The Doctor versus Tooth Face, Round Two

To-day's new Doctor Who was the season finale, delivering a plot with markedly less emotion than any in the Russell T. Davies or Steven Moffat eras. Generally I wished finales from the revived series wouldn't try to hit such high notes but this first finale by showrunner Chris Chibnall has shown me the folly of blandness.

Spoilers after the screenshot

One thing I'll give credit to "The Battle of Ranskoor" for is addressing the seemingly sloppy writing from earlier in the season. Whether it's because Chibnall was planning it all along (doubtful) or he engaged in some self criticism (probable and laudable) I like that Ryan (Tosin Cole) now calls the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) on using bombs while she lectures people about the use of firearms. The Doctor's explanation, essentially that she established rules so that she can break them--or people who've won her respect can--was a nicely Time Lady moment. You think this show's too liberal? The Doctor certainly has her Royalist side. I still think it would've been sensible to shoot the giant spiders.

And people certainly were happy to use guns in this episode. Yaz (Mandip Gill) even gives Paltraki (Mark Addy) a "Nice shot!" when he manages to shoot two thugs over her shoulder. Graham (Bradley Walsh) has meanwhile gone from quoting Pulp Fiction to quoting Die Hard and he and Ryan standing over Tooth Face at the end looked like a shot from Inglourious Basterds.

If Inglourious Basterds starred people from commercials for local retail. Graham's dilemma over whether he'll kill Tim Shaw in revenge for the killing of his wife lacked a lot of weight thanks to Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole's flat performances. Though it was also deflated for not making sense in the usual way heroes deciding not to kill two dimensional villains doesn't make sense. If you're talking about an anti-death penalty philosophy in a world where even murderers are complex, multifaceted beings with psychological problems that may be treated, it makes sense. But as Graham pointed out early on, all the Doctor did in letting Tim Shaw live was to give him opportunity to commit more atrocities. That's a really good point and no-one really brings up a sensible counterargument. Unless anyone really believes Tim Shaw is going to be stuck in that solitary confinement forever. Well, he was so dull, maybe the writers really won't bother setting him free.

I liked the concept of the two person species, it felt very old school Doctor Who, as did the concept of a villain stealing planets and miniaturising them (in fact that was part of the premise of the Fourth Doctor serial The Pirate Planet).

So that concludes the first season of the Thirteenth Doctor. Some really nice guest stars this season, particularly Susan Lynch and Alan Cumming; writing that ranged from terrible to average; dull companions (Yaz pretty much had no reason for being in the finale); bad music. Whittaker isn't bad though she's easily the weakest since Colin Baker. But I still think things could improve next season.

Twitter Sonnet #1183

Presented drums contain a secret gin.
The quiet sun delivered rain to class.
Reports were gathered late and promptly binned.
Connexions failed to see the noodle pass.
The quiet key contains piano sounds.
A glowing time configured fights for scrap.
Another name was picked to call the rounds.
Appearance spelled the crimson paper wrap.
A planetary orange withheld the seeds.
As harpsichords would tumble down the hill.
Instructive plants were rows of music weeds.
But nothing human wrote the final bill.
A tidy stream concludes with salvaged soap.
A cleansing froth replenished means to cope.

Low Fat Star Wars

There's a new way to digest Star Wars now with Galaxy of Adventures. A series of shorts released by Disney on YouTube, they use audio of the actors from the films to recreate or create scenes in a vaguely anime style but with cheaper 2D cgi. I watched them this morning--it didn't take long, they're all under two minutes, hopefully assuring even the shortest attention spans will be sold on the brand. Also this morning I read this article in The Atlantic about Andy Warhol and this quote seemed appropriate: ". . . Warhol’s great advance was collapsing any distinction between commercial and noncommercial modes of experience." Because Galaxy of Adventures basically seems to be fan art produced by the legal owners of the intellectual property for the purpose of financial gain.

