Whew, I’m finally finished. Getting laid low with Covid was one thing, but after the monthly deadline passed, I found it difficult to get motivated in finishing up this post. Plus, I still have my Recommendations of 2023 and Women of the Year posts to make, and I’ve no idea how long they’re going to take me.
It’s a little strange looking over this log and seeing it divided into what I watched before, during and after Covid. More than that, there are some crazy coincidences in what this material contains, including a. a small, almost throwaway, scene in which a person of colour deals with a passive-aggressive comment on where they were born (Doctor Who and Dial of Destiny), a skeleton that is animated by sentient bandages/rags (Zita the Space Girl and an episode of Legend of the Seeker), two social climbing women (The Crown and Dangerous Liaisons) and actors who looks like Eddie Redmayne, who are not actually Eddie Redmayne.
So here it is, better late than never.
Zita the Space Girl, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl and The Return of Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke
It feels like I’ve had these books on hold at the library for months, and then I had to wait until they all came through so I could read them in the right order, but my turn finally came.
Zita is hanging out with her friend Joseph in the field behind their houses when something falls from the sky, leaving a massive crater in the earth. There Zita finds a big red button, which she presses immediately. That’s the sort of girl she is. A portal opens in the crater, and large purple tentacles emerge to drag Joseph away. Zita runs in terror, stops to think for a bit, hesitates, and then turns out to follow her friend through the portal.
She ends up in an alien marketplace, only to see Joseph being taken aboard a ship and flown into space. But in order to follow him, she needs to make some money to charter a vessel.
This is essentially Zita in a nutshell: a girl who will make trouble for others, and then try her darndest to get them out of it again. As she scrambles to make things right with Joseph, she ends up acquiring an eclectic group of allies: a giant mouse, an overzealous war-ball, a cowardly robot, and an untrustworthy pied piper. As one of them will eventually tell her: “you inspire loyalty.”
This comes in handy in the sequel, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl. Now overwhelmed by her fame after her heroic exploits in the previous book, Zita leaps at the opportunity for a lookalike robot to take her place in front of the adoring crowds of alien life-forms that have flocked to see her.
But when aliens known as the Lumponians enlist Zita’s help against a swarm of star hearts (which looks like something out of a demonic Care Bears episode) she’s delighted to hear that they’ll pay for her services with a jump crystal – the very thing she needs to get home. That’s the robot’s cue to push her out the ship airlock and whizz off to save the day without her. Unfortunately the resemblance between them is so great (this brand of AI is known as an Imprint-O-Robot) that no one realizes it’s not the real Zita.
Making things more difficult is that there’s a warrant out for her arrest over some phoney charges, and it’s only by falling in with a travelling space-circus (lead by a gypsy-like woman called Madrigal who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author’s wife as depicted at the back of the book) that Zita has a chance of catching up with her friends and reclaiming her identity.
The Return of Zita sees our heroine out on her own in the vast reaches of space, though her freedom doesn’t last long thanks to the relentless pursuit of the space cops. A mysterious masked and cloaked figure tries to rescue her from the prison she finds herself detained in – though along the way she makes friends with a talking skeleton and sentient rag-pile in her cell, searches for a jump crystal in the prison mines, and crosses wits with an entity called the Dungeon Master, who has designs on planet Earth.
When read consecutively, all the disparate plot-points in each book end up clicking together really well, from the giant clay man that orbits a planet, to that big red button which started this whole adventure.
There’s even an interesting bait-and-switch when it comes to Joseph’s return. He hasn’t had as good a time of it as Zita has, and after his traumatic experiences as a slave, wanting to use the crystal to return home instead of using it as bait to defeat the Dungeon Master, and dismissively being told “don’t be a wuss” by Zita, I was certainly left wondering whether he would turn on her. Honestly, I don’t think I could have fully blamed him.
If I have one complaint about this trilogy, it’s that the intergalactic planets visited by Zita aren’t very appealing. Places called The Tatters and The Rusted Wastes are rendered in a palette of murky browns and greys. Zita visits desolate wastelands, garbage heaps, grimy slums, a prison complex – and that’s about it. Likewise, most of the alien designs are either shapeless blobs or muppets (seriously, one of them is a dead-ringer for Crazy Harry, that muppet who keeps blowing stuff up, down to the fact that he only ever appears coming out of a drainpipe, as though someone’s hand is hidden there).
Surely visiting other worlds is an excuse for colour and wonder and beauty. Here, the universe is kind of a shithole. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the beauty of other children’s graphic novels when it comes to the artwork on display.
Mighty Jack, Mighty Jack and the Goblin King and Mighty Jack and Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke
A follow-up to Zita the Space Girl (in that she and Jack meet up at the end of the second book, and join forces in the third), Jack himself feels like a mash-up of Jack the Giant Killer and Mighty Max. The fairy tale connotations are apt, as this series has already featured a character called the Piper and a gnome-like creature called Stiltskin.
Along with his single mother and autistic sister Maddy, Jack has moved from the city to the country, and isn’t too pleased with the change – not even when he spots the girl-next-door, who appears to be practicing her sword-fighting.
His mother is struggling to make ends meet, but readers might recognize a familiar face at the local farmer’s market: it’s the Piper, who trades Jack some seed packets in exchange for the use of the family car. Yes, we’re definitely in fairy tale territory with this one.
The usually diffident Maddy is highly interested in the garden that Jack sows with the mysterious contents of the seed packets, and it’s not long before their neighbour Lilly comes over to introduce herself. But soon the plants that spring out of Jack’s garden take on a life of their own: throwing clods of mud at the house, terrorizing the wildlife and growing increasingly out of control.
Jack makes the call to destroy it all, even in the face of Lilly’s assertion that just because something is dangerous, doesn’t make it evil. Did he do the right thing? Did Lilly when she stole some plant cuttings to cultivate her own garden? The story deliberately leaves it ambiguous, and ends with Maddy being dragged off by a garden monster... rather like Joseph was at the beginning of Zita the Space Girl.
Oh, but there’s a dragon this time.
After that cliff-hanger ending, Mighty Jack and the Goblin King follows up with Jack and Lilly following Maddy and her kidnapper into another realm to rescue her, armed only with Renaissance Fair swords and a collection of seeds that temporarily bestow a variety of abilities on those that eat them.
The story veers more into science-fiction than fairy tale at this point (our heroes are essentially exploring an alien planet) though there are a vast array of goblins straight out of one of the Andrew Lang fairy books, with their own distinct syntax: “a bean” is a human, “pause it” is stop, and “got feist” means that Lilly is feisty... gah, I knew there was a reason I didn’t like her.
(Seriously, this character is rather obnoxious, extremely dishonest and deceptive, and as soon as Zita shows up, pettily jealous. Sigh).
The story branches into two subplots at this point, with Lilly fighting off a forced engagement to a troll, and Jack attempting to save his sister from giants. If you squint, you can see the broad strokes of Jack and the Beanstalk. It all ends with a return from the Piper and an appearance from none other than Zita herself, leading us into...
Mighty Jack and Zita the Space Girl, which is a fully-fledged crossover that features pretty much every character from both trilogies. Using Jack’s house as homebase and forcing his poor mother to deal with the burden of food and finances, our collection of heroes plan their move against an alliance of giants and Screed (aliens that worked for the Dungeon Master in Zita’s trilogy) who are attempting to reach earth and plunder its resources through the use of interdimensional doors.
As Piper and Madrigal are chased by agents after they raid Area 51 for a jump crystal, Jack, Zita, Joseph, Lilly and Maddy head through one of the doors in search of the elves in Aelfheim, only to be separated into smaller and smaller groups with each obstacle they face. Some nice threads are picked up from prior books – from the seed Lilly stole to continue seeing her goblin subjects, to a range of small character and location cameos.
On the whole, I actually think I enjoyed Mighty Jack more than Zita the Space Girl, though it’s a close call (and let’s be honest, it’s basically the same story by the end). There are some problems along the way: characters like Strong Strong and Mouse aren’t given anything to do in the final book, and the climactic final fight is just the heroes posing bravely and facing down the giant threat. No actual fighting takes place.
There’s also the odd addition of a buried Confederate treasure (which is found accidentally and without any build-up beyond the throwaway line that introduces the concept at the start of the book) and the irritation of enjoying some colour and open skies in the artwork, right before the characters end up in a sewage system. Perhaps making the settings overwhelmingly dingy and grotty was a deliberate creative choice, but I can’t imagine why.
The Night Eaters: Her Little Reapers by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Surprisingly, I retained pretty clear memories of the first book in this graphic novel trilogy*, which is noteworthy considering I usually find it difficult to remember the details of long-form media that makes you wait years between instalments. I certainly recall more than Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s other collaboration, Monstress, which surely must be wrapping up soon if they’re taking on other projects. Liu also penned Wingbearer earlier this year, though that was illustrated by Teny Issakhanian.
I’m digressing. Her Little Reapers is the follow-up to She Eats the Night, featuring Asian-American twins Milly and Billy Ting. To summarize as succinctly as possible, their parents are demons and the previous book explored how they discovered this alarming fact while strange supernatural occurrences kicked off in the abandoned house across the street.
The twins were busy trying to keep their takeaway food joint afloat during the height of the Covid pandemic (which one day will make this an interesting period piece of a very specific time) but now cannot ignore the terrifying new reality that’s opened up before them, especially when it comes to their own potential for harnessing mystical power.
As their parents Ipo and Keon begin to investigate the strange goings-on that stem from the house across the road (essentially a woman was murdered there as part of a cultic ritual sacrifice) the twins grapple with the awakening of their own abilities – and one is handling it much better than the other.
Billy is convinced that the pair of them are superheroes now, and filters their experiences through a pop-culture lens, vlogging their adventures and throwing out references on a regular basis (something that would usually annoy me, but it works here). Some highlights: screaming “I’m Wolverine!” when he discovers he has healing capabilities, leading him to text his uncle who then announces: “your son texted me that they’re flying to LA and that his sister has Patty Hearsted him and that they are Wolverine,” and in a conversation with his sister, asking “Patrick Swayze pottery wheel nice?” when she admits the “niceness” of another character. He’s a lot of fun.
