DOCTOR WHO: THE GIRL WHO DIED review

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

Vikings, alien warriors, The Benny Hill Show and reflections on the power of storytelling. New scriptwriter Jamie Mathieson delivers a hat-trick.

Ashilda: a blessing or a curse? (Image copyright: BBC)

My God, this is how to do it. ‘The Girl Who Died’ is proof positive that Jamie Mathieson's double whammy of ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ and ‘Flatline’ wasn’t a creative flash in the pan. More than those, it shows how expertly he can blend comedy and drama into a fizzy, enjoyable, blood-and-thunder fantasy cocktail. The episode also had the first big surprise of this series, as everything appeared to be wrapped up in 45 minutes.

For long term Doctor Who fans, there was something of late 1970s producer Graham Williams’ style to this story, when pseudo-historical and comic elements were high in the mix, while the idea of a mythical god, in this case Odin (David Schofield, doing his best Brian Blessed), concealing an alien intelligence has its roots in the tenure of Williams’ predecessor Philip Hinchcliffe. The skewed plot, with Viking civilians left to fight the alien Mire, and the comedy which ensued, was very Williams; the Doctor’s haunted ruminations on abandoning the village as it wasn’t important enough to the timeline, meanwhile, alluded to the Doctor’s ‘Olympian detachment’ under Hinchcliffe.

Presumably they couldn't afford Brian Blessed.
(Image copyright: BBC)

Something else that Mathieson has inherited from the Hinchcliffe oeuvre is the gift for brilliant dialogue that the producer’s script editor Robert Holmes had. A large part of the atmosphere of any setting – historical, future or otherwise – comes from the richness of the words the characters are given to say, and Mathieson slipped effortlessly into the right metre here. Ashilda’s mournful ‘We’ll be cut down like corn’ is a great image to describe an ancient battle, while Odin’s ‘What is Heaven but the gilded door of the abattoir?’ merits a whole article on its own. Particularly striking was the Doctor’s translation of baby talk. What could have come across as plain silly was presented as poetic and haunting, thanks to Capaldi’s committed performance. You can take your pick from the many other examples of how good the dialogue was.

Against the backdrop of comedy Vikings and ingeniously designed monsters, ‘The Girl Who Died’ belonged to three actors: Capaldi, Coleman and Maisie Williams (no relation). The Doctor/Clara relationship is going somewhere really interesting, as the Time Lord recognises his influence on her may not have been entirely beneficial; Clara, meanwhile, is becoming more and more of an adrenaline junkie. Their increasingly complex relationship is an effective contrast with the innocence, melancholy and righteous anger of the remarkable Maisie Williams, 18 but looking at least 5 years younger. I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, but, on her own, she carried Channel 4’s internet thriller Cyberbully earlier this year. Be great if she turned out to be the new companion, but I doubt it somehow.

The face of the Twelfth Doctor's conscience.
(Image copyright: BBC)

By the hammer of the gods, ‘The Girl Who Died’ showed how to do continuity (and I’m guessing this was Steven Moffat’s main input to the episode): the Doctor recognising his new face was set up as far back as his first episode ‘Deep Breath’. Here he realises that he wears it as a result of his survivor guilt, as shown in a jaw-dropping clip from ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ (now 8 years old), that explicitly linked the Doctor with Caecilius, Peter Capaldi’s first role in the series, whose family the Time Lord decided to go back for and save. Not only is it a neat way of explaining the casting of the lead actor in two different roles – not that they had to – but the idea was organic to the story and consistent with developments in the Doctor’s character since 2005.

Amid all the fun and drama was a literate subtext about the power of storytelling. The Vikings believed in Odin, but, as the Doctor astutely pointed out, you can tell a real god because ‘they never show up’, and the Mire’s Odin was subsequently revealed as a fraud. Ashilda made up stories, and it was the Mire’s belief in one of hers which was the threatened downfall of their status as unbeatable warriors on the intergalactic equivalent of YouTube. An apt reference, as where else can reputations – another form of storytelling – be so easily made and destroyed today? It’s obvious that this kind of parable was what they were trying for with last year’s ‘Robot of Sherwood’, but that didn’t quite come off.  

The by now customary pop culture references were present and correct: The Benny Hill Show theme (inspired), The Magnificent Seven and The Man Who Would Be King (the Doctor training the villagers to fight) and this year’s second reference to Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Odin in the clouds was a dead ringer for Terry Gilliam’s cartoon God).

