TV

In the end, we’re all just puppets

So Joss Whedon’s new TV show, Dollhouse, began airing on Fox this Friday, and if viewing figures for the series premiere, Ghost (written and directed by Whedon), are anything to go by, it may very well end up being yanked before completing its initial 13-episode run. Which would be a shame, because, while the episode suffered from some pretty significant problems, what I saw did leave me with some hope that the Joss Whedon in charge of this project is the one who produced the first five seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than the one who oversaw its final two seasons on television and subsequently the dreadful comic book-bound Season 8.

Basically, the premise is that a shadowy organisation rents out young men and women whose minds have been erased to those who can afford to pay for them - whether so they can engage in a bit of hanky-panky, negotiate a hostage release, or even use them for something downright illegal. Basically, these “Dolls” or “Actives” are blank slates who can be imprinted with any persona, and following successful completion of their assignment, their minds are erased once more until their next mission. One of these Actives is Echo (Eliza Dushku, who played the recurring role of Faith in Buffy and its spin-off, Angel), who, following a cock-up which occurs during one such assignment, begins to develop a degree of self-awareness. A maverick FBI agent, meanwhile, seemingly the only person to believe that this “Dollhouse” actually exists, is hell-bent on infiltrating it and apprehending the perpetrators.

There’s a heck of a lot of potential in this concept, given that the programme essentially serves as a showcase for Eliza Dushku’s range as an actress. Put simply, each episode stands to present us with a completely different scenario and Dushku with a completely different character to play. In this opening episode, we see three basic personae: the go-getter party girl glimpsed in the pre-credits teaser (who arguably has the most in common with Faith), the more or less blank slate that is Echo herself when not programmed with any personality, and the slick, efficient hostage negotiator whose identity she adopts for the kidnapping narrative that forms the main thrust of the episode, in which the young daughter of a rich Mexican businessman is abducted by a gang of unsavoury sorts, one of whom is a child rapist. The latter of these assumed identities is not all that convincing, as Dushku’s style of acting doesn’t really go with the primly-dressed, spectacle-wearing agent she ends up playing here. Then again, maybe it’s my fault for not being able to get her Buffy days out of my head.

The rest of the cast, unfortunately, are neither here nor there. They exist, but nothing about them really makes them stand out - shades of the Initiative from Buffy’s fourth season, I fear, where the various cadets and commandos did nothing to distinguish themselves. Compare this first episode of Dollhouse to the first episode of Buffy, where Willow, Giles, Xander et al immediately conveyed their personalities through their characterisation and dialogue, not to mention the performances of the actors. The same was also true of Angel, which, in its first season, had a minimal cast comprised of three diametrically opposed characters - Angel, Cordelia and Doyle (the latter being replaced part-way through by Wesley). There’s precious little of that here: broadly speaking, you could replace Dollhouse’s supporting cast with that of any police procedural and no-one would be any the wiser. Case in point: I can’t actually remember the name of the male lead (the aforementioned FBI agent), whom I suspect is being set up to be the yin to Echo’s yang. I wonder to what extent this has to do with the almost complete absence of Whedon’s traditional “peppy” dialogue: by and large, the characters here talk like normal people. On the one hand, it’s actually somewhat refreshing to see Whedon varying his style a bit; on the other, what we’re left with is fairly generic and forgettable. There are a few good lines here and there (for instance, our FBI agent, after accosting an informant in the process of making use of the facilities, tells him “Remember to wash your hands… and your shoes”; another good one is “We said no strings,” “We also said no ropes, and look how long that lasted”), but again they’re largely interchangeable with any number of other shows of the ilk. I got more than a few hints of Alias (which featured Jennifer Garner trotting about under a variety of assumed identities, working for a shadowy organisation which hadn’t told her the whole truth about what she was doing… albeit without the memory loss aspect), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but does show that Dollhouse needs to do something more to distinguish itself.

Ultimately, I suppose what excites me about this project is where it could ultimately end up going if the network gives it the opportunity. At its most basic level, we have a fast-paced and varied show featuring a charismatic actress assuming a vast array of different personae. On a deeper level, however, we have what essentially boils down to a story about people trafficking and the suppression of free will. We’re told, initially, that the Actives are essentially volunteers who knowingly submitted themselves to having their minds wiped and being turned into what are ultimately prostitutes (both literally and, on occasion, figuratively). However, one has to wonder to what extent any of these people actually knew what they were getting into when they signed up. (It’s a bit like in The Matrix, where Neo is offered the choice of the red and the blue pill. I’ve always wondered if he would really have chosen the red pill had he known what he was letting himself in for beforehand.) The way the B-plot featuring the FBI agent is developing also leads me to suspect that we are in fact headed for a revelation that at least some of the Actives have in fact been abducted and mind-wiped against their wills.

This is quite a potent cocktail of thematic concerns, and the extent to which they are allowed to be played out will, I suspect, be determined by whether or not Fox opts to pull the plug on the show, as they did with Firefly. On the one hand, the Network seems to have really got behind the show and is marketing the hell out of it, as well as using it as a pilot scheme for its new “Remote-Free TV” concept, where shows air with half the usual number of commercials, resulting in an extended running time. According to Eliza Dushku, Whedon already has a five-year arc planned for the characters and storyline. Whether he’ll get to follow it through is, currently, in the lap of the network gods.

Oh, and just in case all that text was beginning to bore you, here is a Dollhouse promo pic of Eliza Dushku with her bum out.

Butterfly on a Wheel Blu-ray impressions

If there’s anything good to have come out of the fact that Zammo has gone into administration, it’s that the branches that are still open are flogging their remaining goods at cut rates. Books, clothing and posters are all going for 50% of the advertised prices, and there are some fine deals to be had on DVDs and BDs as well. In the case of the latter, I picked up the UK release of Butterfly on a Wheel on Wednesday - a blind buy that didn’t pay off. (I also snagged Donkey Punch and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.) This suspense thriller stars Gerard Butler, he of 300 who’s good at looking constipated and emitting gutteral roars (in 300, it was “Sparrrrtaaaaaaa!”; in this film, he just bellows “Aaaaabbyyyyy!” a lot), and Pierece Brosnan, who is under the misconception that growing a couple of days’ worth of stubble and putting on a horrendously overdone Northern Irish accent makes him seem menacing. Unfortunately, it’s nothing more than a bland and improbably plotted piece of glossy, slickly-produced twaddle that should have gone straight to TV… and indeed it did in the US, where it was released under the title of Shattered. After we watched it (on Friday), my brother turned to me and said “This is the worst film I’ve ever seen on Blu-ray.” Had I had the presence of mind, I would have reminded him that we also watched Norbit, but I guess my brain had been turned to mush by preceding 95 minutes of tedium.