Also, Ipo. Ipo! She’s such a great character: expressionless, emotionless, never without a cigarette in her mouth or hand. She’s clearly a send-up of the Tiger Mum stereotype, the explanation being that she’s a demon.
It’s one hundred percent because I just finished a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast (and kicked off a rewatch) but this reminded me so much of that show: a supernatural realm brewing beneath the surface of the mundane world, teenagers testing their preternatural powers, strange things happening beyond the periphery of normal life, gleaning information from odd creatures in strange places. My favourite Buffy scenes were always when they got weird information from equally weird people.
You can also expect the appearance of a malevolent little doll that seems to want to communicate something, an eyeless spirit who claims the twins can help her (and is connected to the murder of several young Asian people in the opening pages), some cool world-building in which terms like “scales” and “wings” are dropped to describe certain groups with no other context, and many panels of extreme violence.
The artwork is discernibly Sana Takeda’s work, but purposefully a little rougher and less detailed than that in Monstress. It almost looks a little like anime at certain points, which I’m sure can’t be an accident.
Now it’s just another long wait until the next book in the series, though at least I’ve got the latest Monstress to tide me over until then.
* At least I think it’ll be a trilogy; there’s at least one more book on the way.
The Babysitters Island Adventure by Anne M. Martin
It’s hilarious to realize how quickly the Super Specials jumped the shark. We’re four in and we’re already dealing with babysitters stranded on a deserted island (with kids of course, because they can never have a break from child-care).
Dawn is the framing narrator this time around, divulging that Stoneybrook has been a coastal town this whole time! Who knew? She and Claudia have been learning to sail, and decide to have a race out to Greenpoint Island.
For some reason they decide to take children with them: Haley and Becca because they’re eager to step out of the shadows of their siblings, Jeff because he’s visiting from California, and Jaime Newton, a four-year-old, because... who the heck knows.
Before they head out, a situation arises between Dawn, Mary Anne and Logan. Basically, Logan calls the Schafer/Spier residence and leaves a message with Dawn: that he’s not going to be able to make his date with Mary Anne. But because Dawn is busy preparing for the race, she forgets to tell Mary Anne, who comes back furious that she’s been stood up. She calls Logan to yell at him, learns that he left a message with Dawn, and then starts yelling at Dawn because Logan is now mad at her for blowing up at him. I mean, that one’s on you, Mary Anne.
The stepsisters are on the outs, and despite being repeatedly told that Mary Anne is the shy, sensitive, empathetic one, she tells Dawn: “I wish I never had to see you again. I wish you would get out of my life forever.” Over a misunderstanding with her boyfriend that's mostly her fault. Man, I’m genuinely starting to hate this character.
While they’re on the water a storm blows up, and after Dawn’s boat begins to sink, she and the children in her care jump overboard and swim for Claudia’s boat before they drift too far away from each other. The ghost writer has no interest in how truly terrifying this scenario is, and they make it without any serious problems beyond the fact that Claudia’s boat is now at full capacity.
They spot land and head towards it, leading us into the “survival on a deserted island” part of the story. Amusingly, the book has already namedropped titles such as Carol Ryrie Brink’s Baby Island and Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, just to let us know what we’re in for. Jeff proves himself to be quite useful in the search for food and shelter, and Claudia keeps coming up with clever ideas to secure water and build distress signals.
That leaves Dawn to take care of a sick Jamie and demonstrate some fairly questionable babysitting, such as letting Becca and Haley go off on their own to search for coconuts even though she knows that they don’t grow off the coast of Connecticut, and describing Haley’s panic attack as a “temper tantrum” after their boat is swept out to sea because they didn’t drag it up the beach high enough. Dawn just leaves her by herself to calm down, even though she’s clearly having a panic-induced meltdown at the thought of never getting home.
Back on the mainland, Mary Anne is naturally choked with guilt over her final words to Dawn (karma is a bitch), while Kristy equivocates over whether or not to cancel the Krushers’ upcoming match against the Bashers. The answer is obviously yes, since two teammates and a cheerleader are currently lost at sea, but Bart decides to be a dick about it and accuses Kristy of exaggerating in order to avoid playing his team, even though the incident has been all over the news.
Man, this book is filled with main characters acting like jerks for no reason. Here’s another example: when the search party finds the remains of Dawn’s boat, Stacey starts to cry and Jordan Pike is described as “giving his father a look that plainly said: girls.” Yeah, weeping because your friends are probably dead – girls, amirite?
The babysitters and their charges are eventually saved of course, though it happens in the most anti-climatic way possible (the narrative isn’t even with them when they’re discovered; the characters on the mainland learn that the search party has spotted them and then we see the rescue from Dawn’s point of view). Still, there are plenty of funny moments that seem to wink at the sheer insanity of this plot, from family members and friends being hassled by reporters at the docks with “how do you feel?” questions (they eventually start snapping: “how do you THINK we feel?!”), to the kids on the island spotting the rescue plane and immediately believing that it’s Batman come to save them, to Claudia unthinkingly using male pronouns when promising that a doctor is on the way, only for Haley to point out that said doctor might be a “she.” The kicker? When the doctor arrives, she IS a she.
All’s well that ends well, and the whole thing even makes the front page of the newspaper. (Mary Anne: “do they quote me anywhere? Where’s my picture?” I HATE HER).
The Bright and the Pale and Wrath and Mercy by Jessica Rubinkowski
Everybody wants to be first to do something second. Sure, that might sound overly-critical in regards to the pile of Slavic Fantasy books I’ve been making way through for the entirety of last year (obviously stories that fall under the same basic umbrella are going to be remarkably similar in content and tone) but it’s hard not to fell a little exasperated with this one.
Naturally Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books (the first one published in 2012) cast a heavy shadow over everything that has melded the myths and legends of Slavic folklore with YA fantasy since (especially in the YA genre) but you can draw some very straight lines between what features in The Bright and the Pale and the author’s inspirations: the heist from Six of Crows, the wildlings from Game of Thrones, the assassins guild from Throne of Glass – it even has “The Thing and Thing” title, though this time it’s adjectives instead of nouns.
Valeria is the sole survivor of a magical freeze that obliterated her entire community when she was only a child, and since then she’s worked in a thieves/assassins’ guild under the protection of guild leader Luiza, who has trained her in the arts of... well, thievery and assassination. Still grieving the loss of her only friend Alik a year ago, Valeria’s simple assignment to steal a religious artefact culminates in her learning that Alik not only survived his injuries but that a reunion is imminent – if she helps a mysterious man on a secret mission.
To see Alik again, she must team up with an assortment of warriors, thieves, criminals and soldiers (most of whom come across as extremely untrustworthy) to return to her hometown of Ludminka and enter the long-abandoned mines in search of lovite deposits – a precious ore that is the strongest known mineral in the world, and a valuable resource in the coming war against the tyrannical tsar.
The title refers to the two Brother Gods that govern this world: the bright one being the god of light and life, while the pale is that of death and destruction. Yet they’re not analogous to good and evil, rather two deities that have been waging war against one another since time began, one representative of summer and daylight and growth, the other of disease and rot and entropy (which may not sound very nice, but are important components of life).
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I found this mythology the most interesting part of the book, and when Valeria becomes the Pale God’s champion, imbued with his godly powers, she becomes increasingly unstable when it comes to overthrowing the tsar and winning the independence of her country. You know how this story goes: it revolves around the immortal question of “is it worth it?” when it comes to matters of war and noble causes and moral compromises.
There’s nothing truly wrong with this duology beyond the fact it reads like a checklist of YA’s favourite fantasy tropes: love triangles, uncomplicated revolution, spunky teenage Chosen One, a token non-white friend, a background Sapphic romance... The author casually mentions in her afterword that she’s been writing this story since she was fourteen, but whether that’s true or not, the similarities to other books are pronounced, as is YA’s general formula at this point.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
This was absolutely NOT what I was expecting. Having seen this book mentioned as an inspiration for Indiana Jones in the behind-the-scenes book on the making of the franchise, I was under the impression that this would be a fairly light adventure story. Hah! Instead, it’s an incredibly grim tale about gold lust that culminates in the death of the main character, who has already attempted to murder his friend in order to stake his claim.
I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it (especially since I had Covid at the time) but I certainly might have appreciated it more if I’d known what tone it struck. Humphrey Bogart plays Fred Dobbs, a down-on-his-luck drifter who is cheated out of his wages by a labour contractor. Along with his fellow worker Bob Curtain, Dobbs meets an old miner called Howard who spins a few stories about gold prospecting, and when he comes into a flush of lottery money, the three of them set their sights on the Sierra Madre mountains.
That’s when the plot really gets cracking. The three men are forced to grapple with harsh conditions, roaming bandits, and the arrival of another prospector who demands to be allowed to join them – but their real adversary is the growing gold-lust within each of them, and the suspicions that are roused when it comes to protecting their cuts. In what (I think it’s safe to assume) is the film’s most famous line, Bogart cries: “Conscience. What a thing! If you believe you got a conscience, it'll pester you to death. But if you don't believe you got one, what could it do to ya?”
The film is ultimately about the answer to that rhetorical question. Dobbs sinks further into paranoia and violence, and by the end there’s almost a Shakespearean air to the proceedings (well, if filtered very heavily through an American lens – by that I mean events turn on external irony as opposed to fatal flaws). I don’t regret watching it, as it’s obviously a classic for a reason, but yeah – not really something I enjoyed.
Psycho (1960)
This is not a movie you watch, but study. It’s also not the most Christmassy film for the season, but I listened to a podcast on it on the way to work and was naturally seized by the desire to watch it. And it does technically take place at Christmas!
