My latest reviews up at Television Heaven include Alien: Earth, the best installment of the Alien franchise since 1986, and the last two serials of Doctor Who season three, The Savages and The War Machines. I should hopefully have more up before the month's out.
Next on the blog itself I'm planning to review Strange New Worlds season three, and mabe get back onto the Lower Decks and Prodigy reviews when I have time.
Fifty boys walk in a straight line at three miles per hour for as long as they can. If they slow down or stop for too long, they’re shot dead. If they try to escape or even step off the road, they’re shot dead. The last boy walking wins untold riches and his heart’s desire.
It’s a grim premise for a story, and slim basis for a film. Frankly, that Stephen King managed to wring a novel out of it is impressive enough. The fact that he was nineteen when he did so is even more impressive, although it also explains a lot about the story, an angry adolescent polemic against society. Long dismissed as unfilmable, The Long Walk has actually been rattling round Development Hell for years, until finally being picked up by Vertigo with Francis Lawrence as director.
It's probably going to be my film of the year.
It’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, albeit one that I will probably never watch again. It’s a harrowing experience as you are pulled along with the young men as they trudge painfully on. There’s levity there, but it’s gallows humour, the brutal laughing in the face of misery that so many of us learn in order to survive. The original 4 mph rule of the book was knocked down for being frankly impossible, but even keeping up 3 mph for hundreds of miles without rest is pretty unfeasible for all but the most immaculately trained superhuman. (You just know there are some hypermasculine pricks in the audience scoffing and insisting that they could win it.)
Cooper Hoffman is excellent as the central protagonist Ray Garraty, perfectly cast as a believable but damaged everyman, but it’s David Jonsson who really steals the film as the resolutely optimistic Pete McVries. The friendship between the two is the heart of the film, a friendship built in the most unfriendly of circumstances. We see the best of masculinity as well as the worst, with even the most unpleasant of the walkers (that’ll be Charlie Plummer’s Barkovitch) being sympathetic as we know they are all here out of desperation. Not one of them truly grasps just how brutal the Walk is going to be, with the possible exception of the stoic Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and even he isn’t truly prepared for it.
Even with the novel’s hundred walkers reduced to fifty, there are too many to fully focus on. Tut Nyuot, Ben Wang and Joshua Odjick all give strong performances as Baker, Olsen and Parker, respectively. Olsen, one of the more unlikely contestants, is especially likeable, but in a way that only drives home how unsuited he is for the gruelling challenge. There’s an unpleasant complicity in the Walk from the audience, spectating from comfort just like the gawping onlookers at the roadside. The brutal Walk is fiction, of course, but the cast still walked for miles in order to get realistic footage, with Hoffman reporting that on some days they walked for up to fifteen miles in the heat.
While King wrote and seemingly set his novel in the 1970s, and the aesthetic of the time has been carried over to the film, there’s no real indication of when the film is set. This is to the film’s benefit, since the themes are timeless and can’t be pinned down to one era. Many have read an allegory for the Viet Nam War in the novel, and while there’s a clear parallel between signing up for the Walk and volunteering for military service (down to youngsters lying about their age to get in), it’s a broader story of desperation and hope amongst hopelessness.
Whenever it’s set, The Long Walk occurs in some distorted alternative history, where the USA has become a fascist dictatorship and undergone economic collapse after an unspecified war devastated the nation. The idea that it would take a war to inflict this on America is laughable; given what you people actually voted for last year, a lot of you practically volunteered for this dystopia to be delivered. As outlandish as the idea of the Walk is, it’s also depressingly easy to believe that it would be enacted, for inspiration or entertainment, and that desperate souls would sign up for it even knowing that it would almost certainly mean a painful death.
So much of the film is spent just waiting for the inevitable, a chilling feeling that makes it an uncomfortable yet compelling experience. None of it would work were it not for the depth of the cast’s performances. While the boys, particularly Garraty, are our way into this disturbing world, it’s brought to life by Mark Hamill’s gloriously loathsome Major, seemingly the head of the military junta in this reality and a snarling figurehead for the oppressive regime. In contrast we have the always wonderful yet still sadly underrated Judy Greer as Ray’s mother Ginnie, who essentially represents all that is good and all that is feminine and nurturing in this brutal state.
There are no punches pulled in this film. Injuries and illness are depicted graphically; there are no clean, screen-friendly gunshots here. Lawrence lingers on the violence just long enough to feel repulsed before forcing us to move on with the rest of the walkers. For all that the Walk is a deliberately contrived kind of brutality, it’s none too far removed from reality in the worst places on Earth. Right now, Palestinians are being marched through Gaza for miles at gunpoint, while men and boys have been forced to walk in front of tanks as human shields. It’s disturbing to think that in Gaza, Sudan or Congo, young men likely would sign up for a gruelling trek with a 1-in-50 likelihood of survival if it meant a chance of escaping and providing for their families.
The film marches along with the boys with a crushing inevitability until we are left with only two. The ending is somewhat predictable (although different to the original ending in the book), yet this only makes the sense of the inevitable more foreboding. Throughout, the cast force you to care about the poor bastards you know you’re going to watch die. And yet, like the best of King adaptations, The Long Walk has an uplifting message at its core: to never give up and to go down fighting.
Good news from Pencil Tip Publishing: Roving Reporter II, the second collection of new adventures for Sarah Jane Smith will be available before the end of the year. This will feature my story "Remembrance" as well as a host of prose and graphic stories, such as Russell McGee's "The Cocoon of Despair," which you can now explore in this timelapse artwork video.
In the meantime, the original Roving Reporter (featuring my story "Exposure") is available for a short time again via Lulu. A full library of PTP fiction and non-fiction books are also available, such as the recent What the Fans Think - Space: 1999, for which I had the dubious honour of reviewing "Space Warp."
I'm roughly 47 years behind on everything I want to write, thanks to many, many real life concerns; however, I have managed to get a few write-ups and reviews done lately. September marked a couple of notable pop culture anniversaries that warranted some attention.
30th September 2025 marks the official 60th anniversary of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's classic series Thunderbirds. I've reviewed the first episode, "Trapped in the Sky," for Television Heaven. Meanwhile on TVH, we've been cracking ahead with season three of classic Doctor Who, with Galaxy 4, The Myth Makers and my beloved The Gunfighters as my latest contributions. I'd written up The Ark previously and Laurence Marcus has also added Mission to the Unknown. I've also reviewed Bookish, the wonderful new murder mystery series from Mark Gatiss.
In other media that gives you square eyes, 13th September was the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. and thus the Super Mario franchise (although, of course, Mario goes back three years earlier, to 1981's Donkey Kong). Head over to Vocal for my two-part play through of every 20th century Super Mario platformer: Part One covers the 1980s (Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Land) while Part Two takes on the 1990s (Super Mario World to Super Mario 64). Summer also saw two notable Nintendo anniversaries, with Yoshi's Island and Donkey Kong Land both hitting thirty. Just like my TV reviews, I can't help but delve into the history of the games as well as replaying them.
Here's a treat: Paul Hanley, who you may recall provided the original art for Forgotten Lives, as well as a whole host of other Doctor Who, cult film and original art, has teamed up with Bret Herholz, another excellent artist and graphic storyteller with a penchant for all things Who, to create The Vampire Inversion, a completely free new comic featuring the Shalka Doctor (as played by Mr. Richard E. Grant back in 2003, and fleetingly appearing onscreen again in 2024).
