Doctor Who – The rest of the season

Aliens rarely dress for the weather.

NB. I’m way behind on these reviews, so I’m going to rush through this.

This review will contain spoilers

‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’
"Whole worlds pivot on acts of imagination."

Incapacitated and rescued by a hospital ship, Team Tardis have to rally the crew and patients to stave off three kinds of disaster, before one of them claims all of their lives.

There’s a good bunch of supporting characters and a nicely Doctorish solution, although this is one of the Thirteenth’s more erratic episodes, perhaps the most extreme of her ‘adjustment’ episodes, and the all-consuming pting is a little too adorable a death machine.

Easily my favourite thing in the episode is when the Doctor is trying to turn the ship around to get back to the Tardis, and the doctor (small d) gives her a chewing out about the other sick people who need to get to the main hospital, and she listens. That last bit is important.

Rating - 6/10

‘Demons of the Punjab’
"This is all that remains of our home. Our people. Every ancestor. All one dust.... They died unwitnessed, unsaved. We were too late to grieve or honor them. But we, who returned, gave up 100 generations to sift, to remember the lost dead, the unmourned. In time, it was all we knew. And now we travel beyond, seeking the unacknowledged dead. Across all of time and space. This is now the Thijarian mission -- to bear witness to those alone. To see. To bear pain, honor life as it passes."

Yaz persuades the Doctor to let her visit her grandmother, Umbreen, to solve a family mystery. Despite her promise not to get involved, Team Tardis find themselves part of Umbreen’s wedding to Prem, a Hindu man who is not Yaz’s grandfather. But the year is 1947, and the partition of India is about to rip the country – and this marriage – apart. Also, there are aliens.

‘Demons of the Punjab’ covers some of the same territory as ‘Rosa’, but this time the racism is all home-grown – Prem’s brother is a Hindu nationalist, violently opposed to Prem marrying a Muslim – and the aliens are there as observers, and perhaps a link to the arc plot (their world was destroyed, possibly by Stenza weapons.)

This is another strong, Earthbound episode, with a solid historical message which, come at me haters, is what Doctor Who exists for. It also gives Yaz the character workout that she has been missing.

Rating - 8/10

Free existential terror with every order.

‘Kerblam!’
Jarvis Slade: How would you like a warning for insubordination?
The Doctor: I'd love one. I could add it to my collection.

Someone sends the Doctor a gift via Kerblam! (basicallt space Amazon,) but the packing note contains a cry for help. The team go undercover at Kerblam!’s fulfilment centre, where they discover a broken system and a possibly misguided conspiracy.

Playing to modern fears of human redundancy, Kerblam! is elevated above lazy satire by making fear and mismanagement the villains, rather than simply taking aim at corporations in general, but unfortunately it does sort of let the corporations off the hook entirely by doing so. A couple of very sympathetic sacrificial characters add emotional involvement, but it isn’t as powerful as the recent pseudohistoricals.

Rating - 6/10


‘The Witchfinders’
"We want certainty, security. To believe that people are evil or heroic but that's not how people are. You want to know the secrets of existence? Start with the mysteries of the heart."

The Tardis team land near Pendle Hill in the midst of a witch hunt, but it’s not the Pendle witch hunt known to history. As the fanatical magistrate Becka Savage drowns her way through the population, no less a figure that James I shoves his oar in, but the Doctor detects an alien hand as sentient mud begins to animate the dead.

Bringing its pseudohistorical game to a more remote time, but more local place, ‘The Witchfinders’ once more looks at the politics of fear and hate in a drama that stands a step above the pure SF episodes of the season. Honestly, I’m curious to see what they current team could do with a pure historical.

Rating - 7/10


‘It Takes You Away’
"This woman is clearly an alien force, collapsing two realities and impersonating your dead wife. Time to move on, mate!"

The Tardis lands in Norway, where the team discovers a young, blind girl, living in an isolated house and menaced by a snarling monster that took her father away. Creepy enough, but then they find a mirror that leads into an alternate dimension, and it all gets even weirder.

Doctor Who gets a bit Scandi-Noir, before bringing in a sentient pocket universe looking for companionship, one of the few beings lonelier than the Doctor. The episode is Graham’s turn to shine, as Bradley Walsh puts in his Bafta nomination performance for his character’s confrontation with a projection of his late wife, Grace.

Rating - 6/10

Another planet, another quarry.

‘The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos’
Ryan: What happened to 'never do weapons'?
The Doctor: It's a flexible creed. Door, locks, walls, buildings. Fair game. If it can be rebuilt, I'll allow it.
Following many, many distress signals, the Doctor brings the Tardis to Ranskoor Av Kolos, where a large number of ships have crashed and a psychic field alters perceptions. Here they discover Tzim-Sha of the Stenza has managed to masquerade as the god of a two-person race called the Ux, who have the power to manipulate reality, using them to shrink planets and store them in glass jars. While Graham declares his intent to kill Tim Shaw, the Doctor struggles to win over the Ux and send the planets back where they belong.

A strong episode for Graham and Ryan, and a cap to the season arc, there’s a lot happening in ‘The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos’, and some of it is a little too familiar. Stealing planets is reminiscent not only of ‘The Stolen Earth’, but of the classic series serial ‘The Pirate Planet’, and as much as persuading powerful religious characters to rethink their life is classic Doctor, it’s really Graham’s confrontation with Tzim-Sha that gets the best of the writing, and the result is somewhat uneven.

Rating - 5/10

Doctor Who – ‘Resolution’

I'm not sure what I'd say about the new look, but I can't help imagining the
response would be: "THANKS! IT HAS BOBBLES!"

"Where's your kitchen? I just need to get some eggs to check the protein alignments in the goo."

Once again, archaeology threatens the foundations of human civilisation, as a fragment of monster is dug up and reconstitutes itself. Now, a Dalek is loose on Earth, and the Doctor races to find it before untold destruction ensues. Meanwhile, Ryan’s dad turns up looking to reconcile.

This is a surprisingly strong festive showing, proving once more that a single Dalek can be more effective than an army if used correctly. There are strong shades of ‘Dalek’, although this lone Dalek – a reconnaissance scout sent out in the early years of Dalek expansion – is a remorseless foe with none of the pathos of that sole survivor.

