Forum Replies Created
-
@puroandson– @winston pretty much has it right.
The referendum on June 23 will determine whether the British people want to remain in the EU under the frankly cosmetic changes of the ‘deal’ Cameron has just ‘negotiated'(Bremain). Or leave the EU and either negotiate ad hoc trade and movement agreements or have associated relationship with the EU a la Norway (Brexit).
At the moment, the Brexit campaign seems to have become a home for a collection of the most risible political entities in the UK — like a really, really crap selection of super villains. The general attitude seems to be a deep suspicion of anyone who wouldn’t comfortably gain membership to a home counties Rotary Club and a nostalgic yearning for some kind of 1950s fantasyland where there is still some benign form of empire and women and fuzzy wuzzies know their place.
As for Yaffle(y). Yes, it probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone not brought up in the UK in the 70s and 80s. Professor Yaffle was a pompous, humourless know-it-all in the children’s TV show Bagpuss. He might remind you of someone.
Right >cracks knuckles< (which is no mean feat for a fish)
Enjoyed watching this again. It’s actually been too long since I sat down and watched some Tennant-era Who. Must do a bit more of that. I’d downgraded Tennant in recent years as I think his performance sometimes pales compared to the nuance of Smith and now Capaldi but I really enjoyed his performance here. It’s also interesting to see now, as we reach the end of Moffat’s tenure, just how far the show has travelled away from the kinetic style of the RTD years.
Similarly, Michelle Collins did a great job. I think she often doesn’t get the credit she deserves because she’s largely considered a ‘soap actress’.
In general, it zips along quite nicely and some of the visuals are terrific and still stand up well. Graeme Harper is a terrific director for this kind of thing and it’s something of a shame that the show stopped using him.
However…
The episode is also a good showcase for Chibnall’s main flaws as a writer. First off, there’s character. The characterisation is just awful. Beyond flat. Collins manages to breathe a bit of life into Kath but the rest are little more than exposition-monkeys that even actors of the calibre of Anthony Flanagan can’t do much with.
The key question is ‘do I believe that these are real, living, breathing people?’ and the answer here is ‘no, I don’t’. And this is a pretty fundamental thing in that Who staple the ‘base under siege’ story. Look at the real classics of the genre in Who — Robots of Death, say, or The Moonbase. We absolutely believe in Hobson and Benoit as characters and we worry for their survival. Same with Poul and Uvanov — and it’s a testament to Chris Boucher’s script for that story that even a dodgy old ham like Russell Hunter can coax out a character that we actually become invested in. Similarly, Cass and Lunn in Under the Lake or Journey and Morgan in Into the Dalek or Adelaide in Waters of Mars. They all convince as characters.
I just don’t feel that here. When they’re not mechanically advancing the plot, the attempts to inject some life into them doesn’t really succeed. Their dialogue strikes me as ‘box set banter’ — a conception of character gleaned from watching other TV series rather than first-hand observation of people. It’s like looking at photograph that’s been photocopied a dozen times. All the vividity, all the detail, has been muddled out. (It’s worth pointing out that there’s no one better at this stuff than RTD. He strikes me as someone who has a genuine interest in and love for people and it shines through in his writing. Rose is almost certainly the best drawn character in Who’s 50-year history. Which makes it odd, I suppose, that he failed so manifestly with Martha. I suspect it was because he still wasn’t quite ‘over’ Rose and didn’t really want to write Martha at all.)
I suspect this is a general CC trait. There’s an opener to a Torchwood episode (I think it might even be the dreaded Cyberwoman) where the regulars are seen playing a game (football maybe?). Aside from being shamelessly pinched from the Firefly episode Bushwhacked, I always got the impression that it had been shoe-horned in to kickstart what had already been perceived as a flaw in the show — the same lacking sense of character — but it didn’t really work.
I spent last night rewatching the first three episodes of Broadchurch s1 just to be sure and I think it’s borne out there too. The real impact comes from a couple of performances — notably Jodie Whitaker as Beth and David Bradley as Jack — who were clearly the characters who interested CC and much of the rest are merely there to service the plot.
Part of the problem is that I think CC is too enamoured of the set piece, the big moment, that he tends to overlook the process of getting there. The impression I get that the momentum of Broadchurch was in its big moments — Danny’s body on the beach, Jack’s suicide, getting Ellie in the interview room with her husband — and that there is a sense of impatience about the actual getting there.
It kind of reminds me of this:
Similarly, 42 strikes me as starting off as a shopping list of ‘cool stuff’ that he wanted to get in and all that character and plot stuff was just a means of getting one from Moment to the next. Thus we get recently corporeal sun monsters who feel the need to don welding helmets. Why? Charitably, you could perhaps argue because they had to keep their eyes shielded for their human bodies to get about. But mostly I get the sense it was because it ‘looked cool’ and Who (and cut down on the VFX bill). And then it’s ‘we have to see Martha drifting in space away from the Doc, the Doctor possessed and the Captain falling into the sun’ with some stuff in between to make those things happen. Particularly interminable in this regard was the ‘pub quiz’ protocols, which struck as particularly ‘filler-ey’.
The episode is basically a mash-up. It’s largely a remake of Planet of Evil with bits of Alien, Event Horizon, Sunshine bolted on. This seems to be both his strength and weakness and often what he seems to be hired for, to create stuff that’s ‘like’ something else. Thus Broadchurch is basically The Killing filtered through a Cracker sensibility. And he adapts the Law and Order franchise to a UK sensibility. He’s writer as remix DJ, as ventriloquist.
Not that I’m saying this is necessarily a bad thing. He’s quite probably just what Who needs at the moment. Moffat has probably taken the show as far in the ‘tricky dicky, timey-wimey’ direction as it can go. I get the impression that CC was perhaps hired to provide a counterpoint to that.
