Other Doctor Lives: The Crown: Season 2, Episode 7 – “Matrimonium” (2017)

Another episode with heavy emphasis on Margaret, where, as usual, Elizabeth’s position complicates her efforts to support her sister. The episode also features another appearance from Matthew Goode’s Tony and another mixed bag where Philip is concerned (a few spoilers.)

When Margaret gets some unexpected news from Peter, it throws her into a tailspin and leads to an impulsive engagement (getting misguidedly engaged when she’s unhappy is becoming a habit for Margaret.) Despite the less-than-ideal circumstances, Elizabeth is determined to support Margaret this time, although she has some news of her own that throws a wrench into the proceedings.

I’ll repeat my approval of Matthew Goode’s performance as Tony. He does a nice job balancing the aspects of the character, and he makes you easily see why Margaret would be drawn in by him while simultaneously revealing the reasons why he shouldn’t necessarily be trusted. This episode gets him into something he’s not prepared for, and it’s kind of satisfying to watch his cool façade falter as he tries to navigate it. Vanessa Kirby has less interesting material to work with, since here, Margaret is mostly just forging ahead blindly, clinging to the idea of the life she wants for herself regardless of any red flags.

The stuff between Elizabeth and Margaret feels a little wash-rinse-repeat, although it’s done well. Honestly, at this point, I’m really just marking my time until I get to the end of season 2 and the end of Matt Smith’s tenure on the show. Even though the acting continues to be strong and it’s an objectively well-made series, it’s been holding my interest less and less. I don’t think I’ll keep up with it when I get to the end of season 2 – we’ll see if my appreciation for Olivia Colman and Helena Bonham Carter can lure me back.

Like I said, it’s a little of both when it comes to Philip today. He shares a sweet scene with Elizabeth, because we need reminders of why she fell in love with him in the first place – they share a nice, quiet moment together that displays how well Claire Foy and Matt Smith can play off of each other when they’re given the chance to. However, at a soiree for Margaret’s engagement, his periodic elitist tendencies coming roaring out full force, along with Philip’s superpower of Making Everything about Him. Seriously, the dude must be exhausting to be around with his perpetually-fragile ego and need to complain about everything. Once again, we see how his “we’re not just a bunch of stuffy old royals, for Pete’s sake!” attitude is less of a sincerely-held philosophy and more a belief that only seems to matter deeply to him on the occasions when it can be wielded in opposition to whatever Elizabeth is trying to do at the time.

Wicked (1995)

Earlier this year, I reread this book for the first time in years and was reminded of how much I liked it. In recent years, I’ve gotten much more acquainted with alternate takes on classic stories (hello, Once Upon a Time!), but this is the one that gave me one of my earliest tastes of that kind of twist.

Elphaba is born on an inauspicious night, entirely green. Her inexplicable color creates a wall between her and nearly everyone she encounters. As she ages, Elphaba learns about both school and life at Shiz University, where she discovers something rotten in the state of Oz. These revelations set her down a path that will put her at odds with everyone from the great Wizard to a child blown in from another world, while also fracturing the few hard-won close relationships in her life.

As far as summaries go, I’m not sure if that quite gets the job done, but we’ll go with it. The book has the very simple elevator pitch of “The Wizard of Oz told from the witch’s perspective,” but in truth, it’s far more involved than that. This is a deeply political story of oppression and outsiders, filled with moral ambiguity, all kinds of Oz lore, and complex personal relationships. It’s not a quick or easy read, but if you have the time to put into it and don’t mind stories that are about things coming undone rather than things being put back together, you might find it rewarding. I’ve read several of Gregory Maguire’s reframed fairytales, but Wicked remains my favorite.

Back when I first read it, it was in preparation for the Broadway musical that of course exploded in popularity. And don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I mean, I was a weird 16-year-old girl who loved musical theatre – obviously “Defying Gravity” was my jam. But if I could only pick one, I’d pick the book every time. The story is so rich, the characters so compelling, the dilemmas so thorny. If Wicked the musical is an entertaining popcorn show, Wicked the book is a satisfying three-course meal, and its more famous adaptation uses the source material largely as a springboard to tell its own kind of story.

Like most works that really resonant with me, I’m closely drawn to many of the characters. Of course spiky Elphaba, who loves and fights hard even as she holds others at arms length, in wonderful, and I appreciate how Galinda’s depth and intelligence comes almost in spite of herself. I also enjoy dependable Boq, romantic Fiyero, and practical Nanny. Additionally, I like exploring so many different parts of Oz – while I don’t go so far as to call Maguire’s writing Tolkien-like, he does write about these regions and cities as though they’re places that exist, or at least existed, and the locales spring to life on the page. It weaves in the references and exposition and various Oz-religion doctrines with a casual air, trusting us to keep up without handholding. And when it comes to the story, it always pulls back from the easy choice and goes in a direction that resists tying the plot up in a bow. This is a book where, on page one, we already know how it’s going to end, but the journey to get to that destination is anything but predictable.

Warnings

Strong violence, sexual content, language, drinking/drug references, and strong thematic elements.

Doctor Who: Series 13, Episodes 21-26 – “The Seeds of Doom” (1976)

 

I have a lot of love for this one.  Sure, it has some of the old classic Who cheesiness (Elisabeth Sladen struggling not to be strangled by fake vines, anyone?), but I enjoy the story and the characters, and the monsters in this one are pretty freaky by classic Who standards.  Thumbs up all around.

 The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane head to Antarctica when a scientific team there stumbles across a strange alien pod.  The pod infects a member of the team and starts rewriting his DNA, slowly transforming him into a plant-based Krynoid whose sole desire is to propogate.  It’s a dangerous alien parasite that has to be stopped at all costs, but the Doctor and Sarah Jane run into trouble when a millionaire with a passion for rare plant life gets wind of a walking, talking alien plant.