Pleasingly, there are no easy answers here, something of a theme in Mathieson’s scripts. The Time Lord’s ‘I’m the Doctor! And I save people!’ declamation proved equivocal, as his saving of Ashilda’s life (reckless? Certainly. Selfish? Possibly) was shown as an act of compassion that he knew could have terrible consequences. Her immortality as result of a Mire implant could be as much of a curse as a blessing, something Ashilda’s chilling look into the camera (top) as time rolled by, leaving her unchanged, seemed to confirm. A superb ending, particularly as it contrasted the sham Odin at the beginning with an ordinary young woman who by the end had effectively become a god.

Yes, this is how to do it. Mind you, I still think the series is on far too late: if ever there was a great Saturday night treat for kids of all ages, it was ‘The Girl Who Died’.   

Bit to rewind: The Doctor realises where he got his new face from.

DOCTOR WHO: BEFORE THE FLOOD review

TIME IN ADVANCE

If you're going to make a series of two-part Doctor Who stories for the iplayer generation, this is how to do it.

Mediaeval imagery, the Cold War and time travel.
Where else on TV could you see this?  (Image copyright: BBC)

One friend turned off angrily after the opening titles, incensed about the electric guitar mixed into the theme music. Another, 54, reckoned he should have watched it with a 9 year-old so they could explain it to him. We’ll come back to this.

****

‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ rewards repeated viewings, like reading a good novel does, when you can unpick the subtleties at your leisure. There’s an incredible amount of detail packed into the story, performances and imagery.

Two notable instances of the latter: the Fisher King’s co-ordinates are shown in close-up on various characters’ eyes. Not only is this showing what’s actually happening – the alien warlord’s signal being seared into a person’s life-force – but many cultures see the eyes as the windows of the soul. This makes the Fisher King’s plan neatly metaphorical, as the gaping eye sockets in the ghosts suggest that the alien has stolen their souls. Follow that line of reasoning, and you understand why the Fisher King looks like a mediaeval demon.

The Russian training ground neatly establishes the past is 1980 without the need for a lot of expensive crowd scenes, as well as delivering some remarkably surreal imagery, such as a mole-faced, top-hatted undertaker fussing around a spacecraft against a background of Soviet propaganda posters. The chilly Cold War setting also allows for the inclusion of unusually large Russian dolls, their model-inside-a-model construction neatly reflecting what’s going on in the time paradox at the heart of the story. In fact, as they fit the concept so well, I’d go as far as to say that Whithouse chose the Russian setting just so he could put the dolls in the story. If you think that’s taking attention to detail too far, look out for a certain clockwork squirrel that Clara mentions.

‘Before the Flood’ wasn’t some cold, intellectual exercise: Whithouse delivered a cast of characters at the heart of the warped physics that you cared about (more so than in the first episode, admittedly). The bolshiness of O’Donnell (Morven Christie) and her military intelligence past was offset by girlish, infectious enthusiasm at being inside the TARDIS, while the nerdish cowardice of Bennett (Arsher Ali) hardened into angry defiance when he suspected the Doctor might have callously used O’Donnell’s death to test a theory. It was a timely reminder of the more morally ambiguous nature of the Twelfth Doctor’s character, which I thought might have been softened for good under this year’s hoodies, t-shirts, rock star shades and more mischievous personality.

This moral angle also played out in Clara’s interactions with Cass and Lunn, with the former angrily questioning if Clara had learned from the Doctor how to put people’s lives in danger. It’s a believable reaction if you were dealing with people who suddenly appear from nowhere, claiming to know how to solve a terrifying situation. This authentic level of characterisation is also one of the benefits of the 90-minute running time – the length of an old 4-parter, significantly – as you could also see in Clara’s desperate, angry reaction to the realisation that someone else she (loves?) could be dead, as well as the Doctor’s world-weary slump onto the TARDIS console as she pleaded with him.

Don't look behind you... (Image copyright: BBC)

All the actors rose to the quality of the material. Sophie Leigh Stone, in particular, communicated so much through only facial expressions and hand gestures, while Paul Kaye was just as good as he was in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. OK, the ‘they all lived happily ever after’ denouement was a bit icky, but Stone, Ali, Zaqi Ismail (Lunn), Coleman and Capaldi were so good they just about got away with it. It was a necessary release too, after sequences like the tensely brilliant one where Cass was stalked by an axe-dragging ghost. Bit of a shame Peter Serafinowicz didn’t get more to do, but it’s a minor criticism. 

