"But... you have doubts?" "Affirmative."

Science fiction (ooh ooh ooh) double feature (bau bau bau). So Manlek did his... William Shatner... im...personation for a bit, started to turn nice, got the Doctor on side, and then his underlings decided his mission was a failure, his life had got too extreme, and they death-rayed him. In a theatre. With audience partici...pation.

And I assume a sonic transducer was involved as well, because I don't see how else they could have got from the basement of the Empire State Building to the theatre that quickly, with Manlek in chains staggering along with them. A plot device that is capable of breaking down solid matter and projecting it wherever happens to be most dramatic. I mean, why bother to chain him up, bring him to the theatre and then exterminate him? If you don't like him, why not just exterminate him back at the lab? This was but one of a mountain of things that bothered me about this week's Who, but let's start on the positive side.

I give Evolution of the Daleks 5 out of 10 - decidedly average, but just better than The Shakespeare Code. Points were awarded for lookin' good, particularly the nice backdrops of New York (yes, DW Confidential, the very nice backdrops, and by the way thank you for spending two episodes dwelling on how nice they were and telling us naff all about the story). Not the first Who story to reduce a city to just three basic locations (Empire State, Central Park, theatre - well, four if you include the sewers) and to give us no sign of anyone living anywhere else in the city, but it did look very good. Manlek, son of Dalek, still looked nice, and I even quite liked his Shatner impersonation. Some nice film referencing - leaving aside the Rocky Horror overtones of the theatre scene and the twinges of Frankenstein in the lab, I did kind of like the 1930s cross-fading as the human Daleks marched through the sewers. Nice Dalek tommy-guns. Nice scenes of the under-Daleks conspiring - looking over their shoulder and so on. Some nice comedy touches, particularly the pigmen making "Come on, come on" faces in the lift. And David Tennant put in one of his finest performances yet, I thought, apart from the bits I shall shortly whinge about. All things considered, this episode looked great, and better even than last week's.

AND YET!

1. The science was shot to buggery. And if I, a science dunce, can spot the problems on first viewing, it's got to be really screwed. Now see, when Cthulhu Dalek swallows a man whole and somehow merges itself with him to form Manlek, I can accept that. It's not presented as a hard scientific thing, and besides we already know from the 2005 series that Daleks can somehow absorb organic material from other life forms, even through their casings. But solar flares and DNA are real, scientific things that behave in real, scientific ways. And I think that's where Daleks in Manhattan scored over Evolution of the Daleks - it didn't contain any of the "science". The non-science, if you will, although I like to think of it as ab-science. To list out each terrible point:

• A vast burst of gamma radiation, caused by a solar flare, translates into a big bolt of regular electric lightning hitting the top of the Empire State Building.


• The Daleks need this energy to turn humans into Daleks by some process of barging the DNA out with their own. (I'm pretty sure genetics doesn't work on an instant basis either, but it's the "zap it with electricity and jolt the new genes in" that got me.)


• Although the hybrids are now "100% Dalek", they are completely unchanged physically.


• They are, however, changed mentally, even though DNA doesn't contain any experiential information that might condition their minds.


• The Daleks plan to use them to convert the rest of New York's population, and then the rest of humanity, although how they plan to do this with one small genetic lab and no more really big solar flares, and a very limited source of Dalek DNA, remains unclear. (Plus, since when did the Daleks become the Cybermen?)
  


• Meanwhile the Doctor has somehow disrupted the process by clinging to the mast and getting himself electrocuted. (This I am sure of: DNA is a chemical and is not transmitted electrically.)

They could have gotten away with it, if they'd just said the Daleks needed a massive burst of electricity to overwrite the human brains with Dalek thoughts. SF has been equating the mind with electricity for decades now, the audience would've bought it easily. There were other, lesser scientific issues, but they're kind of dwarfed by the above.