A strong end to a strong season, I would say, and a good start for the 13th Doctor. Now, roll on 2020.

Rating - 8/10

The Musketeers - The rest of Season 3

"We shall brood like it was Season 1!"

After a bit of a blitz, here are my thoughts on the tail end of the BBC's men in leather spectacular, The Musketeers.

We follow 'To Play the King' with 'Death of a Hero', which bowls us a googly because the 'hero' in question is Feron, who dies on Grimaud's blade after a change of heart about assassinating his half-brother. We're then left with Grimaud as our principal villain, which is promising with his dark swagger and impenetrable plots, but the problem is that moving him front and centre requires allowing the audience to see how the sausage is made, and he just can't quite draw the water he's been built up for and he becomes ever more of a thug.

And Porthos finally gets a love interest for more than one episode! (She's in
two.)

In 'Fool's Gold' we get a glimpse of his upbringing as he flees to his home town. The Musketeers pursue, but fall in with a band of women and children living in the woods to avoid the depredations of deserters now that their husbands, brothers and fathers have all died in the war with Spain. Athos talks Grimaud with his tough-as-nails foster mother, while Porthos has angsty bonding time with pregnant badass archer Elodie, whose husband was part of a regiment he knows to have been wiped out to a man. A group of deserters comes looking for gold that they stashed nearby and which the women took to support their community, and the Musketeers assist in the astonishingly brutal defence of the settlement.

"Aramis for supper again?"

The rest is mostly arc plot and sort of blurs together. The Queen backs a public education programme run by Sylvie, but it gets sabotaged so that a bunch of lewd pamphlets about the Queen's lovers are printed instead. Then Grimaud intercepts Aramis carrying a letter from Anne trying to broker peace with Spain behind Louis' back. The King comes to suspect Aramis' involvement with the Queen and forbids him to see her or the Dauphin ever again. Athos does get back together with Sylvie, just in time for Milady to arrive back in town(1) and seek reconciliation through the time-honoured method of breaking into his house. With her other prospects surprisingly thin on the ground, she offers her services as a spy and assassin to Treville.

"I'm basically ginger Feron."

The King dies and Treville - declared as surprise regent - smuggles the Dauphin into hiding, with Sylvie and Constance to protect him, while he plays Gaston and the Duke of Lorraine off against one another. Grimaud manages to snatch the Dauphin by following the Queen, who has gone to great lengths to find where her son has been hidden, the location being kept from her and from Aramis. Everything falls apart and Treville is killed, although the Dauphin is rescued, and seriously, only Aramis really acknowledges that while they might not like his secrecy, Treville got within an ace of settling the whole thing without bloodshed by bluffing with a hand of nothing until the Queen screwed it up.

Awkward.

Finally, in 'We Are the Garrison', Grimaud blows up the Musketeer pub and the garrison - because at the end of the series you might as well set your big sets on fire - taking out Cadet Redshirt(2) - and then kidnaps Sylvie. The Musketeers pull off a rescue after casually swearing off honour for the occasion, with the aid of the thought-to-be-dead D'Artagnan. D'Artagnan kills Captain Whatsisname of the Red Guards and Grimaud is wounded, but escapes to be accidentally treated by Constance. Then he tries to blow up the coronation, but is thwarted and finally killed by Athos.

The Queen becomes Regent, hires Milady to shank Gaston, and then reforms the regiment as the People's Musketeers. D'Artagnan is given command of the new regiment and tasked, along with Constance, with rebuilding it. Aramis becomes First Minister and Royal Queen Snogger, putting Milady's snarky declaration that the Queen would now be alone out the window. Porthos marries Elodie before setting off to be a general, and Athos and Sylvie head off to raise their expected child somewhere else.

Season 3 of the Musketeers has been... okay. It's a shame, because Season 1 was good and Season 2 excellent, but the mid-season loss of Feron and a lack of focus meant that the personal stakes felt distinctly less, and thus the pressure to set aside honour against a foe who was less impressive the more we saw of him came off as forced. Honestly, I think that killing off one of the four at the start of the final episode might have been the better move, although I can see why they didn't want to go that way. Also, I've nothing against Sylvie, but Milady was missed, even when she was around, especially as Constance was a sadly reduced presence.

(1) Called it!
(2) Called it!

The Musketeers - 'To Play the King'

There's something so creepy about dressing children as tiny, fancy adults. The
wig makes it much worse.

It's the Dauphin's sixth birthday, which means it's time for Paris to par-tay!

Of course, when I say Paris, I mean the prisoners of the Chatelet, and when I say par-tay, I mean jailbreak. As the Red Guard flail and the Musketeers track down escaping convicts, Grimaud leads a team into the prison to kidnap a defaulting locksmith and force him, at threat of his wife's life, to open the impenetrable door he created to protect the King's treasury.

The Musketeers track a group of inmates to one of Sylvie's interminable rallies, at which she and her cohorts once again agree that it's terrible and something needs to be done. The convicts take hostages, but the Musketeers kick them in and Athos covers for Sylvie's sedition. Then D'Artagnan goes after another inmate, who turns out to be an ex-soldier who thinks he's the King, and whom he leaves in the care of some nuns instead of returning him to the garrison, where the escapees are being held until the Red Guard restore order. Aramis, meanwhile, goes with Constance to track one of her worthy causes, the moneylender's wife, letting them uncover the plot.

"I am untouchable!"

The Dutch moneylender from last episode delivers final notice on the loan Feron secured 'for the King', revealing the Governor's treachery to Treville, but the King is completely obsessed with the Dauphin's party. Treville leaves the letters for the king to find, and Feron's attempts to remove them are thwarted by the Prince and the Queen, pushing him to murder the moneylender in his own chambers, which in turn distracts him from alerting his captain that Grimaud needs more time. Feron has the devil's own luck, however, as the mad man breaks into the palace to kill the 'imposter', burning the letters and providing a handy scapegoat for the murder before being shot while trying to kill the Queen. Feron then brazens it out with Treville, telling him he'll let all Paris know of the King's impending mortality if his position is threatened.

