Doctor Dracula is In

So why do vampires need to be invited in? Why are they put off by crucifixes? Such questions are at the heart of the dialogue in 2020's Dracula, a Netflix/BBC miniseries from Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. I've only caught the first episode so far but I've found it enjoyable but not brilliant. With Sherlock and Doctor Who, Steven Moffat took fan speculations, nitpicks, and decades of critical analyses to generate new versions of the classic characters, turning analyses into genuine people. A similar attempt is made in Dracula but so far the result is more of a video illustrated deconstruction than the same kind of organic endeavour as Moffat's previous forays.

But there's already been deconstructionist takes on Dracula--how couldn't there be? Bram Stoker's novel is one of the most adapted works of fiction of all time. There was Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula which broke down the implications of class stratification with an amusingly wimpy, aristocratic performance by an adorable Udo Kier. There was Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, an insufferable slog through the shallowest, academic perspectives on the book as reinforcing patriarchal and colonialist privilage. One of the most refreshing things about Gatiss and Moffat's version is that, though it references English presumptions in foreign lands and culturally supported sexism, it also makes a point to show that Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) is compelled to risk his own life as a matter of course when someone requests his aid. This is a show that's aware of the fact that part of the Christian cultural heritage is a basic sense of human decency. The conflict between the good and bad qualities of the religion forms the internal conflict of Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells).

A female version of Van Helsing has been done (there's a USA series which, for all I know, may still be airing new episodes). But this one is also Sister Agatha, another character from the book, so she's not simply gender swapped, she's a combination, one that works well enough to serve as an intriguing streamlining of the story. Her crisis of faith is something entirely new, though, as neither Sister Agatha nor Abraham Van Helsing seemed to have any trouble believing in God.

Mostly the show has the quality of an intellectual discourse, exemplified when, in their first showdown, Agatha and Dracula (Claes Bang) argue about why vampires require invitations. The show brings very little new to the table in terms of atmosphere and effects, much of which is cribbed a bit from Hammer and a lot from Francis Ford Coppola. Claes Bang comes off a bit like Christopher Lee's Dracula crossed with Cary Grant in Suspicion but with the faster speech of a typical Steven Moffat character. There's nothing Vlad the Impaler-ish so far, he doesn't even have the "We Szekelys have a right to be proud" speech, Dracula's longest monologue in the novel. This is a show much more about discussing the vampire in modern fiction in a breezy manner and, while it doesn't inspire much shock or awe, it is kind of fun.

Dracula (2020) is available on Netflix.

The Santa of Your Dreams

There'll be no Christmas for Doctor Who under the harsh rule of Chris Chibnall this year but we can always go back and watch the old Christmas specials. Last night I watched the fascinating balancing act that is "Last Christmas" again, the 2014 Christmas special (can it really have been five years?). In addition to being a Santa Claus story to appeal to children, it also has elements reminiscent of Alien and Nightmare on Elm Street 3. It's ambitious. Does writer Steven Moffat pull it off? Your mileage may vary but I find the episode has improved with age for me.

21st century audiences used to be kind of fussy; they would want fantasy but they never, ever wanted to feel like rubes. The younger generous seems more credulous, which has its pros and cons, but maybe the constant irony of Nick Frost's Santa Claus in this episode was already wearing thin. Still, at its heart "Last Christmas" is a story about the value of fantasy and how it can save you from deception, which is a very good idea. It's why I'm always disappointed when someone tells me they prefer non-fiction. Documentaries and biographies always have a point of view, however benign--the process of editing for time alone involves picking and choosing what matters.

"Dreams. They're funny," says the Doctor (Peter Capaldi). "They're disjointed. They're silly. They're full of gaps. But you don't notice because the dream protects itself, stops you asking the right questions." When the Doctor talks about how the "dream crabs" are networking their brains, it's not hard to think of the shared reality of internet discourse. And this is an idea Moffat played with a lot in his tenure, maybe most directly with "The Bells of Saint John."

