Stranger Things 2

Who you gonna trick or treat?

The first season of Stranger Things was a runaway success, a wonder of American Gothic television that built on familiar influences to make something fresh and unique. And now it’s back and strangerer than ever. And just as good. Like seriously. Just. As. Good.

With a handful of new additions and an upping of the stakes in terms of the big bad boss level danger, season two drops us back in Hawkins, Indiana to hang out with those meddling kids again. And those meddling adolescents. And those meddling grown-ups. Can you tell I’m trying to go spoiler free here?

The boys at the heart of it all are a year older, slightly more disparate as a group but only because puberty beckons not because they’re less tight than before. It’s not really a spoiler to say Eleven is also back as she’s been plastered all over the promo material for this season. She’s becoming increasingly aware of her abilities but also learning more about the kind of normal life an upbringing in a military complex denied her.

Samwise Gamgee is also around only he’s not here because he was a Hobbit but because long before his feet went all huge and hairy he was a Goonie. Yes they nod to it, the Duffer Brothers were never going to be able to resist nerding out over such a casting coup.

Will, who spent so much of the first season present by his absence is front and centre this time around and it’s fair to say his experiences in the Upside Down have left a mark.

Conspiracy theories are probed, teen love further explored, bad haircuts invoked, arcade games played, Indiana Jones’s hat continues to adorn the police chief’s head, Eleven’s history is developed and she connects to a deeper past, Winona Ryder is still awesome and still looks in need of several large dinners, tricking and treating looks a whole lot scarier than it does in the scenes from ET that are obviously being referenced.

Just watch it. You’ll be very glad you did. And then watch the nerd fest that is Beyond Stranger Things and learn stuff about the actors, writers and director as they chitter chat with some uber geek who is probably famous for uber geeking in the US but I’d never heard of him cos I’m just a stupid Limey.

Star Trek: Discovery - Almost Half Term Report

Next week’s episode of Star Trek: Discovery will be the ‘mid-season finale’, an oxymoronic term which simply means that the season has been split into two parts and will resume in early 2018. Doctor Who fans will know the curious frustration which mingles with excited anticipation that more is to come as outgoing showrunner Steven Moffat wanked about with season breaks for a bit to enable him to supersize his bank account writing another hit BBC show about some detective or other.

I digress. Discovery is unlikely to lose viewers due to the break as the season so far has exceeded expectations and given audiences the most grown-up version of Trek yet. Crew members swear (yup, no substituting the word ‘fuck’ for ‘frack’ here, Battlestar fans), they experience genuinely complex emotions - Burnham and Stamets especially - and most of the scripts have delivered dark, reflective science fiction fit to grace movie screens, let alone TV.

Jonathan Frakes has observed that the cast seem as tightly bonded as TNG were which can’t harm the show in the least. A tight knit crew often create something together which can reach beyond the sum of its parts. But it’s not just the actors, every interview I’ve seen with producers, writers, special effects people, stunt teams etc, has revealed a genuine love of what they’re working on. When Star Trek itself is half a century old and has inspired a generation or two to go into various sides of the industry, you’re bound to end up with a hell of a lot of Trekkies gravitating towards each new addition to the franchise.

Trekkies within the scriptwriting team also ensures canonical matters are dealt with in a dignified manner even when aspects of canon are being bent out of shape - Sarek raised an adopted child as well as his own son Spock? Well that’s new on us but by the end of the first two episodes nobody was griping about it. None of the Klingons look much like Warf but this is all taking place way before he’s even born and maybe he’s just a rare pretty one, eh?

The look of the show is incredible, again reaching cinematic levels due to a combination of advanced special effects, incredible set designs and presumably a far larger budget than TOS ever had.

Most importantly of all because this is Trek, despite the backdrop of war, despite the body count being rather high (especially when you factor in Harry Mudd repeatedly destroying The Discovery in his looped attempts to work out how the spore drive works), despite esoteric and occasionally mind bending sci-fi plotting, the show remains focused on the people at the heart of the action. The central characters are all multi-layered and it is already evident that it might take several seasons to fully explore individuals such as Captain Lorca, Saru and Michael Burnham herself.

I’m a fan. Not a given despite my being a Trekkie (I’m not hot on Enterprise and I can’t say I’ve seen every episode of DS9). In dark times we seek escape and inspiration in fictional heroes who are also undergoing hard, even traumatising circumstances. Discovery is the perfect Trek for the modern age; Michael Burnham is us - a flawed yet true-hearted person faced with impossible decisions and irrevocable choices on an almost daily basis. Only she has better hair and gets to cop off with the sexiest guy on the ship.