On the upside, Grimaud's men are caught before they can take the money, although Grimaud himself escapes. Athos' growing dissatisfaction with the status quo leads him back towards Sylvie. Treville squares up for a showdown with Feron, while Grimaud prepares himself to take revenge on the Musketeers for interfering with his plans. The whole thing is building up towards a proper downer of an ending to this final season.

Stranger Things - Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

My three year old daughter took one look at this promo image on Netflix (en route to PAW Patrol, naturally,) and said: "Someone lost a bike." Clearly the image communicates its message.

In small town America a boy goes missing after a D&D game. Reluctant at first, the Sheriff begins to share the concerns of the boy's mother, launching a major search, which the boy's friends join on the sly. A lost girl with uncanny abilities appears in town, pursued by sinister agents who will kill to retrieve her.

Welcome to Stranger Things, a Netflix original love story to 1980s science fiction.

I'd like to see the casting calls for this series: "Will Byers, a nine year old boy
who looks like he was raised on CRT television and pizza to a soundtrack of
unironic Michael Jackson."

The main thing you notice about the series is just how goddamned 80s everything is, from the clothes to the music (I'm pretty sure one of the producers rang John Carpenter's doorbell while another nipped in the back window and stole a load of demo tapes) to the faces. I mean, seriously; how do you cast 80s looking faces? And yet... I guess those kids have always been there, they just haven't been on TV for twenty-five years. It even somehow affects to treat D&D like some mysterious new thing that no-one knows  much about except that it was in E.T.

As in Spielberg's seminal tear-jerker, at the centre of the series - or at least at the cnetre of episode 1 - are the kids: Eternal outcast nerds Mike, Lucas, Dustin and the soon absent Will, and the enigmatic and powerful Eleven, who seems to be connected to the local super secret science lab where a dark, looming presence that kill scientists and makes lightbulbs flicker may have hatched from a thing. It's the 80s, so the boys act with a freedom undreamed of in this endarkened age, despite the acres of lonely forest surrounding the town of Hawkins and the darkness that descends from about 4.30 and enfolds the town in the kind of night that falls and really means it.

"Joyce Byers, a single mother with hella 80s hair."

There are grown ups and teenagers, but they're less important so far: Will's mother drives the search for her son, but has no existence beyond that yet; Mike's parents, his sister and her horny boyfriend are just around, the latter two most making out in her room and listening to 'Now That's What I Call a 1980s Soundtrack Album*'; Sheriff Hopper is a bit more rounded, a lost soul mired in drink, but under it all a good, solid copper; the government agents are ruthless and sinister; and the guy at the diner is a decent soul until he's shot in the head. So it goes.

Stranger Things is intensely familiar and retro, which somehow manages to be new and interesting. There are shades perhaps of Super 8, but it's a slightly later period and leans a little more towards horror than SF, despite many trappings of the latter genre. 'Chapter 1: The Vanishing of Will Byers' is very much a foundation, but hints at good things to come with its sparse, practical effects and deft recreation of the visual and auditory language of 1980s cinema.

* If I were an 80s nerd or hunting for the Easter Egg in Ready Player One I'd probably be using this scene to date the series exactly.

The Musketeers - 'The Queen's Diamonds'

It's that man again.

The Musketeers go back to their roots this week, in a search for 'The Queen's Diamonds'.

But - aha! - it's not Queen Anne whose sparklers have been nicked, but Queen Henrietta Maria, sister to the King and wife of the beleaguered King Charles - who somehow makes Louis look grounded and sensible - and the jewels were to have been sold to a Dutch financier for money to fund Royalist troops to oppose the forces of the English Parliament, before being nicked by a daring highwayman.

Within minutes of being given the job, the Musketeers spot their old adversary Emil Bonnaire hanging around. They like him for the perp, and given his stalwart soul he immediately fesses up, but claims to have sold the rocks and given the money to his partner for safekeeping. Cue a search across the city to retrieve the various bits of bling before the financier tires of the delights of Feron's bathhouse. It's a fairly simple task, so Aramis gets leave to go off and help out a long lost friend who is about to marry well, but is being blackmailed by her past as a prostitute. Thus we learn that before his father took him in, Aramis was raised in a brothel.

Pauline is marrying a McGann, but damned if I know which one*.

In other news, Athos has a continuing flirtation with Sylvie, who has taken up her father's place at the head of the growing civil liberties movement in Paris, voicing the people's discontent with the aristocracy. Via some prodding from Grimaud, Athos' involvement in the hunt for the Queen's ice, where no-one cares if the common folk are murdered in their beds, leads to a falling out between the two, although during the course of the mission we do see Porthos lobbing a stone into a field to be found by the workers.

In the end, Sylvie gives Athos the elbow, Bonnaire gives up the last of his haul and the money for immunity for him and his partner, the Queen's handmaiden, and the Musketeers piss off Pauline's fiance by showing up to take back his intended wedding ring in a frankly baffling scene in which the phrase 'it was stolen from the Queen of England' is not used, Athos instead throwing down. Aramis also learns that the fiance's groom is the blackmailer, claiming that he is looking out for the bride as well as the groom, because society will rip them to shreds. To remove this obstacle, she murders him, but turning up to the church with blood on your gown turns out not to be a winning move.

'The Queen's Diamonds' is a bit of a dog's breakfast, in which three b-plots struggle for A status to the detriment of all.

Aramis' new backstory is frankly confusing, given that all we know of his later childhood is 'signature booze' and 'girl who then became a Blessed Sister of St FuckYeah.' The twist - the wedding isn't spoiled because he turns out to be a tyrant, but because she is a laser-guided crazy - is decent, but in many ways this feels like a plot that should feature the Comte de la Fer, given the whole 'married a woman who turned out to be a thief and look how that turned out' bit.

The development of Sylvie's subplot is obviously arc-related, but out of kilter with the rest of the episode, and prevents this being a light romp to relieve the tension between episodes of grimdark conspiracy and monarchical tuberculosis.

