Spoilery Thoughts on “Twice Upon a Time” (Doctor Who)

I don’t usually feel the need to take a second go-around at a Doctor Who Christmas special, but since this episode is both a Christmas special and a Doctor finale (and new Doctor introduction!), there are some suitably epic things going on that could use a little more discussion than I was able to give in my initial review.  Full spoilers on our last episode with the Twelfth Doctor.

First things first, I’m really grateful for the chance to see Bill with the Doctor one last time.  I do wish it had been the “real” her, if only because now neither of them really know that the other survived the encounter with the Cybermen last season.  For all the Doctor knows, the memory scan of Bill was taken from the ship on Mondas, and the Bill who sees the Doctor back up and about is a copy – the Bill (presumably) traveling the universe with Heather doesn’t know about this.  That said, I like the use of the glass vessels/memory copies and the idea that, because a person is their memories, this Bill is no less genuine than the flesh-and-blood one.  I also love, by the way, that the glass people and the Chamber of the Dead ultimately have a compassionate agenda; the Doctor realizing it’s not an evil plan and then not knowing what to do with himself makes me smile.

What other happy things?  I’m glad to get one last look at a glass version of Nardole (he has invisible hair!), something I wouldn’t have pictured saying when he was first introduced on the show, and I appreciate that the Doctor gets his memories of Clara back.  And despite going on too long, the Doctor’s final speech is wonderful – Capaldi does these moments so well, and even if a lot of his “advice” for his successor is stuff she’s obviously already gonna know (never cruel or cowardly, etc.), I like seeing him give it.

I like the addition of the Captain, not least of which for the lovely use of the WWI Christmas truce.  I’ll admit that I didn’t think of it until the moment the singing starts, at which point I got super excited.  Looking back over the course of the show, it’s a little surprising that they’d never tackled it before this point, at least not on TV (I recall Nine and Rose enjoying the truce in a comic book.)  Mark Gatiss does a great job as the Captain – I especially like his introductory scene, in which he calmly (futilely) tries to convince the uncomprehending German soldier not to shoot him, as well as the whole idea of him going in and out of the mindset of being ready for death.  As soon as the show got coy with his name, I knew he was important – although, seriously, neither Twelve, One, nor Bill ever ask him his name throughout the whole adventure?  They just call him “the Captain”?  At least use his first name and save the last name for the ending reveal!  I confess that him being a Lethbridge-Stewart never occurred to me.  Because the episode has One in it, I suppose, I kept thinking First Doctor companions and was expecting a Chesterton or a Wright.  I should’ve known, though:  that mustache!

I already discussed my dislike for the stupid First Doctor sexism stuff – leave it to Moffat to be more sexist than the ‘60s when he’s trying to prove how not-sexist he is, oy.  Additionally, I think Rusty is a weird character to bring back, both in terms of importance to the series/to Twelve and to its function within the story.  There’s really no reason at all for it to be Rusty.  I know there’s more stuff that’s either dumb or doesn’t make sense, but enough of the episode works for me that I’m still riding the high from it.  I’m sure, once the story comes out on DVD and I’ve seen it again, I’ll find more nits to pick.

And again, the Thirteenth Doctor.  I’ll repeat what I said in my review:  it does bug me a little that the show takes so long to just show her face and “reveal” that she’s a woman.  They’ve never done that with any other Doctor, and to me, that highlights the moment in a way that makes it feel like a Very Huge Deal.  Which, I mean, it is, culturally, of course – don’t get me wrong there.  But it shouldn’t be so Big and Significant within the show itself.  Going forward, it’s going to be absolutely crucial for Thirteen to just be the Doctor, and I’m wary of the show having a self-conscious attitude of, “Look!  The Doctor’s a woman now!!!  Can you even believe it?!”  (Plus, Thirteen regenerates, obviously, in Twelve’s clothes, so why does she have makeup he wasn’t wearing?)

But I’m so prepared to love her.  That gorgeous smile when she sees herself, that “Aw, brilliant!” – there you are, Doctor.  I’m ready to meet you.  I think this can be done, potentially fantastically well.  I just need the show to not let her down.

A Little TLC(w): Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

This is definitely an intriguing film, and there are elements of it that are really interesting and impressive, but I’ll admit that, on the whole, it was a little slow for me.  My attention waned here and there, despite a lot of technical proficiency.

