Other Doctor Lives: DuckTales: Season 1, Episode 17 – “From the Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22!” (2018)

Like last week, this is a good episode for Webby, with her sharing the main plot with Scrooge this time around. And like the week before last, it’s an episode that has fun playing in Scrooge’s past. On top of all that, it’s also a good showing for Mrs. Beakley, Scrooge’s housekeeper.

Mrs. Beakley is thanklessly working in the kitchen of McDuck Manor when she’s attacked by an old enemy, the super-spy known as the Black Heron. All in a day’s work for someone in Scrooge’s orbit, right? Luckily for her, Scrooge realizes she’s been snatched by the dastardly villainess and goes after her, treading the same paths they did in their old spy days together. Webby has researched both Scrooge and her grandmother’s past extensively, because of course she has, so she insists on being allowed to accompany Scrooge and help rescue her granny.

First off, the flashbacks are a ton of fun. It’s already been established, on Other Doctor Lives, in fact, that I’m not at all a James Bond person, but they have the vibe of what I assume classic Bond films to have, along with a strong dose of The Avengers (the Mrs. Peel version, not the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes version.) It’s all impressive gadgets, hand-to-hand combat mojo against implausible foes, and stylish ‘60s threads. Quite the delight.

I mentioned last week that Webby grows on most decent people eventually, and that goes for me as well. That kid is always at ready-for-action eleven, and I am here for it. Teaming her up with Scrooge is a hoot, and it’s fun to see the parallels between their unlikely partnership and Scrooge’s work with Mrs. Beakley in the ‘60s. In the old days, Scrooge was the inexperienced upstart with more confidence than knowhow, but now, he’s the old pro who’s perpetually annoyed at his new partner’s rookie mistakes. But in both periods, the veteran quickly learns that the novice is more useful than they first appear.

David Tennant plays well off of both of Scrooge’s screen partners here. Kate Minucci’s Webby veers between oblivious ardor – “Oh, I know everything about you,” she gushes to Scrooge, not picking up on the discomfited look in his eyes as she gazes at him in fascination – and shy over-enthusiasm, which meshes nicely with Scrooge’s annoyed exasperation and “God grant me the serenity” resignation. Meanwhile, his blustery arrogance makes a good foil for Mrs. Beakley’s cool professionalism and no-nonsense badassery. By the way, even though her role has been smallish so far, there’s always been something engaging about Toks Olagundoye’s performance, so I’m glad to see Mrs. Beakley getting more of a spotlight here. In both cases, it’s fun to watch the respective pairs start to shed their annoyance/impatience and slowly start to bond.

And because I’m always here for a good Scrooge-the-miser joke, I love that the billionaire with a literally vault full of money reuses his tea bags for a month. “Taste the savings!” he extols. Ha!

Free Guy (2021, PG-13)

I remember thinking the trailers for Free Guy looked like fun, and after it came out, I heard pretty uniformly good things about it, but for whatever reason, it didn’t make it onto my watch list until now. I’ve finally seen it, though, and I had a great time.

Guy lives an ordinary life. Get up every morning, put on his blue shirt, and go to work at the bank, which will inevitably robbed by at least a few of the “sunglasses people” who regularly drop into town. He’s content with that existence, until he passes a sunglasses woman humming a song that stirs something in him. He sets about pursuing his insta-dream girl, which confuses her. See, she knows something important that Guy doesn’t: this whole city is a video game, and while she’s a player, Guy is an NPC.

I’ve never been into video games, but I’ve spent enough time around gamers to know some of the basics, so I able to roll with the premise of the film, recognize the important lingo, and notice some of the bigger references (Free City is obviously from the Grand Theft Auto school of wanton violence and sexualization.) But I think people with even less video-game knowledge than me could still appreciate and enjoy this story. Both inside and outside the game, we have likable characters (along with a few highly-entertaining unlikable ones,) and the story nicely balances jokes with action and heart.

It’d be hard not to root for Guy, a wholesome dreamer who greets his crime-ridden city every day with a smile, and even though he pursues Millie pretty tenaciously, it’s with an innocence that speaks more to the changes she unwittingly initiates in him than just your standard guy-meets-girl story. And I enjoy too that his journey isn’t just about a love story. As Guy becomes more aware and autonomous within the game, he develops a desire to make Free City a better, safer place for him and his friends. Meanwhile, Millie has plenty going on outside of being the object of Guy’s fascination. Her interest in Free City goes beyond simple game play, and she has her own scores to settle in the real world.