In this sense, Santa Claus is a brilliant antidote because when he shows up in context he's an immediate signal, the brain's defence mechanism to show the falseness of the crab's "anaesthetic" illusory world. Yet the episode also has to have children in mind so we have things like the sleigh ride and Clara (Jenna Coleman) emotionally pledging her belief in Santa, at one point even implying that the Doctor is her Santa. Which is an interesting evolution from the Doctor as Christ figure in the Russell T. Davies era.

These contrasting elements--the importance of fantasy and the danger of compelling illusion, exist side by side and the conflict is wonderfully provoking. Fantasy, because we know what it is from the start, allows you to evaluate its ideas and aesthetics on your own terms, the power is implicitly in the reader or viewer. Illusion or propaganda reserves power for the creator of the material, it's meant to disorient and subdue the viewer. It's a good thing we have the Doctor.

Young and Old and Ageing Voices Resurgent

Yesterday was both Jenna Coleman's birthday and Russell T. Davies' birthday. I felt like I'd been watching a lot of Davies' episodes of Doctor Who lately so I decided to watch one featuring Coleman. For some reason I chose the two parter premiere of Twelve's second season, "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar", which doesn't showcase Coleman a whole lot. Watching it I was more reminded of how much I miss Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and Michelle Gomez as Missy.

I do love the look on Clara's (Coleman) face when she reacts to the Doctor starting to play "Pretty Woman" on his guitar as an indication that he knows she and Missy are present. Of course, we and they may wonder, which one is he playing it for? And suddenly it seems like they both should be wondering if they should be wondering and in that moment they become his groupies a little bit. Then the ladies descend to meet him and it seems clear he was playing for Clara--she asks how he picked her out of a crowd and he says, "There was a crowd, too?"

But the pair dynamic in this two parter is mostly between Missy and Clara and Missy is definitely the star. Gomez is just so damned good--she takes good lines and makes them twenty times better with her delicious scenery chewing. It seems like in most serialised genre fiction, the arch-villain always eventually teams up with the heroes but I like how Steven Moffat makes it perfectly clear Missy hasn't turned "good"--both by having her literally saying she hasn't turned good and then randomly picking off some soldiers. When Clara, bewildered, asked how she survived, Gomez adopts the careless tone of an aristocrat to say, "Death is for other people." So, so good.

I sure hope she'll be back at some point though I hear Gomez has a role on the new Sabrina series for NetFlix. That alone makes me want to check it out.

The other dialogue that dominates the two parter is between the Doctor and Davros (Julian Bleach), and it's another instance of a hero and villain possibly working together. The whole sequence plays off the famous scene in Genesis of the Daleks, a clip from which is actually featured in the episode, Tom Baker agonising over whether he has the right to kill a child he knows is going to be a mass murderer. I found myself thinking of Herbert Lom in Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, which I watched again recently, playing a Holocaust survivor. When asked if he had had the foresight and opportunity, would he have murdered Hitler? Most viewers would feel no compunction about agreeing with him when he says yes, of course he would. The counterargument in science fiction would generally point to the unforeseeable consequences to the timeline, and that's touched on in "The Magicians Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar". But a more effective demonstration of the unintended consequences of seemingly straightforward actions is when Davros' own idea backfires, his scheme to use the Doctor to inject new life into himself and the Daleks, which ends up including the elderly, forgotten Daleks carrying on a wretched existence in the sewer. Leading to a lovely pun from the Doctor; "Your sewers are revolting."

Dr. Same and Mr. Similar

Once again, I've had occasion to marvel that many people consider Steven Moffat to be misogynist. This time it's because I watched his six episode 2007 series Jekyll, intended as a sequel of sorts to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I can understand why someone would come away from this thinking Moffat has a slightly embarrassing attitude about women but not that he harbours hatred for women. This is a story about a guy whose whole existence is defined by women. As a Jekyll and Hyde adaptation, this is one that casts its lot with the interpretation of Hyde as id, avoiding any explicit contemplations of morality. It's fun at times, more of a superhero story than a horror film, and has the same pattern as most of Moffat's Doctor Who seasons and Sherlock--the earlier, more grounded episodes are better, the later ones that give way to untethered emotive fantasy tend to have reaches that exceed their grasps.