****

One friend turned off angrily after the opening titles, incensed about the electric guitar mixed into the theme music. Another, 54, reckoned he should have watched the episode with a 9 year-old so they could explain it to him. Well, Friend 1 should have stuck with it, as he’d have seen one of the most sophisticated and satisfying Capaldi stories so far. If Friend 2 had asked his 9 year-old what it all meant, the young fan would probably have told him to watch it again – ‘cos, y’know, you can – and delighted in a monster and ghosts that were ‘brilliant’ and ‘scary.’

That’s Doctor Who as it should be: clever, frightening, thrilling, stimulating, fun and, as befits the best examples of the 21st century version, something you can watch again and see more in every time. And that’s no paradox.

Roll on ‘The Girl Who Died’.

Bit to rewind: The fourth-wall breaking prologue. And the final shot.

DOCTOR WHO: THE WITCH'S FAMILIAR/UNDER THE LAKE review

HISTORY REPEATING

The opening stories of Doctor Who's 2015 series have drawn heavily on other sources, with varying results.

'SHH! Don't mention the viewing figures!' (Image copyright: BBC)

THE WITCH’S FAMILIAR

The performances were great, the visual effects impressive, the direction inventive, but…

‘The Witch’s Familiar’ didn’t work for me because it focused solely on the fate of the regular/recurring characters. Nine years into 21^st century Doctor Who, we know that the Doctor, the companion and the Master aren’t going to die, and that Davros probably won’t, so with the fate of no supporting characters at stake, the inevitable resolution of the regulars surviving wasn’t a surprise. The conclusion of Davros (inevitably) tricking the Doctor and the Doctor (inevitably) anticipating being tricked and outthinking Davros was also predictable and disappointing, too.

I guess that’s a case of being careful what you wish for: two weeks ago, I’d wanted ‘50 minutes of the Doctor debating morality and ethics with the Dalek’s creator,’ and when the script concentrated on that – with Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach at the top of their game – you forgot about the limitations of the set-up, and were swept up in the idea of Davros being given a redemptive death by the Doctor showing him some compassion. That’s a lovely blurring of the moral certainties around the characters that was completely flattened by the clichéd ‘I wasn’t fooled for a minute!’ ending.

(Image copyright: DC Comics, 1988)

When ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ established the idea that Davros and the Doctor are in many ways the same, as well as suggested this was because he’d been responsible for the creation of Davros as we’d previously seen him, I was reminded of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. In that, Batman is shown to have created the Joker when, trying to avoid the caped vigilante, he jumps into a vat of chemicals that transform his appearance and drive him insane. ‘Under the Lake’, the episode following ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, is full of obvious fantasy references, but the latter had a subtler form of homage, confirmed this week when the Doctor and Davros both laugh at the joke ‘You’re not a very good Doctor’; The Killing Joke ends with the Joker and Batman laughing at a joke his nemesis makes (above).

Moffat also snuck in another two pleasing references, one to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the other to Michael Caine’s ‘60s caper movie The Italian Job. (I’m not going to say what they are: you can have fun working it out). I’d also bet that the Doctor zooming around in Davros’s chair among the Daleks – a great image – was inspired by a 1960s TV Comic strip in which the Second Doctor commandeers the bottom half of a Dalek and does the same.

Those incidental pleasures aside, what concerned me most about the opening Dalek two-parter was the way it recycled a lot of previously used Doctor Who ideas: the Doctor missing/on the verge of death, the impossible girl imprisoned inside a Dalek – even if the psychology behind that was a clever touch – and Daleks turning on Daleks are all ideas that have been done before, some of them very recently. I can’t decide if the decrepit Daleks made of sewage rising up against the Dalek/Time Lord hybrids – the Daleks being defeated by their own crap, effectively – was an inspired concept or the most risible that Doctor Who’s ever come up with. The jokey line ‘Dalek Supreme, your sewers are revolting’ didn’t help.

You can have all the stunning production values and set pieces you want, but ‘Sorcerer’/’Witch’ relied too much on them, at the expense of what Doctor Who’s always done best – tell a good, well thought out story.