I’ll also say that, while Millie is the only significant female character in the film, the movie takes care to include female gamers in minor roles throughout. Whether it’s in quick cuts to players (the film delights in humorously cutting between people’s self-consciously “cool” skins and the actual human beings sitting at their computers,) dialogue from coders at the company that makes the game, or commentary from streamers, girls and women are a clear part of this video game landscape.

If the film was just decent, the talented cast alone would be reason enough to see it. But since it’s actually pretty excellent, that means we also get strong material for them all to work with. At the center of the film is Ryan Reynolds, playing Guy with innocent charm and aplomb, and Jodie Comer provides a nice foil for him as the more cynical Millie. Lil Rey Howery gets in on the action as Guy’s best friend in the game, and out in the real world, we get strong performances from the always-welcome Taika Waititi, Joe Keery (Steve from Stranger Things,) and Utkarsh Ambudkar as the gaming company CEO and two of his employees investigating strange goings-on within the game.

Warnings

Violence, sexual references, and language.

Character Highlight: The Ainley Master (Doctor Who)

*A few spoilers for this Master’s era.*

Not my favorite Master but, as I’ve been noting in these write-ups, most of the Masters tend to be hit-or-miss for me. I suppose Anthony Ainley’s incarnation of the rogue Time Lord ranks somewhere in the middle: he’s not nearly the smooth criminal he’d like to be, but on the other hand, he never rips apart a turkey carcass with his hands, so that’s something.

The Ainley Master gets up to a lot of the same kind of stuff the Master usually does: bids for world domination, acquiring pawns through hypnosis, occasional agent of chaos. He’s always got something cooking, and you’d be wise not to trust him as far as you could throw him.

The biggest difference being the Ainley Master and the earlier Delgado version is one of temperament. Where the Delgado Master is sleek and controlled, the Ainley regeneration is the first of the drama queen Masters. Not that Delgado’s didn’t have a flair for the dramatic now and then, but Ainsley’s is a preener, a showboater. He basks in his own cleverness and villain-monologues with the best of them. And even though his basic look is very similar to the Delgado Master’s—dark hair, goatee, black wardrobe—the overall effect is different. His appearance too invites drama, what with the Elizabethan sleeves and the wild look in his eyes.

Like most Masters, this one gets himself into dicey predicaments nearly as often as he’s defeated by the Doctor. Among other things, he accidentally shrinks himself with the Tissue Compression Eliminator once, and there’s that unfortunate incident where he starts turning into a Cheetah Person. That’s something I appreciate about the Master as an overall character. A good villain can obviously be compelling to watch, but a villain who’s always two steps ahead of the hero, until possibly the last second, gets old. Nobody’s that brilliant and Machiavellian, so I like that the Master’s overconfidence and tendency to stab his allies in the back sometimes comes back to bite him.

If I have the count correct, this is the first Master to stray beyond the bounds of the twelve-regeneration limit. With his previous body ravaged and unable to repair itself, the Master steals the body of Tremas, the father of the Doctor’s soon-to-be companion Nyssa. It’s a horrifying prospect, that the nemesis who dogs team TARDIS multiple times during Nyssa’s tenure on the show both murdered her father and now wears his face.

Honestly, it’s an aspect that doesn’t get enough play. When the Master first reveals himself to the Doctor and co. in this form, we get some mileage out of the horror-and-revulsion factor, but after that, he mostly just goes back to being the Doctor’s “best enemy.” I’d have liked to see more of Nyssa dealing with this in their interactions with this Master, not to mention the additional layer of guilt for the Doctor being reminded of someone he failed to save every time he looks at the Master.

I think there’s further wasted potential in the underlying implications of the body-stealing as well. Here’s a Master that’s so desperate not to die that he’s gone against the rules of his people’s very biology, coopting someone else’s existence so he can continue on. It has shades of Voldemort, a villain who’s always up to terrible things but who also, on some level, is just terrified of dying and claws himself away from it while better people face up to their ends as they come. That’s something that I find fascinating about the Master, and I wish the show did more with it.