TV Review – Constellation, The Regime, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin

Carry On, Dick

There’s a lot of quantum in Constellation (Apple TV+). But then there’s been a lot of quantum in recent storytelling generally. For those unsure about quantum physics, there are a number of weirdly impossible things that have been theorised, one of which is that a particle can exist in two places at the same time, the way Bradley Walsh can somehow present both Gladiators and The Chase.

To explain this, physicists have come up with things like Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment to explain how something can be both dead and alive. For example, Constellation commits one of the biggest cardinal sins of modern drama early on: the first guy to die is the only black guy. But wait a minute, is he actually dead?

There are a lot of doubles in Constellation. Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Jonathan Banks plays what may or not be brothers, whilst another character is played by twins. Five episodes in and we still don’t know why this character is played by twin actresses, although it’s pretty obvious that this will be the latest attempt to scare the effluent out of our heroine, an astronaut played by Noomi Rapace.

For whilst there is all sorts of talk regarding quantum physics and the first two episodes take place on the International Space Station, Constellation is deep down an old-fashioned haunted house movie. Rapace, no stranger to being the lead in scary movies (passim) is perfect to deliver the screams when she comes face to decaying face with the floating corpse of a long-dead Cosmonaut. She’s someone who barely survives an accident aboard the ISS and is trying to piece together why her earth-bound life feels wrong and why seemingly impossible events are happening.

The writer of Constellation is Peter Harness, adapter of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and writer of some of the more cerebral recent Doctor Who episodes (Kill the Moon, the Zygon two parter) so I trust he isn’t going to do the obvious ‘Rapace died in the accident and this is all a dream’ plot. But where Constellation is going remains as ineffable as an impossible particle.

Another new TV show that is hard to predict is The Regime (Sky Atlantic). Kate Winslett plays the dictator of a country in somewhere pointedly called ‘Middle Europe’, as if it was a Tolkienesque fantasy world. Any allusions to wizards and elves are quickly dispelled, however, as the media property The Regime most resembles is The Death of Stalin.

Like that film, we are dealing with the inner circle of an absolute autocrat, as we quickly discover that Winslett’s Chancellor Vernham brings a Donald’s worth of eccentricities to her role as absolute ruler, including germaphobia and fondness for larger-than-life self-portraits. As with Armando Iannucci’s film, most of the main cast are using their natural accents and, because most of them are English, it gives the impression this country is being run by graduates of RADA.

This seems deliberate. Into this world comes the only member of the cast who isn’t English, Belgian Matthias Schoenaerts, playing a hulking soldier (“he’s a plough horse”) who may be guilty of war crimes. He is given a second chance by Winslett, who seemingly doesn’t mind the odd war crime. He is the only character who could plausibly come from a place called Middle Europe, although there is another exception in the actor playing Winslett’s husband, Frenchman Guillaume Gallienne, who describes their courtship thusly:

“We met in medical school in Paris. I had a wife and baby at the time but Elena is very persuasive. Alas, she went home to pursue politics so I went home to my wife and kid. And then she thought that marriage would help her campaign. So she asked me to propose, which I did. And I left my family in Paris for good and haven’t seen them since.”

So romantic. 

The other show that The Regime most resembles is The Crown, specifically when the very real Michael Fagin had an impromptu early morning royal audience with Her Majesty. The same thing happens here, although rather than let the mysterious visitor to the Chancellor’s bedchamber have a friendly natter, Schoenaerts takes it upon himself to beat up the uninvited guest to within an inch of his life.

Coping with the trauma of having her personal space invaded (“I breathed him! I breathed him!”) Winslett comes to rely on possible war criminal Schoenaerts, to the point of taking his advice to get rid of all the English people she’s surrounded by. So farewell Henry Goodman, David Bamber and Pippa ‘Mrs. Brittas’ Haywood, although we suspect Andrea Riseborough’s very Northern palace manager will survive, unlike Roy Hodgson.

The Regime revels in its many absurdities, such as Winslett earnestly singing If You Leave Me Now by Chicago at a party, pointedly emphasising the ‘please don’t go’ line. I don’t think the largely unseen people she rules have got a choice. The Regime is directed by Stephen Frears, the same guy who directed Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door.

There are a number of mistakes people make when doing historical comedies. One is to make it expensive. If there is one lesson Blackadder gave the world it’s that historical comedies should be as cheap as chips. Even the Monty Python lot realised this back in the 70s and actually got a few laughs from them not being able to afford horses. The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin (Apple TV+) can afford horses, which doesn’t bode well.

Another mistake of historical comedies is to make the main character utterly earnest and boring whilst surrounding them with a bunch of wacky sidekicks. There are plenty of sidekicks on this show but Dick Turpin himself is played by Noel Fielding, a man immune to the word boring. Rather than play any documented historical figure, Fielding is playing the usual Noel Fielding role, a gadfly obsessed with clothes and looking cool. He gives the boring role to poor sidekick Ellie White, leaving her to be the one who looks constantly exasperated. 

TCMUAoDT, as we must mercifully abbreviate it, is not a 100% success. It has taken the format of a pirate drama and copy and pasted the word ‘highwayman’ in, and the show is a bit unsure who the bad guys are. It’s also a little too fond of the innuendo in the title. “I want this Dick in my hands as soon as possible”. But it’s better than it has any right to be and gets better as the characters are developed. By the second season it should be flying so naturally we won’t get a second season, as nobody knows what they’re doing anymore.

TV Review – Masters of the Air, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Daily Show

Questionable Tactics

“We won’t go without a fight.” Despite hailing from the same executive producers as Band of Brothers (the little known pair of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg) Masters of the Air (Apple TV +) is very different from its illustrious forebear. Even the titles are contrasting; Band of Brothers comes from Henry V’s St. Crispin Day speech (“we happy few”). Masters of the Air’s title is meant ironically, at least to begin with, because nobody here is a master of anything.