The actual A-plot is the best, because it's the most fun, but ends up being disappointingly simple. Bonnaire is quite fun in moderation, and I could have stood the episode committing whole cloth to a more complicated scavenger hunt.

* IMDb says Paul, who was of course also the foppish rival in the 1993 movie version of The Three Musketeers.

Penny Dreadful - 'Ebb Tide', 'Perpetual Night' and 'The Blessed Dark'

So very music video.

Okay, so they kind of spammed out the last couple of episodes, so I've held off on reviews until I could binge the final three, which are - as it turns out - the actually final three.

In 'Ebb Tide', Lily dispatches her army of the night to bring her the disembodied hands of their erstwhile abusers and Dorian is clearly having second thoughts about the whole arrangement, as the planned immortal coup becomes some sort of grass roots ultramilitant suffrage movement in which he is basically irrelevant (kind of the story of his life in Penny Dreadful.) Consequently, by the end of this episode he has delivered her into the waiting tranquilisers of Drs Frankenstein and Jekyll to be remade into a 'proper woman'.

"Shoot. Just shoot. Why doesn't she shoot? Do you think she
knows how to shoot?"

Elsewhere, Kaetenay has a vision of destruction, and Ethan returning to find Vanessa a vampiress. Dr Seward has a clash with crazy Renfield when she catches him listening to her recordings, in which she diagnoses Vanessa with some sort of massively multiple personality disorder.

Vanessa, meanwhile, counsels John Clare to love the him that he is now and return to his wife and child, also mentioning their past acquaintance, which of course he does not recall. He follows her advice and is incredibly accepted, telling his family the truth about what happened to him and being welcomed back into the home.

Vanessa then compares note with Catriona 'Cat' Hartedigan, and learns that Dracula is not that vampire. As a flesh-bound fallen angel, he has a reflection, can walk in the daylight, eat garlic and all that, but he can be killed. In fact, in human form he can be killed just like anyone else. So Vanessa gets her gun, goes over to the museum and...

Damnit, Ives!

And we end the episode with Lily a captive and Vanessa surrendering herself to a sweet-talking prince of darkness (who interestingly uses all the same lines as Hecate did on Ethan. 'I love you for who you are. I want to embrace the darkness with you. Lead me to the throne of Hell and I will follow. Love me, fear me, do as I say and I will be your slave.' Dramatic parallel, or did they just go to the same evil pick-up guru*.)

Still, it's not all doom and gloom.

"Who the Hell are you?"
"I believe I'm the woman who just saved your life."
Oh, sick burn!

Okay, actually it is all doom and gloom, and 'Perpetual Night' opens with London wreathed in poisonous fogs as Sir Malcolm, Ethan and Kaetenay return (so apparently Rusk is dead.) Rats swarm on the docks and frogs are thronging in Dr Sewards' office, where she faces down a would-be masterful Renfield and clobbers him proper.

Returning to the mansion, Ethan finds a slaughtered wolf in his bedroom - bastards - and the team are attacked by Dracula's scuttling minions, fighting them off with the help of Cat, who moves straight into take charge mode to cauterise a bite to Sir Malcolm's neck. She then goes off with Sir Malcolm and Dr Seward to question Renfield and find out where Dracula is.

Actually less scary than just Wes Studi. I mean, if you saw
this guy you'd be 'crap! werewolf!' whereas regular Kaetenay
you'd be all 'oh fuck! It's Wes Studi! Cheese it!'

Ethan finds Dracula and is mobbed by the scuttlers, but fortunately wolfs out and - joined by wolfy Kaetenay - slaughters a whole lot of minions before settling in for an expository chat in which Kaetenay explains that he once thought he was given his 'power' to save his people, but ultimately infected Ethan so that he could save the world.

Lily appeals to Frankenstein's better nature, telling him the story of her greatest pain - the death of her infant daughter; thanks for that - and he releases her, realising that his 'cure' is monstrous and breaking with Jekyll, who gives the parting news that his hated father is dead, rendering him the new Lord Hyde. No chemicals here; Henry is already Jekyll and Hyde combined. Frankenstein then leaves the test chamber and immediately runs into Sir Malcolm and company leaving Renfield's cell, so at least he won't be left out of the finale.

Oh, this isn't going to end well.

During the meanwhile, Dorian kicks Lily's army out of his crib. Justine stabs him in the heart for betraying Lily, which obviously does nothing to him. She refuses to go back to her old life, however, explicitly choosing to die instead of living as a slave to men. Lily returns to find her body on the floor and leaves Dorian to his hollow life. I'd kind of been expecting her to trash his portrait, but there you go. Neither of them does anything else in the series anyway, their plot ultimately a closed loop save for its brief intersection with Frankenstein's.

And thus the team meets up for the final clash with Dracula in 'The Blessed Dark'**.

Whatever else, the final 'two-parter' contains some of television's finest
'walking in fog' moments.

Actually, I think a bunch of the above may have happened in 'The Blessed Dark', but such is binge watching, and after the prep the meat of the finale is the showdown.

Kaetenay and Ethan go in through the sewers, because they're the ninjas, and get into a mad scrap with sewer minions, because they're not very good ninjas. The others confront Dracula, who tells them that Vanessa is his - so much for the whole 'I long to serve you' bit - but that they can leave because she doesn't want them hurt, and by the way I totes turned your daughter to use her as bait, lol. Unsurprisingly, Sir Malcolm isn't having it.

"Clearly some people got hurt."

The ensuing fight scene is actually pretty badass. I can not accuse Penny Dreadful of ever skimping on its action scenes. Sir Malcolm and Cat are pure fucking hardcore, while Dr Seward's childhood in tough, East Side New York has left her with top notch combat skills and after some early flailing even Frankenstein finds his metier in the form of a length of pipe. Team Wolf bust in just as things look bleak, and Ethan is sent to find Vanessa as Dracula enters the fray in person and starts lobbing our heroes - who make the error of attacking one at a time, which is a disappointingly bush league mistake for seasoned monster punchers - around the room like rag dolls.

Ethan finds Vanessa, who tells him that she needs to die to save the world. They recite the Lord's Prayer, he shoots her and Dracula goes off looking all sad.

