Star Wars: The Last Jedi - On Balance

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Extremely spoileriffic. Spoilers all the way down. SPOILERS.

So. *deep breath* I think The Last Jedi is the Star Wars film I have waited for and will stand the test of time better than The Force Awakens.

It is immediately clear that this is not a consensus. Talking to friends after the midnight screening, first reactions were very divided: a couple of them threw up “disappointing”, an assessment I so vehemently and indignantly disagree with I am actually a-quiver, others were much more positive but cautiously so. Compare this to The Force Awakens: at least anecdotally among my peers, the response was overwhelmingly positive with a few notable outliers. So how is this so different?

Well, first of all, I will concede with pleasure that the film is completely, utterly extra. Everything is at eleven all the time. There are about three movies worth of Star Wars in there. It’s A Lot. The Last Jedi is the Schroedinger’s Cat of the franchise. It is a film full of slapstick, peppered almost constantly with humour of every stripe, and some moments that are so earnest they slip into cringe. It is also a film that casts itself out into the furthest and darkest reaches of what the saga actually is, is visually the most stunning of the series (I don’t think this one is in doubt, only Empire comes close), and the very same moments that are so earnest come hauling a huge load of character development for just about everyone involved.

I loved it. In a complicated way.

Don’t get me wrong, I think The Force Awakens is a delight. It is exactly what I wanted from the rebirth of the franchise; it is 99% fan service, and I wanted to be fan serviced (further explanation: I am a very simple fan who is always on some level pleased by the existence of new Star Wars content). The vast majority of the beats come from A New Hope, reshuffled mostly very well*. But The Last Jedi goes back and asks what the original Star Wars trilogy is about in the first place, and does it by interrogating the most ill-defined yet fundamental part of it: the Force. It’s ambitious, and obvious, and unexpected, and I love it.

The Force - as many have noted - does not really make sense. We are repeatedly told it is about balance, yet the original trilogy is very much about the triumph of one side, and not just the Light side in general, but specifically the (Return of the) Jedi, a religious order (who, in turn, are apparently charged with preserving balance and like I said, it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny). Yet here we have Luke Skywalker - the last Jedi, the Jedi - disenchanted by years of failure at trying to make old authoritarian systems work and rejecting those systems outright, which is not dissimilar to antagonist Kylo Ren, a structural choice that is as smart and complex as I want a Star Wars film in 2017 to be (something something alt right). That Kylo ends the film declaring himself Supreme Leader, and thus not breaking the cycle at all, is properly distressing (as well as a necessary levelling up in order to take on the primary villain role). That Luke ends the film accepting his failures and passing on the baton to the future - the promise of hope, the arc word of the film - feels both tonally different to the straightforward (and more epic) good vs evil victories of A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and, yes, The Force Awakens, yet entirely in keeping with the essential promise of the original series, whose great climactic moment is the redemption of Darth Vader: no-one is good or evil, Dark or Light. Everyone fails but everyone can be turned. Balance.

I will admit that a lot of my thinking about Luke has been disproportionately influenced by this meme.

It is key that Luke gives up his life in an act that seems almost futile - allowing a straggling handful of Resistance to escape one last desperate time - far more so than if he’d gone out saber to beautifully choreographed saber with Kylo Ren for real. It is part of the emphasis on small, hopeful community-orientated acts of resistance and rebellion that is repeated again and again throughout the film. It feels like it’s taken a lot of tips from Rogue One (“Rebellions are built on hope”) and it’s all the better for it. It’s the defining theme of all of those disparate character arcs: Poe Dameron’s coming of age story is couched in terms of Not Blowing Shit Up, which is both very literal and very entertaining. Finn and Rose - two characters, both played by POC, who have experienced very direct oppression under the First Order - face almost certain death but “it was worth it” because they got to put that fist through a society of war profiteers first (if this is not Star Wars at its most directly anti-capitalist then…well, it is. It is exactly that). Admiral Holdo is prepared to look like a coward and traitor if it means the ultimate survival of the movement.

The emphasis on the Resistance - what it means, and those who make it up - is timely and really a new thing for Star Wars in its mainstream canonical films, yet, again, very Star Wars-y, with the Extended Universe practically built on the premise of wanting to know more about all of these people with cool names.  In the opening sequence, many die but we really get to meet them first - Paige, Rose’s sister, most prominently but others too: Billie Lourd’s character, the female pilot with the gold helmet who I fell instantly in love with, all of Poe’s backup troupe on board the cruiser. Our acquaintance is fleeting but the storytelling gives you their faces, allows you to touch base with the same people throughout the film, feel the cost of more loss at an already dark time (it allows us to feel along with Leia in particular, for whom loss is foregrounded in this film. It means more than I can say for Leia to be the audience’s touchstone for the original trilogy, despite Luke’s elevated screen time). I don’t think Star Wars is ever concerned about making overt parallels with the real world - nor should it be - but The Last Jedi is extremely conscious of the global context in which it is being made. Hope is a spark, and if you guard it, it grows into a blaze. And, to tie two threads together, part and parcel of that guarding is being flawed and failing and living with failure rather than (in Finn’s case, literally) self-immolating at the first chance. (Holy shit, did Star Wars just make a film about self-care in the face of global politics? Maybe.)

I am actually sparing you the brunt of my Rey/Luke/Kylo Ren feels but just picture me looking at this image whispering "can't even" a lot.

In the interests of balance, of course there are things that didn’t work for me as well, and I’ll probably feel them more on the re-watch: I could take or leave the casino planet as a concept (“Prequals-y,” was my partner’s entirely correct assessment) and Benicio del Toro left me kind of cold, despite evidently having a lot of fun**. I would have liked more Phasma, but I’m also not sure what else they could have done with her narratively, other than just have her hanging around the bridge and I guess they wanted to keep her in the wings for the third act. I think some of its pacing will feel more stumbling when I watch it again - there are a lot of plates spinning and they don’t all stay in the air all the time - and even though I’m a huge fan of what it means for Kylo Ren’s character, boy did they ever not give a shit about explaining Snoke.

And on the other hand, everyone from here to Jakku is going to talk about the visuals, so let me add my voice: the light-speed warp through the Star Destroyer, Rey’s hall of mirrors, and the moment when Kylo and Rey’s fight in the throne room against the red-clad henchmen (Knights of Ren, I want to say?) went into slow motion are some of the most beautiful things you will ever see in a Star Wars film or fuck it, maybe any film. Everyone is nailing their performances - John Boyega has less to do in this one but is never anything less than insanely great to spend time with. Oscar Isaacs sells Poe’s growing up and his instinctive impulsive charm. Daisy Ridley has matured a whole lot since The Force Awakens and, despite the occasional odd line delivery (and even that I now think of as an intrinsically Rey-ish thing) radiates a pureness of heart and conflicted need to belong that is too painfully Original Trilogy Luke for words. Laura Dern pulls off the stupidly difficult job of being a one-shot character that is tonally very new to the series (and has LILAC HAIR, and I could do a whole other blog about the presentations of femininity in this film). Kelly Marie Tran is instantly right in the universe in the most Rogue One-ish role of them all and nails the tricky Ascended Fangirl thing with utter charm (cf also Ingrid Oliver as Osgood in Doctor Who).

A word though for Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I think it’s fair to say that Mark Hamill’s acting ability is a (very loving) matter of some debate. (Personally, I’ve always been pro-Hamill - he’s not amazing in the original trilogy, but he is Luke, in the way that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer but he was the best Beatle. And besides, his voice work.) But I would say that here Hamill is undeniably, properly actually good. He’s funny, he’s gruff, he’s in pain, he’s completely over the top (Do I hate or love the bit where he brushes his shoulder off after they turn the guns on him? I JUST DON’T KNOW) but he also kisses Carrie Fisher on the forehead with just the right amount of weird romantic tension and Skywalker sibs, I die. I don’t need to say how sad it is that we won’t have her back. I don’t need to say how gutting it is that this film was so obviously teeing up for Episode 9 to be The Leia Film***, in the way this one was The Luke Film and Force Awakens was The Han Film. I’ve written before about the skill of elevating the role of Princess To Be Rescued, how much we feel the loss of her, and The Last Jedi is a punch in the gut, not least because it feels like here is a woman - authoritative, a leader, snappy, hard-edged, inspirational, weary, powerful - finally and completely getting the respect she deserves. It’s hard to watch for a number of reasons.

Not least because we'll now never get to see Leia using a lightsaber.

Above all though, I keep coming back to this film’s care - care for the characters whose story it’s telling, care for nudging those stories off on different vectors. Judging by the early reaction, I think some people feel that it was careless, and it may be the case that tonally it remains unresolved in places, the light and the dark unbalanced. But the flaws are a result of ambition, not laziness, and I was thrilled, and excited, and I’ll take that every single time.


Other assorted thoughts:

- I cannot believe Rey and Kylo Ren spent the whole film Force Sexting. “Join me on the Dark Side. P.S. Send nudes.”

- My wish for the Porgs to have some kind of narrative significance and not be blatantly there to sell toys did not come true, but they were cute and good for a handful of laughs so we’ll let it slide.