For this adventure, Paul has written the script and Bret has provided the art, and his scratchy blac-and-white style really works for this gaunt and foreboding Doctor. The Vampire Inversion is a postmodern adventure into vampire cinema, which also explores the hidden corners of Doctor Who's own mythology. As the cover page teases: "Two Doctors, vampires and... Andy Warhol?!" When you've enjoyed the comic itself, you can also read Paul's original script.
Paul and Bret have provided this comic for free, but do suggest that you might like to make a donation to one of the charities they've chosen to support:
The Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT)
TRACTION (Trans Community Action)
The Central Florida Emergency Trans Care Fund
So, go on. Have a bite.
It's been a little while, hasn't it? I've been busy elsewhere, I'm afraid. This seemed the place, though, to mark the passing of one of the greats of twentieth century comedy.
It's hard to actually feel sad at the news of Thomas Andrew Lehrer's death, given that he'd reached the impressive age of 97. The feeling is more one of, oh well, it had to happen eventually. Lehrer himself seemed to have been preparing for his death for the last few years, having put all of his song - lyrics, music and recordings - in the public domain. You can still access and download everything here, although Lehrer did warn that it wouldn't be up forever.
I won't go on with a biography of Lehrer; you can find that in any number of places. I won't spend time on his first calling as a mathematician, his still secret operations in the NSA, or his alleged invention of the Jello shot. No, I'm here, of course, to talk about his songs. Endlessly quotable, raucously singable, bitingly satirical and frequently verging on the obscene, Lehrer's songs are perhaps the greatest comedic songs ever written.
I didn't really come to learn about and love Tom Lehrer until very late on. I knew the wonderfully nerdy "The Elements" from a young age, although I couldn't sing it then or now. It needs an update, of course, with the latest sixteen elements added on, which will need to be inserted as an earlier verse so that the classic final lines remain, rhyming "Harvard" with "discahvarred." "We Will All Go Together When We Go" is another well known song; so fun to sing yet so dark in content.
It wasn't until my partner Suzanne introduced me to Lehrer's greater catalogue of work that I fell for him. I don't think I've ever laughed as much at a song as I have at "I Got it From Agnes," the absolutely filthy but very carefully worded story of communal diseases. It stuns me that he got away with that in 1954, and it became our Covid-19 anthem.
Jostling with "Agnes" for my favourite is the gleefully mrderous "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," which we have localised to "Cyaniding Seagulls by the Shore." Not that our parks aren't full of pigeons, or, for that matter, seagulls. High positions, as well, for "The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist" (perfect for any anthropoid) and "The Masochism Tango" (truly, a love song for every couple, throuple or otherwise).
Shockingly, there has never been a film of Lehrer's life, and surely now one will finally be made. Although who could be found to play him? An actor tall enough, gangly enough, who can sing such well-crafted lyrics with such speed and only occasionally trip over his tongue will be hard to find.
Still as unhappily relevant now as ever, Lehrer's satire only bites harder for being delivered in song. As a farewell, let's have one of his less celebrated compositions: "Pollution."
SPOILERS, I guess. But I'd be surprised if you don't know by now.
It's a tricky one this. It simultaneously tries to do too much and doesn't go far enough. There's so much potential here; the initial pitch of "Eurovision meets Die Hard" is irresistible, while pastiching Eurovision provides the potential to be the most politcially charged episode in years. (Sorry, I forgot, Eurovision is not political. Honest.)
This is Juno Dawson's first contribution to Doctor Who proper, after writing the radio/podcast series Doctor Who Redacted (which I confess I disliked and didn't finish). It's a lot of fun, while also clearly being an allegory for real world atrocities. But which ones exactly? The obvious target is Israel's genocidal assault of Palestine, and the atrocious double-standard of allowing the country to continue to compete in Eurovision, while Russia was suspended for its brutal invasion of Ukraine. It's frankly impossible to read the episode without making this link, and it's genuinely surprising that the BBC allowed this to go out right before Eurovision itself, so obvious is the comparison.
Yet this was filmed over a year ago, possibly in time for last year's controversy over Israel's Eurovision inclusion, and Dawson would have written it months earlier. That said, even if she did write the script before October 7th 2023, it's not as if Israel's abusive rule over Palestine wasn't already well known, and their ongoing involvement was already controversial. There's also a lot of additional material that can be added during filming and post-production, with some elements - the burning poppy fields being the most blatant - that seem to be explicitly calling on the images of Palestine's suffering.
Yet the faceless villain here is "the corporation," with the Hellions being displaced and smeared so that their world can be turned over for a profitable commodity. Yes, this is a factor in Israel's plundering of the land and its backing by the US-led West, but it's not the driving force, nor what anyone would immediately associate with the genocide. This side comes across more as a general attack on global capitalism, having more in common with Nestle than Israel under Netanyahu.
If this is meant to be about Palestine, then the story is muddled. Kid has a sympathetic background, but his actions are genuinely abbhorent. The attempted murder of 100,000 people is already a vast crime; to then try to kill three trillion is beyond insanity. If he had killed a thousand people and taken hostages, with the corporation then killing thousands of Hellions in retaliation, the allegory would be inarguable. The link is too vague, Kid's actions too extreme, the corporation too bodiless to really work as a story about Palestine, yet there's no way to watch this in May 2025 and take it as anything else.
At the time of writing, we still don't know why Ncuti Gatwa dropped out of presenting the UK's votes on Eurovision at the last minute. We can certainly speculate that he was going to say something that the BBC disapproved of. It almost feels like this is one half of a presentation that was never allowed to finish.
As with the real Eurovision, "The Interstellar Song Contest" remains a lot of fun, in spite of the politcally-charged controveries that sit beneath the surface. It's still a staggeringly messy episode, though, with way too many elements jostling for attention, which is presumably largely down to RTD using it to set up parts of his ongoing season arc. I think that bullet points are actually the best way to approach it, since it seems like the script was written from a shopping list template:
After taking on most of the writing duties himself last year, RTD has invited far more new writers for this season. They're also writers from varied backgrounds, one of the strengths of the hit-and-miss Chibnall era (although the only writer actually returning from Chibnall's showrunning is Pete McTighe, the one white guy of this year's guest writers). Inua Ellams, a celebrated British-Nigerian playwright, is the first black man to write for Doctor Who and only the fourth black writer at all. This is also, I believe, his first television script, one that reportedly draws on some of the content and themes of his stage work. Apparently, he originally piched a different idea that was too similar to another script in production, although this eventually fell through, so who knows what story this might have been.
Ellams, along with director Makalla McPherson, create an episode quite unlike anything we've seen on the series before. The most obvious thing is that the main cast is entirely made up of people of colour and, aside from Varada Sethu, entirely black people. If not for the flashback to the hospital (which could have featured only people of colour with no problem, were it not for the necessity of including Anita Dobson for her weekly cameo), and the parade of earlier Doctors, it could have been an episode that only featured actors of colour. It's also one of very few stories set in Africa ("Praxeus" took place largely in Madagascar, and we've had a few quick visits to Egypt over the years). Ncuti Gatwa got his wish for an episode set in Nigeria, written by a writerwith whom he personally wanted to work.
