kusno dan sukron: April 2011

Saturday, April 30, 2011

'DOCTOR WHO' 6.2 – "Day Of The Moon"

It's tough reviewing episodes like "Day Of The Moon", which are so thick with incident and swathed in different layers that you end the episode gasping for air, feeling like your brain's been shaken for 45-minutes. As I said last week, there's a certain distancing effect when plots are as knotted as writer Steven Moffat enjoys making them, but I was glad the concluding part of this premiere had a greater sense of cohesion -- by virtue of resolving most of the storyline.

Moffat seems to enjoy reuniting-the-team sequences, as the episode opened with another one set three months after last week's 1969-set cliffhanger, with Amy (Karen Gillan), River (Alex Kingston) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) on the run across Utah from the FBI's Canton Everett Delaware (Mark Sheppard), while a bearded The Doctor (Matt Smith) languishes in a variant of last year's Pandorica prison inside Area 51. I'm still trying to fathom why that was the case, seeing as The Doctor earned the permission of President Nixon (Stuart Milligan) to solve the mystery of the "spaceman" and the crank calls to the Oval Office, but these are the kind of "plot holes" you suspect a repeated viewing or a question on Gallifrey One will patch over.

Regardless, it was another knockout sequence that quickly recaptured the frenetic pace of "The Impossible Astronaut", as the details and implications of The Silent villains took over. These sartorial alien memory-erasers proved to be the real stars of the episode, as Team Who devised a way to investigate creatures you forget about if you break eye contact with them. The Doctor later providing high-tech Dictaphones, buried in everyone's palm, which they activate and describe encounters with The Silent for a future replay. Or you can ink your skin with black marks to signify an encounter, Memento-style, although I didn't quite understand why you'd do that once The Doctor had implanted one of his pill-sized bugs...

One again, Moffat proves himself the master of ruthlessly gripping scenes built around fundamentally simple ideas that he stretches to logical extremes. Canton realizing he's made a recording of seeing a Silent over his shoulder, seconds after being given his bug; Amy, dressed conspicuously like The X Files' Scully, investigating a spooky orphanage with Canton; the aforementioned opening sequence, ending with River free-falling off a skyscraper and into the TARDIS, landing in its unseen swimming pool. Really, you could rattle off most scenes and find something memorable in the visuals or twinkling dialogue. Perhaps best of all, the method eventually used to rid humanity of The Silence (which we learn have been pervasive in society for millennia, nudging mankind along like parasites) was both simple, effective and actually made some sense -- with The Doctor inserting a recording of a captured Silent into the famous Moon Landing footage, edited to give humans a psychic nudge to kill any lurking Silents on the spot.

There were some strong character moments, too -- especially Rory feeling jealous about Amy's attachment to "best friend" The Doctor, made worse when he kept her extracted voice-recorder and learned about her false alarm pregnancy second-hand. More than at any time in the show's history, it really feels like this group are a close-knit family that also have to tackle their emotions and relationships in-between battling aliens. Plus, the first kiss between The Doctor and River Song when she was returned to prison -- although, from River's perspective, this kiss was tragically their last. To be honest, my brain turns to mulch whenever I try to parse the chronology of their relationship. All I know is it's heading towards an event we've already seen (David Tennant's Doctor putting her consciousness inside a supercomputer for eternity), so in some ways the love story loses its grip on me when I remember that fact. I just hope the actual identity of River Song (his wife, Amy's daughter?) is a surprise worth waiting for.

Of course, this story isn't really over. The Silence are too good to dispose with so easily, so they'll be back. Amy's pregnancy (why is the TARDIS scan so indeterminate?) will obviously be a central storyline going forward. And we still need to complete the season's arc by explaining who the little girl is, why she kills The Doctor, and how The Doctor is going to escape what appears to be an inescapable fate only his companions know about! Plus, there's the small matter of why that child is able to regenerate from injuries, exactly like a Time Lord, in this episode's jaw-dropping denouement.

Overall, "Day Of The Moon" was an unremittingly entertaining and surprisingly scary episode that I'd feel bad about nitpicking too much. It wasn't as baffling as part 1, and despite the fact a good 30% of everything that happened still needs to be fully explained, those are the plot threads Moffat's chosen to weave throughout this series, so categorical complaints will have to wait for the end of year finale. Above all, the pace, scares, humour, dialogue and a sense of scale was all present and correct. You can furrow your brow about many things, and I'm sure there will be people who felt bamboozled by the whole episode, but with the caveat that you allow several things to wash over you, "Day Of The Moon" was an extremely enjoyable and ambitious piece of sci-fi entertainment.

