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The Most Disappointing TV of 2020

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2020 will be remembered for a great many things, few of them sanguine. The year began with Australia burning, and ended with Donald Trump trying to smash democracy using other people’s money and temper tantrums. Wedged between those two terrifying totems was the coronavirus, an invisible and deadly assailant that first inexplicably robbed us of our toilet paper, then our freedom, then our collective sense of objective reality. That spectre of lost lives and lockdowns is still with us, and the virus itself only seems to be getting stronger, more deadly and more widespread, like some hideous airborne variant of Mrs Brown’s Boys. As a consequence of the endless upheaval, there wasn’t much to do in 2020 except panic, and watch TV. Thankfully, there was plenty of panic to go around, and a veritable smorgasbord of terrific TV to be sampled.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to talk to you about the shows that made me wish for some kind of retroactive coronavirus-related production disruption that would wipe from existence whole seasons of said shows, and, most mercifully of all, expunge them from my memory. I’m talking about the shows that felt fittingly 2020, in that they were a heinous assault on mankind itself.

The Middle

First, let’s look at a handful of shows that for one reason or another teetered on the cusp of entertainment oblivion, but never quite plummeted, or else started to nose-dive but managed to pull the stick back to achieve if not quite a loop-the-loop then at least a level flight.

Early in the year, Armando Ianucci’s hotly anticipated, space-based comedy Avenue 5 certainly elicited more bangs than whimpers; unfortunately, the bangs came as a result of people slamming their heads off of the nearest solid object in pained bewilderment that an Armando Ianucci project could be so insipid. I think much of the problem lay with the uncharted territory being explored, by creator and audience both. Ianucci usually satirises existing institutions and power structures for which we have countless frames of reference, even if we find ourselves ignorant of the minutiae of their functions. Without much foreknowledge we can get what he’s trying to do and trying to say, and who he’s trying to say it about. We understand the archetypes.

In Avenue 5, set aboard a futuristic luxury space-liner, the institution and target was more opaque, and it took some time for the pieces to fall into place, more time than many viewers were willing to extend. Which is a shame, really, because after a somewhat shaky start – initially, the characters felt oddly broad, and the humour fell a little flat – the show unfolded into a delicious, hilarious farce. Its message on the madness of crowds was moulded, I would guess, with the rise of bumbling populist power-mongers and their slavishly devoted minions in mind, but the year’s events transformed the show into a prescient, scathing, very timely satire on how societies behaved, and continue to behave, during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully the second season can hit the ground running… if the coronavirus doesn’t stop them from filming it, that is.

Red Dwarf could easily have ended up slap-bang in the middle of 2020’s dreck list, but it managed to dodge that fate largely thanks to low expectations. Few expected it to be good, even – perhaps especially – childhood fans like me. It still pains me to say it, but Red Dwarf hasn’t been truly noteworthy since its sixth season. Every few years it returns with just enough nuggets of what made it beloved in the first place to justify its continued existence. It’s like a slightly shambolic, age-faded uncle whose hoary old jokes you tolerate because he used to tell you funny stories when you were young. And so it proved with Red Dwarf: The Promised Land, a feature-length special that largely squandered the long-anticipated return of the cat people, especially with its damp squib of a generic villain, but squeezed a lot of laughs out of Lister’s reluctant ascension to godhood (and Rimmer’s reaction to it). There were also a few stellar scenes the dialogue from which wouldn’t have felt out of place in the show’s golden era. Red Dwarf needs to re-learn that it’s always at its best when it trucks in pathos, and lets the laughs flow from character rather than trying to force them through innuendo and crudity.

And now, as promised, the year’s biggest failures and most crushing disappointments.

How the West was Lost

Westworld season one was a brilliant piece of story-telling: dense, rich, mysterious, confounding, thought-provoking. Its second season took a few stutter-steps and stumbles – adding fuel to the fire of those who’d derided the show for over-staying its welcome rather than taking a one-and-done approach – but still turned in powerful, and emotionally resonant sequences and episodes. Then came the third season. Gone were the slow-burns and puzzles, here to stay were the whizz-bangs and non-stop robot ass-kicking. The difference in tone and quality was as pronounced as the difference between Alien and Alien vs Predator 2; Terminator 2 and Terminator: Genysis; and a kiss on the cheek and a thunderous kick in the balls. Westworld has become more like a bad, generic Terminator sequel than the inventive and reflective mind-bender it was when it began. In mulling things over before writing this article, I realised I’d completely forgotten Aaron Paul’s prominent role in season 3; I only remembered once I started grabbing screenshots. This highlights the season’s worst, most unforgiveable, crime: it’s forgettable.

Star Drekking

I was accompanied on my voyages through adolescence by the starships Enterprise, Defiant and Voyager, a triumvirate of overlapping Trek shows (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager respectively) that got me hooked on televised science fiction, and opened my mind to the richness and possibilities of its story-telling.

Sci-fi these days, though, can’t be allowed to revel in its cult status. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry thanks to the likes of Star Wars and Marvel and Disney. Sci-fi is now for the masses, and they want blockbusters, all of the time, whether the screen is small or cinema-sized: big explosions, big emotions, big lens flares, and loud and manipulative musical scores.

Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point. It looks great. Some of the visual effects, particularly in its third season, have been breath-taking. But I can’t help but feel that the aesthetics have been dialled up at the expense of the writing, and somewhere along the line the show has lost its grip on what makes Star Trek ‘Star Trek’. I know times change, and with them budgets, attitudes, audience habits and technology. What might have worked in the 60s (even the 80s) wouldn’t necessarily work today; a lot of it definitely wouldn’t. I know Star Trek has evolved, and has to evolve, to stay relevant. I just wonder if the show has changed too much, to the point where Star Trek: Discovery isn’t just a bad Star Trek show, but a bad (or, if I’m being generous, a mediocre) show, full-stop.

I say this not only as a borderline fuddy-duddy who looks back fondly and perhaps with a sense of protectiveness on the halcyon days of Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, but also as someone who watches, and often critiques, an unhealthy amount of television. I’m not operating in a vacuum here. I know what a good Star Trek or, more broadly, a good sci-fi series looks like, and I know what a good TV show looks like. And Discovery doesn’t look like any of it.

Season three saw our plucky crew following Michael through a wormhole into the far-future, acting as custodians of data that a malevolent AI had tried to use to end all sentient, organic life in the universe.

The season started well, with an opener that was entertaining and luscious to look at, if a little vacuous and whizz-bang, followed by an effective episode that saw the crew having to extract the ship from a tomb of fast-replicating ice. Things quickly went downhill after that. The season’s premise, that the Federation of the future was a spent and rag-tag force, a shadow of its former self only kept alive by hope and goodwill, was a strong one, though, as usual, Michael Burnham’s habit of instantly saving the universe just because she’s Michael Burnham rather robbed the story, and the new universe, of its chance to grow in depth and complexity.

Myriad complications face the crew in this new far-future universe, chief among them the cataclysmic event that occurred 120 years before the Discovery’s arrival. This was ‘the burn’, an unexplained phenomenon that caused all dilithium in the galaxy to spontaneously combust, killing untold thousands and rendering most spaceships incapable of fast interstellar travel. Again, fantastical and implausible as this notion was (and I clearly say that in my capacity as a qualified astro-physicist…) there was great potential here for complex conflict and drama that was unfortunately side-lined in favour of slick and shiny whizz-bang, and the sacrificing of all ancillary characters and themes on the altar of Michael Burnham.

You could lay some of the blame for Discovery’s problems on its serialised format – the shift away from the standalone episodes that were once Star Trek’s bread-and-butter – but that would be to deny Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s phenomenally successful forays into that type of long-form story-telling. Even when dealing with war and hopelessness and loss DS9 never lost its essence, its hope, its intrinsic sense of the wider canvas – and franchise – in which it existed.

It helped that DS9 had layered, flawed and fully-fleshed-out characters. Discovery has, at its core, Michael Burnham and Saru (I loved Georgiou, but she’s been spun off into her own spin-off series now), maybe, at a push, Book, Stamets, and Culver, and I wouldn’t include any of them, barring Saru and Georgiou, in the top 50 of Trek’s best characters. I’m still not entirely sure of the names of most of the bridge crew. Very few supporting characters enjoy much in the way of development in this show, and if they do it’s either to service the plot, or service the universal constant that is Michael Burnham – usually the latter. This is not an ensemble show: this is the Michael Burnham show, with occasional not-so-special guest stars.

Season three had so many cynically manufactured emotional beats it was almost a percussive symphony, a dirge scored to the background wail of crying. Jesus, they cry a lot on this show, a lot more than any group of people I’ve ever encountered in life or fiction. And they affirm each other a lot, too, whether it’s earned or not. There were so many bullshit inspirational speeches that I started to think I was watching The Walking Dead In Space. Hugging and crying, crying and hugging, feeling and being in touch with feelings. Signalling to the audience, ‘You should feel this NOW and now you should feel THIS’: telling not showing; shouting not whispering.

Whereas Trek spin-offs like The Next Generation had consultants on hand to advise on the plausibility and logistics of the scripts’ speculative science, Discovery is content to cleave closer to mood and magic. The emphasis is always on feeling over thinking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the revelation that ‘the burn’ was caused by a sad and angry Kelpien child reacting to the death of his mother under extraordinary (and extraordinarily stupid) circumstances. I’m afraid so. This is no longer a science-fiction show. It’s like something written for the CW by someone who used to write fantasy for children, and doesn’t really like Star Trek, or science-fiction, all that much. I never get the sense, like I did with previous incarnations of the show, that the characters live on the ship. The ship doesn’t feel like a home to them; more like a spaceborne feelings’ factory, or a mobile exposition unit. When the characters appear on-screen – usually running, frequently crying – it’s as though they’ve just entered stage left. Not real people but actors, ciphers. Surface. It’s all just surface.

