Taking the Short View

Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor (BBC1)

andrewlewin — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:47:10 +0000

Spoilers, sweetie.

I’m confused.

Not, I should immediately make clear, by the story and events of “The Name of the Doctor”, the series finale of the extended staccato season 7 of Doctor Who. As has so often been the case with Steven Moffat’s work down the years, what appeared at the outset to be brain-scrambling head-twister of a puzzle is by the end almost charmingly simple and straight-forward by the time it’s explained – and I mean that as a sincere compliment, an example of the craft of writing at its highest level.

Most of us had already figured out that the secret to Clara Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman) was that she had somehow been ‘split up’ and scattered (“like confetti”, as the show itself described it) across all of time and space in a manner akin to the fate of the last of the Jagaroth from the classic serial “City of Death”; all that this new episode did was provide the mechanism for how this did indeed come to happen, and why it was that the Doctor kept running across her. It was not coincidence, it turned out, but an essential part of the design – no accident but rather completely unavoidable.

The episode as a whole was one of Moffat’s best-written and the team’s best-executed adventures in some time. It looked brilliant and was well paced, epic without resorting to the sorts of ‘running around blowing things up’ season finale approach beloved of Russell T Davies in his tenture as showrunner. It contained some of Moffat’s best ideas of late, from the ‘seance’ acting as a ‘conference call’ across time and space, to the graveyard at Trenzalore and the symbolism of the headstone on the Doctor’s tomb as it weeped out transcendental dimensions in all directions. The idea of what the grave contained at its core was really quite brilliant, and the visual execution of it by director Saul Metzstein as a sort of pure-white but hyper-complex strand of temporal DNA was exquisitely beautiful.

Moffat also brings out his best characters for the occasion. Once again – like “The Crimson Horror” – the first ten minutes of the episode are almost entirely Doctor-free and concentrate instead on his Victorian surrogate family of Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax (Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart and Dan Starkey) and I could once more go on about how brilliant they are and how much I dearly want to see the spin-off show, but I won’t – just take it as read: far from outstaying their welcome by their recurring appearances, they truly get better every time. Here they’re joined for the first time by Professor River Song (Alex Kingston), still wonderful even though she’s a markedly different version of the character from any we’ve seen before. Also back is Richard E Grant as the Great Intelligence from the Christmas special “The Snowmen,” and he’s great albeit a little under-utilised.

As is fitting for the fact that this episode deals with the concepts of death, mortality and that the end must come even for an immortal Time Lord, this is a very downbeat and funereal episode that’s much more sombre and melancholy than you’d ever expect from a season finale. It’s also a very creepy episode, perhaps inevitably given the amount of running around in shadowy graveyards there is to be done. The episode goes from the deeply unsettling (the moment during the conference call when Jenny realises that her corporeal form is under threat is nightmarish in the extreme) to the existentially terrifying (the reveal of the lack of substance to the Great Intelligence’s presence) to the ‘jump out of your seats’ scares such as when one of the Great Intelligence’s Whispermen sidekicks suddenly crashes through a projection of River Song in the underground catacombs. Those sidekicks are terrifically effective as a whole, even if they are rather near to being rehashes of the incomparable ‘Gentlemen’ from the all-time best-ever episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and visually also very similar to the Trickster seen in Doctor Who children’s TV spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures.

So, it sounds like everything in the garden (or rather, graveyard) is rosy with this episode, right? I certainly found it engrossing, thrilling, intelligently written and emotionally accessible, perhaps the best of the entire run of episodes of a ‘season’ that has stretched all the way from Christmas 2011. So what’s to complain about? Why did I start this review with a declaration of confusion?

It’s this: in the lead up to the season finale and also the upcoming 50th anniversary special to air on November 23, Steven Moffat – discouraging fans from expecting a load of guest appearances from former stars of the show – has said that this years’s shows can’t just be (if you’ll pardon the expression) a load of ‘fanwank’ but must appeal to a wider general audience and look to the future as much as to the past. I wholly agreed with that, disappointed as the 12-year-old Who fan inside me was at not having an ’11 Doctors’ reunion special on the cards. So what does Moffat go and deliver for the season 7 finale at the end of the day? Well – what can only be described as exactly the ‘fanwank’ he said mustn’t happen. And to raise the stakes on the matter still further, he only goes and makes the season finale into a 45-minute lead-in to the 50th anniversary story, meaning that the forthcoming special – the best shop window to spread the word of Doctor Who if ever there was one – is now a ‘part two’ that relies on having seen this episode first.

More problematic yet, I can’t imagine this episode being very appealing or even intelligible to anyone who has not been watching the series avidly not just for Moffat’s tenture (as it pays off a lot of things from the last three years) but the entire 50 years, right back to the moment that the original Doctor stole a TARDIS from Gallifrey to begin his adventures. What would a casual viewer have made of the dizzying array of weird characters running around the screen at various points? The episode did not even mention the concept of regeneration, let alone lay the groundwork for who these people were within the 45 minutes of its run time. There’s even mentions of parts of Who mythology that pretty solid fans of the show won’t know: the mention of the Valeyard for example comes from the period of Doctor Who commonly held as its absolute creative low, just before the first semi-cancellation ‘hiatus’ crisis in the late 80s.

And I have to say, the integration of the Doctor’s past regenerations was not well done. Even though that 12-year-old fan in me was thrilled to see William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy back in the show as something other than static photographs, the technical execution fell short of everyone’s hopes. That’s to do with the limitations of the source material, which despite impressive digital restoration work simply can’t hope to stand comparison with a modern high-definition production, especially when those antiquated sequences are intercut with modern-shot ones using stand-ins dressed in the Sixth and Ninth Doctor’s old costumes albeit with the faces obscured to represent those incarnations. Why they didn’t do the whole thing as a ‘period’ flashback along the lines of the exquisite one Metzstein himself delivered for “The Crimson Horror” is beyond me; maybe there was a creative imperative behind needing to show all the Doctors as being equally as ‘modern’ as the 11th rather than old and stuck in the past. Unfortunately the reality of the passage of time caught up with them and made the end result so much less than the idea hoped for; it was jerky and ineffective, bumping us out of the story for the duration while we “Oooh, ahhh,” and generally try to work out which episodes the archive clips come from.

If a few shots of uneven quality were all there was then it would have been okay, but the entire story that followed pretty much entirely rested on this explicit bit of ‘fanwankery’ right up to its shock ending (well, a shock if you haven’t been reading the papers in recent weeks …) The other thing that the episode did was deliver on things from earlier in the stop-go season 7 that had felt odd even at the time: it made sense of events in “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” for example, and resurrected the importance of the leaf from “The Rings of Akhaten”, while also going someway to explaining why “The Angels Take Manhattan” had the emphasis on that weird coda in a New York graveyard, and even retroactively explaining why the end of “The Snowmen” needed that clumsy end in which Dr Simeon was briefly taken over and re-animated by the Great Intelligence. Things that appeared like mistakes and missteps at the time were suddenly presented as part of a bigger plan that we just weren’t privy to at the time – although whether this was really Moffat’s masterplan all along or a bit of opportunistic revisionism is known only to the man himself. (The mention of the Doctor’s cold-bloodedness towards the fate of Solomon the trader in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” for example seemed like a bit of a retroactive nod and acknowledgement that this simply hadn’t been originally well handled at the time.)

That’s all well and good, and certainly helps make the season finale feel all the more satisfying as it pays off so many story points. But my problem with the entire approach is this: however well this episode ties off those hanging threads into a little ribbon bow, it has only won this moment by compromising a dozen shows before it with (intentional or otherwise) plot flaws and oversights. That’s not a good trade off: I’d rather have had 12 brilliant, exciting and enjoyable episodes and one damp squib of a finale rather than a terrific finale after a dozen compromised, flawed outings – but then I’m a mathematician, I trust the numbers, and 12 > 1 (or: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; or the one.”) I can’t help but shake the feeling that Moffat’s view of how to run a season is out-of-whack and rather than concentrating everything on this climax he should have kept an eye to the bigger picture instead.

Even the episode itself contained one massive new ‘flaw’ which I suspect will have frustrated many of those who watched, long-time fan or casual Saturday-night viewer alike. The title of the story was “The Name of the Doctor” and an entire season (let alone the heavy BBC promotion in the week before the episode aired) was orientated around the promise of this revelation, that we would finally get the answer to the question “Doctor who?” first framed in an October 2011 episode and arguably stretching back to 1963. Personally I had my doubts about this being the central notion of a story – what, really, can a mere name actually deliver? How can it really ‘change everything’ as the BBC trailers kept insisting? More likely it would be a letdown and leave us rolling our eyes, but still: having set up the question so fixedly at the centre of everything, there had to be a payoff and an answer. And … There wasn’t. There was a total cheat, which if you’re charitable you can write off as ‘creative misdirection’ on Moffat’s part but which if you’re not can leave you so frustrated that you’re apt to demand your money back under the Trades Description Act for failing to deliver the promised item.

And hence we get to where I’m so very confused. As a long-time fan there was a great deal to love about “The Name of the Doctor,” from its vintage clips and story arc pay-offs to the return of the brilliantly vibrant characters that only Moffat can come up with. On a wider level the episode looked wonderful, had great moments and a real poetry to it, and perhaps the best performance of the year from Matt Smith after what I felt was rather a misstep in “Nightmare in Silver.” It was thrilling and absorbing and paid off so much that I ought to be jumping around the room as light as a moon beam with delirium. That I’m not – and find myself more irked by “The Name of the Doctor” than I have justifiable right to be – says a lot; and none of it very encouraging.