This is a movie in two halves, which turns on two very important conversations. The first half is the story of Marion Crane, a woman so desperate to marry her divorced, debt-ridden boyfriend that she impulsively steals $40,000 from her place of work and goes on the run. It goes wrong almost immediately, from her boss spotting her driving out of town, to a cop finding her sleeping in her car, to her fatal decision to stop for the night in a little out-of-the-way motel.
What struck me on this viewing was how overwhelmed Marion is made to feel by the men around her: the oppressive customer who flirts with her, the cop that clearly tries to intimidate her, the boss that condescends to her – perhaps the only completely benevolent male figure in the first-half of the story is the used car salesman, and no one trusts a used car salesman. No woman can look at this shot and not feel uneasy:
Perhaps the tragic irony of the film is that the one man Marion choses to lower her guard around is the one that poses the greatest threat to her life. (Though it’s also ironic that the cop tells her sleeping on the side of the road is dangerous; she should check into a motel).
Marion has dinner with the proprietor of the hotel, one Norman Bates, a rather nervy but seemingly good-natured young man who asks to have dinner with her. A conversation takes place over sandwiches, in which both learn a little bit about the other, and the film’s other great irony takes place – Norman’s words inspire Marion to fess up to what she’s done and head back to Phoenix.
But it’s not to be. Marion gets into the shower and is stabbed to death by what appears to be Norman’s deranged elderly mother. It’s at this point the entire focus of the film switches to Norman, and we’re witness to the methodical clean-up of the hotel room and the disposal of Marion’s body in a nearby swamp, wrapped in a shower curtain and stuffed into the boot of her car. Why is it that we breathe a sign of relief when the car sinks out of sight beneath the water? Why are we rooting for the success of Norman’s cover up?
From there, Marion’s sister Lila and her boyfriend Sam get involved, attempting to follow the leads of the private investigator that Marion’s employer hired in order to quietly retrieve the money – but of course, nothing is ever that simple.
So much ink has already been spilled on this film that there seems little I can add to it, though on this viewing I was deeply interested in the portrayal of Marion. She’s obviously committed a crime (insofar as stealing from a bloviating rich guy who keeps waving his money around can be considered a “crime”) which suggests the audience should dislike her, though the film has gone out of its way to give her understandable motivation for her actions.
(Another observation: this film could only take place in the 1950/60s. Would anyone these days care if a woman was in a relationship with a divorced man? More than Norman himself, Marion is killed by conservatism).
I guess my question is: is Marion’s murder meant to be punishment for what she did? You can’t deny her crime is the reason she’s in that hotel room in the first place, and the film makes it clear the money is what led her to this fate: the camera pulls out from the closeup of her eyeball and in a single shot moves out of the bathroom to where the money is hidden, concealed in a folded newspaper on the bedside cabinet.
And yet, Hitchcock has also gone to great pains to make us relate to her. Thanks to her conversation with Norman, we know she’s decided to face the music and return the money, with the shower scene staged as some sort of baptism in which her “sins” are washed away (well, before Mrs Bates turns up, at least). She dies in a symbolic state of grace, even if the audience is the only witness to that fact.
To me, the story is less about whether Marion deserved this fate or not, but a depiction of the hideous randomness of death. As is pointed out frequently by the subsequent investigators into her disappearance, the money is ultimately irrelevant in her murder. Like many victims, she was out there just living her life when she crossed paths with the wrong man.
That’s the true power of this film: it perfectly captures the randomness of horror in the world, something Hitchcock understood when he changed the rules of the movie-going experience by insisting that audiences had to watch the film from start to finish, with no admission given to latecomers. Marion doesn’t know she’s in a horror film – more importantly, neither does the audience. We spend so much time with her, we’re fully invested in her story, and then boom. It’s over. She was in someone else’s story the whole time.
There are also plenty of little details that I came to appreciate this time around: the matching smirks on Marion and Norman’s faces at different points, when they realize they’re going to get away with their crimes. The elegant exposition that sets up Marion’s predicament within the context of natural-sounding conversations (this is a lost art these days). Moments like Marion’s unthinking wave at her boss at the crossing, or Sam commenting that the shower curtain is missing, or Norman silently noticing the holes in Marion’s story.
I particularly liked all the subtle puzzle pieces that that the film scatters throughout, leaving the audience to ponder the implications: that there were two more women who went missing in the vicinity of Bates Motel, that Mrs Bates’s boyfriend was a married man, the hushed ways in which people reference his death, and Norman’s adverse reaction to Marion’s suggestion that his mother go to a “madhouse” – they all provide food for thought about what’s being going on in Norman’s life up until this point. Sometimes not knowing everything is part of the viewing (or reading) experience.
But perhaps for that reason, people can’t help but come back to this story, wanting more. We ended up with three sequels, a shot-by-shot remake, and a prequel television show – all of varying quality, but which don’t do the original justice by a long shot. I wonder if that’s just human nature: to want more of something we enjoyed, even when it dilutes the magic and thrill and mystery of the original. To have more of the same instead of moving onto new things. I’m not sure we’ll ever escape that impulse.
Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Earlier in the month I watched the Starz prequel to Dangerous Liaisons (see below), and naturally had to follow up with the famous 1988 film. This is probably the most well-known adaptation of the 1782 French novel, even though it’s apparently based on the 1985 stage play by Christopher Hampton. It has a stacked cast (Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfieffer, Uma Thurman, baby Keanu Reeves – even Peter Capaldi!) and gorgeous production values, the irony being that the beauty of its locations, costumes and interiors deliberately make for a striking contrast to the sordid, viperous, deeply unpleasant events that take place.
Close and Malkovich are the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, two character types that – if they were updated into a modern setting – would almost certainly be a Queen Bee and her Gay Best Friend. Or at least they would if not for the fact that Valmont’s heterosexuality is a reasonably big plot-point. Merteuil wants revenge against her ex-lover, who has called off the affair due to his impending engagement to another woman: Cécile de Volanges.
Cécile is young and naïve, and that she’s spent most of her life in the shelter of a convent renders her a lamb to the slaughter in the hands of these two schemers. Merteuil’s request is that Valmont seduce Cécile in order to humiliate her former lover, who believes his bride-to-be is as pure as the driven snow.
But Valmont has his own project in the works: a desire to seduce Madame de Tourvel, a godly and virtuous married woman who is currently staying with Valmont’s aunt. Still, he agrees to Merteuil’s request when she offers herself as a reward for bringing him written proof of his affair with Tourvel.
And so the game is on, with both Merteuil and Valmont wrapping their tentacles around these two women and the people around them in order to achieve their entirely selfish, cruel, meaningless goals.
Valmont decides to approach Madame de Tourvel not by presenting himself as a good man or even a reformed rake, but as a terrible human being who is being inspired to better himself, entirely against his will, by her goodness and virtue. It’s a tactic that works, not just because Tourvel is intrigued by him, but by the effect she’s supposedly having on him. That’s the key component of any bad boy/good girl romance – in many ways it’s less about the boy, and more about the power that the girl wields over him; an appeal to her vanity that’s hard to resist.
At this stage all the guy has to do is plant within her head the belief that she’s tormenting him, and that potent mix of vanity and charity (as well as the societal expectations that have been instilled in her to always be cooperative) will make her feel obligated to relieve that suffering. Tourvel tries her best to resist, but Valmont plays her like a fiddle.
Then of course the second part of this very specific narrative rears its ugly head: he starts to genuinely fall for her. Naturally, Dangerous Liaisons plays out this drama much more scathingly than your average YA novel or paperback Mills & Boon, and the course is set for tragedy. There is no happy ending for the star-crossed couple.
I recall that even the end of Cruel Intentions has its Tourvel/Valmont surrogates reconcile before the latter dies, with the former assured of his genuine love for her – but there’s no such closure here. Valmont dies in a pointless duel, and despite hearing his final message to her, Tourvel is too emotionally shattered to believe it. Then she dies in a convent of some random illness she’s just picked up.
As much as we generally (albeit guiltily) enjoy watching terrible people wreak havoc, this adaptation makes sure that we can’t. Too many innocent lives are ruined, too much misery and despair are sown, and all on little more than a whim of its perpetrators. It’s a grim tragedy, not soap opera trash, and you can’t end this without thinking to yourself: bring on the French Revolution! Sweep this entire sordid society and its participants/enablers into the sea.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
And so it ends, my three year project to watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy on their twentieth anniversaries. Of course, Covid delayed my viewing of The Return of the King until closer to New Years Eve, but I got there in the end.
In hindsight, I still consider The Fellowship of the Ring to be the best of the three films, though whether that’s down to the initial thrill of watching something for the first time with no expectations, or the fact that it simply feels like a better paced and imagined adaptation is something I can’t quite decide on. Probably both. The Return of the King is a deeply satisfying conclusion in many ways, but at the same time, it can’t help but trip at the finish line a bit.
I think my biggest problem is that despite being the titular king of the title, Aragorn is oddly muted here. This was his time to stand up, step forward and accept his destiny – which he does, but not in a particularly dramatic way. In hindsight, what the film is missing is a scene in which he’s recognized and accepted by the people of Gondor as their rightful king.
In the book, this occurs when Ioreth the healer notices that he’s able to revive Éowyn and spreads the news that the Heir of Isildur has returned. In the movie, it just sort of happens. Suddenly he’s leading the combined forces of Rohan and Gondor to the Black Gate. Do these men even know who he is? Couldn’t they have at least noticed that the White Tree was coming back to life? (There’s a brief moment when a flower blossoms on one of its branches, but only the audience is privy to this).
What makes this really irritating is apparently a scene like this was shot, and one of the visual guides even has a screenshot of Aragorn and Ioreth in the same frame together. Sadly, this appears to have gone the way of so much other footage that didn’t make it to the extended edition (release the super deluxe ultimate edition, you cowards!)
Something else that bugs me: in the book, Aragorn’s decision to seek out help from the Dead Men of Dunharrow is a widely discussed strategy. In the film, Aragorn heads off in the middle of the night without telling anyone what he plans to do, leading to the troops believing that he’s running away.
