Other Doctor Lives: The Crown: Season 2, Episode 1 – “Misadventure” (2017)

Onto season 2 now. Too soon to tell if things are going to be turning around where Philip is concerned – we’ll see what happens (episode premise spoilers, which include a spoiler from the season 1 finale.)

At the end of last season, Elizabeth’s mother suggested sending Philip to Australia in Elizabeth’s stead to preside over the Olympics, in the hopes that some time away coupled with a chance to be in the spotlight would help him get his head on straight and be a little gracious about being the royal consort. We ended with the understanding that he’d agreed to do it, and the season premiere jumps ahead to sometime after his return from Australia before circling back to cover some of what we missed. Alongside the relationship stuff, we also get the major political news of that time: the seizure of the Suez Canal.

We’ll start with the canal. Even though this was obviously a big political deal for Britain, I do find it at least slightly satisfying that Nasser proves to be such a thorn in Eden’s side when Eden is so patronizing and insufferable. He’s bad enough early in the episode, giving an annoyingly-elitist speech at Eton extolling the virtues of so many “Eton men” going on to become prime minister, but when it comes to the Suez Canal, he really outdoes himself. When he assures Elizabeth that the whole sorry business will be over quickly once he takes away the British soldiers to pilot ships through the canal (Egyptians “aren’t a seafaring people,” you know,) I wanted to smack him.

In this episode, Philip is more conspicuous in his absence than his presence, since he spends much of it away in Australia. While he’s gone, Elizabeth reckons with how their marriage is going and whether his heart is fully in it. Even when he’s not around, it seems he has a talent for giving Elizabeth even more to worry about in the midst of an unfolding international crisis.

It’s another frustrating entry because, at different points of the scenes Philip is in, I actually enjoy him quite a bit, probably more than I have at any point since the first few episodes of series. There’s a really charming scene of him and Elizabeth being flirty first thing in the morning, and we get a bit more of him being sweet with the kids. I go with “frustrating,” though, because these are the episodes that show that he isn’t just self-centered and full of fragile male ego. The episodes where he’s full-on jerkish annoy me, but they don’t frustrate me like these do. As I’ve said before, these scenes demonstrate what he can be capable of. When he gets his head out of his butt and focuses on being a partner to his wife, he can be great. But that then makes it all the more aggravating that he so often chooses not to be so.

Crimes Against James Olson (Supergirl)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a Crimes Against… post, and it makes me a little sad to write a Crimes Against… about anything involving Supergirl. However, as I’ve said, great shows can still get things wrong, even shows that also get a lot of things right. While I love Supergirl, corniness and all, I recognize the places where it could do or could’ve done better, and James Olson is a big one (some James-related spoilers.)

I started thinking about this earlier this past season, when Mehcad Brooks left the show. It had been clear for a while that the show never really had a grasp on what to do with James after they abruptly cut the romance between him and Kara short, and after like 3-and-a-half seasons of lackluster plots even on the occasions when he did get attention, it was understandable that Brooks was ready to part ways with the series. But it was really rewatching the series from the start that made me want to write this post. Watching a show week to week, year to year, you can gradually acclimate to changes and thus have to work harder to really take notice of them. But when you compress it all into the span of several months, those changes get magnified.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my point: I remembered how much I really liked James in season 1. I like the importance given to his role as a photojournalist, I like his move to reassert himself in National City outside of his association with Superman, and I like the calm, steady presence he brings in many of the scenes he shares with Cat. He’s a man with flaws, because every good character is, but he’s also a man who knows who he is and feels right in his own skin.

In season 2, between the move to the CW and the reversal on Kara/James (how much were the two events tied together?), James gets lost in the shuffle. Even though there are various stabs at giving him his own plots – running Catco, all the Guardian stuff, his relationship with Lena – none of it fully lands for me. Most of it feels like afterthought storytelling, a manifestation of “oh right, we’d better give James something to do!” without putting much effort into considering who he is and what would be organic moves for his character. Post-season-1 storylines for James often feel either 1) so immaterial they could be easily cut from the episode and not be missed, or 2) a lot of time spent on a story that isn’t all that enjoyable.