The airmen depicted may have been trained to the best of their abilities but they have been given an extra-shitty assignment. By the end of 1943, Nazi Germany should have surrendered. Beaten in Stalingrad and North Africa, there was no way, at that point, that they were ever going to win World War II. But Nazis wouldn’t be Nazis if they had any regard for their own people, and they somehow managed to fight on. Even though, by then, the Allied air forces were raining down bombs on their cities. 

Masters of the Air concerns a US bomb squadron as they’re continually sent to do the impossible: the precision bombing of German aircraft factories from a great height in frequently awful weather. As a result, they often get torn apart by the same fighters made in the factories below whose bombs they’re failing to hit.

As the first four episodes detail, loss of experienced, expensively-trained pilots and crews was horrendous. So why was this American show made to be shown to American audiences and thoroughly depress Americans?

The makers of Masters of the Air are still recovering from a bit of bad research about a character in Band of Brothers, Marc Warren’s Private Blythe, who didn’t die during the war as stated but made it out alive. So they’ve taken it upon themselves to make sure that every detail of this story is correct.

But this has made for somewhat unsatisfying storytelling. A better version of this story might have had those first four episodes summed up in a montage or crawling bit of text. ‘The war is going badly for these guys, so they need something to turn around their fortunes. Now watch on.’ Instead, such is the commitment to verisimilitude, we have to understand exactly how bad it was going in excruciating detail.

Those viewers who haven’t turned off in despair should know that there is a happy ending. As is the case with almost any story about World War II, fascism is defeated. With Masters of the Air, hope comes in the promised introduction of Ncuti Gatwa and his fellow Tuskegee Airmen, ready to see off those deadly fighters and clear the air for D-Day. You see? The Doctor always saves the day.

Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t disquiet about carpet bombing industrial areas that contained plenty of civilians. The Nazis, of course, had no problems with it, but the Americans tried to reassure themselves with a top secret bombsight designed to land their bombs right on the factories they wanted to knock out of the war. But there were just too many variables that in the end made this impossible.

And if you’ve already spent so much money on those bombers, and their sights, why not use them?

Some people who are not that bothered about questionable tactics are the title characters in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Amazon Prime). In the first episode they murder an entire family of strangers and are openly delighted about it. They didn’t mean to murder anyone but they’re just glad that their supposedly “high-risk” assignment wasn’t what they thought it was: delivering a cake.

Donald Glover and Maya Erskine play these unnamed thrillseekers who have signed up for a possibly un-patriotic agency. Already trained to an extent – there are hints that they’re ex-CIA or FBI – the two are immediately married and given the names John and Jane Smith. “You draw less attention as a couple,” reasons Erskine, “an old KGB tactic.” That both are comfortable following the methods of their supposed enemies gives some clue as to what they’re prepared to do.

The TV show is very different to the Brangelina film on which it’s based. The first scene underlines this by killing off two other John and Janes, who share a passing resemblance to Brad and Angelina. More a study of a relationship, the film(s) this TV show most resembles are the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy. Glover and Erskine do a lot of talking; getting to know each other and testing out how much they can share.

“What was your name before Jane?

“It wasn’t Jane.”

The first episode of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is such a terrific mix of genuine tension, awkward first date humour and, yes, explosions and gunfire, I was almost scared to watch the rest of the series in case it wasn’t as good. I can assure you it is, plus you get to have such guest stars as John Turturro, Ron Perlman and Sharon Horgan to enjoy. 

Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show (YouTube) this week, and it was good to see him back, albeit only part-time. He has returned to his former haunt to oversee the build-up to the US Election in November.

As part of a segment interviewing ‘correspondents’, Jon, who has the best pauses since Gene Wilder, asked what voters think about the election so far, which looks highly likely to be between two “chronologically challenged” candidates.

“This is the same shit all over again,” said regular contributor Dulcé Sloan. “It’s just a reboot. We need more than just the same show with an older yet familiar face.”

Jon: (huge pause) “You mean the two candidates, right?”

Dulcé: “Yeah! I mean they already had this job. Now these old white dudes got to come back and reclaim it? Come on sir, go and do something new. Don’t be desperate. Like, let someone else run the show.”

Jon: (even huger pause) “We’re talking about the election, right?”

Dulcé: “I said what I said.”

TV Review – Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office, Criminal Record, True Detective Night Country

Two of Us

ITV loves a police procedural. They long ago gave up making dramas about anything but, preferably involving either Fred West or Harold Shipman. Even when they’re altering the course of history, as they recently did with Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office (ITV1), there’s still plenty of cops crawling over proceedings, albeit the private sort that the Post Office still inexplicably employed because of Dick Turpin or something.

I tried to watch Mr. Bates (did we really need that smirking innuendo?) but since I’ve been reading Private Eye and have known all about the heartless cruelty of the scandal for something like 13 years, I did not need my blood boiling for a 94th time.

How about having your blood mildly simmering with tension. Criminal Record (Apple TV+) is not an ITV show, to the bafflement of aficionados, although the programme it most resembles is the BBC’s own Line of Duty, wherein we have to speculate whether a load of obviously bent coppers are bent coppers.

The leader of these dodgy detectives is played by Peter Capaldi and it’s hard to think of a better person to play a villain. Despite his relatively recent turn playing a saintly Time Lord, Capaldi will forever be known as the All-Swearing Eye, Malcom Tucker, one of the biggest villains of them all. Only Samuel L. Jackson is better known for turning the air blue, although Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein is a relatively recent ascendent to the f-bomb firmament. 

We know who the villain is, so who’s our hero? How about the queen of stoically not-taking-this-shit Cush Jumbo, now thoroughly re-housed after her sojourn across the pond (passim). “He wants to fight. I can do that.” The one-time regular guest star on ITV police procedural Vera seems at home flashing her badge at crime scenes and Jumbo is perfectly cast as a lowly police sergeant who smells several rats when it comes to Capaldi and his team’s clear-up rates.