And oh jeez, the stupid “Arwen’s fate is tied to the Ring and so she’s therefore dying” nonsense. Guys, the stakes are high enough. Our heroes are fully motivated at this point. You did NOT have to add this.
Finally, the climactic showdown. Just as Aragorn leads the remaining Rohan/Gondor troops to act as a diversion at the Black Gate and Frodo and Sam make the final desperate race to Mount Doom, things just fall apart. I should be on the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails, and I’m just not.
The CGI creep that eventually ate The Hobbit movies began with the conclusion of this film, and my brain simply switches off at the sight of the Fell Beasts and the Oliphaunts and Shelob and the thousands of computer-generated troops swarming across the landscape. A troll in the first movie was terrifying, now there’s twenty of them and I just don’t care. I know it’s not real.
And some things look just plain awkward. What the heck is Eowyn’s fight against the Witch King? Was that really the best they could do? Am I really supposed to believe that Denethor ran ON FIRE across that entire courtyard to throw himself off the parapet? Why all the goofy Gimli moments that completely cut through the suspense? Aragorn flat-out murders a parlay messenger? Big no. I can understand why they didn’t bother with trying to hide Éowyn’s identity as Dernhelm from the audience, but why is there a scene with her standing in the middle of the Rohan camp, sans a helmet?
And then the downright crappy editing of those final climactic minutes. That all of Mordor’s structures just collapse like that? That the earth crumbles around the orcs but stops JUST short of the good guys? And of course, that STUPID STUPID EYEBALL. I HATE IT SO MUCH. The idea that the Eye of Sauron is a physical thing hovering at the top of a tower, which constantly projects a beam of light over Mordor like it’s a lighthouse and then actually reacts with horror when it feels Frodo put on the Ring... it’s awful. AWFUL! If someone could bring me a cut of this movie that neatly edits out that stupid visual I’d be forever grateful.
It's been well-documented that Sauron was meant to appear in physical form at the final battle, only for them to switch him out for a troll at the last minute (there’s a shot of Gandalf waving his hand to one side; that’s the tail-end of a shot in which he pulls back the veil from Sauron’s angelic visage to reveal his true self) and there’s no getting around the fact that Gollum leaping on an invisible Frodo and dangling there in midair just looks silly.
And of course, the horses. What happened to the horses?? When Aragorn makes his big speech to the troops, he’s riding back and forth on his horse, but when it cuts back to him saying “for Frodo”, EVERYONE is inexplicably on foot. Buh? Why on earth would they give up the advantage of being on horseback?
You can simply tell that the whole thing was hurriedly slapped together, when these final minutes were crucial to the cathartic relief of the Ring finally being destroyed.
Okay, so that’s a lot of complaining. Let’s talk about the good stuff. Pretty much the entirety of the film’s first three-quarters, which amounts to a good three hours’ worth of material. The sequence in which Pippin lights the beacons is quite possibly my favourite sequence of the entire trilogy. The dynamic between Faramir, Denethor and Pippin is fantastic, especially since they only had a few scenes to set it up. The nighttime evacuation from Osgiliath. Arwen having a vision of her son and realizing that her future is in Middle Earth, no matter what it costs her. Gandalf and Pippin on the balcony in Gondor, described as “the deep breath before the plunge”, and later, Gandalf comforting him with the promise of “a far green country under a swift sunrise” in the midst of battle.
And of course, the movie’s true climax: the Ride of the Rohirrim. The musical score, the lighting, the striking of Theoden’s sword against the spears, Merry clutching Éowyn and her whispering: “courage for our friends” in return, the horns, the slow advance that gradually becomes a tidal wave... I get chills every time.
Many of the changes to Tolkien’s text not only make cinematic sense, but are occasionally better than their source material. For example, it makes sense that Theoden and Éowyn get the chance to say goodbye to each other on the battlefield (in the book, Theoden dies without ever knowing she’s there). Merry gets to be at the Black Gate with Pippin (in the book he’s too injured) and Frodo grapples with Gollum over the Ring at Mount Doom, as opposed to Gollum just losing his balance and falling into the lava. Even Frodo temporarily sending Sam away makes a certain degree of dramatic sense, if not a logical one.
Despite a few missteps, Peter Jackson is smart enough to hone in on the emotional beats, not just the big, blaring, epic set pieces. Which leads me to my absolute favourite unique-to-the-film scene: when Frodo falls to the ground in despair and exhaustion, only to have a vision of Galadriel in Lothlorien, who telepathically gives him words of encouragement. She offers her hand, he takes it, and he’s pulled to his feet once more. It’s utterly perfect, all the more so for having no precedent in the book. Had Tolkien seen it, I’m sure he would have kicked himself for not writing it.
I don’t blame Jackson for cutting the Scouring of the Shire, even if it means short-changing Saruman (he gets the line: “you’re all going to die!” followed by an impalement on a giant spike, both of which are rather dreadful) and I don’t even mind the litany of endings which everyone always complains about. Tell me, which one would you cut? The Fellowship reunion? The coronation? Sam’s wedding? The goodbye at the shore? Come on, they’re all absolutely necessary – though one final nitpick: why on earth does the movie close on a yellow hobbit door as opposed to the iconic green one at Bag End, which Sam and Rosie WERE meant to be living in at this stage?
As we pass the trilogy’s twenty-year anniversary, the best thing I can say about it is that after my friend and I watched the credits roll, he turned to me and asked: “do you think we’ll ever get something this good ever again?” I couldn’t answer him.
The Lost King (2022)
Watching The White Queen and The White Princess last year made this the perfect time to transport myself hundreds of years into the future to the exhumation of Richard III’s body in 2012, and the myriad of issues that surrounded its discovery.
On paper, it’s a great story: a woman who is not taken seriously ends up finding the long-lost body in a carpark. Much like when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the ruins of Troy in 1870, it’s always a triumph when a supposed kook is proved correct, especially when there’s a feminist angle in the mix. Just like Martha Mitchell, Phillipa Langley was right.
However, watching this film sent me down a bit of a psychological rabbit hole, as the actual depiction of Phillipa’s search for the burial site (and the supposed “truth” about Richard himself; specifically that he was a good man who was in no way responsible for the deaths of his nephews) is... well, I suppose the only word for it is “cringe.”
The crux of the matter is that Phillipa Langley was inspired to research Richard the III after seeing a performance of the Shakespeare play and (very explicitly) projecting her own health issues onto a figure who also suffers from a physical disability – he’s a hunchback, she has myalgic encephalomyelitis. From there she joins the Ricardian Society, a group of amateur historians that are committed to (in the words of their website) “securing a more balanced assessment of the king and to support research into his life and times.”
In the film at least, this amounts to them arguing that a document which describes how distraught he was after his son’s death is evidence that he couldn’t have killed his nephews, as though one naturally negates the possibility of the other.
Basically, they’re devoted to woobifying Richard the Third. Now look, I am totally open to the possibility that Richard was not the culprit behind the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower, but at the same time, it’s impossible to take this equally jaundiced view of history seriously. Facts should speak for themselves, whereas Phillipa Langley and her cohorts are taking a hypothesis and then finding evidence to support it. That’s... not good research.
The film also explores what it means for Phillipa to be up against the patriarchy when it comes to tracking down Richard’s remains and (supposedly) “clearing his name,” which naturally pits her against fuddy-duddy, hoity-toity historians who scorn her biased research and insist on the facts. The outrage! In comparison, Phillipa is depicted as being guided almost entirely by emotion and instinct, in which the actual narrowing down of potential burial sites is reduced to a couple of zoom calls, and her discovery of the carpark staged almost as if she’s having a psychic premonition.
That’s not even getting into the fact that she begins to have hallucinations of King Richard (as played by Harry Lloyd – hi, Will Scarlett!) and carry on conversations with him. Honestly, she comes across as a complete weirdo. I’m not entirely sure what actress Sally Hawkins was going for with this portrayal, but her Phillipa is very high-strung and off-putting.
And yet, no one can deny the fact that she was right. The body was where she thought it was.
So I really don’t know what to think or how to feel about any of this. The paradox of it all fascinates me: that Phillipa went about doing this for the wrong reasons and in entirely the wrong way, and yet... was successful. I ended up in something of a stew over it. Is my scornful reaction to her methods just internalized misogyny? Am I frustrated she blew her feminist cred by being so ridiculous about King Richard’s innocence? Do I fear professional women in the field will never be taken seriously when amateurs like her run entirely on their emotions?
Because if you compare this film with the documentary on the same subject, it’s abundantly clear that Phillipa is in love with her idealized version of Richard, and has no interest in objective facts. In the film, when she’s told that the unearthed skeleton has a spine deformity, she whispers: “he’s perfect.” In real life, she ran off in tears because it didn’t match her vision of a handsome, straight-backed prince.
(That’s the other fascinating irony at the heart of all this – Philippa set out to prove that his hunchback was merely Tudor propaganda, only to reveal that there was some truth to it after all. And if they were right about that, what else?)
Furthermore, for a film about Phillipa going up against the establishment in order to find Richard’s body, most of her opposition comes from other women. Aside from Amanda Abbington’s character, a potential sponsor who stops the male-dominated boardroom from interrupting her and later takes Phillipa aside and advises her not to use “I have a feeling” as a reason why she should get funded, this film is filled with bitchy women.
The movie starts with Phillipa being passed over for a promotion in favour of a younger woman (she’s a blonde, which is film-code for “please hate this bitch”) and later a sneering P.A. says: “it’s the equivalent of someone with a homemade rocket saying they’re going to reach the moon.” She even faces baffling levels of hostility from a bookstore clerk in a throwaway scene when she goes to buy some books on Richard.
As the credits rolled, I didn’t know what to make of it all. It definitely leans into the feminist angle of Philippa Langley being a Cassandra figure whose feminine feelings were held in contempt despite being correct, but at the same time all her detractors are made out to be stuffy and/or arrogant academics who hold the outrageous opinion that emotions shouldn’t get in the way of the historical truth.
