Other Doctor Lives: Twenty Twelve: Series 1, Episode 2 – “Visitors from Rio” (2011)

Episode 2 leads us pretty quickly into its central comic mishap, which the characters attempt to deal with in an exceedingly British way. While the pilot started off more measured, this one drops us right into the action.

The commission has a (seemingly) simple mission today: pick up a Brazilian delegation for the 2016 Olympics at their hotel and ride a chartered bus together to the Olympic park, where they’ll tour the facility and meet with MP/former Olympian Sebastian Coe. Not so simple, unfortunately, when the driver has no idea where he’s going.

Making things worse is Graham, our character of the week. Played by Karl Theobald, Graham is the commission’s head of infrastructure. He’s the one dealing with traffic and such ahead of the Games, and while he immediately realizes the bus driver is headed in the wrong direction, he way overcomplicates things in his efforts to right it. For example, when he puts together a new route in the hope of making up for lost time, he uses his special government intel to identify the roads with the least traffic, not thinking about how that’s going to send a massive bus down a small residential street lined with parked cars.

This is a fun episode. It’s a very mundane sort of crisis—the sinking realization that you’re going to be late (very late!) to where you’re trying to get to—and Ian and his team flounder. They try to explain the seriousness of the situation to the driver as politely as possible, and they do everything they can to distract the Brazilians from the unfolding disaster. Meanwhile, Sebastian Coe is already waiting for them at the Olympic park, and Ian fields numerous calls from Coe’s assistant, giving her the most optimistic updates he can. This exchange pretty much sums up the atmosphere in the bus, when Ian is grasping for solutions and Siobhan cracks a very deadpan joke:

SIOBHAN: “I think we can still be humorous here, right?” 

IAN: “Well, I suppose we could be, yes, but let’s just not, shall we?”

For another bit of added fun, I knew I recognized the bus driver. Well, he’s played by none other than Karl Collins, a.k.a. Shaun Temple from Doctor Who! So he’s been in episodes with two different David Tennant Doctors, one prior to Twenty Twelve and one after. Since Tennant only narrates this show, they wouldn’t have worked directly together on it, but I’m still counting it as a Whoniverse reunion.

There are a bunch of gags involving the interpreter who’s accompanying the Brazilian delegation. As an interpreter myself, these jokes feel pretty lazy to me—I know a spoken language interpreter isn’t the same thing as an ASL interpreter, and I don’t know what sort of regulations interpreters have in Brazil, but there’s a lot here involving the interpreter adding her own commentary, refusing to interpret things, and trying to one-up Siobhan while she’s going over some announcements. I wasn’t really a fan of that side of the episode.

I’m enjoying David Tennant’s narration. His delivery is always very measured and serious, but there’s a fair amount of sly humor here, often in the specific structure of his sentences. Here are my favorites from this episode:

• “Meanwhile, it’s 10:45. By this time, they should have arrived at the hotel. But so far, they haven’t.”
• “It’s been a day of managing expectations, and Ian’s final task is to manage the expectations of his important guests as to what exactly it is that’s happened to them.”

Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” (2009)

*Episode premise spoilers*

This has always been my favorite of the 2009 Tenth Doctor specials, even though it really freaks me out (any type of “the infected” narrative invariably gets to me.) Gripping story, I’m invested in the oneshot characters, and it’s a fascinating scenario to put the Doctor in.

As the Tenth Doctor runs from his own destiny, he encounters a human colony on Mars. But not just any colony, the first—it’s 2059, and this is Bowie Base One. Their future is history for the Doctor, and although the details are a mystery, he knows that their mission is doomed to end in death and destruction. Knowing that this is a fixed point and he can’t interfere, the Doctor tries to best to just get out, but the end has already begun.

We’ve seen the Doctor run into fixed points in time before. It’s always agonizing for them to let people suffer as history takes its course. But “The Waters of Mars” does something interesting, because this isn’t history from the audience’s perspective. This is our future, and yet the Doctor knows the inevitable course it has to take, just like he knows the course of Pompeii or the French Revolution. I really like the scene where he discovers where/when he is and he realizes who everyone on the base is, calling each of them by name and citing their role in the mission.

In this way, it’s also a celebrity historical about the future, since the Doctor is thoroughly taken with the captain, Adelaide Brooke. It’s easy for him to slip into his fanboy tendencies with her, even though she’s severe and by-the-book and has no time for nonsense from him. And the Doctor comes by his adoration honestly—she proves herself shrewd and observant, recognizing how much more the Doctor knows than he tries to let on.

In addition to Lindsay Duncan, who brings a steely intelligence to Adelaide, the crew of Bowie Base One offers up a few familiar faces of the “before I knew them” variety. There’s Gemma Chan, who went on to play Astrid in Crazy Rich Asians, as Mia, and Joplin Sibtain (a.k.a. my beloved Brasso from Andor) plays Tarak. Both are relatively small roles, and we now know they can both do much more than that, but it’s still fun to see them!

The story is very well done. There’s a strong emotional core here, and even though it’s not my absolute favorite base-under-siege story, it still does a good job of making me feel for the characters. The Flood are super creepy baddies—they look really unsettling, and as I said, any type of infection angle always gets to me. And the connection between water and zombies is apt:

ADELAIDE: “We're safe. It's hermetically sealed. They can't get in.”

DOCTOR: “Water is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits. It wears down the clifftops, the mountains, the whole of the world. Water always wins.”

