Other Doctor Lives: Call the Midwife: Series 10, Episode 0 (2020)

We’re going old-school today! I’m not explicitly seeking out projects from pre-Nine Doctors the way I am the new Who Doctors, but I’ll certainly review stuff from classic Doctors as I come upon them. Today’s review features the delightful occurrence of a former Doctor popping up somewhere I wasn’t expecting, namely the latest Call the Midwife Christmas special. Our Doctor du jour is none other than Fifth Doctor Peter Davison.

Another holiday season is upon the midwives and nuns of Nonnatus House. Shelagh runs into a woman she spent time in the hospital with during her own pregnancy – the woman, Gloria, is on her eighth pregnancy after seven miscarriages, and while she’s as close as she’s ever been to carrying to term, she can hardly bring herself to hope that it’s finally, really happening. The circus has come to town, and as Nurse Crane attends to a heavily-pregnant trapeze artist, the young woman is also concerned for the health of her father, the ringmaster. Sister Monica Joan is in the hospital after taking a bad fall, and despite what everyone else is telling her, she insists that she’ll be home in time for Christmas.

Those are the three main plots, but honestly, there are several other big threads going on. All the main characters on the show have at least a little something to do, but rather than feeling overly-stuffed and busy, it all sort of comes together. I suppose in that way, it feels a little like the holidays itself – crowded with hustle and bustle but still warm and cozy. I like both of the major midwife plots. Shelagh helping Gloria, not just through the physical demands of her eighth pregnancy but the lingering fears and grief over her seven miscarriages, is lovely, and I always enjoy Nurse Crane’s calm reassurance when things take an unexpected turn during a delivery. Side note: there’s also a fun mini-plot of Nurse Crane and Miss Higgins commiserating over the “spinster Christmas” experience and thinking about their own ideal holiday celebrations.

Peter Davison gets in on the circus plot, playing the ringmaster Mr. Percival. I’ll admit that I didn’t recognize him when I first saw him onscreen, but when he started talking, his voice set off my Doctor Who spidey sense and I exclaimed, “Five!!” His storyline is a pretty familiar one, that of an aging parent not wanting to burden an adult child with their health problems, but the particular execution with this character is done well. There’s Mr. Percival’s understandable concern over his daughter’s pregnancy rather than his own health issues, given that his wife died giving birth to her, as well as his deep love of the circus and his reluctance to any ongoing treatment or procedure that would take that love away from him. The scenes between Mr. Percival and his daughter Jacquetta are trademark Call the Midwife touching.

And once Nurse Crane gets involved, there’s the wonderful, unexpected connection between them. Not gonna lie: by the end of the episode, I was shipping Nurse Crane and Mr. Percival so hard. Not that I would want her to leave the show, and it’s not as if the nomadic ringmaster is about to settle in Poplar, but these two share something beautiful together. After the way she keeps him strong for his daughter’s sake during the delivery, they have several lovely scenes together exploring themes of dreams realized and unrealized, actions, regrets, and life. I don’t want to get too much into the details of it – just watch the episode! – but it’s excellent. Davison plays off of Linda Bassett’s Nurse Crane splendidly, and their scenes together are simply magical. One thing I appreciate about Call the Midwife is the depth and nuance granted to older female characters like Nurse Crane or Sister Julienne, and I love that Davison gets to be a part of such a lovely storyline.

Accent Watch

Same as his Doctor, not overly posh but still RP-sounding. Whether that makes sense for a circus ringmaster is up to you.

Recommend?

In General – Yes. I just recommend Call the Midwife as a rule, and while best practice would be to watch the whole thing, you can’t really go too wrong jumping into a Christmas special, even 10 seasons in.

Peter Davison – Yes. Some fine, sentimental acting from Davison here. He fits well into Call the Midwife’s style – in other words, he got me crying!

Warnings

Intense medical scenes, drinking/smoking, and thematic elements.

2021 Disclaimers

This is something I began last year, beginning the new year with looking back over some of my old posts and adding disclaimers to them, 12 posts for 12 months. For 2021, I have a mix of notes about alleged sexual predators involved in projects, acknowledgement of places where shows I love didn't step up where representation is concerned, an admission that I previous let one of my favorite comedians off the hook on a racist joke, and a few updated posts to account for accurate names/pronouns. As with last year, I'm only editing the posts to correct names and pronouns - otherwise, I'm adding the disclaimer to the top without changing the original content of the post.