This concept isn't new, of course. In the comments section of the io9 article on Galaxy of Adventures, many people have been sharing covers from tie-in comics from the 80s that, to say the least, played fast and loose with plot, character design, and basic concept of Star Wars. I remember owning a Return of the Jedi 7 inch record and book--I see someone's selling it on eBay for 19.99. It got all kinds of little details wrong from the movie though the impression I generally had was that this wasn't so much because the writer was asserting an alternate creative vision so much as it was someone looking to pay bills with spec writing who didn't necessarily have quick access to a copy of Return of the Jedi. A lot of people forget how hard it could be to see movies, especially new movies, in the early days of home video. The writer was probably working from a script or synopsis--many such things contained references to scenes deleted from the final film.

Of course, even incidental changes or changes based on haste or limited available source material are still artistic choices, choices that alter what's expressed in the artefact. For many people, these distorted hand me down narratives form an essential part of their experience with Star Wars--even if sometimes they didn't want it to. Say there's a difference between how Vader talks to the Imperial officer at the beginning of Return of the Jedi in the movie versus how he talks to him in the little record book I had--as I seem to remember there was. I remember at one point the memory of that scene as it plays in the book being closer to my impression of the "real" scene--and then one day seeing the movie again and experiencing a small shock at realising it's different. Over the course of a few rewatches, I'll always remember that shock and it'll always occupy a part of my reaction to the scene. I might think about how the alternate versions relate to each other, ponder which one is better, and wonder why the difference exists.

In this way it's different from an old oral tradition or myth proliferated by word of mouth. There's an official version that "wins". And that's another part of the story, too, the meta-narrative, if you will. It's all part of the psychological construct of "Star Wars" that the version on the big screen with the special effects and the actors is the "right" version. This is why George Lucas fought so hard to destroy the Star Wars Holiday Special--it looked too much like canon. But this dichotomy is increasingly breaking down, partly due to the fact that ownership of a property isn't quite as successfully translating to control of the canon as corporate owners had hoped. Star Trek fans, even ones who try very hard to, are having trouble incorporating Discovery into the Star Trek canon they recognise, and the fights over Last Jedi have been sometimes sad and nasty, and hopelessly infected with politics. Simon Pegg had a very interesting point recently:

There was an odd thing with [‘The Last Jedi’] in that the people who didn’t like it were sort of being gaslighted by the people that did like it, who were just dismissing their complaints about the film as being fanboy butthurt. And yet, the whole thing is just eating itself in a hideous cultural soup. It’s a shame because it’s just a film.

Speaking as someone who liked Last Jedi, one of the problems I did have with it is that its political messages aren't very well incorporated into the film. That's different from saying I didn't like the political messages, though there are some I disagree with, like the meme about letting old things die or killing them--though, to be fair, the movie leaves some ambiguity in this since it's the villain, Kylo Ren, who urges Rey to "Let the past die" and Rey, the heroine, saves the old Jedi texts at the end. I can enjoy a completely political movie even if I disagree with it philosophically--I'm not a Communist but I think Battleship Potemkin is a brilliant film. I think people complaining about Last Jedi's politics—and people defending them--are missing Oscar Wilde's very important point, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

So that was a bit of a digression on what I intended to be a very short entry on Galaxy of Adventures. Which aren't very good. The animation isn't quite as bad as Forces of Destiny but it's close. The episode that repackages the famous scene from the end of Rogue One saps it of most of its power; the episode in the Death Star trench omits the shot of the Millennium Falcon, leaving it unclear where the shots are coming from that hit Vader's ship. The facial expressions and gestures are overwrought in a way more symptomatic of bad American animation than Japanese. The series brought me again to the thought, one that would probably be very worrying for Disney; can Star Wars really be bought and sold, even for several billion dollars? One of the themes from the George Lucas films notably absent from the Disney films is the conflict between humans and machines. Vader turns bad because he becomes "more machine now than man", Luke turns off the targeting computer to destroy the Death Star, even General Grievous is a sort of prototype of Vader. It might not be a comfortable idea for Disney who, with things like Forces of Destiny and Galaxy of Adventures, seem like they should be about to buy an audience with Star Wars Holiday Special quality. To just flip a switch and let the machine of the property do the work rather than foster artistic vision. But maybe not--I love Rogue One and I have hopes for The Madalorian. We'll see how the battle for the soul of Star Wars plays out.