I have, perhaps for the first time, the cold certainty that the show has taken a wrong turning and found itself in a cul-de-sac from which there seems no escape, only an inevitable and fast-approaching end.

The Name of the Doctor is repeated on BBC Three on Friday, May 24 2013 and is also available on the BBC iPlayer. The DVD and Blu-ray release of Series 7 part 2 has been delayed by a week and is now scheduled for Monday, May 27.

The Fall S1 E1 (BBC2)

andrewlewin — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:03:52 +0000

Apologies, I’m a week behind watching this series and although episode 2 aired last night as I write and post this, I’ve only seen the first episode so far. Even so, I still wanted to pen a few words on it before the series went too far into its run for people to decide whether or not to jump on board. This post does contain spoilers for episode 1, but not beyond.

This is a new five-part psychological thriller by writer-producer Allan Cubitt (Prime Suspect 2, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Runaway) that takes the serial killer crime procedural into welcome new territory, both in a storytelling and geographical sense. Set in Belfast, there are echoes of the time euphemistically referred to as ‘The Troubles’ but refreshingly these are neither the point nor the focus of the story that unfolds.

Instead, the series follows two characters, both of them outsiders but in very different ways. DSI Stella Gibson is from the Metropolitan Police, asked in by her counterparts in Northern Ireland to conduct a review of a murder case that’s gone cold despite having a high profile victim, a successful young architect who was also the former daughter-in-law of a Unionist MP – which immediately suggests political pressures will apply.

The second character is Paul Spector, a quiet unassuming man with a wife and two kids who works as a psychotherapist. On the face of it he’s the kind of person you’d be happy with as a next door neighbour, although there’s something about his suppressed emotions and general distractedness that might give you pause to wonder what is really going on in his mind. As he tells his wife, to actually know what is going through someone else’s mind would be intolerable, for Spector’s general low-level chronic depression only finds relief as he spends his days stalking women and planning ways to break into their homes to assault them. Spector by name has become a haunting spectre by nature.

So far his movements have gone unnoticed and unsuspected by the local police; when Gibson hits on the idea that the specific cold case she’s been brought in to review is connected to an even older one, the senior officer who invited her over in the first place doesn’t want to know and rejects out of hand the option of linking the cases. But events elsewhere are moving rapidly out of his control and will likely force his hand …

The first episode is a sombre, slow-burning affair that’s pervaded by an unsettling atmosphere of tension and menace by director Jakob Verbruggen, so much so that it’s probably the closest yet that British TV has got to the feel of ‘Nordic Noir’ since Wallander first arrived and helped rewrite the rules of top-quality crime shows. It’s got so much of that unearthly and eerie sense of otherness that if you dubbed the actors into Swedish or Danish and then played in Franz Bak’s music over the scenes of Gibson staring off into the middle-distance as she makes a slow realisation that will become a major break in the case, you’d be entirely forgiven for thinking you were watching Forbrydelsen IV on BBC4 on a Saturday evening.

The first episode sets up a lot of parallels between the characters. Gibson is newly arrived in Belfast and doesn’t know the area or the people, so she is a genuine outsider disconnected from everything around her; Spector might live here but he’s just as much an outsider even while surrounded by loving family and cheery work colleagues. As Spector watches his latest target working late and drinking red wine in the faux-safety of her home, the director intercuts scenes of Gibson in her hotel room also working late, also drinking red wine. The comparison between Gibson and Spector’s ‘type’ is made disconcertingly clear and perhaps prefigures future events, and yet for now it’s us doing the stalking of the DSI rather than Spector which if anything is even more unsettling for the audience.

I’ll make no secret that the initial principle appeal of The Fall is in the actress playing Gibson: I’ve been a completely smitten fan of Gillian Anderson ever since she first stepped out in her star-making role as FBI agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. Not only did I love that show, but I genuinely thought she was the best thing about it; and the amazing thing is that in the intervening 20 years (yes, I know – scary, isn’t it?) she’s only got better. And, if you’ll allow me to gratuitously add, all the more beautiful. She’s playing a quite icy and inscrutable character here but at no time does it become blank or expressionless as could so easily have been the case in less capable hands. She gives orders to officers she doesn’t know with the utter surety of being obeyed without question; we can sense her exasperation that her break-through lead in the case is blocked, but despite this Gibson never breaks her professional demeanour or acts improperly. She even has one run-in with a loathsome local journalist and manages to make a standard PR line about how important and helpful the media can be in the work of the police into a slam-dunk put-down that sends even the hack scurrying off to safety.

Anderson, then, delivers to the absolute highest expectations, and her British accent is also note-perfect. Seriously, British actresses can’t pull it off this well. That could make it hard for anyone to play opposite her in the other main role as Spector, and when you learn that the part has gone to a former Calvin Klein model turned singer-songwriter then you’d be forgiven for having some cause for concern. It’s not quite Jamie Dornan’s first acting gig – he also played Sheriff Graham (and The Huntsman) in US series Once Upon A Time – but it’s worryingly close.

Well, no matter: Dornan is compulsively excellent here in what is an unusually subtle and nuanced portrayal of a serial rapist and killer, the kind of role that could easily go terribly wrong but which here is captured quite beautifully by its underplaying. The character’s depression is not spelled out in banner headlines, and he’s sufficiently off-kilter to the viewing audience to grab our attention without making us wonder why none of the characters in the story notice anything is out of place with him. When he transforms into his ‘night stalker’ guise he’s genuinely chilling, the former model’s features becoming something quite darkly different when viewed creeping through a woman’s bedroom. He makes Dexter look bright, cheery and rather crass by comparison. (Ironically given Anderson’s perfect English accent, I was puzzled by Dornan not seeming to have an Irish accent for his part. Then I found out the actor’s actually from County Down so it seems he really does know what he’s doing with it after all!)

There are other characters that are only just coming into focus as well, and it’s to the drama’s strength and realism that none of them react quite as we’d probably expect them to if they were the usual stereotypes. An example is the two uniformed police officers who check out the home of Spector’s next target after she reports a break-in during which nothing significant appears to have been taken. You can sense the heavy scepticism of the officers (“oh, just another hysterical woman who has had too much to drink at the bar”) but it’s not over-played by the actors and nothing overt is said; then later, after picking up on a passing comment from Gibson, the female WPC makes a commendable and lightning-quick connection to the earlier case and insists that they do a callback just in case.

It’s the heart-stopping moment of the first episode when they’re at the house ringing the door bell, and only we know that they’re already too late.

The Fall continues on BBC on Monday nights at 9pm. It’s encouraging to see that it opened with an average audience of 3.5 million viewers (peaking at 3.6 million) and 15.4% share (meaning it won its time slot) making it the highest drama series launch on the channel since HBO’s Rome in 2005. The series is released on DVD on Monday, June 17 2013.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

andrewlewin — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:02:07 +0000

These days I strictly ration my visits to the cinema, with the exception of two franchises that will immediately override the austerity lockout: one is the James Bond series, and the other consists of the Star Trek films. Currently the tally of each stands at 13 for the former up to last year’s Skyfall (or 14 if you include Never Say Never Again, which of course I don’t) while Star Trek Into Darkness marks the 12th film of the science fiction series that I’ll have dutifully trotted out to see during its initial theatrical run.

Let’s cut through the suspense and deliver the bottom line: is it any good? The answer is yes, very. If you love the 2009 JJ Abrams-helmed reboot (see my contemporary review here) then you’re almost guaranteed to love this follow-up since it contains all the elements that made the first film to successful, including the jaw-dropping spectacular visuals, non-stop adrenalin-rush thrills, the jittery camerawork and jump zooms and of course the lens flare that slathers every shot to the point of self-parody. Of course if you were among that group that felt the first film made a travesty of the original spirit of the Star Trek series then none of this is going to do anything to persuade you to the contrary this time, either. And I confess, I had at least one foot in that camp and wasn’t as utterly thrilled with Abrams’ first outing as many people were as a result.

The first modern-cycle Star Trek film spent a lot of its plot time setting up a ‘parallel timeline’ meant to appease that group of hold-out old-style Trekkers by suggesting that the classic Trek we knew and still love was safe in the ‘other’ timeline, freeing up Abrams to do what he likes here without fear of contracting established series lore. With that done and out of the way in 2009, this film has a lot of extra time on its hands to play with: some of it is spent on being ‘bigger and even more spectacular’ and delivering some fan-pleasing touches like new-style Klingons, but fortunately the rest of it is invested on having a plot which is not only halfway decent, but which extends into operating on multiple-levels – quite a treat for an action blockbuster these days.

The initial story revolves around a mysterious terrorist named John Harrison who stages an atrocity on Earth that leaves many dead, and then follows it up with an even more audacious attack to make him Starfleet’s most wanted: the rule book goes out of the window as Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise o full=on bloodlust in search of retribution, with only Scott baulking at what they’re planning. This is the ‘darkness’ of the title, although as more layers of the mystery of Harrison’s background are peeled away there’s a second darkness exposed that’s even more disturbing and threatening, and which almost turns Harrison from being despised mass-murderer into legitimately being able to claim the moral high ground. That means there is a clear parable to the World Trade Center attacks, and the stance that the film eventually goes on to take holds out hope that today’s Western society might finally be emerging from a decade-long post-post-9/11 era and finally learning that if we adopt the same mindset of ‘bloody revenge for an unjust act perpetrated on us in turn justifies any action we take no matter how heinous’ then we are no better than those who did us wrong in the first place.

That’s just one level of Star Trek Into Darkness; it also works as pure action film, as a character piece either being a coming-of-age for a juvenile Kirk or the ultimate bonding moment finally bringing Kirk and Spock together into one command unit. But it’s the character of Harrison (played with an eerie, uncanny stillness and authority by Benedict Cumberbatch) that powers still more levels to the story and takes us to a place I genuinely hadn’t been expecting.