James Nesbitt plays Doctor Jackman, this series' version of Doctor Jekyll--his Hyde, also played by James Nesbitt, is still called Hyde. In this reality, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella exists but is secretly based on a true story. One of the ongoing mysteries throughout the series is how Jackman can be related to Jekyll if Jekyll had no children. There're a lot of bait and switch clues that lead to an amusingly mundane explanation.

As far as Jackman knows, he was abandoned as a baby at a railway station in Belfast--thus explaining Jackman being Northern Irish. Nesbitt's good in the role, maybe a bit too zany as Hyde for my taste. He's certainly the nicest Hyde I've seen--this is a Hyde who's never killed anyone and although a scene in the first episode had what I thought was a prelude to a rape I think we're meant to believe he's never raped anyone. Everyone seems to think he's dangerous, though, which is why Jackman has himself strapped in and monitored by the first of the show's series of mother figures, a psychiatric nurse named Katherine (Michelle Ryan).

This show is filled with beautiful women that want to help Jackman take care of his rampant id, in one way or another. In addition to Katherine there's Jackman's wife, Claire (Gina Bellman), who seems to become a more prominent custodian of Jackman as the series progresses than she was intended to be at first; there's a lesbian couple who are detectives who are at first hired by Claire to follow Jackman but then want to help him pro bono; and then Jackman's possibly actual mother shows up. I guess if you consider turning all women into mother figures misogynistic then you might consider this misogynistic too. I think it's boring to think of all women as primarily mothers but not necessarily hateful unless you resent women who don't act like mothers. But just because this show is crammed with mother figures one shouldn't assume that that's how Moffat sees women in real life, especially since this might be part of a conscious statement on the nature of Hyde.

This seems to me another case of someone adapting Jekyll and Hyde to argue against the fundamental argument of the original novella. Jekyll in the novel is this repressed Victorian who's sold himself on the idea of a totally abstract morality and his Hyde is a result, the really real that's spoiling to come out around the edges of what society wants to be real. Moffat's point, which he has several characters explicitly state, is that Hyde is really a child who assumes the whole world revolves around him. The point of all the mother figures could have been to intentionally highlight the childish nature of Hyde, to emphasis the dynamic of this big kid who always has to be picked up after. Though Moffat kind of shoots himself in the foot by making the whole series revolve around Jackman/Hyde. Just like his Doctor Who or Sherlock, the story always seems to eventually focus on its protagonist. Here, it might have been nice to focus more on the people who were negatively affected by Hyde, which would complicate the final episodes where Hyde essentially becomes an unambiguous hero figure.

No, not an antihero. There's a term that gets misused a lot nowadays. Venom is not an antihero. Alex DeLarge is an antihero. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets is an antihero. Hyde in Jekyll, by contrast, becomes downright altruistic. Partly because the show gives him fewer and fewer opportunities to genuinely be an egregious miscreant. Instances where he does commit acts of extreme violence are always mitigated by the fact that his victims had been established as two dimensional assholes who had hurt or had tried to hurt Jackman/Hyde or someone innocent.

It turns out there's a standard issue, shadowy, super wealthy organisation that wants to get its hands on Hyde for medical research. They're much more ruthless than Hyde, believing the ends eventually will justify the means, which might have been this series' version of Victorian morality but so little time is spent on their motives. They mostly boil down to people in suits striding through fluorescent corridors discussing strategy on how to capture Hyde. In flashbacks to Jackman's first dates with Claire, he seems a bit shy, as though there was some thought of going the Nutty Professor route, but the show doesn't go very far with it. Jackman disapproves of Hyde smoking and drinking but there's no sense of a repression that's really had a detrimental influence on his life.

In the end, what exactly the show wants to do with Jackman and Hyde is left pretty vague, which may be the reason it was never picked up for a second season. Incredibly, by the end of the series Moffat had actually removed the conflict between the two to the point where they seem more of one mind than Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple.