Tag Archives: AMC

Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

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TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affair’s (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

The Most Striking TV Moments of 2018

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There was a lot of great TV this year. Among the stand-outs were Better Call Saul, Future Man, Barry, Glow, The Americans, Ozark, The Good Place, Santa Clarita Diet, Preacher, Ash vs The Evil Dead, Agents of SHIELD, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and the documentary mini-series Wild, Wild Country. There was also a lot of good, but not great, TV this year: Orange is the New Black, iZombie, The X-Files, Star Trek Discovery, The Man in the High Castle, Fear the Walking Dead and Westworld among them. There was also a lot of missed TV this year, owing to a seemingly endless explosion of new shows.

There’s so much TV, on so many channels, across so many platforms, and always more and more and more, year upon year – much of it of a high pedigree – that to miss even a month of watch-time would be to find yourself a year or more behind the zeitgeist. Or so it starts to feel. Even when a great show reaches the end of its natural life, potentially freeing up a space in your schedule, another six – of equal or comparative quality – rise to take its place. As a consequence, I haven’t yet had a chance to watch The Haunting of Hill House, a single episode of This is Us or Atlanta, Sharp Objects, The Bodyguard, Castle Rock, Save Me, Killing Eve, The Sinner, the latest seasons of The Affair and The Deuce, season 3 of The Expanse, season 3 of Daredevil. The list goes on…

(I have, however, managed to binge my way through Vikings and Outlander. I’m enjoying both enormously. You can read my Outlander Binge Diary from the beginning HERE)

What I’m trying to say is that this list of ‘Striking Moments’ is in no way supposed to be exhaustive or scientific. Just in case you all start clamouring to say things like, ‘But what about this moment, or what about that moment?’ Or ‘This whole list falls apart without the inclusion of this, that or the other moment’. I’ve got two kids, a partner and a day job, asshole. I can’t just sit around watching TV all day, just to make YOU happy. In saying that, I hope that some small part of this list does make you happy, because it’s Christmas and I’m a nice guy.

Without any further ado, then, and in no particular order:

Vikings – Floki’s utopia

OK, so this is technically cheating, because the following moments/episode technically premiered in late 2017, but because the half-season spilled over into 2018, I’m including it here.

The battle to avenge Ragnar’s brutal death predictably led to further battles, bloodshed, and renewed divisions. Floki’s arc, running in tandem with and parallel to the journeys undertaken by the vengeful sons of Ragnar, also came to a tragic and bloody end, with his wife, Helga, being murdered by the half-kidnapped/half-rescued Muslim girl she’d brought back from the Mediterranean with her as her adopted daughter. Floki’s soul went into free-fall. He declared himself an empty vessel, and put himself at the mercy of fate, spending weeks in his small boat drifting aimlessly upon the tumultuous seas, letting himself be carried by the winds of fate and the hands of the Gods, wherever they saw fit to take him.

They took him to the country we know as Iceland, though he mistook it for Asgard, the home of the Gods themselves. The sequences wherein Floki wanders the empty, rugged landscape of fire and ice are beautiful and breath-taking. One minute the air fills with the rush and thunder of water, like a God’s roar breaking above him, the next silence – the silence of death; the sound of an empty world at the universe’s end. Angry waves break on beaches untrammelled by human feet, and in the distance a plume of primordial smoke slithers into the freezing air, a reminder of the violence sleeping just below the surface of this whisperingly empty world.

In the end this new world – this blank canvas of peace and promises – is corrupted, as worlds always are, by mankind. But that comes later. When Floki, a lone prophet in the ethereal wilderness, casts his widened eyes on the raw magnificence of a pre-human Iceland, we too can feel the island’s ancient power, and imagine a little of what it must have been like to walk the line of awe and terror in a world that was foreign to us in every way.

Soul-stirring.

And a great advert for the Icelandic tourist board.