Bit to rewind: Missy pushing Clara into the sewer.

UNDER THE LAKE

Not telling a good story isn’t a criticism you could make of Toby Whithouse’s first script for Capaldi. A new take on the classic Doctor Who scenario of an isolated based under siege, it was genuinely creepy, atmospheric and strange. It might have been built from the science fiction films Solaris, Quatermass and the Pit, the Alien movies, The Abyss and Event Horizon, but Doctor Who has always borrowed from other fictions. It’s the flip side to filling a story with predictable series continuity – making something creatively new from external sources.

‘Under the Lake’ has what I like best about Doctor Who: a situation the Doctor hasn’t encountered before, so he has to work it out with the help of the new people he encounters, who in turn gradually come to trust him. That concept never gets old, as you can take it in so many directions. Ghosts under water? Terrific.

OK, there could have been bit more conflict and character among the base crew, but, for the first time in a very long time in Doctor Who, it was great to see someone who was disabled, the deaf Cass (played by the deaf actress Sophie Leigh Stone), in a position of authority. I had hoped she would be there as a virtue of her fitness for the job, so it was slightly disappointing her deafness became a plot point as she was able to lip read what the ghosts were saying. Still, a major step forward.

The pace was slow, but it needed to be, and I enjoyed the long, cerebral dialogue scenes. Sonic sunglasses? Not sure, although Capaldi looks good in them, but what I didn’t like was the cliffhanger that revealed the Doctor had apparently died – again! Is anyone paying attention to the order these stories are shown in?

So far, the opening two stories are the reverse of each other: Moffat’s full of recycled Doctor Who ideas with understated genre allusions, Whithouse’s a new take on a staple Doctor Who format with obvious, but cleverly reinterpreted, cinematic reference points.

I’m really looking forward to next week, but here’s a thing: can we please have a new Doctor Who story that doesn’t owe a huge creative debt to something else? We did last year.

Bit to rewind: The Doctor sorting through his ‘tactful’ prompt cards.

While I was typing this up in the library, a young boy from a visiting class was excitedly telling his teacher about the opening Dalek story.

What do I know?

RED REFLECTIONS review

COLD WAR EXPRESS

In 1966, two young filmmakers were able to film their journey across Communist Eastern Europe. Available now on DVD, Red Reflections is a fascinating insight into a period rapidly receding into history.

The austere, Cold War Moscow of 1966

This documentary is an enthralling piece of social and political history. If you like the 1960s you’ll love it: the film starts – in black and white, appropriately enough – as a young man, fashionably dressed in a polo neck, says goodbye to a dolly-bird girlfriend. He then hurtles across a London railway station to catch a train to Europe, in an equally fashionable jumble of A Hard Day’s Night-style, excitable hand-held camera work. From there, though, Red Reflections leaves the youthful mischief of '60s English cinema behind to embark on a sobering, enlightening and quite possibly unique journey into the heart of Communist Europe.

The popular image of the Soviet bloc

Young filmmakers Eric Mival and Richard Owen film on the streets and in the countryside of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Russia in an accomplished verite style. It was a time when the closest most Western young people, and Westerners generally, got to Communism was through the villains in the spy fiction of Danger Man or The IPCRESS File, among many others TV series and films of the period. As the 1960s was the height of the Cold War spy craze, it’s an appropriate period touch that Mival secured Patrick McGoohan, best known at the time as the secret agent John Drake in Danger Man, to provide the voiceover for a quote about Western tourists being kept under surveillance, for possible recruitment as Communist agents. In terms of status, it’s like getting Daniel Craig to do it today.

Owen is a gifted writer, and his narration (synced audio being too expensive, apart from a couple of scenes) is perceptive, lyrical and forthright. The East Germany the filmmakers’ party of young English, American, Indian and Africans travellers find, that Owen memorably calls ‘a polemical world of deep blacks and harsh whites’, is easily recognisable as the frontline in Cold War fiction and fact. It’s the perspective of the ordinary people living there – which hardly ever, or perhaps never, features in spy stories – which makes you stop and think and reconsider what you’d previously thought about the political situation. One resident tells Owen that the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’, which included the Berlin Wall, was constructed to deter an attack from West Germany in 1961; the automatic reaction is to dismiss this as propaganda, but who knows? In that environment of plot and counter-plot, nothing was ever certain.

