"Captain America: The First Avenger"

I have something of an inconsistent relationship with superhero comics. While I sometimes find the ideas and characters compelling the narratives often lend themselves towards cheap, repetitive thrills and rather lame science fantasy. For every Watchmen, which effectively showed that superhero comics could be a serious artform with a multilayered narrative and a number of valuable social and literary messages, you have a ream of comic lines which are just melodramatic romps with lots of explosions, people holding shocked expressions on their faces and unsurprising twist endings where people who were supposed to be dead or absent show up for a final frame full-page profile shot. It makes it hard to take the medium seriously when it's so often pulpy or unfulfilling. It's no wonder, then, that I have an equally strained relationship with superhero films. I'll admit I'm not a reader of Marvel comics; as ridiculous as DC is I find something reassuring about the safe and relatively trustworthy presence of Batman which simply lacks an appropriate equivalent in Marvel's circles. The handful of Marvel works I've read have left me thinking that when push comes to shove they're probably no better and that I'd be better off sticking to the DC characters with whom I at least have familiarity to get me by.

However this has never stopped me from viewing the film adaptations of Marvel superhero comics, and they seem to have managed a relatively consistent quality-to-quantity ratio recently. The first Iron Man was a pretty solid introduction, and while Iron Man 2 suffered from being more of the same and thus less notable a few other good ones like X-Men: First Class have kept me reasonably interested. In the lead up to this big Avengers tie-in Marvel has been planning they've done Thor too, which was okay but felt kind of rushed, and the now semi-redundant The Incredible Hulk which was... just okay. As for the previous series of X-Men films which would be virtually unwatchable without Ian McKellen carrying the rest of the cast (including Patrick Stewart, unfortunately) and the Spider-Man trilogy, of which I only saw the second and thought it was crap in spite of everyone apparently loving it, well, let's just not mention those. They seem, however, to be doing a decent job with their Avengers-related films. Not amazing or anything, but decent.

"Decent" pretty much sums up Captain America: The First Avenger. It's solid, it's robust, it's got enough action and enough laughs and enough romance and enough seriousness to get the job done without exactly pushing any major envelopes. It's kind of like Captain America himself. He's a big strong guy who can jump ten feet and outrun a car but he's not flying, throwing tanks through the air or shooting lightning at people. He's portrayed with similar stoicness by Chris "That's Actually Hilarious" Evans, who gives us a reasonably naturalistic performance. We get the impression that Steve Rogers aka Captain America is a kind of idealistic guy with a healthy dose of courage and a good heart but we never really have it shoved down our throats, which is nice. What we see the most is his humility and altruism which of course serve as an ideal counterpoint to his opponent, Red Skull.

While you would think that the classic comic book villain horrifying visage would already make Red Skull fairly hard to swallow the fact that he's played by Hugo Weaving, who is a massive ham sandwich on rye bread with cheese and a dash of mustard, turns him into an unfathomable caricature of the tallest order. We have absolutely no sympathy with this villain, nor does he have understandable motivations. Occasionally people say he's "nuts" but that's about it. He speaks in an outrageously exaggerated pseudo-German accent and has some diabolical plan to take over the world. Or destroy the world. One of those two. He seems to go for the 'destroying' option towards the end but it's suggested that he still wants to take over as well. He gets some kind of magic energy from a cube which I think may have been in the Thor post-credits sequence but it's never really explained and that lets him build distintegration cannons and some kind of super plane called the Valkyrie which has bombs that can wipe out whole cities... I think. No one ever says that but you see these flying bomb things with city names on it so I guess that was the plan. He also has Toby Jones, who seems to have scored decent secondary roles in loads of films lately, as his evil scientist offsider who inevitably gets cold feet. One day can't we have a villain and chief henchman team who actually get along? It's not helped by the unfathomable motives of Red Skull.