2. Related to point 1, even the ab-science has a yawning chasm at its heart. Why was the Dalekanium strapped to the mast? The Doctor clings to the mast to magically stick his DNA into the human hybrids, and tries for some reason to tear the Dalekanium off, so the obvious inference is that the Dalekanium was there for the same purpose, to introduce Dalek DNA into the process. (It's not too unreasonable (for a given value of "unreasonable", accepting for a moment that we're talking about electrical transfer of DNA) - if Dalek metal could absorb organic material in 2005, maybe it does actually contain genetic material itself. Or then again maybe that, it now turns out, was another example of metal "conducting" DNA?) But Manlek says he's supposed to be the genetic template for the hybrids, so the DNA must have come from him and been introduced in the lab. But then why was the Dalekanium strapped to the mast?
And while we're here, how does Manlek, son of Dalek - formed from the direct merging of two bodies, gestated in and born from a Dalek casing - form the template for hybrid creatures created by a completely different process? (And why don't they share his boyish good looks - but see point 1.)

3. It was a joke, even in the old series, when the Daleks had a golden opportunity to exterminate the Doctor, and by some contrivance they wouldn't do it. Here it happened at least three times, twice with the Doctor actually standing there inviting them to do it. The Doctor's developed some kind of pointless death wish, apparently (and these, incidentally, are the scenes where I felt David Tennant's performance lapsed from excellent to merely good). Not only this, but the last Dalek - honest guv, the very last one this time, really, until we bring them all back again, chiz chiz - had a clear shot at him at the end and scarpered instead. D minus, detention.

4. And that deserves a sub-header of its own: the Emergency Temporal Cop-Out. Oh, how I long for the day when they actually finally really do kill the Daleks off, because to me they don't just represent lack of imagination, they are lack of imagination. ("What will we do this week?" "Oh, we'd better have another Dalek story. People like the Daleks.") How my heart swelled when two of the bastards bit the dust in the theatre - just one left! Just one left! Go on, do it!! And yet, even if they had killed off the Very Last Dalek Honest Guv, my cynical brain wouldn't believe it. It's been soured by six happy weeks in 2005 after Rob Shearman's fine episode, at the end of which the Daleks all came back again.
The real tragedy here is that Manlek was the most interesting thing to happen to the Daleks in decades, and they killed him off. They had to, I suppose, for a variety of narrative and dramatic reasons, but it's still a shame.

5. A few remaining points of plot illogic. The human hybrids have the same problem as the pigmen - if all you're after is zombie-like footsoldiers, why not just take regular humans and brainwash them? Worked in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Why all this pissing about with genetics, just to end up with manual labour?
If your army of hybrids is so expendable (and if you already know they've been compromised), why not self-destruct them before they blow up the only two other remaining Daleks, instead of after? (I'm not complaining, you understand, but... why?)
Why (just to repeat it) drag Manlek all the way to the theatre in chains, just to parade him for a bit and then kill him? Why leave him alive at all, if you're a ruthless genocidal Dalek and you think he's let the side down?
Why does the Doctor apparently go along with Manlek's plan when a) Manlek is 50% unwilling human, and b) his future race of hybrids is composed entirely of murdered humans? Is it worth that much moral compromise just to egg on the one Dalek who might turn out to be nice?
One missed opportunity: why wasn't something like this included:
"But... why?"
"Da-leks do not ques-tion or-ders!"
"But you did - you deposed your leader and shot him in front of us."
I know, I'm trying to "improve" the script, and am therefore the lowest of the low even by my own standards. But still, might have been a nice point to make.

All of this might give the impression that I hated this episode. I repeat: 5 out of 10, and it was nice to look at. Still, roll on next week's.
One cheeky final thought, and I haven't seen anyone else online mentioning it, which suggests they're all far too lovely, or I'm a complete disgrace. Daleks in Manhattan made it clear that Tallulah Threeellsandanaitch is Jewish. Muttering "Dumb goy" at the Doctor, several "Oy"s, that kind of thing. (Plus you're not going to tell me Threeellsandanaitch isn't a Jewish surname.) Her boyfriend is now half pork. I'm guessing there won't be any more blow jobs, then. At the very least, it should be an interesting relationship.