Jekyll's New Sedative

So you'd like to see a Jekyll and Hyde movie but you wish it didn't have to be so darned exciting. Maybe you've wondered, what's with all the running around and shouting? Bah! Well, 2017's Madame Hyde just might be the Jekyll and Hyde for you. A French film, it was released this year in English speaking countries as Mrs. Hyde I guess because "Madame" sounds too foreign. An anaemic and directionless film, even the daring Isabelle Huppert in the lead roles is abnormally dull. It's streaming on Amazon Prime if you want a free sleep aid.

France is one of the countries that has already had a distinguished history of adapting Robert Louis Stevenson's original story--the best French version being Jean Renoir's Le Testament du docteur Cordelier but 1981's Docteur Jekyll et les femmes is also well worth seeing. Maybe it's the shadow cast by these films that prevented Madame Hyde's writer/director, Serge Bozon, from finding his own point of view on the tale. It kind of seems like he realised he had nothing to say halfway through production and then just went through the motions of making a movie.

Huppert plays Marie Gequil, a meek physics teacher, one of those people who rises to every troll's bait, to the delight of her unruly teenage students. She helplessly yells at them to stop harassing her and their fellow students at every provocation and seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There's an interesting moment where she overhears the students talking about Spider-Man and she mocks them for thinking you can become powerful quickly thanks to some magic potion. It seemed like this was going to be an ironic set-up for her ultimate transformation into Hyde but then the transformation ends up being an accident caused by an electrical discharge in her lab.

I thought maybe the film was going to be something like We Need to Talk about Kevin when she starts to get closer to one of the more disruptive students but this doesn't happen either. For some reason, the students stop being disruptive and become cooperative and they work on a group project together, assembling a Faraday cage. Were the kids changed by Gequil? Were they affected by her imperceptible transformation? Are we meant to be seeing some air of authority or assertiveness that wasn't there before? I don't know. If any of these things happened I missed the very subtle cues that indicated them.

Hyde's form manifests at night when Gequil gets out of bed, solemnly walks outside, and starts glowing. Instead of Mr. Hyde cavorting about town, casting off all moral inhibitions, Madame Hyde just walks around and any people or animals who get too close might be burned to a crisp, though surprisingly a lot of people don't seem to notice the glowing woman wandering about. At one point she comes upon a number of delinquents having a peculiarly well rehearsed and choreographed rap battle in a bad part of town. Is this meant to be a movie-ish musical number? I had the impression Bozon thinks this is how problem kids really act when they're on their own.

Gequil doesn't seem to have a philosophy or motivation beyond teaching her students physics. In this reality, art classes are valued above science classes for some reason and the dean is an obnoxious yuppie who dismisses physics as being too alien to the artistic temperament for the two ever to meet. Gequil never actually proves him wrong but he does start to kind of respect her. I think. There's a lot of shots of people just kind of standing around and looking at things. It's really hard to say what Bozon thought he was doing.

Beaming Around and Around

As usual, Montgomery Scott set a good example when he wore his pants close to the natural waist in "Relics", the sixth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you have a gut of any considerable size, you shouldn't allow the waistline of your pants to cradle it. I've been seeing this around town. It's not a good look. That's one of the reasons I recommend suspenders/braces.

"Relics" is an episode that justly has a lot of affection. Although there are a lot of quotable Scotty-ish lines from Scotty (James Doohan) ("I was drivin' starships while your great-grandfather was still in diapers!") the winking references don't dominate the story. Instead it's about a man fighting with the circumstances that lead older people to feel marginalised, a fairly relevant story to-day when ageism seems to be prevalent among young people, though I suppose an episode of TNG may to such people be a little too old to be worth paying attention to.

I suppose I probably haven't won any of them over by starting this post endorsing high waisted pants. Oh, well.