“Let it go,” counsels her boss, “Dan’s one of the good ones.” But is Capaldi’s DCI Dan really, I’m not going to say ‘clean’ as this is the police; let’s say ‘less corrupt than most’? Much emphasis is given to him regularly walking his dog. Can anyone who promenades a pooch be all bad? Criminal Record is good at playing around with our perceptions and elevates itself above the many, many, many, many police procedurals British TV regularly shits out with a few genuinely surprising twists.

It helps that this is a wholly original series, which, as with the first series of Vigil (passim), seems to be the best way to freshen up what can be a very tired genre. However, considering this is coming from Apple, whose output has been stellar lately (Slow Horses, Foundation, Shrinking, the afore-mentioned Ted Lasso), Criminal Record is as generic as its title.

“The night country. It takes us. One by one.” A much better twisty tale of probing police is True Detective Night Country (Sky Atlantic). We recently noted that the colder the procedural, the better they are and this takes place so far north in Alaska that there is no sunlight, as the sub-title may suggest.

“Fine. We’re just going to do this one thing. Work together to close the case. And that’s it for the two of us.” Police Chief Jodie Foster is a lot more optimistic about the investigation that falls into her lap than the audience is, given what we know about previous iterations of the True Detective brand.

Way back in 2014, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey re-opened an unsolved case and went on quite the existential journey. Two other series soon followed with people like Colin Farrell and Mahershala Ali taking the lead roles of detectives investigating troubling crimes.

Five years after the last season was broadcast, this version of True Detective may as well be a completely different series. Not only have the cast and theme song changed again (Billie Eilish’s chilly Bury A Friend setting the scene this time), but the showrunner has also departed. Until this season, most episodes were written by Nic Pizzolatto and the overall feel could best be described as Southern Gothic. Night Country is written and largely directed by Issa Lopez and the tone now adopted is definitely Scandi-Noir.

Although it’s set in Alaska, a quick look at the credits will reveal plenty of Icelandic names. For this we’ve presumably got a previous HBO series to thank; because of all those snowy scenes beyond The Wall in Game of Thrones, Iceland has a well-established film unit and personnel that has plenty of experience with other shows (passim).

And that’s another thing that the True Detective franchise has over the likes of Criminal Record: money. The opening scene of the first episode makes extensive use of the Beatles’ Twist and Shout. Plenty of coin must have been spent on that even after you factor in that the Fabs didn’t write it. There is also the extensive use of actors to play slowly thawing corpses; we know they’re actors rather than extras as the first Beatles-soundtracked scene sees them all, well, acting.

There’s not many of True Detective’s trademark flashbacks to bring it in line with earlier seasons although there are plenty of mentions of an unsolved murder that still haunts the imposing figure of Trooper Kali Reis. She plays Foster’s ex-partner and the pair are forced to re-team once they both realise that that old case and what seems to be a gruesome mass suicide could be linked.

(There is another parallel with Criminal Record as another ex-Doctor features here, with Christopher Eccleston playing Jodie Foster’s boss and, as we discover in an eye-popping scene, love squeeze. Roll up folks for the sight of Foster (61) and Eccleston (59) having quite vigorous stand-up sex. I’m not far off their ages and I have trouble bending down.)

This new iteration of True Detective is a visual treat, not just in the dark and mysterious landscapes but the equally magnetic Foster, doing her first TV show since 1975, and former professional boxer Reis. Getting a new showrunner has given the True Detective franchise a shot in the arm after a couple of moribund seasons, even if the only similarity to what we’ve seen before is the amount of money being spent.

TV Review – The Bear, The Curse, Julia

All Happening

This column has long berated American so-called comedy shows for not being especially funny. Let’s have another roll-call of those guilty of actually being quite dark whilst reaching out to us for yucks: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Dead to Me, Barry, Shrinking. All of these supposedly hilarious programmes regularly touch upon such issues as child abuse, atonement for unforgiveable misdeeds and lots and lots of death.

At least those shows occasionally tried to be funny when they weren’t wallowing in mis-judged misery. The Bear [Disney+] won three awards at the Golden Globes this week. However these gongs were won in the Best Musical or Comedy category. Nobody sings on this programme so someone, somewhere has decided it’s a comedy.

It’s not. The Bear is the story of Jeremy Allen White’s abused chef returning to his family restaurant in his hometown of Chicago. This is after an unhappy time spent being bullied in an upmarket New York restaurant by a Gordon Ramsey-esque chef, played with relish by Joel McHale. There he swaps one form of abuse for another, in the shape of his family restaurant’s unfireable manager, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who’s an asshole (“I was running this house fine without you”).

There are a lot of assholes on The Bear, and I include White’s character, who frequently makes what we can call ‘the asshole’s decision’ when confronted with anything. You know the one: the one that Basil Fawlty or David Brent would make which makes you cringe because you know what the consequences will be. I don’t know about you but the last thing I want when I need to be cheered up is multiple assholes.

Having established it’s not a comedy, is The Bear any good? Yes, sort of. It sneaks up on you a bit and, once you get over the fact that it’s not a comedy and that abuse will be a central theme, there’s a lot to like here. The direction is almost Hitchcockian in ratcheting up sometimes unbearable tension in something that’s about cooking food.

The supporting characters are great, especially Ayo Edebiri as a naive but ambitious chef, one of the winners of a Globe along with White, and they come to the fore more as all the assholes slowly get over themselves. In fact, the makers of The Bear, headed by creator Chistopher Storer, must have realised that the first few episodes were a little too intense and slowed things down thereafter. So much so that they make room for that other deliverer of tension, the Oner, or long shot. One episode of the first season is practically all one shot.

The Bear is a great show once you realise that it’s not a comedy. A show that’s irredeemable in any category is The Curse (Paramount+), starring another recent Golden Globes winner, Emma Stone. She received her award for her performance in the film Poor Things but she was also unbelievably nominated for The Curse, despite it being The Worst Thing I’ve Seen recently. 