If you want good small-screen sci-fi, watch The Expanse; if you want good Star Trek, watch 80s and 90s Star Trek, or even watch The Orville, a gem of a show that’s managed to capture the ethos and feel of a modern Star Trek show while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Whatever my interpretation of (or ‘feelings about’ if you want a little sliver of irony) Discovery, a crime hasn’t been committed here. It’s just a TV show, and if people enjoy it or take comfort from it, then who am I to judge them? In any case, I’d take Discovery over Star Trek: Picard any (and every) day of the week.

Christ, Picard felt like a kick in the nuts; a kick so hard it sent my nuts thundering up my body like two errant pinballs, which then ping-ponged between my skull and amygdala until my brain died. Sometimes, as Fred Gwynne said in Pet Sematary, dead is better, and that’s certainly the case here, both in relation to the show itself, and to the fate of Jean Luc Picard at the season’s end.

On reflection, all of the things I enjoyed about Picard season one were rooted in nostalgia. I liked the opening dream sequence aboard the NCC-1701; I liked Picard reuniting with Riker and Troi; I liked seeing Hugh and Seven of Nine again; I liked Data’s (now second) final death scene. But I only liked them in the same way that I would like the sudden waft of a smell that reminded me of being a kid and visiting my dearly-departed grandparents. Running with that memory-sparking theme, then, I would have to say that the experience of watching season one of Picard is like someone reanimating your dead grandparents and having those hitherto sweet, wise and gentle figures hurl foul abuse at you, screaming until they’re hoarse that the world is an irredeemably ugly place and we all deserve death, before beating you senseless and attempting to extract one of your eyes with a dessert spoon (unless your grandparents were like that when they were alive, in which case please pick another analogy from the pile). Gone, also, is the Picard we remember from active duty; here instead we have a walking fan-fic who’s presumably been written by an overly sentimental sado-masochist. The Picard of this show is just a broken old man who seems to spend most of his time being told to fuck off.

I know genre shows like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica have upped the ante, opening the door to dealing with adult themes and content in a commercially successful way, but Star Trek shouldn’t try to compete with them on that battleground. They’re their own thing, and Star Trek is its own thing. By all means re-invigorate Star Trek, but, again, don’t lose sight of the sort of show it is and always has been, and don’t transmogrify it into ‘Quentin Tarantino in Space’.

Star Trek: Picard is gritty, dark, spectacularly and incongruously violent, full of swearing (people say fuck in Star Trek now), sombre and miserable. It falls light-years short of the success and quality of The Expanse, and in so courting that audience-base at the expense of its life-long fans fails at being a Star Trek show. The worst of both worlds, if you like.

Oh, Doctor Who. What’s happened to you? I was never a huge fan of the show as a child. I was aware of its place in the cultural consciousness, knew the contemporary doctors of my era, and enjoyed it whenever I watched it. I was too young to deduce the death throes the show had entered into under the helm of controversial show-runner Johnathan Nathan-Turner, and didn’t particularly mourn its passing when the original run ended in 1989. As an adult, I enjoyed the show’s new iteration, starting with Christopher Eccleston and running all the way up to Peter Capaldi. As I had started writing for Den of Geek I thought it criminal I wasn’t fully au fait with the show’s long history, geek behemoth that it is, so took to bingeing it from the very beginning. My kids came along for the ride, and fell in love with Doctor Who, almost to the point of fanaticism. They now know every era, every doctor and companion, and almost every story from the Classic series to the present day, up to and including the 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.

And this era is the one they’re least enthusiastic about. I feel the same. Again, the special effects are, in most cases, better than they’ve ever been, but everything just feels a bit flat, from the performance of the central character to the villains to the alien worlds and wonders we’re invited to explore. It’s like the showrunner Chris Chibnall, despite being a fan of the show since childhood, has forgotten the essence of what Doctor Who is. The show has become more like a series of facile morality plays with sprinklings of Quantum Leap than a show about a space cowboy rolling into town in his rusty blue wagon, righting wrongs, fighting evil and trying to leave the universe a better place than when he found it.

This latest season was an improvement on last year’s season 11, but that’s like saying Jeffrey Epstein was an improvement on Jimmy Savile. In fairness, the opening two-parter, Spyfall, was actually a lot of fun, and I loved the new, wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Master (Sacha Dahwan). The Haunting of Villa Diodati, too, was a strong outing, with an intriguing premise and a commendably eerie atmosphere. Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, was, as always, a rare chink of light in the darkness, a warm and engaging companion. Jo Martin’s incarnation of the Doctor, pursued to rural England by the Judoon, was a similar joy to watch, proving that the Doctor’s gender isn’t the real, or at least the greatest, problem with the current manifestation of the character. But, despite little flashes of competency here and there, the season got bogged down in boredom, preachiness, and insipid story-telling, very much wearing its politics on its sleeve, shaped like a giant mutated fist. There was also Orphan 55, one of the worst ever episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the worst ever episodes of anything ever. And that’s before we even consider the canon-smashing sledgehammer of the season’s closing two-parter that makes Jodie Whittaker’s version of the character not the 13th, but approximately the 1,000,013th.