The Man in the High Castle – Lady Liberty up in smoke

From the beginning, The Man in the High Castle’s world-building has been exquisitely rich and detailed. The Japanese Pacific States, the Neutral Zone and the Greater German Reich all look and feel lived-in and eerily authentic. This nightmarishly plausible landscape of a world where World War II’s winners and losers were reversed is so immersive – so grimly fascinating to spend time in – that the show was able to get away with moving at a slower pace during its first season, taking time to revel in the shadows of its mysteries.

Season three saw the show leaning into its sci-fi multiverse concept harder than ever before, plus piling on the tragedies and agonies of its deeply conflicted characters. Smith and his wife were put through the wringer (I feel I can get away with using archaic metaphors when I’m writing about a show that’s set in an alternate 1960s America), Frank struggled to find somewhere to belong, and the Nazis were gearing up to invade other universes.

The season’s most iconic, though, moment came in the finale, when a ranting Himmler presided over the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Seeing flames and spinning debris exploding from that great monument to liberty and freedom, as people whooped and cheered, was as captivating as it was horrifying. Himmler had declared war on history and truth, and the people loved him for it.

All told, a timely and powerful reminder that nothing, not even Lady Liberty, is set in stone, and everything – even reality itself – can be undone and remade.

Fake news is in the eye of the beholder.

Or sometimes the bomb-holder.

Ozark – Drop me a line sometime

I really liked Ozark’s second season, but do you know what I really, really liked? Witnessing a character in a TV show sending a text message, and the typing and sending of that text message taking the actual length of time it would take to send that message in real life. I almost wept with joy. I know reality occasionally has to be suspended or sacrificed in order to keep a story flowing, but Christ, I didn’t realise how much TV’s two-second text messages had been getting me down. Thank you, Ozark. Thank you so bloody much.

Plus, kudos to Ruth Langmore’s line, which I vow to use often in 2019: “I don’t know shit about fuck.”

Walking Dead – Rexit Means Rexit

Andrew Lincoln was leaving The Walking Dead. Fans were bound to find out. It wasn’t a particularly large leap from that revelation to the reality of a hard Rexit. However, Rick wouldn’t be leaving in the traditional, tried-and-tested manner of every other character who’d left the series since its inception, i.e. either living dead or dead dead, but moving over into a movie-based Walking Dead pocket-universe, where fans would get to see him Rick-xercise his authority one last time. AMC certainly didn’t want anybody to know that. At least, not yet.

AMC obviously couldn’t stop news of Lincoln’s departure from leaking out – after all, we live in an age of information in an intimately, interconnected world – but the network could use the news to its advantage, and with a little creative sleight-of-hand throw the audience off the scent of Rick’s true destination. What better way to blind-side the audience than by coming at them head-on, not only peeping and shouting about Rick’s departure, but making it the lynch-pin of AMC’s marketing strategy? The network very cleverly – or infuriatingly, depending upon how you look at it – hinted at Rick’s death and told the whole truth about his fate at the same time, and using the same words.

It’s a shame that Andrew Lincoln had to bail out just as The Walking Dead was getting good again, and it’s an even bigger shame that Rick’s exit episode threw the season’s momentum into reverse. Thankfully, it recovered again, and the mid-season ended strongly, but Rick’s goodbye could just as easily have dynamited the whole show. Whatever you think of the execution (and you can find out what I thought about it by clicking HERE), there’s no denying that it was a bold gambit, and – for better or ill – AMC definitely created a piece of event television.

House of Cards – Claire stacks the deck

House of Cards’ sixth and final season – sans Spacey – started strongly, faltered at the half-way mark, and then limped through a landscape littered with more bodies and serial implausabilities than it had ever before managed to muster, before collapsing in a messy, bloody heap on the floor of the Oval Office.

Robin Wright was exceptional (as always) as the lizard-like Claire Underwood, and it was interesting to see how her grip on, and relationship, to power differed from that of the freshly-dead Francis. It might have been an exceptional swansong season had Kevin Spacey’s disgrace not forced the creative team to improvise and engineer an ending instead of letting the end-game unfold as per the original plan.