Of course this segues into the whole plot about taking down Red Skull. Despite being a World War Two film the actual German forces are conspicuously absent for virtually all of it. The swastika is only displayed a handful of times in the first half of the film and at a conveniently early juncture Red Skull's nefarious organisation, HYDRA, goes rogue from its Nazi affiliation and starts operating their own agenda. This accomodates a huge private army and numerous facilities. If Nazi Germany barely had the resources to stand on its own, where is HYDRA getting all the metal for planes and the recruits for soldiers and so on once they sever ties with Hitler? Good outsourcing? It reduces the sense of plausibility when we have this ridiculously cheesy evil organisation like SPECTRE on steroids with so much gear in the middle of the war. This is problematic because as mentioned before Captain America is a hero who maintains a lot of his believability and humanity; he's clearly above human power but he's not alienated as some heroes are. It would have been a lot more effective in my opinion to have pitted him against the Axis as part of the actual war rather than some kind of side operation against this similar but ultimately unrelated secret army. At least having HYDRA working on its own avoids what I like to term the "Wolfenstein Nazi syndrome" where despite being stretched to the absolute limit in a hopeless battle they couldn't win somehow late-war Nazis are so often depicted with access to beyond-modern levels of technology squirrelled away in bunkers and stuff, but it's still implausibly powerful and well-equipped for a private organisation in the Forties. Speaking of which, the HYDRA troops even have this ridiculous "Hail HYDRA!" salute where they stick both hands in the air. It looks completely absurd and is impossible to take seriously. This whole thing should have been dropped. Instead we get the now-overdone Marvel film conceit where our hero must fight a villain who has the same powers as him but is evil. It happened with Stark versus Stane in Iron Man, Stark versus Vanko in Iron Man 2 (good power armour man versus bad power armour man), with Bruce Banner and Blonsky in The Incredible Hulk (good Hulk versus bad Hulk) and for all intents and purposes in Thor with Thor (good Norse god) versus Loki (bad Norse god). Now we have Captain America (good serum-enhanced soldier) versus Red Skull (bad serum-enhanced soldier). Time to come up with a new plot, guys!

This all serves as an uncomfortable juxtaposition to the rest of the film which, beyond Captain America's own enhancement, presents a reasonably realistic and only mildly romanticised depiction of the war. The montage sequence of Steve becoming a propaganda figure for the war bonds movement unaffiliated with the reality of the war is considerably effective and is rather unceremoniously and disappointingly dropped after the first part of the film the moment Steve attacks the first HYDRA base to rescue Bucky and is immediately established as a perfect combatant and leader. Again it comes back to the silliness of the main plot involving Red Skull and HYDRA which, while providing the suitably action-paced superhero fodder, is not nearly as compelling or interesting as the exploration of Steve's own character and the interesting contrast of his very science-fictiony super-soldier enhancement and the associated personal power and glamour with the harsh and bitter reality of the front lines. It might have been effective, for instance, to see Steve thrown into battle by his superiors strong but unskilled and inexperienced, how his individual power contrasts with Nazi military might or the hollowness of promotion and moneymaking compared to life-and-death in the field. Unfortunately however the ideas presented in the first half of the film, which are the best ones, never get borne to fruition. Similarly all of HYDRA's sci-fi weirdness makes the sci-fi enhancement of Steve seem relatively mundane and unopen to artistic scrutiny.

The other characters are fairly unremarkable. Tommy Lee Jones puts in an acceptable but relatively textbook performance as Colonel Phillips, Sebastian Stan's Bucky is sadly undeveloped due to a lack of screen time, and Captain America's team of all-Allied buddies are introduced too late to be particularly noteworthy. Stanley Tucci's Dr. Erskine is unfortunately a rather uninspired mentor-figure and on a nitpicky level I can't imagine anyone from that period having such dishevelled facial hair. Dominic Cooper's Howard Stark is another interesting character who doesn't get enough development. Too much time was wasted on stupid Red Skull scenes! Lastly Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter, while of course very pretty in an extremely proper kind of way and given a few impressive moments is nonetheless a predictable romantic hook for Steve and similarly fulfils an incongruous and anachronistic action-girl stereotype of the kind so favoured in these kinds of films in a now-cliché and equally condescending attempt to avoid the 'Bond girl' dilemma. While all these actors give solid performances they don't get enough time to shine.

What Captain America boils down to, then, is a game of two halves. We have the rather compelling exploration of a superhero in the brutal scenario of the Second World War and a group of curious themes to be queried about the consequences of such a situation but it's sacrificed for a boring action-based plot surrounding HYDRA and the lamentable Red Skull. I know a superhero film like this shouldn't necessarily aim for great intellectual depth but in that case I shouldn't be teased with the tantalising hints of it we get in the first half of the film! It's a shame it becomes such a romp by the end. Similarly it looks like we'll have to wait until The Avengers to get a look at how an All-American Hero from the Forties might interact with the society and culture of the Twenty-first century and Samuel L Jackson's increasingly arbitrary appearances as Nick Fury are becoming quite needless. Unfortunately there's too much franchise direction in here. If a film like this had been made on its own and for its own sake it could have been something altogether more valuable. It's a good watch and is reasonably engaging but had it gone a step further into the artistic ground rather than the safe and comfortable retreat of action it could have pushed itself into the spotlight, like Steve Rogers in one of his bond drives, as a truly great film.