- A tip of the hat to Adam Driver’s control over his own face. I particularly covet the ability to look handsome at will when the narrative demands that we sympathise, and like a kind of mad wet cat the rest of the time.

- Mark Hamill and That Bit With The Blue Milk: A Play
   Me: So that’s where the blue milk comes from
   Mark Hamill: *drinks grossly, winks at camera*
   Me: I IMMEDIATELY REGRET THIS EASTER EGG

- How to be Poe Dameron:
  - older ladies
  - constantly pleased to see people
  - just, like, appallingly handsome
  - explosions.


...
*not well done - the First Order/Resistance. Which came first? What exactly is the First Order? Who actually was Snoke anyway? Who the fuck cares, I guess, is the film’s answer.

**I think I actually felt it was too close as a performance to his role as The Collector in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is tonally a very different film. A weird sense of deja-vu, maybe.

***Prediction: Episode 9 will open with Leia’s funeral. Massive ceremonial goodbye, eulogising Leia’s in-universe importance to the Resistance and Carrie Fisher’s importance to the series. And if they do it right, she can still remain a central presence to the film - referenced as the inspiration to keep going in the rebuilding of the Resistance/fight back against the First Order that will presumably make up a lot of Ep 9. She (both shes) deserve nothing less.

#GBBO2016: Batten(burg) Down the Hatches

IT'S BACK. And this year the stakes are higher than ever, because I've managed to convince my partner to watch it from Week 1 instead of doing his usual thing of feigning disinterest while freshly made lemon drizzle cakes keep mysteriously appearing in the kitchen.

By now we have had a solid hour of getting to know this year's sacrificial twelve. I can say, with confidence, this is how this shit will go down:

Lee having dropped sweetly away like the body of a rocket falling gracefully back to earth to allow the elites in the shuttle to soar to new heights of human achievement, Val must be next. a) Her cakes are characterised by the sort of slightly shonky icing that goes unnoticed in grandma's house but when Paul Hollywood is staring down at it suddenly makes you feel a gnawing pity in the depths of your soul, and b) she defines herself by liking Ed Sheeran, and no-one who willingly submits that biog deserves an airing on national television.

Val: not long for this show but may live forever

I am spectacularly uninterested in the three remaining white men in the tent. They are a really bad representation of white men in general. Tom already believes he has his own cooking show and is providing faux-expert commentary whenever the camera comes near, which would be fine except that this is the sixth season of Bake-Off and we all know everything forever about baking now, and are watching like when you watch a football match roaring advice at world class athletes while your triple chin jiggles gently. Michael is doing a kind of sub-Blumenthal thing which resulted in him serving up green sponge that tasted like grass, baffling Mary Berry almost to the point where she looked personally hurt.  Both of them should, and will, leave in the first half of the competition. Andrew is a more interesting one as he is, on the face of it, the candidate most likely to become Telly Boyfriend of 2016 (soft of face and voice, clad in sensible flannels, awakener of maternal lusts), but has been thwarted by a) displaying no real character thus far and b) the presence of Selasi.

Ah, Selasi. Selasi Selasi Selasi. Anything I could say about Selasi has already been perfectly summed up by his entry in this Vice article, which was written BEFORE THE COMPETITION EVEN STARTED:

"Selasi is the boyfriend of the girl you're lowkey in love with and he's better than you in every single way. "Hi," Selasi says, his handshake tight but smooth, strong but finessed. "Selasi." The girl you are lowkey in love with – your housemate, which makes this all the more uncomfortable – suggests you two will get on. "Selasi plays football too!" You invite Selasi to play with you all on Wednesday nights and he absolutely, yet modestly, outplays you. You're panting out of your arse and you're pretty convinced you're having a coronary. "Good game, mate!" he says, then jogs off the field. At the bar afterwards, Selasi gets a round in for 15 people without even blinking. "Please, lads," he says, "don't worry about it. I just got a bonus at work, they're on me." You were going to walk home because you don't have the bus fare but Selasi gets you both a cab. "I'm heading back to see Kate anyway." That night, you lay on your bed and listen as, there in the living room/kitchenette combo, he cooks a curry from scratch, bakes a cake, then plays her a subtle and beautiful saxophone solo. Later, you hear giggling and immaculate, fulfilling-sounding intercourse. You realise in the middle of the night that you are now low-key in love with Selasi as well. Your life really is a mess."

100% Vice. A fucking star. Every single thing Selasi did resulted in a chorus of shallow intakes of breath from me and my partner, a nominally heterosexual man.

Selasi: will make a fortune on an app where he just comes over and holds you in the middle of the night

The result of which is that I am now hardcore shipping Selasi/Candice, saving each other's cakes week by week. I can only assume the end result of this will be something like the end of the first Hunger Games, where they make it all the way to the final and rather than allow a corrupt Mary and Paul to keep the populace divided by claiming a single winner, they vow to end their own lives, possibly by drowning in a vat of soggy bottomed Victoria sponges.

Speaking of which, I love Candice. I regretfully feel she may not last long in the tent but her lipstick is on point, so I just need her to last through to Week 5, by which point she will have enough Twitter followers to be answering make-up questions and eventually land an endorsement deal with Benefit.

So who does that leave? Louise, who I like but I am wise enough not to get too attached to, as she has Week 4 Exit written all over her. Rav, alas, I feel may also not make it past Week 6, though I feel sadder about this as the world is not done seeing Rav and his family whose names almost but don't quite rhyme or alliterate. Perhaps Rav's House is the next great British sit-com, and we will laugh and cry and grow together in equal measure. Perhaps not. (Probably not. The Daily Mail is a thing that exists in the world, after all.)

Benjamina. Benjamina evoked an instant, uncomfortable stab of empathy for me as she is clearly a perfectionist who will never quite believe her work to be good enough, while turning out beautiful, understated high quality work. She will get to the semi-final and then inexplicably lose out to someone like -

Well, someone like Kate. Let's talk about Kate, shall we? Kate, who owns a farm, which was referenced not once but several times in the programme. Kate, whose children will grown up in the outdoors and actually be both hale and hearty and you will look at them and not know what those words mean but know they are it. Kate, who lives a life of incredible prosperity despite genuinely believing that blue icing will make a mirror glaze. Kate, who will almost certainly make it to the final through sheer absence of controversy. Kate, who forages. Kate, who is nothing and yet inescapable. Kate, who will always, always be fine.

Kate: #blessed #byalawyerwhomanagedtocircumventinheritancetax

Let's talk about Kate being, for the next ten weeks, someone who I will loathe joyfully and religiously. There is always one, and they nearly always make it to the end. It is almost my favourite part of Bake Off. Now, I understand that there are those who claim the programme's appeal lies in it being a gentle tea-time treat, a celebration of the diversity and talent to be found the length and breadth of This Great Nation, those who look on the dizzying heart-stopping pains of near-cake-drops and sliced fingers and say, "Ooh, it's a bit tense, isn't it?"

To these people I say, Fools. If you only choose, you too can live your life in a barely contained state of emotional instability, constantly teetering on the edge of tweeting all in caps while stuffing handfuls of raw cake batter into your grateful mouth. If you only choose it, Bake-Off can become the bloodiest arena sport since man first stumbled out of the sea.

My hatred of Kate is a beautiful thing, a poetic thing, and I shall nourish my blood-baby with the fury of a dying sun; the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. It lives eternally, at least until October.

Also her whole swallows thing is, like, out of control twee.

I am so glad to have you back, Bake-Off. The scent of blood and icing sugar is in my nostrils once again. Morituri te salutant.

Happy Birthday, Mr Swan of Avon: An Unnecessary and Rambling Defence of William Shakespeare

It was going on four years ago that, casting about for a name for the blog I had decided to start so that I might make the option of engaging with my Doctor Who rants voluntary rather than inescapable, I settled on Jane Shakespeare.  ‘Shakespeare’ is, natch, my favourite writer, which seemed appropriate for a blog that was sure to be devoted to vital and pressing literary journalism and not at all discussions of which fictional characters I’d most like to bang, and ‘Jane’ had a pleasantly anonymous feel to it, making it suitable for my sophisticated and mysterious alter ego.

I shall allow you a moment to finish mirthfully wiping your eyes.

‘Jane’ is also, of course, a reference to my favourite novelist and, as such, she has already been made the subject of a celebratory post.  Shakespeare, though, not so much. There were my reviews of The Hollow Crown, which remains to this day my post with the highest hit count, teaching me the valuable lesson that if you want traffic to your blog, include pictures of Tom Hiddleston in a sauna (I’d love it if there was just an insatiable hunger for over-enthusiastic dissection of televised Shakespeare but I am, occasionally, a realist).  I’ve started Shakespeare-centric posts a couple of times – my top ten characters, the five greatest performances I’ve seen, and so on and so forth.  Shakespeare has featured in several other posts.  But for one reason or another, having his own has never quite happened.  Until now. The man turns 450 this year and by god, I’m going to acknowledge it.

