3.17: Unity

Reference to the previous bald Star Trek girl?

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Seventeen - Unity
Written between 28th and 29th September 2015

How appropriate that as I begin Cybermen Month on Nostalgia Filter, we encounter Unity, the first Voyager episode to star the Borg, Star Trek's direct equivalent. It's funny now to see look here and see that Unity was considered such a highlight episode, a rare guest appearance. While this episode may have only been added to the series in order to tie the show in with the release of Star Trek: First Contact, the movie which renovated the Borg, Voyager would go on to use the pre-existing lore around them to turn them into their most important recurring villains - and would even have one as a main character. It's no exaggeration to say that the Borg were Voyager's saving grace as a show.
   Chakotay is on a shuttle with Obviously-Dead-Ensign™ when they crash onto an island with a Federation hail. Chakotay awakens to find himself in a community inhabited by lots of species from back in the Alpha Quadrant - the result of a Borg Ship being separated from its collective, its inhabitants regaining their old lives. In particular, Chakotay becomes friends with a human woman, Riley. Voyager is trotting along until it encounters a burnt-out Borg Cube. Riley says that they're creating a shared society, and asks Chakotay to ask Voyager for weapons and supplies should they arrive. Chakotay has a brain injury from being attacked upon the crash, and so the Borg-ettes implant him with a temporary brain device which allows him to become part of their collective, somehow healing his wounds. When he returns to Voyager and Janeway refuses to help them in their desire to reestablish a collective, they use the residual trace connection to force Chakotay to reactivate the Cube, allowing them to spread their collective across the planet and achieve peace and harmony.
     Despite last week leaving that big ol' cliffhanger that this was the Borg episode, and the presence of the Borg being a massive part of the publicity around this episode, the episode tries its best to keep their presence here a secret. When Riley explains the reason why she's in the Delta Quadrant in the first place, she's obtuse in her description of the Borg, simply calling them "aliens". This has a story purpose, of course, but it feels a little lacklustre to hold this information hostage - I would have preferred it had the episode had Voyager encounter the cube in the cold open, allowing the scenes with Chakotay's shuttle to feel more sinister with the knowledge that the Borg are here, just not in plain sight.

Because we had to have at least one active Drone for it to be
considered a Borg episode.

     While there were hints towards the Borg's future in the series (the "greater enemy" which would become Species 8472), there's really nothing here that hasn't either been done better before in Trek or would be done better later. Meditation of whether it's possible to return from life as a Borg was already thoroughly examined as a philosophy in TNG's I, Borg, while the emotional side would be embodied in the character of Seven of Nine. It would have been a decent character piece for Chakotay if it hadn't felt more like a Love-Interest-Of-The-Week plot which didn't really characterise him as anything other than "Starfleet guy." Considering that Chakotay is supposed to have become a member of the rebel Maquis (that plotline's relevance being shown by how seldom I write that word), I think it's a real shame that it never came up here - and that this episode wasn't a better showing for one of Trek's biggest villains.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The "unholy trio" of bad Season Three episodes begins with Darkling.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tenth Planet

One with Ben at the South Pole.

Doctor Who - Season 4, Story Two - The Tenth Planet
Written between 19th and 20th September 2015

Under William Hartnell's tenure as The Doctor, the show had not only begun, but had also become a national phenomenon. Other shows take a while to get embedded into the public imagination, but under Hartnell the show had risen phenomenally, following the 60s trend of Dalekmania. Behind the scenes, however, several accounts show a man often harder to work with. In 1966, near the start of the show's fourth season, Hartnell's failing health and friction with newer members of the production team led to the suggestion of his leaving the show. In order to do this, writer Gerry Davis created the concept of regeneration, and he incorporated it into a story he'd been writing with his friend Kit Pedler, about a race of cybernetic creatures known as Cybermen...
     The Doctor and his two companions Ben and Polly (both from 1960s England) arrive in the South Pole. There they wander into an underground base led by General Cutler. The base is a scientific station monitoring a rocket launch towards Mars, and the three are immediately treated with suspicion. The rocket starts heading off course, and is ultimately lost, as a planet seems to come within range of Earth - a planet The Doctor identifies as Mondas. Soon the base is invaded by tall, bumbling creatures called Cybermen, who explain their origins as a race of human-like beings forced to replace parts of their bodies with technology. They want to invade Earth, robbing it of enough energy to keep Mondas alive and to kidnap to human population in order to convert them into more of their own kind. Before they can truly get their plan under way, however, Mondas absorbs too much energy, and is destroyed. As the Cybermen lie in ruins, The Doctor, feeling a bit tired, makes his way back to The Tardis and collapses, regenerating into The Second Doctor.

