Doctor Who: Season 40 / Series 14 / Series One.... Aaargh! 2024 Series Round-Up

Well, it's the morning of Thursday the 27th of June as I type these words and BBC Breakfast are live in my home town this morning speaking to the locals about the election and stuff. I generally loathe vox poppy stuff ("Here is some ignorant and ill-informed rubbish from a bloke waiting for the bookies to open!") and was going to switch over to avoid cringing myself inside out at it, but I was this many picoseconds old when I found out that a shop/food bank that I've walked past tons of times is run by a guy called Mark Auton.

WTF? All the times I've been in Horsley Hill and I never realised that it was in the thrall of the Nestene Consciousness.  That said, the malevolent tendrils of Shub-Niggurath's Polymos-based mannequin-animating spawn wrapping ever tighter around the brains of the town's inhabitants would explain my older sister's recent inexplicably stupid pro-Nigel Fartrage's RefUK Facebook activity; she's clearly not herself, it's the aliens doing it.

Sunny South Shields: twinned with Wuppertal and Innsmouth.

Anyway, I'm bored and the piece I was hoping to have up this week is taking a little longer to finish than I thought and have a few minutes waiting for the kettle to boil so here's my brief capsule reviews of this year's season of Doctor Who:

Young Team: not just a Mogwai album

'Space Babies' - Fun, slight, mid-season episode. Baffling way to open a bloody season though. WTF, RTD? Mynde yew, I've spent 18 years saying the same thing about 'New Earth'. Y U keeping doing dis?

'The Devil's Chord' - Loved it. Menacing, colourful and fun all at the same time. Jinkx Monsoon's Maestro was a great villain. Fave bit: probably where the sound drops out and we have a minute of silence, broken by the tuning fork. Melodia from SilverHawks would approve.

'Boom' - Nah, mate. I usually really enjoy Moff's Who (with apologies to Claudia Boleyn and Sophie from GallifreyBase and everyone else who has spent more than a decade reiterating their seeming allergy to his writing, I just enjoy his writing [mostly]), but this was just Moffat by numbers. Usually I'd be fine with that, but in an eight episode season - two of which hardly feature our new Dr Who - I ain't got time for dat shizz. Weakest of the season, even if not actually bad.

'73 Yards' - Yes! Moar of this type of thing! Favourite episode in ages, with M.R. James-y folk horror trappings (I'd bet my old mate Jim would have loved it - he's the guy who got me into reading authors like Thomas Ligotti and Arthur Machen, bless 'im) completely carried by Millie Gibson. Why'd you let her go, Russ?!!? Ruby takes on a Welsh Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone.

Also, it led to me making this meme:

Which amused me, anyway.

'Dot and Bubble' - Two Doctor-lites back to back? Maybe organise the season layout better in future. But a good episode with a great gutpunch at the end (even though I knew it was coming, Ncuti and Millie sell it so well); peppy little racist Lindy Pepperidge-Farm, murderer of pop stars, I cannot unsee as being a fascist version of Bryce Dallas Howard's version of Gwen Stacy from Spider-Man 3.

Gwendy: probably saying something racist

'Rogue' - Great fun. Always love a (pseudo-)historical even if this is no 'Villa Diodati'. Herron and Redman can come back and co-write an episode any time. Everyone rocks the frocks, and Indira Varma seems to be having a good time chewing the fantastic scenery - though I'd have loved her to guest in a more serious-toned episode. I never, ever want to see Bridgerton though due to it being mentioned so many times the word has just become an abstract fridge-buzz noise.

'The Legend of Ruby Sunday' / 'Empire of Death' - Guess who's back, dawg? Alright, Typhonian Beast. Very much a game of two halves (sick as a parrot and other footballing analogies are available), with a magnificent build-up and reveal in the first part - I was grinning for ages afterwards. I can't remember being quite that excited about a cliffhanger in years. Of course true to form the second part would largely fail to sick the landing. I mean, I enjoyed it but if you're going to reveal that Ruby Rey is just an ordinary person with ordinary everyday parents, maybe don't give her unexplained magic Jedi snow and music powers in the first place?