Happy New Year. May 2021 be better as soon as possible, and may we all do our best to be better ourselves.

Soldier's Girl (07/07/15) - Although I do mention it in my review, it bears repeating more emphatically at the top. As excellent as his performance is, it isn’t right that Lee Pace was cast as Callie. It was a missed opportunity for a trans actress to play a leading role, and even though the film does a lot of things right, this is a wrong call that can’t be overlooked.

The Fosters (07/30/15) - While I really enjoy Noah Centineo on this show and prefer him as Jesus to Jake T. Austin’s 1.0 version, I acknowledge that it’s not a character he should’ve played. He’s one of a long line of white actors in Hollywood who’ve been cast as Latinx characters, something I didn't realize when I was first watching the series. The show also features a late-series ongoing plot in which an able-bodied actor plays a character with a disability (for the sake of spoilers, I won’t mention who.) How many more times do we need to see this happen?

A Single Man (11/20/14) - The last time I watched this movie, I exclaimed out loud when I saw the Weinstein Company ‘W’ logo during the opening credits – I hate that that man had a hand in so many great movies. In the case of A Single Man, the Weinstein Company didn’t produce it on the front end, but they did distribute it.

X-Men: The Last Stand (04/27/16) - Fixed Elliot Page’s name - the first of several for this year's disclaimers.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (06/17/14) - I added disclaimers to all my reviews of Bryan Singer movies last year, but I revisited this one again to fix Elliot Page’s name. (Note: I’m still using she/her pronouns to refer to Page’s character, Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat. Looking over the post, I never referred to Page himself using any pronouns, so I didn’t need to change anything there.)

News Satire Roundup: March 6th-March 10th (03/11/16) - Fixed Elliot Page’s name and pronouns.

Midnight in Paris (04/05/14) - As I said in this review, I was never a huge Woody Allen fan, and that was before I heard about Dylan Farrow’s allegations against him. I’ve only ever seen a few of his movies, and this was the only one I ever loved. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but it bears repeating – I hate it when predators taint beautiful and creative things. I used to love this movie, but Woody Allen wrecked it.

Blue Jasmine (04/14/14) - More Woody Allen. Seriously, eff this guy.

Supergirl (07/02/16) - Over the seasons, I’ve come to truly love Supergirl, handwavy silliness and all. However, that doesn’t change the fact that seasons 2 and 3 featured a major Latinx character played by a white actress. The extra-irritating thing about this is that, in the comics, Maggie Sawyer is white, so they could’ve just had the white actress play her as white. But they specified Maggie as a PoC in her first appearance and established her as clearly Chicana in season 3. Why?! It’s so frustrating – “diversity points” don’t count when they’re not real diversity, and this was an important example of Supergirl failing to live up to its own ideals.

Convict 13 (03/14/16) - When I first reviewed this short, I neglected to mention a racist joke involving Buster’s caddy on the golf course. It’s one that I didn’t initially connect to the caddy being Black – when he hears a whistle blow, he instantly sits down in the middle of the green, on his lunch break – but when I rewatched the short for 100 Years of Buster Keaton, I realized it was probably a link that audiences in 1920 would have made. Being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t be critical.

Orange is the New Black (05/04/14) - Like Supergirl, Orange is the New Black is a fine show that does a lot of things really well but falls short in certain aspects. Namely, like way, way too many shows, it features multiple characters with disabilities played by able-bodied actors. Seriously, if characters with disabilities were cast appropriately, actors with disabilities would be all over Hollywood in prominent roles.

Shakespeare in Love (08/16/19) - I remember that I’d had it in the back of my mind when I watched this movie that Harvey Weinstein was involved in some way, but when I didn’t see the Weinstein Company Logo in the opening credits, I assumed I was wrong. Turns out, he did produce it – the film just predated the Weinstein Company. Additionally, the cast includes Geoffrey Rush, another alleged sexual harasser. That’s something I ought to have mentioned when I wrote the review.

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: The Second Doctor (Doctor Who)

My love for the Second Doctor is no secret. A lot of what we think of as quintessential Doctor traits in the new series began with him, and for a madcap little cosmic hobo that the bad guys would tend to underestimate, it was fun to look back at some of my favorite moments of him being awesome (spoilers.)