This show is dying, despite its occasional grand gestures and increasing attempts at fan service, and I don’t think I care anymore. And my kids don’t either. Which should be a little worrying for the BBC, given that my kids, and thousands like them, are the show’s primary target market.

Spitting Image is the spitting image of a very bad show. I used to love the series when I was younger, and now find myself wondering if the ‘satire’ was always this broad, the jokes always so cheap. Much of the problem lies with many of the show’s targets being beyond parody, especially Donald Trump, who is already a malevolent puppet. Elsewhere in the show, though, the writers seemed content to take lazy, tabloid-style pops at their targets, most notably Harry and Megan, a duo, and a representation of them, sure to please the Daily Mail crowd. Just leave them alone, for Christ’s sake. The characterisation of Joe Biden, too, could have been ripped from tweets written by Trump himself. And as much as I loathe Prince Andrew, having the punchlines to his appearances be literal punches and head-battings rather lowered the satirical tone to sub-Punch-and-Judy levels.

I liked Dominic Cummings’ pulsating-headed alien, and, contrary to my comments on Prince Andrew, it’s always a joy to see James Corden being viciously beaten, but beyond that the show either punched down, or couched its punches in soft velvet gloves. Puerile, unfunny and a wasted opportunity for some political satire with some real heft.

What shows do you think missed the mark in 2020? Or do you disagree with my sh*t-list? Tell me in the comments below this article.

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

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You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy  that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…

Geeks may rule, but *that* ‘aint cool…

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Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.

I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.

About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.

And I failed.

Miserably.

Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”

She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”

The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.

How times have changed.

Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.

It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.

Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’

So geek is now cool.

Except… not all of it.

Oh god, not all of it.

Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.

Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong

I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.

Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’

Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.

But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.

Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.

Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.

Red Face in Space

I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.

My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.

Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.

After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.

Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.

It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.

If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.

I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.

An arrow through the ear

I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse… 

I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.

If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.

By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.

Canary, you have failed this.

Shitty.

O Batman, Where Art Thou?

Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.

However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.

There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.

Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty

The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.

Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.

I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.

My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.

‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.

‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.

It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.

And don’t you forget it.

Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.

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.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

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Part 4: Well, that was lovely…

Wherein Jamie is stunned into silence. Not the Jamie in the show. This Jamie. The one writing this now.

If I’ve got one complaint about the final stretch of episodes in Outlander’s maiden season, it’s that they’re just far too bloody nice. But that’s not really a complaint, is it? At least not one I’m prepared to lodge, because nice is… well, it’s nice, isn’t it? The world is so over-run with horrible things, that you should snatch up every crumb of nice whenever and wherever you can, am I right?

Of course I am. I mean, some people might have thought that the bit in episode 12 where Jamie was pardoned and given the keys to Scotland by the King himself was a bit far-fetched, but yah boo and sucks to them, that’s what I say – the bloody killjoys. Where’s the magnificence in their souls? I guess they didn’t like the bit where all of the bunny rabbits started dancing to ‘Feed the World’ underneath that rainbow, either. Or when Claire spent two whole episodes working her way up and down a line of seventeen-thousand soft, fluffy, dewy-eyed puppies cuddling every single last one of them, as Murtagh gave thanks to the sun through the medium of song, and Geillis came back from the dead, and everybody held hands and skipped and danced and cheered and EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY AND NOTHING, AND I MEAN NOTHING, BAD HAPPENED TO ANYONE.

NOTHING.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT?

NOTHING!

A soft voice calls to me from just outside the room. I almost don’t hear it over the noise of my own frenzied rocking. ‘Mr Andrew?’ the voice says, ‘Are you ready for your medication now?’

‘Yes, nurse,’ I tell her.

‘You haven’t drawn a smiling face on a watermelon, taken your clothes off and started hugging it against your tear-soaked breast again, have you?’

I ignore the question, and hug the watermelon all the tighter. ‘Everything’s…still lovely out there, isn’t it, nurse? I mean nothing… nothing bad has… happened… to anyone, has it?’

She doesn’t answer. The silence stretches to what feels like an infinity, each beat of its empty, noiseless drum causing my heart to leap and thump in my chest.

‘Nurse?’ I ask plaintively.

‘NURRRRSSSSSSSSSSE?!!’

A squad of twelve men in white coats bursts into the room, each man grabbing a limb or hunk of flesh and squeezing down, pushing down, hauling down, until they’re sure that I’ve been subdued. One of them snatches a syringe from between his gritted teeth, holds its needle aloft like a tiny fencing sword, and then plunges it into my bicep, the world turning to stars and jelly before me.

‘Went…,’ I mutter as I start to slip into the darkness, ‘Wi-wi-wen… Wentworthhhhhhhhh…’

FADE TO BLACK

I guess what I’m trying to say, in an incredibly indulgent and circumlocutory fashion, is: “Holy merciful fuck, that was absolutely soul-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly brutal! Worse than Lem taking a grenade to the crotch. Worse than Negan giving Glenn an eye-ectomy. Worse than Ragnar ripping out some poor schmuck’s spine and ribs to commemorate the opening of Norway’s very first ‘World of Wings’.”