I’d always thought that the ‘parallel timeline’ gimmick of the first film would be totally dropped in this film now that it had served Abrams’ purpose, and indeed that does seem to be the case for two thirds of the film. And then something happens, which means that while the audience don’t have to know their old Trek canon to enjoy the remainder of the film, it only really succeeds to its maximum if you’re a genuine long term fan. Since I’d assumed up to this point that Abrams’ view was “Well, the old fans can come along if they want, but we’re not making these films for them,” this is quite a shock and surprise, and moreover it couldn’t have been done if not for that ‘parallel timeline’ set-up in the first film in the first place. It allows this new film to play out a riff on a seminal moment of the old show, one that even uses a reprise of original dialogue and staging but then filters it and twists it into a mirror image in a way that successfully unifies both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Trek and actually comes closer to winning me over to the whole Abrams version of Starfleet more than I ever thought possible.

Cast-wise, the excellent Cumberbatch is matched by the gravitas of other major addition to the cast, Peter Weller as Starfleet’s chief Admiral Marcus. Among the returning cast most get a decent turn in the spotlight with John Cho an impressive Sulu and Zoe Saldana getting more to do as Uhuru than Nichelle Nichols could ever have dreamed of and is joined here by Alice Eve as Carol Marcus for little apparent reason than someone noticed that this was a very male line-up and there was need for a gratuitous underwear scene; Simon Pegg gets his own spin-off story, Karl Urban is slightly underused but still does a disturbingly accurate channelling of DeForest Kelly as McCoy, and only Anton Yelchin’s Chekov is really left out of the fun. Zachary Quinto continues to be an exemplary Spock, both honouring the original performance of Leonard Nimoy while also finding his own way with the part, leaving only Chris Pine who for me remains a puzzling non-presence as Kirk – although it’s also fair to say that he doesn’t put a foot wrong in the part, so it’s not much to complain about.

When all the fights and stunts and eye-popping FX are said and done, seeing this film made me want to rush home and watch some Star Trek again: just not the DVD of the first Abrams film, but rather the classic movies and even the original TV series. As fun and frothy as this new blockbuster is with all its ADHD-inducing caffeine thrills, it felt a bit like a meal consisting entirely of chocolate, sugar and candy floss whereas the originals always felt rather more substantial and hence more lastingly satisfying. But to demerit tar Trek Into Darkness on those grounds when it’s clearly not something it’s aiming for feels cheap and underhanded, especially when it does what it does for two hours so superlatively well.

And who’d have thought that of all things to save the day, it would turn out to be a tribble?

Star Trek Into Darkness is currently playing in cinemas in 2D, 3D and IMAX versions. It will be available on DVD and Blu-ray later in the year. The first JJ Abrams films is available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011)

andrewlewin — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:44:23 +0000

With the sad news that film special effects trailblazer Ray Harryhausen had died last week at the age of 92 at his home in London, I thought it was appropriate to pay a small tribute to the man by watching this low-budget documentary that I picked up just last month from the London branch of Forbidden Planet.

In fact ‘low-budget documentary’ is a bit of a misnomer, since there’s pretty much no budget to speak of at all and the whole thing broadly consists of a lot of movie clips interspersed with talking heads filmed in often less than ideal circumstances but with the subjects nonetheless fulsomely gushing over how great Harryhausen was, making this a celebratory hagiographic retrospective lacking even the slightest hint of critical analysis of its subject.

And you know what? When the fans lining up to laud Harryhausen are of the calibre of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, John Lasseter, John Landis, Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton and Nick Park as well as life-long friend and SF great Ray Bradbury, then I’m just fine with that approach. Their glowing tributes to the man, his pioneering special effects work and the magic that his ‘Super Dynamation’ brought to their lives and to all of ours, and how he inspired them to become the filmmakers they are today, give this plainly constructed film a heart and soul that is very hard to resist.

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan is a well-paced overview that follows a simple chronological timeline of the man’s life and career making sure things move on at a fair clip and never flag or dip for a single moment of dullness, even as it dutifully ticks off each of his 15 or so films. There’s a title card of a poster showing the year of each film entry as we methodically work our way through lending the whole thing the air of an academic treatise, but every now and then when the opportunity arises it will also branch off onto brief thematic digressions on the subject of stop-motion animation – how it started, how it’s actually done, and later the future of this art and technique in an era dominated by computers.

If you’re a fan of Harryhausen’s work then you’ll already know his 1950s black and white creature features (It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) or maybe you came to Harryhausen through his Sinbad films (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger) or through one of his other stand alone dinosaur movies (The Animal World, The Valley of Gwangi, One Million Years B.C.) literary adaptations (Mysterious Island, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, First Men in the Moon) or mythological action blockbusters (Jason and the Argonauts and the original 1981 Clash of the Titans.) I confess I was surprised to find out his first cinema outing was as the technician controlling the on-screen representation of Mighty Joe Young (1949) having thought that film came earlier and was a follow-up by the same people behind the 1933 King Kong – itself the inevitable boyhood inspiration for Harryhausen’s career. But almost more charming even than his better-known, more accomplished later work are some of his early colour short films for TV adapting fairytales such as Little Red Riding Hood, The Tortoise & the Hare, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel, which Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park in turn cites as one of his earliest inspirations.

One of the sad things about the low/no budget available to The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation charity which is behind the making of this documentary is that these films themselves are unfortunately under-represented in the retrospective – especially the 50s creature features. They were too expensive to get the rights to show clips and instead the documentary has to rely on using the original cinema trailers for what they can. It’s ironic that director Gilles Penso is in a better position to get clips from modern blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Spider-Man 2, Hellboy 2 and Avatar thanks to the makers of those films themselves being such huge Harryhausen fans and in a position to waive the fees, whereas Harryhausen’s own works are long since locked up in some film library owned by stone-hearted corporations without an inch of movie magic in their souls to do likewise.

Still, you can (and indeed really should) get the original films in their own widely available DVD release, so instead the film makes a virtue out of necessity by devoting the remainder of its screen time to something utterly unique: a visual trawl through Harryhausen’s own archives and workshop, revealing the original concept drawings and actual models together with animation test reels, film set dailies and photographic stills that he’s kept squirrelled away for all these years: bits of movie history that haven’t been seen for decades. The end of the 90 minute film has a short coda on the work of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation in seeking to recover, restore and preserve these priceless cinematic artefacts, as well as describing the charity’s key work (of which this film is an unabashed part) in promoting the sadly slowly fading art of stop-motion animation.

For if there is a level of criticism and analysis in this film, then it’s not about Harryhausen, his work or his legacy but is instead reserved for the current state of the film FX industry and its reliance on cheap, fast but somehow diminishing returns CGI. And it is certainly very strange that while Harryhausen’s films retain a charm and effectiveness even 60 years after they were made, today’s films age poorly in just six and even when freshly minted have an air of unconvincingness about them. I’m reminded of a comment I saw on Twitter recently, where a father described his young daughter’s first viewing of The Empire Strikes Back (having already seen the prequels) at which point she suddenly exclaimed excitedly: “Oh, Yoda’s real in this one!” It seems that even children intrinsically understand the difference between something on screen that’s just a computer animation and something which real and physical being photographed, no matter how photo-realistic the former is and how hokey and deficient the latter by comparison.

The film makes a brief stab at offering an explanation at why this should be: my favourite is the idea that FX of old are analogous to a magic trick in which we know we are being played with and fooled but still take in delight in trying to figure out the secret for ourselves; whereas with modern CGI there’s nothing to figure out, we can simply shrug and say ‘it’s just computers’ and then it’s no more impressive to us than an average video game.

But there’s something else to it as well: looking at the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park it’s amazing how effective and real they still are even though they themselves are 20 years old now. The difference comes in the time, care and detail to attention that was put into them, the fact that Spielberg’s team was still pushing at the frontier of what was possible and themselves having to work their way round deficiencies in available computer technologies of the day much as Harryhausen himself had to with puppets and models. Despite Harryhausen saying near the end of the film that working at a keyboard wouldn’t have appealed to him, in fact you can see that if he’d been born a couple of generations later then he would have taken to the possibilities like a duck to water, and would have brought the same level of craft and skill in conjuring true artistic performances from pixelated creations just as he did from his old clay and metal armature collaborators.

The difference is skill, and also time. The methods of old required Harryhausen to lock himself away in his workshop for months even for relatively short sequences in low-budget B-movies; Spielberg’s own team took two years to produce the similarly limited sequences in Jurassic Park. But these days the FX are churned out for entire movies in a matter of weeks and it’s no wonder most of them look like they’ve come off the factory production line with the main focus on the profit margin rather than the artistic quality level.

It’s this difference in priorities that puts Harryhausen’s canon of work head and shoulders above so much other cinematic fare even today, and why it’s so very important to have a celebratory movie retrospective such as this to remind us that the best films are those that come from a heart and soul and which dare to dream of new marvels to put on the screen no matter how impossible they seem to achieve – and which are not just a matter of wrangling bits and bytes and pixels into empty spectacle to put bums and seats and satisfy the accountants.

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan is available on DVD and Blu-ray, although to be honest the source material doesn’t need or benefit from high definition in this case. The DVD comes with a second disc featuring extensive additional interview and other footage not used in the film itself. Harryhausen’s films are available in a wide number of DVD releases both individually and in boxset collections.

Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver (BBC1)

andrewlewin — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:30:35 +0000

I have a confession to make this week: I was up to my ears in work over the weekend, and was in a distracted mood for everything else that evening, which means that this week’s episode of Doctor Who wasn’t able to really grip me or even sink in properly (and also explains why it’s taken longer to write this post than usual.) I suspect this is mainly my own problem/fault, although if I were being harsh I could suggest that the very fact that the episode ‘happened’ without actually demanding my attention suggests that it wasn’t all that it had been hoped it would be.

In many ways, this was the episode we should have expected from Neil Gaiman when we originally heard that the fantasy author was going to write for the series. Instead we first got the brilliant “The Doctor’s Wife,” which set such high standards for any follow-up story that it was almost impossible to meet even with appropriately lowered expectations set firmly to ‘realistic’ in advance. It’s still full of recognisably authentic Gaiman-esque touches, being set in the richly textured and slightly off-kilter landscape of a derelict amusement planet populated by memorably quirky characters none of whom are or end up being what they initially seem to be – of which the same could be said about the Doctor and Clara themselves.

There’s a great cast here including Jason Watkins as amusement impressario Webley, Warwick Davis as his diminutive sidekick Porridge and Tamzin Outhwaite as the captain of a punishment platoon, but with the exception of Davis the guest guest is rather underused. The real focus here is the return of the Cyberman, with Gaiman saying in advance that it was his intention to make the Doctor’s silver nemesis scary again. By and large he achieves his ambition, easily restoring them from where we last left them (short-circuited by a father’s love for his son) back into a fearsome foe that can only be stopped by wiping out whole planets. While some of the reboot on display here includes gimmicks we’ll likely never see in the series again, many of them – the ‘superspeed’, the disturbing Cybermites, the instant upgrades, the head snapping backwards – are well worth adding to ongoing Cyberlore.

The one false note in the set-up is the inclusion of the two children from Clara’s regular life back in London, who found out about their nanny’s new travelling habits in an odd clunky coda at the end of “The Crimson Horror.” Considering how much it takes to crowbar Artie and Angie (Kassius Carey Johnson and Eve de Leon Allen) into the episode in the first place it’s rather bizarre that they’re put into stand-by mode (or in human terms, a coma) at the first opportunity. At least Angie gets a nice pay-off moment near the end, but otherwise it’s hard to see the point of them. If you’re going to make such a fuss about having two very young kids aboard the TARDIS then at least make it worth doing: this entire episode should have been told exclusively through their eyes, showing the Doctor and his world(s) through their eyes – an opportunity to make everything bigger, brighter, more insane and fantastic than our regular ‘helicopter’ view. Instead it does nothing and the episode is actually rather tamely but technically proficiently directed by Stephen Woolfenden, with little pretention to a conspicuous visual style in the way that Saul Metzstein had so successfully pumped up “The Crimson Horror”. For example, the potential of the scene where the children were left to sleep in a room full of inert potential ‘monsters’ ended up really quite flat and absolutely squandered.

Woolfenden did get to show off a little with the Doctor’s internal conflict scenes, which were snappily realised and which contain a lovely visual throwback to the show’s past and the character’s previous incarnations. But now we’ve arrived at the episode’s weakest aspects: the long sequences during which the Doctor has to mentally struggle against being assimilated by the malign Cyberplanner. This should be a real tour de force moment for the show’s star Matt Smith that allows him to deliver a knock-it-out-of-the-park bravura performance worthy of a Bafta, but the odd thing is … It misses the mark. It’s not an outright flop by any means, and Smith is doing some interesting things, but it seems that either the script or the direction beats him in the end. The evil slyness when the Cyberplanner is in control doesn’t come off while other moments are too broadly played, leaving us with something much less interesting than it probably looked on paper. Smith can’t even really pull off the riffs on his immediate predecessors’ quirks and catchphrases, probably because he’s trying to do them as they would be channelled by the Cyberplanner – one layer on top of another on top of another, and it’s just a reach too far for him.

Jenna-Louise Coleman also has trouble with her character here. It’s not the actress’s fault but rather the script, which seems to have a different concept of Clara from that which we’ve seen to date in any of her three lives. The idea that she would take charge of a group of soldier misfits and organise with such assured glee and relish is something more along the lines that Rose would have done in season 2 back in 2006; for Clara, it’s such a disconnect from the previous stories that even Coleman can’t sell it and make it part of a coherent continuity. It’s fair enough, then, that she decides to just have some fun with it and hope no one notices how oddly the character is behaving. Maybe this ‘different personality every week’ is a clue to Clara’s ultimate secret (which we learn in next week’s series finale) – but the problem is that if the character is becoming so inconsistent from week to week that we have no chance to know, identify with or like the character. It’s not only baffling, it’s also distancing us from caring about either her secret or her fate.

This post feels like it’s been very critical. Again, I point to my opening statement about being overrun by work when I watched this, and I haven’t had time to rewatch it since either, so I could very well be much more down on this than it deserves. It’s certainly not the weakest episode of the season (Akhaten is going to win that prize, alas) because the Gaiman-esque touches and the rejuvenated Cybermen are overall such solid successes. It’s just that as a whole, the episode has problems and feels like it needed more development work before it was rolled out to the viewing audience.

Perhaps the oddest ‘criticism’ – if it even qualifies as such – is that underneath its stylistic trappings this episode felt strangely old-fashioned. Not just the familiarity of the Cybermen, or the setting – which felt a very Seventh Doctor sort of set-up – or even the battle of wills that put me in mind of classic serial “The Brain of Morbius”. It’s also the way the episode splits up its protagonists, features a base (or castle in this case) under siege, and a platoon of soldiers that’s like a riff on UNIT or “Earthshock” that made it feel like the whole thing had time-travelled from the olden days while picking up a decent CGI budget along the way – although it has to be said that there were slightly more dodgy FX shots than usual this week.

I get the strong sensation that I will like this episode more in hindsight and will come to appreciate its strong points much more with a bit of distance than I do right now. That happened to me a lot with Russell T Davies-era instalments – episodes that I didn’t like initially, like “Partners in Crime,” eventually became big favourites on subsequent rewatches. It’s why the old stories are always better once they’ve taken root in the ‘golden memories’ section of one’s brain. Right now I’m just feeling oddly non-plussed about “Nightmare in Silver”, wanting to warm to it more than I do but at the same time oddly constrained by the frustration of being unable to shake the sense that it just didn’t knock it on the head when it needed to most, and should have been a few notches better all round from all concerned.

The final episode of this series of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat’s “The Name of the Doctor”, is on Saturday May 18 2013 at 7pm on BBC1, with a repeat on BBC Three the following Friday. There is currently a five-minute prequel for the episode available on the BBC red button service, “She Said, He Said”, which is a rather leaden pair of monologues albeit with nice performances from Smith and Coleman. The series is also available on the BBC iPlayer. Series 7 part 2 is out on DVD and Blu-ray on May 20.

Murder on the Home Front (ITV)

andrewlewin — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:46:37 +0000

Something of a peculiar beast this one, which is billed as a crime drama following the pioneering early forensic work of a pathologist working in London during the Blitz in 1940.

I say ‘billed as a crime drama’ because to be honest it feels more like a comedy pastiche at times, right from the opening titles which are impressively and stylishly done but which play exactly like a modern video game. Then there’s the fact that everyone’s so ruddy jolly and perky, busy having illicit sex in blacked-out rooms at the height of air raids, chuckling to their favourite radio show, heading off to dance houses and generally having a whale of a time of it.

The aim is presumably to make the programme full of dark, black humour but if so then it misses the mark because the first half is just too frilly: it ends up making the dark days of World War 2 look infinitely more cheery than living in today’s stressful austerity era, even when there’s a brutal murder or a bombed-out house to investigate.

It all feels very odd, as though the production doesn’t want to get people down and is throwing in all the good time clichés from the 1920 and 1930s to leaven the gloomy wartime bits. But then maybe that really is how people got through the war, by adopting brittle bright smiles and laughing at the slightest excuse in order to hold back the tears. Since I wasn’t there, it’s hard for me to say; but it doesn’t play that way on screen and so as a TV drama it comes across as a little ‘off’ and weird with a sense of heightened unreality.

Despite its tonal differences, it’s impossible to put the understated and classyFoyle’s War out of your mind entirely while watching this flighty counterpart. Still, the production all looks very good (sometimes too good – once bombed-out interior in which a body is found more closely resembles an artfully dishevelled location for a fashion or indie band photo shot) and the cast is very pleasing. It’s particularly nice to see Patrick Kennedy get a shot at some prime time recognition, as he’s usually one of those supporting players who always does a great job but rarely gets the attention.

Here’s he’s playing Lennox Collins, an enthusiastic, idealistic young pathologist determined to bring a new rigour to forensic science, which means telling the police off for eating sandwiches at the scene of the crime or locking horns with his boss who is prone to giving time of death to the minute and apparently able to determine cause of death by the merest whiff of the corpse. Not that Collins is averse to using his own sense of smell in his deductions, with a vital clue being the distinctive coconut oil added to handsoap used at a particular dance hall helping to narrow the pool of suspects considerably. That includes one ‘spiv’ by the name of Danny Hastings who has an amazingly oversize jackyl-like grin that should put actor Ryan Gage to the head of the queue if ever the Batman films need to cast a new Joker.

Also deserving mention in the cast is Tamzin Merchant, rather like a young Honeysuckle Weeks in the way that she plays Collins’ newly acquired sidekick Molly Cooper (the fictional version of writer Molly Lefebure on whose real life memoirs “Evidence for the Crown” the series was based by series devisor David Kane.) There’s a brief cameo for the original Prime Suspect John Bowe as a hammy stage actor, and the always terrific James Fleet is Collins’ blinkered and self-important superior. The senior investigator is DI Freddy Wilkins (David Sturzaker) who alternates from taking a quite relaxed view on the nerdy pathologist inserting himself into the investigation and sitting in on interviews, before abruptly switching into antagonistic mode just in time to produce some friction ahead of the end of the first episode.