 

Getting Past the Sonic Lock (Series 4, Episode 13 – “The Power of the Daleks:  Episode 5”)

This moment, from Two’s very first serial and now only available as an animated reconstruction (obligatory fist-shake at the BBC,) is the Second Doctor all over: coming across as foolish and a little annoying, but in actual fact, sneakily getting the job done. He’s imprisoned in a cell with a “sonic lock,” with the guards’ key emitting a certain frequency to open the door. Now, this episode predates the sonic screwdriver, but our intrepid new Doctor manages another way. He first tries to match the frequency by running his finger along the lip of a water glass, and when that doesn’t work, he turns to his trusty recorder. No wonder Two is the one who later goes on to invent the sonic screwdriver – he knows from experience how handy it is!

 

Reversing the Gravitron (Series 4, Episode 26 – “The Moonbase:  Episode 4”)

With the Cybermen inexorably marching forward toward the Moonbase, the Doctor gets the idea to use the base’s Gravitron against them, aiming it toward the surface of the moon in the Cybermen’s direction. When the base’s controls can’t get the device pointed as low as they need it to be, the Doctor also gets the idea to move it the rest of the way manually, and it pays off: with the Gravitron aimed down, both the Cybermen and their ships start to float away from the surface of the Moon!

 

Preventing the Reactor Explosion (Series 5, Episode 11 – “The Ice Warriors:  Episode 1”)

The classic Doctor M.O. Walk into the middle of a disaster like he owns the place, then fix everything in the nick of time. The Doctor doesn’t even need to be in the base’s control room to realize there’s a problem with the reactor – he can tell something’s wrong just by listening to its pitch. He then sidles into the control room, tags along after Clent noting all the readings he’s taking, and does all the calculations in his head, diagnosing the issue before Clent even has time to input the data into his computer. Naturally, Clent wants to throw him out as a woolly-coated intruder who wandered in from the cold, but the Doctor quickly takes over. He mans the various stations, adjusting on the fly when the instruments can’t do what he wants them to, and he averts disaster with seconds to spare. Then, just to be extra BAMF, he tells Clent to go ahead and run the now-redundant computer calculations anyway, proving his own accuracy.

 

Homing in on the Moonbase (Series 6, Episode 25 – “The Seeds of Death:  Episode 3”)

This episode finds our heroes in even more of a jam than usual – with the T-mat teleportation stations between Earth and the moon nonfunctional, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe make a daring dash for the moon on a rocket that’s literally a museum piece, and equipment malfunctions leave them without any way to contact Earth or reach Moonbase. Luckily, they intercept Phipps’s cobbled-together radio distress call, and the Doctor manages to home in on that in lieu of the beacon that failed on them. He reconfigures the equipment and, with Zoe’s help, gets the rocket back on course, landing them safely (if not smoothly) on the moon.

 

Learning to Deprocess (Series 6, Episode 39 – “The War Games:  Episode 4”)

On the War Lord base, the Doctor and Zoe sit on a demonstration of how the War Lord scientists use their machine to “process” their human captives, reconfiguring their minds for the purpose of the experiment. The scientists uses Carstairs as a model, since his processing has failed, and the Doctor manages to trick the scientists into revealing vital information. First, he argues that Carstairs can’t be effectively reprocessed without deprocessing him beforehand (fully restoring his mind,) and then he plays the skeptic to get the scientist to show how the machine can be altered to deprocess captives. This plants the seed for the scientists to deprocess Carstairs in the next episode, giving team TARDIS a crucial ally back, and it also primes the Doctor for using the machine himself to restore others.

Doctor Who: Series 12, Episode 11 – “Revolution of the Daleks” (2021)

New Year’s special! A mixed bag, but at this point, I’m definitely in the frame of mind of being grateful for anything new in the way of TV and movies right now. So, I can appreciate the great moments while being only moderately annoyed at the not-so-great ones (spoilers for the previous episode. Casting spoilers as well, but it’s nothing that wasn’t already revealed in the episode trailer.)

On Earth, it’s been 10 months since the Doctor sent Yaz, Ryan, and Graham back home in a spare TARDIS while she faced an uncertain fate against the Cybermen and the Master. Meanwhile, the Doctor has spent decades locked up in Stormcage after getting captured by the Judoon. However, her old pal Captain Jack Harkness breaks her out and heads back to Earth with her just in time for a looming crisis. Jack Robertson, everyone’s least-favorite self-serving entrepreneur, is on the cusp of releasing his latest revelation in public security: robotic drones that just so happen to be modeled on Daleks.