Oh well, at least it’s got Maria Bello in her pants. Actually, screw it, even that isn’t enough to save this train wreck.

For what it’s worth, Icon’s all-regions disc is actually pretty good, albeit with an irritating audio sync issue which affects both the lossy Dolby Digital and lossless DTS-HD Master Audio tracks. The AVC encode suffers from little if any noticeable compression issues, and detail is, for the most part, quite pleasing. The whole image has been slightly pre-filtered, with ringing visible around high contrast edges, such the letterbox bars and the on-screen credits, but, while this is less than ideal, it doesn’t affect the look of the film as negatively as something like Kung Fu Panda. On the other hand, the blacks look quite milky, although it’s unclear whether this is a fault in the original photography or a problem specific to the transfer. (I’m leaning towards the former, since the black screen against which the first few credits are overlaid is “proper” black, unlike, say, Silent Hill, where the black level is off from beginning to end.) 8/10

Butterfly on a Wheel
studio: Icon; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 19.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 29.61 Mbit/sec

DVDs I bought or received in the month of January

• January 2, 2009: The Messengers (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: The Untouchables (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: Poltergeist (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: Black Sheep (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 5, 2009: Death Proof (Region ABC USA, Blu-ray)
• January 5, 2009: Planet Terror (Region ABC USA, Blu-ray)
• January 22, 2009: The 39 Steps (2008 BBC TV version) (Region 2 UK, DVD) [review copy]
• January 26, 2009: Peep Show: Series 5 (Region 2 UK, DVD)
• January 29, 2009: Shaun of the Dead (Region 0 UK, HD DVD) [gift]
• January 30, 2009: The Butterfly Effect (Region A Canada, Blu-ray)
• January 30, 2009: American Psycho (Region ABC Australia, Blu-ray)
• January 30, 2009: The Descent (Region ABC Australia, Blu-ray)

A very bloody Christmas

I’m afraid there won’t be a DVD review this week. I’ve simply been too busy, both with PhD work (I need to turn in a draft of what will eventually become my first analysis chapter before the end of March) and with the day job (since the beginning of the year, I’ve been getting sent on relief to various libraries around Glasgow, with the travel cutting into my “me” time). Rather than post nothing, though (which would be bad manners after I promised a review every week), I decided to dig up a piece I’d previously started and polish it up to a standard fit to be seen by other eyes. It’s a review of the 2-parter Barbara Machin wrote for Casualty during Christmas 2006. As such, it’s a bit late coming, and it’s a little on the long-winded side, but hey - at least it allows me to avoid breaking one of my New Year resolutions.

 
Killing Me Softly and Silent Night
Series 21, Episodes 15 and 16
Written by Barbara Machin; Directed by Diarmuid Lawrence
Originally aired December 23rd and 24th, 2006

It’s been too long.

A normal Christmas Eve shift in Holby City Hospital’s Accident & Emergency department: patients suffering from various ailments, minor and major, are waiting to be treated, and the staff are knuckling down while each having to juggle the demands of the job with their own personal woes. However, unbeknownst to them, two members of the team are about to come face to face with death in a very literal sense as what seems like a bog standard day turns into anything but. Nothing will ever be the same again come the end of the shift…

I’ve probably watched this two-parter more times than any other episode of Casualty made in the last decade, and with good reason: as far as I’m concerned, these are the best episodes that have been made at least since we entered the twenty-first century, and you have to go back to, oh, say, Series 12 and Love Me Tender to find an episode of comparable quality. That’s not to say that there haven’t been any great episodes between “Love Me Tender” and this two-parter - there definitely have, but the calibre of these episodes is such that they eclipse everything else made in recent years.

I think that part of what makes these episodes stand out is that they fall bang in the middle of a very rough patch in Casualty’s history. Series 21 is, as I’ve said a few times now, in my opinion the absolute worst series of all time, due to a combination of lazy writing, inconsistent characterisation, unbelievable storylines and a genuine sense that no-one on the writing staff knew or cared what they were doing. It says a lot about how bad things had got that it took an outsider to turn the show on its head and, arguably, show the regulars how it should be done. That someone, of course, is Barbara Machin, who, along with the likes of Bryan Elsley (Skins), Bill Gallagher (Lark Rise to Candleford) and Peter Bowker (Blackpool), was part of a bold, daring team of writers that joined the show when it was in the early stages of becoming Great Television (™) and helped lead it through its golden age period. Machin left Casualty after writing Series 13’s excellent episode One From the Heart, and from then went on to do Waking the Dead, of which I’m a massive fan, as you probably know.

[Continue reading "A very bloody Christmas"...]

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 11 and 12: Yahrzeit

Written by Declan Croghan; Directed by Tim Fywell

We finally come to the final episode of Series 6. It’s been a long trawl, and at times has felt like a chore, but at least we get a half-decent episode to finish off the season. This one finally brings to a head the “Mel’s bracelet” plot that has been simmering in the background throughout the series, and it does an interesting job of finally bringing Boyd to properly acknowledge her death, while as the same time concocting an interesting tale around the murder of a young girl in a London backstreet in 1945. We kick off with a ceremonial Nazi dagger being delivered in a package addressed to Mel at CCHQ, with the plot thickening when it is discovered to have originated from a derelict house once occupied by the Dusniaks, a family of Polish-Jewish refugees who settled there at around the time of the young girl’s death. The dagger is discovered to be the murder weapon, and as a result Boyd launches an investigation into the Dusniaks, unearthing a whole lot of secrets that certain members of the family would prefer to remain hidden.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out why it is that this episode works better then the rest of series, and the best explanation I can really come up with is that it presents us with a tangible idea. Most of the cases this series have been rather oblique, exhibiting a strange ethereality and dealing with vague ideas, more often than not focusing more on trippy hallucinations and flashbacks and less on deduction. Yahrzeit’s story is not only a concrete one but a deeply emotive one, using the backdrop of Josef Mengele’s experiments on children under the Third Reich and spinning a complicated web involving subterfuge identity theft. The puzzle at the heart of the episode isn’t particularly hard to work out, though. Once an elderly man in the throes of dementia who is supposedly a Polish Jew starts wittering away in German and calling his grandson by the wrong name it’s pretty obvious what’s going on, and this is only compounded when his daughter begins waxing lyrical about her life in Panama and attempts to spirit him away there, before admitting defeat and providing him with a cyanide pill when the police start asking awkward questions. Still, the plot is at least well-concocted, and, as is often the case with Waking the Dead mysteries, the fun lies in trying to work out the specifics of who did what to who and why rather than the broad whodunit.