Her ex-husband mansplains to her that people are inclined to demonize or sanctify others, and Philippa is obsessed with Richard to what is clearly an unhealthy degree. It feels unwise and unprofessional to invest so much emotion and instinct and gut-feeling into an historical theory, but then, aren’t women’s feelings denigrated constantly, even when they’re right?
Ultimately, the movie is more interested in making us believe that King Richard was a poor, maligned, guiltless little baby than in the complexities and difficulties of finding his body, which is a shame. And when it comes to the question of whether or not he was innocent of familicide, all that springs to mind is that Game of Thrones quote: “Stannis is a killer. The Lannisters are killers. Your father was a killer. Your sons will be killers one day. The world is built by killers.”
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
This movie has one of my favourite topics at its core: the idea that too much virtue is a bad thing. In the case of Ada Harris, an aging charwoman who provides emotional support to her clients as well as a cleaning service, she is simply TOO KIND. Always happy to listen to other people’s problems, always going the extra mile to make them happy – it sounds lovely on paper, but all it’s really done is given people a license to walk all over her. There’s a fine line between being generous and being a doormat.
But one day, while she’s at the house of a woman who keeps putting off delivering her paycheque, Mrs Harris falls in love... with a custom-made Christian Dior gown. For the first time in her life, she covets something. To covet something is very different from wanting something. People want things all day, every day. But to COVET something – that’s when you realize you cannot live happily without the object of your desire.
Of course, this mentality is also a vice, but Mrs Harris has spent years of her life making other people happy, and now she has a dream of her own: to travel to Paris and buy herself a Christian Dior dress.
The first half-hour or so of the movie details the saving she must put into making her dream a reality, complete with a couple of stumbling blocks along the way (at times she’s her own worst enemy when it comes to following signs and portents). But with the help of her circle of friends and some serendipity, Ada gets herself on a plane bound for Paris.
The adventure really starts once she’s in the City of Love, and as predictable as events are once she gets inside the Dior showroom (expect allies, foes, misunderstandings, good Samaritans, scenery porn, mad hijinks, French breadsticks, and Mrs Harris passing on her wisdom to the next generation) it all makes for a snuggly feel-good story.
2022 was one hell of a year for Leslie Manville, who also took lead roles in Magpie Murders and The Crown, and it’s always a balm to see a woman on the wrong side of fifty have romantic adventures, treat herself to luxuries, and learn to embrace life after being in a lengthy rut. Her trip doesn’t always go according to plan, but just as Mrs Harris’s kindness leads her down several costly roads, the narrative ultimately makes sure she’s rewarded for it in equal measure.
As someone who doesn’t have much interest in fashion, even I could appreciate some of the gowns that were on display here, and it’s all beautifully shot and performed. Think Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont fused with Amelie – good for a rainy day or after a particularly hard week at work.
Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
It’ s hard to know what to say about this one, mostly because it’s only the first half of a two-part movie, but also because it’s so loud and fast and intense that it’s difficult to tell what’s going on sometimes. I can imagine some people watching this and simply not being able to keep up with it; an explosion of noise and colour and chaos.
I watched and enjoyed the first movie in this intended trilogy, though I was undergoing superhero fatigue at the time, and since then have also had my fill of multiverse drama (and I’m not even talking about the MCU, who jumped very quickly onto that particular bandwagon after the success of Into the Spider-Verse!) This more of the same, but MORE – and to be clear, that’s not a bad thing. We won’t know until part two comes about, but the dream team of Lord and Miller seem to be in control of their sprawling story, and everyone knows that a sequel has to be bigger than the original.
About a year after the events of Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales has got the hang of being Spiderman, juggling his superhero duties with his personal life... for the most part. He’s still a little directionless about where he wants to go after school, and his parents are finding his behaviour (brought on by rushing out to be a vigilante) increasingly strange.
But things get serious when he runs into a villain known as the Spot, whose body is infused with portals that allows Miles to start traversing the multiverse. In doing so, he meets other Spider-people from various parallel worlds, noting their similarities and differences along way. Eventually he ends up in the Spider Society, a massive complex where the various Spider-people monitor the events of every world. Specifically, what are known as “canon events.”
It gets quite meta at this point (I couldn’t begin to identify even half the cameos on display) as Miles is made aware of the fact that every single Spider-person becomes the hero they need to be through losing someone they love, whether it’s a parent, a love interest, or a child. Running the show is Miguel O’Hara, who is very zealous about canon events playing out – no matter whose life is on the line.
Naturally, our hero and his antagonist are going to butt heads, and that’s while the Spot is still out there somewhere, causing havoc.
But I’ve come this far without mentioning Gwen Stacy. It struck me as a little amusing that this Spiderman sequel very much follows the same template of The Lego Movie’s sequel. There, Emmett was the initial protagonist, with Wyldstyle being an almost too-perfect example of Trinity Syndrome. When the sequel rolled around, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Lord and Miller had heard the critiques and righted the ship, with Wyldstyle becoming the unquestionable protagonist of The Lego Movie II.
A similar thing happens here with Gwen, who (despite not being as mishandled as Wyldstyle was in her first movie) is now very much a co-lead with Miles, whose narrative becomes the framing device of this story. The whole thing begins and ends with her, and the decisions/actions she takes are essential to the direction the story unfolds. I’m looking forward to seeing more of her.
Plenty of ink has been spilt on how this movie’s animation style has ushered in a new era of creative, stylistic animation – everything from Arcane to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish have clearly drawn inspiration from the Spider-verse’s bold, kinetic, “2.5D” design, in which computer-generated images are combined with hand-drawn ones to create what looks like a living painting.
This movie goes one step further, using strikingly different styles for every universe (and its inhabitants) that Miles visits: the parchment-like visage of the Vulture, Gwen’s pastel-hued home, Hobie’s punk rock artwork, the liquid, ever-moving state of the Spot... there’s even some live-action and stop-motion Lego thrown in.
In other words, a feast for the eyes, and there’s no way you can pick up every detail on a single viewing. But the payoff is yet to come. Third instalments of movie trilogies are underwhelming at the best of times, and those written as the second half of a two-part movie have even more disappointing precedence (The Matrix Revolutions, The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – heck, Divergent didn’t even get the second half of their split-in-two final instalment).
Make it happen, Beyond the Spider-Verse. I’m rooting for you.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
In a more organized world, Indiana Jones’s fifth and final outing would have been released ten years ago, and brought together the most beloved Indy sidekicks for one last adventure that would give all of them a chance to shine: Marion, Short Round, Henry Jones Senior, Harold Oxley, and of course Sallah and Marcus Brody in support. Heck, I wouldn’t have said no to a return from Mutt, as I love a redemption story for an unpopular character.
But three of those actors have since left us, and the time for that film has passed. Instead, we get The Dial of Destiny, which is... fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just fine.
After a prologue that takes place in World War II, in which Indiana is once again pitted against the Nazis in a race to lay claim to an historical treasure (and which makes copious use of de-aging technology – please Disney, for the love of cinema, I beg you to stop doing this) he escapes along with his friend Basil Shaw with one-half of an artefact known as the Archimedes’ Dial, which is said to grant its bearer the ability to time travel.
Twenty-five years later, Indiana is preparing to retire. Remember how The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had his colleague sadly intone that they were at the stage when “life stops giving us things and starts taking them away,” only for the film to end with Indy being reunited with Marion and his son Mutt? Well, since then Mutt has been killed in the Vietnam War, Marion has filed for divorce, all his friends are dead and/or gone, and none of his students find him attractive anymore.
On that cheerful note, he’s visited by his god-daughter Helena Shaw, who (in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones sidekicks) has never been seen or mentioned before. In the lead-up to this movie, I honestly thought she’d end up being the daughter of Marcus Brody, or at least Ray Winstone’s Mac (in fact, that latter character as her father would have done wonders in explaining her personality) though I can understand why Disney wouldn’t want to commit to either of those actors/characters being portrayed entirely by deepfake technology.
In any case, Helena drags him out of his depression for one last adventure to find the missing half of the Archimedes’ Dial – and who knows, perhaps they’ll change history along the way.
I’ll say this for the movie: there were a lot of bad faith predictions in the lead-up to its release, and none of them came to fruition. This is a new adventure, with new sidekicks, after a new treasure, in new locations. This scathing Bingo card checklist was astoundingly wrong regarding what the film would actually contain:
Other than the promise of one last Indy adventure, I was intrigued by the presence of Helena, who was all set to become the first heroine in an Indiana Jones movie who was not a love interest. And played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge? Awesome! Unfortunately, it’s hard to know what they’re trying to achieve with her.
She’s clearly meant to have a callous-to-caring arc, but the callousness is just so intense (locking Indiana in a room full of men with guns while she makes her own escape, being totally indifferent to the fact that his friend has just been murdered) that the caring part feels like it’s coming from a totally different person. Not helping is that she’s obviously very fond of her own Short Round, a boy called Teddy, which doesn’t jive at all with the rest of her characterization. If she had used the kid as a human shield at some point, I can’t say I would have been surprised.
This franchise simply can’t do female characters, and it’s a bit of a cringe-inducer that the only other notable one is a Black CIA agent who gets shot in the head about halfway through.
I liked the historical backdrop of the moon landing, and what they end up doing with Archimedes’ dial is probably the best use of a MacGuffin since the Ark of the Covenant, but Mads Mikkelsen as the main villain is imminently forgettable. How is that possible with Mads Mikkelson??
And as nice as it is to see Karen Allen and John Rhys Davies as Marion and Sallah again, the film misses the opportunity to get a full reunion. Ke Huy Quan could have effortlessly taken the place of Antonio Banderas’s character (though preferably minus the unceremonious death) and I wouldn’t have even said no to a cameo by Jim Broadbent or Kate Capshaw. And come on, what they do to Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt is so mean-spirited.