I’ll freely admit, the alien plot? It’s meh. We borrow some of the same Dalek gimmicks from last year’s “Resolution,” which isn’t a favorite of mine, and I wasn’t clamoring for a return of Robertson after “Arachnids in the U.K.” Also, I realize that this special was filmed before 2020, but this storyline is set up with some incredibly-bad optics involving a young Black scientist helping Robertson create the Dalek drones as a “tool” for “our poor police” to use in quelling “civil unrest.” I mean, what the everloving hell? Now, I 100% buy Robertson as the sort of clueless capitalist who would think he could use the Daleks to his advantage (see also, Mr. Diagoras in “Daleks in Manhattan,” Maxtible in “The Evil of the Daleks,” and others,) but that set-up is just so bad. Side note: another guest character appearing in this story is an opportunistic politician played by Harriet Walter, a.k.a. the quintessential Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. She’s underused but effective in the part.

Fortunately, the character stuff is a lot better. After Jack’s surprise appearance in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” which is oodles of fun but such a cruel tease, we finally get to see him meet Thirteen, and it’s predictably a delight. He has a few nice scenes with the Doctor as well as good bits with the companions, who in turn each get at least one good scene with the Doctor. In particular, I’ll highlight a discussion between Jack and Yaz about what it’s like trying to go back to “normal” life after being separated from the Doctor, as well as a lovely scene of the Doctor and Ryan catching up with each other. After two full seasons with Ryan, Graham, and Yaz, I still feel like a lot of what we know about them and their relationships with the Doctor are things we’ve had to infer between the lines, but the scenes we get here are wonderful, the sort that I wish we’d been getting all along.

My only major complaint with the character stuff is that, in relation to the Dalek plot, the characters are almost constantly split up. I realize that’s a hallmark of any crowded TARDIS and it’s certainly been true for this crew, but it doesn’t make as much sense to me here. First of all, it’s been 10 months since the companions have seen the Doctor and decades since she’s seen them, so it’s odd that they wouldn’t spend more time together. Second, they tend to split into a Doctor-led group and a Jack-led group, meaning that, after the initial prison break, Jack and the Doctor spend most of the episode apart. Given that this is the first time in goodness-knows-how-long that Jack has seen the Doctor, 1) it doesn’t jive all that well, and 2) selfishly, I personally wanted to see a lot more of them together.

Ali Wong: Hard Knock Wife (2018)

Another week with no News Satire Roundup, so we’re back to a standup special. I loved Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra, and Hard Knock Wife is just good. Funny, filthy, and outrageous!

As with Baby Cobra, Wong performs her set while heavily pregnant. This time around, though, she’s on her second child, meaning she’s already had one baby and so is brimming with material on childbirth and being a new parent. She launches eagerly into the full body horror of labor, postpartum diapers, and breastfeeding. She explains that, during a C-section, the doctors put up a curtain so a wife’s husband can only see the “human” half of her and not the “cadaver” side, and she likens her questionable ability to get her baby to latch to parallel parking. She warns of the dangers of laughing after giving birth, which risks “the carne asada falling out of the taco.”

She’s solemn-faced as she discusses the sobering 8-and-a-half weeks she spent as a stay-at-home mom, which she describes as a “whack-ass job.” She’s now friends with the sort of moms she used to make fun of, since being a new mom is “like The Walking Dead,” where you latch onto whatever crew you can find, and she’s figured out why new moms wear such loud, bright patterns: “to replace the light that has died inside you.” She seethes with rage at how low the bar is for dads compared to moms, glowering at the thought of the “confetti cannon” her husband receives for occasionally changing diapers. Throughout, she punctuates her points with, “This is why we need maternity leave!”

While the special is frontloaded with childbirth and new-mom content, and both topics feature prominently throughout, Wong hits a variety of other topics as well. I like the section where she talks about her post-Baby Cobra fame and how it has and hasn’t changed her, especially her difficulties haggling over Craig’s List purchases now that she’s famous and can afford a $20 bike helmet! She also discusses making more money than her husband, stupid questions she gets asks as a comedian who’s female/Asian American/a mom, and why she’ll never be someone who ditches their spouse after they get famous to “trade up” for a much younger model, which leads into a great bit about receiving oral sex.

Through it all, Wong is emphatically dirty and incredibly upfront, telling us the truth as if she’s daring us not to believe it. This is a fantastically-funny special, and it offers up the added bonus of reinforcing my resolution to never bear a children because my god. Wow.

Warnings

Tons of language, graphic sexual references, gross-out humor, unnerving mental images, and thematic elements.