Asides

So -- any theories on who the little girl is? It must surely by Amy's daughter, if the photos on her bedroom table are to be believed. But the child's ability to regenerate surely means that (a) Rory isn't the father, but a Time Lord is? Or (b) Amy spending so much time in the TARDIS has given her as-yet-unborn child the ability to regenerate like a Time Lord? Trouble is, both seem like humongous stretches to be plausible. Amy is unlikely to have slept around, certainly not with a Time Lord! Or was her joke about having a baby born with a "Timehead" right on the money? But how would that work? Have no companions ever had children after leaving the TARDIS? Or maybe the child is River's -- who at some point sleeps with The Doctor and gives birth to his daughter, but Amy becomes her baby's adopted mother? It's not Georgia Moffett's character Jenny from "The Doctor's Daughter", is it?
Maybe we should be asking not who the little girl is, but who she'll be regenerating into? I'm guessing River Song. There, said it. No, actually -- she's a clone of The Doctor, who we later see dying in "The Impossible Planet"? So the "little girl spaceman" murdered her future self? Oh, my head hurts.
Time Lords CAN grow facial hair! Did he use the sonic screwdriver to shave?
Who was the strange lady with the eye patch in the little girl's room? A creepy nanny? The eye patch must be significant. Who is going to be losing an eye at some point? The character is known as Eye Patch Lady (Frances Barber) and is confirmed as returning to the show later this series...
Rory can remember his 2,000 years spent as a Roman soldier, despite the fact that technically happened to a different Rory before the "Second Big Bang" that restarted the universe. It would be much easier to just say Rory can't remember that stuff, so I suspect the fact he can is a clue of sorts -- right?
The character of Renfrew at the orphanage was an obvious nod to Dracula's Renfield. I also felt some similarities to the Silence and the sack-cloth headed boy in the Mexican horror The Orphanage, how about you?
It's confirmed that The Silence have a proto-TARDIS like the one seen in last year's "The Lodger", but it's probably not the same one.

written by Steven Moffat / directed by Toby Haynes / 30 April 2011 / BBC One

Next time....

'CAMELOT' 1.5 - "Justice"

I didn't have much faith in this episode to begin with, but it slowly came together in a surprisingly pleasurable way that crystallized several things about Camelot and provided some much-needed glimpses at what the show's really all about. In particular, through the prism of justice, we learn that Morgan (Eva Green) is a shining example of the "old ways" (making allies by demonstrating she has the zero tolerance for criminals), while Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower) is promoting a very modern judicial system that involves patience, investigation and fair-mindedness. Now more than ever it's easy to see them as two sides of the same coin, which heightens Camelot's drama as these half-siblings fight for the hearts and minds of their countrymen...

This week, Arthur and his men came to the aide of a villager called Colfur (Outcasts' Liam Cunningham) after hearing his daughter's cries for help while riding through a rainy forest. It appears that Colfur had murdered his village's leader by bludgeoning him with a rock, and is in the process of being lynched by his victim's brother Ewan (Luther's Steven Mackintosh), but Arthur calls a halt to the capital punishment and orders a proper trial at Camelot to ascertain Colfur's guilt or innocence. An event that a vengeful Ewan has no faith in, but Arthur believes Colfur's predicament is a great way to demonstrate his progressive attitude to lawfulness.

Over at the Castle Pendragon, Sybil (Sinéad Cusack) proved her usefulness to Morgan by summoning the locals to complain about the lack of protection from Camelot, and manipulate them into believing the true source of power in the land comes from Morgan, not the half-brother they've taken to their hearts on principle of his bloodline. This involved Sybil paying a mercenary to cause her physical harm, so the locals perceive Morgan as someone who knows their own suffering through personal experience. I said last time that Sybil's effectively Morgan's version of Merlin (a surrogate parent and mentor figure), and the parallels are fun to see play out. It was a particularly effective moment when Morgan seized on Sybil's plan and then embellished it to make converts of everyone gathered at her castle, by ruthlessly cutting the throat of Sybil's "attacker" and earning everyone's respect and admiration through a theatrical, grisly show of power and the kind of intolerance that speaks to the people of the day. She's the trusted right-wing politician to Arthur's uncommon left-wing approach to peacekeeping. Two people wanting to rule; one through hope, the other through fear.