Star Trek: Discovery

Last week’s screening of the first and second episodes of Discovery followed a Trek tradition of introducing audiences to a new crew across a double hander. Only it was more like a two-part origins story in which quite a few of the new crew we got to meet were killed off courtesy of a space-tacular battle between the Federation and a spiky Klingon faction trying to reunite the 24 noble houses and defend their culture against dilution from Earthy/Vulcany/Whoevery infiltration.

Then came this week’s third episode (the first aboard the actual ship Discovery) and the audience’s discovery, if you will, that this promises to be a darker, more intense Trek than the small screen has ever seen.

Michael Burnham, the pivotal focus of this series, is not the captain. Indeed she (it can be a woman’s name, get over yourself) is a mutineer en route to a penal colony where she is meant to spend the rest of her born naturals. Which would be boring unless they wanted to do Orange Is The New Trek. They don't want to do that. They want to show a pre-Kirk era Federation at war with the Klingons. And weird science. And they sort of want to reference any and all good science fiction as well as nodding at Trek’s history along the way.

Episode 3 alone paid homage to Alien, Doctor Who, Minority Report, Serenity and possibly even Star Wars as far as my nerd-dar could make out. Oh and quoted Alice In Wonderland. Yup, Burnham falls right down the rabbit hole but such moments are the least satisfying in Discovery, seeming over-egged and hinting at eyebrows arched higher than Spock himself could ever manage.

Good he came up: Burnham was fostered by Spock’s parents after her own (both human) parents were killed by the previous last Klingon attack some years ahead of the opening twinisodes. No, that's never come up in fifty years of Trekking. No, the Internet doesn't seem to have completely melted down over it. Yet.

I could spoiler you right up if I wanted to. Like mentioning that bit where…and the…with a melon…

Not gonna. Get the heck on Netflix and catch up. When Star Trek first aired in its original form in the sixties is was intended as both a reflection of the times and a pointer to a better future, as sci-fi often is unless it's all dystopian and shit. Diversity was key, intergalactic harmony as a metaphor for international peace in the real world? With Discovery things are less flower-power optimistic, just as modern politics is more shit-coloured and subject to interpretation by whomever controls the media lens through which it is dispersed. It shines a light on us, not on a plausible future. Which in truth has always been Trek’s purpose. Long and prosperously may it live.

Straight Outta Compton

As a white British male all I really understood when NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ album hit the record stores in the late 80s was that that I liked this darker, harder, more political rap just as much as I'd liked most of the strictly groove based incarnations throughout the decade. 

The small West Country town I grew up in had violence aplenty but I’m talking different factions of music lovers scrapping over turf with fists and feet. No guns, no hard-core gangs, no genuine deprivation - ours was a predominantly middle-class, Caucasian town although youth culture was driven by my working class peers more than by anything else at that time.

Being young, black, talented and ambitious in Compton at that time was a very different matter and did not excuse the NWA members from police harassment and brutality or from gang-bangers swaggering around the neighbourhood brandishing handguns in case their dicks and bravado were not large enough. If the music was hard - lamely dubbed ‘gangsta rap’ by a white mainstream media as frightened by the truth of certain aspects of their country’s schizophrenic attitudes to privilege and power as it was thirty years earlier when rock and roll thrust so many black artists into the public domain - it was because it reflected the truth of the world these young men grew up into.

No, they were not innocents and their early careers were peppered with controversy, street language to go along with the street knowledge, drugs, sex and conflict both within the group and from that appalled white media.

What this movie conveys despite not wanting to pretty up the darker aspects of the lives of the three greatest contributors to the NWA sound - Ice Cube, Eazy E and Dr Dre - is the friendships that endured despite betrayals over money and personal power trips, the importance of their music and lyrics to a disenfranchised generation of black youths and their wider cultural influence. Surely only Public Enemy can lay claim to similarly vocalising the issues of that generation and equally providing musical foundations for the generations to come.

The performances are spot on with Jason Mitchell’s portrayal of Eric ‘Eazy E’ Wright particularly compelling. He is the heart of the movie, Dre (Corey Taylor) and Cube (played by his own son, O'Shea Jackson Jr) initially revolving around him like planets orbiting a star but eventually realising they have to find their own way, their own trail across the heavens if you will, in order to fully satisfy a creative compulsion that E seems to drop the ball on once the money and the drugs and the women come rolling in.