Stone and co-creator of the programme Nathan Fielder play a married couple making a reality show about ‘house-flipping’ (no, me neither) who make the assholes of The Bear look like well-adjusted people who are happy to get along with each other. We may have to come up with a word for how bad these people are as the word ‘asshole’ is somehow inadequate to describe them. Let’s designate them ‘horrortwats’, as everything they do is truly reprehensible. “We’re doing good here, we are good people.” No they’re not. They’re arrogant and privileged; patronising and selfish. And you really don’t want to know how they have sex – let’s just say that very little actual sex takes place.

But the big problem with The Curse, and it’s so obvious I was expecting a twist explaining it which never came, is that everything is shot like a reality show. Bear in mind that our horrortwat protagonists are actually making a reality show, with cameras constantly following them around. There is a disconnect in what we’re seeing. It’s like we’re following Kirstie and Phil home after a hard day spent failing to sell a house and watching them have no doubt very similar sex. “Everyone will get to see who you really are.”

And this is all established before the Curse of the title is placed on them by one of many people who have suffered an injustice at their instigation. How on earth is the audience supposed to react to this? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for the two least sympathetic people who’ve ever been put on TV? Are we supposed to laugh and cackle at their deserved calumnies? Who do the makers of these ‘comedy’ dramas think the audience for this sort of show are, a bunch of sadists? “This is all happening for a reason.” No, I’m completely baffled how or why this show was made.

Onto cheerier fare being produced across the pond although it’s bad news for Happy Valley fans wanting another series. Julia (Now TV) stars Sarah Lancashire and a surprisingly large number of very familiar faces from the world of US TV, including two stars of Frasier, to explain why they didn’t return for the recent revival and why they got in Nicholas Lyndhurst to cover for their absences.

Lancashire plays Julia Child, and if that name is familiar to you it’s the same person Meryl Streep played in the film Julie and Julia. Child was a well-known name on American TV in the sixties for introducing French cuisine despite not being, to use her own words, “camera ready”.

If there’s one word to describe both the character and series Julia it’s ‘fun’, and it’s a welcome counterpoint to some of the fraught alleyways of US TV. Lancashire is clearly having a ball playing the scatty TV chef, who was well-known for things going wrong on her live TV show and just styling it all out. She doesn’t even bother putting on an American accent, since the real Child spent so much time abroad.

And it’s always welcome seeing David Hyde Pierce, playing Child’s husband, and Bebe Neuwirth, as Child’s best friend. “I suppose I’ll have to get used to sharing you,” laments Hyde Pierce, although he’s secretly delighted she’s a success. There has been a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel hole in my life since that show finished and Julia fills that hole like a toad.

TV Review – Shetland, A Murder at the End of the World

Overexposed

“Trees.”

What are the best murder procedurals? It seems the colder they are, the better.

“In case you’re wondering what it is about the place that looks strange. No trees in Shetland. It’s too exposed.”

You can’t get further north in the British Islands than Shetland (BBC1) so it’s as cold as we can get, although it’s now on its eighth season so it may be overexposed. In the meantime it has to get over losing its main character, Douglas Henshall’s DI Jimmy Perez, who abruptly quit the force for love – and to see a tree again – at the end of season seven.

So it’s up to the other series regulars, Alison O’Donnell’s DS Tosh and Steven Robertson’s DC Sandy, to welcome a new chief detective played by Ashley Jensen, up from That London. “Is that a Scottish accent, DI Calder?” asks a surprised DC Sandy. Of course it is. It’s Ashley bloody Jensen and they don’t come more Scottish.

As it turns out, Jensen’s DI Ruth Calder grew up in Shetland, although she couldn’t wait to get away from the place as soon as she could. This is understandable. As the people of Sheffield and Plymouth will attest, discovering there are no trees can be unsettling.

So Shetland (pop. 22,000) must be a sleepy procedural, which is why there is no mention of ‘death’ or ‘murder’ in the title, as discussed here (passim). The biggest problems for real-life Shetlanders possibly involve sheep-worrying, but Shetland, the TV series, not only has a sheep murderer on the loose but there are also three deaths and one near-fatal shooting in the first episode alone.

And, being a modern-day police procedural, matters only escalate further in subsequent episodes, bringing in London gangs, hit men, drug dealers, a serial killer and Nordic black magick worshippers. But the important thing is that Jensen stays on the islands at the end and is a suitably big star to helm future seasons.

The recent revelation that there is a port on Shetland capable of launching actual spacecraft into actual space would seem a perfect backdrop to any future seasons, although the show’s thunder will surely be stolen by a future season of Vigil (passim), which has somehow returned for a second season with the same title, despite the submarine after which it is named no longer featuring. This must be a Scottish thing, like when Taggart continued long after the actor playing the title character had died.

Even colder is A Murder at the End of the World (Disney+), which is mostly set in Iceland but is otherwise an American production, despite the presence of a few Brits. One of these is Clive Owen, using his normal British accent when he should technically have a South African one as he’s playing yet another thinly disguised variant of Elon Musk.

This show is much nicer to Musk than other recent versions, such as the dumb one played by Edward Norton in Glass Onion or the bonkers one played by Jason Isaacs in Skyfire. Just to labour the point, the show even slings Grimes onto the soundtrack.

The main character of what we must abbreviate AMatEotW is played by another Brit, Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in The Crown, just before a sudden growth spurt caused Diana to be three feet taller for the last two seasons. Unlike Owen, Corrin is putting on a soft Midwestern American accent, which seems to transform her into Jodie Foster.

But the most important Brit here is American Brit Marling, for this is the latest in a line of what seasoned American media watchers call Brit Marling dramas, which she usually writes and stars in. This includes such films as Another Earth and Sound of My Voice as well as her first foray into the world of TV, The OA.