Not that I’d class this as a particularly “fun” episode. Indeed, given the subject matter, it’s understandably bleak, albeit ending on a note of optimism that I must say feels a tad forced. Much of this has less to do with the central mystery itself and is more concerned with Sarah (Michelle Forbes), a mysterious American woman who enters the picture as a nuisance and ends up canoodling with Boyd in front of an uproariously unconvincing blue-screen New York backdrop. Sarah is in fact a Mossad agent, and was communicating with Mel just prior to her death. To go into specifics would be to give the game away, and would probably be rather boring to read, but it’s not spoiling too much to reveal that, despite Mossad being illegal in the UK, Boyd allows her to swan around with the rest of the team, make key decisions as regards the investigation and generally act like a snotty bitch. Michelle is a rather loathsome character, and it’s a little too much to swallow that the thoroughly dictatorial Boyd would tolerate her, let alone enter into a relationship with her. (I also have trouble processing the image of her and Mel being friends, but there you go.)

Incidentally, in this episode, we are told that Mel was attempting to trace her Jewish roots prior to her death. Given that Mel was almost certainly not Jewish by birth (as revealed in the Series 4 episode Fugue States, she was born Mary Price and adopted as a baby), I’m not entirely convinced by the use of the word “roots”, but then again, I suppose you can argue that it fits with the “you are who you choose to be” message that the writer clumsily shoehorns into Boyd’s dialogue towards the end. Personally, I’m more content to see this as nothing more than a continuity gaffe, albeit a minor one compared to the clunker the writers drop in the next series in the form of Boyd’s son.

“Yahrzeit”, by the way, is a Hebrew word, meaning the anniversary of a relative, commemorated by the lighting of a candle for the deceased and the reciting of religious text. Thematically, it’s a very appropriate title for the episode.

DVD Review: Trial & Retribution: The Fourth Collection

With this fourth collection, essentially all the Trial & Retributions that are worth owning have been released on DVD. The subsequent 2008 series really wasn’t much cop at all, and, going by what has aired so far of the 2009 series, things are unlikely to get any better. Perhaps the time has come to put Trial & Retribution to rest: as it stands, it has now completed its de-evolution into another run-of-the-mill police thriller and is therefore serving no particular purpose in a schedule already jam-packed with run-of-the-mill police thrillers. What started out as a unique and inventive take on the investigative and judiciary processes is now left with precious little sense of its own identity, and while the three episodes included in this set are all of a decent standard, all but one of them are a far cry from what was being produced in the series’ heyday. At least the relatively agreeable price tag - less than £15 at our cheapest affiliate - helps cushion the blow somewhat, with Curriculum Vitae coming close to justifying the cost alone.

With the latest series of Trial & Retribution currently airing on ITV1, I examine the fourth volume of the series on DVD, which contains the final three episodes from the 2007 season. Review at DVD Times.

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 9 and 10: Double Bind

Written by Richard Warlow; Directed by Andy Hay

Confession time: the first time this episode aired, I gave up on it at the end of the first part. That, for me, is incredibly rare. Generally, if I start watching a show, I stick with it, especially if it’s part of a long-running series I’ve been following since the beginning. For whatever reason, though, something about this episode served to distance me from it so much that I just couldn’t continue with it. Maybe it was the dizzying jump cuts, time lapse photography and clumsily “trippy” scenes. Maybe it was Miles Anderson running around gurning like a ninny and doing a piss-poor job of portraying a man off his face on LSD. Maybe it was the fact that Grace barely appears in the episode. Or maybe it was because I was feeling under the weather at the time - I can’t actually remember.

The point is that something about this episode was so unpalatable to me that I did something I almost never do. What makes this double strange is that, watching it for a second time, and actually watching both parts instead of just the first, I didn’t get the same feeling of revulsion or apathy (whichever it was). For reasons that I’ll go into in a moment, this is not a particularly good episode, but it’s far from the worst of the season or indeed the series as a whole. Basically, the story goes that, as a teenagers, Daniel Lennon (Miles Anderson) stabbed both his parents to death and has spent his entire life since then incarcerated in a psychiatric unit. One day, on the way back from a trip to the ophthalmologist with his psychiatrist, Dr. Caroline Ritter (Jill Baker), he forces the car off the road and, in the confusion, escapes. The first thing he does is to log on in an Internet café and send an email to the owners of a house in Hampstead, telling them to dig up their flowerbed. Surprise, surprise, there’s a body buried there, and a post-mortem reveals that the death is likely to have taken place weeks before Lennon killed his parents. Is he another of Lennon’s victims, or is (in Waking the Dead tradition) more going on than meets the eye? Meanwhile, Grace has had enough of Boyd’s erratic behaviour and, declaring that she can’t work with him any more, walks out on the team.

I’m still not entirely sure why Grace was all but written out of this two-parter. In terms of characterisation, it makes sense for her to walk out, and it actually comes as something of a pleasant surprise to hear her finally telling Boyd that enough is enough. The problem is that it’s never resolved. Grace leaves, comes back briefly (in Part 2) to interview a key witness, then leaves again, but come the next episode, it’s as if nothing ever happened. As someone who stuck with the show for so long because I enjoyed the characters and their interaction, this feels like a complete slap in the face. Okay, I’ll grant you, there is some nice writing here and there, with the team’s discussions often petering out or reaching dead ends because, without Grace there to provide the psychological perspective, a vital component of what makes them work is missing. It’s also mildly amusing to see Boyd rooting around in Grace’s office, pouring over some of her textbooks and trying to figure out the psych angle himself, but, bereft of the character, the show feels remarkably empty.

The central mystery that is the focus of the episode can’t make up for this lack either. While it starts out reasonably promising, with Part 1 raising numerous questions and the web of clues and suspects suitably tortuous, the pay-off simply doesn’t justify the setup. To be blunt, the explanation to the mystery is utterly mundane, meaning that the journey to get there hardly feels worthwhile. Oh, and a certain character’s identity, a major issue particularly in the second part, is staggeringly obvious you wonder why the writers even bothered trying to set it up as a puzzle.

On a side note, my reviews have now caught up with my viewing. Now I just need to watch Yahrzeit and Series 6 will be done and dusted. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see the back of it.