Season six did, however, have one tremendously powerful image, that will stick with me for a long time: the unveiling of Claire’s new all-female cabinet. This wasn’t a sudden burst of ultra-feminism from Claire, or some bold idelogical statement, but rather another example of Claire using her power and cunning for strategic gain, fashioning the cabinet into a people-shaped ‘fuck you’ directed out at the world, and into the face of her equally lizard-like enemy, Annette Shepherd (Diane Lane).

The stunned look on Annette’s face as the silent table of women stared out at her from the cabinet room, before Claire shut the door in her face, was absolutely delicious.

Bravo, Claire. And bravo House of Cards.

Westworld – Ooh, Heaven is a place on earth

The best episode of Westworld’s second season, and also one of the best TV episodes of 2018, was it’s eighth, Kiksuya, which took Akecheta of the Ghost Nation on a journey through sorrow and sacrifice on the bitter road to sentience. It was a beautiful paean to love and identity, viewed through the haunting prism of loss.

But as striking and memorable moments go, it’s hard to beat the image of a caravan of hopeful, frightened and confused Westworldians trudging, marching and fleeing to the top of a rugged hill, as chaos and death erupts at their backs, towards an image of heaven itself: a doorway to a new world, the promise of new and eternal life, a perfect life in a perfect world; one that uploads their ‘souls’ and ‘essences’ into the heart of the matrix at the same time as it sends their broken, empty bodies to the bottom of the unseen and unseeable cliff just beyond the portal. I’ve seldom seen such a powerful conflation of faith, hope, horror and happiness.

Final proof, if further proof was needed, that the ‘synthetics’ are just as fallibly, desperately ‘human’ as we are.

Who is America – Welcome to the party, sphincter

Sacha Baron Cohen’s fresh dose of satirical punk-nacity never lived up to the promise of its mostly very funny first episode, losing focus and drifting into disjointed and uninspired puerility as the series progressed – and I say that as a life-long fan of the man’s work. However, one new character, former Mossad agent and anti-terrorism specialist, Erran Morad, never failed to elicit laughs, and featured in what was quite possibly one of the funniest sequences Baron Cohen has ever committed to screen.

I’m talking about the third episode’s Quinceanera skit, where Morad took three, real-life, Trump-salutin’ motherfuckers under his wing to teach them how to defend themselves against the greatest evils of our age: Muslim and Mexican immigrants. The ignorance, prejudice and empty-headed racism of the three men made them perfect conduits for Cohen’s devilish brand of justice-based pranksterism. Within minutes they were smearing their faces with KY jelly, and slipping on ‘pussy panties’ and fake boobs.

But the best was yet to come. The piece de resistance, the segment that had me howling until I couldn’t breathe, was the staging of a fake Quinceanera party, loaded with drugs and drink, at which one of the dolts was dressed as a 15-year-old Mexican girl, complete with fake pussy, and another crouched inside a pinata with a hidden video camera, waiting to bust the gaggle of Mexican rapists and drug-addicts who would surely swarm to their bait after reading the giant sign Morad had erected by the road-side, which read: QUINCEANERA 5pm – FREE DRUGS! YOUNG GIRLS! YOUNG PUSSY! The moment where not Mexicans, but police officers, arrived on the scene, demanding an explanation, almost killed me.

American Horror Story: Apocalypse – It’s the end of the world as we know it

AHS is an odd beast, an absurdist collection of horror tropes all wrapped up in a slick package with sex, songs and sadism. Given that its an anthology series that renews its setting, themes and characters each year (sometimes it returns to old haunts), most of its seasons take a few episodes to find their feet; to assemble all of their many weird little pieces into something resembling a coherent story (some seasons don’t manage it at all). I really like it. Even in its weaker seasons and moments it usually manages to rustle up a great episode, or a stand-out scene or sequence.

This time around, I really admired the first few minutes of the premiere, which did a brilliant job of conveying the fear, urgency, horror and panic of the impending apocalypse. I really felt the dread, tension, helplessness and savagery of the dying world as its people scrabbled to survive at any cost.

Striking stuff.