A Nigerian barbershop is both a wonderfully unusual setting for a Doctor Who story and a cultural space that will be new for a large majority of the audience. After "Dot and Bubble" and "Lux" had the Doctor confront racism, "The Story & the Engine" sees him revel in the inclusion his new form can bring. It's only right that the incarnation who appears as the Doctor's memory of Abena surfaces is the Fugitive, with Jo Martin being the only other black actor to play the Doctor (a fantastic and genuinely unexpected cameo). While they all get a look-in (the barberhsop patrons must have been wondering who all those white guys on the screen were), the other regenerations are a footnote in this celebration of the Doctor's busy past.
I was, based on the Barber's mastery of stories and the glimpses of the giant spider in the trailer, fully expecting him to be Anansi, something the script teases us with. We're so primed now for the Doctor to face down gods that we immediately accept that this stranger is one himself (or several, as he claims). That the Doctor laughs this off thanks to having apparently already met most the gods he claims to be suggests a much longer association with them, beyond the Pantheon of Discord, even before we learn that he tangled with Anansi back when he was a woman with dreds. This is the first story to present gods with any positivity, noting their importance, along with stories in general, to the human condition.
There's a certain incoherence to the plot among these many elements. Omo and the Doctor both act like the former tricked the latter into coming, in spite of the Doctor actually going to Lagos of his own accord to piggyback off their comms. Quite why a gigantic spider has made its home on the Barber's worldwide web is unclear, as is pretty much every aspect of how the ship's engine works. The mysterious little girl who helps Belinda - confirmed in the credits to be Poppy from "Space Babies" - is a baffling conclusion that will presumably be explained further down the line. This messiness hardly matters in a story so packed with inventive visuals and ideas. A barbershop that is also a starship, exisitng both in a Nigerian backstreet and the depths of space and imagination (as close to the original concept of the TARDIS that we've ever seen). A heart within a brain within an engine. A man willing to kill the gods and doom humanity because he's angry he wasn't credited for his work. An entire story centred around hair, from the infinitely regenerating haircuts to the story of cornrows (a vital piece of black history that will be news to many watching).
While Belinda gets short shrift in this episode, it's an absolute showcase for Gatwa's Doctor, allowing him to go all out in a story that would not work for any other version of the character. Sule Rimi and Michelle Asante both give heartfelt performances as Omo and Abena respectively, but it's Ariyon Bakare who impresses the most as the Barber. He gives an unsettling and inscrutable performance, skirting around the scenes to begin with and only slowly becoming a bigger and more emotive presence in the story, until he is fully humanised at the end.
More from Inua Ellams, please, and more episodes from writers from different backgrounds, completely new to Doctor Who.
Setting: Lagos, Nigeria, 2019
Maketh the Man: After a TARDIS scene in which he wears an orange-and-green-striped polo shirt, the Doctor changes into a Nigerian outfit which includes a pale orange kurta-style top, a loose brown waistcoat, a black kufi cap and a necklace. It's a uniue outfit for the Doctor but sticks to this incarnations signature colours.
The God Squad: The Doctor reveals that he knows Dionysus, Saga and Bastet, and we learn of his encounter with Anansi. Yet he doesn't mention the other god the Barber claimed to be, Loki. I was expecting the Doctor to reveal he was Loki himself.
Speculation: A question that arises: how does the Doctor remember an event he experienced as the Fugutive Doctor, a life that was erased from his memory?
There are two possibilites. The first is that it's simply a matter of a memory leaking through, presumably triggered by the presence of Abena. We've seen the Doctor display the occasional bit of knowledge from Gallifrey's distant past, and seen the lost faces in his mind batle with Morbius, so this isn't entirely unheard of.
The second possibility is that the Doctor has opened the watch that contains his stolen memories. This is tempting to believe. Perhaps, during the Fourteenth Doctor's long rehabilitation, he decided to open the watch, meaning the Fifteenth Doctor was born with all his memories intact. This is possibly supported by his openness in discussing his being adopted; perhaps he actually remembers his original childhood now.
Further reading: Inua Ellams has also written a short prequel story to this episode, "What I Did on my Holidays by Omo Esosa."
Of course, the most important thing about an episode is how it hits on first viewing, not pouring over it down the line, and on this basis, this is a cracking episode. Millie Gibson once again holds an entire episode in the almost total absence of the Doctor, giving us a more mature Ruby in a different way to the rapid fast-forward of "73 Yards." Ruby seems to be our standby now for UK-based political stories, acting as the realistic everywoman dealing with life a day at a time, after the Doctor. Considering that "73 Yards" had her continually under threat in one way or another, it's interesting that it's this episode that actually deals with her PTSD, albeit in a fairly shallow way. Doctor Who rarely tackles the long-term impact of the constant danger of TARDIS travel, virtually never on TV. It makes some sense of the sudden rush of former companions joining UNIT; what else do you do when you've adjusted to that lifestyle?
(It's a bit weird that Kate doesn't mention the companion support group that was set up only three years ago. Mel surely would have done, but she's off dealing with "something strange in Sydney Harbour," doubtless a set-up for The War Between the Land and the Sea.)
Even more impressive is Jonah Hauer-King as Conrad. He's just started to become annoying once the staged Shreek attack on his village begins; then it looks certain that he's going to be killed purely due to being an idiot with Doctor-envy, leaving Ruby to feel guilty about it for the rest of the episode. He becomes far more entertaining once the mask has slipped and he's revealed himself as a far-right misinformation peddler and conspiracy nut. As with many stories of this nature, Conrad has to be an unrealistically good actor to pull off the reveal; yes, Hauer-King is that good, but would Conrad really be, day in, day out, and unobserved? Still, that's an intrinsic flaw of the "secret enemy" story type.
There's a dichotomy in this case, though. For all we might cheer the Doctor's furious rebuke of Conrad and the bile-spewing trolls that populate our media these days, he's not entirely off the mark by calling UNIT to account. The joke, that there really are alien invasions every week in this universe and that you'd have to be a fool to not believe in them, falls down a little when you realise that UNIT has been operating for years with minimal oversight, keeping secrets from the general populace and hoarding incredibly advanced technoogy. It's hard to credit those commentators who think Conrad is unrealistic because his motivation is so inconsistent; that's an accurate depiction of the psychology of someone like him, both cynical and an opportunist. Yet, amongst all the nonsense, when it comes to UNIT's operations he does have a point.
Jemma Redgrave gets the her best material probably since "The Day of the Doctor," and gives her best performance to go with it. There's a sense now that the nepotism she allegedly fought against is weight around her neck, as she's constantly expected to live up to the mythical figure her father has become. Her moment of "going too far" is perfectly in character, given this was the woman who was willing to nuke London to deal with an alien threat; this is small beans in comparison. She's also dead right when she says the Doctor would have stopped her, but it's notably exactly the sort of thing the Doctor would do himself in nobody stopped him (q.v. his behaviour in "The Interstellar Song Contest").
There's a sense of this episode lashing out against authority, yet not having the courage to actually condemn the arrogance and unchecked power that both UNIT and the Doctor have. They're presented as the good guys primarily because it's their show and we know they're the heroes, but there's no actual attempt to show this outside their contrast to Conrad and his Think Tank. Of course, we have the finale and the spin-off to come yet, so who knows. Still, given that twenty years ago or so UNIT had its own private Guantanamo for people who got curious, and that even the Brigadier didn't trust them, and that according to (the admittedly baffling) history presented in Flux the organisation was founded by an alien warlord, we might have a few questions for it.