Let’s be clear: much of the 450 celebrations are tourism.  Shakespeare  the ‘national poet’ is an export, a cartoon guy in a ruff with a bald head and maybe he’s like holding a skull or something because that’s from one of the plays right? No snobbery or denigration is intended here (well, not much) because Stratford as a town basically runs off of Shakespeare tourism, despite the irony that he spent much of his life trying to objectively not be in Stratford.  Shakespeare also gets caught up in nationalism debates a lot – when Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (essentially a treatise on the whole notion of Englishness) was in the theatres, one of the most frequent name-drops in reviews was Shakespeare, with the play being received as a kind of mixture of Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (like, so many feelings about that but the margin being too narrow for my purposes etc etc). Keats has a right old fanboy squee about the “Chief Poet!” and his work: “The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (but I can’t stay mad at Keats for long, bless him).  It’s natural, in a way – there is no more famous writer in the English language, no other playwright who has their own company, their own theatre, their own place on every syllabus at every age. Shakespeare is inextricably part of the make-up, the DNA of Britain – if you don’t believe me, then Hugh Grant says it in Love Actually too (but frankly I’m quite offended that you believe Hugh Grant over me, especially in Love Actually).

But. But. But. That is not a good enough reason to make such a song and dance about it.  Of course it isn’t. Tradition on its own never is. And tradition is not why every single person ever should be acquainted with Shakespeare in some way.  Because I do believe that, I really do.  The first thing to say here is that I’m not saying it should be compulsory in schools (although I think it already is). Schools, for the most part, make kids hate Shakespeare. And no wonder. I get bored reading it sometimes and he is my very favourite playwright ever. But it should be seen and it should be heard and it should be spoken and it should be talked about.  That’s what he wrote it for – entertainment.  To make people laugh and cry and throw up in their mouths a little bit (Titus Andronicus). It’s silly enough to make stupid jokes and high school comedy adaptations of (not an insult, 10 Things I Hate About You was perhaps the peak of artistic endeavour in the early 2000s), and it’s serious enough to bring hope and solace to those in need (personal experience applies but also the Robben Island Bible and so many, many other instances).  I like arguing, and most Shakespeare plays could be argued about forever.  It’s a natural partnership, you might say.

But one of the most common complaints I hear about Shakespeare is that he’s irrelevant.  Who cares what a Dead White Guy has to say about stuff four hundred odd years ago?  And yes, it bothers me sometimes that as both a feminist and a literary person, my favourite writers are pretty much all of the Dead White Male persuasion (notable exceptions included).  I couldn’t say why but early on in my education, Shakespeare, Keats and Austen formed a triumvirate that retains its empire over my heart to this day.  One thing they have in common is that they’re all writers who are passionately misunderstood by their most passionate fans.* Allow me to put on my hipster glasses for a moment.  Keats is thrillingly romantic but he’s first and foremost Romantic, in a small, angry, dying man kind of way.  Austen gives her characters happy endings but I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to her at a dinner party (actually I totes would, if only because I’d feel more out of the line of fire there than opposite her, and we could bitch behind our fans). Shakespeare...yeah. I say Shakespeare is misunderstood by his fans, because I think to some extent he’s misunderstood by everybody.  Misunderstood isn’t even the right word really – ungraspable would be a better adjective, or unknowable, or subversive. Contemporary accounts of the man himself are rare, and those that exist aren’t always reliable, but they all seem to say the same thing: a quiet man, an observer. From his will, we know he wasn’t especially generous – not so much the second best bed furore, but the fact that his bequeathments to the Stratford poor are negligible compared to what other writers of similar financial status left behind. Then there’s also the fact that, as mentioned, he skipped town to London pretty quickly after his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway (although again, debate continues over how loving or unloving this marriage was).

From very little evidence and completely unscientific instinct, the picture painted seems to me more writer than man, someone not entirely engaged in the business of living his own life and much more concerned with recording others. But he was a man, and that – I think – is where we go so wrong.  Milton, as a young poet, wrote a sonnet about reading Shakespeare and being helplessly paralysed in the wake of it – what would be the point of writing, when you knew you would never be as good? And that was from the guy who wrote Paradise Lost. But Shakespeare was just a man, and he was a lucky one – he lived at a time when theatre was the dominant form of entertainment, and a form of entertainment that was about hearing, about language, which he was, y’know, pretty good at. The vocabulary of English as a whole was rapidly expanding, he lived through the turn of a century and a crisis of succession, not to mention the aftermath of a hundred or so years of religious wrangling, and the end of a dynasty. It’s all so much more complicated than I can ever fully explain, but something shifted during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he was the right man in the right place at the right time.  Jonson famously wrote that he was “not of an age but for all time” – true, but it’s the first bit that we tend to forget about. He was completely of his age, and it was the age that he happened to belong to that allowed him to be ‘of all time’.

All this means – confusingly, as someone who obviously loves Shakespeare a lot – that I think we could stand to knock him off the pedestal a little.  Sometimes as a director I get asked why I keep doing Shakespeare plays (of the eleven full length plays I have directed, seven are Shakespeare plays, and that’s not counting workshops) and the answer is always the same: within the Complete Works is every story I could ever want to tell. I believe that it is directors, rather than writers, who are the descendants of storytellers, travelling bards – we don’t make up our own stories, but we take ones that already exist and embellish, alter, bring elements in and out of focus.  Basically, if a play has too many stage directions, I go “nope” and get out the Complete Works again because those plays are robust. They withstand a lot of loving dicking about. Age shall not wither them etc. They don’t endure because Shakespeare is some mysterious dude up on a monument, but because they’re low down and dirty plays, quick and living and breathing and painful. Bad Shakespeare happens when people approach with too much reverence – of course, it also happens when people approach without actually having a single clue about the play they’re doing, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. But at least those disasters tend to be fascinating car crashes that you can’t look away from – the greatest sin, born of too much veneration, is to make it boring.  You can do kind of anything with these plays.  I’m not saying every idea is gold but theoretically, you can.

And to purists who insist that Shakespeare should be performed in tights and ruffs, or have all male casts because ‘original practice’ (yet curiously displaying a casual disregard for ‘original practice’ in, oh, every other area of the production, Propellor, I mean you and your huge amount of Arts Council funding**), to you I say this: he’s been dead for four hundred years. He doesn’t care.  In fact, what with the way Renaissance playwrights rewrote each others’ work to keep it up to date, he’d probably just shrug and be all, “Whatevs, forsooth” if you told him you were relocating A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a secondary school and replacing the fairy music with Miley Cyrus.*** And while ‘original practice’ is actually very interesting and can provide hugely valuable insights into the way the plays work (for example, knowing that The Winter’s Tale was written for the Blackfriars indoor theatre tells you a lot about why the pacing of it is so much statelier and more intimate than, say, Henry V which is a Globe play and involves lots of rushing about to cover all the entrances and exits), that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly reproduce those practices for an audience that has changed a lot in the four intervening centuries.  The fact is, these plays can and do adapt beautifully because they are about people, and people do not change all that much, whether they are in medieval Verona or 1920s Berlin or present day Afghanistan (also Will was not exactly historically accurate himself, cf chiming clocks in Ancient Rome). Furthermore, it is people who are going to see your play, and you have a duty to share your story with them because selfish theatre that doesn’t care about its audience is just no good to anyone, and I could be doing stuff with your funding.

The exception to all of this is that I am an absolute devotee to understanding iambic pentameter and verse – but Picasso did not jump straight in with the eyes on the sides of heads, he learnt how to draw from life first.  It astonishes me the number of Shakespeare productions I see where the director has jumped straight to the concept and ignored the fundamentals of actually speaking the goddamn script – and that, really, is what makes a great production.  One of the best I’ve seen was Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It at the Globe.  I don’t even like As You Like It (ha).  Plus, it was in period dress.  But every single moment was clear and golden and the play just swept you along and Rosalind was a sexy butch lesbian type and Orlando looked like a goddamn rock star and Celia and Oliver**** were real, proper characters, and gah, my heart.  Verse is also something that I hear a lot of uncertainty about.  I won’t lie, it takes some getting used to, and there are rules to it that take some time to learn – but once you do, it unlocks a whole new, extraordinary level of meaning and, from a dramatic point of view, basically tells you how to do the play. Another young director once said to me that she would find Shakespeare too difficult to direct because it was this unbreachable, alien fortress of a thing– I wanted to shout, “No! I’m a fraud! It’s so easy! It’s the easiest thing in the world! The director of every Shakespeare play is Shakespeare! You just have to learn how to listen!” But I did not. But I wish I had. Because you should know that understanding it has absolutely nothing to do with schooling and everything to do with listening and instinct. Anyway.