"So... white walls again."

Funeral, poetry, the end.

I'm not even kidding. After three seasons we close on some sort of Anglican guilt trip. A lot of the series has been focused on faith, and in particular Vanessa's faith, but it's such a conservative salvation. Actually, that's pretty apt to so much of the series, which has always toyed with 'damn the patriarchy' while being a little too cosmically patriarchal to quite convince. It was disappointing to go back to Vanessa as a largely hapless pawn incapable of controlling her own power (although in fairness, this perhaps applies to all characters with power, including Gray, the werewolves and John Clare, whose son dies and whose wife kicks him out for refusing to get Frankenstein to transform the boy into an immortal abomination, by the by,) and disappointing that we'll never get to see the team joining Lyle in Egypt to battle mummies (barring spin off possibilities; Dime Novel, perhaps.)

I've never been Penny Dreadful's biggest fan, but it showed - and I would say squandered - a lot of potential in Season 3. While it wanted to be edgy, great chunks of its core concepts remained mired in stodgy conservatism - love is good, sex is bad; a woman's power exists to service men (or masculine entities); faith = conventional religion; minority characters service the narrative of the European leads - leaving the better aspects of the show somewhat adrift. It also took much too long to get to a place where the flawed (deliberately) characters were exposed enough to become sympathetic or likable, leaving Season 1 in particular hard to invest in, and Dorian Gray always seemed somewhat pointless here.

On the upside, the show was never less than lavish, with its mix of gorgeous interiors, grey streets and grim hovels, free flowing blood and brutal action. Alas, it never quite found its flow, and its swift ending after suggestions of six seasons (and a movie?) hints that perhaps it had terminally lost its way.

Here's hoping that Eva Green's next role has more opportunities for her to smile.

* A series of evil seminars given by Bowie's Goblin King, perhaps.

The Musketeers - 'The Hunger' and 'Brother in Arms'

"Oh look, trouble. My hubbie must be back in town."

Buckle your swashes and swash your bucklers, for a double bill of The Musketeers.

D'Artagnan is disappointed that a morning with his wife involves less fooling around and more fetching the garrison grocery order. This inevitably runs them into trouble, as the Duke of Beaufort announces that his grain has been stolen and an angry mob of already hungry Parisians turn on a nearby camp of war refugees. D'Artagnan rallies the cadets to defend the camp, but the Red Guard appear to round up the usual suspects, including D'Artagnan. It quickly emerges that the Duke is in cahoots with Feron and Grimaud - although he despises the latter - to disappear the grain, using the refugees as scapegoats, then resell it to the King at double the price.

Remember, all sympathetic supporting male characters in this series a) are
doomed, and b) must have hot relatives the Musketeers' age.

The Musketeers sally forth to try to prove the innocence of the refugees, including Sylvie, an outspoken young woman who is initially distrustful of any soldier. As the Red Guard and their plant in the camp work to incriminate the refugees, Aramis and Porthos trace the wagon used in the theft and Porthos finds the stolen consignment. It's always good to have a reminder that this Porthos isn't a fool.

Captain Marchaux kills the plant and blames him for everything. The Duke doesn't get his payday, and Feron narrowly dissuades Grimaud from murdering him for being a snobby tosser. The refugees are released, but not before Sylvie's father dies in custody. All in all, a distinctly qualified win. Grimaud pops up to taunt the Musketeers in person, and Aramis and Porthos recognise the horse he took from a wagon owner he murdered. We also see the first rumblings of popular revolution, as the refugees espouse opposition to the absolute monarchy which destroys lives with its wars.

The Queen is unhappy to see her son encouraged to play with murderous
psychos.

This latter theme is continued in 'Brother in Arms'. The Musketeers are sent to retrieve the King's rebellious brother , the Duke of Orlean, from exile, only for him to flip out during a rest stop and stab three dudes after he misses his wallet. The pub where this happens is a veterans' bar, populated by disgruntled, pensionless ex-soldiers, who demand justice of the aristo-hanging variety, and are of course to be disappointed.

Feron and Orleans machinate to have the veterans made an example of for daring to be stabbed by a man of quality, while Treville and the Musketeers try to maintain the rule of law and spirit of justice. There's a lot more rumbling against the King, and Sylvie pops up again, as a friend of the soldiers'. It all winds up with a hostage situation and the Red Guard attacking the Musketeers surrounding the tavern, precipitating a fight in which the Musketeers join the rebels and let them off at the end of it, doubtless leading to further consequences along the line.

Sylvie and Athos look like they're going to hook up, probably about thirty seconds before Milady returns.

"Are you getting that 'King's Landing' feeling?"

Orleans ends up in the Bastille, since his wallet contained not money, but incriminating letters, but the political game ends poorly for our heroes. The King clearly suspects that his son might not be his son, but dotes on the boy as his legacy to the neglect of all else. As we, Treville and Feron discover this episode, this is because he has contracted the White Plague (tuberculosis, I think,) and will be dead within the year. The game is now to hold the loyalty of the Dauphin, and with the boy apparently poisoned against his mother, it doesn't look good.

Season 3 is obviously going for a darker vibe even than Season 2, and a sense of impending disaster only cemented by the Omen-like creepiness of the Dauphin (which may be more to do with the wig than th lad wearing it.) For this, it's kind of odd that there was no more comeback from the fact that the Musketeers killed several Red Guards while defending accused traitors. You'd think that might at least rate a scolding, although perhaps it was forgotten what with the whole 'uncovered a plot to overthrow the King' angle.

The Musketeers - 'Spoils of War'

NuMusketeer - Way more metal.

After a long break, The Musketeers are back for one final season of derring do and buckling swashes.

WAR!

Sorry. Yes, France and Spain are at war after the whole Rochefort double agent queen ravishing and just about everyone spending time on the block farrago, and Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan are on the front lines being goddamn manly. Aramis is not, however, having followed through on his promise to God and taken orders, or at least preparing to. It turns out that the Abbot of his monastery is keeping him at lay minister and orphan-teacher level until he can get over himself enough to stop yearning for battle and let his beard get at least a little scraggly.