Then again, UNIT has always been wildly inconsistent in its presentation (as is often the case, this episode seems confused as to whether it's a British or international operation). Regardless, Conrad is still an evil bastard, even if he does occasionally have a point. I look forward to him coming back in the finale, and hope to see him get a leg bitten off, the ungrateful bastard. Honestly, like being smothered in Ruby's lipgloss was really such a chore...
Setting: London and Dorset, 2024-5; briefly, London 2007.
Placement: Ruby and the Doctor's initial encounter with the Shreek takes place between "The Devil's Chord" and "Boom;" the Doctor's confrontation with Conrad is somewhere between "Empire of Death" and "The Robot Revolution;" and his and Belinda's meeting with little Conrad at the beginning actually takes place in their "present."
Maketh the Man: Considering he's in it for all of ten minutes, the Doctor gets to show off a lot of looks. In the beginning he wears a long brown duster with big orange checks, over a white T-shirt, black trews and a beanie, which seems almost archetypal for his Doctor. Next we see him in his long brown leather coat, a red-and-orange striped top and blue trousers. Finally, for his TARDIS scene we see him in his much-publicised all-white look. On the subject, the pinstriped business-suit look is fire on Ruby.
Links:
Well, well, well...
There are going to be spoilers from the outset for this one, although if you'd heard the rumours swirling about before the episode aired then you probably know what's coming. However, you can still back out now if you don't want to know the twist in this one. If you don't mind knowing or you know already, click "read more..."
 |
| Zoinks! |
We're only two episodes into the season, but "Lux" already look like the Fifteenth Doctor's standout story. While it seems to be a bit of a marmite episode, most commenters I've seen really liked it, and I'm with them. This was a barmstormer, an episode that throws everything it can at the screen and manages to pull it off. There a few flaws, mainly with pacing, but this is a story that barely puts a foot wrong.
On the one hand, there's nothing much that's new here. Screaming people trapped on film, threatened with immolation, are straight out of Sapphie & Steel; stepping into black-and-white has been done time and again, from Pleasantville to the most recent season of Black Mirror; even the villain being overwhelmed when they achieve their goal and ascending to the next level of existence has been done before (hell, they even did that on Mighty Max). And, of course, splicing cartoons and live action together has been going on at least as far back as the sixties, with Disney producing a bunch of films that combined the media, with the biggest and most impressive being Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with which this story shares a lot.
Yet it's all put together and realised with such verve and style that the result is exhilirating. Mr. Ring-a-Ding is a technical marvel, beautifully manifested. In the old days cartoons and film would be overlaid by hand and spliced together, whereas now CGI is used. Nonetheless, this is impressive (and the character himself was hand drawn, which makes a real difference). The moment when the Doctor and Belinda circle round Mr. Ring-a-Ding, who stays 2D but appears fully part of the 3D environment, is remarkable. It's even better for it's subtlety, but there are other moments that are just as impressive while being overtly showy: Mr. Ring-a-Ding's gradual evolution into a physical being is almost tangible, as well as utterly hideous, as a cartoon character would be in the flesh.
None of this would mean anything without a strong story held up by strong performances; fortunately, "Lux" is a stunner here too. Alan Cumming gives a suitably manic vocal performance as a godlike being manifested as a cartoon character, becoming genuinely sinister when the story calls for it. Both Gatwa and Sethu give evocative, three-dimensional performances, even when they're reduced to cartoon characters. The script gives them great material to work with, allowing both of them to show sides to their characters that bring them more depth.
We've seen the Doctor faced with racism before, of course, in the equally good (but very different) "Dot and Bubble," but that was a distinctly different situation. Here we see him embedded in a racist culture, albeit fortunate enough to meet understanding and sympathetic individuals. His statement that sometimes he must wait for people to change immoral and corrupt systems is a more mature approach than that seen in "Rosa," although I still believe that episode worked well. It's important to see the series face this again, especially as we have a TARDIS team played entirely by people of colour for the first time. "Dot and Bubble" (and "Rosa," for that matter) warned us against the risk of racism rising again in the future, but the Fifteenth Doctor's trips to the past have sidestepped the issue ("The Devil's Chord" simply ignored it, while "Rogue" was deliberately an unrealistically mixed historical setting).
"Lux" is a clear follow-up to "The Devil's Chord," with Lux Imperator another member of the Gods of Chaos (aka the Pantheon of Discord). This works far better though, taking the concept of the God of Light and that of a living cartoon character, using them to their full potential. It's fascinating to see how Lux manifests as Mr. Ring-a-Ding, showing us that these supposedly all-powerful gods can be constrained by the limits of how they enter the world. (It also raises the possibility for previously defeated gods to reappear in new forms that are more powerful and harder to defeat.) The script sets up numerous elements so that the viewer can guess at how they'll be resolved (although the repeated mention of "Blink" meant I was going "Have we seen Ring-a-Ding blink?" and wondering if that was what he never does).
The most notable element of the story is the Doctor and Belinda's being pulled into the film stock and converted into cartoons, a gloriously silly sequence that nonetheless allows the characters to open up about they're hopes and fears, getting to know each other on a more honest footing. Belinda is still a bit too quick to accept the Doctor's lifestyle but never lets go of her determinaion to get home. The next scene is the fan-pleasing one, where we get to see ourselves (or people like us) as characters in the show. This sequence does go on a little too long and slows the otherwise gripping pace. It's another element that's not remotely original; about half the fantasy shows on TV over the last thirty or forty years have had the characters find out they're fictional characters and meet their audiences and/or actors. (Usually they step out onto the set, rather than push themselves out of the TV.) It works well though, largely thanks to strong performances by the fans (particularly Bronte Barbe as Lizzie, who's tremendously likeable). The self-referencing winks at the camera do go on a bit too long, though, and the Doctor and Belinda are a bit too accepting of the idea that they're fictional themselves.
Linus Roache gives a beautifully sympathetic performance as Reginald Pye, the mourning projectionist, while Lucy Thackery gives a lovely monologue as Renee, waiting for her son to return. It's one of those episodes where everyone is bringing their A-game, in front of the camera and behind, and it really raises the episode to something special.
On the negative side, I have been singing "I'm Mr. Ring-a-Ding!" in a loud, annoying voice all weekend.
Settings: Miami, Dade County, Florida; 1952.
Title Tattle: Missed opportunity to go with "What's Up Doc?" Amazingly, no one says this in the episode.
Alternatively, "Who Framed."
Maketh the Man: The Doctor wears a gorgeous pastel blue suit, with a white shirt and pink bowtie, and two-tone brogues.
The Shallow Bit: Varada Sethu is, of course, very beautiful, but in that yellow dress she is truly stunning.
The Regeneration Game: We might speculate that the regenerative energy Lux drains from the Doctor uses up a life, or maybe even limits his regenerations again. Most likely, though, he's got plenty left for his, apparently, limitless roster of regens.