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 7 and 8: Mask of Sanity

Written by Laurence Davey and Declan Croghan; Directed by David Thacker

James Jenson (Nicholas Beveney) is released from the secure psychiatric unit in which he has spent the last 20 years. Prior to being incarcerated, he was the prime suspect in the murders of three men connected to the children’s home in which he grew up, but was deemed unfit to stand trial. On the day of his release, however, the widow of one of his victims receives a package containing the wallets belonging to each of the three dead men. Boyd reopens the investigation and, in the process, digs up a veritable hornet’s nest in the form of a catalogue of abuse surrounding the children’s home, of which James was but one of many victims. Were the murdered men the perpetrators of this abuse and were their killings acts of revenge carried out by their victims, or is there more to the case than meets the eye?

Mask of Sanity is far from the worst episode of Waking the Dead, but it is an incredibly derivative one. The theme of the institutionalied abuse of children was already handled with far more panache, and indeed by the same director, in the Series 3 episode Breaking Glass. Here, we have an unusually generic tale that essentially plods from plot point to plot point, and not always particularly convincingly, offering up a portrait of cruelty that somehow manages to be both quite harrowing and utterly mundane at the same time. None of the various characters paraded before us, or their tortuous web of relationships, are particularly interesting, and the unravelling of the mystery itself is played out in such a way as to leave this episode virtually indistinguishable from that of any other halfway competent detective drama.

I should probably also mention that, in this episode, Boyd’s behaviour towards the rest of his team, particularly Grace, becomes utterly despicable. In the early years, Boyd’s temper was like an ever-present fuse just waiting to be lit, and his flare-ups were generally interesting to watch. Here, however, there’s no rhyme or reason to the way he treats his colleagues or his suspects, repeatedly undermining Grace in incredibly demeaning ways and, early on, deliberately goading a clearly frightened and mentally deficient suspect into committing an act of violence. This sort of behaviour has gone beyond ever being charming and now just seems mean-spirited.

Oh yeah, and, with this episode, my dad, who is suffering through this project with me, commented: “Is it just me or are they [i.e. the writers] trying to make Spence look as stupid as possible?” I think he may be right. By this stage, the character has all but stopped ceased to function as an actual person and is now relegated to merely being the dim-witted, bumbling plod who constantly loses suspects he’s supposed to be tailing or gets himself beaten up by thugs when he blunders into their path.

Holby connections: until recently, Richard Dillane (Ricardo Rivelli) had a recurring role in Casualty as orthopaedic consultant Sean Anderson.

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 5 and 6: The Fall

Written by Damian Wayling; Directed by Robert Bierman

The conjoined corpses of a man and a woman, shot dead with the same bullet during a sex act, are discovered when the floor of a concealed room gives ways in a former City bank, which went down the tubes in the aftermath of 1992’s Black Wednesday. The man is identified as Mervyn Simmel (Nigel Whitmey), one of the bank’s directors, while the woman turns out to be Katherine Keane (Alison Doody), a journalist known for having a string of affairs with wealthy older men, many of whom hold down prominent government positions. The team’s investigation reveals several potential suspects, one of whom, Lucien Calvin (Peter Capaldi), a former partner at the bank, now clearly deranged and lecturing on the evils of capitalism, seems to be the likeliest.

This episode is undoubtedly a step up from its dire predecessor, but, watching it, one gets the impression that the writer relied a little too heavily on The Da Vinci Code for inspiration - not a good state of affairs by any stretch of the imagination. What this means is that, while Peter Boyd is a considerably more interesting character than Robert Langton (not that it’s difficult to be more interesting than Robert Langton), he does spend rather a lot of time chasing self-flagellating members of a secret society - yet another secret society with the spectre of religion hanging over it, which, hot on the heels of Wren Boys’ sinister nunnery and Deus Ex Machina’s Islamic overtones, means that things are beginning to feel a bit samey.

The highlight of this episode is undoubtedly Peter Capaldi, a fantastic character actor who plays the character of Calvin brilliantly, imbuing him with just the right mix of eccentricity and sinisterness. In the scenes in which he appears, the episode comes alive, and his interaction with Boyd and Grace is fascinating on many levels. In the most straightforward sense, it’s a pleasure to watch three extremely talented actors playing off each other; on a deeper level, writer Damian Wayling weaves a fascinating “family” undercurrent, with Boyd and Grace fairly obviously serving, in Calvin’s eyes, as surrogates for his own domineering father and docile mother, respectively. In Series 6 and 7 there is, on the whole, very little of the Boyd/Grace dynamic that helped make the first five series so enjoyable, so it’s very nice to see it making a welcome, albeit brief, return here.

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 3 and 4: Deus Ex Machina

Written by Nicholas Blincoe; Directed by Andy Hay

This episode manages quite a remarkable feat: on the one hand, it’s completely different from any other episode of Waking the Dead ever aired; on the other, it totally forgettable. It plods along to its conclusion, going in one ear and out the other, leaving no lasting impression. The plot is an odd one that doesn’t really feel like it belongs in the series, clumsily roping Boyd and co into recovering the Skull of the Mahdi, an artefact taken from Sudan as a war trophy more than a century ago, when a prominent Sudanese politician, Khaled Ahmed (Abdi Gouhad), goes on hunger strike. The team are also tasked with re-investigating the murder of an Iraqi refugee, Omar Jaffiri (Hassani Shapi), whose death may be related to the case of the skull. Along the way, they come across the Fakir society, a crowd of pretentious academics who like to dress up in robes and perform bizarre, masonic-like rituals.

Struggling to put my finger on just why this episode left me so cold, I popped over to the BBC’s official Waking the Dead web site and took a gander at the various user reviews that had been submitted. One writer, Ian Gould, hit the nail on the head:

There were too many loose ends and the first part gave the viewer no ideas at all. I expect to be confused but this was beyond confusion, almost bordering on boredom.

[…]

The top and bottom of this episode is that it was based on three ideas of interrogation and that seemed to be the whole plot. I have never been disappointed with this excellent programme before but this particular episode was rubbish.

I apologise for using another viewer’s review in place of my own, but this simply demonstrates how much of a non-entity this episode was for me. Barring some striking images injected by the director, among them Eve’s physical reconstruction of the scene of Jaffiri’s murder, which mixes the past with the present in a manner reminiscent of Series 3’s vastly superior Breaking Glass, I can’t recall a single memorable moment in the storyline’s entire two-hour duration. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I actually watched the episode (I’m currently playing catch-up with my reviews), but I didn’t in any way feel compelled to revisit it. When it aired it was, by a considerable margin, the worst Waking the Dead episode to date, and while I feel that the next season’s Wounds was even poorer, there’s not really all that much between them.