I blame the midichlorians.

Sutekh is a good doge. Much death. So sand. Such jackal.

That was a bit more detailed than I meant to write. Going to have to boil the kettle again now. Grrr.

Looking forward to this cuppa. Am singing 'mint selenium' in my head to the tune of 'My Delirium' by Ladyhawke.  Apologies for the half-arsedness of this, all.  For a Doctor Who thing that I put a bit more time into, there's this here.  For a Who-related thing I knocked off for a laugh whilst drunk that is inexplicably one of the most read things on here, click here and sap my soul.

I promise there'll be a better-written piece up soon.  Honest.

Oedipus Rex ([a.k.a.: Edipo Re] Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

A blind beggar, incongruously sporting dark sunglasses, stumbles around the streets of ancient city begging for alms when he recognises the steps of a friend approaching.

Oedipus: "Hey, Josephus!"

Josephus (high-fiving the blind man as he passes): "Hey, motherfucker!"

- Ronny Graham and Gregory Hines, in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I.

There's little so awkward as a joke that a child has to explain to their parents, except one that involves mythological incest.  Still, a joke that very much amused my school age self (probably my second favourite in the film, aside from Torquemada's auto-da-fe musical sequence ["It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway!"]) due to lazy afternoons at the library guzzling volumes on Greek legends and history - long before actually studying Sophocles' Oedipus Rex at college: possibly the most famous out of the hundred and twenty-something plays 'what he wrote' (not that anywhere near his 124 or so canon are still extant).  Dude was a dramatic powerhouse: he was entered into theatrical competitions around thirty times, of which there is a historical record of him winning at least twenty four.  Imagine being nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award thirty times, and coming home on twenty four of those occasions with the Oscar.

The story of everyone's favourite mother-loving Theban monarch had been dramatically adapted before Sophocles set quill to parchment (or stylus to slate, or whatever) by Aeschylus in his Oedipodea - a trilogy comprising his plays Laius, Oedipus and Seven Against Thebes; the latter of the three is the only extant text, the prior two (as well as the comic satyr play Sphinx) being lost to the mists of time.  Perhaps the ancient archives had their own Pamillus Nashus gleefully burning all known copies of prized dramas.  Archive BBC TV fans will know what I'm talking about, at least.  Euripides, too, would turn his hand to an Oedipal oeuvre (Antigone, Oedipus and The Phoenician Women) which eerily followed the same pattern of only the third instalment surviving - the first and second surviving only as fragmentary scraps.

Betwixt Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles would craft his own Holy Trilogy, the famed Theban Plays - the second of which to be written (but the first, chronologically, like some prequel of antiquity) was Oedipus Tyrannus, alias Oedipus the King.  Previously committed to celluloid in 1957 by Tyrone Guthrie, in a Greek theatre style production with cast sporting masks like the tragedians of old, the play would also be adapted for the screen in English in 1968 - the year following the film with which we are here concerned - by veteran director Philip Saville (who not only directed my favourite Dracula adaptation, the 1977 BBC Count Dracula,  but also 1964's Hamlet at Elsinore, 1986's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil [containing a retina-scarring scene featuring TV's Doctor Who Tom Baker that can and did warp at least one young mind], 1988's First Born in which Charles Dance was a monkey's uncle, and the 1997 Metroland with Christian Bale and Emily Watson - quite the C.V.) with Christopher Plummer and Lilli Palmer getting jiggy with it.