And in a small subplot, Merlin (Joseph Fiennes) wrestled with his demons many days of self-imposed isolation in the bowls of the castle, driven to a near-manic state by the fact he caused the drowning of an innocent girl over a sword. I'm still unsure if Fiennes' twitchy performance is a masterstroke of tangled frustrations and mental toil, or simply a ludicrous case of overacting, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt again. It helped that there was a surprisingly good scene between him and Queen Igraine (Claire Forlani), who discovered the sorcerer's whereabouts and shared a touching moment with him that almost turned passionate, until Merlin broke the sexual tension. He's an isolated man who believes anyone who gets close to him becomes tarnished, as he's effectively playing on the outskirts of a magical world that gives him great power at the price of a normal existence. This unexpected will-they/won't-they between Merlin and Igraine is likely to return, as Merlin's the perfect example of a damaged man a kindly woman like Igraine would want to fix.

Overall, "Justice" was probably the best episode of Camelot to date, simply because it seemed to have some intelligence to it. Previous episodes have been enjoyable because of the violence, nudity and magic on display, but this story worked because the characters and ideas behind the series began to take clearer shape. Arthur's interactions with Guinevere (Tamsin Egerton) even felt more enjoyable this week, as it wasn't totally driven by mutual lust. If Camelot can keep this up, then bring the magic in to compliment things without looking too silly, I have hope the series may actually become something to look forward to each week.

Asides

A very good performance from Liam Cunningham as the man on trial, who has his private reasons for desiring the death of a fellow villager. Cunningham was one of the main reasons to keep watching the recent BBC series Outcasts and it was great to see him give a very different performance here, in his natural Irish accent.
I'm a little confused that people have so quickly taken Arthur to their hearts and descended on Camelot in droves. Word spreads a lot quicker than I would have thought, but we know the show likes to get a move on with things. It was also interesting to get a feeling that some villages aren't so willing to accept Arthur's new regime and may fight against change. In many ways, the big challenge to Arthur is going to be changing people's longstanding beliefs and preconceptions of what being a good King actually means, while his sister Morgan sticks to what's worked in the past: prove to people you're the biggest bad-ass in town and that they should come to YOU for protection from enemies.

written by Sarah Phelps & Terry Cafolla / directed by Stefan Schwartz / 29 April 2011 / Starz

State of the Blog: updates & Thrones

My Blogger/IE6/Disqus issues are back in force, so just don't expect many updates or replies to your comments until after 5pm on weekdays. There will be a few instances when I can auto-post things from the day before (TV Picks, Jump the Blast's, Polls), but in general DMD won't be updating until late-afternoon now. It's all beyond my control, but could be fixed by May when my workplace finally upgrade IE. I'll keep you informed!

"Am I reviewing Game Of Thrones?" I hear you all cry. Well, a few of you. The answer is: um, no. I had every intention to make Thrones a weekly review after my pilot appraisal at OWF, but after watching episode 2 it dawned on me that I'm not enthused enough to bother. I quite like the show and enjoyed episode 1 (more for its potential than content therein), but it's not something I feel passionate enough about to wade through in next-day reviews.

If I was being paid, there would be no problem. I'd happily sit through each episode a few times, make extensive notes and research the material. But I don't get paid. I blog for fun and a desire to communicate, and Thrones isn't speaking to the passion necessary for that. As I sat down at my laptop, facing a blank Word page, trying to distill my thoughts on "The Kingsroad", I realized that writing 800-1000 words on that episode would just be a drain on me.

My apologies if you were looking forward to regular Thrones reviews here, but my state-of-mind takes priority. I'll still be watching the show, so there's an outside chance I'll find away to chime in with a quick mini-review of an episode that speaks to me more, but don't bank on it.

In a similar vein, my reviews of Camelot and The Killing are still on shaky ground, owing to low comments/page-hits since they started. As I've said before, there's no point stealing time away from reviews of shows people DO care about to cover ones most people DON'T. Of course, those shows are on US cable channels, currently not being shown in the UK, so it's possible the core audience for these reviews just aren't in sync with me. That's always the risk you take with reviewing brand new US cable shows.