Gore, guts, blood, and brutality have been frequent visitors to Outlander’s highland vistas. And death: horrible, senseless, agonising death. Hangings, guttings, slittings, gougings, gurglings – every revolting, disturbing thing ending with ‘ing’ that you can think of, up to and including sing-ing (sorry, Claire). But Jamie’s treatment at the hands of Black Jack Randall outstrips and outranks the lot, certainly in terms of its haunting impact and savage, psychological cruelty.

I knew it was coming. Well, I knew something was coming. Not only thanks to the chorus of ‘Wait until you see the last episode of the season!’s I heard from everyone who knew I was bingeing Outlander, but from a one-star review on Amazon I foolishly read that – while it didn’t identify a recipient – mentioned a bout of rape and torture that the reviewer had found so foul and disturbing it had put him off the show for life.

I can see why the chap would have been disquieted. What happens to Jamie is horrible and harrowing, but while it’s unpleasant and hard to watch, I didn’t find it in any way gratuitous. Randall is a narcissist, a psychopath and a sadist. His treatment of Jamie – wooing him; beating him; smashing him; threatening him; envying him; loving him; hating him; hurting him; curdling him; soothing him; breaking him; reprogramming him; generally toying with him as a cat would a dying mouse – was absolutely in-keeping with the sort of full-spectrum assault a damaged and dangerous man like Randall would launch upon a victim, especially one so completely, situationally, institutionally and legally at his mercy as Jamie.

It was a grimly effective touch for the classic ‘hero races against time to save their lover’ cliché to be subverted by having Randall, and not Claire, arrive to rescue Jamie just in the nick of time. The hangman’s noose would’ve been kinder.

‘How does it feel to be alive, but wear so much dead flesh?’ Randall asks Jamie as he inspects his own handy-work. It’s a question that Jamie could just as easily have asked of Randall himself, a man who carries his deadness on the inside.

Claire attempts to rescue Jamie from Wentworth, but only succeeds in getting ring-side tickets to his torture, and almost earning a place by his side in the process. Jamie helps her to escape by killing Randall’s goon, leaving him at the mercy of the malevolent maniac’s grotesquely intimate end-game. Jamie is violated, beaten, broken, branded (or rather made to brand himself), all of which is viscerally upsetting, but in the end the most brutal parts of his treatment are those that would’ve seemed affectionate, even loving, in a different context. Randall weaponises tenderness, and uses it to inflict greater damage upon Jamie than a hundred-thousand lashes ever could.

I know I’ve often characterised Jamie’s and Claire’s romps as something akin to soft porn meets soap-opera, but in retrospect it’s a relief that those scenes exist. The couple’s lingering, loving, intimate embraces ultimately serve as a necessary counterpoint to Randall’s abuse, a crucial reminder of gentler, happier times – although you could also argue that Claire’s love only serves to accentuate Randall’s hatred.

Is there more to Randall than just evil and psychopathy? What does he want? The most terrifying answer to that question is that he just wants to love and to be loved in turn, but hates himself so much that in order to show any vulnerability or tenderness he first has to destroy someone’s body and spirit utterly and completely. It’s chilling that what Randall does could simply be a souring and a corruption of the human desire to belong. Randall is a mess of mental illness, malevolence and contradictions: he wants Jamie, he hates Jamie; he wants to be Jamie, he wants to destroy Jamie. He wants Jamie to love him of his own volition, yet he never wants to cede control and thus risk rejection. He wants to co-opt the ready-made love that Jamie feels for Claire, to erase her face in his recollections and replace it with his, so that every thought in Jamie’s head always leads back to him.

Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies deserve plaudits for bringing this monstrous, one-sided love story to life with such pain and conviction. If it was hard for us to watch, then think how hard it must have been for them to play it.

Now, let’s get the hell out of Wentworth; regroup our collective sanities and have the psychological equivalent of a long, hot shower.

So much of Outlander deals with people trying to conceal their true natures, identities and intentions. Sometimes they hide it from others, sometimes they hide it from themselves. These secrets and subterfuges make for some entertaining scenarios, and also – as we’ve already seen before in this show – some of the most awkward dinner parties known to man.

The scene where Jamie and his family dodge volleys of suspicious questions from the Watch Commander, Taran MacQuarrie, was a masterclass in tension. When Horrocks showed up the next day with his big bag of slippery tricks and a tip-off for Taran, I knew the triple-crossing Irishman wasn’t long for this world. Even still, it was a nice surprise to see the death-blow landed by Jamie’s brother-in-law.

Things quickly descended into the realms of classic farce, and I braced myself for a brutal and bloody confrontation between the lads of Lallybroch and the Watch, but I’ll be damned if Taran didn’t welcome the news of Jamie’s outlaw status and the murder of Horrocks with a hearty laugh.

The ability to create secondary characters and bit players that the audience cares about is a good measure of a series’ overall quality (unless the main characters they’re supporting are less interesting to watch than paint drying on a dead tortoise’s back, in which case there may be a problem). Outlander has them in spades, and the show is never frightened to kill them off in service of the story, no matter how accomplished the actor or popular the character. The story is king, and I’d imagine even kings will be cast aside if they stand too long in the way of the show’s time-crossed lovers.