Worse, these storylines frequently occur almost entirely outside Kara’s sphere. Yes, we want characters to have their own things going on and not just live to support Kara’s plots, but as the protagonist, she lends weight to any storyline she’s in, and if she largely stays out of another character’s plots, their narratives tend to feel decidedly outside the “main” story. When you’re consistently having to leave the A-plot to check in with what James is doing, he’s naturally going to end up feeling like his storylines matter less, which isn’t fair to him and is a far cry from how well-integrated he is into the proceedings in season 1. There, even when he does go off in his plots, they don’t feel so separate, both because they aren’t the only scenes we’re seeing him in and because we also see him talking to Kara about the things that are happening in his life outside of her.

For me, the Guardian storyline is a pretty colossal fumble. To go from a season 1 James who’s secure in knowing that the non-physical ways he contributes to the fight are important, to a season 2 James who’s apparently always had a major case of cape envy and won’t be content until he’s wearing a mask and beating on bad guys? Ugh. I feel like there’s a way that James could’ve been Guardian where it would’ve been palatable, especially if it happened with Kara’s support and blessing, but as it is, it just falls flat. In an unspoken way, it suggests that James can’t handle staying in the female superhero’s shadow and needs to assert his manhood by being a fighter himself, so that’s obviously going to leave a bad taste for a female-driven show. And we go back to the same “worse” mentioned above – not only do a lot of Guardian storylines happen outside of the A-plot, but when they do intersect with Kara, the arc actually sets off a further wedge between Kara and James, first with her not trusting masked-vigilante Guardian and later with her trying to shut down the operation when she finds out it’s James.

It’s weird. In male-driven shows, female characters run the risk of losing some of what makes them them if they get subsumed into a romantic storyline with the lead, but in James’s case, the more the show takes him outside of Kara’s sphere, the more it seems to dim his shine. It’s so unfortunate, because female-driven shows have a real chance to redefine what a love interest looks like, and Supergirl had that chance with James but then swapped it out for something more generic and less interesting, where both James’s character and Kara’s love life were concerned.

Honestly, what happened with Kara/James is a whole other thing, and this post is already long enough. I’ll be back another day to discuss the issues the show created with that relationship.

Character Highlight: The Seventh Doctor (Doctor Who)

Like the Sixth Doctor before him, the Seventh Doctor reflects a clear intention on the show’s part to do something different with the character.  Personally, I think this experiment is a lot more successful with Seven than with Six, but there are times when it doesn’t really work for me.

I’ve said before that there are really two separate characterizations for the Seventh Doctor, one for series 24 and one for series 25 and 26.  His initial portrayal is pretty “typical Doctor” – kooky and fairly light, hitting the trickster notes hard.  The are notes of Four’s eccentricities here, along with One at his most mischievous.

In series 25, though, we start changing things up again, and we see a Doctor who’s much more manipulative and enigmatic.  While I certainly wouldn’t call Seven a villain and there’s frequently a well-intentioned reason behind his machinations, he’s a character who often leaves the viewer (and Ace) a little unsure of his motivations.  This can make it hard to trust him – it’s like, in the back of your head, you get that he’s still a good guy, but when you watch him in action, it’s hard to remember that sometimes.

For me, the manipulations can get trying.  Pull that on the baddies, sure, but I’m never a fan of the Doctor puppet-mastering his companions, and Ace has to deal with a lot of that.  Even if he often does it to “help” her or for the greater good, it strikes me as kind of arrogant, assuming he’s so right/justified that he doesn’t even need to tell Ace what he’s up to.  It’s more understandable in instances where he needs to do something in order to trick the villains, like how he stops Fenric, but when he still plays those games when he doesn’t need to, it makes it harder for Ace to take it on the occasions when he does have a good reason for his machinations.

This show also hints at some greater mystery and darkness for Seven, neither of which I’m really a fan of.  I always get a little wary when the show elevates the Doctor’s importance, because I like it when the Doctor isn’t part of some grand plan that’s centuries in the making or mythologized in the legends of other planets (hello, Timeless Child!)  I love it when the Doctor saves the day unassumingly, here to help and then gone again.  That isn’t the chord the show typically strikes with Seven, which can be disappointing for me.  I don’t dislike it the way I do the manipulative stuff, but it’s definitely less interesting to me.

I do like, though, that even as Seven gets “darker” and more enigmatic, he never fully loses his Doctory whimsy.  These are often the moments in which I like him best, like when he blithely banks on Ace bringing the Nitro 9 he told her not to take or when, in the middle of a speech about Davros’s lust for world domination, he adds in a throwaway line about “unlimited rice pudding.”  Darkly mysterious or not, he’s still the Doctor, and I never want that to change.