After encountering the massive Dyson Sphere, an enormous hollow habitation built around a star designed to allow populations to reside on the interior surface, the crew of the Enterprise-D encounter a crashed ship with Scotty preserved in a transporter buffer for 75 years thanks to his own engineering genius. There really needed to be a scene where the characters beamed down to the interior surface of the Dyson sphere, I think, though we sort of got that in the Orville episode "If the Stars Should Appear". Also in the Doctor Who episodes "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls" as well as Farscape episodes set on the Peacekeeper ships or the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series in episodes set on that station or in Interstellar at the end . . . Well, that kind of thing is a little overexposed now. I'm guessing "Relics" probably didn't have the effects budget for it though now it seems like a budget short cut to just go outside and say, "It's actually a really advanced space craft out here!"

I felt like it was a little cold when Picard (Patrick Stewart) immediately brushes off Scotty in sick bay. Shouldn't he and La Forge (LeVar Burton) have asked some of the more detailed questions about the crash of Scotty's ship which they do get around to later? Well, writer Ronald D. Moore nonetheless gets the important stuff right with the emotional core of the episode.

It's crucial that 75 years ago Scotty was on his way to some kind of retirement colony. He's already thinking of himself as finished, and you sense this in his dialogue with Picard on the Holodeck recreation of the original series Enterprise; "There comes a time when a man finds he can't fall in love again. He knows it's time to stop. I don't belong on your ship. I belong on this one. This was my home. This was where I had a purpose . . ." It's an old question; how much is the physical and mental decline of an individual due to nature or perception? One might think of the recent embarrassing story of a Dutch man who tried to legally change his age from 69 to 49.

Scotty has a better claim to disputing his legally defined age considering he was held in stasis for 75 years, raising a legitimate ambiguity as to how his age should be defined. But fortunately by the end of the episode he's more focused on things he can accomplish rather than on the ways he's perceived. The kind of respect he wants, after all, is better earned by walking the walk than pitifully demanding respect (though, again, the way he wears his pants goes a long way). I kind of like that we never find out what happens to him after this episode, though Memory Alpha claims Doohan wanted to be a regular on Deep Space Nine. How great would that have been?

Twitter Sonnet #1182

A jelly sandwich spelled preserves in bread.
A pizza cooled while waiting late for spoons.
The land of check was patterned white and red.
No microwaves can breathe in paper tombs.
A cocoanut concludes a crumbled road.
To pass the brainy jug we must arise.
The army grants a star a meek abode.
For pants exceeding long we must resize.
A sushi switched for crackers quickened tongues.
The test continues late beyond the night.
A breathe of air destroyed the diff'rent lungs.
The circulation rose in proxy might.
The matter sparkle wrought the dough to fly.
A pastry's worth exceeds its price to buy.

A King and a Beggar

An adventure film starring Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, and Alan Hale with a score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold can't fail to be good. But 1937's The Prince and the Pauper isn't as good as it could've been, and many of the choices made to adapt Mark Twain's novel are hard to understand. Two of the most emotionally effective moments from the novel are absent from the film and changes are made to characters that are only partly explained by Hays Code morality. But the costumes are magnificent and Rains and Flynn give great performances. Twin boys, Billy and Bobby Mauch, as the title characters, aren't so bad either.

Still, most people probably showed up for Errol Flynn who doesn't appear until halfway through the almost two hour movie. He's perfectly cast as Miles Hendon, the down on his luck gentleman who was deceived by his brother and robbed of his birthright. That whole subplot, a perfect excuse to give Flynn a larger role in the film, is completely removed in favour of a longer build-up to the moment when the two boys fatefully switch places and in favour of spending more time on the machinations of the Earl of Hertford (Rains) who, unlike in the novel, provides an overtly villainous character. It's always a pleasure seeing Rains, though, and he doesn't play him as a man devoted to evil. When the false King asks him for some real advice as Lord Protector, Hertford sits down and lends his ear.

The Captain of the Guard is also built up into a more villainous role, which makes it somewhat perplexing that he's played by Alan Hale. He's written as conflicted, too, and I certainly didn't hate this good natured fellow even as he was ready to stab England's rightful king. This could be an interesting bit of nuance, I suppose.