I was very sorry to see Taran go. He was a wonderful character and Douglas Henshall gave a commanding performance. There was a Chicken McNugget of nobility hiding beneath the cold fries of Taran’s knavery, and I’d like to have seen that nugget blossom – and, yes, I’m well aware that I’ve royally fucked that metaphor and you’re now thinking about fields of chicken nuggets blooming in the spring sunshine.

As MacQuarrie approached the gallows I kept thinking, “He’ll survive this. He’s too good a character. Think of the adventures he and Jamie will have together. He’s not going to… well, the rope’s going round his neck… ach, someone will yell ‘Stop’, any second now. They’ve pushed him off. He’s… he’s going rather blue now… but… but I dare say it won’t be long before Jamie’s punching a guard and running up there with a sword to cut him down, and then they’ll both fight their way out of that castle. Any minute. Any minute now. Annnnnny minu.. he’s doing a really good job of pretending that he isn’t violently choking to death up there… Annnnnnnnnny minute now…”

It wasn’t until one of the English soldiers swung onto Taran’s corpse and started pulling it groundwards with all of his might that I realised the only way Taran was going to walk again would be if his body fell through a portal in time and space and dropped down at Rick Grimes’ feet in post-apocalyptic Georgia.

One of the many things I admire about Outlander is how often and how quickly it moves. Neither the story nor the characters ever remain static for long. Just when Castle Leoch starts to become too familiar, Outlander takes us into the nearby town, or out on the road collecting rent. We could be in an English garrison one minute, a west-coast fort the next, Lallybroch the other, the characters in a constant state of propulsion and flux, growing and changing as they speed their way through the highlands, running from and towards both their enemies and loves alike.

Jamie’s disappearance gave Claire a chance to try out some different double-acts away from the core relationship. Her time with Jamie’s sister involved a lot of moping through the woods followed by an almost-death, but it was as part of Team Clurtagh that Claire really shone. While some pathos was wrung from the pairing, their time together was mostly characterised by dressing-up, singing saucy songs and boozy dancing – all in the name of smoking Jamie out of his Heelan hidey-hole, of course.

When Claire donned a dusty little jacket to help kick-start her singing career, she looked like she wouldn’t have been out of place in Christmas panto at the Edinburgh Playhouse; playing Buttons in Cinderella, perhaps. But the more I looked at her, the more I realised that there – right there before my very eyes – stood not just a viable front-runner for the next Doctor Who, but the perfect one. Caitriona Balfe is in many ways a far stronger candidate than the Tardis’s incumbent betitted Time Lord.

One thing I’ve noticed since starting this binge is that the Outlander fan-base is more rabid, fierce, animated and committed than the Star Trek and Star Wars lot combined, so if they want to make Caitriona Balfe the next Doctor Who, then Caitriona Balfe will be the next Doctor Who. If they sent a squad of Outlander fans back through time to Culloden, they’d win the fucking thing.

A few asides: What an unscrupulous and horny old goat you are, Dougal; Jack Sparrow gypsy guy? I hope you come back. You were pretty cool; and Sam Heughan looks a dash like Wentworth Miller (STOP MENTIONING WENTWORTH – starts rocking again), though doesn’t share his prison breaking skills. The award for best prison breaking skills of course goes to… erm, some cows.

Claire treated Jamie’s physical wounds, but his psychic ones will take far longer to heal. And though we saw Randall lying prone on the ground following a frenzied coo attack, he definitely isn’t dead. He can’t be. That would be too quick, bizarre and incidental a death for a larger-than-life, havoc-wreaking figure like Black Jack. Especially when Jamie has an awful lot of closure to reap from Randall’s violent demise. I guess I was wrong in my last: Jack’s coming back.

Or rather Jamie’s coming back, because as the season ends he’s on his merry way to France.

When Claire stood on the deck of that ship and revealed to Jamie the news of their impending parenthood, I smiled. And smiled again as they lost themselves in a sea of love and joy – their wounds, for the moment at least, healed; their bond strengthened by the age-old mathematics of procreative multiplication. I may even have offered an involuntary volley of affirming words to the empty room, like ‘Aw, that’s nice,’ or ‘You go, girl.’ Thank Christ I didn’t cry or anything. I’ve escaped season one with some small sliver of masculinity intact.

Never-the-less, I think it’s time to re-watch Game of Thrones and The Wire to remind myself of the callous indifference of the world before I end up perched on the couch with a tub of ice-cream on one side of me and a box of tissues on the other doing box-set marathons of Drop Dead Diva and Sex and the City.

In my defence, I think that after all Jamie and Claire had been through by that point, both separately and together (poor Jamie especially) they probably deserved a clichéd, soap-style coda. Some simple, honest-to-goodness good news and happiness.

Ah. [breathes a heavy sigh of relief]

She’s going to lose the fucking baby, isn’t she?