In the end, the point I wish to make is this.  To end where I began, the episode of Doctor Who that has Shakespeare in it describes him as “the most human human”.  I can’t really get much closer than that.  He is the least Dead, White or Male of any of the DWMs I know and love – his perspective, that quiet, observer’s perspective, is always that of the outsider.  His plays are full of people trying to get in, always excluded from something, no matter what their social status.  His characters are creatures of want, of desire, and their happiness is predicated on getting that thing – I’m not sure Hamlet is a tragedy, and I’m not sure All’s Well That Ends Well is a comedy (ok, well, it’s definitely not a comedy, but I’m not going to get into why ‘problem play’ is too easy a cop-out now).  He takes the part of the dispossessed, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – there is compassion and sorrow running through and through the veins of Shakespeare, not least in the plays that take place in crappy universes where everything is terrible always (King Lear, Troilus and Cressida). That’s why he’s relevant, that’s why he goes on.  Not always, of course, there are areas that are hugely problematic – Coriolanus’ whole “give political power to the poor? That is ridiculous” stance, the minefield that is the gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew*****, the casual racism of The Merchant of Venice’s deceptively awesome heroine Portia, and so on and so forth forever. But that’s part of the deal. That’s the package of being human, and no production will ever make a definitive discovery on any of this.

I want to direct Shakespeare because, as I said, travelling storyteller. There is not just one Hamlet to tell, there are as many Hamlets as there are actors. I have at least three different ways of doing King Lear, and everything I’ve already directed only makes me want to do it again. It will never stop being new to me, which is exciting and beneficently humbling. With other writers I may direct one of their plays and feel it has been exorcised from me – with Shakespeare it’s just a Zen matter of waiting for the wheel to come full circle, and feeling out when the time is right for a particular story in a particular way.  I am sceptical of the books and talks and teachers who say, “The thing you need to know about Richard III is...” because if you are a sufficiently good storyteller, I believe that in the end the only manual you need is the text itself. By being you, an individual reading it at your place in your time, it becomes a new play again – perhaps this is true of any good writer, but it is Shakespeare, who finds time for every walk of life and every strain of feeling, who lends himself to it most.

And just to prove that I learn from past experience:

You’re welcome.

*Also in this category: Byron.  I’m told that Byron conventions are full of men who think they are Byron, and women who want to go back in time and sleep with Byron, to which I say, ladies, please. Think of the syphilis. Yes, he was a rake and a cad and a brooding, wandering, tortured soul but he was also an absolutely on the ball, incisive and keenly-minded genius and his greatest work is basically a sex tour of Europe, in rhyme.

**I do know Propeller are not in any way purists, and I really enjoy their productions but also I cannot really get on board with the idea of a company being funded to take jobs away from women, especially when there are so few in the first place.

***Not actually being facetious, I would probably enjoy this production a lot.

****Massively helped by Oliver being played by Jamie Parker, who can get it. More Jamie Parker doing Shakespeare, for it is what the people want.

*****I will never stop saying this: it is not a sparky tale of two social misfits playing a sexy sex game, it is a tale of a woman being systematically abused until she gives up her desire to speak her own thoughts, at which point she is rewarded with the opportunity to speak her husband’s thoughts. However, 10 Things I Hate About You will never not be excellent, so maybe let’s all just watch that instead.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 1: Thor: The Dark World

Blimey, it's been a while, eh?  Not to worry, adulthood hasn't got me yet.  If you're wondering why I've decided to title this three-part blog post* with a variant on 2013's strangest yet most persistent meme, it's because these three works of media degraded my ability to think in full sentences to about that level.  Really.

...

Thor: The Dark World: Review: Basically I'm Reviewing Loki: Just Loki: Where Do I Stop Putting Colons

Ok. So. I'm going to preface this review by saying that when I saw the film, I was suffering under the combination of having just said farewell to a supremely lovely cast of actors on an excellent production I'd been working on for a few months, and that farewell came in the form of excessive drinking and very little sleep, so my emotions were already dancing a merry dance all over my nervous system. The result of this was that when the film finished, my immediate instinct was to go and light up a cigarette that can only be described as post-coital. I collapsed, limbs splayed in my cinema seat, hyperventilating with the sheer force of ALL MY FUCKING FEELINGS.

And then I snapped out of it and remembered the first half of the film. Because the first half of the film is, frankly, dull as fuck. It starts ok (gratuitous crotch shot of Loki) and then just kind of stops (very little Loki until halfway through and then it's All Loki All The Time).  And for once in my life, I'm not just being a fangirl (I said not just being a fangirl). Basically, there's not enough Loki to make this film deliver on its promises. It was marketed as 'Thor must ask Loki for help, angst ensues' and that's just not really what it is. Tom Hiddleston has been walking the earth like the Wandering Jew with cheekbones, to promote a film that he's barely in.

To be honest with you, I don't even remember that much of the first half (something about Christopher Eccleston's career not quite panning how he expected) and awkward segues into comic interludes, mostly courtesy of Kat Dennings as Darcy, though even her infallible ability to be deadpan and awesome seems strained in the odd, tired energy of the events. There's also a cameo appearance from Chris O'Dowd, going on a date with Natalie Portman and let's all back the fuck up and read that again because CHRIS O'DOWD WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON A DATE WITH NATALIE PORTMAN GET BACK TO THE BASEMENT. So there are more jokes than the first film but none of the effortless delight of, say, Thor walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse. In fact, there are actually too many jokes to sit comfortably with the amped-up grit factor and the tone lurches drunkenly all over the place from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again via a rainbow bridge**.

Part of this is the criminally under explored villain, when the film can actually decide who the main antagonist is - Malekith or Loki.  If the rumours are true that a bunch of Malekith's stuff was bumped from the film to make way for Loki, then it raises the horrifying possibility that Tom Hiddleston's original role in the film was confined to maybe just one eyebrow raise and that is a world that I want no part in.  I am disappointed in the disservice done to both Chris Ecclestone and his character, not least because when they announced him I spent two days in a sort of glee-coma unable to say anything except repeat, "Malekith the Accursed.  Dark elf.  Christopher Ecclestone." But things were always going to be difficult post-Avengers. The first Thor had the advantage of being largely encapsulated in its own universe, the action confined to the remote realms of Asgard and New Mexico. Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe's internal public is aware of superheroes, the threat level has to be very finely judged for solo outings because otherwise just, like, call the other Avengers, y'know? And frankly, all the known universes collapsing in Greenwich kind of seems like at least an equivalent level of threat to a leather clad sociopath letting aliens on flying bikes into New York. But whatever, maybe Bruce Banner was on holiday. 

And I suppose things were also always going to be difficult in terms of how to write Loki. After going gloriously and hammily full villain in The Avengers, giving him any kind of arc must necessitate a little backtracking - bringing him home is a start (and let's not forget the moment in The Avengers when Thor tells him he can stop and come home and goddamit it, you can see in his eyes that that would actually maybe be really nice were it not for the whole attempted genocide and mass murder blips) but in The Dark World, it's just done in far too broad brush strokes. This is where the lack of Loki becomes problematic. There's not enough time to make this film what it deserves to be, which is Thor-and-Loki-go-to-family-counselling. I'm not quite sure that the MCU appreciates what it has in Hemsworth and Hiddleston, which is a few dozen gallons of heartbreak and an effortless chemistry. This film feels like it was written for lesser actors, ironed out into Hero and Villain, and yet the Brodinsons of Sassgard*** run away with every scene they're given (in Loki's case, cackling). Hiddleston's least subtle character elicits, weirdly, his most subtle performance,**** doing more acting with his eyes in one scene than there is in the rest of the film combined, and Hemsworth leads the film with lovely sincerity, retaining the streak of self-effacing humour brought out in The Avengers (I mean, thank all the Nordic gods, because the lack thereof in the first film was what sent me running into Loki's mad arms in the first place).

The fact is, the greatest superpower any of these films possess is humanity - that's what gives us the hook to keep us coming back, and is also why Superman movies are doomed to fail in comparison.  Tony Stark has his inner demons, Bruce Banner has his rage issues, Steve Rogers is a good man in a bewilderingly and increasingly complicated world, and Thor has a dysfunctional family. It's even ironic, maybe, that the most ridiculous Avenger (space-god-thing-with-science-magic) has the most affecting and, dare I say it, relatable backstory. Not so much with the frost giants, obviously, but the fuck-up sibling and the inability to ever really give up on family when they're threatening to take over the world that your signifiant other lives on, well, we've all been there.

Or maybe at this point Hiddleston's popularity with the fan base is just becoming a hindrance to writing a well balanced story.  I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to love Loki. The right way is to appreciate him for the magnificent bastard he is, in which case you probably like Avengers Loki best, slasher smile, death metal hair, eye-ripping and everything. And there's the wrong way, which is to watch him whilst silently keening "MY BABY YOU JUST NEED A HUG", in which case you probably like him best in the first film, all wobbly bottom lip and palpable and justified sense of betrayal. (I'm somewhere in between the two, since you ask, feeling somewhat relieved at the last second reveal of him finally sitting on the throne of Asgard, with a moment of "oh thank god, that's my clever little psychopath", but far far too many moments of "JUST LET YOUR RIPPLING BLOND BROTHER SAVE YOU WITH HIS LOVE" for me to be entirely comfortable with myself. It is not, after all, a million miles away from "he just gets tense when he's trying to usurp a throne, he loves me really!")