Leftist firebrand auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini - whose 1975 abduction, torture and murder (most likely at the hands of the fascist-allied criminal terrorist organisation Banda della Magliana) still remains unsolved and unlikely to be reopened under the current far-right Italian government - had already established himself as one of the premier enfant terrible of Italian cinema by way of his scriptwriting talents for movies such as Federico Fellini's 1957 Nights of Cabiria and the 1960 'posh people reeling around a fountain' classic La Dolce Vita before making his own directorial debut with 1961's Accattone, starring his future fated Theban monarch Franco Citti as well as Silvana Corsini and - in a small uncredited voice role - Modesty Blaise herself Monica Vitti.

By 1967 Pasolini had made movie magic such as Mamma Roma with Anna Magnani (there's a Morrissey song in that, probably) and The Gospel According to St Matthew but only just graduated from monochrome to colour with his segment of the '67 portmanteau film The Witches (the other stories in the compendium being helmed by luminous luminaries such as  Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, Mauro Bolognini and Vittorio De Sica) before taking on Sophocles' play as his first full colour feature film.  

Opening with an original to the film prelude set in early 20th century Italy, we meet an unnamed couple (Silvana Mangano, star of much classic Euro cinema but forever - to me anyway - Reverend Mother Ramallo from David Lynch's classic 1984 adaptation of Dune, and Luciano Bartoli) who find themselves saddled with a newborn child much to the chagrin of the jealous father who elects to abandon the baby boy in the wilderness - a very rocky Morocco, standing in for some null-space hinterland betwixt wartime Italy and Ancient Greece.  The child is of course found bound hand and foot and taken in by King Polybus of Corinth (Ahmed Belhachmi) - who, like other monarchs seen in this movie wears a tall stacked golden crown more suited to Renaissance popes than a basilieus or wanax of late Bronze Age Hellas - and his Queen Merope (Alida Valli, again and even more so than Mangano a star of many cinematic classics but will always be remembered firstly by your correspondent as Madame Blanc from Dario Argento's 1977 horror opus Suspiria [more on which here for anyone interested]) and raised with the name Oedipus for his swollen feet.

Upon reaching manhood, the princeling (Franco Citti, voiced by Paolo Ferrari) leaves Corinth and, true to the tale, is predicted by the Delphic Oracle (played by an unknown performer, and sadly this particular Pythia lacks either a serpentine sidekick or anything to do with Gallifrey) to kill his father and make love to his mother.  Resolving to dodge his fate by not returning to Corinth, Oedipus instead heads towards Thebes where he encounters his natural father, Laius (Bartoli again), upon the road to the city whee an early instance of footbound road rage leads to Laius' death when the arrogant monarch refuses to give way.  Arriving in the city itself to find Thebes plagued by the Sphinx - though anyone expecting a leonine human hybrid or winged chimaera,  as I did, will be greatly disappointed at the monster's appearance as a loinclothed man in a wickerwork witch doctor-style mask - our hero slays the beast and is granted the boon of marrying Queen Jocasta (Mangano, again in a double role).

After wedding and bedding his quite literal own MILF (repeatedly, for she is one hot mama and legend tells us that their incestuous loins bear fruit with four children-siblings: Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices), Oedipus reigns over Thebes as god-king until the blind prophet - a seer without sight - Tiresias (American actor Julian Beck, the terrifying Reverend Kane from Poltergeist II, appearing ) reveals the truth and prophesies that the king will end his days as a blind itinerant beggar wandering in foreign lands.  After initially refusing to believe and engaging in one last big motherlovin' bag session with Jocasta, Oedipus has the Oracle's prophecy confirmed and goes quite round the bend when his mumsy wife hangs herself over the revelation.  Gouging out his own eyes, he leaves the city he ruled bleeding and cloaked like a beggar heading out on the lonely road.

Which will lead, eventually, to Colonus.

