Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 5 – “Possession with Intent” (2024)

*Episode premise spoilers.*

With Other Doctor Lives, I typically watch/review stuff a while before I get around to posting it, so I always have something on deck and ready to go up without having to write a brand-new post first. Long story short, it was a few months ago that I was watching Criminal Record, and I watched this episode the day after the election. Even with my notes, things were a bit spotty.

Hegarty’s cronies are escalating their intimidation of June, going so far as to stop-and-frisk her 12-year-old son. In turn, she confronts one of his associates directly. She also tries to dig into the reasoning behind why Errol might have made a false confession.

I’ve learned enough to know that false confessions are a lot more common than people might think. Personally, I think the explanation they use on the show pushes things further than it needs to, but if it’s ultimately what they go with, they have started laying groundwork for it in previous episodes.

The police messing with June’s son Jacob is pretty ugly. Obviously, police don’t really need a reason to harass and scare a 12-year-old Black boy, and the whole situation would be harrowing enough as it is. But doing it specifically as retaliation against June gives it an extra layer of creepiness for me. When Jacob doesn’t turn up for football practice, Leo and June have no idea what happened to him and frantically try to get him on the phone. And June is later disgusted by the realization that her son’s picture and fingerprints are now in the system.

Another interesting aspect of this is seeing a Black mother, who’s also a police officer, try to navigate giving her son the talk. We’ve seen what she’s been going through all season, so she’s obviously not in denial about racist cops, but she’s so careful and hesitant in addressing the subject. In fact, Jacob is the one who prompts her to use the word “racist.”

One intriguing thing about Hegarty is how frustrated he is with the behavior of his cronies. It’s certainly not that he dislikes them trying to scare June off the case. But his approach is much subtler than theirs, and he dresses them down when their efforts are too conspicuous. You get the sense that his underlings are sort of like attack dogs that he can’t fully control: he wants to use them to send a message to June, but things quickly get out of hand and he can’t rein them back in. There’s a bit of an “I’m surrounded by idiots” vibe going on here.

I appreciate that, that Peter Capaldi can play this bad guy without really any mustache twirling. It comes through loud and clear that Hegarty is bad news, but he does it in such a way that he can often intimidate June in plain sight without drawing anyone else’s attention to what he’s doing. Meanwhile, his cronies are loose cannons who repeatedly up the ante, which makes covering their tracks a lot harder.

Doctor Who: Series 19, Episodes 19-22 – “Earthshock” (1982)

*End-of-serial spoilers.*

This one is iconic, understandably so. I’ll be getting into all that, after I take a look at the story overall.

The Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan come to Earth in the future, where they come across an archeological team that’s suffered a devastating attack. Naturally, our heroes are blamed for this, as they always are when the TARDIS drops them off near a murder scene. But there are larger matters at play than the humans realize—out of the sight, the Doctor’s old nemeses the Cybermen are hatching a plot.

Because the Cybermen are so frontloaded in classic Who, I tend to think they’re more prominent throughout the series than they really are. After being introduced in One’s final serial, they’re all over the Two era. But then they skip the Three years entirely, and after that, each classic Doctor has just one Cyberman story. At the time that “Earthshock” aired, it had been like seven years since we’d seen the Cybermen as a major baddie, which is nice. With the big villains like this, I think it helps to take breaks from them. Much like the Daleks, there can be diminishing returns with the Cybermen, so spacing out their stories like that keeps them from feeling too repetitive.

I enjoy this story. We get a classic “must defuse the bomb!” crisis, an out-of-control spaceship barreling through time, and callbacks to Cyberman lore from earlier episodes. But while the sci-fi stuff is entertaining, this serial is more noteworthy for its character moments, so let’s get into it.

I’ve talked about many a companion exit in various episode/serial reviews, but Adric’s last story is justifiably renowned. In the new Who era, where RTD preferred heartbreaking “to the pain” endings for his companions and Moffat killed every single one of his (but also not-killed?), it can be hard to remember that tragic companion endings used to be rare.

In the classic series, the farewells are frequently sad, with the departing companion wistfully looking on at the dematerializing TARDIS even when it was their choice to leave. But a companion dying, getting killed over the course of an adventure? Before Adric, the only companion deaths we got were Katarina and Sara Kingdom way back in the One era, and both of them were only in a small handful of episodes. It’s wrenching for the Doctor, as well as Nyssa and Tegan. Just in general, they’re horrified at Adric’s death, and it’s made even worse by the fact that they’re not there when it happens—they can only watch helplessly on the TARDIS scanner screen.