As with the Morse-prequel Endeavour I do wonder about this current tendency for period-set crime dramas (we’ve got another The Suspicions of Mr Whicher coming up on Sunday). They seem to exist purely so we can oooh and ahhh all over again at such marvels as using Luminol to detect blood – ironically, a German innovation just before the war and surely borderline as to whether anyone in England would have known about or used it – and going back to resorting on cosy clues like cotton threads and lost buttons for key deductions. It seems like a curmudgeonly throw-back response in reaction to modern crime dramas’ predilection for using computers and state-of-the-art DNA evidence. As it was, some of the terminology sounded rather anachronistic to me – but maybe police in the Second World War really did routinely refer to ‘the crime scene’ and ‘fibres’ with the same savoir-faire as a 21st century Scene Of Crime Officer.

At least all the fun and frivolity and bodies help the thing keep moving along at a brisk clip and to hold the attention in just the way that the ponderous Endeavour just doesn’t, at least for me. And there are a lot of bodies here, as the case ends up involving an early serial killer applying a gruesome signature to the tip of his victims’ tongues, and who considerately delivers his latest corpse like clockwork at just the right time for the next advertising break. For once, the outcome isn’t a tedious foregone conclusion at the halfway point despite a dwindling pool of suspects.

The program does start to take a more serious line toward the end of the first hour, and the ‘next week’ clips suggest a pacier, more action-packed and tense second half – which might be rather good and very welcome, but would also make the tonal levity of the majority of the first instalment feel all that odder. Still, it’s a programme with some character and individuality among the less-interesting cookie-cutter aspects, and that is never bad thing.

Part 2 is on ITV at 9pm on May 16. The DVD release is yet to be scheduled as of time of writing.

What I’ve been watching (May 3-9)

andrewlewin — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:18:24 +0000

Sometimes I’m asked how I decide what to review on this blog, and the answer’s pretty simple – it’s whatever I happen to have watched, read, seen or listened to that week. I never choose to watch something purely to review it, which at least means that everything I review here is something that I actually wanted to see and why a negative post is usually a function of genuine disappointment rather than because it’s not my sort of thing in the first place.

But I don’t review everything I see/hear/watch in a week – I do have a life, strange as that seems to me as well I’m sure as to you. I cherry-pick the things I have something (new) to say rather than just churning out the same comments on an ongoing series for the sake of it. However, I thought as a one-off experiment, what I’d do here in this Very Special Post is run through the disturbingly long list of things that I have watched on the screen in the last seven days just to put a little context around the posts that did make it to the big time so far in May …

Friday, May 3

Thriller: Murder Motel (DVD): I’ve carried on watching the boxset of this 1970s anthology series since writing reviews of the first dozen instalments that I saw; this particular late-run offering starts promisingly with a riff off Hitchcock’s Psycho but quickly falls apart. Poor plotting, a bunch of bad guys who mess up at every opportunity, a sequence where dead bodies spill out of every hiding place like an Abbott and Costello film and a lead actress who appears to be completely smashed the entire time makes this one a rare complete dud.

The Mentalist (Channel 5): Although I haven’t reviewed the show since its season 3 finale, I’m still watching this undemanding detective show which is nearly at the end of its fifth season. Simon Baker’s easy-going charm as Patrick Jane is the main strength of the series, but this episode was largely an excuse to concentrate on two of the other regular characters – Rigsby and Van Pelt. Even so, a nice twist in the plot stops this light-hearted froth from becoming total flimflam – just! – and with just two episodes to go till the finale it’s likely that the spectre of Red John will now once again turn things darker and meatier for a spell.

NCIS (Fox): Even though I’ve watched this show since its very first episode, I’m still at a loss to explain why it’s now regularly the best-rated show in the US. That’s not to denigrate it: it’s got a great ‘family’ ensemble and a nice line in gentle humour, and the stories are always solid although in this particular episode (about a former Navy serviceman suspected of being a Washington DC serial killer) I did see the ‘twist’ and the responsible party a mile off. Despite being well into its groove after ten series, the show still resists sitting back on its laurels and while not all the episodes in this run have been vintage, there have been some genuine excellent ones that make renewal for year 11 thoroughly welcome news.

Da Vinci’s Demons (Fox) – already reviewed in full.

Saturday, May 4

Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror (BBC1) – already reviewed in full.

Arne Dahl (BBC4): Having reviewed the first part of “The Blinded Man,” I enjoyed the conclusion to it very much and felt that it certainly rewarded my faith in it. The second two-part story, “Bad Blood”, got off to a slightly rocky start with the team spending the entire first half sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and indulging in soap operatics while waiting for the main plot about a US serial killer to kick in; fortunately it was worth waiting for, even though one key ‘twist’ was right from the pile marked ‘bleeding obvious’. The current story, “To The Top Of The Mountain,” is better balanced in terms of investigation/personal lives but the case feels rather small-scale for the supposed Swedish ‘A’ Team and more like a regular case of Taggart transferred from Glasgow to Stockholm; right up to the jolting final scene, at least. Still very watchable for all that.

United States of Television – America in Primetime (BBC2): I’m not sure I’m learning anything particularly new from this four-part documentary on the changing social norms of the US as depicted on primetime television in everything from Father Knows Best to Modern Family, but the vintage clips of some favourite shows of the last 50 years are a joy and the assembled talking heads are a staggeringly big name line-up of the very best talent to have worked on the small screen in the last five decades.

Sunday, May 5

Motorsport: IndyCar (ESPN), MotoGP (BBC2) and BTCC (ITV4): Sunday is sports day for me, and the best of the bunch this week was a thrilling IndyCar race from Sao Paulo. By comparison, the motorcycling was rather tame right up until a controversial final corner clash between two of the local Spanish favourites. I’m enjoying both series while I have them, since both move to the new BT Sport channel soon and I’ll not be able to continue with them. Meanwhile the BTCC coverage is extraordinarily good: considering how ITV have pretty much failed with every motorsports series they’ve ever covered, it’s amazing that their six hours of coverage of touring cars is so quietly wonderful. Anchored by the ever-reliable Steve Rider, it’s a great way of spending a Sunday afternoon.

Dexter (Fox): I’ve been a big fan of the friendly neighbourhood serial killer ever since it began, and it’s still an incredibly intelligent, well-made series with Michael C Hall just brilliant in the title role but kudos also for Jennifer Carpenter as his sister Debra and Lauren Vélez also particularly strong in season 7 as Captain LaGuerta; Ray Stevenson has been impressive as Eastern European mafia hardman Isaak Sirko with a revelatory secret of his own, and Yvonne Strahovski has shone as serial poisoner Hannah McKay. The problem with this latest run is that while there’s some great highs, there’s no overarching theme or story: individual plot lines stop or start almost at random, sometimes very suddenly as though the writers just got bored and wanted to move on. A little too much self-reverential reflection into the show’s past is also creeping in ahead of the final series 8.

Monday, May 6

Arrow (Sky One): One of the strongest new shows of the current TV season, which gives a rather irrelevant DC Comics superhero a whole new level of greatness with Lost-style flashbacks and a Batman-esque dark vigilante feel. The show has even improved on its early episodes as Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) has let more people into his posse ensuring that the whole thing is bubbling away to a good climax. It’s also lovely to see Colin Salmon back on deck after his break for Strictly Come Dancing.

Grimm (UK Watch): Now solidly into its groove after a less than promising start, this show looks good and has had some more interesting and original stories in its second season. A move to give protagonist Nick (David Giuntoli) some superpowers and to give his formerly blank love interest Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) a memory wipe, together with revelations about his boss Captain Renard (Sasha Roiz), have given the show more interest and inventive energy in its sophomore season.

Criminal Minds (Sky Living): Now in its eight season (and with a ninth apparently on the cusp of being confirmed) this show feels a bit stuck in the past especially with the likes of Hannibal muscling into the criminal profiling scene. The show is at its least successful with multi-episode arcs and this season has had two – one with Reid’s (Matthew Gray Gubler) mysterious lover, and now with a psychopath stalking the BAU team and replicating crimes they have already solved. Trouble is, the stand-alone episodes aren’t particularly memorable either and some of them stray too close to a voyeuristic nastiness along the lines of Saw, the kind of thing that led original star Many Patinkin to walk out and later decry the whole production.

Major Crimes (Universal): The strange thing here is how seamlessly this show has followed on from its predecessor, The Closer. In almost all respects (and virtually all of its principal cast) it’s business as usual rather than a reboot or a reimagination. It’s slightly less kooky now that Kyra Sedgwick has departed and former recurring special guest star Mary McDonnell has taken over the lead spot as no-nonsense Captain Raydor, which might make it more mainstream and successful; certainly the new show is slightly more to my liking than its occasionally saccharine forebear.

Tuesday, May 7

Elementary (Sky Living): It’s no Sherlock and it can occasionally be a little silly or derivative (one minor plot line this week was nicked straight from the climax of Homeland season 2) but I’m enjoying the US take on the Holmes mythos. Jonny Lee Miller is putting in a fine eccentric performance pleasingly completely different from Benedict Cumberbatch’s take while Lucy Liu is doing great work as Watson, a role that can often be rather thankless. Now that Watson is no longer a drug rehab worker but has instead become a full-fledged apprentice consulting detective, the dynamic between the two has stepped up a notch and it is one of my favourite watches of the week.