Hendon's plot is excised in order to spend more time with the boys but the pauper's mother is removed from the story, thereby removing a huge part of his psychological motivation in the last part of the book. Was it deemed too shocking? I'm not sure it really falls under anything forbidden by the Hays Code. There's a longer sequence with Father Andrew (Fritz Leiber) that feels a bit Hays-ish. Certainly the book's allusions to Henry VIII's appropriation of properties formally belonging to the Catholic church present a lot of potential for the Catholic interests behind the Code. Father Andrew, who's already a sad case in the novel, is built up into a saintly figure who consoles the pauper, Tom.

But the sets look fantastic and Flynn looks smashing in costume. More than anything, the film presents a wonderful atmosphere and I'd be happy to roam this 16th century London. It would've been nice if they'd included the wonderful sequence on London Bridge, though. I love the digression with which Twain introduces it;

Our friends threaded their way slowly through the throngs upon the bridge. This structure, which had stood for six hundred years, and had been a noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was a curious affair, for a closely packed rank of stores and shops, with family quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it, from one bank of the river to the other. The Bridge was a sort of town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets, its manufacturing industries, and even its church. It looked upon the two neighbours which it linked together—London and Southwark—as being well enough as suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important. It was a close corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them—and all their little family affairs into the bargain. It had its aristocracy, of course—its fine old families of butchers, and bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for five or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way. It was just the sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited. Children were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old age, and finally died without ever having set a foot upon any part of the world but London Bridge alone. Such people would naturally imagine that the mighty and interminable procession which moved through its street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and its muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in this world, and themselves somehow the proprietors of it. And so they were, in effect—at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and did—for a consideration—whenever a returning king or hero gave it a fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching columns.

Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull and inane elsewhere. History tells of one of these who left the Bridge at the age of seventy-one and retired to the country. But he could only fret and toss in his bed; he could not go to sleep, the deep stillness was so painful, so awful, so oppressive. When he was worn out with it, at last, he fled back to his old home, a lean and haggard spectre, and fell peacefully to rest and pleasant dreams under the lulling music of the lashing waters and the boom and crash and thunder of London Bridge.

In the times of which we are writing, the Bridge furnished ‘object lessons’ in English history for its children—namely, the livid and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes atop of its gateways. But we digress.

Evidence of Having Seen Movies

In 1981 Brian De Palma released his cocktail of Hitchcock and Antonioni to unenthusiastic audiences, a movie called Blow Out. Taking the basic premise from Antonioni's Blowup and throwing in quite a few Hitchcock references, particularly to Vertigo, De Palma never reaches the heights of his influences, in craft or storytelling depth, but stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen are charming and there's something entrancing about the film's broad cheesiness.

The best example of which is Dennis Franz as someone cut right of a pulp comic; a fleshy guy named Manny Karp in a food stained wife-beater drinking J&B from the bottle in a hotel room bathed in red light. Gavin Elster he ain't. But the scene, where he and Nancy Allen's character, Sally, talk about their scheme to frame a politician is a clear reworking of a few scenes in Vertigo. De Palma switches the green light from an outside sign to red as Truffaut did in his own Vertigo homage, Mississippi Mermaid, and it's in the hotel room we learn that the female lead has been misleading the male protagonist.

And as with Scottie and Elster, there's a connexion between Jack (Travolta) and Manny; they're both in the film industry and both seek to control and take responsibility for the female lead. There's no line about how saving someone's life makes you responsible for them but Jack does believe he saves Sally from drowning. But unlike in Vertigo, Sally isn't secretly in control of this moment and generally she's a much simpler character than Judy/Madeleine (or Catherine Deneuve's character in Mississipi Mermaid). Sally just seems like a sweet hustler who got mixed up in all this. We don't really get scenes from her perspective as we do with Judy so there's none of the emotional high stakes act of manipulation, part of what makes the last third of Vertigo so captivating.

The plot about a politician being assassinated is essentially just mechanics here, business, and lacks the deeper commentary on how art and public deception are related that we see in Blowup.

What is intriguing is De Palma's interest in showing how multiple stories occur simultaneously and the tension inherent in the potential for any two stories to connect with explosive consequences. Even the exploitation movie we see Jack working on at the beginning of the film is a nice collage of occurrences with the killer's POV outside the sorority, seeing the girls aimlessly partying in one room, and another girl frustrated in her attempts to study in another. Each of these three partially quarantined environments are separated as much by lighting as by physical barriers, creating the sense of different, isolated universes.