Holby connections: in addition to his appearance in Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, Adam James (Michael Leonard in this episode) had a recurring role in Casualty as lawyer-cum-rapist Pete Guildford during Series 19.

DVD Review: Trial & Retribution: The Third Collection

This third Trial & Retribution box set provides us with three episodes that are each, to differing degrees, flawed, but each engaging in their own way. The first two episodes, despite their shortcomings, ultimately make for solid television, with only the third episode threatening to collapse completely due to its shortcomings. It helps, I suspect, that all three episodes were personally penned by Lynda La Plante. This would change all too soon, with La Plante gradually reallocating these duties to various writers-for-hire, but here at least she seems to have been fully invested in the material, which gives the drama both the polish and the truthfulness that lifts her work above that of many other crime writers.

With the latest series of Trial & Retribution currently airing on ITV1, I take a look at the third volume of the series on DVD, containing three episodes produced between 2005 and 2007. Review at DVD Times.

Waking the Dead: Series 6, Episodes 1 and 2: Wren Boys

Written by Declan Croghan; Directed by Tim Fywell

For some reason, no episodes of Waking the Dead aired in 2006. When Series 6 finally came round, in January 2007, around 16 months had passed since the end of Series 5. The show came back with a new producer, Colin Wratten (who came from EastEnders and, before that, Holby City), a new lead writer, Declan Croghan, and a new pathologist, played by Tara Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, while Waking the Dead doesn’t have much in common with the previous show I did a full run through, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they do share one trait: both go off the rails in their sixth season.

Admittedly, Peter Boyd’s fall from grace is considerably less drastic than Buffy Summers’. Even at its worst, Waking the Dead still manages to retain a veneer of respectability, and I could never claim that these episodes are badly made (whereas some of the latter-day Buffy episodes were shockingly poorly written and directed). Instead, they just tend to feel rather empty, going from Point A to Point B, going through the motions but leaving no real lasting impression. One of the biggest losses come Season 6 is the team feeling that permeated the earlier episodes. Series 5 had its work cut out, having to make do without two of the five original characters, but it somehow managed to pull through, retaining the dynamic between the three remaining regulars and working hard to integrate the two newcomers. Such traits are not in evidence by Series 6. By and large, the characters behave like automatons, the interplay between them feels forced, and they function less as a team and more as a collection of people clocking in and out of the office.

It doesn’t help that the writers seem intent on ignoring any previously established continuity. Their biggest faux pas would come with Series 7 (which I’ll discuss when I get that far), but for now, the wheels are already being set in motion. Stella’s betrayal at the end of the previous series is never even mentioned, while Spence’s brush with death, which provided the cliffhanger between the two series, is brushed aside in a single reference to him having had a tattoo painted around his bullet wound. Seeing him laughing and joking about this with Stella, who played a part in his brush with death, is such a blatant breach of continuity that I find it nearly impossible to forgive. The fact that Felix is never once mentioned is also hard to swallow, although admittedly not entirely surprising, particularly if, as I suspect, she was only ever intended as a last-minute temporary replacement for Frankie.

Unfortunately, the new pathologist, Eve Lockhart, just makes us yearn all the more for her predecessors. The writers are at great pains to ram down our throats the fact that the character is alternative and wacky, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes, burning incense in the lab, listening to reggae music at crime scenes, and so on. Unfortunately, the actress, Tara Fitzgerald, may be many things, but “wacky” is not one of them. Her attempts to be so come across as completely forced, and all too often end up veering towards “annoying” rather than the “charming” that I suspect the writers were going for. At least, however, she is a little more animated in these opening episodes than she would later become: come Series 7, she would barely alter her facial expression and tone of delivery at all. Her major gimmick, aside from her insincere wackiness and amazingly deep voice, is that she keeps a “body farm” consisting of a bank of old body parts, which sounds interesting in theory but in practice is only ever referred to a couple of times.

Anyway, the series begins with what is probably the least impressive episode of Waking the Dead to date. There was worse to come, but I remember the massive disappointment I felt when this two-parter initially aired a couple of years back. The basic plot is that the team are investigating the case of a teenage boy found drowned in a pit of concrete back in 1990. A teenage boy is dumped outside a Casualty department, badly beaten, and Boyd suspects there may be a connection. (I actually can’t remember what it is that causes him to suspect this, which says a lot about how much of an impact the storyline made on me.) This leads him and the team to investigate the community of travellers from which the boy came, along the way taking in the sights of a local abbey and a young nun apparently suffering from stigmata.

This episode does actually have a rather interesting theme: the combination of pagan and Christian beliefs and rituals. As far as I can gather, it’s a pretty accurate representation of the religious beliefs held in many traveller communities, harking back to the latter days of the Roman Empire’s occupation of Britain, when the occupying forces concluded that the easiest way to convert the local tribes to Christianity was to mix the doctrine in with their existing pagan traditions, resulting in (to quote Bremner, Bird & Fortune’s piss-take of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams) “an à la carte religion”. At the same time, though, I think that the episode’s greatest failing is that there are simply too many ideas scrambling for attention, resulting in it feeling incredibly disjointed and not very satisfying as a whole. In addition to the exploration of the travellers and their beliefs, we’ve got stigmata, hallucinogenics, Rottweilers straight out of The Omen, a goat demon who seems to have stepped straight out of Hammer’s adaptation of The Devil Rides Out, arranged fights which clearly own something of a debt to David Fincher’s Fight Club, a family tree as complicated as a spaghetti junction, a young mother offering her unwanted newborn child up to a benevolent angel (no, really), and the curious arrival of an envelope addressed to Mel containing a bracelet inscribed with Hebrew letters. The latter sets up a plot strand which is actually carried through the entire season before finally coming to a head in the final episode, Yahrzeit. I’d like to say that this storyline, which hearkens back to the good old days, provides a sense of continuity to the series and resolves Boyd’s feelings as regards Mel’s death, but I’m sorry to say that, for me at least, this is something that should have been done in Series 5 if at all. Barely mentioning Mel in that series and then taking up the storyline again over a year later, while introducing some whopping continuity errors in the process (more on that later), merely cements my ambivalence towards this season.

Holby connections: Gregory Foreman (Davy in this episode) has appeared in Casualty at various points in Series 22 as Charlie Fairhead’s son, Louis.