The spires of the East

Decades of preconceptions about the Communist bloc tumble further when Owen and company reach the countryside and rural towns, finding a ‘pride in the past… far removed from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Workers of the World Unite”’. In particular, in Czechoslovakia’s Prague – one of Europe’s oldest cities – Owen reflects on the ‘peaceful sanity’ where ‘Communism lies like a surface skin on this city. It is history which dominates.’ Of all his observations, with hindsight this is the most ironic, as two years after Red Reflections was completed, the Russians ruthlessly suppressed the liberal ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. 24 months before the uprising, Owen could clearly tell there was something in the air.

With a noticeable absence of consumer goods like cars and televisions, young (and not so young) Eastern Europeans devote their spare time to music, either classical or folk, played in concert halls, restaurants, or, in one charming instance, as an audience dutifully assemble outside a young piano player’s house to hear him give a recital from his living room. The citizens’ dedication to making their own entertainment is moving and somehow inspiring. You can’t help feeling this attitude is culturally and socially more enriching than being in thrall to white goods and TVs.

Arriving in Moscow, Owen wryly notes the propaganda posters in Red Square ‘not advertising Omo or Daz [washing powder].’ This shift in perspective signifies the film as a balanced view of life behind the Iron Curtain: as well as all they’d found in the Eastern bloc that was positive, notably the Economics and Space Achievements Exhibition, Owen and Mival highlight the downside, challenging Russian students that their country is ‘a dictatorship’ and the ‘bureaucracy gone wild’ that blights everyday life. Perceptively, the filmmakers conclude that in the Iron Curtain countries it’s the ‘red tape’ that strangles freedom rather than military oppression. In a telling image, border guards carry a tray round their necks with an intimidating variety of official rubber stamps, while in Moscow, shoppers have to queue for a ticket to buy something, then queue to exchange it for the item they’ve chosen.

Rediscovered documentary gems like this should be cherished, as they challenge the preconceptions offered by the broad brush strokes of ‘official’ history. Red Reflections is well worth your time.

Images copyright Quoit.

Copies of the DVD are available from www.theunmutual.co.uk/villageshop.htm. If emailing the site to order, please mention my blog to receive a £4 discount.

DOCTOR WHO - THE MAGICIAN'S APPRENTICE review

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Doctor Who's back on and seems to be dividing the fans more than ever, but there's still plenty to enjoy.

Best publicity shot EVER. (Image copyright: BBC)

THE STORY – WITH SPOILERS: Davros, creator of the Daleks, is dying and looking for the Doctor via his mysterious emissary, Colony Sarff. Missy has been given the Doctor’s Time Lord ‘will’ and, through the ruse of freezing airliners in time, finds Clara and uses her to locate the Doctor. The trio are taken by Sarff to a reconstituted Skaro, the Daleks’ home planet, where Clara, Missy and the TARDIS are apparently exterminated. Back in time in the war between the Kaleds and the Thals, the Doctor prepares to execute Davros as a boy…

So, after blanket trailers that seemed to start in the middle of last year, Doctor Who is back. Predictably, the press are making a fuss that ‘millions’ have deserted the show and that it was ‘slaughtered’ in the ratings by The X Factor. Get past the hysteria and hyperbole, however, and you find that it was still the most watched programme of the day on BBC1. What intrigued me most over the weekend, and has done since Peter Capaldi materialised, is the reaction of the committed, i.e. other long-term fans like myself.

Look at Facebook or some of the online forums and you’ll find people saying that ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ was the last straw and it’s where they and Doctor Who part company, or that it was ‘terrible’ – one of the more printable descriptions. At the other extreme, one friend of mine thought it was the best episode since the show was revived in 2005. Last year, some fans I know, and have generally shared the same opinions with, thought that Capaldi’s debut series as the Doctor was the worst season of Doctor Who they’d ever seen. I couldn’t understand it: their views were so diametrically opposed to mine – I loved it, generally speaking – that it was like they’d been watching a different programme.