Better Call Saul – The mask slips

This whole series is one long, unbroken striking moment, and if you aren’t already watching it, then it’s my duty to tell you that you’re missing out on one of the most immaculately-crafted, pain-stakingly plotted, perfectly-acted, richly cinematic, emotionally resonant and funny shows of recent years, wildly different from but just as powerful in its own way as its parent-show Breaking Bad. Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in particular smash it out the park in almost every episde.

So watch it.

I could’ve chosen so many moments as this year’s best – from Mike assassinating German faux-Walter in the desert beneath the cold glare of the moon; to the ‘Something Stupid’ montage that showed the steady breakdown of Kim and Jimmy’s relationship, but I’m going to plump for the exact moment at which Kim realises that the good but complicated man she’s loved and championed for so long may in fact have be the dark, irredeemable creature his brother, Chuck, always accused him of being. Maybe he’s become it, maybe he’s always been it. But there can be no doubt: the mask has slipped. Slippin’ Jimmy McGill is now Saul Goodman.

Preacher – Did I get your order reich?

At the end of Preacher’s first season, Jesse Custer accidentally sent poor Eugene Root to Hell, courtesy of a slip-of-the-tongue that was tragically literalised and amplified by the Godly power of Genesis. Eugene spent season two adjusting to Hell – imagined as a grimy, cyber-punk, dystopian space prison – and striking up a warm and fuzzy friendship with none other than Hitler himself.

Although there have been almost as many fictionalised Hitlers committed to the small screen as Santas, Preacher at least attempts to do something novel with its version of the Fuhrer: it tries to redeem him. It’s a strange feeling to find yourself empathising with perhaps the most vicious mass-killer of the twentieth century as he’s being bullied by his peers and struggling to make friends.

Thankfully, as soon as old Adolph escapes to the earthly plane he reverts to type, rushing off into the world with a renewed sense of cowardice, hatred and zest for mass-death, and we can cancel our membership card for ‘Team Hitler’.

All of this leads to one of Season 3’s funniest and most enduring moments – among a multitude of others in this gloriously ghoulish and mirth-tastically mental show – the sight of Hitler working in a low-tier fast-food restaurant. Although he still has the trademark hair-do, moustache and accent, he’s gone to great lengths to disguise his identity, evident by the name-tag he wears on his lapel, that says ‘HILTER’.

Watching Hilter/Hitler try to whip up enthusiasm for a fascist uprising, even resorting to screaming in German, while he enjoys some sandwiches with his bored work colleagues behind the bins at the back of the restaurant, is bizarre, unsettling and hilarious, much like the rest of the series.

Roseanne – Roseain’t

When Roseanne returned to our screens earlier this year after a break of twenty-one years, the eponymous matriarch cackled back into a landscape that was radically different to the one she’d left. Last time around she was a blue-collar mother raising a family in Clinton’s America (give or take a hint of Bush); this time around she was a grandmother scrabbling to survive in Trumpland, paying lip-service to the orange one’s policies while at the same time suffering under them. I say ‘was’, because Roseanne is now no more. Not the show – which dropped both the star and her name to continue on as ‘The Conners’ – but the character, who is now dead and buried, finished off by an accidental over-dose of pain-killers that she’d become addicted to because she couldn’t afford a knee operation.

In reality, though, Roseanne was killed by Roseanne Barr herself, who ended both her character’s life and her own career with one ill-advised, seemingly racist tweet, attacking a former staffer of President Obama (strange behaviour from Roseanne, who I always thought of as a former working-class hero, a champion of gay rights, and a person who always stood up for the little guy – I guess fame and pills can do that to you).

Trump tweets with impunity; his supporters and apologists, it seems, do not. I guess it’s easier to get people booted off TV than it is to get them booted out of the Oval Office. Still, if Roseanne can be re-imagined without Roseanne, then perhaps there’s hope that one day, America can be re-imagined without Donald Trump.

Whatever you think of a Roseanne-less Roseanne, or the events that led up to it, the image of Dan Conner (John Goodman) lying alone in his Roseanne-less bed, was strange, sad, powerful and affecting, and definitely one for the ages.

RIP Roseanne. Long live The Conners.