Flood Warning: Mrs Flood turns up in 1952, the first time we've seen her in another time zone. There's still no clue to her identity. With regards to the overall arc, something to with the Land of Fiction certaily seems feasible, especially with the focus on fictional existences in this story. Impossible to say how, or even if, Mrs Flood or Belinda fit into all this. We might also ask why the Doctor can't just land on May 23rd and take Belinda for coffee until she syncs back up with her own time. Of course, this might lead to him being hit in the face by whatever is waiting on the 24th. It's a fun - and brave - touch to tie this into the end of the series, as right now we don't know if it will be renewed.
Links: This isn't the first time the Doctor has encountered living cartoon characters: the Eighth Doctor arrived in an animated world in the 2002 novel The Crooked World. Neither is it the first time he's crossed over into the "real" world and discovered he's a TV character: both DWM and IDW produced comic stories with this basic idea (the 1999 Eighth Doctor strip "TV Action!" and 2013 Eleventh Doctor special "The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who," respectively).
It’s taken twenty years, but RTD has finally given us a story about a space planet in the future with rebels running up and down corridors.*
Introductory episodes are a tricky business, given that they have to devote a large part of their runtime to creating a new companion and introducing the Doctor and their world to them; and, these days, set up a whole new arc or mystery connected to the new companion. RTD’s favoured approach of a new companion and/or Doctor every year makes this a necessity, so each of his seasons tends to start with a fairly thin story, although he’s too good a writer not to add some extra depth to the adventure.
So, “The Robot Revolution” might be a bit of a runaround, but it fulfils its primary objectives, which are to introduce Belinda and to be entertaining for 45 minutes. Cliched and silly it might be, but it’s tremendous fun, and Belinda is never anything less than fantastic throughout. The basic idea of buying and naming a star leading to aliens thinking you’re their queen is obvious but extremely fun, and I don’t actually recall it being used in sci-fi before (feel free to correct me). At least it’s better than in real life, where naming stars through commercial companies is completely meaningless.
Varada Sethu is brilliant as Belinda, giving an entirely believable and likeable performance as someone who is entirely done with this shit, be it work, romance, or space/time adventures with ancient aliens. She sells the character perfectly even when she verges on the unrealistic, as she does occasionally when she’s a little too easily accepting of the bizarre situation she finds herself in. (Although, this is 2025 Britain in Doctor Who, where alien invasions are a regular feature of recent history.) It’s been a long while since we had a companion who doesn’t want to be one, especially on screen. Donna comes close, but only for her first appearance, and after that she’s desperate to join the Doctor. The last companion genuinely in this vein was Tegan, and of course, she came round as well.
What both the script and Sethu’s performance show so well is that Belinda is both supremely capable and used to being underestimated and taken for granted, especially by men. Alan is clearly one in a long line of men who have treated her as less than she is. Her attitude to the Doctor is perfect: we finally have someone who is suitably impressed by the wide universe that has opened up in front of her, but has no time for the Doctor and his posturing. While the Doctor isn’t exactly a man, he usually presents as one, and while his attitude of superiority might come from being a Time Lord it still comes across another arrogant bloke. It works especially well with the Fifteenth Doctor, whose charm is his primary weapon. Belinda simply refuses to be seduced by this. Sethu and Gatwa have fantastic chemistry, but it’s of a completely different sort to Gatwa and Millie Gibson, with an entirely different dynamic.
It's good to finally have someone call the Doctor on his invasive behaviour as well. I don’t think we’ve had anyone pick him up on this sort of thing since Rose was angry at the TARDIS translating her thoughts without her permission back in “The End of the World.” The Doctor does this sort of thing to friends and foes alike, in all their regenerations, but the smile on Fifteen’s face as he does it makes it especially satisfying when Belinda calls him up on it. As for the mystery he’s investigating, I’m tentatively engaged. While I wish that occasionally Doctor Who would just recast an actor they like in a new role without making a big thing of it in-universe, I like that it’s simple enough that Mundy Flynn is just Belinda’s descendant, while also accepting there must be more to it than that because families simply do not produce identical people generation after generation. We’ve clearly also got some kind of time loop situation going on here, even beyond the one that the episode itself centres on. (It might also be significant that we have an episode coming up set in 2008, the year Alan bought Belinda’s star, but then again, it might not.) Oh, and the imminent destruction of the Earth, for a change.
Everything that happens on planet Missbelindachandra One is hewn from purest cliché, which is rather the point, as it’s been warped by evil Alan’s manipulations. That doesn’t make it any less cliched, of course. The sets and CGI mattes are great, the robots are fun (even if they’re essentially just Hydroflax with a Vardy’s face on), and everything chugs along nicely. However, the humans on the planet are paper thin, most notably Sasha 55. While I love the idea of the Doctor spending six months having an adventure off-screen and building relationships that we only come into at the end, there’s nothing in Sasha’s character or Evelyn Miller’s performance to tell us why he cares for her. Yes, she’s got “doomed potential companion” written all over her, and Gatwa’s acting sells the Doctor’s grief beautifully, but there’s nothing there that suggests he should care about her more than any of the other mooks who get vapourised. Polishbot had more character.
Really, though, all this fluff is there to hang Belinda’s story on, and to make a point about controlling and misogynistic men. This is also quite thin on the surface, but there’s more going on under the hood. Alan’s obviously a prick at the beginning, but not necessarily dangerous, which only highlights the slippery slope men can go down in our society. “Planet of the incels” may be glib, but it’s also a pretty good description of our own. As much as Alan’s transformation and his desire to “weld” with Belinda are nods to Superman III, the concept – both the welding and the enforced marriage – are clearly an allegory for rape. There’s very little made of Alan’s apparent plea for death via his every ninth word, but nothing at all made from his subsequent message: “Belinda mine forever.” It’s the only such hidden message that isn’t spelled out for the viewer, and the most important, showing us that whatever suffering he’s gone through, he genuinely feels entitled to Belinda. This is a fun, silly episode, but it could be made as something much more serious in a more adult series without changing that much.
There really is a lot to love here, even if on the surface it’s by-the-numbers Doctor Who. The Blinovitch Limitation Effect – not that it’s called that here, but that’s what it is – is genuinely satisfying for once, giving us a trippy loop through time rather than the usual fizz of sparks. (Although the Doctor explaining how two of the same atoms can’t occupy the same space at the same time should have been dropped, since there won’t be a single atom in common between the two versions of the certificate.) There’s some nice, dark comedy here, best illustrated by the robot casually vapourising the cat. Most importantly, though, solidly good fun.
*Thanks Miles Reid-Lobatto for that one.
Settings: England, 24th May 2025; planet MissBelindachandra One, around the same time; briefly England in 2008.
Title Tattle: Just a tweak, and "Revolution of the Robots" would be the archetypal Doctor Who title.
Maketh the Man: The Doctor’s outfit at the beginning of the episode, a blue pinstriped kilt with an optional tartan fleece, is absolutely gorgeous. Sadly he has to swap it for beige fatigues for the rest of the episode, although naturally Ncuti Gatwa makes these look amazing as well. Hopefully he’ll be back in the kilt before the season’s out.