"The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings is boring. There, I said it. No one else had the guts to. I have mixed feelings about Brandon Sanderson. On the one hand he took The Wheel of Time, a series which Robert Jordan had, until his death, been pointlessly spinning out for books upon books with overcomplicated plots, excessive characters and increasingly turgid prose, and turned it into something punchy, energetic and reinvigorated while still maintaining the original style. His own writing, on the other hand, possibly leaves something to be desired. I've read four Sanderson fantasy novels now, the three volumes of the Mistborn trilogy and The Way of Kings, the first and so far only item of an alleged ten-volume series. Mistborn was a trilogy which started reasonably strongly, only for Sanderson to kill off his most interesting character and over the remaining two novels explain some of the mystery and create a haunting apocalyptic scenario with almost every main character dying only to handwave it away by having one of the survivors literally become a god and set everything right. It seems a little inconsistent of Sandy, who loves to resolve the seemingly unwinnable scenario. Spoilers will abound for The Way of Kings in this review as well, by the way, so if you haven't read it and intend to then be warned, although you should also be warned that this novel doesn't match the hype and you might want to reconsider investing in the reading time.

I picked up The Way of Kings because people have been going on about it like the absolute blazes and it was meant to be the next best thing ever after Tolkien and Oporto chicken burgers, although practically all Fantasy is described that way these days, be it this or A Game of Thrones, which I haven't read but is being bandied about alot, or The Name of the Wind, which actually managed to live up to most of its reputation. The problem with The Way of Kings, though, as I already stated, is that it's boring. I can't sugar coat it. It comes in at a whopping one thousand pages and it's meant to be the first of ten volumes. I suggest you think about that for a second. Consider the one they're all compared to, The Lord of the Rings, where in the space of a single book (it's not a trilogy remember) and a thousand pages Tolkien composed a timeless classic which ran all the way from beginning to end and was still incredibly rich and complex. It's considered trite these days but in my opinion Tolkien is easily the best Fantasy author. Sometimes I think he's the only good Fantasy author. Sometimes I think since he accidentally more or less created the genre his work doesn't have to be labelled as Fantasy. Regardless, his is the master work. No one will ever top it. No one will ever have the subtlety and simple aestheticism of language, the sheer depth of backstory or the same totally genuine narrative and characters. It's not a criticism of other Fantasy authors, it's just a fact. So people really shouldn't talk about novels like The Way of Kings as being the next best Tolkien sort of thing, a labelled equally misapplied to The Wheel of Time. The Lord of the Rings is on a completely different plane to The Way of Kings.

"Grey" is how I would describe the novel. Sanderson presents to us the world of Roshar, a rocky and windswept landscape constantly buffeted by huge tempests called "highstorms". There are humans and horses but other than that the flora and fauna are virtually unrecognisable. Lots of emotions and situations have "spren" associated with them, insubstantial sprites which manifest in the air if you're feeling certain things or certain kinds of weather are occurring and so on. This is kind of interesting with ones like flamespren and fearspren at the beginning because it gives evidence to people's feelings and conditions and stuff but when there are abstractions personified as well like "gloryspren" and "honourspren" it just becomes weird. Hopefully this is explained eventually, as is having men and horses in with this weirdness because if not it makes the entire setting seem weak and inconsistent. He also presents us a society where people with brown eyes are the lower class and people with other colours are the aristocracy. Men do practical work while women are universally scholars and artists and are the only literate members of society. There's a weird energy called 'stormlight' which powers devices including a sort of power-armour called Shardplate. The Kingdom of Alethkar are fighting a war of vengeance against some non-human people called the Parshendi over the death of their previous king. A number of other nations are named and identified on maps but only a few are visited, and all but one fleetingly, in the course of the narrative. There's a lot of implied history about people called the Knights Radiant and a time when apparent nasties called the Voidbringers wanted to kill everyone. You can tell Sanderson's figured out a pretty detailed world with a variety of different cultures, and if anything the cultures and geography vary a bit from your standard 'Europe by any other name' setting, although the people of Alethkar, the Alethi, don't exactly push too many envelopes away from a reasonably textbook pseudo-medieval European template of feudal politics and general social organisation. The sense of originality is also hampered somewhat by the presence of the Vorin religion, a sort of straw-man Catholicism of the kind delightful hacks like David Eddings were always eager to employ. Nonetheless things feel fresh, although the image of this entirely gloomy, overcast, desolate world is a little uninspiring at times, and maybe it's meant to be but the lack of variety is a little unhelpful. Even Kharbranth, where the secondary plot takes place, feels a bit insubstantial at times even though it's meant to be a wondrous "city of bells".