"New Amsterdam, New Amsterdam?"

Hmm, Daleks in Manhattan. There were Daleks, they were in Manhattan, and thus was the Trade Descriptions Act of 1968 not broken. I tentatively give it... 7 out of 10. (Next to which, Smith & Jones is definitely an 8, while Gridlock can be fixed down to a 6. My opinion of The Shakespeare Code is endorsed by the fact that The Lovely Jo had forgotten about it just a fortnight later.) I may come back to this rating after next week's episode, but overall... hmm. Alas, the Daleks didn't sing, but Dalek Sec did dance a bit (well, it looked like dancing). And then he turned into a Monoid with dreadlocks.

There was much to recommend it, certainly - just some things I didn't like. The episode dragged quite a bit in the middle. It took about thirty seconds for all the female cast and their voices to get thoroughly on my Dalek balls. Almost including Martha, sadly - whenever she's acting "excited", her voice does this odd Bonnie Tyler thing, and her believability suddenly drops. In all other respects, she's bearing up very well - once again, we see that she's smart, resourceful, and open-minded enough to chase a pig hybrid with the words "You're not like the others!" More good news: David Tennant's finally nailed "angry", with that lovely line "They always survive, while I lose everything." On the other hand, there were quite a few dialogue wobbles. Most notably (and unfortunately) that final line. Lovely prosthetics, dodgy line.

Ways in which the final line could have been worse (just about):
"I am Manlek, son of Dalek!"
"Heeeeeeeeere's Dalek!"
"Hi, and welcome to the show - I'm Jay Leno."

Of course, the real sin is that the shock ending was given away on Tuesday by the Radio Times - fules! Whose decision? Russell T's, according to the interview. Was this just a stupid mistake, or an act of sabotage? Still, to play devil's advocate for a minute, if I hadn't known what was coming I'd've fallen right off my chair, so maybe, just maybe this was an attempt to avoid traumatising the kiddies (too much) by preparing them for the ending. Generosity leans towards stupidity, however.

News amusement this week: Sheryl Crow suggests that, to conserve paper, people should only use one sheet of toilet paper a time. Clearly Sheryl Crow has never shat. Either that or she just doesn't care, and the inside of her undercrackers looks like the Somme. Still though... perhaps if someone could devise an alternative to toilet paper? Yes, it's time for the three seashells. It's the last thing standing between us and the world of Demolition Man.

What happened to this song we once knew so well?

Kicking and screaming, I drag myself into the 21st century. I've finally bought an MP3 player - let the early adopters spend their month's pay-packet on these things, I'm happy to wait for the technology to become commonplace and get myself a bargain.

Up till now my mobile musical needs have been adequately met by an old Walkman. Yes, magnetic tape. (If it slurs when I'm doing anything more energetic than a stroll, well, that's still better than the skipping I got when I tried using a portable CD player.) It has meant carrying something like a saddlebag around to hold the machine, tapes and spare batteries, but I'm a big man and I quite like the physicality of big gadgets. That said, I can see the appeal of replacing it with something keyring-sized.

The main incentive for this is another purge of the CDs. It's good to prune the collection down now and then, and to let Oxfam benefit from my musical fickleness, but all the real chaff went months ago and I'm now looking askance at those albums that don't really merit a place on the shelves, but are hanging on by virtue of one or two good tracks. The solution: give the odd tracks a new home on the MP3 player, and the CDs can be safely disposed of.

Here are some of the albums now shaking their heads in forlorn disbelief at their P45s.

Jethro Tull - J-Tull Dot Com
Some Tull fans say that the party ended in the 1980s with A; others say that nothing after the 1978 live album Bursting Out is worth hearing. Personally I feel that things got a bit patchy between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, but recovered again with Roots to Branches. However, the Tull sound by then was remarkably similar to what Ian Anderson was doing with his solo albums, and frankly if you've got his Secret Language of Birds then you've already got all the good bits of J-Tull Dot Com. All except one track: "El Niño". A saucy little number with a driving electric guitar motif.
(The real heresy for Tull fans, mind you, would be that I'm also getting rid of Aqualung, widely supposed to be the zenith of Tull. And it wasn't even one of the main album tracks I saved, but a bonus track. The thing is, because it's so often claimed to be the best album, the interesting songs have been wheeled out on every compilation and live album since. It won't be missed.)