The film centers around several flower houses (elegant brothels) in Shanghai in the late 1800s.  There’s less of a specific narrative and more wanderings through the stories of several flower girls (courtesans) working there.  We jump back and forth between different flower girls and their patrons in mostly unconnected plots, although each thread follows its own loose throughline.  There’s Crimson, who’s become a one-patron woman but starts to worry when her client begins visiting another flower girl.  Pearl, older and more experienced than many in her house, mediates disputes between younger women and tells it like it is.  And clever Emerald is ready to move on, so she begins bargaining with her auntie (the madam) about buying her freedom.

The plot is quite slow and very meandering.  Also, notably, it’s a movie about brothels that contains zero sex scenes – zero kissing scenes, in fact.  (To be fair, I understand that flower girls were equal parts courtesans, companions, and entertainers, so much of their work isn’t strictly sex, but it’s interesting that we never see any of the sex that is going on, or even the preamble to it.)  Instead, it’s a lot of “in-between” moments – flower girls dining with patrons, discussing personal or business matters behind the scenes, sitting by while the patrons play endless drinking games, etc. 

So, there’s not much attention paid to the actual plot.  Focus is then placed on the formation of the film itself.  The production design is predictably exquisite – a period piece about beautiful women in gorgeous costumes?  Come on.  And the structure of the film is also noteworthy.  Each scene is filmed with one continuous take, sometimes lasting upwards of ten minutes.  This is a credit to the smooth flow of the camera work as well as the endurance of the actors.  Speaking of which, it’s definitely the actors that carry the film.  All of the main courtesans are excellent and keep you interested in what happens to them even when the onscreen story isn’t all that gripping.  Wong Kar-wai alum Michelle Reis (Fallen Angels) and Carina Lau (Days of Being Wild) are especially good as Emerald and Pearl.  (Side note:  the film also features Rebecca Pan, Mrs. Suen from In the Mood for Love.)

Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Master Wang, Crimson’s possibly-wandering patron.  The situation between them is somewhat tricky.  As her patron, Wang isn’t precisely obligated to stick with Crimson, but he’s a high-class client, and when he started devoting his attention to her, a lot of her other customers backed off – an arrangement he was perfectly fine with.  However, now that he’s dividing his time between Crimson and another flower girl named Jasmin, that puts Crimson in a tough spot, because those other customers aren’t returning to make up for the fewer bookings with Wang.

This is a very absent sort of character.  I bet he’s onscreen for a good 15 minutes before he utters a single word, and that’s not for lack of focus – other people are talking about him and speaking for him, but he doesn’t say anything for himself.  Even though he’s the one making issues with Crimson by seeing Jasmin, he feels very passive.  Things happen to him, and he reacts.  You get the sense that Crimson frustrates him – he seems to love her more than she loves him (understandably,) and he feels she strings him along with promises of commitment to get more money out of him – and he starts spending nights with Jasmin, not to “punish” Crimson or to make her jealous, but just because he thinks, “Well, that’s not working out.  Guess I’ll do this then.”  His response to nearly everything is muted, but he’s not as indifferent as he seems.  When his veneer cracks, it does so pretty significantly.

Recommend?

In General – I don’t think so.  It’s a nice film, and well-made, but I don’t feel there’s enough interest to really recommend it.

Tony Leung Chiu-wai – Not necessary.  There’s nothing too special about this character.

Warnings

Sensuality, brief violence, lots of drinking/smoking (opium,) and thematic elements.

Top Five Season 4 Stories: Last Week Tonight

Compared to previous seasons, quite a few of Last Week Tonight’s main stories this year looked at high-profile issues of immediate concern.  While there were still a good number of “You’ve probably never given any thought to this issue before, but here’s why it’s super important!!” stories, more and more weeks were devoted to subjects currently in the headlines, including instances where the week’s planned story had to be scrapped in favor of something in the news.  Here’s hoping the show doesn’t find itself with as many pressing needs for stories next season.

Season 4, Episode 5 – “American Health Care Act”

Here’s a subject so crucial it’s the focus of two main stories in the span of three weeks.  This is the one put out after the details of the GOP plan were officially released, so it has more of the solid details, the numbers to reflect how many would lose their health insurance and how the plan skews to benefit the people who need it least, and the quotes from its advocates to show how little they care about whether poor people survive.