Doctor Who – Old Mother Time

I wasn’t terribly enamoured with the idea of the Doctor changing sex when it was first announced. Some of that was down to Jodie Whittaker, who somehow didn’t feel quite doctor-y enough. If you’re going to go down that road, why not Olivia Coleman, Tilda Swinton or Caitriona Balfe?

But, yes, I also didn’t like it because I felt that the change was both unnecessary, and undertaken in a confrontational spirit. I feared that the big move would be framed in ideological rather than creative terms. These were concerns that the show’s pre-air promos did nothing to assuage. Certainly my worst fears were confirmed when I saw Jodie Whittaker standing beneath an actual glass ceiling as it shattered into pieces, as the words ‘IT’S ABOUT TIME’ flashed up on screen. I had no idea that the Doctor, a geeky icon to generations of children, had been working all these years as a repressive agent of the patriarchy.

Now, before we continue, let me just take a moment to assert my credentials as a card-carrying non-misogynist, lest you condemn me as some sort of fundamentalist, knife-wielding incel for my opposition.

I’m a man who was raised in a matriarchal household, with an older sister who served as something akin to a second mother. I’m pro-choice, pro-breast-feeding, and pro-equality, even though arguably all of these things should be a person’s default position. Most of my educators have been women, certainly one hundred per cent of my nursery and primary teachers. Most of my bosses throughout my working career have been women. What I’m trying to say is, em, ‘All of my best friends are women!’ Christ, I know how that sounds. Stick with me.

I believe that while there can be biological, physical and psychological differences between men and women, there should be no differences in the rights afforded to them to control their own lives, bodies and destinies. Men and women should have equal capacity to succeed and prosper. Women can rule countries and perform brain surgery, men can be nurses and nursery teachers. Many of the gender stereotypes we’ve clung to over the centuries, decades and millennia have been harmful, regressive and nonsensical.

So, I’m pro-woman. Or just pro-human, if you prefer.

I was prepared to have my fears laid to rest. I was prepared to be proved wrong,

But they weren’t. And I wasn’t.

Picture shows: The Doctor (JODIE WHITTAKER)

Ultimately, season 11 didn’t fail because the doctor was a woman – or at least not only because of this – but because the lead actor was miscast; because the scripts were dull, corny and vapid; because the episodes were boring; because the characters were so poorly defined (including the Doctor, and with the exception of Graham, but I suspect that had more to do with Bradley Walsh’s performance and inherent charisma than any difference in how the character was written); because of weak villains; because of messages being hammered home at the expense of plot and character; and, most crucially, because it no longer felt either like sci-fi or Doctor Who any more.

So, ‘New’ New Doctor Who?

A striking moment in TV history – but for all the wrong reasons.

Thanks for reading. See y’all next year, TV fans.

The Walking Dead Rolls Rick

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I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day.

Season 9 Episode 5 – “What Comes After.”

Word up, people. You’ve been Rick Rolled. Where did Rick Roll? Under a dumpster, motherfuckers. Only this one had wings.

I don’t know how I allowed The Walking Dead to pull this bait-and-switch trick on me again. In retrospect, dwindling audience figures notwithstanding, it seemed slightly desperate and insane to make a massive spoiler – ‘It’s Rick Grimes’ Final Episode’ – the focus of the show’s marketing campaign.

I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?

Just after the bridge blew up I scribbled something down on my notepad and read it aloud to my partner: NO BODY – SEE YOU IN SEASON 13, RICK. We laughed and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Watch this, he’ll turn up in a few seasons time and they’ll reveal that he was fished out of the river and whisked away in a helicopter.’ The idea amused me: Rick rocking up to the Hill Top disguised under a heavy cloak and clutching a walking stick, Willy Wonka style, and then casting off the cloak, chucking the stick away and doing a big comedy forward roll, before jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘Did somebody call 911?’

I quickly realised that I’d accidentally discovered the ending. Well, not the stuff with the forward rolls, of course, but the helicopter rescue. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen – at least until Judith Grimes showed up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WALKING DEAD? YOU’VE ONLY JUST GIVEN US ETERNAL PEACE FROM ONE IRRITATING-AS-FUCK GRIMES KID – AND THE REPLACEMENT’S HERE ALREADY??