This is not suitably humble facial topiary for a man of God.

The Musketeers pull victory from the slavering jaws of defeat when they destroy a Spanish gun emplacement without artillery support, due to the delay of their ammunition supplies. Said supplies are then swiped by a band of mercenaries led by one of the primary villains of the season, a brooding fellow named Grimaud who gets framed with ravens and appears and disappears in the fog like he's some sort of freaking wizard. Athos spots him on the battlefield right about when he's kidnapping their general to help with the heist, and there seems to be some sort of recognition there.

There's no explicit link, but I'm already thinking of him as
'Dark Athos'.

Back in Paris, a newly fancified Treville is first minister, leaving his chief of staff, Constance, to manage the Musketeer garrison and trying to keep his cadets out of trouble with the Red Guard, under their new leader Philippe, Marquis de Feron and governor of Paris, played by Rupert Everett with a heavy, sagging face, lank, black hair, a severe limp and a painkiller dependency, all of which suggest total evilness. He is, it emerges, the King's sort-of-acknowledged bastard half-brother, and thus entirely trustworthy. He is also, it seems, moonlighting as a racketeer and fight club organiser, and effectively ruling Paris as his own fiefdom as long as the King is too busy spoiling 'his' son rotten to take an interest.

Evil.

Grimaud take the stolen weapons to a nearby monastery to await his Spanish buyers. He murders the Abbot just to prove his evil cred, and rounds up the monks while Aramis gets the war orphans out of the way. A young lad named Luke who dreams of war and all kind of reveres the Musketeers has a beef with Aramis for being too timid. He makes a break for it after ringing the bells, and meets up with the other Musketeers, on the trail of the weapons. Luke leads them in via a secret tunnel and they are reunited with Aramis, to the delight of all except Porthos, who is clearly feeling a bit abandoned by his wingman.

The Musketeers help Aramis to get the monks and orphans clear of the monastery in a massively truncated Great Escape sort of deal. Some of the mercenaries catch up with them, but Aramis proves he's still got the stuff, enabling to bond with his difficult pupil before heading back to mend bridges with Porthos by helping him steal a cart full of weapons and blow up a bridge.

The King makes the mistake of thinking that he can rock a
Van Dyke as well.

Back in Paris, Constance, Treville and Cadet Redshirt (who is totally going to die in about episode eight to signal that shit has got real, probably at the same time that Feron manages to get Constance arrested on some trumped up charge of being competent while female) set fire to the uniforms of Red Guards using a bath house in order to humiliate them and level the playing field after a number of cadets have been hammered in Feron's fight clubs. It's weirdly Revenge of the Nerds.

The Musketeers, including Aramis, report back to Treville, apart from D'Artagnan who goes to 'report back' to his wife by dropping his gear all over the floor and letting her catch him half-naked in a bathroom. I'm more than half convinced he must have been standing at the sink, washing his hands for like an hour and a half waiting for her to get in.

Fancy.

Treville reassigns the Musketeers back to Paris to counter Feron's machinations, to which Feron is all 'snark, snark, rickety old losers.' Feron, if I've not communicated this adequately, is a dick. He is also, just in case we had any doubt, working with Grimaud for reasons of, as far as we can tell so far, evil.

'Spoils of War' brings the Musketeers back to our screens in a high budget spectacular, with battle scenes, explosions and just way more homoerotic tension than previous seasons. Seriously, for a series about the manly camaraderie of men in tight leather, The Musketeers has always been rather modest in its subtext, but Feron, Grimaud and the captain of the Red Guard are significantly tense and there's definitely something more loaded betwixt Porthos and Aramis since the separation.

9th-level Seamstress/Fighter

I definitely approve of the fact that there's some actual character progression on display. Perhaps Aramis's doesn't stick, but D'Artagnan is more completely part of the gang, Constance is settling in as Musketeer den mother and Treville is delightfully out of his element as First Minister of France. Our new villains are all pretty strong, with Grimaud in particular verging on the preternatural, although yet to be tested in combat against our heroes. Feron drops neatly into the same groove as Richelieu as the all-but-untouchable powermonger, while Grimaud is obviously the more direct threat. He also has a certain physical resemblance to Athos and comes from the same sort of background as Porthos, so there may be some interest there.

Notably, Mamie McCoy is (at least for now) out of the credits, so no idea if or how Milady might appear again.

Houdini & Doyle

PC Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard), Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan)

Playing fast and loose with history, Houdini & Doyle is an historical detective procedural with a paranormal twist, set roughly in the period of the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and many other works, including the 'serious' ones that he mistakenly believed were the ones he would be remembered for, and American escapologist and showman Harry Houdini. It's an obvious choice really, since the two men were close friends and later rivals, falling out over their diametrically opposed views on the paranormal: Houdini becoming a dogged debunker of spiritualists, media and psychics, while Doyle increasingly hewed to a fairly generalised belief in 'something'.

Houdini & Doyle gives us both men at the height of their powers in London, 1901. Doyle has killed off his millstone, Holmes (a decision which everyone seems to have an opinion on,) and Houdini is the toast of the town and an inveterate ladies' man. Of course, Holmes was written out in 1893 and by the time he became famous Houdini's constant stage assistant was his wife, but why let fact get in the way of a good story. On that front, when the two celebrities start to interest themselves in police cases with a potential supernatural twist as part of their drive to settle their dispute over the existence of the paranormal, they are assigned as liaison Constable Adelaide Stratton, a non-nonsense female officer determined to be taken seriously. In real life, the first female PC was Sophia Stanley in 1919.

So, it's not accurate, is what I'm saying, and I think it's inaccurate in a way that doesn't do it any favours. Unmarrying Houdini is supposed to create an opposition with tragic family man Doyle (I have no idea if his tuberculitic first wife spent the last several years of her life unresponsive, while Doyle tried to contact her unconscious spirit via media,) but also practically forces a romantic tension with Stratton which does neither character many favours. It also turns Houdini into a mummy's boy on an almost Norman Batesian scale, and for some reason leaves out the real-life soap opera of Doyle's 'other woman', his future second wife towards whom he maintained a chaste love until his first wife's death.