Brit Marling dramas are vaguely metaphysical tales of un-ordinary people which intrigue right until the moment she fails to pay everything off in a satisfactory way. Watching the first season of The OA, I was drawn into its many mysteries before it all came apart in an overwrought last scene. This annoyed me so much I refused to watch the second season.

So it’s with some trepidation that I started on AMatEotW, although it unsurprisingly proved quickly addictive. Murder mysteries tend to do that to you. Set in a hotel in a remote part of Iceland, Corrin is an amateur detective who specialises in forensic pathology (her dad’s occupation) who has been invited, along with a diverse group of geniuses, to a conference organised by Owen and his reclusive wife, played by Marling.

She plays Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Hold on, that can’t be right. No, wait, she plays a character who happens to be called Lee Anderson. Marling, and frequent co-collaborator Zal Batmanglij, must curse their luck sometimes, not just with coincidental real-life events but at the fact that AMatEotW has an almost identical set-up as Glass Onion.

But the tone of AMatEotW is very different to Rian Johnson’s savage satire. For once, Marling has dialled back the mysticism and tried to focus on unsettling aspects of the real world, such as troubling technology and climate change. When Corrin tells future boyfriend Harris Dickinson “the dead talk to me,” she’s referring to her skills at pathology rather than any supernatural ability. 

“This is my 57th crime scene,” she assures Marling, when she deduces that the death of one of the guests was actually a morð (Icelandic for murder). As expected, the bodies pile up thereafter and it’s down to Corrin to solve not just who’s slaughtering everyone in the present day but also the identity of a serial killer from the past which made her famous in the first place.

I haven’t watched the whole series yet, but you know, just know, that the ending of AMatEotW is going to be disappointing. But it’s been a great ride getting there so far.

R’n’B Mix

Also, I don’t think I ever linked to this. Part 1:

https://confidentials.com/liverpool/liverpool-statues-part-1

Part 2:

https://confidentials.com/liverpool/the-true-stories-behind-liverpools-statues-part-2

(Big thanks to Vicky Andrews)

TV Review – Loki

Chicken, Meet Egg

(Yes, I’ve already kinda done Loki before (passim) but that was only in passing and so much has happened on this show that I couldn’t resist)

I’m always a sucker for any kind of time-travel story. There is one show I like so much that I wrote and performed a musical concept album about it. Loki (Disney+) is the latest TV format to embrace paradoxical alternate realities which will take whole minutes of precious Disney time to explain. And then contradict them all without thinking five minutes later. It’s a time-travel show after all.

But this isn’t quite time travel as we know it, for it is not only a sort of sequel to one of the most successful films ever made – Avengers: Endgame – but takes place in the same established multiverse. As deftly explained by a strangely calm giant green rage monster: “Changing the past doesn’t change the future”.

“So Back to the Future is a bunch of bullshit?” questions a non-tiny, yet still quite small, colleague. This explains how Karen Gillen’s Nebula is later able to kill her past self and not suffer the consequences. There are no paradoxes here. Neither Grandfather nor Bootstrap (see below).

One person who does suffer some consequences is our pal Loki, still played by the pallidly skeletal Tom Hiddleston (spelt, like his fellow time traveller Christopher Eccleston, without the ‘e’ on the end), for the tenth time in total, including his voice work in What If…?. He managed to escape the path to his death at the hands of Thanos two films earlier by doing what everyone using this version of time travel does: creating a new branch in time.

Unfortunately for Loki he has unwittingly broken the rules of a Byzantine organisation called the Time Variance Authority, an all-powerful bureaucracy that operates outside of the normal universe and uses Infinity Stones as paperweights. “Is this the greatest power in the universe?” asks a suitably chastened former Asgardian God of Mischief.

The TVA monitors the unauthorised use of time travel and regularly ‘prunes’ users and universes that don’t meet their ruthless definition of what is referred to as “the sacred timeline”. But, as we discover at the end of series one of Loki, this sacred timeline is actually another ‘bunch of bullshit’ designed by someone called He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) in order to get rid of other versions of himself.

So The Avengers using time travel? A-okay. Loki doing the same? Ruthlessly purged, and we discover why as the series goes on as there are a lot of versions of Loki who could upset the machinations of He Who Remains, or Kang, as the few people who saw Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania know him.

Despite being a time-travel show, the first series of Loki featured few actual mind-melting time-travel shenanigans, as it mostly happened in places out of time like the TVA. Most proper time travel takes place in ‘apocalypses’, where, much like a leaving do, you can do what you want as the place is going to get trashed anyway.

Unlike the first series, season two of Loki delves right into head-scratching timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff, of the sort that would give even Steven Moffatt headaches. One of the first scenes features a new character, played by recent Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, who has the pointedly on-the-nose name Ouroborus. He’s the TVA’s Head of Repairs and Advancement and he has the nickname OB.

At first, we think that it is Loki’s regular handler/sidekick Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, who gives him this nickname, although Mobius has no memory of doing so. This is an ongoing issue for a lot of TVA employees. “I have no memory of having my memory wiped”. But it turns out that it was Loki himself who gave OB his nickname after zapping back into the past and accidentally thinking that everyone called him that.

See what I mean? Head-scratcher. And that’s before we have a scene where Ouroborus meets a 19th-century scientist called Victor Timely, yet another version of He Who Remains/Kang. OB is impressed as Timely originally inspired his theories on time travel, despite Timely telling him that it was “Mr. Ouroboros” who inspired him. Chicken, meet egg.

That’s a lot of paradoxes for a universe where paradoxes don’t apply. Think back again to what the Jolly Green Science Bro said in Endgame. “If you travel into the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past.” As Facebook once concised, it’s complicated; so much so that even the writers and directors of Endgame disagree on how it all works.

(For the record, the writers of Endgame think that when Steve opted to live in the past at the end of that film, he was still in our universe but keeping his head down. The directors think that Steve went into a different universe as that’s how this version of time travel works. Steve had to do a parallel shift from that other universe back to ours to hand the shield to Sam. It doesn’t really matter and have a lie-down.)