Okay, so I know at this point you’re thinking: “but Rav, aren’t you always complaining about fanservice? Wouldn’t a litany of cameos have just been obnoxious?” Well maybe, but I’m also of the opinion that if you’re going to film the capper of a forty-year franchise, you may as well pull out all the stops.
Basically, it’s a perfectly fine coda to a series of big-screen movie adventures, though it doesn’t really feel like an Indy movie. Even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull felt like an adventure only Indiana Jones could have gone on, whereas Dial of Destiny is something you could have put any fictional lead into and still had the same movie.
I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, but I was always going to see it once.
Doctor Who: Season 4 (2008)
I headed back in time and watched this season of Doctor Who in order to prep myself for Donna’s return in the Christmas Specials. What struck me most was that this was early enough in the show’s run for the Doctor himself to get a degree of character development – specifically, an exploration of his need for human companionship and the grim consequences of what he does to people if they stick around long enough. During Moffat’s tenure, he was practically an infallible god.
I was also reminded that the show at this point very much took on the structure of Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons: that is, there would be a number of one-off episodes nestled within a longer arc, containing various clues that pointed towards where the storyline was going: glimpses of Rose, mentions of displaced planets and missing bees, the reiteration of phrases like “DoctorDonna” and “there’s something on your back” – it all points to the events in the season finale.
Russell T. Davies was also very good at weaving elements of other people’s episodes into the overarching structure to make a more cohesive whole. For instance, the fact that the Doctor met Donna’s grandfather Wilf independently of her, and that coincidences and parallel worlds seemed to be attracted to Donna were obviously just happenstance when they were written –but Davies takes the time to turn them into actual plot-points.
There are also plenty of themes and ideas in any single episode that reflect the larger whole, such as Agatha Christie’s memory loss being an early echo of what will eventually happen to Donna. All of it ties together nicely.
There are plenty of great episodes in this season, with highlights such as “Midnight” (which reminded me of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat this time around, in that the right move was to immediately jettison the dangerous alien from the vessel, regardless of any moral equations) and Moffat’s two-parter “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, which introduce River Song.
Speaking of which, if there was one thing that bugged me about both Davies and Moffat, it was that both seemed to be in some sort of competition with each other to create the Most Important Companion of All Time, whether it be Rose or River – both of which I found to be vaguely unpleasant at best or completely obnoxious at worst.
They have their moments, but you can just feel the authorial favouritism they’re getting, best seen in the levels of adulation that the other characters are forced to cede to them (in the finale, everything screeches to a halt so that Donna or Martha or someone can quiver in awe over the Doctor and Rose being reunited. Thirteen years later, Donna’s daughter ends up calling herself Rose, and I don’t have enough eyes to roll at that one).
I’m sure that the reason Donna turned out to be such a popular Companion was that she wasn’t treated as special by the narrative – just a normal woman caught up in intergalactic events – and blissfully free of any romantic entanglements with the Doctor.
But Davies also has a strong grip on continuity (there’s a cute moment when the Doctor and Rose recognize Gwen Cooper, whose actress appeared in Doctor Who as a completely different character) and with that in mind, it’s fun to see the likes of Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan guest-star in “The Fires of Pompeii” long before they return to the show as much more important characters.
It all ends with a bang. Knowing that it’s his final episode before show-running duties are handed over to Steven Moffat, Davies brings back all three Companions from his tenure, plus the main characters of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, to fend off a Dalek invasion led by Davros... which felt a bit odd to me, since I was only vaguely familiar with these characters. Even K-9 gets a cameo appearance, and I know virtually nothing about that dog.
Yet you can’t say Davies didn’t take out his tenure with a bang, and everyone in the incredibly loaded cast gets their chance to shine. It’s actually quite a buzz seeing all their names come up in the opening credits.
But of course, it all ends in tragedy, with Donna having her memories of the Doctor taken from her, forcing her to revert back to the shallow gossip we first met in “The Runaway Bride.” It’s a long time before that creative decision is rectified...
The White Lotus: Season 1 (2021)
What was I thinking? Well, I do know – my mum and I catch up every week and watch an episode of something, and this was a show she had been recommended at work. Of course, we got two episodes in before realizing it wasn’t really for her, by which point my sister had come back from England, the Christmas holidays started, and I got Covid.
So we threw in the towel when it came to watching it together on a weekly basis, and I just binged the remaining episodes while I was in isolation (I’m incapable of leaving things unfinished, and it’s not like I had much else to do).
Basically a take on Upstairs, Downstairs at a Hawaiian resort, it follows the storylines of various guests and hotel employees as they struggle to get through each day, whether it’s enforced fun and relaxation, or attending to the every whim of those determined to receive said fun and relaxation.
The ensemble is made up of Tanya McQuoid, an eccentric and self-absorbed heiress who has come to scatter her mother’s ashes, Shane and Rachel Patton, newlyweds who are already having serious second-thoughts, and the Mossbachers, a standard nuclear family (with their teenage daughter’s friend Paula joining them) who can barely tolerate each other.
Forced to deal with their (completely unself-aware) demanding behaviour is Armond is the hotel manager, five years sober but increasingly pushed to the edge by Shane’s entitled behaviour, Belinda, the kind-hearted woman who runs the spa and sees in Tanya a chance to start her own business, and Kai, who becomes romantically attached to one of the guests.
More than anything it’s a character study, specifically of how the intensely privileged remain oblivious to the negative effect they have on those who must work for a living. With that in mind, it’s difficult to know what to take from the show once it’s finished. It’s a foregone conclusion that Tanya will disappoint Belinda. Rachel decides to stay with Shane because she lacks the backbone to leave him (even though she knows it’s the right thing to do). Paula’s plan to financially assist Kai by convincing him to steal from the Mossbachers’ hotel room backfires spectacularly, but we learn nothing about the fallout. And Armond’s escalating feud with Shane eventually costs him his life.
With all that in mind, I suppose another comparison would be Parasite, though without that film’s spectacular twists.
The vistas and locales are gorgeous to look at, but it’s ultimately a pretty depressing portrait of how the rich get away with everything, and the rest of us are left to clean up their messes.
Avenue 5: Season 2 (2022)
Remember this one? It’s okay if you don’t, because no one really watched it the first time around and it became yet another cancelled show. Created by Armando Iannucci, so you can expect a pitch-black satire of how terrible people generally are, it centred on the galactic cruise ship Avenue 5 and its array of passengers.
After a series of unfortunate events leaves the vessel without a captain and veering 0.21 degrees off course, Hugh Laurie has to step up as the ship’s fake captain (initially hired as an appealing front while the real work goes on elsewhere) while the crew scrambles to find a solution to the fact that they’re now looking at over three years in space.
The first season ended with busybody Karen Kelly jettisoning the extra cargo out the side of the ship instead of the rear, thereby sabotaging the necessary thrust to shorten the return journey and lengthening it to eight years instead. That her name is Karen is certainly not a coincidence, and her henpecked husband has taken advantage of her plight to confine her to quarters, having convinced her that the rest of the passengers are out for blood.
The truth is, they don’t even know yet. Nobody aware of the ship’s true predicament has any idea how to break the news to everyone that their journey has been extended, and that they probably won’t make it anyway due to the food shortages.
Honestly, it’s not great. Besides Hugh Laurie as Ryan and Lenora Crichlow as engineer Billie, there’s no one to root for, which means that if the entire ship collided with a meteorite on its way back to Earth, it would be no big loss. There are some amusing bits, such as some inventive putdowns (“are you trying to confuse predators?” is said to a woman wearing clashing colours) and a dramatized version of the ship’s tribulations that’s being broadcast back on Earth (where dialogue is comprised solely of noble declarations) but nothing that comes close to making it a must-watch.
For every fun character and performance – Zach Woods as the nihilistic PR man, Nikki Amuka-Bird as frazzled head of mission-control (she should do more comedy; she’s hilarious) and even Josh Gad as the spoiled manchild owner of the vessel – there are at least twelve others that I just don’t care about, and would have quite happily seen thrown out the airlock. Also, there’s been a blatantly obvious slash in budget.
I don’t regret watching, and I’m reasonably happy with how it ended, but at the same time I can’t help but wish it had been better than it actually was.
Dangerous Liaisons: Season 1 (2022)
A prequel to Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel, Dangerous Liaisons seemed like a solid bet, and Starz apparently thought so too, as it was renewed for a second season before the first had even aired. Well, I have to presume that I was the only person who watched it (ironically because I thought it HAD secured a continuation) since the network reneged the renewal and duly cancelled it.
*deep weary sigh*. Another promising show consigned to the dustbin of “why’d you even bother?”
Years before the events that are probably best known to modern audiences through the 1988 John Malkovich/Glenn Close costume drama and the modern remake Cruel Intentions (the trashiest trash that ever trashed), this prequel takes us back to the early years of Pascal and Camille, later known as the future Vicomte de Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil (no idea why their names have been changed from the book’s Sebastian and Isabelle though).
Back in 1783, they were giddy youngsters in love, and relatively innocent. Well, not really. Valmont has already collected a range of older lovers and compromising letters which he plans to blackmail them with should the need ever arise, though he also seems to genuinely love Camille, a prostitute trying to pay off her indenture to the madame of the house.
He promises to get her out of her current predicament, but she isn’t impressed on realizing that this involves the aforementioned extortion of his many lovers. Once he disappoints her by not showing up to their rendezvous to run away together, she inveigles herself into the home of Geneviéve de Merteuil, a noblewoman desperate to get her love letters to Valmont returned before her husband finds out.
She takes Camille under her wing, and then (rather inexplicably) kills herself by throwing herself down the stairs. Not remotely secure in her new position as the Marquis’s new ward, Camille has to think on her feet and draw upon the myriad of secrets at her disposal to retain her new standing.
Meanwhile, Valmont is trying to win Camille back by following her instructions to seduce a woman called Jacqueline de Montrachet, with whom she shares a mysterious past. As he sidles himself into her life, he can’t begin to understand what the vendetta against such a virtuous, God-fearing woman might be, and so begins to question what’s really going on.