Flood warning: Mrs Flood is back, suddenly living next door to Belinda and talking to the camera again. Her “You haven’t seen me,” when the Doctor shows up is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed the character, so hopefully she’ll grow on me as she crops up throughout the season. I’m still finding it hard to care too much who she is given what a let down all the reveals were last season, although I am tempted by the idea she’s Iris Wildthyme. RTD is a fan of Paul Magrs, after all, and if Beep the Meep can show up on the TV series, anyone can. I haven’t seen Mrs Flood drinking heavily, though, so it seems unlikely.
It's been quiet here of late, but I have been a busy person elsewhere, including writing up a bunch of stuff for Television Heaven.
Having discovered the truly remarkable Severance just before the second season began, thereby rather deftly missing the three-year hiatus by being slow off the mark, I've given both seasons a spoiler-lite review.
Twenty years after it aired, and with a new, fifteenth series just round the corner, I've written an in-depth, episode-by-episode review of Series One of Doctor Who, starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper.
We've also got some classic Doctor Who with the bizarre Sylvester McCoy serial Paradise Towers, Chris Boucher's three Tom Baker stories The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl, and the Jon Pertwee classic Doctor Who and the Silurians.
I've gone even more retro with my old favourite Mike & Angelo, that CITV classic that might just have been inspired by Doctor Who (well, let's be honest, it was.) Both incarnations of Angelo get their moment in this overview.
All three of Sky One's adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels now have reviews, including the Christmas-themed Hogfather, the first adventure The Colour of Magic, and the superb Going Postal.
And, of course, there's more to come.
Brave New World is the fourth Captain America film for the MCU, and the first to see Anthony Mackie step up as the lead after playing second fiddle to Chris Evans for so long. It's also the 35th movie in the MCU as a whole, and deep into Phase 5 of the increasingly convoluted franchise. This perhaps explains some of the film's messiness and the mixed reviews it's been getting. It's inarguable that Brave New World tries to juggle too much of the franchise's unwieldy backstory, leaving us with a messy script. Yet, for all that, I found Brave New World to be a highly entertaining movie, one of the stronger Marvel movies of recent years, and a great showcase for Mackie's classy new Cap.
Still, it's an odd beast. It's challenging enough for the wider audience that this follows from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a TV series that was released three years ago, and which many watching in cinemas would not have seen. Yet the Marvel masterminds have decided not to make this the true next step in the Captain America story (not for the first time, in fairness: film three, Captain America: Civil War, was an Avengers film in all but name). No, this is a follow-up to The Incredible Hulk, a middling film that came out over sixteen years ago. This is one way to get round the seemingly intractable distribution dispute between Disney and Universal, which has prevented a Hulk-led sequel from being produced. Add to this the involvement of “Celestial Island,” a vast leftover from the equally middling Eternals, and it's impossible to escape the conclusion that Marvel has made this film just to tie up some loose ends. It's also no secret that this film has experienced significant rewrites and reshoots, even more than Marvel usually subjects its films to.
Still, messy as it is, the film works. This is largely down to some excellent star performances. Mackie was popular as the Falcon, but has his work cut out for him taking over from Evans as Captain America, the figurehead not just of a nation but a global franchise. Fortunately, his quietly commanding, resolute performance makes Wilson's Cap easily the equal of Steve Rogers. Still displaying an infectious sense of humour, this is a more serious, more focused Wilson than we saw in earlier films, shouldering an enormous responsibility. Both Wilson and Mackie himself are representing Black people, and more specifically African Americans, something the film comments on and brings to the forefront without ever becoming preachy or overbearing. Wilson may wear a vibranium-laced suit of armour, but he lacks the physical enhancements that Rogers enjoyed. He suffers in his fights, his refusal to back down against overwhelming opponents a potent parallel to the fact that, as a man of colour, he has to be twice as good and work twice as hard to get to the same place.
Harrison Ford is the second star of the film, putting in a more committed performance than I would have expected. It's a shame for William Hurt, who was reportedly keen to play the next stage of Ross's story, but Ford makes an excellent replacement and brings some solid gravitas to the role. In spite of some critics likening President Ross to Trump, he's really not that like him beyond being old and arrogant – for one thing, he advocates coming together as a country, which is pretty much the opposite of the First Felon. Plus, if he'd been meant as a Trump analogue, they'd have made his Hulk orange, surely. Ross's transformation into the Red Hulk was heavily trailered, so there was no surprise in its revelation; rather, a gradual build-up to its inevitable creation. The Red Hulk is a remarkably realistic creation, given how absurd a creature he is. Making it a transformation against Ross's will is far more potent than the deliberate “upgrade” of the comics, with more of a parallel to the original Hulk.
However, the best performance in the film is from Carl Lumbly, who, as usual, is pure class. Lumbly has form playing superheroes, of course, but as in Falcon he shows he's at his best when playing wounded characters carrying the weight of the world. Isaiah Bradley is a lesser known Marvel character, one who is unlikely to be recognised by those who aren't up on the comics or haven't seen Falcon, which is the bulk of the audience. Bradley's story, though, is so straightforwardly tragic and infuriating that anyone coming in can understand how this man was wronged and why he's so important to the story of Captain America. Less essential is the inclusion of Joaquin Torres, the new Falcon, but Danny Ramirez makes him hugely likeable and it would be a poorer movie without him.
As for the villains, the surprise inclusion (well, surprising when the news broke months ago) of Samuel Sterns works fairly well. The beginnings of Sterns's mutation into the Leader, way back in The Incredible Hulk, left the MCU with one of its biggest unresolved story hooks. Now we finally see the fully enhanced Sterns, he looks just right; recognisably like his comicbook counterpart, but distorted and deformed, how someone haphazardly mutated by radiation and chemicals surely should look. With his towering intellect, the Leader can provide a complex plot in which he pulls the strings of our heroes... unfortunately, there isn't really time for all that, so it remains largely sketched in and frustratingly easily resolved. This is one area to which a TV series is more suited than a film; had this been season two of Falcon, say, Sterns's plan could have been made as Machiavellian as it deserves. It's also hard to deny that, while Tim Blake Nelson gives a decent turn as the Leader, he's thoroughly outdone in the villain stakes by Giancarlo Esposito as Seth Voelker. Esposito has a sinister presence that Nelson simply lacks, and his relegation to an impressive but minor adversary is a misstep.
The elephant in the room is the inclusion of Ruth Bat-Seraph, one of the most controversial Marvel characters. As a member of Mossad and an originally highly Islamophobic, Palestine-vilifying character, her inclusion was going to be contentious even before Israel's nightmarish final push began. Disney/Marvel hedged their bets and rewrote the character into an ex-Black Widow, who while Israeli has no overt ties to that regime. I'm all in favour of reinventing problematic characters from earlier times, but it still rankles, particularly due to the casting of Shira Haas in the role. She gives a strong performance, and there's a certain joy in seeing a tiny, disabled actor playing a deadly warrior, but given Haas's historic support of the IDF her casting is bound to cause anger. There's not an easy way round this, and it's not as if Israeli actors shouldn't be cast in major films, but it adds an unsavoury political controversy to the film.
On a far less weighty note, there was one genuine surprise appearance in the film. Not Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes – it would have been more of a shock if he hadn't turned up – but Liv Tyler reprising her Incredible Hulk role as Betty Ross. After trolling the audience by using a perfunctory voice performance which could just as easily have been a soundalike, Tyler appears in the flesh in the film's closing act. We are assured that it is indeed her, and she was present on set with Ford and Mackie, although given the amount of Botox she's clearly had they could have saved a few quid and used generative AI.