Negan goads Rick by taunting Karl’s eye again

Still, sad as Judith made me, I could never be sadder than old Saddam Hu-Negan, ripped from his cell by Maggie and ready to die cause he missed his baseball bat, or his dead wife or something. His whole reaction here is really in-keeping with the character, just as long as the character you’re talking about isn’t Negan. I always hoped they’d add a little colour and substance to Negan’s X-rated panto-villain schtick, but instead of nuance, we got no-ance.

On a side note, how strange that a show as nihilistic and violent as The Walking Dead would choose this time to take a stance against capital punishment, even if the show’s argument does appear to shy away from the moral and ethical considerations and lean heavily into the assertion that prison fucks people up more and for longer, so let’s do that!

So what did this episode teach us, apart from the two most obvious and painfully apparent lessons, namely: 1) that we should never, ever trust The Walking Dead, and 2) that we shouldn’t let four very good episodes fool us into thinking that the show is now fixed and back on track after two-and-a-half disappointing – and often downright duff and dull – seasons?

Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.

“Why are we herding these thousands of zombies?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are we stabbing sleeping people through the head?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are you such a poorly defined character?”

“I AM RICK!”

It’s a shame, really, because there were elements of this episode that could’ve lent a poignant sheen to Rick’s death, had the show had the balls to actually bump him off. I wrote things in my note-pad like, ‘the herd represents the death that has stalked him from the pilot episode, that stalks us all, now catching up with him’ and ‘Rick is looking for his family – he will find them in death’. And what a nice touch it would’ve been for Rick to have died willfully destroying the literal and metaphorical bridge he’d spent the season wholeheartedly believing in and building. But in the end it was all a lot more wanky than that. (See also: ‘I GUESS YOU WERE MY FAMILY ALL ALONG, GUYS!’)

It was either this, or Shane, Hershel and Sasha appearing in the sky above Rick scored to a John WIlliams’ composition.

I went with the Rick Roll angle in naming this review, but the other title I was toying with was: ‘A Rickmas Carol’. After all, Rick was visited throughout the episode by three ghosts of Walking Dead past, each with some nugget of knowledge to impart to the man who had directly and indirectly caused all of their deaths. Shane said, ‘Hey, Rick, you’ve got to get angry and keep stabbing people, man,’; Hershel popped up to say, ‘Something something something big cuddle’; which left Sasha to cover the mystical angle: ‘Confucius say these aren’t dead people you’re standing on, Rick. This is a carpet of almost inscrutable super profundity, and we’re going to have a stilted, cod-philosophical conversation all about it, my friend.’ At one point in their dialogue, Sasha says something about going toward the good, toward the brave, and a teary-eyed Rick replies by splurting out ‘toward love’, which I felt was a rather an incongruous almost-coda for a man who’d spent so much of his time beating people to death with his bare hands and running them over with his car.

This was no ‘Rickmas Carol’ (or ‘Rickmas Corrrrrrrrrraallllll’, if you prefer), though. In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Scrooge emerges from his Xmas Eve hauntings a changed man; Rick emerges from his slo-mo horse-based chase… well, exactly the same, but exactly the same and flying through the air in a coma.

It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’

In the final analysis, it didn’t work. Mainly because the analysis wasn’t final.

Rick may very well be alive.

But I’m not sure how much longer the show will be.

#10seasonsandthreemovies

F*** The Walking Dead Season 3: The Return of the Un-Fun-Dead

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How can I describe Fear The Walking Dead for the benefit of those who haven’t yet sampled its delights? Here goes.

Imagine writing a list of all the things you love about The Walking Dead. Now imagine pulling your pants down and taking a long, slimy shit all over that list, working and twisting your hips so you actually spell the word ‘shit’ with your own shit as you shit it out, like piping the icing on the world’s most abominable cake. Imagine stomping your bare feet into all that shit, really spreading and squishing it around, and then getting a lamb to lick the mess from between your toes.