E’s widow was an executive producer along with Cube and Dre which means this is ultimately a love-letter to a dear friend and partner whose sexual appetites led to a shockingly early demise from AIDS related complications just as the three friends seemed on the verge of getting past their conflict and rivalries and were looking to record new material with the original line-up.

If the tragedy is Eric Wright’s ignorance that heterosexuals could spread HIV as well as homosexuals (still a very common fallacy at the time), an ignorance that ultimately led to his death, the menace is brought into sharp focus by R. Marcos Taylor’s depiction of Suge Knight, founder of Death Row Records and a man with a reputation for being more than happy to settle old scores and fresh grievances with violence and death threats.

For all the sombre tones this is also an exhilarating tale of a group of guys who defied the odds of their locality and their position within society to make celebratory as well as angry music - Express Yourself funks along like James Brown on sensimilia.

Great movies about rock and roll bands are rare. Great movies about rap artists are even more rare but this surpasses pretty much all that do exist. And it's even got Paul Giamatti doing his customary trick of playing a character you somehow both love and hate, this time as the band’s manager Jerry Heller.

Yes I know that Ice Cube has since made some god awful family movies to pay the bills but he's also been involved in scripting and performing in one or two classics along the way, not least ‘Boyz N The Hood’. Dr Dre has spent the years since NWA’s heyday perfecting the incredible talent he already had for laying down beats and producing music with some of the greatest rap artists of all time. ‘Straight Outta Compton’ leaves them both on the cusp of these developments in their lives, distraught at the death of Eazy E but looking forward. 

The film ends with actual footage of NWA videos, news clips describing reactions to E’s death from the rap community and the public, and snippets of the futures to come. At a time when white supremacists march openly in the United States of America and the uber white-privileged man in the White-est of White Houses fails to condemn such defiantly racist behaviour, the history and the messages of NWA are perhaps even more important than they were at the time.

Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker

I’ve waited a while before imposing my opinion about the upcoming changes for Doctor Who. Knee jerk internet jerks are no doubt still frothing and bubbling in their mother’s basements about the fact that the Thirteenth Doctor is to be played by a woman. Or, worse, rubbing their knees and nethers in disgusting boyticipation. Mostly they are decrying what to them is a step too far for a science fiction show.

Science fiction, lest anyone has forgotten, is all about fantasy, imagination and the possibilities at the edge of probability. In the shape of Doctor Who science fiction has always, absolutely always, been about breaking rules, imagining the impossible and making fantasy seem so almost-real that young kids who get hooked on it are still obsessed when they are approaching their dotage.

As one such uber-nerd I should like to point to the very first edition of the show, all the way back in 1963: An Unearthly Child. And who was that child? It was the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, a woman, no less. A Time Lady, dontcha know. I'd wager that while she was mostly a damsel in distress sort of character, as was common back then for most females in action-driven shows aside from the odd possessor of her own agency such as Honor Blackman, she was also canonical proof that Timelords do both genders.

And when the Doctor eventually visited his homeland onscreen in the seventies Time Ladies were in evidence, despite the ‘Lords’ still being more front and centre. Until Romana, that is, the second longer-term Time Lady incumbent in the Tardis. Both male and female characters, even The Brigadier, played second fiddle to Tom Baker’s Puckish Fourth Doctor, so it's no surprise Romana was often also somewhat damselly and distressy.

All of this long before Who was rebooted by a generation of screenwriters infected by a more modern ‘political correctness gone mad’, as some are still assuming is the reason for casting a woman in the role of the Doctor for the first time. It's as if those who most loathe the idea of a female Doctor are privileged white male misogynists who may well suffer with varying degrees of homophobia and racism, isn't it? 

Hmm, whatever. If they don't like the direction the show is going in they could always choose not to watch it and save themselves from some kind of seizure.

Jodie Whittaker, like Matt Smith before her and even David Tennant to a degree, is a moderately well known purveyor of the acting arts yet to make the step up into being a big name. Like both of them, Peter Capaldi and Christopher Eccleston, she is also a brilliant purveyor of said arts, despite only being moderately well known thus far. She has range, she has a unique energy, she can totally inhabit the roles she plays: all perfect qualifications for being the Doctor. Does the lack of a penis create a demerit so enormous that those facts about her as an actor are irrelevant? No, knee jerk internet jerks, it does not.