This film was stuck between the two, flirting with both sides enough to be really really frustrating but not nearly enough to be satisfying. What we want, I suspect, is for Loki to be - like any good trickster figure - consistently and ambiguously using his emotions for his own gain. Like Sherlock. Or Artemis Fowl. Or - Loki's classical ancestor - Edmund in King Lear. We want a conman who is always ultimately up to something but in the moments when he displays vulnerability, left wondering whether it was all an act or possibly, maybe just a little bit sincere. We were almost there with this film. His 'death' is a particularly egregious example - the redemption, the regret, it should have been a Type 2 Loki fan's wet dream (and also how I was predicting they would write him out of the franchise). But there just wasn't time to process it. The quick cut to the gags about Chris O'Dowd and Thor hanging his hammer on the coat rack undermined it so quickly that there was no way he was really dead. Similarly, perhaps showing Loki's lonely displays of grief over Frigga's death (Frigga, my thoughts in brief: wow someone had some awesome in their coffee this morning, oh wait look she's dead in order to further the character development of the male protagonists, colour me shocked) would have made the later bluff too obvious, but it was obvious anyway because this film took a fond farewell of subtlety in the opening credits, so lingering just a little bit longer on him blowing stuff up with his mind would have been an infinitely more satisfying exploration of character.  That, in the end, was the core disappointment - everything was undercut so swiftly that you hardly knew how to feel about any of it (ambiguity is great, confusion is not). We're invested in these characters now, and not for the big explosions. Iron Man 3 was a darkly sincere look at the individual, not the costume. The Thor story should be an obvious contender for this type of treatment and yet became something so much less than the sum of its parts.

Look, it's not all bad. It was worth the ticket price for Hemsworth and Hiddleston alone, frankly. From the moment they Reservoir Dogs their way down the halls of Asgard, through the chase on the spaceship ("Well don't hit it, just press it gently." "I AM PRESSING IT GENTLY.") to Loki's deadpan "Ta-da" upon emerging into Vanaheim, the central section of the film is a pure joy. And, crucially, it's set us up for a Thor 3 in which the action is Thor-Loki centric, and me being the eternal optimist that I am, I'm going to hope for all the bickering, sparring, betrayal, game playing, double bluffs and tentative reconciliations we were promised this time. And after all, Loki essentially won this one. I can't really hate that. So until then I'm going to wait for the DVD and play a specific twenty minutes of it nonstop until my laptop breaks (cf also: War Horse) or Gotterdamerung occurs.  Whichever happens first.


*THREE PARTS.  Seriously though.
**A mysterious repaired rainbow bridge - how? It was a massive deal that Thor couldn't go and see Natalie Portman at the end of the first film and there was a shoehorned-in mumble about dark energy in The Avengers and now it sort of turns out that, basically, Asgard engineers totally could have done it, no problem, but the thing is, like, union stuff, and also they'll need to get some parts in.
***Kudos for this outstanding piece of wordplay goes to my colleague, Kate. Good writers imitate, great writers steal etc etc.
****No seriously.  Go and watch his other stuff and tell me he doesn't bring unnecessary melodrama to more conventionally written roles.  Then watch Thor again and tell me why and how he's finding deft emotional complexity in Giggling Space Despot.

In Which a Generation of Viewers Learn Never to Trust GRR Martin: 'The Rains of Castamere' (Game of Thrones) Review

Game of Thrones Series 3, Episode 9: The Rains of Castamere

Have you stopped crying yet? Have you? Well I don't care, Casual Viewer, because I READ THE BOOKS.  Do you know what that means? Do you? It means I WENT THROUGH ALL OF THAT TWICE.

The climactic events of this week's episode are probably the most major of the spoilers I have been determinedly holding back while writing this blog, although Jaime losing his hand was a close runner up (don't worry, there are more - so many more - to come, presumably next season).  There have been many occasions on which a friend who either watches the show only or hasn't caught up with the books instigates a "So who do you think is going to win?" type conversation with me, wittering on happily about how Robb is totally going to serve the Lannisters their gilded asses on a plate and I am sat silently, bottom lip a-quivering, holding in the words, "NO HE WON'T BECAUSE HE'S DEAD FOR GOD'S SAKE THEY'RE ALL DEAD."  But th- th- that's Westeros, folks.  

Oh, it's all very clever really.  It works because we think we understand the rules of fiction; today's audience are more trope-literate than ever.  After the shock death of Ned at the end of Series/Book 1, we think we know the rules of this game: sure, the 'anyone can die' atmosphere has been established but we also see now how it's a much bigger and longer story than one that can be held by a single protagonist.  And then we make that mistake again.  We think we know who we're following - it is the War of Five Kings, after all (although the show took the excellent option of sidelining the Greyjoys as early as possible*).  It's Joffrey and the Lannister fen v. frowny Stannis v. hot shit Robb Stark (dead gay Renly having been comprehensively deaded and, as I said, the Greyjoys having been apparently sent to a farm), right? And on a fictional level, we understand the rules of this universe, i.e. some kind of vague pseudo-medieval bullshit, plus tits.  We know that there are codes of honour that some choose to uphold and some don't and it is that choice that the whole show revolves around.  Ned dies because he's honourable and Joffrey isn't.  The Red Wedding is so very clever because of who it is making the choice to defy those rules, i.e. the Freys.  The pretext is a wedding, the righting of a wrong because Robb broke his vow.  The whole occasion is designed, apparently, to restore some of those codes.  And the Freys - unpleasant, certainly, and sadly not nearly as pretty as the rest of Westeros** but not evil, right? Just self-important.  Just a bit "ooh we've got these big over-compensating towers that you need to get past for your war".  I mean, they're not Lannisters.  Wrongity wrong wrong wrong.  

And that's what makes the Red Wedding one of the most shocking events in a book and television series that revels in shocking events: it's done out of sheer pettiness - because Walder Frey was going to have to settle for the uncle of a king instead of a king.  And, for my money, the show got it mostly right.  The payoff, interestingly, didn't come until Catelyn's death in the very last scene; for a horrible, underwhelming moment, I thought they were going to leave it with Robb dropping to the floor covered in arrows and not show us the rest.  In a series known for its violence, this was certainly extravagant with the old Kensington Gore, but it was right to be so: a lesser show might have 'artistically' panned away, tried to give its characters some dignity in their dying moments.  Fortunately, the Game of Thrones team understand that the horror in this case comes precisely from that lack of dignity, the naked brutality of Catelyn slashing the throat of an innocent woman before exploding into a gushy red fountain herself.  I mean, Jesus Christ on a dragon, the massacre was commenced by stabbing a pregnant woman in her stomach.  And given the reworking and focus that's been given to Robb's Non-Canonical Wife, it felt completely...well, not appropriate, but you know.  Appropriately awful.  And unexpected - in the book, Robb's Canonical Wife is not present at the wedding and has currently vanished off to some unknown fate (i.e. I can't remember what happened to her).

The obvious parallel is with Ned's death way back in Series 1 (and how did we not see that coming when, y'know, Sean Bean).  Back then, I was like you, Casual Viewer.  After Series 1 I decided to read the books so television could never hurt me like that again.  Anyway, as well as milking the obvious Stark-dies-because-honour-goddammit connection, there was also all of that "Don't you want to teach little Ned Stark to ride?" stuff and, for fuck's sake HBO, do you ever maybe think about pulling your punches? Cruel.  The final emotional KO was Roose Bolton delivering the killing stab to a somehow-still-standing-despite-resemblance-to-a-secretary-bird (look it up) Robb Stark, echoing the moment when Littlefinger turned on Ned way back when hope was still alive, delivering him to his Lannister-y fate.  Very well done to all involved.

Having said that, it's a difficult episode to evaluate on its own merits.  I spent the whole thing knowing what was about to happen and I suspect that if I hadn't, I would have thought it was dragging a bit.  Danaerys seemed out of a place in an episode that should have been Stark-centric and was presumably only in there as misdirection so that the events of the Red Wedding came completely out of left field.  I was right about Ser Jorah's reactions to Daario though; for every "Khaleesi before personal pride" lecture he gives Ser Barriston, he definitely picks the petals off a daisy going, "Khaleesi loves me, Khaleesi loves me not".  Part of the problem is that Iain Glen is much more sympathetic than the character is probably supposed to be and I don't think I'm alone in kind of rooting for him.  Still, Dany's on a high as she adds a new city to her ever-growing collective (please don't ask me which one though, I'm so confused about everything east of Westeros, I've given up trying), in welcome contrast to, well, everyone else this week.

Elsewhere, Jon Snow's Great Wildling Adventure came to an end as he chose to reveal himself rather than kill an innocent man, proving yet again that Starks are absolute darlings and also total fucking idiots.  As with Robb and his Late Non-Canonical Wife, the Jon/Ygritte storyline has been mixed, I think, without the extensive passing of time that you get in the book (it's one of my favourite storylines in the series and thus there is a bit of readership bias here), allowing you to see the slow confusion of Jon's once black-and-white morals.  It's all been a bit quick, really, and not helped by the fact that Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie are right poshos in real life and the catchphrase heavy scenes aren't helping the feeling that they vaguely heard someone from Yorkshire talking once and just working-classed it up a bit (I won't miss having to hear "Jon Sneeeeeuw" dragged over far too many syllables ever again).  Perhaps that's why Ygritte's silent half-furious half-soulful gaze as Jon Snow hauled ass back to the Night's Watch was by far the most touching their relationship has ever been.  And a sad farewell to Mackenzie Crooke, who also kicked it in this episode, and was sadly underused while he was alive.  Although before he died, he did deposit his soul in that of his pet bird, so hopefully next season will yield us Mackenzie Crooke in a giant bird outfit when they run out of money after all the CGI dragons.