The really baffling thing, though, is the act of making this an in-all-but-name sequel to The Incredible Hulk, and not include the actual Hulk. Who knows, perhaps that would have tipped it over into being a Hulk film and invoked the wrath of Universal. Still, it's one of many odd decisions in a film that baffles as much as it entertains. Nonetheless, it does entertain, and should Mackie lead the Avengers in the MCU's next phase he can certainly shoulder the burden. Let's hope Marvel holds its nerve.
I'm posting on Vocal again, and trying my hand once more at some of their fiction challenges, not least because they force me to actually knuckle down and write something creative.
The latest challenge is "Legends Rewritten," for which I have devised The Gorgon: Medusa's Story, a sci-fi take on a very old myth. Go give it a read, if you fancy it.
Never underestimate the staying power of a good horror story. Over a century since F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was released, another version has rocked the world with its powerful gothic imagery. Of course, even the original Nosferatu wasn’t actually original, being simply Dracula with the names and half the setting changed, to the point where several versions have had the names of the main characters changed back to the ones from the book. It’s a funny thing, copyright: the 1922 Nosferatu was almost destroyed at the orders of Bram Stoker’s widow and now it’s in the worldwide public domain itself. Hence two remakes in just over two years (the 2023 version by David Lee Fisher has not made such a big impact, but it does star Doug Jones, so must be worth a look).
Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) has had Nosferatu on his ambition list for years, announcing it back in 2015 before production finally started in early 2023. Director’s dream projects that sit in pre-production for years don’t often make for very good films in the end, but Eggers’s ambition and flair are more than up to the task of bringing Nosferatu back to haunting and powerful unlife. Infused with a desolate, strange beauty, Nosferatu is ashen, cold and dour, and yet palpably unsettling. There’s barely any more colour to it than the original, with the odd flashes of bold colour energising the scenes around them: a bouquet of lilacs, the blonde locks of the doomed Anna Harding, and, of course, plenty of blood.
There’s an incredible attention to detail in the production, with pains taken to make the archaic Transylvanian locations look authentic. For external shots, Castle Orlok is in fact Corvin Castle in Transylvania, where the real Vlad Dracula was once imprisoned, with much of the remaining filming taking place in Czechia. Orlok is dressed in heavy furred robes rather than the long, shroud-like coat of the original or eveningwear popularly associated with Dracula. Together with the decision to use a reconstructed form of the ancient Dacian language for Orlok’s own tongue, makes him appear as an actual Transylvanian noble for once. There’s a dedication to using genuine vampire folklore rather than the elements introduced by Dracula and more modern stories; the plague that follows Orlok, while taken from the original Nosferatu, is a common association in Eastern European vampire myths, as is the drinking of blood from the chest or heart, rather than carefully from the neck.
Bill Skarsgård is completely unrecognisable as Count Orlok, the Nosferatu himself. Eschewing the iconic rat-faced look of the original, Skarsgård is made up to appear ancient, haggard and diseased, his pale face dominated by a prodigious moustache. This is more in keeping with the appearance of Dracula at the start of the novel, something infrequently retained by adaptations. However, unlike the original Dracula, Orlok doesn’t rejuvenate as he feeds on others, remaining decrepit, albeit still frighteningly powerful. Skarsgård moves in a disturbingly stiff and deathly way, in keeping with Orlok’s corpselike appearance, but what’s more impressive is his voice. Incorporating operatic training and Mongolian throat music techniques, he reduces his voice to a subhuman growl, something that in most productions would be achieved by electronic or digital modulation.
Eggers initially intended to cast Skarsgård as Thomas Hutter, the Jonathan Harker equivalent of the story. While it’s easy to see that he would have played it well, we would have been robbed of his Orlok as well as Nicholas Hoult’s Hutter. Less than two years since his title role in Renfield, Hoult gets to play a different leading role in a Dracula adaptation with considerably more dramatic clout. His performance is remarkably realistic in an unreal situation; you can sense how desperate and out of his depth he is from the moment he is assigned the job of getting Orlok to sign the legal papers. Meanwhile, the Renfield role is taken by Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, who gives a fabulously over-the-top performance that stays on just the right side of believable.
Willem Dafoe, while restricted to the second half of the film, is almost as intense as Professor von Franz, this version’s equivalent to the great Van Helsing. Having played a vampiric version of original Nosferatu star Max Schrek in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, it’s no surprise that Dafoe was considered to play Orlok here. While it would have been interesting, and no doubt entertaining, to see him more-or-less reprise that role, he is so well-cast as the deeply eccentric alchemist/occultist von Franz that the film would be far poorer without him. There are strong performances from Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Ineson as well (particularly pleased to see how many Hollywood roles Ineson is getting lately).
Out of a stellar cast, the best performance is by Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, the central figure of the narrative whose uncanny abilities cause her to call out to Orlok and set the events in motion. While based on Dracula’s Mina Harker, Ellen is central to the story in a much more profound way, and Depp gives an astonishingly intense and deep performance that carries the film. It’s to her credit that, even when we’re immersed in her husband’s experiences in Castle Orlok, we are more than content to be taken back to Wisborg to spend time with the ailing Ellen. Depp shares strong chemistry with Hoult, but it’s her scenes with Skarsgård that are the most compelling.
While Nosferatu almost eclipses its inspiration in foreboding, death-laden atmosphere, it’s not without its flaws. While naturally a slowly-paced film, it loses further momentum as both Hutter and Orlok travel to Wisborg. Much of this is down to the time spent on the cursed journey of the ship that carries the vampire, a sequence that almost invariably slows down and overstretches the more faithful tellings of Dracula. (This reminds me that I must watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which overcomes this problem by committing a whole film to the section.) While the sea voyage is also present in the original Nosferatu, its inclusion is just as questionable in both, Dracula sets its second half in England, but why is Orlok travelling from Transylvania to Germany by sea? Hutter has no trouble taken the more sensible course over land.
The film never quite recovers the momentum it needs in the final act, even as events crescendo with plague ravaging Wisborg and Orlok carving a bloody swathe through the main cast. Nonetheless, Nosferatu remains powerfully haunting till its inevitable, dark and moving end. Both tangibly sexual and profoundly distressing, carefully beautiful yet achingly dark, Ellen’s final encounter with Orlok reflects the atmosphere and emotions of the film as a whole. Nosferatu is a quite unforgettable experience.
 |
| You can wear anything you like, as long as it's black. |
It’s also not very good, which is pretty much the worldwide consensus on the film. Much of this stems from its origins as a series, which was scuppered by COVID and Michelle Yeoh’s status as one of the most in-demand actresses in Hollywood. The reworking into a one-off film (ostensibly, the sequel hook is as clear as it is unlikely to lead to anything) shows what a hack job was needed to make it fit. With more room to breathe, and time to get to know the characters enough to actually give a shit about them, it may have worked a lot better.
Even accepting that, Star Trek: Section 31 is an inherently flawed production. It’s a real pity, as there is stuff to enjoy here, and frankly, the idea of a different sort of Star Trek is always welcome. While there are many, many fans who would be happy with TNG clones forever, the franchise has to move with the times and try new approaches, as the recent burst of new series has shown. For better or worse, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds and Prodigy have all delivered different takes on Star Trek, and while each has its flaws, they all succeed in different ways as well.