Either way, it’s a great engine for storytelling. One of the big problems with time travel is how insanely complicated the timelines quickly become. Just ask Douglas Adams. Or any Doctor Who fan; the aforementioned Steven Moffatt solved this problem by regularly resetting the universe. However, if you can go back in time and not have to deal with touching the wrong butterfly, you can focus on what should be the important thing: the forward momentum of the story being told.

The latest episode of Loki (spoiler alert for season two, episode four if you haven’t seen it) ends with the TVA being destroyed along with most of the main characters, including Loki him/herself. There are still two episodes to go, so what the hell happens next?

As we’ve already discovered from a cliffhanger in season one, wherein Loki was supposedly ‘pruned’ from existence, there are ways to get out of these situations. In that case, we didn’t know what ‘pruning’ actually entailed. We were just told what people thought happened. Similarly, has the TVA actually been destroyed? We don’t really know what that means. Anything could happen now and I can’t wait to find out what that anything is.

(Tom Hiddleston’s ten turns as Loki: Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, The Simpsons: The Good, the Bart and the Loki, What If…? and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is admittedly just a spliced-in scene from this second series of Loki but I’m balancing this by noting that his scene from Avengers: Age of Ultron was cut out)

TV Review – Ahsoka, Big Brother, Survivor

In Order to Create

(This review is brought to you so late because I’ve only been watching shows I’ve done before recently: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, now with Scotty and played by an actual Scotsman, Ted Lasso, which never did even mention Liverpool as far as I noticed, Perry Mason, now with lead cast nudity, The Crown, a great advertisement for the monarchy, The Great, a much better advertisement for the monarchy.

*takes breath* Black Mirror (done twice accidentally, when I forgot I’d already done it), featuring the always welcome sight of Salma Hayek giving it the full sweary comedic beans, Taskmaster, with Frankie and Ivo making for one of those all-time great unpredictable teams, Good Omens, which somehow is even cheaper, What We Do in the Shadows, still finding ways to be deeply weird after five seasons, Foundation, with added psychics, Only Murders in the Building, now with Meryl Streep, and at the moment the new series of Loki.)

There is a big problem with the not-that-original-either Star Wars’s new offering Ahsoka (Disney+) and, by extension, all extended fictional universes: what am I missing? The last we saw of the titular ex-Jedi Ahsoka Tano and her apprentice Sabine Wren was in an animated series called Star Wars: Rebels, at the end of which Sabine agreed to be mentored in the ways of the Force by her new master.

By the time of Ahsoka, the series, set ten years later, it’s clear that this went badly wrong and neither party much feels like talking about it. Did we miss something? A quick search online reveals that no, there has been no TV show/audiobook/podcast to explain what happened, despite all the Star Wars-related stuff we’re bombarded with these days. But we did miss something.

For some inexplicable reason, Ahsoka, the show, doesn’t want to tell us what happened. “She’s still just as stubborn as ever,” complains Ahsoka, the character, of her former apprentice when they’re forced to team up again.

”You never made things easy for me,” moans Sabine in return.

Now normally, this wouldn’t be a problem; the withholding of vital information is sometimes called a ‘mystery’. These can be resolved later. If we stick to the same universe, all Alec Guinness’s talk of ‘Jedi Knights’ would have meant nothing to folks in 1977.

These days, with multiple versions of Star Wars happening all the time, it can be a little hard to keep up. The last time we saw Ahsoka, the character, was in an episode of The Mandalorian, or was it The Book of Boba Fett? I’ve watched all these shows and even I’m a bit confused.

And that’s before we get to how dense the backstory of Ahsoka, the character, is. She was first introduced in the animated film and TV series The Clone Wars as a girl, when she was a young Jedi padawan paired with a master called, ah, Anakin Skywalker. Having left the Jedi Order at a fortuitous time (for her), she joined the Rebellion and subsequently almost died in a lightsaber duel with her former master, now called Darth Vader.

Most of her time in the Rebellion was spent battling a member of the Empire called Grand Admiral Thrawn, which is like telling the story of the resistance on the Channel Islands whilst the Allied D-Day fleet sailed serenely by. It was all pretty inessential which is why myself, along with many others, didn’t watch any of it.

So it was a bit of a surprise when she turned up in The Mandalorian (or maybe Book of Boba Fett) still looking for the former supreme governor of Guernsey, Thrawn. This, despite the Empire having fallen, thanks partly to a volte-face by her former master. Which is where we join her at the beginning of her own inevitable Disney+ series, as the makers of Star Wars have and will make TV shows about even the most minor of past characters.

So what occurred between Ahsoka and Sabine? Now played by Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo, the question of what happened between them is often brought up yet is only finally answered in the last episode, when it’s revealed that Sabine had just lost her family when she began her training and may not have been in the best frame of mind to train in the serene ways of the Jedi. Never mind that Ahsoka had vivid personal experience of what happens when a Jedi turns to the Dark Side.

This is all explained in a single line delivered by an ancient droid voiced by David Tennant and one can’t help wondering why it took eight whole episodes to get there. If you’re effectively the sequel to a programme a lot of people watching have most likely not seen, it’s probably best to get old mysteries out of the way as quickly as possible and just concentrate on whatever new mysteries you feel like introducing.

What’s good about Ahsoka, the show, is that plenty of new mysteries are introduced. These include three Night Witches who live in a galaxy far, far away; zombie stormtroopers, which is something that was always going to happen sooner or later; and the afore-mentioned Grand Admiral Thrawn, as played with full blueness by the man who did his sotto voice work on Rebels: Lars Mikkelson. Unlike just about every other bad guy in the Star Wars universe, he is an unsettling presence in that he isn’t constantly chewing the scenery in his every appearance.