Some surprisingly touching stuff coming from Bran's storyline as well.  Bran has an easy to ignore storyline, I find, given that it's the most overtly Lord of the Rings-y (good guys on magical quest, much walking and hiding from bad people).  Not only does Natalia Tena continue to be consistently excellent as Osha, we can add Art Parkinson as Rickon to the show's ever-explanding list of brilliant child actors.  His tearful insistence that he needed to take care of Bran was the moment of the episode that brought me closest to welling up, rather than the bloody events further south.  Saddest of all, Rickon and Osha are now departing from the merry jaunt across the Wall, leaving us only with Brandon "Did I mention I can't walk today?" Stark, Jojen "Jailbait" Reed, Meera "This Show Has One Too Many Badasses" Reed and Hodor "Hodor"Hodor.  We may not see Osha and Rickon again for a while, so valar dohaeris and all that and I really bloody hope you're the Stark that survives, Rickon.

Speaking of child actors, though, Maisie Williams is taking everyone to school.  It's largely down to her performance that she's become the kind of unofficial mascot/protagonist of the show; the best comment that cropped up on my Facebook feed regarding the episode was, "I hope that little transvestite girl kills the Jesus out of everyone." As do we all, Arya, as do we all.  But for all that she's popular because we like the idea of a little kid being unflinching and killing people and whatnot (god, we are terrible people), this episode very much showed us how (mercifully) far Arya has to go before she becomes hardened to it, still prizing life more dearly than the majority of Westeros' population.  But also not afraid to hit an old man round the head with a branch because he wakes up at the wrong time.  That's why we love Arya.  And after her witnessing of and disappearance from the Red Wedding, her storyline's only just getting good.

After their absence from, yet crucial part in, this week's episode, I'm guessing things'll be a little more Lannister-heavy next week for the series finale.  Aside from Sansa getting the news, I don't want to make any guesses about what they'll wheel out and what they'll keep in the bag for next season because a) I genuinely don't know at this point, I thought they were going to end Series 3 with the Red Wedding in the finale and b) it would be hilariously spoileriffic and I'd rather not be chased down by angry Casual Viewers who have acquired too many ideas from watching Game of Thrones.  Just give me some Brienne and Jaime to see me through to next year.  Curse you, show, and curse all the emotions you have forced into my bitter, dead heart.

*Obligatory, "NO-ONE CARES ABOUT THE GREYJOYS."

*Mad props to my boy Tom Brooke stabbing a pregnant woman in the stomach though.  As Lothar Frey.  Not just as Tom Brooke.  That would be bad.

True Romance: 'The Name of the Doctor' (Doctor Who) and 'Second Sons' (Game of Thrones) Reviews

Author's Note: As you can probably tell, I wrote my Doctor Who review immediately after seeing the episode (for the third time).  Game of Thrones, on the other hand, has taken me a week to get round to watching, hence the lateness of this review.

Doctor Who Series 7, Part 2, Episode 7: The Name of the Doctor

Oh Stephen.  I know I say this every year but I swear, I'll never doubt you again.  It was only when my brain had stopped playing the word "WHAT" on a loop and I'd drunk a substantial amount at a Eurovision party that I realised what a truly fantastic episode this was.

I'll admit, a large part of this conclusion came from the cessation of my hyperventilating-y thoughts of OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU TAKING MATT SMITH AWAY FROM ME because, rationally, let's look at the facts: a) We know he's in the 50th anniversary special and b) I don't really believe John Hurt is going to take over full-time as Doctor Number Twelve.  There was that mention of the Valeyard early on in the episode that seems like a great big honking clue: for those unaware, the Valeyard was (in Old Who) the Doctor's final regeneration gone all evil and introspective, basically.  Take that coupled with the closing dialogue about Hurt "not acting in the name of the Doctor", factor in the show's propensity for wordplay/riddles/literal language and it seems to me that, for all the talk of the 50th anniversary marking Matt Smith's regeneration, it could be just as much about resisting a regeneration.  For bonus evidence, the BBC released an interview of Tennant and Smith (together at last) in which Smith said that 10 and 11 seemed to get on pretty okay but there was Someone They Weren't Allowed To Talk About who was more bemused/annoyed by the two of them - given that Hurt was announced to be in the anniversary show months ago, I bet this is who they're talking about and he's sort of the Doctor but not.  Because he's the evil Valeyard guy.*

Although then again, I've just thought back to that "Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor" caption and have immediately doubted all of this. I mean, the Doctor lies though, right?  Let's move on before I devolve back into sobbing "please don't take away Matt Smith" again.**

Speaking of sobbing, I did.  I was all tarted up to dash off to the aforementioned Eurovision party the minute it finished and it was a good twenty minutes before I actually left the house because I was completely redoing my eye make-up.  River River River.  That was some pretty fucking glorious River.  Anyone who wants to disagree, let's take this outside, because that's my River - not clingy and dress size-y and smug, but brave and calm and brilliant.  The moment where the Doctor caught her hand and said "You're always here to me" literally made me drop my fork and neglect my delicious takeaway like a hilarious romcom moment.  We've had so much of the Doctor being superior to River, brushing her off, ignoring her etc etc that she was in danger of becoming just a running joke (Moffat thinks wives are annoying, no-one is surprised) - and it looked like that was how it was going for the first half of the episode too - so that whole dialogue ("I thought it would be too painful" "I think I could have coped" "For me") was possibly one of my favourite things this show has ever done.  All we wanted (me and my pal River) was some acknowledgement that she was in some way different to every other companion that heads through those doors, and we got it.  Sorry Amy, but I'm awarding the 'Girl Who Waited' badge to your daughter.  If that was River's final goodbye - and I suspect it was written so that Alex Kingston could or could not come back as the show demanded - it was a bloody good one.  Compliments all round.

Not least to the actors.  At least forty percent of my DON'T LEAVE ME MATT SMITH woe wasn't down to the frankly inexplicable level of attractiveness he manages to achieve on a weekly basis (this week's new Doctor-fetish: blindfolds) but to the fact that, unlike the rest of the show, he just gets better and better and better.  I mentioned a few weeks ago how he's undeniably a different Doctor to the one who shouted at baked beans that we started with; that came to beautiful fruition here with Smith skipping electrically along the spectrum from comedy to tragedy, and nailing it all the way.  He's so good I'm not even going to make a joke about wishing he would nail something else as well ifyouknowwhatImean.  There's not much I can say about his performance that I haven't said before, except that I am so so so looking forward to seeing how 10 and 11 interact, since 10's whole schtick was 'bouncy yuppy' and 11's whole schtick is kind of 'ancient old man fragility with the face of a twelve year old'.  I turn instead to the supporting cast: Vastra, Jenny and Strax once again prove themselves to be as able a TARDIS family as any ragtag bunch of misfits from the RTD era, and bring a substantial amount of human drama to the proceedings (which is impressive, considering that they're two-thirds cold-blooded). I even welled up a little when I thought Jenny was dead (which would have been a cruelly Whedon-esque move) and her "I'm so sorry, I think I've just been murdered" was chilling and heart-breaking in perfect measure.  Similarly, Strax and Vastra's "The heart is a simple thing", "I have not found it to be so"got me right in the feels - which only begs the question: if you can write like this, Moffat (see also above mention of Doctor/River dialogue), then why don't you, like, all the time?  It certainly silenced my inner Moffat-can't-do-characters demons.

And speaking of characters, this leads us, of course, to Clara, who deserves a special paragraph all of her own.  I was very satisfied with the resolution to the Clara mystery: the whole 'Impossible Girl' thing always seemed like a bit of a red herring.  Far more interesting were the moments when she was confirmed to be 'ordinary' - because that's really what companions are for, in the end, is to celebrate the capacity of the ordinary and everyday for heroism. My prediction was something along the lines of "Clara is just a normal girl being copied across space and time and ultimately the evidence will be all there in the TARDIS" and you know what? It kind of was.  Just, y'know, the burnt out shell of the future TARDIS.  But they were in it.  Oh shut up, I'm going to take that one, and there's nothing you can do about it.  The episode also seemed to clear up the hazy Clara-Doctor dynamic somewhat (maybe it was all that River in the air) with him saving her in a desperately parental way.  Hopefully now Jenna Louise Coleman can get her teeth into something with a bit more in the way of defined personality, because she bloody deserves to.