Finally, owing to the fact I have quite a few unfinished reviews/articles scattered about, I may put those all together for a special post soon. This will include: an aborted Being Human Series 1-3 DVD review, a short review of Dexter Season 4's DVD, an episode of Caprica, and a partial review of Dollhouse's Season 2 DVD.

By popular demand, what are my favourite shows right now? In descending order of greatness:

Doctor Who (S6)
Fringe (S3)
The Good Wife (S2)
Justified (S2)
Arrested Development (S2)
Community (S2)
The Killing (S1)
Game Of Thrones (S1)
Camelot (S1)
The Event (S1)
Chuck (S4)
The Ricky Gervais Show (S2)
Rubicon (S1)
Glee (S2)
Nurse Jackie (S2)
Campus (S1)

Friday, April 29, 2011

Trailer: BBC Original British Drama

The BBC have released another Original British Drama trailer with more footage of upcoming shows like The Shadow Line, Exile, The Hour, Luther and The Night Watch. It also includes a few snippets from Doctor Who and, towards the end, what appears to be a world-exclusive look at Torchwood: Miracle Day (featuring a car chase on a beach with a helicopter, an exploding house, people in creepy masks, and a rather amusing confrontation between Eve Myles and Dollhouse's Dichen Lachman.) Enjoy!

Who's at the Royal Wedding?

via GaryTomWilliams

Did you enjoy the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton this morning? I certainly had a fun time tweeting snarkily about it for a few hours, but it was genuinely a lovely occasion. One of the funniest tweets that caught my attention was the above photo, proving that The Doctor himself couldn't resist making an appearance, which I can't resist posting here.

'RUBICON' 1.4 - "The Outsider"

This wasn't the big turning point I was hoping for. "The Outsider" took things in a different direction, but in so doing it rested most of the storylines that were already in play. That seems like a terrible decision, as audiences are surely clamoring for revelations and developments not fresh material. Still, it was nice to leave the usual confinements, with Will (James Badge Dale) accompanying API boss Spangler (Michael Cristofer) to Washington D.C, for a meeting with military top brass to convince them their company is still a necessary and vital part of intelligence-gathering that demands heavy financing. Will was the titular "outsider" of the hour; learning that Spangler cherishes the "gifts" of solitude that espionage brings, whereas Will's unconvinced by the lifestyle. Spangler even made attempts to befriend Will (buying him a briefcase, singing his praises to the officials), but is he just playing a game?

Back at API, Will's team had to work to a deadline without their leader, trying to ascertain if it's necessary for the US government to order an airstrike on the hideout of a mujahideen operative, even if it might cause collateral damage that includes innocent children. It was a pretty simple moral quandary, although the interaction of Grant (Christopher Evan Welch), Miles (Dallas Roberts) and Tanya (Lauren Hodges) appears to be coalescing into something fairly interesting to watch. It was also interesting to see how much stock they put in Will, to guide them to the right decisions. It was almost like they're siblings who've been set a tough homework assignment by a teacher, and struggled without their wiz kid brother around.

There were only a few strands that connected to the ongoing story: Will receiving intel from a CIA contact called Daniel, who has researched the seven decoded names Will discovered last week, and discovered six were part of the CIA's Middle East division in the '80s, but only two are still alive; while Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson) received the personal effects of her late-husband, including a cell phone with a threatening voicemail ("if you keep this up, you know what's going to happen"), before getting confirmation her husband's friend James Wheeler knows about the townhouse she was bequeathed because he ordered Chinese takeout from there. Will also noticed that an attractive woman is suddenly noticeable from his apartment window, living n a building close by, so I'm assuming she must be surveilling him.

A strange episode, when all's said and done. Too much of the previous week's storylines were ignored, despite the fact Rubicon hasn't reached a point where a break from the matters at hand would be appreciated. So I'm still waiting for the moment when the story begins to crystallize and it's not so willfully vague about everything. But "The Outsider" also felt a little fresher than usual, and turned Spangler into one of the show's best characters in the blink of an eye (his speech about ties was a little clunky, but delivered so well it worked.) I guess the show's intriguing enough that it manages to keep me tuning in every week, but I'm restless for that moment when the show makes enough sense that I can properly invest in the characters and the situations they're embroiled in.

written by Richard E. Robbins / directed by Jeremy Podeswa / 28 April 2011 / BBC Four