Waking the Dead: Series 5, Episodes 11 and 12: Cold Fusion

Written by Ed Whitmore; Directed by Richard Standeven

Series 5 draws to a close, and like Series 4 before it, it’s the end of an era. The casualties this time are long-serving producer Richard Burrell and lead writer Ed Whitmore, who both leave to do other things, and poor Esther Hall, who receives an even less auspicious exit than Holly Aird (whose at least got a brief mention in a conversation following her departure). It also closes on Waking the Dead’s first and to date only end-of-series cliffhanger, and an absolute whopper it is too - a situation made all the more frustrating by the fact that, back when it originally aired, we actually had to wait about 16 months for Series 6, only for it to be addressed in the lamest, more throwaway manner possible (more on that when I get on to reviewing Series 6).

Still, as season finales go, it’s a good one, thanks mainly to the “no holds barred” quality it has. With Mel’s death at the end of the previous series, we were shown that the regulars were by no means safe from harm, and so, when the lives of two of the main characters come under threat in this episode, we genuinely fear for them. At the heart of it all is Spence, who as I’ve mentioned before is, in my opinion, the least interesting of the original cast of five. He’s at his best in episodes that delve into his past (see also Series 3’s Final Cut), because they tend to be the only occasions on which he stops simply being a plod and is allowed to exist as an actual character. Here, in the classic “wrong man” tradition, he finds himself suspected of everything from destroying evidence to cold-blooded murder when vital evidence pertaining to a case he worked on as a uniformed PC back in the 80s goes missing from CCHQ (his pass having been used to gain access to the storage room), followed almost immediately by an arson attack on Central Lab in which further evidence pertaining to the case is lost.

Yeah, after watching the character for five years (six if you count the pilot), I’d find it a bit hard to swallow if he truly was corrupt, but that’s where the episode’s central twist lies. Again, I’d prefer not to give it away to those who are considering watching the series, so for the time being I’ll just say that someone on the team is involved in shady goings-on which have led to this situation, but aren’t fully aware of what they’ve got themselves involved in. As far as twists go, it’s a pretty good one, even if long-term viewers are unlikely to have any trouble fingering the culprit. Either way, it doesn’t really matter: the final half-hour is nail-biting stuff, and the cliffhanger I mentioned before could have been so good if the new regime that came in with the next series hadn’t completely dropped the ball.

Waking the Dead: Series 5, Episodes 9 and 10: Undertow

Written by Oliver Brown; Directed by David Thacker

Undertow is actually a rather better episode than I’d remembered, but it still suffers from the problem that plagues the other Series 5 episodes that don’t focus specifically on the past of one of the main characters: it seems almost like filler, as if the writers were really excited about delving into regulars’ back-stories and were simply treading water with the episodes in between. Here, the chance activation of the credit card of a murder victim sets in motion a chain of events that leads the team to suspect Steven Hunt (Stephen Moyer), a man currently serving the final stretch of a prison sentence for benefit fraud, of a series of past murders and attempted rapes. Lacking sufficient evidence, and meeting only hostility from Hunt and his family, Boyd decides to have him tailed when he is released, hoping he slips up and they get the evidence they need to pin on him before he finds his next victim.

As with Subterraneans, there’s no real effort made to conceal the killer’s identity: if there isn’t a giant sign saying “Guilty!” over Hunt’s head the moment he is introduced, then it’s well and truly lit up and flashing in neon by the one-hour mark. It’s not a negative as such, but it’s the second storyline of this season to follow such a formula, although at least this time round the audience isn’t constantly several steps ahead of the police. Actually, the writer of this episode does a rather good job of exploiting the team’s frustration at being 99% sure of the culprit’s identity but unable to do anything about it. For me personally, the most interesting aspect of the storyline was Grace’s use of the geography of the various attacks to help work out the killer’s identity, working from the hypothesis that most people don’t go further afield than they have to.

That said, particularly in the second half, things get a bit farcical, with Boyd first trying to drown Hunt, much to Grace’s consternation (“Why didn’t you just slap him about like you usually do?” she demands frostily - me thinks someone somewhere is taking the piss), and then agreeing to a completely asinine entrapment scam with Stella as Hunt’s bait. (We’re supposed to believe that, despite having been tasked with tailing him in the most obvious manner imaginable, Hunt isn’t going to recognise Stella as part of the police force.) As such, we end up in a situation where Part 1 is superior to Part 2, a problem which also plagued the two previous storylines in this series. I don’t dislike this episode by any means. The interplay between the team is still as good as ever, and the banter is often highly amusing, but it’s a minor effort overall.

Waking the Dead: Series 5, Episodes 7 and 8: Straw Dog

Written by Declan Croghan; Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

“Look, we’re not monsters, Sarah.” - Detective Constable Stella Goodman
“Speak for yourself.” - Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd

The following year, Declan Croghan would become Waking the Dead’s lead writer, presumably based on the strengths of this two-parter, which stands out as being by far the best of Series 5. Beyond any great flair in the writing however, this is Sue Johnston’s chance to shine as Grace, for once, steps into the spotlight to become the focus of an entire story. The backdrop is the first case she ever worked on with the police, back in 1980 - a particularly nasty affair involving a serial killer who chopped off his victims’ fingers and sent them to the senior investigating officer, DI Harry Taylor (Tom Ellis). In the present day, the man convicted for the murders, Tony Greene (David Norman), alleges that his confession was beaten out of him, with Grace softening him up psychologically before turning him over to Harry, a man with a suspiciously high rate of success in securing confessions. During the retrial, at which Grace is giving evidence, another victim is abducted and one of his fingers sent to CCHQ, along with a demand that Grace admit that Greene is innocent. As a result, Grace is forced to come face to face with her past and consider that what she remembers as a triumphant first success may in fact have involved her playing an unwitting role in a case of corruption.

Incidentally, at one point in the past I suggested that this episode contradicted an earlier mention by Grace of “kids she never sees” by implying that she never married or having children. Watching it again now, I don’t think it’s quite as clear-cut as this. Yes, it’s true that the scene in question, where Grace strongly urges Felix to have children if she gets the chance, does hint at a sense of longing on Grace’s part, but it’s far from conclusive. (And let’s not forget that she is shown to be wearing a wedding ring throughout. Actually, wait a minute - that in itself creates another inconsistency, as in the final episode of Series 2, Grace stated that her marriage didn’t last.) This scene, by the way, is a very good one, sensitively written and well acted by Sue Johnston and Esther Hall. Material like this would become increasingly less common by Series 6, so it’s very much appreciated here. Equally effective is the scene at the end of the first part, where Grace speaks directly to the abductor via the press. In fact, it’s possibly my all-time favourite moment in the history of the series: the writing has a simple but powerful quality, and the combination of the music and acting succeeds in taking it to another level entirely.