Each to their own

Because the series has been going so long and has varied so much in style and content, perhaps certain fans have their own ideas – usually dictated by the era they grew up with, I’d say – of what Doctor Who should be like. By any stretch of the imagination, what was shown on Saturday wasn’t ‘terrible’. Looked at objectively, it’s a more than competent piece of modern television, with pace, jeopardy, wit, exemplary special effects and good acting (OK, Jami Reid-Quarrell’s Colony Sarff was a bit one-note, but that character was dependent for its impact on visual effects, and it really was stunning when he disintegrated into a pile of writhing snakes). The friend I watched it with third time around over the weekend – I told you I was a fan – isn’t a Doctor Who enthusiast and she thought it was great.

2nd best publicity shot EVER.
(Image copyright: BBC)

So what did I think, as the kind of fan who’s a long-term watcher but who tries to keep an open mind? Hmm. The first time I didn’t really know what to think. With modern Who, I’ve never been a fan of the frenetic comic-strip type of story that hops around multiple locations. That’s why I preferred the more sedate pace of episodes last year, which I felt suited a more austere, older Doctor better. In fact, ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ felt very much like a Matt Smith story, particularly all that larking around with the electric guitar and the tank. That scene in particular seems to have got people’s goat. If it was designed to make the Doctor look cool I thought it fell flat. To my mind, having an angular, sharp-tongued Doctor the age of Methuselah dressed in severe threads achieved hipness last year. The gimmick of having him play the Doctor Who theme in the style of Slash from Guns N’ Roses felt like the nerdy kid at school trying to make you believe he’s ‘cool really’. Perhaps that’s why some people have gone postal on that sequence, as fans of my generation tended to be seen as nerdy at school if they liked Doctor Who.

The rough with the smooth

What else did we have? Daleks, Daleks and more Daleks. The Missy Master. Davros (young and old). UNIT. Skaro… you could be forgiven for thinking there was a Gallifreyan kitchen sink in there somewhere, too. Again, it’s a personal thing: with a few exceptions, I’m not big on stories that riff on Doctor Who’s heritage. (Mind you, as someone who sat open-mouthed in front of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ in 1975, I did get a kick out of seeing the conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds again, particularly as it looked like the production team had gone back to the same quarry). I prefer the episodes – like last year’s ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ and ‘Flatline’ – which break new ground and/or take a good central idea and explore every angle of it. There were so many good ones scattered around ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’: you could have made a whole story out of Missy freezing the world’s passenger jets in time, as well as those macabre ‘Handmines’, the sort of surreal Gothic concept that Steven Moffat effortlessly comes up with on a regular basis. In fact, the more you think about it – dead bodies being cannibalised, presumably, and turned into weapons – the more disturbing it becomes.

Despite being rammed to the gills with continuity, the story clearly wasn’t a mess as my female chum, who’s only got a passing understanding of Who lore, was able to follow it. So if you like that sort of thing ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ worked, and as it’s only the first half of the story, we’ll really have to see next week’s episode to form a complete opinion of it.

(Image copyright: BBC)

What I liked the most were the performances. The rough edges of Capaldi’s Doctor appeared to have initially been smoothed down, but the same dangerous man who (might?) have pushed the Half-Face Man out of a flesh balloon was back in the cliffhanger – the first of many this year, hopefully. Jenna Coleman as Clara was as self-assured and feisty as ever; Missy (Michelle Gomez) had the funniest lines, to the extent that she nearly walked away with the episode, but was matched by the weary gravitas of Julian Bleach’s Davros. Thinking about it, I’d happily watch 50 minutes of the Doctor debating morality and ethics with the Dalek’s creator, and the scenes of that we did have were the story’s high points for me.

****

I’ve just written over a 1,000 words on the first part of a new series of Doctor Who. There can’t be many other TV series that are analysed in such detail episode by episode, and the passionate response of fans, positive or not, feeds that intense scrutiny. Even if I’m not 100% into ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’, I know that there’ll be more stories down the line that I’ll prefer, and that something mind-blowing will come along that you won’t see in any other TV show.

That’s why I’m still a Doctor Who fan.

Bit to rewind: Missy (Michelle Gomez) doing That Thing With Her Head.

RIPPER STREET Series 3 review

RIP IT UP

The Victorian thriller Ripper Street has again been getting down and dirty on BBC1. It's third series is better than ever.