There’s room for all kinds of stories in the Trek universe, but one as cynical as this is a tough fit. I’ve long thought that a ragtag antihero gang, in the vein of Guardians of the Galaxy or Farscape, could work well in Trek, but the critical point of those is that while flawed, the characters were essentially decent when the chips were down and had each others’ backs. Guardians and Farscape are both about criminals and dropouts from different backgrounds who are forced together by a common cause, and end up becoming a found family. What’s more, there’s a sense of optimism to their stories, which is essential to Star Trek and missing from Section 31.
But let’s consider the good parts, for there are plenty. Michelle Yeoh is a real leading lady who deserves her own show, with former-Emperor Philippa Georgiou succeeding in spite of being a fundamentally monstrous character thanks to Yeoh’s charisma. The obligatory gang of aliens from all manner of origins is done well, even if individually they don’t all work. Visually it’s stunning, with some of the most impressive battle and space scenes seen in the franchise. It even manages to be funny, occasionally, although not often enough.
One thing that’s really welcome is the lack of legacy characters in this story. Yeoh is the only actor to return from a previous production, this being her own Discovery spin-off. The only character to return from the old days is Rachel Garrett, who’s obscure enough that only the hardcore fans will mark her inclusion as noteworthy. While we have some familiar aliens, they’re from previously seldom seen races, or tweaked in interest ways. The only major elements being carried forward with little explanation are the Mirror Universe and the Empire, which are such basic sci-fi concepts that they barely need explaining.
Let’s look at the rest of the gang. The only one who, for me, works completely is Sam Richardson’s Quasi, the anxiety-ridden shapeshifter. We can buy the idea of an incredibly powerful being hamstrung by indecision thanks to his sympathetic performance, and he stands out thanks to being the only actually likeable character in the whole film. There’s no shortage of metamorphs in Trek, but making him a chameloid is a nice touch, calling back to one of the most memorable characters of the classic Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country without being a copy in any way.
I also found myself enjoying big cyborg guy Zeph, which surprised me, as his character is uninspired. Robert Kazinsky (born in my hometown only one year before me, fact fans, so no wonder he looked so familiar) plays him dumb-but-fun, which downplays the absurdly overpowered threat played by his mechanised suit. The big dumb mech is cliched sci-fi character but a new one for Trek, and the idea of someone suffering from mecha-dysmorphia, while thrown in as a joke, is worthy of exploration.
The other character I enjoyed was Fuzz, played by the very cute South African Sven Ruygrok, for reasons best known to himself, with an outrageous Irish accent. Fuzz is a whole bunch of fun ideas together: a microscopic alien intelligence with small-man syndrome, piloting an android body around, is a daft, Men In Black-esque idea that really works. Add to that severe emotional regulation problems, and then making the android a Vulcan, and you’ve got a wonderfully bizarre combination. Both Zeph and Fuzz have some of the best lines, which is to say, lines that were actually kind of funny, if only because they were sufficiently ridiculous. Frankly, the entire script could have done with being more stupid; it would have been a lot more fun.
As for the rest: Alok Sahar makes an OK male lead, with Omari Hardwick giving a decent enough performance with little to work with. The Augments are by now as tired a trope as the Mirror Universe, but being from the grimmer side of Trek had to have some kind of involvement here. There’s an added spin with Alok, though, in that he was originally an ordinary human and was augmented later by one of the Eugenics Wars despots. This, and his man-out-of-time nature, could have been explored and provided much needed depth; another thing doubtless lost to condensing this to a single sitting.
Humberly Gonzalez as the Deltan Melle does exactly what a Deltan needs to do: be incredibly hot and distracting. She might have had more to offer than that, but doesn’t get a chance. Finally, we have Kacey Rohl as Lt. Rachel Garrett, the solitary member of Starfleet along for the ride. Garrett seems like the real missed opportunity. A chance to flesh out the least-known captain of the Enterprise, she’s given next to no actual character, existing solely to have an officially moral character to chide the various criminals she has to work with. I can’t help but feel terribly sorry for Rohl, who seems to be a decent actor but has very little to work with here.
There’s potentially a good story to be told with this bunch of characters, but you won’t find it here. The first act has enough madcap action to at least be reasonably entertaining. Once they’re off the Baraam, Georgiou’s elaborate and impressive space station, and on their actual mission, there’s little to enjoy. There’s precious little to mark this out as Star Trek beyond the name and the surface trappings. It’s not that we can’t follow the dangerous and disreputable parts of the Trek galaxy – there’s enough of them, after all, and they’re often favourite characters. At the end of the day, though, something of Star Trek’s spirit always shone through even the grimmest tales of the past. All this can muster as an endorsement for Starfleet is that they don’t commit murder, and the best it has for a moral “there are no benevolent dictators.” Which, while distressingly topical, is a bit hollow coming from someone whose leadership style was “gleefully genocidal maniac.”
This is wrapped up in a script with some of the most witless (and somehow already dated) dialogue ever, with a storyline involving a faceless villain with the most painfully obvious secret identity, which eventually devolves into the surviving characters standing around pointing out their own cliches to each other.
Yeoh pitched a Georgiou spin-off this to Alex Kurtzmann before Discovery was even broadcast, mainly because she reportedly loves playing her. You can see that in her performance on Discovery, even when the character isn’t written well. Throughout Section 31, though, she appears jaded and tired, and I can’t escape the feeling that this isn’t acting. You can’t blame her; Yeoh is absolutely wasted on this.
Spoilery bits and Trekkie observations
Future history:
The exact setting of this story isn’t clear, but it’s the early part of the 24th century. Memory Alpha goes off the stardate of 1292.4 and calculates that (somehow) to 2324, or forty years before The Next Generation, which sounds about right.
The Terran Empire is still in power at this time. By the late 2360s it will have fallen to the Alliance.
Alok Sahar was born in the 1970s, which would support an old school dating of the Eugenics Wars in the 90s. On the other hand, given that he was genetically altered after the fact, he could be older than he looks (even accounting for stasis), so a 2030s date might still hold.
Alien life forms:
Various aliens from Discovery’s later seasons are seen on the Baraam, and will no doubt show up in other eras as the costumes are reused.
Dada Noe, the arms dealer, is apparently a Deltan as well. He’s not as sexy as Melle.
Quasi’s transformations have a completely different effect to Martia’s, making it appear that he’s made up from a bundle of tendrils.
Virgil, Georgiou’s major domo, is a Cheron, the two-tone species from the classic TOS episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” In that episode we were led to believe that Bele and Lokai were the last survivors of their species, but there’s nothing to say no more of them managed to escape the planet before it was devastated.
The singer on the Baraam appears to be of the same species as Natalia, the semi-crustacean poster girl for Star Trek Beyond’s creature designs.
Cameo surprise:
So seeing Jamie Lee Curtis as Control was a nice touch, reuniting with her buddy Michelle Yeoh. The old Control was a crazy AI; this one seems to be a cybernetically-enhanced human. Cyborg stuff seems to be the fashion in this era.
Control sends the gang off to Turkana IV, failed colony and legendary hellhole that will be home to Tasha Yar. I think I could do without a sequel on the planet of the rape gangs, thanks.