Season 4, Episode 16 – “Coal”

I like John’s tactic here.  Rather than spending time debating whether it makes sense to pursue coal instead of cleaner forms of energy, he devotes the entire story to the differences between coal miners, coal companies, and the coal industry, and how Trump’s repeated promises to revitalize coal country only seem to help the latter at the expense of the former.  Plus, there’s a giant squirrel costume, and the story earned the show a high-profile lawsuit from a thin-skinned, litigious coal executive – not bad for a day’s work.

Season 4, Episode 21 – “North Korea”

This was an excellent piece.  It can be easy to get caught up in Kim Jong-un and “the threat of North Korea,” but it’s also a country filled with people who’ve suffered a lot and been lied to for a long time, and in thinking about the conflicts, those people and their lives can get lost in the shuffle.  This story, however, focuses on them and separating the myths we’ve heard about them from the truth.

Season 4, Episode 26 – “Confederacy”

I love the many beautiful, succinct ways John refutes the idea that Confederate statues are about “celebrating heritage” (or that the Civil War was about “states’ rights”) in this story.  He comes at these racist myths hard, giving them no ground to go to, and ends with a great handful of options for alternate statues in Southern states, including the actual Stephen Colbert standing on a pedestal and telling you facts about Georgia.

Season 4, Episode 30 – “Presidency of Donald Trump”

This was a good deep dive into particular aspects of Trump’s use of language and delegitimizing the truth.  I appreciate pieces like this, because I still can’t fully get a handle on what he does with words.  Clearly, he says/does all kind of stupid stuff, but he’s not just a blundering oaf, either.  He’s capable of being very savvy when the situation calls for it.  The problem is, I can never quite tell what the balance is between calculating and idiotic, and that scares me.  John does a great job here explaining what Trump does and why that has such dangerous implications for the truth.

Falsettos: Thoughts on Act I vs. Act II

My first few times through Falsettos, I was struck by the feeling of quasi-disconnect between the first and second acts.  It reminded me of the difference between act breaks in Into the Woods (with its second-act “after the happily-ever-after” deconstruction) and Sunday in the Park with George (which changes in its time/place setting and all its major characters between acts.)  In all three cases, the differences can feel like jarring, and especially with Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, you can encounter folks who think the show would’ve been better off ending at the intermission.  To some extent, I do prefer the first act for all three shows, but I ultimately recognize the added depth that comes from the two sides stitching together (spoilers for Falsettos.)

Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods are both Sondheim shows from the same period in his career, so it made sense to me to see the similarities there, but it surprised me a little to get the same feeling from William Finn’s Falsettos.  In truth, though, the disconnect in Falsettos is a little more understandable, since it actually began its life as two separate one-act shows written about a decade apart; even though both halves feature the same characters and a continuation of the same story, it really is two different musicals put together!

Then I discovered that, while Falsettos has a different composer than Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with Goerge, all three have the same bookwriter – James Lapine – and were written in the same ten-year span.  So, in part, I think this is just something Lapine does.  He takes one story and then breaks it into something else or comes at it again from a different angle.  This can have a disorienting effect, as the audience struggles to find its feet again after a dramatic shift in tone/theme or setting/characters.  But by and large, I like it.  I like the extra room it provides to really dig into the show’s ideas, to go deeper than it did the first time, and even if I tend to like the first act of these shows better than the second, I appreciate the new dimension provided by the second act and recognize how it makes the show as a whole into a richer experience.

For me, Falsettos comes at that dynamic a little backwards.  I think Act I, which began its life as the one-act March of the Falsettos, is the more sophisticated of the two, a complex character study trying to make sense of the tangled connections between a small group of incredibly-flawed people.  It’s messy and definitely not pretty, but it’s so engrossing; I love these characters and their neuroses, and I cringe at how they hurt themselves as they hurt one another in misguided attempts at self-preservation.  By contrast, Act II/Falsettoland is more straightforward and narrative-driven, still exploring strong (and highly-emotional) themes but with less of the down-and-dirty character work of Act I.  Within the context of story, two years pass between acts, and the characters are still flawed in Act II, but the level of growth and smoothing-out of their rough edges doesn’t seem entirely believable.  I love both halves of the show, but I do think in the first act is more interesting as a whole.