“One must destroy in order to create.” Alas, another new idea may have been torpedoed by real events, as the intrigue of a pair of lightsaber-wielding mercenaries doesn’t get a resolution, possibly related to one of them being played by the now sadly deceased Ray Stevenson.

What’s bad about Ahsoka, the show, is the same thing that affects most of these TV entries in the Star Wars universe: the extensive use of whizzy SFX gadget The Volume to shoot scenes, where it feels like the action is taking place against a background rather than in it. But it’s great to see any TV show where the all-action lead character is played by the 44-year-old Dawson, who’s been great in just about everything she’s ever done and never really tasted success.

Big Brother (ITV1) is back, if you care for that sort of thing. Never watched a second of it. Survivor (BBC1) is coming back soon as well, which I also never watched. The surprise of both those shows’ return is the mainstream channels they’re on. As with the recent lack of original series for me to watch, and the ongoing absence of tomatoes in supermarkets, we still haven’t recovered from the pandemic.

TV Article – Doctor Who

(This is a thing I wrote for a thing about a thing but the thing didn’t want it)

Tennant’s Extra

What in space and time is going on with Doctor Who? The last episode featured Jodie Whittaker’s incarnation regenerating, as most Doctors tend to do. Only she changed not into the expected incoming actor to play the role, Ncuti Gatwa, but, er, David Tennant. Who’s already done his time as the time travelling Time Lord. Even Tennant seemed confused by what’s going on, noting he’s already had these teeth before. “What!?”

Well, it’s complicated. Really complicated. The main reason why Tennant has returned to disrupt an otherwise smooth transfer to a new Doctor is one word: anniversary. Every time the year ends in a three means that the famously long-running show is ten years older, and anniversaries have long been a Big Thing on Doctor Who.

Ever since its tenth anniversary in 1973 this entails a story, in that case called The Three Doctors, involving past and present Doctors coming together. The same thing happened in 1983 with the story The Five Doctors, done without Tom Baker’s participation because he thought he was out of this world (boy, was he out of this world) and William Hartnell (dead) but with a quite good stand-in.

But this is only the second anniversary story since the show’s return in 2005, and the first anniversary story, 2013’s The Day of the Doctor, was fraught enough having to do without Christopher Eccleston and getting John Hurt in to play a previously unseen version of the character.

So November 2023 is coming up (the sixtieth anniversary, if you’re counting) and there is a need to do something. The problem is, an era of the show has just ended with the departure of Jodie Whittaker and showrunner Chris Chibnall. One of the main reasons stated for the surprise return of Russell T. Davies as showrunner was an experienced pair of hands to oversee the anniversary.

And boy did he have a mess on his hands. Of recent Doctors who could return, Whittaker has just left the role and is unwilling to return so soon. She’s also having a baby. Also, both Peter Capaldi (saying he’s too old) and Matt Smith (off shagging his niece on House of the Dragon) have expressed an unwillingness to return.

So where does that leave Davies? With Eccleston presumably also off the table, although he has returned to the role recently in audio form, it’s unlikely that Gatwa’s introduction as the Doctor would be an anniversary special surrounded by faces from the past.

There is also the problem that Gatwa is a busy man. Filming a sixtieth anniversary special needed to happen earlier this year but Gatwa was away filming both the next season of Sex Education and the Barbie film that everyone’s talking about. Ever since Gatwa was announced as the next Doctor, Davies has had a choice: either ignore the anniversary altogether and wait for Gatwa’s next availability, which will mean we won’t get anything new until 2024.

So the only card Davies had left to play was David Tennant, famously a fan of the show from before he got to play the part and willing to throw himself into anything Doctor Who even now. Davies is honouring the legacy of the show by bringing in a face from the past, along with familiar companion Catherine Tate, for three specials to show over the anniversary dates of November 2023. But he’s also giving Gatwa, who will cameo in the specials, a clean slate to begin his triumphant reign as the next Doctor.

Let’s face it, Gatwa will not be the only cameo. I have no doubt Whittaker, Smith, Capaldi and, oh yes, Eccleston, who Davies first cast, will feature somehow.

Tour de France Diaries Part Six

Rendez-vous à la Vuelta

Friday 21st July

Join the coverage on ITV at their assigned time: 2pm. Not that I seem to have missed much. A pretty flat stage but there’s enough hills for a breakaway to go off the front. Nine riders have got a minute on the peloton, but there’s also what’s being called a ‘second peloton’ that’s a further three minutes back. Don’t know what’s happening there.

(Good old copy and paste) Georg Zimmerman, Julian Alaphilippe, Mads Pedersen, Matteo Trentin, Jack Haig, Nils Politt, Tiesj Benoot, Warren Barguil and Victor Campenaerts have gotten away. The weird second peloton goes further backwards, now down five minutes on the main peloton. They, whoever ‘they’ are as there’s no cameras on them, may want to pack it in.

A group of sprinters, including green jersey wearer Jasper Philipsen, go off the front of the peloton to snaffle whatever points remain in the intermediate sprint, and they stay away, quickly catching the breakaway. Not satisfied with being the main engine of the breakaway yesterday, Victor Campenaerts has gone off the front of today’s breakaway along with Simon Clarke.

The breakaway is now nearly seven minutes ahead of the peloton. Methinks Jonas Vingegaard and team don’t give two figs about the riders getting away. They’ve always got the Ineos Grenadiers to help them chase if the group gets away too much. Don’t ask me what’s going on in the breakaway; they’re all over the place. Campenaerts has finally run out of puff.

Jasper Petersen is in the breakaway, which may explain why everyone wishes to distance him as much as possible. Suddenly it’s one kilometre to go with three riders away from the rest: Kasper Asgreen, Ben O’Connor and Matej Mohoric. It’s a photo finish between Asgreen and Mohoric on the line.

Petersen comes in first of the rest of the riders, with no-one even bothering to challenge him. That’s a reputation. The win is finally given to Matej Mohoric, who promptly bursts into tears. It must be embarrassing to have all the attention whilst wearing Bahrain Victorious on your shirt.