I'm going to miss Capaldi. But I was also going to miss Smith. And Tennant. And Eccleston. And McGann. And…skips a bit here to the next one I really, really was going to miss…Tom Baker. And Jon Pertwee. I’m not quite ancient enough to remember watching Troughton and possibly never did more than hear Hartnell’s bumblesome tones from my pram. The point is, virtually every actor who has played the Doctor made the role their own; Jodie Whittaker will do exactly that too and not because she’s a woman but because she’s brilliant.

And when she leaves the show to be replaced by a robot fish I will miss her like heck too. Until halfway through the first episode of the Fourteenth Doctor’s adventures.

Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls

It is the end, but the moment has been prepared for. 

Tom Baker’s final words as he began to morph into Peter Davison have been quoted a fair deal in the run-up to Peter Capaldi’s last season finale before he regenerates in this year’s Christmas special. However, as he lay on the floor of the Tardis towards the end of the episode, apparently dead beyond regenerative trickery, it was Jon Pertwee’s last scene I was most reminded of. From the dandified cuffs of Capaldi’s shirt to the bat-splayed red lining of his ragged jacket to the creased face and bedraggled silver locks, the Twelfth Doctor mirrored the Third with Moffat-fuelled accuracy.

That he later quoted his more immediate predecessor’s last words would have been no whimsical notion nor a spot of nostalgic fanboy onanism from the outgoing show-runner. The moment when it is (of course) revealed that he's not dead after all harked back to the flashbacks Davison had when it was his turn to hand over the sonic screwdriver but let's not dwell on that as the Sixth Doctor was a multi-chrome clown in all the wrong ways.

The Doctor Falls deliberately draws on iconic imagery from Moffat’s own tenure too but more in the spirit of a greatest hits package than the feel of the regeneration echoes (I will grant him kudos for inverting Eleven carrying Amy during Asylum of the Daleks and having CyberBill hold the failing Twelve in the same tragic pose). By alerting long-time fans of the show to the ripples of so many other Doctors running through the energy of Capaldi’s oncoming regeneration it led us to the final twist of the season: Twelve looks to be spending Christmas with the first incarnation of The Doctor.

If you want to nitpick it's the third incarnation of the first incarnation of The Doctor: William Hartnell and Richard Hurndall being far too real-life dead to appear so David Bradley has stepped into the role. It's only fair, he did play Hartnell and thus Hartnell’s Doctor brilliantly in the 2013 anniversary drama about the genesis of the show itself.

My reaction is mixed. It is a thrilling prospect indeed for the Christmas special to feature the original Doctor as well as a soon to golden-glow his way into somebody else Twelve. But the prospect of incoming show-runner Chris Chibnall deciding to reset the entire programme by somehow having Capaldi regenerate as Bradley’s version of Hartnell lurks at the back of my mind like the stench of a rotten cucumber lingers in a refrigerator.

The concept is fine but I pray it's not one that Chibnall has given any serious thought to. Anniversaries are one thing, a great excuse to gather up a couple of previous Doctors and let them squabble their way to harmonious solutions to some devilish alien plot, but a Marvel Spider-Man style reset would most likely lose fans rather than push the show onwards towards 2023’s 60th jubilee.

I've loved every minute of Capaldi as The Doctor and applaud Moffat for bucking the previous trend of recruiting younger and younger actors to the role, seemingly to ensure fangirls came along with the fanboys, but the best regenerations and smoothest transitions in the show’s history work when a proper contrast of personalities (rather than vomit-hued jackets) is set up. Since returning to our screens no Doctor has been too similar to the previous one; there would be a danger of chiming many familiar Capaldi notes if Bradley becomes the next Doctor full time.

I don't know that anybody else is squawking about this or even considering it a possibility. I may be putting Twelve and One together and not coming up with Thirteen. A cryptic Moffat statement about this regeneration being rather different to those we’ve seen before and the continuing lack of announcement about Capaldi’s successor are the fragmentary foundations of my thesis, not really enough to give credence to the idea, right?

Or maybe that's exactly what Chibnall hopes geeks like me will be imagining, the better to help us accept a female Doctor this time? Personally I've been fine with the idea of a woman taking on the role for most of my adult life (once I'd got past the prepubescent ‘girls are pooey’ stage) so I don't really need subterfuge to help me cope with gender changes in a science fiction series.

Hey ho, on with the show. Only it seems like on with the show minus Pearl Mackie, John Simm, Michelle Gomez and Peter Capaldi as the Master/Missy double act reversed the polarity of multiple Doctors by killing one another towards the end, and Bill Potts looks like she’s off to snog around the universe with her romantic interest from the first episode of the season. Talk about regime change.