However, the time lapse between the creation of March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland is key to understanding these differences.  March of the Falsettos was first produced in 1981, meaning it would’ve been written mostly before the advent of the AIDS crisis (Finn recalls speaking with a doctor friend of his after an early performance and asking about the “gay cancer” he’d been hearing about.)  By the time Falsettoland came along in 1990, the world had fundamentally changed, and the show was in some way Finn (and Lapine’s) attempt to process the decade he’d just lived through using these familiar characters he already knew and cared about.  As such, Falsettoland is different because, at this point in time, Finn and Lapine were different.  The world and LGBTQ community were different, and that had to be dealt with.

That’s important to remember, that this show’s second act is set at the dawn of the crisis (Act I is set in 1979, Act II in 1981) and was written by someone who watched it happening from the frontlines.  And because AIDS in those days was so massive, terrifying, unfathomable, and tragic, that means a hyper-focus on it.  Yes, there are other things happening in Act II (like the plans for Jason’s bar mitzvah) and the characters do still snipe and argue despite their growth between acts, but Whizzer’s declining health and the family’s struggle to deal with that takes center stage because it has to.  It’s too big not to.  As Whizzer himself sings, “The many stupid things I thought about with dread / Now delight.”  The mind games and petty concerns and power struggles fall away in the wake of the encroaching shadow, and I think that’s reflective of life at that time for those caught in the eye of the storm.

Inhumans (2017-Present)

That “-Present” in the heading is all but a formality – to my knowledge, Inhumans hasn’t been officially canceled, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.  Iron Fist already showed that Marvel’s TV shows aren’t guaranteed knockouts, and Inhumans, a bland 8-episode mess, unfortunately proves that Iron Fist wasn’t a one-off (I feel compelled to point out that Scott Buck is the creator for both shows, and that’s the last word I’ll say on Iron Fist today.)  A few spoilers.

On Attilan, the secret lunar city that’s home to a society of Inhumans, a seismic shift is taking place.  Maximus, the non-powered brother of King Black Bolt, has rocked the royal family with a coup, looking to overturn the caste system that prizes Inhumans over humans.  As Maximus seizes control of the city, Black Bolt, his wife Medusa, and the rest of the non-usurping royal family find themselves on Earth, scattered across a Hawaiian island and desperate to regroup, return, and retake Attilan.

I like the Inhumans on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., even though it’s clear how cribbed the themes of their narrative are from X-Men (a by-product of Marvel previously having had film rights to Inhumans but not mutants?), but I do not like this series.  Despite its short length, I stuck with its first (only?) season for precisely two reasons:  my completist nature and Ken Leung.  It’s somehow boring and overwrought at the same time, it makes dumb storytelling choices, and for a show about people with superpowers, it features way too many action scenes wherein people are just punching each other – on that note, I get that Medusa’s prehensile hair had to be a bitch to CGI on a TV budget, but why take away a major character’s access to her powers in the pilot?  Overall, it’s just aggressively “eh,” by turns uninspiring, cheesy, and stupid.

As for the cast, I’m alternately unimpressed and sympathetic.  Anson Mount’s Black Bolt (whose voice contains tremendous, uncontrollable power and is therefore almost always silent) is a total miss; a silent character needs to have a really compelling presence, and most of the time, Mount just looks constipated.  I like Serinda Swan as Medusa a little better, although her character’s arc leaves a lot to be desired.  A few familiar faces make me wonder what they did to deserve being stuck in a series like this.  Iwan Rheon plays Maximus, and after his turn as Ramsay on Game of Thrones, casting him as a villain is basically an automatic spoiler.  I’m guessing the Hawaii setting is at least in part responsible for the presence of a couple of Lost alum – Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond!) in a fairly thankless role as a human scientist and Ken Leung (Miles!) as Karnak, who easily manages to be the most interesting of the Inhumans despite not having much good material to work with, either.

At least I’ve since had Thor:  Ragnarok, The Punisher, and the new season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with which to cleanse my palate, as well as the promise of Black Panther getting closer everyday.

Warnings

Comic book violence and thematic elements.