More than any other episode of Waking the Dead, this one relies very heavily on flashbacks, telling two concurrent stories - one in the past and one in the present. Once you get past the fact that the 1980 incarnation of Grace (Emma Lowndes, who otherwise does an impeccable job of mimicking Sue Johnston’s inflections and accent) looks a little too young (that, or the present-day incarnation looks a little too old), it’s possible to appreciate the rather effective recreation of a bygone period, with keen attention to the costume and production design. I’m also impressed by the fact that Croghan was able to create a convincing past for Grace which helps flesh out her character without detracting from or overly contradicting what we already knew about her. What lets the episode down, though, is the killer’s identity. I’d prefer not to spoil things too much for those who haven’t seen it, but let’s just say that it’s a predictable old cliché that reinforces a certain stereotype often perpetuated in films and television programmes about serial killers. It’s not enough to sour things completely, but it does mean that the denouement is less impressive than the setup. Even so, it’s the last of the truly great Waking the Deads, in my opinion. From this point on, possibly only Yahrzeit and Skin can hold a candle to what came before.

By the way, I apologise for having left this project hanging in the lurch for so long. I fully intend to complete it… provided I can work up the stamina to sit through the remainder of Series 6, that is.

Holby connections: director Jim O’Hanlon has helmed several episodes of Casualty and also wrote one episode in 2004.

Prince of Persia (2008) final impressions (long post)

Note: this is not a full review as such, but rather a final summing up of some points I didn’t address in my initial post on the game.

We’re only a few days into the new year and already I’m falling behind in my promise to post more. If I’d been keeping up with myself, I’d have told you that I completed Prince of Persia 2008 a couple of days before Christmas. What has motivated me to post about it now is an interesting video feature about it made by Shamus Young, whose blog, Twenty Sided, is one of my daily pit stops. In Shamus’ view, Prince of Persia is “the most innovative game of 2008”. Well, with a claim as brazen as that, I just had to watch the video to find out his reasons, particularly given that my reaction to the game was somewhat more lukewarm.

I’ve only come across a small number of bloggers who write extremely intelligently about games, and Shamus is one of those precious few. His arguments regarding Prince of Persia and the accessibility of games in general make a lot of sense, and I’m even tempted to say I agree with him 100% as far as his overview of the situation goes. Where I disagree is with regard to the desired outcome. In a nutshell, Shamus would like to see everyone playing games, and he believes the best way to do this is to effectively level the playing field. He presents Nintendo’s Wii as an example of this strategy working. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the Wii is a prime example of what I don’t want to see happen to gaming on a widespread basis. Ignoring the fact that I find most of the games on that platform dull and anaemic beyond belief (something which Shamus addresses, pointing out that, while the Wii’s games may not appeal to everyone, the overall philosophy behind them can and should be carried over to other styles), I find the whole concept of a “casual” gaming platform where everything is dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator repellent. True, the end result is that everyone’s in the same boat, but that’s only because the control system is so clumsy that everyone, regardless of their gaming ability, ends up thrashing around like a disabled jellyfish.

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Operation red menace

Attention, comrades! Who can withstand the charms of Tim Curry hamming it up with his most overdone Rrrrrrussian accent?

Ivana Miličević certainly can’t, which is presumably why she can’t keep a straight face during this mission briefing FMV. Call me crazy, but when I can tell people have had a lot of fun making something, I definitely find myself more likely to enjoy the end product. Silly, intentionally hammy video sequences like these are the perfect antidote to the sort of overblown, pompous imitations of Hollywood that we’re increasingly finding in computer games. The fact that the editor had enough of a sense of humour to leave the aforementioned flub in just seals the deal. You can watch the FMV in question on YouTube at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=16Mpc3ux4Wk - skip ahead to 4:25. (Miličević, by the way, appeared in Casino Royale as Mads Mikkelsen’s girlfriend - the one who did very little other than to almost have her arm lopped off. She also played Riley Finn’s annoying wife in that dreadful Season 6 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, As You Were, the only redeeming feature of which was that at least it wasn’t Hell’s Bells, which followed immediately after it. I’m still undecided as to whether her role here constitutes a step up or a step down from these. At least here, she and Tim Curry have fun trying to outdo each other in the “ridiculous accent” stakes.)

Yes, I now own a copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. As I mentioned in a previous post, EA have relented somewhat and released a patch for the game, allowing users to deactivate their copies and no longer be limited to the idiotic “five installs only” cut-off. Is the situation ideal? No, it absolutely isn’t. You still have to connect to EA’s server to activate your copy, just so you can play it at all (and that includes the single player mode), which is all well and good until EA either goes down the can or decides to stop maintaining the activation server (whichever happens first), and, in the event of a system crash, preventing you from manually disabling your copy, that means one of your five activations will be lost to the ages. Still, I can’t deny that this is a step in the right direction, and it gives me confidence that EA may, at least, have come round to the fact that their moronic rights management implementation may have done them considerably more harm than good. (Similar deauthorisation tools have also been released for Bioshock and Spore, the latter being the game that kicked off the public backlash against this whole sorry affair. Of course, whether similar tools will be released for Mass Effect, Crysis Warhead et al remains to be seen. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath.)

Still, at least I am now able to enjoy a very fun RTS punctuated by FMV sequences that are every bit as entertaining as the game itself. EA have created a great game here; it’s just a shame they had to turn so many potential customers away from it with their needless DRM.

Was Santa good to you?

Well, another Christmas has been and gone. I’ve decided to put my PhD work to one side until the New Year, but I’m back to work at the library tomorrow, so it doesn’t really feel like I’ve had much in the way of a festive break this year. Alas, I can’t really complain, as it’s simply the luck of the draw: I work Wednesdays and Saturdays, and, with Christmas falling on a Thursday this year, I’ve missed out on any additional days off. Next year, with Christmas on a Friday, I’ll end up with a more generous stretch of time to put my feet up.

Anyway, presents! In something of a change in tradition, I didn’t get any movies this year. (As it happens, I’m still waiting on the US Blu-ray releases of Planet Terror, Death Proof and the Canadian Sin City, but, seasonal postal delays being what they are, I’m not entirely surprised that they didn’t show.) Instead, I contented myself with two packets of sour flavour Jelly Bellies, as well as Tomb Raider: Underworld for PC and the 3-disc Legendary Edition of Echoes of War, a symphonic recording of compositions from Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo series of games. Oh, and a copy of the From Dusk to Dawn trilogy on DVD from my work colleagues. My final gift, which I’ve actually had up and running since the middle of November (hence it not really feeling like a Christmas present as such, although technically it was), is my very nice speaker setup, which remains something of a rarity for me in that it’s one of the few pieces of computer equipment I’ve bought and had not one single complaint about.