The fact that this film is a story within a story adds another layer and this storytelling technique is carried on throughout the film and we can see it in how Jack's impression of a story through sound eventually must be connected through Manny's story through imagery.

Like Scottie in Vertigo, Jack has a memory from his past working with the police in which something he did led to a cop's death, in this case his passion for sound design. He gets his second chance when he endeavours to save Sally with the use of a wire microphone she's wearing but this all lacks the psychological implications of Scottie's fear of heights. It becomes more of an interesting ode to film than a film with a story to tell in its own right.

The Perils of Fancy Footwork

Sometimes, no matter how much you dance, people still think you're a pirate. Even the title of 1936's Dancing Pirate implies he's a pirate. But Jonathan, the film's protagonist, is really a dancing instructor who was pressed against his will into service on a pirate ship, but no-one in the little Spanish Californian town listens. It doesn't help matters when he scandalously touches women's sides when teaching them to waltz in this, the first colour full length musical film. It's a lot of fun.

Charles Collins plays Jonathan. He's no Fred Astaire but he's not bad--certainly built much more like a dancer than the menacing brutes who force him to perform menial tasks on the pirate ship. He manages to slip away and get to the town the pirates plan to attack. But the pirates are spooked and leave so poor Jonathan is mistaken for the entire invasion force, and he looks especially guilty when he tries to hide in the bedchamber of the Alcalde's daughter, the lovely Serafina, played by Steffi Duna.

Collins is okay, a sweet, hapless chap, but Duna is great. Jonathan gets in trouble for trying to introduce polite ladies to the waltz in this tale set seemingly in the early 19th century but, as shocked as Serafina is by it initially, I think her own flamenco dancing looks a lot more provocative.

She threatens to kill herself before Jonathan can assault her but, conscious of the misunderstanding, Jonathan warns her, "If you kill yourself now, you'll regret it!"

But most of the film's laughs come from her father, the Alcalde, is played by Frank Morgan, best known to-day as the Wizard of Oz. He prepares for the incoming pirate attack by irritably extracting kittens from a cannon.

The songs are pretty good, by Rogers and Hart, and the story, which mainly consists of Jonathan being put in and out of jail while he and a dastardly Captain of the Guards (Victor Varconi) compete for the hand of Serafina, has just the right levels of silliness and ardour. There's a surprisingly strange and effective fight scene at the end, too. Dancing Pirate is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1181

The wind arrays the pennants long the day.
As courses listed knights began to dress.
A plate of shirt is lost in metal hay.
The hinges rust before the sweating press.
The dial swept a shadow grass aside.
Beneath the keep a ragged treasure kept.
Through secret ways the golden scales reside.
A slender smoke betokened where it slept.
An arrow buried early grew a bow.
The night prepares a bower high and cool.
Collective gleams'll make the garment glow.
The satin ripples subtle milk to pool.
Mistakes convey a baker riding horse.
A lance denied determined dough the source.

Nice Place for a Mirror Universe

Wow. Okay, to-day's new Doctor Who, you've succeeded in making me want to visit Norway. Just look at that. Though I was disappointed when they missed a very obvious joke when the Doctor said, "Three locks on a deserted house in the middle of nowhere." Someone, maybe Michael Palin or Terry Jones, should've said, "No, no, no. The middle of Norway." I mostly enjoyed "It Takes You Away", it felt at times like a classic series episode, all the business in the cave kind of reminded me of the asteroid caves in The Armageddon Factor. But this was yet another episode that showed most proper Doctor Who stories require no less than 80 minutes. Some bizarre plot expedients through dialogue derailed the last third of the episode in the interest of reaching a conclusion in time but there were still plenty of nice things leading up to the end.

Spoilers after the screenshot.

The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and her trio of increasingly disappointing companions investigate the mystery of a seemingly abandoned cabin in the middle of Norway. But inside, hiding like Newt in Aliens, is a blind girl (Eleanor Wallwork) who warns them of a creature outside that "takes you away".