If I had to have a complaint it would be the villains, such as they were.  The Whispermen were very reminiscent of one of my favourite Buffy episodes/villains, the Gentlemen from 'Hush', complete with creepy nursery rhyme - so much so that it strikes me that writers of this show really need to stop presuming that the Atlantic Ocean magically stops the fans from being aware of Joss Whedon.  I felt like they didn't really get much of an outing, being an obvious red herring to deflect marketing attention away from THAT ENDING but maybe they'll pop up again in future with some extra creepy powers?  Let's hope so, it has been a while since we've had a vintage Moffat take-a-standard-fear-make-it-so-you'll-never-sleep-again villain.  The Great Intelligence was ultimately a bit of a letdown, really.  Contrary to my usual opinion about Doctor Who doing over-laboured story arcs (unfavourable, for those in doubt) I sort of felt he hadn't been signposted enough throughout the series, at least not enough for a Big Bad.  Still, ultimately none of it was really about that, was it? The greatest villain on the show, as always, is the Doctor himself.  Oh I am excite, please to make it November soonest.

So I'm calling it: best series finale of the Moffat era.  It didn't quite have the razzle-dazzle/ preposterousness self-regard of Series 6 mid-series finisher A Good Man Goes to War, but it didn't need it: I'm enjoying this quieter, more self-contained mode, and it gives the show a gravitas (if not a dignity) that allows it to strike exactly the right balance between silly and serious.

In conclusion, kids, it's going to be a very long summer.


Game of Thrones Series 3, Episode 7: Second Sons

The obvious centrepiece of this week was the hilarious and tragic Lannister-Stark wedding.  Lannister family events are understandably awkward occasions (all that inbreeding) but this was more so than usual, given that the nuptials were taking place between sensitive hedonist Tyrion and trembling sorority girl Sansa.

I do so enjoy it when the show takes the opportunity to play with its form a bit, especially Cersei and Loras's little moment under the stars.  In a show that excels in putting together unlikely characters and watching the magic, they set up a potential watercooler let-me-show-you-my-hidden-vulnerability moment, only to have Cersei snap "Nobody cares what your father says." Speaking for us all there, Cersei - I still haven't forgiven Loras for not being nearly as good-looking as the books say he is.  Cersei and Margaery's conversation was, similarly, fantasy's equivalent of Sex in the City, or maybe Hollyoaks.  "If you ever call me sister again, I'll have you strangled in your sleep," hisses Cersei at Margaery's perky breasts after the queen-to-be goes a step too far in advancing the Tyrell domestic policy of winning hearts and minds.  Indeed, Margaery was in danger of slipping more than just a nipple this week as Joffrey seems to be not quite so entirely under her spell as we've been led to believe, ignoring his mother's half-hearted attempt at parenting to go and deliver a casual rape threat to the newly wed Sansa Stark-Lannister.  My hatred of Joffrey has reached something like fascination - I'm too saturated with loathing to hate him more so I just wait in a state of something like awe to see what he'll do next.  He's like the Usain Bolt of sadism.  Just when you think he can't top leading Sansa up the aisle in lieu of headless Ned, he offers to come and help her out with her wifely duties later that night, only it's not an offer and I wanted to reach through the TV screen and make him drink his own spinal fluid.

Across the sea, Danaerys is still on a high as she wins a company of mercenaries over to her side (the Second Sons of the episode title).  Another deviation from the books here, with Daario coming in the guise of a character from an 80s-era children's fantasy film rather than the gold-toothed, purple-mustachioed swashbuckler of the books.  Given that Dany clearly has the hots for him (it's amazing what a gift of the severed heads of your enemies will do, I keep telling my dates that but they insist on getting me chocolate) it's probably for the best.  No reaction from Jorah as yet, but given how much I love Iain Glen's petulant little face as he intones "Khaleesi"in manner that is simultaneously bored and longing, I'm looking forward to it.  Quite a lot of nudity in Dany's storyline this week too - not only is there a requisite concubine getting pawed around, we get full on khaleesi-tits-and-arse too.  I don't know what I expected, to be honest - it is Game of Boners, after all - but the nudity count has been surprisingly light in recent weeks and setting that scene in her bath seemed particularly unnecessary.

The third main strand of the episode was probably just there to balance out the genders on the nudity front, to be honest, as Melisandre gets jiggy with Gendry, if your definition of getting jiggy is tying someone up and attaching leaches to their unmentionables.  I know it's mine.  The most interesting aspect of this strand, however, was the conversation between Stannis and Davos in the dungeons, as Stannis attempts awkward make-up sex with his bf (or just says he'll set him free, whatever).  Mainly this is because Stephen Dillane and Liam Cunningham are putting in such fucking good, understated performances.  The way Dillane plays Stannis, he's the guy at the party that there's nothing technically wrong with but no-one wants to hang out with and you just know he really, really wants to be your friend.  The tacit acknowledgment that Davos was right about maybe not murdering innocent boys was a thing of beauty, and Stannis' attempts to make everything ok again were painfully reminiscent of his stilted interactions with his wife and child a few weeks ago.

The episode was bookended by two more odd couples (alas, no Brienne and Jaime this week, though after last week's BE STILL MY BEATING HEART rescue, they deserve a breather). Firstly, Arya and the Hound reach a tentative detente after one little attempted rock-murder, as it transpires he may be her best hope of getting back to her family.  The show seems to be set on presenting Sandor Clegane in more and more of a sympathetic light of late - no complaints, I'm just intrigued as to what exactly do they know because he sort of disappears from the books at some point.  (Not much Littlefinger of late either - after delivering that stonking monologue about chaos, maybe he's gone out on a high? Ah well, the plot requires him back soon, I believe.)  Our other couple was Sam and Gilly, who have a beautiful - if not terribly exciting - equilibrium to their scenes, with Gilly building a fire while Sam thinks about baby names.  One White Walker attack later - heralded by some frankly much scarier crows - and the mysterious dragonglass seems to be coming in handy.  When you get to Westeros, Dany, you could make a packet on that alone.

All in all, an entertaining episode that had an enjoyably gossipy feel to it - lightweight in comparison to recent weeks, though tightly focused nonetheless.  Sadly there is no episode next week, which means I'll have to wait a full fortnight for my next Jon Snow/Brienne and Jaime fix.  It's a hard life.

This Week's Winner: Doctor Who in spades.  I keep just remembering bits and smiling a beatific smile. And then crying.


*The good people on the Guardian comments section seem to think he's not the Valeyard since he's already appeared in Old Who but instead maybe the very first incarnation who wasn't yet "the Doctor" (i.e. Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor but not the 11th regeneration) or the missing Time War Doctor who ended it by killing everyone and therefore acted for "peace" and "sanity" but not "in the name of the Doctor" - which would put an interesting spin on Christopher Ecclestone's tenure as he always seemed to take personal responsibility for the whole shebang but hey ho (actually thinking about it, this makes the most sense).  Either way, we're all agreed that Hurt is only along for the 50th anniversary ride and MATT SMITH IS NOT LEAVING, OK? OK.
**Right, well, I've just read that the Beeb have officially announced that Series 8 will air next year in split-series format with Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman and Stephen Moffat all returning BUT it will mark Moff's last tenure as head writer and possibly contain a mid-series regeneration. So now I just don't know what to feel.  I mean, on the one hand, more Smith/Moffat in the foreseeable future, on the other...all things must pass.  Fuck you, Doctor Who, I'm pretty sure I'm not meant to feel this existentialist about a children's show.

All the Feelings: 'The Rings of Akhaten' (Doctor Who) and 'Dark Wings, Dark Words' (Game of Thrones) Reviews

Two very different episodes, two very loud cries of fangirlish glee.  Television is definitely better than people.

Doctor Who Series 7, Part 2, Episode 2: The Rings of Akhaten

I'll say it now, there's no way I'm reviewing this episode objectively.  It was strongly reminiscent of 2007's 'Gridlock' (David Tennant, kittens), not only in aesthetic terms but in my reaction to it, i.e. I know it was in all honesty not the best but SINGING and THE DOCTOR and A CUTE THING and OVERTLY MESSIANIC SPEECHES and come on now, so many points for trying.  I swear to god, I would have teared up if I hadn't been watching with my mum, who has a very low tolerance threshold for sci-fi and fantasy.  When I showed her the trailer for The Hobbit, she giggled uncontrollably and asked me what Martin Freeman thought he was doing, to which I huffily replied, "HE'S GOING ON AN ADVENTURE."

Well, I was right about one thing: the episode started with the Doctor delving into Clara's past like a box of delicious chocolates.  Presumably no-one has ever told the writers of this show that there are potentially bad connotations to allowing a man whose face is able to twist into seemingly infinite contortions to sit behind a Beano and a pair of NHS specs staring fixedly at young children because Matt Smith + Children = Always Everything Good Ever.  Children are a bit of a recurring theme for Moffat, clearly, and not just the "wait here, I'll be back in ten years" trope.  If you can talk to children, you're good news in the Whoniverse - in Nicholas Sparks adaptations it's boats, here it's children.  (Sorry Mark Kermode, I stole your joke.)  On the one hand, it's a way of reminding all of the intensely-gazing mouth-breathers watching (it's only okay when I say it) that this is a children's show and do try not to crash the internet on your way out, but on the other hand it's often written with a knowingness that belies the adult perspective it's being written from and for - I think it's now obligatory for every child that turns up on Doctor Who to Teach The Doctor A Valuable Lesson and Be Very Unimpressed By Him Because Children Are Discerning.  I'm thinking more of the mini-prequal Moffat wrote (here) than this episode because, to be fair, the Queen of Years was more straight up creepy.