NUUUURRRSSSSSEEEEEEEE!

PS: I’ve been thinking about how Jamie’s ‘ghost’ appeared in 1945 Inverness during the first episode. That’ll be Jamie coming to say a final, silent goodbye just before his death in the very last episode of the final season. I’d wager three sheafs of corn, twelve gold coins and a goat on it.

PPS: Season 4 starts in the real-world this weekend. I’ll catch up soon. In the meantime, my binge-watch will continue, but less frequently than before (don’t want to intrude upon the fans’ excitement about the new season). I’ll return for Season 2 Eps 1 – 4 next Friday. Thanks for reading.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

The Doctor Falls: A Haunting Look at Love, Loss, Death and Hope

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Doctor Who is, and always has been, a family drama, so in theory it should be palatable and accessible to all points of the age spectrum at all times; in practice it’s always oscillated wildly between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. There are some episodes a little too silly or garish for my tastes, but which my son adores. Equally, there are episodes I consider mature, thought-provoking and insightful that my son considers confusing, boring or terrifying, or sometimes all three at once.

The show’s tone can change between and within seasons, and sometimes even within episodes themselves. From its inception the show’s been on a tone rollercoaster: from the stern and semi-educational stylings of William Hartnell’s grandfatherly doctor, to the karate-chop hijinks of Jon Pertwee, to the Mary Whitehouse-bating body horror and gothic grizzliness of Tom Baker’s early years, to the girny slapstick buffoonery  of Sylvester McCoy’s maiden season, to the multi-layered, sometimes senselessly intricate and confusing pseudo-nonsense of Steven Moffat’s stewardship.

Season 10 of Doctor Who (or season 37 if you’re that way inclined), its most recent, has grappled so ferociously and frequently with love, loss and the haunting spectre of death that it’s hard to imagine the gooey cuteness of the Adipose, Pex of Paradise Towers or the farty menace of the Slitheen existing in the same universe. While the show has also never been funnier – the impromptu appearance of the Pope in Bill’s living room being an especial highlight this season – Capaldi’s impending departure has cast a death-shaped shadow over the season that’s introduced a heavy, inescapable note of sadness to the show. If this sounds like a criticism, it most definitely isn’t. The marriage of mirth and melancholy has been a godsend for the show, as has the marriage of Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie, who have been uniformly excellent together. And let’s not forget Matt Lucas, who was an incredibly pleasant surprise – almost a revelation – as Nardole.

Steven Moffat is occasionally guilty of over-loading his narrative, throwing more elements and novelties into a story than its structure can bear, until the episode collapses in on itself, or disappears through a wormhole up its own arse. ‘The Doctor Falls’, however, was pretty much perfect in terms of pacing, mood, dialogue, plot, emotion, the loops and links within the double-episode finale and to the series’ own past, and the deft handling of some of Doctor Who’s most iconic monsters and villains. The Doctor Falls – haunting and affecting; immersed in hope, horror, sadness and goodbyes, and all draped in the cold white of death – was a fitting swan-song for Bill and Nardole, and a somberly satisfying sort-of send-off for both the twelfth doctor and Steven Moffat himself.

David Tennant’s pre-regenerative parting plea – ‘I don’t want to go’ – is regarded with a sneer by a vocal minority of fans, who consider it a particularly egregious example of Russell T Davies’ over-fondness for schmaltz and sentimentality. The Doctor would never behave like that, they snipe. He never greeted any of his previous regenerations in such a spirit of whiny arrogance before.  It’s not death, just change.

But it is a death. How could it be anything other? When we move towns, countries or houses, when we leave school, get divorced, become parents or start a new job, our changing brains and circles (of both friends and influence) and circumstances and stances and outlooks change so drastically – albeit slowly over time and not finger-click quick like a regeneration – that the new people we become are almost entirely disparate entities, with perhaps only a tangential connection to our ‘true’ or ‘original’ self. We break with our pasts, our youths, our lives, in a dance of perpetual reinvention. Imagine how we would feel if we routinely changed our entire body: face, physiology, biochemistry, height, weight, age (gender?), everything. Who would ‘we’ be?

Moffat managed to make the Doctor’s impending regeneration feel like the most final of goodbyes, despite the fact that we all know it isn’t. His handling of both the Doctor and the Master/Missy really hammered home the point that each new version of these characters is so distinct from the others as to be wholly separate beings. The Twelfth Doctor has moved away from the exquisite alienness of his first few years to embrace a deeply earnest sense of humanity and kindness. Missy found redemption, of sorts, through death at the hands of her previous incarnation. With that in mind, it makes sense to arrive at the conclusion that if Time Lords can counter their core instincts, if regeneration can favour revolution over evolution, then each regeneration is certainly a death. But the final message needn’t be fatalistic. Perhaps the feeling we should take away from the finale is that the power, and hope, of change resides in all of us.

The Doctor Falls lends legitimacy to Tennant’s farewell, and adds a greater poignancy and sadness to Capaldi’s upcoming exit, an exit I’m already very, very sad about. On the strength of this incredible episode (both of its parts) I may even miss Moffat, too.