Yes - Close to the Edge
Apparently a lot of people like this album. However, of its three lengthy songs I've only ever really liked one, and it's not the title track. It's the ten-minute romantic ballad "And You and I". The three Yes fans in the world who don't now think I'm mad will do when I tell them that I really, really like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Time and a Word. Fortunately the chances of them reading this blog are zero.

Kosheen - Kokopelli
I have the same problem with Kosheen that I had with Portishead and Talvin Singh - fantastic sound, but what's the good of having the second album when it's just the same as the first? Only one song on this album distinguished itself, pushing its little synth/vocal hooks into my brain, and that was "Recovery". It lives on in electronic form.

King Crimson - Thrak
Like Tull, King Crimson kept themselves fresh over the decades by changing their line-up and sound, although with Crimso the changes were much more pronounced. No one can agree on precisely how many King Crimsons there've been, but broadly they split down into: 1969/flower-people, early 1970s/freaky jazz, mid-1970s/prog rock, 1980s/experimental pop, 1990s and after/hard rock. That's the very vague, unhelpful and somewhat inaccurate version. Thrak is the first of the 1990s albums.
Two tracks have been saved here: "Dinosaur", a hard piece, and "Walking on Air", a gentle piece, both of which are fine and have some rather nice lyrics. The rest of the album is filled with instrumentals that just didn't grab me and songs that hint at the predilection for gibberish/stream-of-consciousness lyrics Adrian Belew would indulge in later albums. Not my favourite era of Crimso. I am, however, keeping hold of the Happy With What You Have to be Happy With EP, which has four strong tracks (including the title track, a nice heavy rock parody) and some unobjectionable instrumental links, and which works better as a whole than the albums either side of it.
The freaky jazz albums, incidentally, went out almost as soon as they came in.

Call of the Wild
A bit of a novelty item, this. Back in Exeter a few years ago, we went to see Ken Campbell's stage show The History of Comedy, Part One: Ventriloquism. The show was introduced by a weird but infectious drum 'n' bass tune featuring a woman's voice and the barking and howling of some dogs. I was curious, and shelled out for this CD, which is a kind of soundtrack to that show, and which incidentally benefited the dogs as well. It's for charidee, mate.
The rest of the CD turned out to be half composed of the constituent bits of the interesting tune, and half snippets of Ken talking with some low-key synth laid over it. Still, it was worth hanging onto for that one weird tune. But no more! Let someone else discover its wonders.

"Just what every city needs - cats in charge!"

Hmm. Hmm hmm hmm. What a paradox we have here. I want to give Gridlock high marks for being wonderful popcorn TV, and yet I must acknowledge that there's hardly any plot holding it up at all. A contrast with Smith & Jones, which almost seemed to have too much plot, yet it seemed to be having a lot more fun. I want to give it 8 out of 10, but feel I ought to hold it back to a 6 or 7 on technical grounds.

There are many reasons for me to like Gridlock. It's a return from the chewy rice-cake "annual" texture of last week to the colourful, chemical "comics" feel of most of the new series that I like so well. (All that really tells me, though, is that clearly I prefer having bugger all plot and some pretty pictures to having too dusty a plot. "A triumph of style over substance", as they used to say - obviously that's my bag. "A triumph of fluff over stodge" might be more to the point.) It looks like what some part of my hindbrain seems to think the future should look like. The expensive CGI's all well and good, but - mother of invention - it's forced the cost-cutting measure of using the same car set re-dressed repeatedly, which I like in a televisual way. (Every now and then the makers of DW find themselves in a corner for reasons of time and/or budget, and end up producing brilliant DW as a result. The first episode of The Mind Robber springs instantly to mind.)