Talking of ancient Greece, we've all surely heard of the Ship of Theseus (also perhaps known better to the average British person as 'Trigger's Broom', in honour of Roger Lloyd-Pack's legendary Only Fools and Horses character) - this being the maxim about whether or not a thing can remain the same thing if it is gradually rebuilt and replaced - but not many I wager will have heard of the Boat of Eckert.  Eckert's boat is legendary at least round these parts for always standing in the guy's front garden, like a prize someone would have won on Bullseye; though this town is at least on the coast - most of the time the participants in that TV show would win a speedboat and have to take it home to some landlocked part of the country like Birmingham.  My brother used to go fishing with Eckert in said boat, quite often along with our erstwhile next door neighbour Brian who later died of an aneurysm - or, as my brother and I put it, "Brain's Brian exploded!".  So now you know.  And you can't not know.  Sorry about that.

Sapphire and Steel: Assignment One [a.k.a.: Adventure One, or 'Escape Through a Crack in Time'] (Shaun O' Riordan, 1979)

As I write this introductory paragraph, it is the morning of the 26th of September 2023 and I woke this morning and turned on the television to see on the rolling news tickertape at the bottom of the screen the words "British actor David McCallum dies at 90"; the first thought that came into my head was "Steel has been reassigned".  An actor with no shortage of iconic roles on his resume - from the Russian secret agent Ilya Kuryakin in seminal Sixties spy-fi series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to Dr Donald 'Ducky' Mallard in the perpetually spinoff-spawning N.C.I.S. - McCallum has been a perennial presence on the small, and occasionally silver - screens for six decades, but to me will always be the acerbic elemental Time Agent Steel; solving temporal conundrums, dimensional incursions, chronic hystereses and all things timey-wimey alongside the luminous Joanna Lumley's beguilingly beautiful and equally inscrutable Sapphire.

The pair's initial assignment - which used to be titled 'Adventure One' on the VHS covers (my first memory of being cognizant of the show was seeing these video tapes on the shelves of HMV [or it might have Forbidden Planet, maybe, it was quite a long time ago] and thinking this was a show that I should probably check out, but the chunky size and chunky price of the double tape set of 'Adventure Two' put me off beginning the journey at that time) but has since been renamed the perhaps more appropriate 'Assignment One' for DVD, and given the fan moniker 'Escape Through a Crack in Time' for the type of fan (me) who likes serials to actually have titles - begins very simply.  It begins with a house.

The house stands across a body of water, as we later find - an isolated country house, perhaps on an island off the mainland.  In the house we meet young Robert Jardine (Steven O' Shea, giving a good and likable child performance in an era when the likes of Matthew Waterhouse's Adric and Ian Sears' Brendan were rotting up genre TV), sat at the kitchen table diligently doing his homework, while his parents (John Golightly and Felicity Harrison) put his younger sister Helen (the absolutely chronic Tamasin Bridge - I was not surprised that this was the final entry on her short C.V. [I know it's a bit much to overly criticise child actors, but seriously]) to bed.  As they read the dreadful child nursery rhymes, Rob works away to the ticking of the many timepieces in this house of clocks.  A sudden strange windless wind whooshes through the house and all the clocks seem to stop.  Time change.  You lose, you gain.  But maybe those frozen hours are about to melt the universe's nervous system and seep out of the pores.  

As the house grows eerily silent - no time, no voices from upstairs, suddenly stifled mid-Ring Ring-a-Roses - and Rob anxiously rushes up the staircase calling for his parents we dissolve to a shot of the sparkling stars of outer space, and through the vasty deep of the cosmos booms a disembodied voice (allegedly that of Hercule Poirot par excellence David Suchet, though maddeningly I've never found it confirmed) proclaiming:

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension.  Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life.  Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel.  Sapphire and Steel have been assigned!"

As we return to coterminous time in the house, Rob arrives at Helen's room to find the traumatised child alone, and their parents mysteriously spirited into the aether - "Just went away" as she puts it.