Well, I’d rather watch you do that than watch another season of Fear The Walking Dead.

So I guess that makes me a sicko as well as both an unhinged completist and a self-flagellating masochist, because I am going to watch another season of Fear The Walking Dead. Why don’t you join me? Or jump back in? Catch up. Take the plunge. Misery likes company, after all.

Here’s a re-cap of the action so far, presented in the sort-of style of a sort-of recipe.

Ingredients you’ll need to make:

A series which purports to show the fall of civilisation

The fall of civilisation (4 episodes)

Getting to a boat (2 episodes)

Being on a boat (4 episodes)

I wish that they were still on that boat (3 episodes)

What happened to that boat anyway? (2 episodes)

A hotel? A Mexican death cult? This could get interesting (4 episodes)

I was promised way more boat than this (2 episodes)

I suppose Fear The Walking Dead itself is a little bit like a boat, a broken boat; cast adrift on a rolling sea of plot as the tides of tired tropes and waves of cringe-worthy contrivances hurl and tug it hither and thither. It’s doomed to sail on uncertainly and aimlessly, at least until the day it’s dashed on the rocks of viewer apathy.

Despite garnering higher ratings than Better Call Saul (What the hell is wrong with Americans? No wonder you voted for Trump!) that day surely can’t be too far away. The only thing stopping me from jumping overboard with this show – “ABANDON SHIT!” – is the faint, infinitesimally small glimmer of hope that things might get better; that I might actually start to care about the characters.

Earlier this year The Walking Dead – FTWD’s zombie daddy – wrapped up what was arguably its weakest season yet. Even in its better days The Walking Dead was never likely to earn itself a place in Television Valhalla, standing shoulder to shoulder with the mighty classics of our age. It’s often clunky, schmaltzy and over-padded. Who cares though, right? Not every painter can be Van Gogh. Not every TV show can be Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos or Rectify. But at least The Walking Dead is capable of turning out exciting, haunting, affecting and powerful episodes, and I actually care about most of its characters. Especially Carol. And except for Carl.

Fear The Walking Dead, on the other hand, is objectively – on the evidence of its episodes to date – a bad show, as I’m sure the subtle analogy I deployed at the beginning of this piece, involving lambs and human feces, made clear. The tag-line for Fear the Walking Dead’s upcoming season might as well be: “YOU ACTUALLY THINK THIS SHIT’S GOING TO GET BETTER, DON’T YOU?”

I hope it gets a lot better. I really do… Or at least marginally better.

Anyway, here’s a re-cap of the characters:

Madison Clark

Hi. I’m Madison. I’m an archetypal strong female character in the kick-ass-mom mould. Good, right? Well, no, because I’m poorly written and portrayed as if I’m a Vulcan at a funeral, walking around with a jaw like a steel-trap, frowning and moaning the whole time. Seriously, I’m so unlikeable I can’t even stand myself. I was in Deadwood. Remember that? Man, that was a good show. And now I’m in Un-Deadwood. Fuck. I wish I’d taken that part in The Strain. At least I’m not a total pussy like my boyfriend… whatever this name is.

Travis… thingy. Or am I?

Hi, I’m Travis. Or am I Curtis? I think I’m Curtis. Am I? Or is that the name of my actor? One’s Travis, the other’s Curtis. No, I’m Travis. I am Travis, definitely. Or am I Curtis? Fuck, is my name Cliff? Christ, I’m so boring and devoid of a concrete identity it’s no wonder I’ve no idea who I am. Dull, dull, dull. I’m desperately trying to survive a fledgling apocalypse here: how the Hell do I manage to be so utterly boring in the process? I just mope around all day looking like Tully from Sesame Street, and pissing on people’s parades. But don’t worry. I beat two punks to death at the end of last season. That was a wee bit interesting and people seemed to dig it, so they’re going to ‘Rick’ me up for season three. WE’RE GOING OVER THE CLIFF EDGE, BABY! Hmmm. That doesn’t work if my name’s not Cliff though. Travis… Travis… Travis… A-HA! WHY DOES IT ALWAYS BRAIN ON ME?!