This all ends up being a red herring. Her missing father, Erick (Christian Rubeck), is safe and sound Through the Looking Glass, literally, in a mirror dimension. The show really needed to make an explicit Alice in Wonderland reference. The Fourth Doctor would've. I think the recent Disney movies have diminished the cool factor of Alice for a lot of people. If Disney can leave the property alone for about 20 years maybe it'll get some of its mystique back. But I'm digressing.

I loved the idea of a buffer dimension and I loved the Nosferatu looking alien, Ribbons (Christian Rubeck), and the flesh eating moths. Though why the Doctor and Ryan (Tosin Cole) assumed the big glowing red orb was just a lantern I have no idea. The caves were also too well lit to make a lantern seem as necessary as the Doctor and Ryan seemed to believe.

I'm not usually a fan of plots where characters encounter dead loved ones apparently resurrected and have to sort their feelings out but this one didn't bother me so much for some reason. But it annoy me there was a cut after the Doctor told Graham (Bradley Walsh) he needed to walk away from the fake Grace. We needed to see him make the decision to follow the Doctor upstairs to the mirror.

The talking frog was a nice touch, also very Alice-y. I wonder why the Doctor seemed so genuine in wanting to be friends with it after it tried to entrap her other friends. I guess the lure of an entire universe for a friend was too strong.

I liked this episode which was written by playwright Ed Hime. Next week it's back to Chris Chibnall. May God have mercy on us all.

The Running, Problem Solving Dead

Zombies are bad but at least they're slow and they can't operate machinery. Unless you're talking about 1980's Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata). These walking dead are different from the living only in that they don't speak, many are covered with grotesque sores, and they have a violent, insatiable appetite for human flesh. Especially women's breasts, for some inexplicable reason. For the most part, it's an effective tale, certainly one relevant to modern times, when a faction of humans may suddenly commit terrible violence for reasons that never really become clear.

One character, a doctor named Anna (Laura Trotter), reflects on the folly of warlike humanity utilising nuclear power, apparently because the zombies got their initial infection from a radioactive spill. But this is a tenuous moral at best. The effective point of the film is the pointlessness. Anna's husband, Dean (Hugo Stiglitz), the film's most central protagonist, is a journalist who's present at the first sight of these creatures. An unmarked military plane lands and someone Dean recognises as a professor steps out, looking perfectly normal if weirdly silent, before suddenly and without any warning he attacks one of the military officers who's come to greet him.

More zombies pile off the plane, some of them with uzis which they fire with aim and discrimination. These things can think. Later in the film, one of them even operates a manual elevator crank to access a group of civilians caught in the elevator.

This is an Italian film--I watched the English dubbed version available on Amazon Prime. Of course, like a lot of Italian genre films from 60s, 70s, and 80s, clearly not all the actors were speaking the same language, and one guy who's clearly speaking English is none other than Mel Ferrer. He turns up in this movie as head of the military, General Murchison, of whatever country this is supposed to be.

He's in charge of trying to put down the menace that quickly spreads through the city but in a recurring theme of mindless censorship the government doesn't allow him to declare a state of emergency or inform the populace of the true nature of the threat. Earlier, Dean's attempt to report the zombie attack in a special news bulletin is interrupted for some kind of gymnastics dance show.

It seems to be five or six people in formation doing some unremarkable routine. Who watches this? Those people in wherever this is sure are easily entertained.

There are some surprisingly dreamlike elements to the film which may actually make sense of the ambiguous location. One of Murchison's subordinates (Francisco Rabal) is married to a sculptor named Sheila (Maria Rosaria Omaggio) who has begun sculpting a weird, disfigured head before the zombie attack that seems to presage the incoming horror.

Some of the characters do the usual foolish horror movie things, like Murchison's daughter and son-in-law who blow off the old man when he begs them to come to army headquarters, preferring to go camping instead. You can imagine how that goes--mainly, though, the violence feels arbitrary, and certainly anyone who gets eaten alive doesn't seem like they deserve such severe punishment. A lot of horror movies use the word "Nightmare" but it turns out to be especially fitting here.