Hannibal (Sky Living) – already reviewed in full.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Channel 5): This old forensics warhorse has been given new life by the casting of Ted Danson in the lead role, so that even an old-fashioned ‘locked room’ mystery comes off very nicely indeed. It was good to hear original star William Petersen providing a voice cameo at the end, too. However, some demerit marks for an opening sequence that doesn’t actually correspond with the end solution – that’s cheating, guys!

Dallas (Channel 5): I kind of stuck with this out of loyalty to the original show and also to see out how they handled the death of the irreplaceable star, Larry Hagman. All things considered they did very well – in fact, the show has been finding its feet more of late and learning to pace itself for a marathon rather than a 100m sprint all the time. This was the second season finale and it felt very much as though the show wasn’t optimistic of getting renewed without JR around anymore, so they ensured all the bad guys got their just deserts and the Ewings emerged neatly victorious and lived happy every after. Except now a third season has indeed been ordered, so the peace and harmony can’t last …

White Collar (Alibi): Basically an updated sequel to Steven Spielberg’s film Catch Me If You Can, here a notorious conman (Neil Caffrey, played by Matt Bomer) serves out his sentence by working with a super-straight FBI agent (Peter Burke, played by Tim DeKay.) It’s one of those fun, stylish and slick shows that coasts along on the charisma of its cast (Caffrey’s cohort Mozzie played by Willie Garson is a particularly effective show-stealer) and is a pleasant undemanding watch at the end of the day.

Wednesday, May 8

Defiance (SyFy): I recently reviewed the pilot episode and don’t have much to add. It’s shaping up nicely so far, putting its world-building blocks in place at an assured pace, and hasn’t done anything off-puttingly wrong so far.

Bones (Sky Living): The early seasons of this show were big favourites of mine, but the shine has rather gone off it in recent times. It’s still perfectly amiable but it’s been a long time since it was remotely believable and these days it seems to be aiming for a weird mix of gore and kook. This week’s episode was also an example of a worrying tendency to ‘worthiness’ of late, taking on the topic of child soldiers, torture and mutilation among refugees from Sierra Leone (another recent episode marked the anniversary of 9/11 with everyone getting similarly emotional.) Unfortunately the end result was more admirable and laudable than it was successful as entertainment, making it rather like a modern day incarnation of the 1970s Quincy, M.E. series which went much the same campaigning way. (Coincidentally, Jack Klugman’s nephew Brian has just joined the series as a recurring character.)

Castle (Alibi): The show has managed to successfully transition its lead stars from being in a flirty ‘unresolved sexual tension’ non-relationship to being a full-blown couple without losing the inherent comedy and humour of the set-up. Even so, for me it’s the ‘sidekicks’ Ryan (Seamus Dever) and Esposito (Jon Huertas) who continue to be the under-appreciated highlights of the series. Sadly this week other than a bit of banter about a scary nun the duo were largely out of the action, which focussed instead on an improbable story in which novelist Castle (Nathan Fillion) and detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) contrived to get stuck in the middle of a New York trouble spot apparently without a single working telephone or means of transport available to them, as a local crime boss closed in on the neurotic witness they’re trying to protect. Even by the standards of a series that doesn’t go hard for believability, this was an episode that swan-dived off the balcony of credibility and died in a splatter on the pavement below. Hoping for better next week.

10 O’Clock Live (Channel 4): Much criticised when originally launched, I happen to rather like this one-hour topical take on the week’s news. Jimmy Carr kicks off with some outrageous stand-up designed to get the audience gasping with an affront to good taste, with Charlie Brooker following up with more deeply observed satirical rants. Unfortunately the rest of the show seems to have been significantly pared back this run, with David Mitchell appearing to have been relegated to just chairing shouty discussions between studio guests (this time featuring the reliably barking George Galloway on whether protest parties like UKIP and Respect will ever amount to anything) and Lauren Lavergne given the thankless task of trying to keep the show on track and reign in her three co-stars during one of their numerous round-table get-togethers between blocks.

Thursday, May 9

Murder on the Home Front (ITV) – already reviewed in full.

Suits (Dave): I do like a good legal drama, and the fact that a mention of LA Law pops up in the season 2 finale just makes me like Suits all the more. The first run of episodes concentrated on slacker Mike Ross (a delightful Patrick J Adams) blagging his way into a job as apprentice to preening hotshot attorney Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) at a top NY law firm, while season 2 has been more about various power plays and takeover bids for the company that have allowed the rest of the cast some good storylines to sink their teeth into as well. Even if the legal detail flies well over your head (as it does mine), there’s enough wheeling and dealing to enjoy and the emotional drama is always very engaging and accessible.

Being Human USA (UK Watch): I reviewed the first three episodes at the start of the month, so there’s little to add about this week’s fourth instalment. I was wondering whether the US version would stick to the UK template for a big development in ghost Sally’s backstory. For a time it seemed not because the casting of her bereaved fiancé seemed to suggest otherwise, but sure enough the plot I remembered from the British show was dutifully and very well played out. It continues to be a impressively solid, faithful and likeable remake so far.

Russell Howard’s Good News (BBC3): The former Mock the Week star has certainly found his niche with this topical show that mixes funny clips from the week’s news and television with Howard’s own stand-up and sketch humour that has become BBC3′s reliably too-rated show. BBC3 is the channel intended to find that legendary ‘youth’ demographic, so anyone older will likely find this a raucous and borderline-tasteless show – it certainly does sail fairly close to the edge at times with what it can get away with. That it does so is mainly by having a surprisingly moral foundation to its excoriating humour (the sequence on Stuart Hall will have you either cheering or recoiling or both at the same time depending on individual sensibilities, but you have to admire its guts at including such contentious material in this day and age in the first place) and the fact that the each episode ends with a piece of heart-warming ‘good news’ gives it extra points in the bank.

Hannibal S1 E1 “Apéritif” (Sky Living)

andrewlewin — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:29:49 +0000

It seems that filmmakers simply cannot leave Dr Hannibal Lector alone to dine in peace. He first appeared on screen played by Brian Cox in Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter adapted from author Thomas Harris’ initial novel Red Dragon, but it was the Oscar-winning film of Harris’ follow-up book The Silence of the Lambs (which was essentially a re-write of the first but with a female lead) that really made Anthony Hopkins’ incarnation of the cannibalistic serial killer into a global phenomenon. After that, Lector rather took over Harris’ stories and became the (anti) hero of Hannibal and then the prequel Hannibal Rising, which were of decreasing quality. Both were made into films (Gaspard Ulliel playing the younger version of the character) and Hopkins further reprised the role in a second adaption of Red Dragon.

Now that cinema has picked the bones of Dr Lector clean, it’s time for television to have its go with a brand new project entitled – oh, how imaginatively – Hannibal. But it’s not a new adaptation of the novel/film of that name, nor is it a new run at the prequel: although set prior to the events of Red Dragon, it’s not as far back into Lector’s childhood. Instead it takes as its jumping off point certain references from Harris’ first book referencing how a young FBI profiler by the name of Will Graham – cursed with exceptional empathy and insight into the minds of serial killers – first met and eventually exposed Lector.

The latter stage is a long way off as the new NBC series developed by Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Heroes, Dead Like Me) opens with noted and respected psychiatrist Lector (played here with considerable cold relish and underplaying by Casino Royale’s Mads Mikkelsen) meeting Graham (Hugh Dancy) and his boss Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) for the first time to consult on a series of abductions and killings.

For me the best of the five films was always the first, Manhunter; not just because Brian Cox made such a terrific understated Lector, but because it was the first time that we’d seen the now-clichéd character of the forensic profile. In the first film the role is taken by a very young and intense William Petersen who would later go on to headline the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and both Peterson’s performance and the way that the film followed Graham’s burrowing into the mind of his prey made a huge impact on me – it’s still one of my favourite films. (Edward Norton was also rather good in the otherwise inferior second version which was sadly unbalanced by the need to pump up Lector’s role to make the most of Hopkins’ star status.) So while I grew bored and put off by the progression of the film series, the idea of revisiting this part of the Lector story and in particular the chance to spend more time with Will Graham (ironically, rather than Hannibal) genuinely appealed to me. If they could pull it off with any aplomb, that is.

So how is the new Graham? In a word: genuinely excellent. I found Dancy’s playing of the role both completely original and utterly compelling. Yes, it’s the dark and tormented investigator tossing and turning in his bed unable to escape reliving the details of the case, but I can’t recall ever seeing that trope played so well and so vibrantly as it is here. The new adaptation also layers on an Aspergers’ element to the role that was hinted at by Petersen’s original portrayal, but here is done full bore to impressive effect. Fan as I was of Petersen and even of Norton, I’m entirely sold on Dancy’s portrayal as the best of the lot.

The problem with a story centring on a character who uses empathy and imagination to project himself into the mind of a killer is that while fine in the pages of a book, this isn’t necessarily the most visual concept for a film or television show. Even Michael Mann – despite his reputation as one of the most conspicuous screen stylists of his time – did this very plainly, preferring to trust the script and allow the actor to sell the process rather than augment it with prominent cinematic tricks. Not so here in the latest version for TV: we get instead a very stylish and artistically (even beautifully) done representation of Graham rolling back time in his mind and projecting himself into the place of the killer, so literally that we are left with some (intentionally) deeply disturbing scenes in which the hero of the piece is splattered in blood, seen massacring a family or choking the life out of a young girl. It’s quite near the knuckle stuff especially for television, but that’s really the point: if it’s difficult for us to watch then just imagine how bad it is for someone to actually go through this level of transference in their own mind. No wonder Will Graham is so disturbingly angst-ridden, in this case it’s genuinely well-earned.