Doctor Who Season Ten: Half-Time Report

Halfway through Season 10 of Doctor Who (the modern, circa 2005 revamped version, no idea how many seasons there have been altogether since 1963) and things are beginning to take shape in terms of various plot strands. Pearl Mackie has bedded seamlessly into place as new companion Bill Potts and even the mystery of why Matt Lucas is aboard the Tardis has become less a vexation and more the possibility of his character Nardole stamping himself into Whovian folklore as a secret badass.

Hanging over everything this year is the fact that it is public knowledge Peter Capaldi is leaving the show. Internet theories abound as to his replacement, theories I have little response to other than to hope the Kris Marshall fans are disappointed when the announcement is finally made. Other theories skitter across the web too, such as the possibility that Capaldi might not last until the end of the season. The first show of the series included a look ahead clip package at the end which showed the Twelfth Doctor in the now classic regeneration pose, something akin to Christ on the cross only with more golden light and no halo.

Tradition tends to insist that the Doctor becomes a brand new version of himself (or herself) in the final show of a season or, more, frequently, at the conclusion of a slightly oversentimental Christmas special. But there is a precedent for replacing a Doctor within the season itself, albeit not an especially encouraging one for older fans. Back in the mid 1980s when another Peter, Mr Davison, had announced he was to step down the role, his replacement came along at the tail end of the penultimate storyline that series, The Caves of Androzani. The season rounded off with The Twin Dilemma, Colin Baker's first full appearance as the Sixth Doctor. Yes THAT Baker, the ridiculous costume one, the portly one, the worst actor of the lot with some of the worst storylines and lowest effects budgets. That went well, then.

In its present form Doctor Who is twelve years old which is pretty good going for any prime time show. Altogether it has been around for fifty four years although of course there was nothing but a wonderful Doctor in a poor TV special to keep us going between 1989 and 2005. The freshness of the Russell T Davies era, the cocksure swagger of the opening couple of seasons under Steven Moffat, these have faded a little yet Capaldi has been given some of the best genuine science fiction stories of all the Doctor's incarnations. As well as a few duffers such as In The Forest Of The Night. Hey, Tenant has Fear Her on his Timelord CV don't forget, and Matt Smith somehow chewed his way through the dialogue of The Power Of Three.

Along with a new Doctor will come a new show runner in Chris Chibnall. He has Who previous: sadly The Power of Three was his work but he was largely responsible for the tour de force power of the first season of spin-off show Torchwood. Apparently he's been doing some detectivey thing with David Tenant in the main role more recently. So how is this season shaping up to hand over to Chibbers (as nobody calls him)?

So far so awesome. The fallibility of The Doctor is not always properly explored but seeing as he's spent two full episodes blind as a bat and was unable to prevent Bill from making a potentially disastrous decision on behalf of the planet at the end of the most recent episode it's fair to say that Capaldi's Doctor will in part be remembered for the times he did not just waltz in and save the day with a wave of his sonic screwdriver (a huge criticism of the Tenant and Smith eras). Uncertainty and vulnerability were an integral part to the role as portrayed by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton so this might be a chance to re-establish the character as well-meaning but not always triumphant.

Too much failure, however, and you're in Fifth Doctor territory. We forget, given how great a job Matt Smith did of making his youth irrelevant in terms of how we saw the Tenth Doctor, that Davison struggled throughout his tenure to stamp authority on a role previously associated with the brusque bossiness of Jon Pertwee and the maverick genius of Tom Baker. The Thirteenth Doctor will need to hit the ground running and establish themselves as firmly as Smith managed to do on the heels of Tenant or the next series might be the show's last in its current guise.

Which would be a shame as the scope of the premise is, as always, limitless. Alien nutjob with a penchant for doing good owns a space-time travelling device so s/he can literally rock up anywhere, anywhen and anyhow in search of adventure and televisual feast. Bill's story arc is more subtle, perhaps, than the days of Rose or Amy but she's strong, funny and unique. If they decide she should stay to help bed in the next Doctor it can only be a bonus. After all, Clara's main detractors forgot their trolling when she was shown in new lights playing against Capaldi's version of the main character.

Still to come this season we have two versions of The Master/Missy colluding to do whatever vile things they can come up with together and we have Hartnell-era Cybermen returning, possibly to wear Capaldi a little thin and cause his regeneration. I've got a boner the size of all space and time just thinking about it. Haven't you, madam?