So far, the three leads are fairly even, even if one of them doesn't get to be in the credits, and that's all to the good. Doyle is imaginative and observant, Houdini questioning and pragmatic, and Stratton thorough and determined. It would be easy for Doyle to become the butt of the series, especially as maintaining the central dispute more or less requires that every case turns out not to be paranormal. Two episodes in, the show's determinedly skeptical stance is probably its greatest weakness, turning the central conceit into a huge red herring.

There may be a follow up at the end of season 1, but no episodic reviews on this one.

Penny Dreadful - 'No Beast So Fierce'

"The invitation said 'don't dress for dinner.'"

Penny Dreadful continues to ramp up the tension as the third season moves towards its conclusion.

In New Mexico, Rusk and the Marshal show up to arrest everyone, and given the logistical problems they accept an invitation to dinner. Talbot harps on the importance of hospitality while Malcolm tries to urge him to reconcile with his son. Talbot insists that Ethan say grace, which he does with a Satanic perversion of the Lord's Prayer. The the Marshal promises a reckoning for his dead men, so Talbot shoots him, and the whole meal really goes downhills from there. Rusk dismisses Talbot's assumption of the upper hand and sure enough, Ethan lets Hecate off the chain and a massacre ensues. Talbot flees as his men are cut down. Rusk takes a bullet, as does Hecate, before Kaetenay shows to finish the last of the guards in the dining room. Hecate dies, the jury is out on Rusk, and the others storm the chapel where Talbot is making his last stand. In the final reckoning, Ethan is unable to pull the trigger on his own father, so Malcolm does it for him.

Back in London, Hyde and Frankenstein recap their plan, while John Clare tries to connect with his sick son and jst ends up terrifying him. Lily and Dorian begin running a series of seminars on the efficient murder of men, with Justine getting way too into it for Dorian's taste. The human hairless cat is also clearly not pleased that Justine, by reminding Lily of all that she was and has lost, is threatening his place in his partner's affections.

"Do make me cut a bitch!"

Justine catches Frankenstein poking about, and drags him in for filleting, utterly ignoring Dorian's instructions unless approved by Lily. He offers Lily his 'cure', but she points out that 'their' happiness was truly only his and that she is quite at home with her pain and rage now, thanks ta. Justine is pretty narked that she decides to let Frankenstein go, feeling that man parts are reason enough for a filleting.

The series has done a bit of a reversal on Lily, hand in hand with revising poor, heartsick Victor into a toxic quagmire of misogyny. At the end of last series she was pretty much 'immortals rule, mortals drool,' but the recruitment of her army of the oppressed seems to have ignited a more idealistic fire in her, now in increasing contrast to Justine's 'kill 'em all and let God sort them out' approach to the Y-chromosome.

"I'm starting to get the feeling that my life might be better without men."

Men get pretty short shrift this week, and the show moves further from its weirdly conservative beginnings as Mr Lyle - on his way to Egypt to kick off Season 4's arc plot - recommends another expert to Vanessa; a trouser-wearing action thanatologist named Catriona Hartdegan, who clearly knows a thing or two about Dracula and is willing to take Vanessa on trust when she says that Dracula is trying to seduce her. She counsels Vanessa to seek company, which sends her to Dr Seward, who suggests that she reconnect with Dr Sweet and give him the chance to choose for himself if he will risk death for her sake. Naturally, Sweet/Dracula is thrilled to bits by this turn of events, and sexy times are had.

From the beginning, Penny Dreadful felt like a show that wanted to be transgressive, but was actually a bit of tame sensationalism. With Season 3 it is finally starting to flex some muscles on its female characters, bringing Lily back from would-be monstrous overlord to immortal militant suffragette, and surrounding Vanessa with strong, female advisers to replace the ersatz family of male protectors who have abandoned her. As a result, this is easily the strongest season to date.

Penny Dreadful - 'This World is Our Hell'

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name...

After last week's Vanesstravaganza, we return to our other protagonists and subplots, most notably those taking place in New Mexico.

With the posse on their heels, Hekaty-poo and Ethan discuss the shortcomings of their parents, and cutting between Kaetenay and Ethan we hear the story of his past sins. It turns out that he was part of a massacre of Apache during his time in the army, before killing his CO and handing himself over to the Apache. Kaetenay decided he should work out his guilt and used Ethan as a weapon in the Apache's war of survival. He took them to his father's ranch to steal guns and horses, where blood was spilled.

Tiring of the fugitive life, Ethan agrees to let Hecate use his blood to summon creatures of darkness against their enemies, and even as Kaetenay is setting out to murder the posse, snakes burst from the ground. I won't say all Hell breaks loose, because they're probably saving that for the finale, but there is certainly a quantity of Hell operating under less than absolute supervision. In the confusion, Sir Malcolm shoots Rusk's sergeant, and Rusk swears bloody vengeance on Ethan.

"And you're sure you know how electricity works?"

Back in London, Frankenstein 'electrifies' Jekyll's serum for injection into Balfour's prefrontal cortex, promising it will remove his madness, along with all memory of bad things, leaving him as innocent as a lamb. He chides Jekyll once more for his temper and they begin to prepare for the capture and 'treatment' of Lily.

Stopping off in a cave, Ethan tells Hecate the story of the first Apache, which I suspect may not be entirely genuine mythology. He explains that Coyote stole the son, allowing the creatures of darkness forth, until one man drove them back and restored light. Hecate suggests that this might be prophecy, not mythology.

Approaching the Talbot Ranch, Hecate and Ethan's horses die. They, Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay are all captured by Talbot's men, and Ethan instructs them to leave Kaetenay to die in the desert. The rest of them are brought to the ranch, where Sir Malcolm meets Talbot Snr, a worthy slaughterer of Indians and all around racist empire-builder played by Albert Finney. He also feels it necessary to dump on scotch for no immediately apparent reason.

"I may be an American, but I'm so evil I'm played by a Brit."

Talbot explains that he wants Ethan to repent. In conversation with his son, he describes the Apache attack, when Apache armed with his own guns broke into the chapel and murdered the rest of his family, including his other son and young daughter. He demands that Ethan repent or die, to which Ethan replies that he is done with guilt and repentance.