This deep into the review and virtually no mention of its eponymous character yet? Well, that’s in keeping with the way that he’s treated by the show itself. Mikkelsen doesn’t make his bow until halfway into the episode, which is just as well as even a low-key version of Lector still threatens to blow away the rest of the cast and story if not carefully managed. Here he’s introduced very archly in mid-cuisine and of course our imagination goes into overdrive about the meat in the dish. But there’s very little that’s overt at this stage and instead it’s his playing opposite Dancy’s Will Graham that grips. It is very well scripted and immaculately performed – an initial coldness quickly developing into mutual intrigue if not friendship – and the way that the story gets Lector to assist Graham by giving him an ‘anti-example’ of everything the current killer is not about is really very smart indeed and lives up to everything that Harris’ book implied about their early relationship.

There was never any doubt in my mind that Mikkelsen wouldn’t be a terrific antagonist: he’d already shown how show-stoppingly good he can be in evil mode as Bond villain Le Chiffre, and then last year he proved himself arguably one of the best actors working in the world today with A Royal Affair and The Hunt. And he doesn’t disappoint here in his first TV role in almost a decade, producing something that both delivers on a visceral level for those of us already knowledgeable about and creeped out by the Lector of the films, and yet also produces something memorably entirely different from the previous players of the part.

As for the rest of it, Fishburne (who ironically replaced William Petersen at the helm of CSI) provides a formidable presence as Crawford, someone who is a believable and credible leader of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences unit and also a skilful manipulator and player of people to get what he wants. It’s a far better role for him than his part in CSI ever way and without question the most interesting, conflicted and layered depiction of the character on screen so far, with all due respect to Dennis Farina, Scott Glenn and Harvey Keitel who were given proportionately less to do with the part.

While yet to make much of an impression in the pilot episode, it’s interesting to see that some of the supporting characters from Harris’ novel have swapped genders for the TV series, such is the need to bring a female presence into an original story almost completely devoid of them other than as victims. Sidney Bloom is now Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) while loathsome hack Freddy Lounds is now blogger Fredricka Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki). The role of forensic specialist Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park) is expanded and Crawford also gets a wife, Bella, played by Suits star Gina Torres. Notably Graham’s wife and son are absent from the TV series, presumably to allow some romantic development later in the series. Geek fans of a certain age will also prick up their ears to hear that the part of Dr Lector’s own psychotherapist is to be played in a multi-episode arc by none other than The X-Files star Gillian Anderson.

All of this has so much promise – so much so that I really want to see it work out and develop over a very long run – that I’m almost not the right person to review it, since my partiality flew out of the window in almost the first minute. It was, perhaps, trying a little too hard to be shocking in its depiction of some quite horrific events, and made jumps in the narrative that were for purely artistic effect, but overall there’s enough intelligence behind it all to persuade you that they know what they’re delivering and can pull it off without it becoming another ‘psycho-monster of the week’ melodrama. Certainly it looks good and is impressively polished and styled on the screen. So far there’s a genuine sense of unsettling horror in the same classic old-school tradition that made The Silence of the Lambs such a success, rather than the over-the-top ghoulishness of the 2001 film or the plain masochistic nastiness of recent horror franchises like Saw and Hostel that have been so inexplicably popular.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the series can maintain the standard that it sets here both in terms of production, originality and most of all in the delicate nature of the Graham/Lector balance without slipping too far over in the way that the films inevitably did. If the TV version can pull it off and maintain the standard its set for itself in this first outing, then this will be well worth sticking with and could be something rather excellent albeit not for the faint-hearted or the squeamish.

But it’s a big task its set for itself, and it could all go horribly wrong at any moment – which is of course half the appeal of watching something like this in the first place.

Hannibal airs on Sky Living on Tuesdays at 10pm, with repeats during the week and also available on Sky Go and Sky On Demand. The DVD/Blu-ray release of season 1 has not been scheduled as of the time of writing.

ArchiveView: Star Trek (2009)

andrewlewin — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:36:53 +0000

Ahead of seeing Star Trek Into Darkness, here’s a review of the first JJ Abrams that I wrote on its original release in May 2009 and reproduced from the general topic blog that I had at the time …

The new Star Trek movie is a great piece of entertainment and easily one of the best action movies of the year. As a relaunch of the Trek franchise, it’s an outstanding success. But for all that, don’t believe the hype – it’s good, but it’s just not great.

Viewed as an attempt to reboot, revive and recast a moribund franchise, it’s an unqualified success. While remaining true to the underlying Trek ethos, the film manages to be fast, funny and action-packed where the old series and movies could be slow, ponderous and preachy. Yet despite any carping from die hard fans, the film is remarkably true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of an optimistic, altruistic and inspirational future. And despite the misgivings of many a fan, myself included, the recasting of iconic roles is almost without exception a collection of huge successes.

Zachary Quinto, for example – so great in Heroes, where he plays arch villain Sylar with an intelligence, subtlety and an outrageous amount of scene stealing that he’s almost the only reason for watching that show any more – is beyond perfect as Spock. He is both convincingly a young version of Leonard Nimoy’s character, and yet his own man as well, much more expressive, on edge and volatile than the refined and dignified Nimoy. He’s so good that you almost believe that this film and the entire Trek reboot has been sitting on its hands for seven years since the previous film just waiting for Quinto to be ready to accept the role.

While Quinto seemed obvious casting, Karl Urban as McCoy definitely did not. Having seen him in The Lord of the Rings, The Bourne Supremacy and The Chronicles of Riddick I thought this was going to be the film’s one bit of bad miscasting. So when I say I watched his performance open-mouthed and am a complete convert, I hope you can tell just how well he channelled DeForest Kelley in the role. He’s genuinely wonderful.

The others – Zoe Saldana as Uhuru, John Cho as Sulu, Anton Yelchin as Chekov and not forgetting the film’s lead, Chris Pine as Kirk – stick less closely to the original portrayals of the roles, but in each case they are successful in creating new portrayals which, while different, manage to stay consistent with the characters we knew. Pine forgoes Shatner’s quirks but has just the right swagger and cocksure way of moving; Chekov may be reinvented as a 17-year-old boy genius (I was reminded of Spencer Reid in TV’s Criminal Minds, actually – ironically, Yelchin’s been a guest star in that show and played against that character) but it still felt right all the same. In supporting roles, Ben Cross was a safe pair of hands to carry forward Mark Lenard’s character of Sarek, while Winona Ryder was an odd but perfectly solid choice for the part of Spock’s mother.

The one place it all falls down, alas, is in the case of Simon Pegg as Chief Engineer Scott. Pegg is used here as the film’s comedy relief – something that Scotty never was in the original Star Trek – and the character is a reprise of the James Bond “Q” that he previously did for director JJ Abrams in Mission: Impossible 3. As good as Pegg is, this feels out of place and a huge let-down. It’s a shame as the film really doesn’t need the comic relief – it’s got a lot of humour throughout, with the scene where Kirk is repeatedly ‘treated’ by McCoy with increasingly dreadful side effects the funniest sequence I’ve watched in any Star Trek outing.

But for the most part it all works far better than we had any right to expect, and so it’s a shame that having pulled off the recasting so well we then get to see so little of the new cast outside of Kirk and Spock. They all get their one stand-out character moment (Uhuru at a bar, for example; Sulu sword-fighting on a mining platform) but we really want far more of it than just one or two scenes apiece rather than frankly extraneous, distracting sequences such as the alien creatures on the ice planet and Scotty trapped in water pipes. Still, that’s an inherent problem with a feature film compared with a weekly TV series where it’s possible to develop a large ensemble cast.

Abrams is smart enough not to drop the ball on the recasting of the film’s other “star” – the Enterprise itself. It still looks recognisably like the Enterprise, just improved here and there with some go-faster stripes and served up with some terrific FX (taking a leaf out of modern Battlestar Galactica’s “hand-held” feel) giving new angles to the familiar profile. Inside, though, it’s less successful: the bridge is slightly disappointing – all gleaming white but no real sense of layout; and the production design is distractingly inconsistent, going from the futuristic bridge to the industrial 20th century sewage plant of an engineering section in a way that doesn’t feel like the two parts belong in the same universe.

These nitpicks aside, there were two real issues I had with the film that stop it from becoming a five-star classic and a genuine “best of Trek” outing. The first is some staggering plot inanities: a critical but wildly improbable meeting between Kirk and Spock in an icy cavern; trans-warp beaming which, taken to its logical end, means the end of starships and of plot jeopardy for all time; Kirk going from suspended cadet stowaway to being promoted to first officer within minutes of crashing on to the bridge, over the heads of hundreds of senior officers just because Captain Pike knew his dad; and then later at the end of the film (mild spoiler ahoy) when he’s handed the permanent captaincy of the Enterprise despite lacking any actual experience. It’s twee “fairy tale” stuff that undermines any credibility Star Fleet may have had as an organisation, and is also a wasted opportunity – wouldn’t it have been better to leave room for the follow-up to have Kirk plugging away as a second officer somewhere, really learning his craft and able to prove himself rather than have it all landed in his lap in one brief outing?

But even all this could have worked if the central plot – and main menace – had been any good. As it is, the whole plot can be described as “villain from the future with a planet-destroying weapon seeks revenge.” That’s it. There’s literally nothing more to the threat, just one band of pissed off Romulans in a decrepit albeit from-the-future mining ship. In the grand scheme of things that’s rather a weak threat, and it’s certainly terminally one-dimensional – it’s just not very interesting. Even the previous unsuccessful franchise outing, Star Trek: Nemesis (which coincidentally used a rogue band of Romulans as chief villains too) had bigger, more dramatic themes than this in terms of identity, xenophobia, alienation and nature vs nurture.