This amazing shot wouldn't be half as effective
if the costume designer had remembered the gloves.

     The previous, premier story of this season, The Savages, was filmed as part of the previous production block, meaning that for Hartnell, he was essentially coming back to the show solely to film his exit. It's been said that this quite frustrated him, even if his health kept continuing to disrupt the show even through the production of this story. At one point Hartnell missed a week of filming due to complications from his arteriosclerosis, and he was hence written out of his own penultimate episode, a lot of his lines being given to the serial's other characters. This means that the third episode, lacking both Doctor and Cybermen, is by far the serial's most boring and tedious, but that actually contributes to the serial's success, as the Doctor's collapse and tired recover foreshadows the (for the time) incredibly surprising regeneration at the end.
     The execution of the original concept of the Cybermen is... well, it's hard to say with a perspective so drowned in hindsight. The explanation of the Cybermen is fantastic - you can really imagine that these beings were once men and women. As with Hartnell's absence in episode 3, blunders sometimes help - the Cybermen's silver gloves weren't ready in time, and so they had to go on without them. The resulting Cybermen, gripping their foes with human hands, look far more body-horror for it. They also, for some people, contribute to the opposite effect. I remember in particular my sister watching The Tenth Planet with me and laughing her head off at them, with their beady eyes and ridiculous sing-song voices. For me, of course, it all works and is a horrifying view into a potential future of the human race. The voices are still funny though.
     Now, for the stuff related to this story's release today. As I mentioned in the prologue to this month, many of the episodes from the black and white days are missing. This provides several interesting and unique challenges in watching the old series, with fans resorting to the use of "recons", facsimiles of the show created using stills, stage directions and the original audio. Luckily, for four stories, their DVD releases have been accompanied by complete animated versions of the missing episodes, using a unique animation style which attempts to as closely as possible match the original shots. Here, the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet is animated, the entire episode (bar the regeneration, thanks to Blue Peter) having been lost. I actually really like it - after the dullness of the third episode, the animated episode has a brilliant element of style and menace which does the Cybermen (and Hartnell) due justice.

Even in animation, Hartnell's final lines carry a great sense of
poignancy.

     There's a brilliant sense of decline in this story which may or may not have been intentional. The Cybermen represent, here, a humanity driven by a desire for survival to a dark, technological fate. They are shadows of their former self. This is a black mirror for the idea of Regeneration in the first place. The Doctor's main aim this episode, interestingly, is simply to wait and allow things to work themselves out, as he knows that the Cybermen will fail. The same was known by Hartnell of himself, and so it stands out as a very definite, very final story for the Doctor who allowed the show to come into being. And I salute him.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Second Doctor is in a base which is under siege. You could say that it's a kind of... "base-under-siege" story. It's The Moonbase.

Review: Doctor Who 9.7: The Zygon Invasion

This promotional image does not happen within the episode.

The last time Peter Harness tried to stick a message into his sci-fi, we were rewarded with the embarrassment that was Kill The Moon, 45 minutes of anti-abortion propaganda wrapped up in a shitty and unbelievable plot. This time, the concept has come straight from the mouth of Moffat himself, and this time Doctor Who is actually trying to be relevant - most notably surrounding issues in the Middle-East, the increasing criticism of immigration around the world, and the refugee crisis currently dominating Europe's headlines. Like Harness' last story, it's dangerous ground to be walking on, because mixing those discussions with standard Doctor Who tropes can often lead to an unintended message at the end of it.
      Apparently, after the events of the attempted Zygon takeover in The Day of the Doctor, 20 million Zygons were allowed to take human form and were distributed within the human populace to live peacefully with Mankind. However, there has been a Zygon uprising with the ranks who insist on the desire to live out their lives in full Zygon form. The Doctor and "Clara" are called in to help maintain the peace. Osgood, who was believed to have died in Death In Heaven, is revealed to have been twinned with her Zygon copy ever since The Day, and hence one half of the pair is here, having been kidnapped by the Zygon radicals. Kate Stewart heads for the town of "Truth and Consequences" in New Mexico, The Doctor heads with a UNIT taskforce to the fictional country of "Turmezistan" and Clara stays behind in London. After investigating, Kate Stewart is replaced by a Zygon, and the UNIT forces in the UK and Turmezistan are replaced as well. As The Doctor attempts to return to the UK on a private plane, "Clara", who was a Zygon the whole time, fires a rocket-launcher at him.
     The Zygon Radicals are a group who give themselves the name "Truth and Consequences". They are described as terrorists, they have an white-text-on-black-background flag, they release hostage videos and they want to radicalise all of the other Zygons into uprising against Humanity. Subtle, you two. I was made quite uncomfortable by a lot of the discussions that went on in this episode - especially because a lot of the comparisons made directly alienate their real-world counterparts. The most direct comparison one can make is that the Zygons are Muslims and that "Truth and Consequences" are some variation on ISIS, al-Qaeda and the variety of other radical groups - although there are some comparisons to be made with immigrants both in Europe and on the US-Mexico border ("They just turned up. No jobs. Nowhere to live. No money.") It's all very well and good expressing that there are good Zygons living somewhere, but like a lot of the right-wing press this episode criticises, they're never shown to us. The only peaceful Zygon in the whole episode is Alien!Osgood, and by the time we reach the present she's dead.