In that past, we’ve generally had the grandparents from both sides of the family over for Christmas dinner, but this year, with all but one of them being six feet under, things were a little different. As a result, myself, my parents and my brother did something we’ve never done before and actually went out for our evening meal, to the Kama Sutra on Sauchiehall St.

Afterwards, we trooped back home to watch the premiere of the new Wallace & Gromit film, A Matter of Loaf and Death, which aired last night on BBC1. I personally enjoyed it a lot, even if it did feel a bit, well, slight in comparison with the previous shorts. It did feel like something of a return to form after the feature-length The Curse of the Were-rabbit, however, which for all its strengths felt like it was lacking the special something which made the shorts so memorable. In any event, Nick Park’s masterpiece remains, for me, The Wrong Trousers, which is just about as perfect as storytelling can get.

Anything goes

The seventh season of Spooks began airing last night on BBC1 (the second episode is on tonight), and it started with a bang. Literally.

** Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for the first episode follow. **

One thing that continues to impress me about Spooks is the climate that has been created in which literally no member of the cast is safe. Anyone can die at any point, and I don’t mean that in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer sense where anyone can die provided they aren’t in the opening titles or the significant other of someone in the opening titles (unless their name happens to be Tara Maclay, that is): literally anyone can cop it at any given point. During the year-long break between Season 6 ending and Season 7 starting, the big question mark was over the head of Jo Portman, who, at the end of the final episode of Season 6, looked very dead indeed. To the credit of all those involved, a remarkably good job was done of avoiding giving away whether or not Jo survived, including omitting any mention of the actress playing her, Miranda Raison, from the press materials, trailers and even the opening title sequence. But survive she did, and I for one was genuinely surprised (pleasantly, I might add) to see her back.

Above: The old and the new.

Of course, there is an old saying that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and, while Jo may still be in one piece, the same cannot be said for Adam Carter, who was literally blown to smithereens at the end of the first episode. If nothing else, you’ve got to admire a show that has the balls to do away with its lead character in the first episode of a new series. I knew the actor playing Adam, Rupert Penry-Jones, was leaving at some point in this series, and it became clear from the start of the episode, when they parachuted Richard Armitage in (much in the same way that Penry-Jones was parachuted in at the start of Season 3, I might add), that he was being lined up to take over as the young male lead (the true lead will always, in my opinion, be the wonderful Peter Firth, the only actor to have appeared in every episode of every series), but I didn’t expect Adam to leave so soon, or in such a way. I figured he’d get in at least another couple of episodes before bowing out, and, given that the writers had already killed off his wife (in Season 4), I didn’t for one minute expect him to do the same with him.

Elsewhere, this did feel like Spooks getting back to basics after a dodgy past couple of series. The references to ye olden days (Armitage’s character at one point asks after Tom Quinn, the show’s original lead) were a nice touch, and, by the looks of it, it appears that the new season will be dipping into Cold War nostalgia, setting up the Russians as the main bad guys. There was even some location shooting in Moscow, which was rather interesting and made for a pleasant change of pace. Of course, I could end up being completely wrong - perhaps Season 7 will turn out to be as big a disappointment as the last couple of years - but, at the moment, things are looking decidedly promising. I’m sure his legion of adoring fans will string me up for this, but I’ve a feeling the removal of Adam Carter may end up providing the show with the shake-up it needed. Now if they can just get rid of Hermione Norris (and bring back Nicola Walker), I’ll be positively elated.

Waking the Dead: Series 5, Episodes 5 and 6: Subterraneans

Written by Ed Whitmore; Directed by Michael Offer

“We’ve all had days like that, haven’t we? You make one small mistake, and because of that you make a bigger one. You leave your wallet by the bed. Then you go up to get it. You trip over the rug, you break your leg. Next thing you know, you’re in hospital with a fatal infection. Just because you forgot your wallet.” - Dr. Nick Henderson

After a slightly rocky start, Series 5 finally hits its stride with a solid if not entirely remarkable case which doesn’t have to worry about introducing any new characters or airing the dirty laundry of those that are already established. The story here is that of Michael Sharman (Alexis Conran), a millionaire businessman who simply vanished a year ago. By chance, his body is found locked in the cellar of an old munitions factory, the evidence suggesting that he had been kept alive by his captor for several months, despite no ransom having ever been demanded. A chain of events leads the team to Sharman’s former neighbour, Nick Henderson (Toby Stephens), a celebrated scientist leading a bizarre double life.

Fairly early on in the game, it becomes abundantly clear that Henderson is as guilty as they come, partly because of the evidence against him and partly because we, the audience, are granted intimate access to his daily activities, which include lying to his wife (Nicola Stephenson) about both his whereabouts and his employment status, holing up in a small shed on an allotment overlooking the site of Sharman’s imprisonment, desperately dashing around searching for an alibi for the day of Sharman’s disappearance, and, when the net closes in, going on the run with his wife after hoodwinking her with a sob story about him having discovered an outbreak of SARS in the UK which the government and the police are conspiring to hush up by doing him in. It all borders on farcical, and, particularly in the second part, the increasing absurdity of Henderson’s claims does detract somewhat from what should have been a tense situation (there is a continual undercurrent which suggests that he may end up doing to his wife what he did to Sharman and at least one other victim), but it’s all quite entertaining, and given that it’s sandwiched between two considerably darker episodes, it makes for a welcome change of pace. Not that that flashbacks to Sharman slowly rotting away and going mad in his prison aren’t brutal, however. In fact, the sheer banality of Henderson’s reason for killing him makes the deeply calculated nature of his incarceration all the more shocking.

Ultimately, Subterraneans isn’t a hugely noteworthy or memorable episode, but it works, and the slightly different nature of the case’s progression (i.e. knowing the identity of the villain from a fairly early stage) succeeds in shaking up the formula a little.

Holby connections: Michael Offer has directed several episodes of Holby City over the years, while Kelly Harrison (Tina) played ambulance technician Nikki Marshall in Casualty between Series 16 and 18. Finally, Nicola Stephenson (Julia Henderson) played nurse Julie Fitzjohn in Holby City for its first three series.