There’s not even much of a science fiction idea in the entire film. That the villain (Nero, a wasted opportunity for an unrecognisable Eric Bana) comes from the future is nothing more than a plot device to explain why this film doesn’t have to follow established backstory from the original Star Trek series but is otherwise unimportant. In fact it hurts the film, since Spock and Kirk find themselves up against a villain who wants revenge for things that they themselves know nothing about, which just means they’re more baffled than motivated.

This lack of a main plot of any substance – compared with, say, the franchise’s best outing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or the Cold War-inspired themes of Star Trek VI: Undiscovered Country which combined action with emotion, character, bigger themes and genuine science fiction ideas – is the real failing of the film which leaves it feeling rather empty and vapid at the core for all its other spectacular successes. And the perfect synthesis can be done – the TV reboot of Battlestar Galactica showed how a science fiction show can be big, dramatic, action-packed, emotional, meaningful – and still hugely successful.

A definite four stars out of five from me, then. I appreciate all it’s done in reviving the Trek franchise and very much look forward to seeing what they do with it next given such impressive groundwork. But this is only a step toward what Trek could – and should – be on screen. Hopefully the strong foundations this film lays will allow them to go on and build a meatier sequel in due course. I’ll certainly look forward to it.

Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror (BBC1)

andrewlewin — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:25:47 +0000

One consistently recurring question among fans over recent years has been why accomplished writer and performer Mark Gatiss hasn’t been able to deliver a follow-up to match “The Unquiet Dead,” his first Doctor Who episode back in 2005. There was the undercooked ‘meh’-ness of “The Idiot’s Lantern” for example, and the flat-out disappointment of “Victory of the Daleks” which was only partially the result of the new-model primary-coloured candy-floss iDaleks. Even 2011′s “Night Terrors” felt like it should have been so much better rather than just acceptably decent.

Given his undoubted talents – just check out his writing for Sherlock for example – and his unimpeachable love of the series, a resounding Doctor Who success for Gatiss has been long over due. Arguably last month’s “Cold War” was the best of Gatiss follow-ups, and it was certainly pretty good and well-received even if I personally thought it narrowly failed to fully deliver. So you can understand then when I say I’d rather given up hope of ever finding a Gatiss-penned Doctor Who that I could unreservedly, unhesitatingly gush over and declare as being his best contribution to the series of all time; and I certainly wasn’t expecting “The Crimson Horror” to be the episode to prove me wrong.

Well paint me red, dress me in long johns and call me dear monster, because I’ve never been happier having to eat my words: “The Crimson Horror” was the most tongue-in-cheek fun that Doctor Who has had in a very long time. Possibly ever, actually. It is delightfully wicked and clever from first to last and shows just how good Gatiss can truly be when he slips his leash and goes on the rampage unfettered by cerebral concerns of what a ‘good’ Doctor Who episode needs to or should look like.

Instead, all the various influences that Gatiss loves and adores are merrily thrown into the melting pot: there’s the Victorian steampunk/penny dreadfuls setting of his Lucifer Box series of novels, the northern comedy grotesques who would have fitted in seamlessly into The League of Gentlemen, and lovely homages to any number of horror films from the original 1931 Boris Karloff Gothic Frankenstein through to the 1953 Vincent Price Grand Guignol House of Wax with even a knowing nod to the peerless Carry On Screaming along the way. And while “The Crimson Horror” is funny, it’s also refreshingly dark at its satirical core – for once the villain of the piece isn’t some poor misunderstood creature just wanting a hug (as has been a cliché of recent New Who stories) but is instead an evil, malevolent cackling mad-person straight out of a old James Bond movie – and it’s joyous to behold.

It’s an incredibly heady mix, as rich as having a double portion of Chocolate By Death served up with extra-rich chocolate sauce on top and chocolate chip ice cream on the side. Your head may never stop spinning again, but if you’ve got an ounce of humour in your heart and any love at all of Who running through your veins then it’ll send you to heaven in the process.

It’s the kind of thing that could so easily have gone horribly, self-indulgently wrong if not played very smartly. There’s a lot more hard work and discipline gone into this episode than the riotous free-wheeling end product would have you believe. There are moments when it teeters on the brink of collapsing in on itself, of becoming too much of a lampoon and pastiche of both classic and modern Doctor Who to be acceptable, but every time you think you’re at the tipping point it jerks back again and saves the day. The continually-swooning (male) client who faints ramrod-straight at the first sign of anything alien is sitcom stuff and yet is irresistibly funny all the same – especially with repetition. The most audacious moment of all is when a character gets directions from a young street urchin, and you can’t believe the out-and-out groan-inducing joke that Gatiss inserts into the show. A quick analysis makes you realise how expertly it’s handled, so that while it’s a gag worthy of a Carry On film it’s actually done in such a way that the humour comes from our knowing reading of it rather than by making the show itself look stupid.

But there are other people who deserve a big share of the credit here. Director Saul Metzstein’s work is exemplary throughout and the scene in the empty factory with the three gramophones blasting out at full volume is particularly effective. But it’s the sequence in which he presents the Doctor’s catch-up reminiscences using an old-style grainy sepia effect that was such a thing of beauty I wanted to stop the episode there and then, stand up and applaud – it’s one of the most sublime and perfectly executed things I’ve seen on television in an age. Matt Smith’s raucous attempt at a full-throated Yorkshire accent is just the icing on the cake at that moment.

Then there’s the guest cast, with Dame Diana Rigg on absolutely top form as the cheerfully deranged Mrs Gillyflower, looking like she’s having a whale of a time. Plaudits as well to Rachael Stirling – Rigg’s real-life daughter – for a quite wonderful turn as the blind and disfigured Ada Gillyflower who is the emotional heart of the story. Overall this felt like an episode with a full and rich supporting cast, with a good number of brief, small parts all pleasingly written and played. That’s such a welcome change after several weeks of really quite noticeable cast claustrophobia: “Hide” and “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” barely scraped together three supporting characters apiece besides the two regulars, while “Cold War” featured the world’s most under-manned nuclear submarine in history.

Best of all, showrunner Steven Moffat has loaned Gatiss three of his best recent additions to the ‘Whoniverse’ to play with: yes, it’s the second return of Victorian-era Silurian supersleuth Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), her maid/companion/sidekick/lover Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart) and their Sontaran butler, the ever-adorable psychotic potato dwarf Strax (Dan Starkey). There are as welcome and as wonderful as ever, with every line from Strax in particular once again an instant quotable classic. Even better, this time Gatiss allows Jenny – hitherto the least developed of the trio – to take centre stage in the story as she goes undercover at Mrs Gillyflower’s ‘Sweetville’ factory and social housing project from which no one ever returns unless they’re bright red and quite dead. In putting Jenny at the focus of the early part of the story, Gatiss finally makes the character every bit an equal for the more obvious attractions of Vastra and Strax. There’s even a cheeky scene in which Jenny strips off her demure Victorian garb ready for action and is revealed to be wearing a tight-fitting leather catsuit that inevitably reminds those of us of a certain age of the strikingly sexy costume worn by Mrs Emma Peel in The Avengers episode “A Touch of Brimstone”: I wonder what Dame Diana made of it as she watched on?

It’s touches like this that raise the episode into quite brilliant new heights. The story keeps the mystery of Clara’s mysterious other lives on the boil, and also makes another fan-pleasing grace note to the past by invoking the spirit of a popular 80s companion. Clara is back at her sparkling best after three episodes in which she was rather ‘generic companion’ for too much of the time. That is all the more surprising given that she’s not actually in a lot of this episode: the Doctor and Clara don’t even appear for the first 15 minutes of the episode, allowing Vastra and her team to take centre stage instead. What this ‘mini-sode’ proves beyond doubt is that if Doctor Who ever again needs to do a ‘Doctor-lite’ episode like it used to do in previous seasons, then it can safely hand over the whole 45 minutes to the Victorian threesome knowing we’ll all be as happy as exceptionally happy things on extra-strength happy pills. Or let’s just hope that the BBC bites the completely bleedin’ obvious bullet staring them in the face and commissions a whole new spin-off show. After all, between running Doctor Who and Sherlock, Steven Moffat must be getting a bit bored at being so obviously under-utilised and just crying out for a whole new show to organise, no?

As you can tell, I loved “The Crimson Horror” and that’s despite not having been endeared to Gatiss’ other most recent contributions to the show. I’m also the kind of Doctor Who viewer who takes things very seriously and who never liked Tom Baker as much as other people did because he was just too damn flippant about things too much of the time. So when even I can stop and say that this episode was a total delight on just about every level on which it sought to work, then I think you have a seriously successful 45 minutes of television.

Normally at some point in a review I’ll say, “But it’s a bit odd and I can understand why a certain part of the audience won’t like it.” This time I’ll say that if you didn’t like this episode, then it really is your own problem and that maybe you’re just not cut out to be Doctor Who fan. You should probably pack it in and find something else to watch. While there’s certainly never been any episode quite like “The Crimson Horror” in the series’ 50 years, there’s a strong argument to be made that we’ve rarely witnessed a single story that most perfectly sums up the heady mix of vibrant tastes and exotic colours swirling around in the show’s DNA, or 45 minutes that then displays these back to us in their purest, most nakedly enjoyable form.

If you didn’t enjoy and adore this one on at least two or more levels then you have no Time Lord poetry in your soul – and moreover never will.

The penultimate episode of this series of Doctor Who, Neil Gaiman’s “Nightmare in Silver”, is on Saturday May 11 2013 at 7pm on BBC1, with a repeat on BBC Three the following Friday. The series is also available on the BBC iPlayer. Series 7 part 2 is out on DVD and Blu-ray on May 20.