It’s quite the episode for the Doctor. There are points where, for me, it gets a little too deep into the Ten angst, but I do understand where it’s coming from on that score. The Doctor has been traveling alone ever since what happened with Donna at the end of series 4, he’s been avoiding portents for the end of this life, and although he’s just run into one of his heroes, the laws of time demand that he stand by and watch her meet her doom. He’s going through a lot. One of David Tennant’s talents in his performance as Ten is how quickly he can shift from silly to scary, and he makes good use of that here.

Joel Fry-days: Game of Thrones: Season 4, Episode 3 – “Breaker of Chains” (2014)

 

*Major spoilers for episodes 1 and 2*

*CW: rape*

When I looked up Joel Fry’s IMDb after season 1 of Our Flag Means Death, I recalled him as the friend from Yesterday, but I couldn’t place him as this Game of Thrones character. To be fair, Game of Thrones had frillions of characters, and the majority of Fry’s screentime is in season 5, when my interest in the show in general started to wane. I’ve since placed which character this was, in a sort of, “Oh right, him,” kind of way—we’ll see if he leaves more of an impression on me this time around.

Note: I’m just going to write these reviews from the perspective of someone who knows Game of Thrones reasonably well. There are just too many characters and plotlines to contextualize every one.

In the wake of Joffrey’s murder, Tyrion has been arrested and Sansa has disappeared. Cersei is grieving her son, while Tywin is already looking for ways to press an advantage. Farther north, Arya and the Hound are uneasy traveling companions, Sam worries about Gilly’s safety at the Wall, and the Night’s Watch debate how to handle recent attacks from the wildlings. Meanwhile, over in Essos, Daenerys has taken command of the army of the Unsullied. She’s now set her sights on freeing the city-state of Meereen.

This is the sort of episode where no character gets more than one or two sequences of scenes. There are over half a dozen different plots going on here, and we kind of check in briefly with all of them. Game of Thrones did this a lot. Rather than go into much detail on each one, I think I’ll just hit the highlights of my favorite parts. For this show, it might be the best way to handle the non-Joel Fry stuff.

• I’ve always liked Margaery Tyrell, and her and Lady Olenna together are great. When Margaery laments that she’s had two husbands—one gay, one a sadist—and they were both murdered, Olenna scoffs, “Nonsense! Your circumstances have improved remarkably.”
• Tywin is stone cold, wasting no time in beginning the work of molding Tommen into the kind of king he can control. Tommen and Cersei are literally standing over Joffrey’s dead body, and Tywin is like, “All right, my boy, lesson time!” Unrepentant bastard from start to finish.
• In Stannis’s storyline, I always preferred Ser Davos (Liam Cunningham!) and Shireen over him, and their reading lesson in this episode is very sweet. That said, I really do like this line from Stannis – “If I do not press my claim, my claim will be forgotten. I will not become a page in someone else’s history book.”
• It’s a shame that Joel Fry is only in a couple season 4 episodes, because this is the season with the wonderful Oberyn Martell in it. Like probably a lot of people, this wasn’t the first thing I saw Pedro Pascal in, but it was the one that made me take notice of him. He’s endlessly great as Oberyn, and Indira Varma matches him note for note as Ellaria. Here, I like how Oberyn describes being bi—“When it comes to war, I fight for Dorne. When it comes to love, I don’t choose sides”—and he has a really strong scene with Tywin.
• Tyrion also has a strong story this season, with the murder accusation and his trial. Peter Dinklage kills it throughout. In this episode, the whole scene of Podrick visiting Tyrion in prison is great. I’m touched that Tyrion forces Podrick not to return for his own safety, and I love this line – “Whenever something bad happens to me, I assume it’s my sister who had a hand in it. But say what you will of Cersei, she loves her children. She is the only one I’m certain had nothing to do with this murder—which makes it unique, as King’s Landing murders go.”
• Another way this episode follows a very typical Game of Thrones format is to end on a big badass Daenerys scene. Her arrival in Meereen makes a big splash—she doesn’t brook their insults against her, and she makes it very clear who she is and what she does. Also, this loving diatribe about Jacob Anderson’s delivery of Astapori Valyrian (from David J. Peterson, the linguist who created it,) recently came back across my dashboard, so I was even happier than usual to get a few crumbs of Grey Worm. Not to mention, Anderson absolutely wowed me in season 2 of Interview with the Vampire!

All that said, this episode has a very major downside: it’s the one where Jaime rapes Cersei in the sept over their son’s dead body, and then prominent people involved with the scene went, “Well, actually…” about it. Even for a show that traffics a lot in sexual violence, this was gross.

As for Joel Fry? Well, very little to say so far. Per IMDb, he’s playing Hizdahr zo Loraq. In his debut episode, he has one scene and zero lines, part of the crowd watching Daenerys’s big entrance in Meereen. From his dress, we know he’s one of the Masters. Like the other slaveholders of Meereen, his wordless reactions are first unconcerned/cocky, then grow more somber as Dany shows them what she’s about.

The one thing I will say is that, even though he doesn’t have any lines, the show does indicate that Hizdahr is going to be someone. As the Masters watch Dany, we get multiple shots focusing on his reaction, including some close-ups. It has a “watch this space” feel—like Hizdahr’s presence here is a placeholder, so when he shows up to actually do something, you can be like, “I’ve seen that guy before!”

Accent Watch

Nothing yet. Will report back when he speaks!

Recommend?

In General – A cautious yes. Game of Thrones fell off quite a bit by the end, but at this point, I was still pretty into it. However, this comes with the huge caveat that the show has lots of graphic violence and sex, including sexual violence.

Joel Fry – Too early to say.

Warnings

Violence (including sexual violence,) sexual content, language (including sexist insults,) strong thematic elements (including incest,) violence against animals, and drinking.