It’s very fun to watch, with all the vicious backstabbing and melodrama you’d expect, even if it does rely on some pretty absurd circumstances. Things get more soaked with intrigue as the episodes go on, with some unexpected connections made between certain characters, and a murder-mystery plot that pulls everything together... which will never get resolved. It even veers into Les Misérables territory a little bit, what with the obsessive search by a police officer for Camille’s whereabouts.
Unfortunately, Valmont ends up being the more interesting of the two main characters, as both manipulator and manipulated – and just as much of a prostitute as Camille initially is, selling his body for a specific kind of currency (also, the actor bears an uncanny resemblance to Eddie Redmayne).
Camille on the other hand, is just a poor impoverished girl trying to make her way in the world, occasionally going too far in her attempts to climb the ladder. We’ve seen this story play out a thousand times before, and there’s nothing particularly vicious or conniving about Camille – which is a shame, since she’s nothing less than an absolute monster in the novel.
And yes, this is a prequel, designed to showcase the genesis of the person Camille will eventually become, but I find that these days writers/shows seem terrified to have their female characters be anything less than perfect victims. Most of Camille’s schemes end up backfiring due to unforeseen circumstances (much like how all the worst problems in House of the Dragon stem from mistakes and misunderstandings rather than deliberate choices made by the characters).
Not helping is that Alice Englert has no allure or charisma whatsoever – not even physical grace when it comes to the way she clomps around the sets. (She’s Jane Champion’s daughter, so I suppose we’ll have to blame nepotism for this one). Camille should be a powerhouse of fascination and charm; someone you simply cannot take your eyes off – here it’s impossible to believe she’s getting away with her ruse, based as it is on being utterly captivating, and it's absurd that so much intrigue is orbiting a complete void. Go watch Glenn Close to see how it’s done.
Still, there’s plenty of fun to be had with Victoire and Azolan, the servants of Camille and Valmont respectively, who naturally are the voices of reason who grow increasingly exasperated by the behaviour of their employers. The show also ends up being something of a reunion between Game of Thrones supporting players: Clarice van Houten is the obvious one, but also Michael McElhatton, Tom Wlaschiha and Miltos Yerolemou. There’s also Stanley Townsend in a small role, playing the exact same character as he did in Andor, and Paloma Faith, who seems to be having a great time.
And hey, Lucy Cohu! I haven’t seen her since Torchwood: Children of Earth and the misconceived Atlantis. She should be in more things; she has so much presence.
It would seem that the heart of this series is the usual cautionary tale about what it costs you to get to the top and the question of if it’s really worth it. These tales have been around for donkey’s years, and usually centre on women – from The Gilded Age’s Bertha (which is far lighter than this show) to Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharpe (which is much funnier). You could even include Carole Middleton on The Crown, so it’s been a month for it! We go a little easier on social climbers these days, as here Camille’s motivation is desperation in dragging herself out of the gutter, and often stories like this take on a “woman against the patriarchal values of the world that oppresses her” vibe.
Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t really mesh with the point of the original novel, in which Camille and Valmont are appalling people who play with innocent lives because they’re bored aristocrats. With the backdrop of the fast-approaching French Revolution, it’s a scathing portrayal of why that country’s upper class was overthrown in the way it was (and it wasn’t just down to the white face paint and bouffy wigs – man, I hate this period’s popular fashions).
So like I said, we’re left with the usual story of a girl’s whose social climbing and desire for safety is measured against the people she has to step on along the way. Perhaps there would have been room for Camille to make more moral compromises as the show continued, becoming more cruel and corrupt along the way, but (as usual) cancellation puts a stop to that.
1923: Season 1 (2022 – 2023)
It’s fascinating to watch a show like this, one that has every reason to be good (solid premise, huge budget, amazing cast that includes Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren) and yet... isn’t. It really isn’t that good. But why not? I suppose the main problem with 1923 is that it never really gives us a chance to care about anything.
I started this year by watching 1883, the first prequel to Taylor Sheridan’s massively popular Yellowstone franchise, which detailed the arrival of the Dutton family in Montana. Now the story picks up a generation later, in which the original couple that settled on the land (James and Margaret, played by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill) have died off-screen, and their homestead/ranch taken over by the former’s brother Jacob and his wife Cara.
That’s straightforward enough, but James and Margaret had a surviving son called John, who I think is in 1923 – only he gets virtually no coverage and is killed off pretty quickly. Most of the action centres around Spencer Dutton... who didn’t exist in the 1883 series. I suppose it’s possible that he was born after the events of 1883, despite Margaret’s rather advanced age... but then why would you kill off the son that was featured in that series in order to focus on the one that’s seemingly just appeared out of nowhere?
Even with Elsa Dutton providing a voiceover commentary from beyond the grave (which completely disappears in the last couple of episodes), it was a little bewildering trying to sort out the family tree.
So, with the entire cast of 1883 unceremoniously killed off, the show divides itself between three distinct storylines. The first is set at the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana, where the Duttons get into a deadly feud with a neighbouring sheep farmer (played by Jerome Flynn) over the lack of grazable land, which culminates in the Dutton family – including the aforementioned John Dutton, who possibly featured as a child in 1883 – being gunned down.
But you can’t judge Jerome Flynn too harshly for this, considering Jacob finds him grazing his sheep on his land, and responds by hanging him and his men from the nearest tree. Escalation much? It’s clearly a desperate time for everyone with livestock to feed, but instead of pulling together, Jacob declares war and then acts mildly surprised when he’s treated in kind.
Fearing a lack of strong leadership, Cara writes her to nephew Spencer who is working as a big game hunter in Africa, having fought in World War I and still nursing his psychological wounds. His storyline might well be the most absurd of the three, which very much plays out like it’s been written by a man attempting to emulate a Mills & Boon. While out on the hunt, Spencer crosses paths with Alexandra, a terribly annoying and self-satisfied heiress who runs away with him on little more than a whim to escape her weedy fiancé.
The two are instantly, passionately in love with each other, engaging in sex out in the open all over Africa, and forced to deal with obstacles like elephant attacks, lion attacks, ghost ships, capsized boats, shark attacks, and duels thrown down by that pesky aforementioned fiancé, who rather hilariously gets chucked overboard. The lovers are unable to have normal conversations with each other, their dialogue is made up entirely of either witless prattle from Alexandra, or overly-serious declarations of eternal togetherness – also from Alexandra.
And to make matters worse, the pair of them don’t even make it to Montana by the end of the season!
Finally, the third story strand features a young First Nation girl called Teonna Rainwater, ensconced in one of those monstrous Catholic schools that were ostensibly meant to teach “the natives” how to act civilized, but were clearly just hotbeds for abuse and violence. This is an overlooked part of American history that needs to be discussed far more often than it is, but at the same time this plot is almost unwatchable due to the sheer amount of cruelty that’s on display.
Teonna manages to escape and reaches a certain degree of safety by the end of the season, but she’s not completely out of danger and – more to the point – it’s difficult to know what any of this has to do with the other two subplots. I can only assume that the Rainwater family ends up at Yellowstone Ranch (I know there are First Nation characters in the mother-show) but given that I’m watching this franchise in chronological order, everything in this storyline feels disconnected to the point of random.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the last two episodes, which features the gratuitously prolonged sexual torture of two prostitutes at the hands of a mining baron. It’s completely pointless and unnecessary, and when a writer/showrunner clearly has as much executive power as Taylor Sheridan does over his screenplays, it’s difficult not to suspect that he’s just writing his own porn (it also doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the women of this show get naked far more often than the men).
The show is never unwatchable (it’s too expensive for that) and with a surprising amount of talent on display – not just Ford and Mirren, but guest stars like Jennifer Ehle, Peter Stormare, Joseph Mawle, Sebastian Roché, Robert Patrick and Timothy Dalton to name a few.
Everyone in my family was talking about Yellowstone last Christmas, and so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and catch up across the course of 2023. That didn’t got exactly to plan, and I’m not entirely sure I want to continue after this.
Doctor Who: Christmas Specials (2023)
Having watched Donna Noble’s tenure on board the Tardis in the show’s fourth season, I was primed and ready for her big return in these Christmas Specials. Given that I’ve already discussed the character in January’s Woman of the Month, there’s not much more to say – only that any overly convenient plot-points that are used to return her memories and Time Lord capabilities are borne away by the sheer emotional power of Donna’s long-awaited reunion with the Doctor.
David Tennant and Catherine Tate pick up their chemistry and friendship right where it left off, as though it hasn’t been over thirteen years since we last saw them together. What’s especially touching is that it’s not just David Tennant and Catherine Tate who return, but also Bernard Cribbs, Jacqueline King and Karl Collins as Donna’s grandfather, mother and husband, respectively – all last seen back in 2004.
If there’s a particular theme to these three Specials, it’s one that popped up regularly when Russell T. Davies was the original showrunner: that life goes on, and it isn’t any less important or meaningful when there isn’t a time-travelling alien ushering you on a range of intergalactic adventures. As Ten said at one point: “it’s the one adventure I can never have.” This is returned to here, when – all these years later – he’s finally given a chance to set down roots and rest for a while.
What also popped out at me while I was watching season four is the fact the Doctor very much had a character arc – specifically, that he was constantly in danger of becoming the “Time Lord Victorious”, a god-like being who flouted the laws of time and space, answering only to his own ego and hubris. Davies connects these Specials back to that run of episodes, harking on just how traumatized and exhausted the Doctor is after fighting so many battles (including the ones against himself) and thereby ensuring that his extended Sabbatical feels both necessary and earned.
Davies is also good (or at least interested in) finding the connective tissue throughout various episodes (even those not written by himself) and drawing on anything from major plot-points to tiny details –themes, story ideas, even repeated words – to weave into his story.
In this case, I found it quite gratifying that he didn’t simply throw out Chris Chibnall’s Timeless Child contribution to the Doctor Who mythos (which is more than I can say for Chibnall, who immediately drop-kicked all of Moffatt’s careful setup to bring Gallifrey back into play) and a little chuffed by how he connected the word “binary” (which Donna incessantly repeated at the end of season four when she was overtaken by Time Lord memories) to Rose Noble’s non-binary self-identification.