I’m no Adric fan, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, but I do really like his final scenes. And no, not in a “good riddance, he’s gone” way! In a very genuine way. Adric has a good death, and while it has elements of a traditional heroic sacrifice, that’s not quite how it plays out. Trapped on the freighter as it falls through time on a collision course with Earth, Adric is determined to solve the logic puzzles the Cybermen placed on the controls, retaking control of the ship so he can save himself/the others on board and prevent the crash. Yes, he is trying to save himself and others, though he doesn’t recognize the significance of the ship slipping back 65 million years—the crash will be part of Earth’s prehistoric record, not its destruction.

But when Adric refuses the chance to get away on an escape pod, it’s about more than just stopping the collision and (he thinks) saving Earth. A significant motivation is tied back to his analytical mind and his relentless need to solve puzzles. As he’s being pulled into the escape pod, he’s hit with an epiphany, and he slips past the closing door almost casually. He’s not thinking about the danger or the possibility that he’ll be killed. “Of course! That’s it!” he exclaims. He’s only thinking about besting the logic puzzle that’s been thwarting him. Likewise, when he’s on the verge of solving it and a Cyberman shoots the controls at the last moment, condemning him to die in the crash, Adric’s final words are, “Now I’ll never know if I was right.”

It's just such an Adric way to die, and that’s what I really like about it. It’s so rooted in who he is and how his mind works, and even if I don’t like his character that much, it’s very effective from a storytelling standpoint. So well done!

Love Hurts (2025, R)

*Premise spoilers*

First new movie of 2025 for me—I snuck this one in before the Oscars, along with Brave New World. The first trailer for this movie got me so hyped, and while news of the crappy reviews was a bummer, I knew I still wanted to see it in theaters and give action hero Ke Huy Quan some love.

What’s It About?

Marvin, an upbeat realtor, receives an intense blast from the past he thought he’d put behind him. Members of his brother’s gang have turned up looking for Rose—the last person Marvin was supposed to have killed for his brother. He needs to call on his old skills to keep himself and Rose alive, while also fighting to preserve the new life he’s built for himself.

Who’s in It?

Obviously, the headline here is action-comedy star Ke Huy Quan as Marvin. He’s every bit as delightful as he was in the trailer, and he absolutely kills every joke and every fight scene. The dramatic moments ARE a bit shakier, but that’s entirely down to the lackluster script, not him. Ariana DeBose gets in on the action as Rose. The romance angle between them is a hard sell—down to the script again, and because Quan’s peak goofy-dad vibes make the age gap feel bigger than it already is. The film also features Daniel Wu as Marvin’s brother, a nice appearance from the always-welcome Sean Astin, Mustafa Shakir, and Lio Tipton (I couldn’t quite place them, but afterwards, I looked at their IMDb and realized I’d seen them in Warm Bodies.) And I was pleasantly surprised to see the one and only Rhys Darby show up as a crooked accountant for the gang!

What Do I Love About It?

·        This movie isn’t nearly everything I’d hoped it would be, but I can’t bring myself to call it a bad movie. It has a bad script, and there are times when the actors can’t overcome that. But Quan is just so much fun here! I can’t be mad at a starring vehicle for him, even if he deserved a much better story here.

·        The action scenes are an utter delight to watch. I like that, while Marvin is a certified badass, he’s not untouchable, and he takes plenty of hard hits. I also appreciate that we see the creative ways he makes use of his environment to get the upper hand on opponents who are much bigger than he is. During the fights, you can really see how well Quan could do in that Jackie Chan-esque action-comedy space.

·        To that end, they don’t pull out the big Daniel Wu guns until the third act, but the final showdown is worth the wait!

·        One thing I’d been hoping for with this film was that it would give Quan a post-Everything Everywhere All at Once opportunity to really show off his range. That movie was perfectly calibrated to highlight everything Quan can do, but many of his roles since then have leaned heavily to the “laundry Waymond” side. As much as I love that type of performance from him, he’s already proven how much more he can do. Love Hurts doesn’t realize all my hopes there—the script just isn’t up to the task—but I do find it interesting that Marvin’s upbeat, silly personality is something he’s deliberately cultivated and chosen for himself since leaving the gang. That gives it a slightly different angle than some of Quan’s other post-Everything Everywhere All at Once work, and again, the action scenes allow him to flex that side of his talent as well.

Warnings

Tons of violence, language, drinking, sexual content, and thematic elements.