'This World is Our Hell' suffers from following the excellent 'Blade of Grass' and thus being the episode to lead us back into Season 3's increasingly diverging plotlines and the general problem of my not giving a flying fuck for the lives of any of these characters. Seriously, they can all die in a fire for all I care. Hecate is rapidly emerging as the moral centre of the New Mexico storyline, simply by virtue of not pretending to be anything else but the Devil's attack monkey.

I also have no idea why people keep casting Albert Finney - a fine actor, to be sure - as Americans.

Penny Dreadful - 'A Blade of Grass'

"Miss Ives; how do you feel about bottle episodes?"

We're almost to the middle of the season, which means it's time for Vanessa Ives backstory theatre (traditionally a strong point of the show,) and this time we're also doing a bottle episode.

Vanessa plumbs her memories of the asylum where she was committed following her breakdown, to experience the gamut of Victorian mental health treatments - force feeding, hydrotherapy and so on - in the care of the rigorously scientific Dr Banning and a kindly orderly who will one day be transformed into the murderous juggernaut we currently know as John Clare.

The episode begins with John - for want of a better name; he isn't allowed to give one for reasons of protocol - trying to persuade Vanessa to eat, and we see the relationship between them begin to evolve as his kindness wears down her walls and he begins to fall in love with her. He tells her of his family and his son's sickness, which requires him to work in such a cruel place, and it is clear that he believes in the methods of the doctors even if he doesn't understand them. Still, he warns Vanessa that if she doesn't act as if she were 'normal', she will be subjected to trephination, a procedure even he recognises as crude.

"So, you feel you are under attack?"

Then, as she begins to tell John her story, things get weirder. Dr Seward tells her that she is not able to pull her out of the trance, and John is possessed by Vanessa's tormenting angel. Dubbing himself Lucifer he strikes at her with barbs and accusations and professions of love. Then another arrives, a presence which also manifests as John and clearly overwhelms and terrifies Lucifer; the presence of Dracula. This is a terrific moment, with Rory Kinnear compelling as the two vast presences, the lords of spirit and flesh, and Eva Green once more turning in a powerhouse performance, by turns repulsed, enthralled, cowed and finally, triumphantly defiant. Moreover, the fact that Lucifer cowers in the presence of his flesh-bound brother - Dracula claims that Lucifer has become nebulous, deprived of belief - sets aside any nagging worries that going from fighting the Devil to fighting Dracula would be a step down for our protagonists.

While Patti LuPone provides admirable support, this is Green and Kinnear's show, and provides considerable substance for Vanessa's next meeting with John Clare. As for the other characters... Well, who knows; there are no subplots at work here, just a tour de force two-and-a-bit character bottle drama which maintains the standard of past backstory episodes.

Damnit. I think I might actually like this season of Penny Dreadful.

Penny Dreadful - 'Good and Evil Braided Be'

"I am so fucking British."

Kaetenay and Sir Malcolm take the racist express to New Mexico in search of Ethan, who is now dreaming of his sort-of father showing up all bloody faced and yelling incoherently, which can't be good.

Rusk and the Marshals look over the scene of Ethan's escape. On the edge of town, Ethan tries to impress on Heckaty-poo the merciless nature of the desert and himself, but the latter is undercut when he's the one who gets upset by her murdering a man and his wife for horses. She lays it out that she's intent on following or leading him into hell to become the Devil's hitman or whatever with her as his worst gal, and is willing to murder literally everyone in the world for that to happen.

They flee across the desert, pursued by Rusk and the US Marshals. The latter are pretty useless, firing wildly at Ethan from half a mile away, stopping when they finally realise that there's a woman with him. Rusk is all poo-poo firearms, and cautions the Marshal that he might want to start believing in the occult. I really hope he doesn't die like a chump, if only because the Marshals are bigger arseholes than he is and I begrudge them the satisfaction.

Kaetenay and Sir Malcolm find the dead ranchers and are concerned about the company Ethan might be keeping.

"Well, this can't be good."

Back in London, Vanessa works some mojo on Dr Seward to try to convince her that her 'delusions' are the real deal; so far it seems like a no-score draw. Vanessa then goes on a date with Dr Sweet which leads to a circus mirror maze, where everyone else disappears and weird-looking-skinny ghoul gets all up in her face, telling her the master was with her 'in the white room where there is no day or night'. She decides she's too dangerous for Sweet to be around and dumps him.

John Clare is back in London. He sees Vanessa meeting Sweet and looks wistfully happy for her before heading off to look for his former family. After roughing up the current owner of the building, he finds them in a slum, his son dying of cholera, and like any good dad starts mugging passing strangers to give them money. Maybe next he'll start cooking high grade meth.

Sweet/Dracula pummels his goon for scaring off Vanessa and lets the other ghouls tear him apart in a feeding frenzy. The super-strength punch is an impressive and restrained use of practical effects to display Dracula's casual power, and the piranha pile is creepy as hell.

As David Balfour descends back into raving madness, Frankenstein proposes to use his research to make Jekyll's serum permanent.

No, I'm not including a picture of the bloody three-way. This
isn't that kind of blog.

Lily and Dorian bring Justine further into their plans, explaining their intention to basically murder and terrorise their way to secret power with an army of invisible women of the street, poo-pooing the gentle methods of the suffragettes. They give Justine the opportunity to kill her former tormentor, which she does, before engaging in a gore-slicked three way with her benefactors.

I know I've criticised the show for being sex negative before, but I'm not entirely convinced that one murder would really undo all of the psychological trauma of a decade of brutal abuse. Of course, it's equally possible that Lily and Dorian don't give a rat's arse about their recruit's psychological health.

Vanessa has Seward hypnotise her to recover memories of her time in an asylum, where the orderly who brought her food was the future John Clare (dun-dun duh!)

Season 3 of Penny Dreadful continues to be a massive improvement on what went before. Okay, Dorian and Lily are still pretty gratuitous, but at least they have a point at last. It is also hard to see how - if at all - the separate plotlines will come together, but time will tell.