Most importantly, I got the sense that the characters had lives beyond the confines of the story. Those lives might not have made much sense in plot terms, but at least they weren't just there for the Doctor's benefit. Effectively, the characters, the imagery, the metaphor (and I can excuse a lot of the plot failings on the basis that the big eternal motorway is a metaphor, or at least a joke) are conveying the story instead of the conventional things like narrative. Any old monkey can read out a page of infodump, whereas the people here were acting their backstory.

Plus it had kittens in it. I mean, what more do you want?

Of course, I'm just making excuses for an episode that made no sense, merely because it made my brain happy. But if nothing else, it was a blessed relief after last week's visit to the Television Shakespeareworld Heritage Theme Park. Next week: singing, dancing and Daleks! But will the Daleks sing and dance? We can only hope.

The Shape of Easter

So, Eostretide is upon us. A time for eggs, fluffy yellow chicks, bunny rabbits... and chocolate (ahh, good old Aztec Easter). This is, in the words of the Amazing Blondel, Spring Season.

Readers will undoubtedly already know that the word "Easter" derives from an old Germanic word meaning "dawn" or "spring"; that the Venerable Bede wrote, around the turn of the eighth century AD, that the season was in fact named for a Pagan goddess-avatar of the spring (although as his is the earliest account of this, you have to trust that Bede did his homework - see also footnote*); and that Christians associate this rebirth of the year with the Biblical rebirth of Jesus Christ, although none of the European farmyard imagery of the festival has any relevance whatsoever to him. Fans of the Amazing Blondel may also know that Spring Season has a sound, which one may "hark and hear". But what you may not know is that Easter has a shape.

I was alerted to this strange fact in the supermarket last week, as we shopped for Easter eggs for The Lovely Jo's family. All Easter eggs these days must be accompanied by some kind of back-up sweets ("eggcessories", perhaps, or "B-candies", the sugary equivalent of B-movies) and most are packaged with chocolate bars. But my eye was caught by a row of eggs aimed at younger kids, which rode into town on "Easter-shaped jellies". Little jelly sweeties shaped like Easter.

What is the shape of Easter? Do seasons have shapes? My first thought was that it ought to be something non-Euclidian and strange-angled - something suitably abstract. (Still haven't learned from Bernard Matthews' disappointing Turkey Princess Dreams, then. Little poultry nuggets in the shape of crowns and stars - damned if that's the shape of any of my dreams, never mind the dreams of royalty. I'll bet Princess Diana wasn't blessed with dancing visions of little bready crowns and stars. But perhaps I'm assuming too much.) The Lovely Jo remarked that it very probably wouldn't be crucifix-shaped, although the thought of pastel-coloured jelly Christs amused me for a while.

In the event, one of her brothers had wondered the same thing and gave us an egg with Easter-shaped jellies. It turns out Easter has two shapes - a sort of circular, blobby chick and a gnarled thing that might be a rabbit. Either these are mere facets of Easter's much weirder true shape, or I'm disappointed. The manufacturers didn't go so far as to suggest that the sweets were "Easter-flavoured", which is a shame because the taste was anonymous enough that they could probably have gotten away with it.

(*Fakelore: Invented folklore. Also covers Bowdlerised folklore. A lovely word that I stumbled across on Wikipedia while reading up on Bede's part in all this. I'm sure we can all think of examples, although to be honest most folklore must be fakelore by now. What religious groups, heritage/re-enactment festivals, Hollywood and Ladybird books haven't beaten into shape, the Victorians invented wholesale. "Fakelore" is now my second favourite Wikipedia-given word, after the found word (at least, I'm assuming it's a typo) "anarchronistic", which is strikingly apt for an entry on Wild West steampunk.)

"Hey nonny nonny..."

"...my lord!", to quote the second Blackadder, as this week's Doctor Who so nearly did. Alas, I cannot bring myself to award it more than half marks. Perhaps 4.5 out of 10. A few good lines in the script, but a bit of a mess overall, and...