Osgood's return is actually quite welcome, and her actress is
allowed to be more than a walking joke.

     Dodgy attempts at a political message aside, there were some good moments. The episode's main sense of tension was built upon its clone plot, with evil doppelgangers and enemies hiding in plain sight and manipulating people. This works amazingly thanks to a single performance in the second half of the episode where a Zygon manipulates a soldier into dropping his weapon by pretending to be his mother, but parts of it fall down elsewhere. Little tip for Harness on writing a plot about clones - if you want us to believe that Clara hasn't been cloned, don't have her randomly wander into a flat, come out appearing completely out-of-character (now that Clara has one) and then spend the rest of the episode saying weird shit. The whole "Clara was a clone!" thing was a complete non-surprise, and it made the end of the episode feel a bit naff.
     Had this been penned by the hand of Moffat himself, I think it would have been a hell of a lot more openly offensive, but somehow Harness has learnt from his mistakes in Kill The Moon and is keeping his political discussion very heavily in allegory. Not so heavily hidden that you can ignore it, though, and I think that the way that next week concludes the question of the Zygon Terrorists will really determine whether this week's episode comes with good or bad intentions. I was a little distracted during my first watch, and that did affect the way I viewed the episode, but it did have a fair share of really intense moments which made for good television though. Although, of course, that does not necessarily mean it makes good Doctor Who. We'll have to find out next week.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The ridiculous title which we've been laughing at for about two months - it's The Zygon Inversion.

Review: Voyager 3.16: Blood Fever

Rated M, Lemon, Paris/Torres hurt/comfort, a little smut.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Sixteen - Blood Fever
Written 24/9/15.

Star Trek, as a rule, is not very open about sex. It was supposed to be teatime viewing, after all, and despite the show's tendency to fight back against injustice and inequality, the executives at the top were fairly conservative in terms of their censorship of the show. However, the writers still wanted to discuss sex and sexual things, and so there arose an uneasy middle-ground where certain episodes would be more sexual and fanservicey than others, even if it didn't usually make sense. This is the reason why you sit here today, reading a review of Blood Fever, one of the most sexually uncomfortable stories in Voyager, joining the ranks of Elogium and 25% of everything to do with Seven of Nine.
     Voyager has a great need for the made-up mineral... "spins wheel"... galicite! Upon ordering an exhibition of a planet stuffed to the gills with the stuff, recently appeared recurring character Ensign Vorik propositions B'Elanna, accidentally mind-melding her. Vorik has entered the Pon Farr, a period in a Vulcan's life whereby every seven years he must have sex or die. With The Doctor being tactlessly fascinated by the idea of treating him, Vorik is left out as B'Elanna, Paris and Neelix go on the away mission. While away, however, B'Elanna starts becoming aggressive, and all hot-and-bothered. Investigation by Tuvok and Chakotay reveals that the accidental mind-meld transferred the Pon Farr to B'Elanna too, so now she must mate or die. She gets locked in a cave-in with Paris, where despite her attempts to mount him, he resists for the sake of preserving their friendship. Upon leaving the cave-in, Tuvok orders Tom to have sex with her, which is only broken up when an enraged Vorik engages B'Elanna in a ritual mating dual for her own sexual agency, which somehow ends up curing both of them. On the abandoned planet, Chakotay and Janeway find a body - a dead Borg.
   The Pon Farr originally existed in order to give Spock a storyline in which he was emotional and irrational, in contrast to his usual composed self. In Voyager and Enterprise, however, the Pon Farr moved much more into the area of fanservice, and this more or less the first time this appears. Given the intimate nature of what telepathy means to Vulcans, the episode from the start hits on some decidedly rapey tones - Vorik enters B'Elanna's mind, and through the power of inception manages to alter her behaviour. The episode essentially then works as a huge metaphor for an abuse victim repeating the actions of the abused, with the caveat that both of them will die if they don't get their mack on.