Or am I Curtis?

Alicia Clark

Hi there, (bats eyelashes) boys are like soooo gross, shutup I love boys, oh God I love my iPod, but oh God I’d die for my boyfriend, he’s like my bff, oh my God, gross that is like SO unfair, oh my God I hate you guys, I’m such a girl, I’m so ditzy, oh I’m on a boat, OMG, boys, I can talk to boys out here, uh-oh I almost got us all killed, FML, I wish I wasn’t so naïve and blindly trusting and … (CHUNG CHICK) Hi there, that was the sound of me loading a fresh cartridge into my shotgun, that’s the kind of thing I do now, because I’ve just inexplicably woken up in possession of the wise, noble soul and tactical combat knowledge of a 900-year-old warrior-general, and the inner-calm of a Lara Croft android. I’ve gone from ‘Damn, she MOAN’ to ‘Michonne. DAMN’ in less time than it takes a man to check IMDB to see if I’m safe to wank over.

Nick Clark

OK, let’s get all of the Johnny Depp and heroin addict gags out of the way first, shall we? What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Zombies, that’s what! I’ll also give you Edward Needle-hands, Willy Wonky and Crack Sparrow. There. All out of your system now. Hi, I’m Nick. I worked out how to walk safely through hordes of zombies pretty early on in the apocalypse. You just smear yourself with zombie guts. I tend to do it every single time I’m out amongst the zombies, because I quite like being alive, unlike those fucking idiots on The Walking Dead. Anyway, give or take my recent spell in a Mexican death cult, I’m probably the best character on the show, which is a bit like being awarded best in show at Crufts when you aren’t actually a dog. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ve taken a lot of heroin.

Victor Strand

I’m mysterious. Christ, I’m mysterious. Look at me lounging against the bars of this cage in my dapper clothes, offering gruff nuggets of cod-philosophy and intrigue to my jonesing new friend, Nick. It’s like my old dad used to say: if you find yourself imprisoned under martial law during a zombie apocalypse, make sure you’ve got a junkie as your right hand man. Junkies are indispensable survivalists, and not a liability at all; everybody knows that. I’m Strand, by the way. Or am I? Who am I? Who are you? Who’s Abigail? Ah, forgive the mystery, it’s my boat, you see. And I’m going somewhere. Where? Well, aren’t we all going somewhere? Christ, there’s that mystery again. I’m also dangerous. Did I mention that? Can’t you see it? Dapper and dangerous. Positively stranger-ous. I’ll cut you and you won’t even know you’ve been cut. I’ll cut the rope on your dinghy. I’ll shoot you. I’M IN LOVE WITH DOUGRAY SCOTT. He was great in Love Actually. He wasn’t in it? Well, what was the one… Kathy Burke was in it. He had the long hair and that? Anyway, I love him, and we’re all going to Mexico so we can… Oh. He’s dead. Fuck. Erm… eh. Yeah. (sigh) I’m boring now.

Chris Manawa

Hi, I’m Chris, which is short for ‘Christ, I’m an awful character.’ Remember how you thought Carl Grimes was the most awful boy in existence? Well allow me to introduce you (points at self) to this cunt.

You watched me at the end of last season and thought to yourself, ‘Oh, thank goodness he’s dead, I hate that fucking guy’, and then when the guy who plays me appeared in Agents of SHIELD – as Ghostrider’s brother – you thought, ‘Phew, well that seals it then, he’s absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly dead,’ and then the character was only in the show for about three episodes, and you thought, ‘Oh, fuck, maybe Chris ISN’T dead’. And then you couldn’t quite remember if my death had only been hinted at or if it had been shown on screen, and you thought to yourself, ‘Actually, now I’m thinking Curtis killed him… or did Curtis kill the guys who killed him? Wait, is it Travis or Curtis… but… shit, I can’t remember’, and then you didn’t even care enough to Google it.

Oh, and Ofelia, too. I guess she’s a thing?

F*** the Walking Dead returns to US screens on Sunday 4th June with a host of new characters, and hopefully the tragic death of a few old ones.