...and here I digress for a moment. 21st century Who in general has a strong flavour of the old Who comics about it - particularly the very old Dalek comics, from which the end of series 1 took its Dalek flying saucer design. There's more than a hint in some of the more surprising TARDIS antics - flying through space at missiles, popping out of mid-air and crash-landing, hovering down the motorway, etc. Note also the general colour, brashness and "anything goes" attitude. But this story felt more like the sort of thing you get in an annual, the sort of two-page text story for which the entire brief is "Dr Who [sic] meets a famous historical figure", and the writer pads this with a few gags, a wafer-thin story and some laboured bits of dialogue of the play-ending "...Rexel 4" variety. Last year's second episode veered close to annual territory, but avoided it by the judicious use of wuxia monks, a werewolf and a better story.

At some point (probably in the next month or so) a fan who cares more than I did will reveal exactly how many sly Shakespearean references there were in this episode, and exactly how much of the script was written in iambic pentameter, and therefore exactly how clever we should all admit this episode to be. But cast your minds back to 1988: Silver Nemesis had Shakespearean references and iambic pentameter all over it, and it was, in a word, wank.

Particular lowlights: well, that bit of Shakespearean programming language at the end of Love's Labours Won for a start. The pre-credits monologue to camera, with that "Eeee-heheheheheee!" cackle at the end. Mother Doomfinger (the Bond villain that never was?) - I doubt she even scared the pre-teens. In fact, the witches in general. Presumably they felt they had to include a trio of cartoonish children's-story witches to get the "Shakespeareness" right, and yet they still got it wrong. (After all, the witches in Macbeth are mannish creatures (oddly enough, being played by men) with beards, who do their manipulating by psychology alone and who don't fly anywhere. The Carrionites weren't even right by regular myth-witch standards - instead of maiden, mother and crone they had two crones and called them both "Mother". Feh.) Oh yes, and: "Got to get used to this - whole new language - when are we?" Which is stretching the notion of "whole new language" a bit far, methinks.

If this poor spirit hath offended, think only this, and all is mended: that I rate this higher than Silver Nemesis. That's pretty faint praise, but there it is.

In other news, round at The Lovely Jo's folks' for Easter, to coo at week-old kittens and cop for some chocolate. More detailed Easter news may or may not follow at a later date.

"Justice is swift."

What's that on the TV? Is it Brian May in a "Greek philosopher" style curly white wig and beard, pretending to be old? Yes it is - The Sky At Night are larking about, which reminds me of this week's media amusement. Sky At Night Magazine are celebrating the TV programme's 50th birthday in their own way, with two collectable covers. Wooooo! One of the covers has the words "50th Anniversary" in gold lettering on a plain black background, while the other - wait for it - has the words "50th Anniversary" in black lettering on a plain gold background. Quick, collect them before they're all snapped up by art-lovers.

But what of this week's brand new Who episode, Smith and Jones? Why, that'll do nicely. Best of the three season openers so far, I think. Much more busy than Rose; made a lot more sense than New Earth. Unusually, we saw some evidence of the Doctor "only taking the best" - he may have said it of Rose, but really she just got involved by chance and came through in the end. Most of his companions have just kind of stumbled into the TARDIS. Here there's actually some suggestion that Martha catches his eye by being smart, resourceful and not too easily fazed. We think she'll work out all right. Nice work on the Judoon as well. I tentatively give this one... 7.5 out of 10. Maybe an 8, but we'll see how the rest of the series pans out.

On a side note, two of The Lovely Jo's relatives have now appeared in crowd scenes in the new Who. Last year her cousin was in one of the many crowd scenes in the Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel two-parter (we can't figure out which one - she may well have her back to the camera). Now The Lovely Jo's cousin's husband has appeared, much more prominently, just behind the shoulder of Martha's sister in the scenes where people are staring at the big hole in the ground. We didn't even realise until it was pointed out to us.