 Ah, the old chestnut, a rich human who thinks they can get an alien to bend to their will rather than the other way around.  It’s a story we’ve seen plenty of times (it seems the Cybermen in particular get this a lot.)  What sets this story apart a little is that Harrison Chase isn’t really interested in the Krynoid for profit or power – he doesn’t have some grand scheme that the Krynoid pretends to play along with before turning on him and revealing its own plans for world domination.  Instead, he’s a ravenous collector who, having heard about the Krynoid, is hellbent on having it at all costs.  In this way, it’s still about greed, but Chase wants the Krynoid for the sake of having it, not for anything it would do for him.  In fact, he kind of reminds me of Van Statten in the Ninth Doctor story “Dalek.”

 So that makes Chase stand out a little from the more usual trope in these kinds of stories, and a lot of the other one-shot characters are interesting too.  I like Chase’s goons and his conflicted scientist, and there’s an eccentric, headstrong painter who winds up lending the Doctor and Sarah Jane an important hand – love her.  What’s more, the Krynoid itself is both creepy and cool.  Anything that infects someone and then hijacks their brain so they want to infect everything else automatically makes my skin crawl; zombies are the iconic example (and my issues with zombies are well-documented,) but any monster of that nature freaks me out.  The Krynoid has a really neat, alien look, and the show handles the slow transformation from human to Krynoid nicely.  The ramped-up powers toward the tail-end of the story get a little ridiculous, but on the whole, it works for me.

 And then, of course, there are our heroes.  Four and Sarah Jane are one of my favorite companion teams – one of my top five classic teams, and one of my overall top ten.  They’re so fun, the way they alternately bicker with each other and present a united front against the bad guys.  Here, I especially love the bit early one when they’re captured by Chase’s goons.  Any story featuring these two instantly goes up in my estimation, and this is a pretty great one to start with.

News Satire Roundup: August 2nd

Sunday, August 2

·       Recap of the Week – Coronavirus updates

o   John has some of the best Jared Kushner descriptions, such as looking like “he just emerged from a vat of Vaseline as a fully-formed hate mannequin.”

o   Advice for Rep. Louie Gohmert – “‘I’m carrying a highly-infectious disease,’ is never news that needs to be delivered in person!”

o   Ha, John compared wearing your mask on your chin to “putting a diaper around a baby’s ankles; you clearly don’t know how butts works!”

·       And Now This – Steve Guttenberg riffs dog names

o   As a dog lover and a sucker for a literary pun, I smiled at “Virginia Woof.”

·       Main Story – Teaching the history of race in America

o   The fact that George Washington owned his first slave when he was 11 years old is “so horrifying it’s kind of hard to know what to do with it” – also, a Black professor describing students discovering that Thomas Jefferson was “the R. Kelly of his day” was on point.

o   Looking at one textbook that called slave labor “chores,” John likened that euphemism to calling Hitler “a best-selling author with a side hustle.”

o   I appreciated that John acknowledged the experiences of Black kids in these classrooms – “It’s not just the history that hurts here. It’s how it makes you feel as you’re learning it.”

o   Re: people learning about the Tulsa massacre for the first time, I loved John’s analogy asking us to imagine someone who’d never heard of dinosaurs before and suddenly learning about them and their subsequent extinction.

o   Ending on several great lines – “The less you know about history, the easier it is to believe you’d always be on the right side of it.”

o   “Ignoring the history you don’t like is not a victimless crime.”

o   “History taught well teaches us how to improve the present. History taught poorly teaches us there’s nothing to improve.”

It’s wild to think that, before long, it will have been five months since The Daily Show first went remote. I think the show has done a fantastic job navigating the constraints of lockdown, and I’m glad that they’ve continued to do the responsible thing even as various places have reopened in recent months.

That first week of remote shows, the YouTube exclusives that were mainly extended “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That” segments of coronavirus news, was rougher around the edges, and the show quickly stepped up its game, but I still liked them. I liked that the “guests” that week were just the correspondents video chatting with Trevor, doing bits but also just talking about how they were coping in quarantine. While unpolished, it was real, and I liked hearing them talk honestly about their feelings on COVID-19 and isolating.

Since then, like I said, much of the show’s more usual bag of tricks has returned, including graphics, interviews (that whole first week after the show came back following George Floyd’s murder, the interviews were off the charts,) correspondent pieces, fake ads, and more, with good video and sound quality overall. The lack of live audience no longer bothers me, and I enjoy seeing Trevor’s neverending collection of hoodies (as well as how long his hair has been getting in quarantine!) The other day, I was watching an old clip of the show and actually had a bit of an “oh yeah, that’s right” feeling when I saw Trevor in a suit behind the desk and heard the audience laughing.

One thing I’ve noticed that’s different about The Daily Social Distancing Show is an increase in silly cutaway gags that often involve cornier jokes than the show’s usual humor. Things like the “flashbacks” of Trevor attempting to make a mask out of a T-shirt or cutting to a tight shot of Trevor delivering some kind of confessional or call-out directly to the camera. And I like these moments a lot – to me, they’re reflective of that slightly-giddy quarantine mindset, leaning into the idea that, “Yes, this is what you find funny when it’s been ____ days since you’ve been in the same room as another human.” Although the show’s normal jokes are much funnier than these gags, I find them highly relatable on that level.

I can’t speak for the other late-night shows, but it feels like this show and Last Week Tonight have both been taking more weeks off since the start of all this, and I don’t begrudge them for it one bit. It can’t be easy to handle the logistics of putting these shows together remotely, and during such a wild, stressful time, I’m glad that these shows are taking time out to look after themselves. Stay strong, everybody! We’re lucky to have you!