Classic Doctor Who: hammy, hilarious, and worth it

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through old episodes of Doctor Who, rejoicing in the wobbly-setted delights of the first four doctors. I’m currently concentrating on a chunk of episodes from Pertwee’s tenure in the 1970s, some of which I vaguely remember seeing on UK Gold many moons ago, most of which is entirely new to me.

It’s become something of a cliché to talk up the rubber monsters, the hammy acting and the all-round low-budget feel of the show’s yesteryear, but, Christ, some of it’s downright hilarious. Last week, I saw a Northern Irish bureaucrat screaming in terror as he was slowly eaten by a plastic armchair; a posh old toff wailing miserably as he was attacked by a ridiculous, scrunch-faced plastic doll who’d come to life and leapt onto his neck from a mantle-piece, and Jon Pertwee himself reacting to a malevolent phone cord trying to strangle him to death. Granted, these are events out-with the normal sphere of human experience, and thus reasonably difficult to react to with any measure of verisimilitude. Even more difficult considering the special effects technology that was available at the time. In most episodes from that era the poor actors had to feign death in response to nothing more than a series of increasingly daft sound effects and shimmering blobs, that were only added in post-production. Meaning they were actually reacting to absolutely nothing. However, in all cases the director appears to have shouted from off-camera: ‘BOGGLE YOUR EYES OUT, THAT’S IT! LIFT YOUR HANDS UP LIKE A HEROINE IN A SILENT MOVIE WHO’S ABOUT TO BE HIT BY A TRAIN! THAT’S IT! SCREAM LIKE A SHOT TORTOISE! NOW STICK YOUR TONGUE OUT LIKE YOU’VE JUST BEEN STRUCK DOWN BY A STROKE MID-WAY THROUGH TRYING TO MAKE A BABY LAUGH! THAT’S IT! THAT’S PERFECT!’

I do like Pertwee though. A lot. I like his haughtiness, his abruptness and his occasional bouts of silliness. Pertwee’s doctor and Capaldi’s share much in common, although Capaldi tends to accentuate the doctor’s strange otherworldliness, while Pertwee always strived to put the ‘Lord’ into Time Lord. However, Pertwee’s Doctor was a Lord who seemed to have a fondness for poor people and the less fortunate, which is a rare Lord indeed.

The act of criticising a piece of television for the crime of reflecting the society in which it was created is a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but the way that race was handled in some of the early Who stories can’t help but make me cringe. I keep expecting Jeremy Clarkson to materialise alongside Pertwee’s Tardis in a time-travelling Porsche, muttering about ‘woeful indoor plumbing’, ‘spears’ and ‘laughable head-wear’. Hindsight’s 20/20 I suppose. The great Roman orator and lawyer Cicero owned a slave, George Washington owned slaves, and we all used to hum along to Gary Glitter songs.

It’s still uncomfortable to watch, though. In the Troughton serial ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, an archaeological expedition team has a giant, ox-like, black slave/henchman who trundles in its wake, issuing monosyllabic grunts and clobbering people. In the Pertwee serial ‘Terror of the Autons’, a circus baddie has a giant, ox-like black slave/henchman who trundles about the circus, issuing monosyllabic grunts and clobbering people. In ‘Mind of Evil’, the Master has a black limo driver. That could just be the law of averages. There were probably a lot of black limo drivers in those days, and there may even be a fair few of them today, I don’t know; I don’t have the statistics to hand. However, perhaps less forgiveable, that same serial features a Chinese lady whose every appearance on screen is accompanied by plinky-plonky, mysterious oriental music, which registers as a little lazy and gratuitous to modern ears. Thank heaven for small mercies though. At least the lady wasn’t required to ride around on a ceremonial dragon whilst eating rice and shouting about communism.

And let’s not forget this line, uttered by a Scotsman in the opening seconds of the Tom Baker serial ‘Terror of the Zygons’:

MUNRO: Hey, listen, Willie. With tomorrow’s supply ‘cop trip, can you no send over a few haggis?

Hey, Munro, Groundskeeper Wullie wants his patter back! I guess the contrast between the two Who-eras is only made starker by how inclusive and reflective Nu Who is of contemporary British society. Are we ready for a black, asian or female Doctor Who? Well, I’m ready, insofar as I wouldn’t care one way or the other. It’s not a case of ‘We should have a non-white male as Doctor Who’ and more a case of ‘Why shouldn’t we have a non-white male as Doctor Who’? The only problem the show would face if it recast along those lines would be our own history, which has discriminated against women and non-whites for long millenia. Every time a non-white Doctor Who travelled to earth’s past, the storyline would invariably have to tackle racism and prejudice, which would become incredibly tiresome for the actor in question who presumably would just want to be left alone to dash along corridors brandishing a sonic screwdriver and shouting at Daleks.

Still, I’m enjoying my little journey through time (on-screen and off), despite the fact that my partner will occasionally walk past the screen and offer her considered opinion on classic Who in all of its glory:

“How can you watch this awful, awful shite?”

How indeed.

Or should that be Who?