Jeri Ryan inches ever closer. (Always a good mental image.)

      That perpetuates itself throughout the episode, as things are prone to do when dealing with the Pon Farr - an idea which collates sex with life-and-death necessity gang aft agley. Throughout the story, several people are robbed of their sexual agency, and it's mostly just paved over as a quirk of the sci-fi universe. B'Elanna is assaulted by Vorik at the beginning of the story, and the end, with intent to essentially rape her. B'Elanna spends a good chunk of the story doing the same thing to Tom, although at least she has enough self control to not do anything more than nibble him. (Klingon mating is weird.) Later, in a bizarre out-of-character moment, Tuvok orders Tom to "help" B'Elanna. In the alien culture of the show, I'm sure this can be explained away as a "logical" move, but for the viewer, we're shown one of the most rational guys on the show basically pulling rank to declare Tom's sexual agency forfeit.
     What this episode does foreshadow is the main canon relationship of Voyager, Tom and B'elanna. There have been hints to it before-hand, but the focus in the first production season seemed to be trying to set Tom up with Kes, and driving B'Elanna through her anger issues. Here in Season Three, the relationship is a great idea for the both of them - Tom grounds B'Elanna, and B'Elanna excites Tom. She loves fixing spaceships, and he loves flying them. (Alongside being a Doctor-Biochemist-Archeologist-Historian). It's such a shame that this is the first episode where they actually discuss having any feelings for each other, especially given all the rapey subtext. There's a nice scene closing out the episode where Tom makes an odd if rather sweet comment, and that almost saves it, but it's a bit of a pointed stick in a gunfight.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We finally meet The Borg, after I've made a million references to them. It's Unity.

Review: Submarine

For another look at this film, why not read my friend Josh's review here?

Submarine - Directed by Richard Ayoade (2010)
Written 24/10/15.

I tried my absolute best to despise this film for five years. My impression from promotional images was that this was a piece of twee, misguided faux-Andersonian dreck plastered across a British background and filled to the brim with the pretentious, "quirky" mannerisms and stupid quotes to be mass-produced on moody Tumblr posts. And, for my part, I was more or less completely correct. Now now, don't go away. I was far too harsh on Submarine - I judged the book by the cover, and I was mad to do so, because this film is one of the most refreshingly realistic romantic comedies I've seen in a long time. Simultaneously managing to be sweet, witty, and just a little bit weird, Submarine uses art-film techniques for a remarkably accessible experience.
     Directed by comedian Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, Was It Something I Said?), the film follows Swansea teenager Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts, Being Human) and his strange, creepy obsessions with both his parents' love life and with Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige, The Sarah-Jane Adventures), a cold pyromaniac that he is desperately in love with. Tate narrates the film with a fast-paced string of sometimes-witty sometimes-cringey teenage observances about the world he lives in, and charts his efforts to both save his parents' flagging marriage and to woo Jordana. Obstensibly opening as a quirky romantic comedy, the film wanders through several shades of surrealism before settling in on our own reality, where Oliver must take responsibility for the stupid decisions he made trying to achieve both of his goals.
     The film's Welsh aesthetic is breathtaking and feeds into the overall feel of the film, tying in loose, Andersonian references to French New Wave and classic Hollywood into maritime folklore. Ayoade spends a great deal of time deliberately muddying the waters between love and grief, and there are a few scenes which deal with certain characters' experiences with depression and hopelessness. Despite this bleakness, the film also feels quite warm - stoked with nostalgia of our own childhood mistakes, and eventually triumphant when despite cocking up massively, Oliver is implied to get everything he wanted. It's a bittersweetness which ends up falling very much on the side of sweet, and the film takes you through so many peaks and troughs of feeling that it really earns that final one-sidedness.

I mean... you can tell why I thought this film was hipster trash,
right? Look at this stuff. It's not, though, you should totally go
and see it.