The main peloton come in nearly 14 minutes down but there’s no change in the top ten. Reports afterwards state that this was the fifth fastest stage in the Tour de France, ever. Shouldn’t they be knackered?

Saturday 22nd July

The penultimate day of this year’s Tour and, while there may be a lot of hills, it’s unlikely to change the general classification. Particularly as there will be a lot of riders looking for individual glory.

Giulio Ciccone, who is dressed head to toe in polka dots, takes the points on the early hills, cementing his place in the jersey. Carlos Rodriguez crashes on an early descent but is soon back on his wheels and chasing the peloton down. He’s got visible bleeding on his face and knees. Sepp Kuss is another rider who hits the tarmac at some point and he’s patched up with bandages.

Riders keep trying to go off the front, but none of them get away. Finally, a group of six get some seconds between them and the peloton, with plenty of riders hoping to bridge the gap to them. Amongst the group of six are Ciccone, Tom Pidcock and Warren Barguil. They get a minute up on the peloton.

The six become nine as they’re joined by another three riders. They’re maintaining that minute’s distance from the main pack. The next mountain of the day is once again taken by Ciccone – nobody else in the breakaway is interested – and he celebrates wildly as he’s now uncatchable in the King of the Mountains competition.

Another mountain thins down the breakaway to five riders, including Thibault Pinot, the local boy who is riding in the race for the last time. Most of the signs on the roadside are in praise of him. Maybe inspired by this support, Pinot goes out ahead on his own. Ciccone, work done, heads back to the peloton.

A Groupama FDJ rider has hit the ground and for a second I thought it was Pinot, but it turns out to be David Gaudu. The French nation lets out a collective sigh of relief.

From the peloton, Tadej Pogacar goes on the attack! The very definition of a futile gesture. Yellow jersey Jonas Vingegaard could let him go, he’s that far ahead, but opts to chase him down, which he does with ease. Pogacar sits up, but they’re suddenly only 25 seconds behind Pinot. Soon enough, Pinot is caught and passed by the GC leaders plus Felix Gall. Way to ruin his day, lads.

Gall is the first over the top with Vingegaard and Pogacar watching each other closely, as if this was still a contest. A group containing Adam and Simon Yates is not far behind. There is no descent on the other side as there is a bit of a plateau. The front three are joined by the Yates’s just in time for the descent to begin.

2 km to go and the five riders are only 30 seconds up on a group of three including Pinot, Barguille and Pello Bilbao. Carlos Rodriguez is another 15 seconds back. Who’s going to sprint for the line? Vingegaard goes out in front for a short while, but Pogacar takes out all his frustrations, bolting for the line and celebrating in the most aggressive way possible.

So Jonas Vingegaard is the 2023 champion, as if we didn’t know already. The big news of the day is that Simon Yates has gone up to fourth in the GC, just behind his brother. They may be on different teams but they’ve worked as a unit this year.

Sunday 23rd July

Usually, I avoid the last day of Le Tour because nothing happens. Tune in out of loyalty to finishing this blog and it’s all the expected things: the winner and team abreast at the front of the race drinking champagne; long chats between riders; the odd attack which gets hissing disapproval from the rest; a flyby from the French equivalent of the Red Arrows (Les Flèches Rouges) once we get on the Champs Elysee.

There’s normally a lot else going on today, but the Fourth test in the Ashes has been rained off and it’s also weeing on the last day of the Open Championship, which is a one-horse race from the beginning. Brian Harman wins that easily, just as Jonas Vingegaard will win here.

A bunch of riders get away on the Champs Elysee, but not by much. One of those riders is Tadej Pogacar, the cheeky scamp. I don’t think he’s gonna win doing that. Bad luck if you get a mechanical here, as Stefan Kung does. The roads may be wide but everyone’s going at top speed, even over the cobblestones.

3 km to go, and Vingegaard – plus his entire team – decides not to bother with what could be a pretty violent bunch sprint and lets them all go. They sit up serenely and wave at the camera. This is not like that time yellow jersey Bradley Wiggins decided to lead out non-teammate Mark Cavendish to the line.¹

Another photo finish on the line, with four riders abreast over the line, including the usually unstoppable Jasper Philipsen. It’s a while before Jordi Meeus is revealed to have won the final stage. Jordi who? Where did he come from? Philipsen’s digits remain on the end of his arms.

Crossing over the line some seconds later are the entire JumboVisma team of Jonas Vingegaard, who dismounts and lifts his bike in the air. He won that at a trot, as the horse racing folks like to say. Vingegaard first, Pogacar second, Yates, A. third, Yates, S. fourth and the much battered Carlos Rodriguez fifth.

The hitherto unknown Jordi Meeus is first on the podium to collect his gold medal, or whatever it is, for winning today’s stage. Next up is Victor Campenaerts, uncontested winner of the most combative rider of the race. Best team is up next, and almost the entire JumboVista team marches out, minus Wout van Aert who had to leave early because his missus was giving birth.

Now it’s the individual jerseys, headed up by Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar as sarcastic-sounding ‘best young rider’, the last time he’ll ever be in white and I’m sure he’s as sick of the shirt as we are of seeing him in it. This young whippersnapper has won the fucking race twice and has now come second twice.

King of the Mountains next, and it’s Italian Giulio Ciccone who is resplendent in polka dots. The green points jersey was sewn up a long time ago. Belgian sprinter Jasper Philipsen won four stages and almost won again today. He was so dominant that other riders refused to race him in a bunch sprint on Friday. Last up is Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard in yellow, who dominated the race in the end, in a way we haven’t seen for a while.

Rendez-vous à la Vuelta.

1. As pointed out by Country Steve, and clearly visible in the YouTube video I bothered linking to, Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish were on the same team. I’d forgotten Cavendish was briefly on team Sky. He tended to move about a lot. ↩︎