As the terrified tykes try to make sense of the evening's eldritch happenings, suddenly there comes a rapping at the door - these particular visitors entreating entry from the Plutonian night are a taciturn man in a grey suit (McCallum) and a scintillating blonde woman dressed in blue (Lumley).  The strangers enter the house unbidden and immediately take charge of the strange situation, assessing the house as old and full of old things, inhabited by a family with an old (Norman French) name; seemingly this confluence of old things has created a weak point where the malevolent forces of Time can try to break through.  Taking one of the carriage clocks up to Helen's bedroom, Sapphire and Steel recreate the circumstances of the parents' disappearance down to Sapphire reading aloud the nursery rhyme 'Ring a Ring o' Roses'm causing strange phantasms - seemingly period appropriate to the 17th century by their clothing - to appear in the room, and for the far wall to zoom off into the distance; a horrifyingly scarred and cloaked figure credited as the 'Countryman' (Ronald Goodale) shambles towards us up the corridor of eternity chanting the rhyme:

"Cattle in the meadow, lying fast asleep..."

Banishing the spectres by reciting the rhyme backwards to reverse the effect, they tear the page containing that rhyme out of the book, Steel giving the order to burn it, and barricade the door of the bedroom to buy them time to formulate a plan against Time.  In the interval, they make mention of their previous adventure, when they tracked an incursion to a ship in the middle of the ocean - a ship that they casually mention as being named the Mary Celeste.  Of course, we all really know that the Daleks caused that.  Though I suppose 'The Chase' counts as a temporal event doesn't it?

When Rob is lured to the boarded up door of the shuttered room of the shunned house (how many H.P. Lovecraft references can you get into one sentence challenge?) by an entity purporting to be his lost mother crying for help, his misguided attempt to release her allows a fragment of temporal maleficence to escape - through a crack in time one assumes, given the fan-bestowed title.  This latest incursion manifests through the nursery rhyme 'Goosey Goosey Gander', taking the form of Puritan Parliamentary soldiers from the English Civil War ascending and descending the floors of the house.

"Upstairs and downstairs..."

The paranormal pair attempt to explain these ghosts as "visual refractions... an anachronism", whilst the fragment itself (appearing as a moving, flickering patch of light) is described as "a scion... a descendant, a successor, a child".  The thing gets into an old painting upon the wall (the picture in the house, there's another Lovecraft-ism!) and draws Sapphire in with it, into an old cottage redolent with echoes of terrible past happenings; a rope hanging from the ceiling and a meat cleaver glinting in the periphery of her vision (here comes the chopper to chop off your head) giving clues to her imminent fate from the distant past.  Steel manages to rescue her from this anomalous and perilous situation at great risk and cost to himself by lowering his own body temperature to near absolute zero, thus putting himself temporarily (temporally) out of action, and so whatever mysterious aegis they work for dispatches another agent into the field to assist.  This is the hulking and powerful Lead (American actor Val Pringle, who was sadly murdered by intruders in his home in 1999), here to serve as Steel's backup and "insulation".

Our three adventurous elementals and two mere mortal children proceed to clear the house of all the antiques that they can (old things being the 'triggers' for the weaknesses in the fabric of the continuum); paintings, boxes of books and nicknacks removed to the "youngest" place available - the outhouse recently added by the father.  Unbeknownst to the others, the sinister force appears to young Rob in the shape of his errant father, drawing the callow youth down into the basement.  Down, down, deeper and down to the earliest foundations of the building and backwards in time to the eerie twilit evening when the builder's cornerstone was first set in place.  It is here, at the building's very beginning, that the elementals must pit their wits against the force to fight for the boy's freedom and banish the evil forever. 

"And hide his head under his wing, poor thing."

A truly timeless testing trial against Time itself, and a wonderfully weird (in the best uncanny meaning of the word) introduction to the adventures of the intrepid titular Time Agents - or, at least, agents against Time's agency - portrayed by a pair of screen legends.

And legends always live on.

(Just in case it's not obvious from the opening line of the review, it's taken quite a bit of time between me starting it and finishing it.  Though not as long as my All Hallow's Eve review)