      A lot of this is down to the likability of the leads. Craig Roberts, at this point trying to move away from his time in Tracey Beaker and that one Being Human episode with a gimp in it, manages to create a wonderful duality within Oliver Tate - a character who is clearly selfish and pretentious, but whom you end up loving regardless because of the genuine good intent behind a great deal of what he does. Despite sporting a dodgy accent, the same is also true of the wonderful Yasmin Paige, presenting Jordana as effortlessly cool and distant one moment and gentle and fragile the next. It really pisses me off that the most work she's had since this film is effing Pramface (although I have yet to see Glue, so there's always time).
       One thing that makes Submarine work is that it isn't trying to be clever with its direction - it occasionally uses title cards and other stylistic flourishes, but these are all heavily functional and serve to enhance the film's mood. It's a story of two strange but highly identifiable characters, engaging with the rest of the world and attempting to find solace in their idea of "okay". I've been tempted throughout writing this review to call Submarine, "the British Moonrise Kingdom". But I've got a much different idea now, one that surprised even me when I decided I was going to write it.
       Submarine is better. And that's the best accolade I can give.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We discuss the artsy-fartsy Jim Jarmusch film, Broken Flowers.

November is Cybermen Month!

You will become like us....

Hundreds of years ago, Earth was not alone in the sky. Its twin planet, Mondas, contained a race of humans far advanced of their Terran counterparts, and when Mondas was knocked out of its orbit, this race turned to technology in order to survive. They replaced parts of themselves with cybernetic alternatives, until a society arose which enforced their use in the name of survival. The products of this society became known as the Cybermen, beings stripped of all emotions, with only the imperative to survive and proliferate their kind across the galaxy.

      The Cybermen are my favourite Doctor Who villains by a country mile. The first Classic Who episodes I talked about on this blog were Attack of the Cybermen and Earthshock - reviews which I later revisited when my writing style became a little more focused. I've reviewed eight of the ten stories of the original run which feature the Cybermen as one of the main villains, leaving out only their first outing, The Tenth Planet, and 1968's The Wheel In Space. Having recently received the former on DVD, I had the idea to go back to those 60s Cybermen stories and give them another go, this time filling out the gaps.

      Back in the 1970s and 80s, a lot of the black and white episodes were burnt. By the end of the show's run in 1989, the vast majority of the stories I'll be reviewing this November were missing. Thankfully, over time we have recovered lost episodes, and for all but one of these stories, the stories exist in their completion - either in episodes as recorded or in animated reconstructions using the original audio. In four weeks, when I review The Wheel In Space - I'll effectively be attacking my first reconstruction . How exciting!

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: William Hartnell bows out as the Earth is attacked by mysterious, cloth-faced beings... it's The Tenth Planet.

Review: Doctor Who 9.6: The Woman Who Lived

She may not look it, but Maisie Williams is terrifying in this
episode. Phenomenal actress. Last week was just a crap script.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you something which so very rarely happens on Doctor Who, even rarely in NuWho - a story written by a woman! And it's a woman that isn't Helen Raynor! The woman bringing you this revolution in storytelling is Catherine Tregenna, who previously wrote a few good episodes of Torchwood and who now swoops in to finish off last week's loosely dangling plot thread - namely, the existence of the now-immortal Ashildr, still played by Maisie Williams. Williams was much better this week, and she seems to react very well to the more sci-fi heavy, philosophical material than last week's silly fluff with Vikings. As did I, in fact.
       Seeming to have dropped off Clara on some adventure or another, The Doctor stumbles upon a highway robbery in 1651 being comitted by "The Knigtmare", who turns out not to be an 80s kids show but instead to be Ashildr, now apparently over 800 years old. She explains to the Doctor that her immortality has come with the ability to master new skills over time but not to hold many memories of actual events, a fact she makes up for by keeping a library full of her own diaries. Tired by grief and contempt at the ephemeral nature of humanity, she employs the Doctor's help to steal from a manor an alien jewel - a jewel which, she reveals after the fact, will allow her to go along with her leonine alien pal and escape Earth, provided she kills someone with it. Despite The Doctor's attempts to stop her, she goes through with it, but upon seeing that her alien associate only wishes to invade the Earth with his people, she foils his plot. The Doctor explains to her why he can't take her with him, and they go their separate ways.
      After Williams' relatively lacklustre acting last week, this week was a breath of fresh air. Tregenna, unlike a lot of her compatriots on the writing team, focuses a lot of her writing on the consequences of people's actions. Here we find Ashildr as a genuinely fascinating character - a dozen times widowed, mother to dead children, forgetting the names and the faces but remembering all of the pain and grief by choice. She embodies the consequences of one of The Doctor's rash decisions, and she herself faces similar decisions as The Doctor slowly tries to teach her how to live "amongst the Mayflies". It was wonderful, and touching, and it really felt like I was watching Doctor Who again. Maybe that had a little more to do with Clara's absence than I really thought it would.