Davies is interested in what I suppose we’d call Arc Welding, though it’s a lot more fluid and organic here than what the TV tropes page describes.
He’s also never let storytelling logic get in the way of emotional stakes, and between the relatively easy fix for Donna’s memory loss, the “bi-generation” that introduces Ncuti Gatwa, and even the explanation behind why Ten returned in the first place, it’s clear that Davies is more interested in emotional pay-off than plots that are grounded in any sense of rational cause-and-effect plotting. But he’s always been this way, and in light of that, it’s almost funny it wasn’t just the return of Tennant and Tate that stirred up feelings of nostalgia, but all the obvious tells of Davies’s writing style.
“The Star Beast” is essentially a reintroduction to Donna, her family and her predicament, culminating in the restoration of her memories of the time she spent with the Doctor. I have to admit being a little disappointed that the titular alien ended up being the episode’s villain, but there’s wonderful use of the fact that Donna’ daughter Rose is transgender, and how this figures into the plot (like I said – no narrative logic, but immense emotional and thematic resonance).
In “Wild Blue Yonder,” Donna and the Doctor end up stranded on the edges of the galaxy with a creepy threat that’s very reminiscent of the creature in “Midnight” in regards to the fact we learn so little about them. More pertinently, it sets the tone for the forthcoming season, what with a fascinating scene in which the Doctor invokes a superstition (throwing salt) at the brink of the universe, thereby opening up the possibility that these fairy tale-based rules will have real weight and power in the stories to come. As Davies has said, this season is going to lean more into a fantasy vibe (not that this show has ever been without it).
Finally, “The Giggle” serves as the big finale. Neil Patrick Harris chews up the scenery as the Toymaker, UNIT is back in force (complete with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and old school Companion Mel Bush) and we get out first look at Ncuti Gatwa taking over the role of Doctor going forward. And he NAILS it. Truly, his enthusiasm and energy are infectious. We’re in for a good ride.
Plotwise, the whole bit about the entire human race being brainwashed into thinking they’re right, leading to mass violence and death, is abruptly forgotten about halfway through the episode, but I had to laugh at the fact that despite all the Disney money now at Davies’s disposal, the fight against the Toymaker culminates with three men throwing a ball at each other. I don’t think Davies is going to fall into the George Lucas/Peter Jackson trap of letting CGI overwhelm one’s storytelling proclivities.
Also, surely that rumoured UNIT spin-off is a go? I can think of no other reason for the otherwise superfluous robot character (Google tells me it’s called the Vlinx) and the organization’s brand-new set if it wasn’t. Which means they can rectify the one sour note of these Specials: that Martha Jones is the only Companion of the Davies/Moffatt era who doesn’t get a mention or a check-in. Seriously, that was glaring.
Basically, Doctor Who has hit the ground running. Ncuti Gatwa is excellent, Ten and Donna get a well-deserved happy ending, and the board has been reset for the Fifteenth Doctor to get out there and have some baggage-free fun. Can’t wait to get into it!
The Crown: Season 6 (2023)
Yes, I just managed to squeeze this one in before the year ended. Remember when The Crown was considered prestige television? Now it’s absolute melodramatic shlock. Yes, the rumours were true and Princess Diana appears to Charles and the Queen as a ghost (or as a mental projection of her, whatever) for a few final conversations. What on earth was Peter Morgan thinking?
This tone had crept into the last season as well, which I chalked down to the show catching up with events that took place within living memory, thereby coming across as rather sordid and intrusive rather than the informative period drama of the show’s early years. Naturally, the final weeks of Diana’s life and her tragic death overshadows everything else that occurs this season (the season’s very first scene is a bystander seeing the car enter the tunnel, at which point we go back “eight weeks earlier,” essentially putting the whole show on a countdown) and there’s nothing pleasant or entertaining about watching her being hounded to her death.
Furthermore, Morgan has covered this ground before, with the controversy over the establishment’s response to Diana’s death explored in 2006’s The Queen. As such, that period of time is truncated for obvious reasons, and you can tell Morgan isn’t interested in going over the same material. Why would he be? He’s already won the Oscar for it.
The episodes are on steadier ground once we’re really in the aftermath of the event, and the other characters are free of Diana’s all-encompassing orbit. Charles continues to obsess over Camilla, Princess Margaret grapples with her failing health, and William’s early friendship with Kate Middleton gets turned into a sweet albeit bland love story. (Only the fact that Kate seems to have walked into that situation with full cognizance of what she was getting herself into – unlike Diana and Meghan – prevents me from feeling the most profound pity for her. I would not want her life for the world).
There’s also a nice flashback sequence which seems to have been based on 2015’s A Royal Night Out, in which Elizabeth and Margaret sneak out of Buckingham Palace to join in the VE Day celebrations. Interestingly, they bring back Beau Gadsdon to reprise her role as a young Princess Margaret (she was also the child version of Jyn in Rogue One) but switch out Verity Russell for Viola Prettejohn (who also played Mrytle in The Nevers). It’s not hard to see why – her resemblance to Claire Foy is frankly astonishing.
It's also nice that Dodi Fayed’s life and its tribulations get some attention, as naturally his death in the 1997 car crash was completely overshadowed by Diana’s. That said, the show is utterly brutal to his father Mohamed Al-Fayed, who is essentially made the leading cause of the accident. Obsessed with the royal family and seeing his son as a way-in to their inner circle, Al-Fayed forces the pair of them together, sets the paparazzi on their trail, and is indirectly the reason that Diana was in Paris that fateful night (he was pressuring Dodi to buy her the engagement ring that could only be purchased in a Parisian store).
The show makes it clear that Diana has no intention of getting engaged to Dodi, despite her potential father-in-law’s deranged goading, and let’s just say that Peter Morgan is lucky this aired after Al-Fayed’s death in the August of last year, as I’m sure there would have been no end to the pending lawsuits if he’d ever seen this depiction of himself.
And I have to say, I’m disappointed that the show ended with Charles and Camilla’s wedding as opposed to Harry and Meghan’s departure from the UK, as that would have been the perfect bookend to most of the show’s themes and ideas. After six seasons of witnessing so much personal misery, in which stodgy, outdated laws prevent a small group of insanely privileged people from marrying who they love and living out their lives in peace, it would have been an apt capper to see Prince Harry actually learn the appropriate lessons from Edward VIII, Princess Margaret, and his own mother’s unhappy legacies by simply picking up his family and getting the fuck away from that institution’s toxic influence.
(And deliberately or not, the show’s depiction of Charles’s PR team tracks very well with what Harry had to say about the royal courtiers and the competition between them over “their” royals getting all the good press, often at the expense of other family members).
Instead, he’s portrayed as something of a spoiled brat, even if the final episode does afford him a measure of grace when Elizabeth points out that the people in his position (that is, the number twos) aren’t granted the same level of care and protection that the first-in-lines are.
And so Prince Charles finally got everything he wanted, the public moved on from the adultery scandal, and all the obsessive, seething hatred directed at Diana was eventually turned onto Meghan Markle with no self-awareness whatsoever. Peter Morgan can’t bring himself to do anything less than make the final episode a complete love letter to Queen Elizabeth, though the show in its entirety has done nothing to relieve me of my feelings about the monarchy: that the entire institution has to go.
You may be aware that "The Star Beast" is an adaptation of a comic strip that originally appeared in Doctor Who Magazine in 1980? I was interested in your disappointment at the Meep turning out to be the villain, as in the original comic the reader is keyed into that some time before the characters are, and that was originally preserved in the episode (which is a perhaps surprisingly faithful adaptation of the source material) but Disney executives suggested to RTD changing it so the audience and the characters found out at the same time.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised by how little problem I had with how much sense bi-generation/Ten's face coming back in the first place, but I guess... regeneration wasn't really a concept that ever had that much thought put into it? It was really something they threw together when they needed an excuse to change their lead actor (it may also interest you to know that in the Toymaker's original appearance in the show in 1966, he was going to be responsible for the very first regeneration -- the original idea being that the Toymaker would turn the Doctor temporarily invisible, and when he became visible again he'd be played by a different actor -- but BBC executives intervened and Hartnell's departure was put off for a few more months before it became apparent he really was too ill to continue). I also really liked "Wild Blue Yonder", if only for the audacity of getting Disney to pump in a substantial extra amount of budget and then basically doing a bottle episode.
They also published novelisations of all three specials (yes, "The Star Beast" was a comic strip that was adapted into a TV episode that was adapted into a book) for which the writers had access to earlier drafts of the scripts and deleted scenes (including the material with Bernard Cribbins he sadly wasn't well enough to film), and "The Giggle" is a really clever way of adapting a highly visual story into text, should you wish to seek them out.
I haven't really kept up with The Crown but I did see that clip of the Queen imagining Blair taking over and I want some of whatever Peter Morgan is on, frankly.
I actually was vaguely aware of the Star Beast having comic book roots, but interesting that the "secretly evil" twist was there both times and how a story can change when a reveal is held back/brought forward. It was just too cute to be a villain!
DeleteI also really liked "Wild Blue Yonder", if only for the audacity of getting Disney to pump in a substantial extra amount of budget and then basically doing a bottle episode.
Yes, a bit like how the big showdown between the Toymaker and the Doctors was just throwing a ball around! I don't think we have to worry about that newfound budget going to RTD's head.
I haven't really kept up with The Crown but I did see that clip of the Queen imagining Blair taking over and I want some of whatever Peter Morgan is on, frankly.
That was definitely something!
One other thing in the comic strip that isn't in the episode is when the Doctor realises the Meep is a villain there's a flashback to the Planet of the Meeps before they all went insane, which is a bit of a shame to lose but probably impractical to film.
Deletehttps://static.wikia.nocookie.net/tardis/images/7/75/Meep_society.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20231126012126