Speaking of children and growing and changing and whatever other spurious segue I can make here, it was a rite of passage this week, as Clara took her first trip into space.  I always wondered why more companions don't go for the 'back in time' option, personally, but then again I've had my first TARDIS trip planned since I was seventeen ("The South Bank 1599, leave off the brakes and I'll tip extra"*). Clara continues to grow on me, with Jenna-Louise Coleman elegantly avoiding the pitfall of choosing between 'smart' and 'kind' and instead showing herself to be extremely adept at both.  This bodes badly for the blog, of course, as I am generally only able to convey either extreme rage and/or despair (Amy) and extreme worship and/or lust (River Song).  Currently Clara lies somewhere along this axis at a point marked "warm respect".  But, y'know, I warmly respect the hell out of her.

So yes, I know the pacing was all wrong and the plot was predictable but it was comfy - it felt, again and at long last, like a proper episode.  It had aliens called Doreen and Indiana Jones references and a child in peril and obligatory alien forehead bumps and Matt Smith stood in front of a big orange glowy thing and said things that hit all the right spots** about stories and how we were all forged in the heart of a star and days that will never come being infinite and all that overreaching, grandiose bollocks that shouldn't work but really, really really does.  I love Doctor Who most when it forgets that it should just be a funny Saturday tea time show.  I love the fact that the people making it so clearly and earnestly believe in its importance, and I love how readily this is accepted by the people that watch it.  I love it because it takes everything that just shouldn't work, shoves it into a blender and shrugs majestically when it works, and when it doesn't.  Maybe I'm feeling sentimental because the show is approaching its 50th anniversary but it's episodes like this, largely underwhelming yet still able to pull off moments of frankly hubristic grandeur, that prove its uniqueness.  All in all, a showcase of the most familiar comforts of Who.

On a similar note, I just watched this trailer for the 50th Anniversary Special comprised of bits of all eleven Doctors and now I'm crying.  Crying.  Like, actual tears.  At a trailer.  I fear I may be blind by the end of the real thing.


Game of Thrones Series 3, Episode 2: Dark Wings, Dark Words

Because I am cold and heartless, I don't give many fucks about Bran and his Whiny Quest of Leglessness, so it was with a sinking sensation that I watched the opening of this week's episode.  However, I am glad to report I had not accounted for several things:

a) Bran has, hilariously, hit puberty in the, er, week between when we last saw him and now.
b) Bran who is, I say again, going through puberty, dreams about his brothers (it's only okay when I do it).
c)  Bran also has Jojen Reed turning up in his dreams, missing 'enigmatic' by a country mile and landing squarely on 'fucking smug'.  So it's at least faithful to the books, then.

Even better, when Jojen turns up for realsies later on (accompanied by his sister Meera, who is awesome), everything he says sounds like a come-on. "What else did you see?" asks Bran throatily, discussing second sight with his new bro.  "The only thing that matters," says Jojen staring into his eyes.  "You."  That's not fanfiction.  That's the script.  Who knows, Bran's Whiny Quest of Leglessness Now With Added Homoeroticism may become my favourite part of the series.

Anyway, after a scene with the second least interesting Starks (Robb and Catelyn***), in which the writers desperately try to justify Robb's Wife as a character, there comes the first real thrill of the episode: everyone's favourite odd couple, Jaime "Family First" Lannister**** and Brienne "Of" Tarth.  Hi Jaime and Brienne!  Hello also to Jamie's accent, which is rejoining us after a brief holiday.  It must have been hard for Jaime, growing up as the incongruously Scandinavian Lannister sibling.  Gifts of herring every feast day when the others get cloaks and swords and the like.  Anyway Jaime's game plan as of this moment seems to be a Westeros variant on "Are we there yet?" leaving poor, put-upon Brienne to shout that so help her, if she has to come back there, she will turn around back to Harrenhal and there will be no sexual tension for anybody.  His back up plan seems to be a Westeros variant on "lol u fancied Renly he was gay", but hey, it's working.  Just sit back and watch the magic happen.

Joffrey and Cersei next and, worryingly, I think I'm actually starting to enjoy Joffrey's scenes.  Then again, he has not yet forced prostitutes to beat each other this series, so there's still time.  Essentially, he acts exactly how every teenage king ever would and has acted times a factor of a thousand dicks.  Shae counsels Sansa on the wisdom of forming an alliance with a dude who sleeps with a lock of your mother's hair under his pillow.  Three seasons in and Sansa's gaydar is still not functional as she starts batting her eyelids at Loras "Rough Trade" Tyrell before being led off to tea with Margaery Tyrell and her grandmother, Diana Rigg.  Lady Di is, as always, a treat and I'm very much enjoying Natalie Dormer's scheming, butter-wouldn't-melt Margaery (in all seriousness, one of the things the series does very well is take the non-point of view characters from the books and go "fuck that ambiguity").  The later scene between Joffrey and Margaery is frankly brilliant, as Margaery starts to unpick what poor romantic Sansa never could, i.e. how to control a petulant teenage psychopath with near-absolute political power, using only a crossbow and some cleavage.

Not only did we get Diana Rigg this week but another pleasing addition to the cast in the form of Mackenzie Crooke doing Ambiguous Wildling Animal Magic.  One of the strengths of the series (both book and television) is how sparing it is with the magic - so sparing, in fact, that I occasionally forget about it altogether but being reminded by Mackenzie Crooke's nigh-on Lovecraftian features is perfectly acceptable.  Anyway, here he is alongside Jon Snow's girlfriend casting yet another withering look in Jon Snow's bewildered direction.  Bless, it's not his fault - no-one ever sat him down to explain the birds and the bees, as demonstrated by a long and actually pretty well done scene between Catelyn and Robb's Wife of which the gist was "oh man Jon Snow he ruins everything and basically we're all going to die now".  Cut to Jon Snow's lower lip quivering several hundred miles north of there.  His Woobie Sense is tingling.

But there's not much time to dwell on Jon Snow and his implausibly tousled hair because ARYA!  Damn, girl, where have you been?  I've had to sit through, like, five Sansa scenes already. Anyway in her three odd minutes of screen time, Arya manages to be at least thirteen times more awesome than anyone except Tyrion, encountering the Brotherhood Without Banners (apparently some kind of eco-terrorist organisation in this incarnation, led by Paul Kaye, another winning casting choice) without flinching.  Well, last season she did make time in her busy schedule of kicking ass and taking names to give to Faceless Men for one on one chats with Tywin Lannister.  Speaking of Lannisters, I thought we were a bit Tyrion-light, though as I said last week, we won't be seeing everyone regularly from here on out (no Dany either, surprisingly).  HBO has shown stunning good sense thus far in not inflicting on us more time with the Greyjoys than is strictly necessary - just a brief glimpse of Theon being tortured, and given spurious hope by Simon from Misfits, and I don't think anyone will be complaining about that.  Anyhow, sneaking in at 37 minutes is Tyrion who manages to be a total boss even when a prostitute is squeezing his face with one hand.

Back to Brienne and Jaime for the final treat, I didn't think we'd get to see them fight so early in the series.  It is, as expected, excellently and believably done, in part because Jaime insists on commentating like that one irritating kid playing football at school, in part because Brienne rolls her eyes and advances on him almost casually, only to be stopped by a brace of Boltons looking for Jaime's head.  End of episode.

All in all, an extremely satisfying affair.  Still not quite the balls-to-the-wall-awesome I'm waiting for but it's early days yet.  Like the series opener, there was a lot to set up, new characters to introduce, etc but there were also enough returning favourites (Brienne, Meera, ARYA) and unfavourites made palatable (Bran) that I enjoyed it start to finish.  The plotlines were juggled beautifully, the scene shifts were seamless, the dialogue was as (nay, more) impressive than the action and the performances were pretty flawless.  Keep it up, Game of Thrones, this is frighteningly good stuff.


This week's winner: Game of Thrones.  It was tough one because 'The Rings of Akhaten' had me feeling all the feelings there ever were, but I know in my heart it was a ropey episode with a few good set pieces.  'Dark Wings, Dark Words', on the other hand, had accelerated enough to be consistently excellent all the way through with its series of odd-couples, and, with all of the players now in place, marks the recommencing of the game fo' srs.  Makes you just want a grab and sword and kill something, really.

*I am aware that Martha Jones has somewhat stolen my thunder on this one, but I do an excellent impression of someone who doesn't know that Martha Jones ever existed.  The main difference is that they're smiling.
** I meant emotional spots, you perverts.
***This is unfair.  I forget Sansa.
****I toyed with Jaime "I'll Slay Your King" Lannister, but it's really hard to communicate the subtle intonation of the innuendo over the internet.