I fought the law, and the law... (Image copyright: BBC)

Regular readers will know about my enthusiasm for Ripper Street, BBC1’s Victorian melodrama. For newbies, it’s based around the fictional Whitechapel cases of the decent but repressed Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), his equally conflicted deputy Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn, unrecognisable from the family-friendly Soldier, Soldier) and the decorated and often drunk American military surgeon Captain Homer Jackson (if you’ll forgive me, a ‘spirited’ performance by the great Adam Rothenberg).

With its authentically grisly look at the squalor of the Victorian era, the series was a breath of fresh air for BBC costume drama after the cosiness of such fare as Larkrise to Candleford. Ripper Street wasn’t to everyone’s taste, certainly, which is why, for a while, it looked as if it was all over after the second series. It was a relief, then, when Amazon Prime Instant Video (previously LOVEFilM) picked up the funding for a third series, which would be shown on BBC1 several months after it was available on Amazon.

Ripper Street has always been unapologetically bleak. But the third series, in the best traditions of the Victorian Gothic novel and perhaps because it premiered online, has gone to some psychologically very dark places. Reid has been reunited with the daughter he believed dead, who’s been through harrowing mental agony because of her imprisonment by a childless couple, as well as her father’s investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. ‘Long’ Susan (the glacial MyAnna Buring), Jackson’s estranged wife, drifts slowly into corruption while she paradoxically tries to improve the lot of Whitechapel’s citizens. Meanwhile, Drake is still grappling with his feelings for ex-whore turned actress Rose (Charlene McKenna), as Jackson oscillates between his surgery and a battle with the bottle. In one of the series’ best examples of Grand Guignol, he goes out drinking with a dead pig, dressed up in a hat and jacket, which he christens ‘Reid’. You wouldn’t see that on Call the Midwife.

(Image copyright: BBC)

That’s what sets Ripper Street apart from being a Victorian Deadwood, the HBO series that similarly revelled in the gutters of its era: the poetic and twisted strangeness. The most striking example, unusually in this image-obsessed age – as well as the reporter with a china ear, victims drowned in beer and a little girl who believes she’s a fairy – is Ripper Street’s dialogue. It’s ornate, gothic, even existential, a stylised Victorian idiom the actors clearly relish delivering. Delicious lines like ‘there is a stench around this man’ and ‘the clown we see cavorts everywhere but the stage’ fit Macfadyen’s simmering portrayal of an honourable man brutalised by the horrors he’s witnessed, while Flynn’s Drake (above with Reid), who looks like he belongs in a Dickensian thriller, has a neat line in earthy philosophy, with pearls of wisdom like ‘we fight monsters, we become monsters.’ A sign of the writers’ attention detail is that even the names of pubs reflect the visceral ambience; my favourite – The Lamb and Kidney.

Ripper Sreet 3’s debut online may be another reason why, this time around, the production team has played around with the series’ narrative. As well as the relationships between characters weaving satisfyingly and more prominently through each episode, they’ve tried a shock cliffhanger halfway through the season and a story told more or less in real time. The online environment is also more relaxed about violence, so, more than ever, Reid and his crew can shoot, punch and head-butt their way through the Whitechapel underworld like Old West gunmen (the composer recognised the similarity from when Ripper Street first started, with cheeky snatches of Western-style music from the title theme on). Notably, one story ended with the most violent scene shown on BBC television for years, as Reid repeatedly smashed a suspect’s head into a wooden post. Surprisingly, as far as I could see, no-one in the media even noticed it; perhaps a sign of how the social impact of terrestrial TV has dwindled.

The running story of the third series – Long Susan’s attempt to build a social utopia built on theft, dirty money and violent intimidation – sums up the whole ethos of the series, of basically decent people being contaminated by the brutal world around them. Striving for social acceptance through good works, abetted by her sinister adviser Mr Capshaw (softly-spoken John Heffernan, who easily wins the award for TV Villain of the Year), the irony is that Susan has become more of a criminal than when she ran a brothel. The disparity between public and private life is pleasingly authentic to the realm of Victorian fiction, and, significantly, still murmurs contemporaneously today.     

Ripper Street Series 3 ends tonight on BBC1. It’s a bit late to give it a go if you haven’t already, but a DVD/Blu-ray box set is imminent, so you can sink into the loquacious Victorian ambience at your leisure. Be aware, though, that the set apparently has the edited episodes shown on BBC1, rather than the longer ones seen online. 

So – Series 4, Amazon? By God’s boots, do not deny it!