Leomon, use "Fist of the Beast King"!

      There were a few things here or there that missed the mark. The leonine alien (whose name I am too lazy to look up, sue me) seemed very tacked-on and his appearance overhyped, much like the unfortunate monster from back in Before The Flood. I've heard many comparisons to Thundercats. There was also this season's "celebrity cameo you almost didn't notice" from Rufus Hound in the form of highwayman/stand-up-comic/inter-dimensional portal Sam The Swift, who filled a good ten minutes of the episode with atrocious puns. Aside from that though, there wasn't much to complain about - there was some comic relief within the plot, but it worked itself so seamlessly into the story that it didn't feel that bad at all.
       The biggest and most important difference that this week brought was in the writing style. You could feel the difference while watching it - instead of last week's Moffat-co-written episode, which jumped from showpiece moment to showpiece moment, Tregenna gave the characters some time to breathe. Characters talked to each other about what they wanted to do, about what they were going to do, and about what they had done. It is these things which lets us define characters and empathise with them. All we learnt about Ashildr last week was that she was a brave but foolhardy child - here we get given a much deeper, much better character that feels like she really deserves her place here instead of just being some shoddy excuse for continuity. It's the pacing and the character development that allows good science fiction to work its way under the skin, and that's exactly what we got tonight.
      Tregenna for showrunner?

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The universe conspires to remind me that the atrocity that was The Day of The Doctor was in fact broadcast as the show's 50th Anniversary Special. It's The Zygon Invasion.

Review: Voyager 3.15: Coda

There's a frame where he's giving her the Kiss of Life and the
title card "Written by Jeri Taylor" appears.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Fifteen - Coda
Written 21/09/15

Sit down, kids. We need to have a serious talk about Jeri Taylor. The dichotomy between Deep Space Nine and Voyager did not come from indecisive scriptwriters. Near the end of the run of Star Trek The Next Generation, the writers going off to their respective series separated into two factions - Ronald Moore and Ira Steven Behr for DS9, Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor for Voyager. There was of course a lot of overlap, but the important thing here is Jeri Taylor, who conceived of The Maquis, Janeway and several other important aspects of the show. While her influence on the show is very important, there came a point where her writing for the show was developing certain... themes. Mainly, long speeches about how people love Janeway, and especially about how much Janeway and Chakotay are deeply, madly in love with each other.
     It is because of this that this week's episode, Coda, ends up being a bit of a wet mush. The Braga-esque sci-fi plot, in which Janeway seems to die recursively until she is confronted by her father's spirit, does not as you might expect have anything particularly to say about the nature of human mortality. Now, I am an ardent Janeway/Chakotay shipper, as you will have seen over these many weeks. But here it seems really out of place. Every time Janeway "dies" we are shown character upon character lamenting her death with great prose, culminating in a lengthy funeral scene where each characters gives a loving eulogy for her. Then, she fights off the spirit of death by sheer will alone, and once recovered goes off to the Holodeck with Chakotay.
     The episode is crippled by the fact that, as it keeps telling us, Janeway is the brilliant main lead character that all the other characters love. There's no tension surrounding her actually being dead, because she's the main character of the show, and because temporary deaths on Voyager are like people being sent home on Top Chef. I mentioned Brannon Braga - this episode's beginning reminded me of Projections from the second season, where the layers of realtiy around our characters seemed to be fading away fast. But the episode doesn't really crank out it's main premise (Janeway is supposedly dead and in the afterlife) until the last fifteen minutes, leaving just under half an hour of confused plot, mad editing and everyone gushing about how beloved Janeway is.

I do most of my own screencaps now. Some are better
than others.

     I won't lie - I did enjoy this episode. Whether or not you agree with the politics behind Janeway and Chakotay, I believe that they work as a couple, and I love all of the little hints spread through the series (mainly by Jeri Taylor herself). But this episode, without that, is just a mess - a splattering of broken plot segments, leading up to a plotline which could have had some really fun sci-fi intricacies - themes on the nature of death like in Emanations, and later in Mortal Coil. Instead, this episode is content to be nothing more than the Captain Janeway show - and that's just not enough.

Thanks,

NEXT WEEK: B'elanna gets really horny and needs to Tom Paris to bonk her now. It's the teenage fanfic that is Blood Fever.