So into this setting Sanderson plops roughly four important characters and a few others who get a little attention in side passages, sort of like the maid and the butler in a stately home. The problem with them is that Sanderson's third-person narrators are almost universally of the brooding and introspective sort, who spend paragraphs and pages internally analysing their emotions and behaviour rather than presenting them through their actions. This was a problem equally true of the Mistborn series. Sanderson seems to like to roughly divide the majority of his chapters between brooding and action, and this contributes to a lack of pace and a sense of repetitiveness. Too much brooding, and you know you're about to get a long fight scene. If a fight scene's been dragging on, you know you're up for some brooding next. Sometimes characters brood while fighting, or between fights, and very little is given over to the exposition, which is usually the interesting part. Not enough time is devoted to dialogue either, which can sometimes be more engaging than the action and brooding as well. It feels like an application of the "tell don't show" philosophy and while some people might think it makes the characters well-developed to me they were shadowy and indistinct. Critic Richard Jenkyns once semi-famously described the characters of The Lord of the Rings as "anemic, and lacking in fibre", and while I certainly don't agree about that text it fits so perfectly for Sanderson's novel that I had to mention it here. His characters are rather dull and the conversations are often stilted, awkwardly phrased, unsubtly expository or constructed of attempts at casual, flirtatious and "witty" banter which come across as cack-handed and inept, like mediocre actors reading a weak script.

Ultimately it makes his characters unbelievable. They're all too stock, too mould-fitting, too perfect. They're not perfect like scary Ayn Rand characters with unfathomable motivations. They're just typical archetypes. There's the soldier, Kaladin, a former surgeon with a textbook haunted past who wants to save people but can't and is very frustrated about it. He happens to be virtually unbeatable with a spear and later develops what are for all intents and purposes magical powers involving stormlight. There's the prince, Dalinar, who is the typical grouchy, stern old leader who feels all guilty about killing and war but knows he has to do what honour demands. He also happens to wear this power armour stuff, kills hundreds of men at a time in combat and has a magic sword which lets him insta-kill people. Thirdly is Shallan, a young scholar who has gone to steal a MacGuffin from a powerful princess by becoming her ward but instead becomes enraptured by the world of scholarship and study. She too develops the ability to use magic. Fourthly there's Szeth, an assassin who sparked off the whole thing by killing the previous king of Alethkar and is now being used in fresh plots of nefariousness, much to his chagrin. He's also the greatest killer in the world and is completely untouchable in a melee. They feel like bad video game characters, their personalities secondary to their physical skills. They're just all too good at what they do to be believable, and while they all spend their time brooding even the murderous Szeth is one of these four 'tormented individuals' along parallel lines without any variety or fluctuation in their behaviour. Their big, major character traits never exhibit flaws; they are universal characteristics. The most interesting one is Shallan, who at least breaks the warrior mould and whose character arguably goes through a bit more development. Kaladin, in reverse, is somewhat more interesting in the flashback sections from before he becomes a soldier. Dalinar's sole source of variety is to be employed in the arbitrary and needless romantic subplot. However they're all rather insubstantial and never impress themselves upon the reader. It's to a significant extent the fault of Sanderson's incredibly prosaic language, which strives for the most straightforward and sufficiently-detailed account of action and thought without any real flair or aesthetic enhancement.

The plot too suffers from this. Sure, it may be part one of ten, but the novel is all just set-up. The main overarching narrative, as far as can be determined, isn't even fully established within the first novel. It's rather heavily implied that God is Dead and some other, evil god called Odium is going to destroy the world, which is so utterly bland, tired and predictable that I find it slightly insulting. If there is one thing I find tedious in Fantasy, it is the 'evil god' trope. Other than that the plot is virtually nonexistent. Dalinar tries to win the war against the Parshendi but is betrayed by his former friend and erstwhile ally Sadeas. Kaladin rises from an oppressed slave to a magic-wielding troop leader who gets his freedom in the end. Shallan tries to steal the MacGuffin, gets caught by her mentor but eventually ends up joining her anyway. All pretty standard stuff, really. That's the end of the book and the actual problem of Odium and the Voidbringers hasn't even been established yet as such. There are a lot of diversionary bits too with one-off characters where it seems like Sanderson just wants to show off the world he's invented. It's not integrated with effectiveness into the story, because too much of that is wasted on endless brooding and the action scenes which are not Sanderson's strength. Read one chapter about a guy in super armour waving a sword around and you've read them all. It's all the same: you run, trip people over, slash them with your sword or spear, occasionally an arrow grazes your helmet or whatever. There are a few moments in the flashbacks which are successful in conveying a sense of how absolutely bloody frantic, awful and terrifying it must be to participate in a real battle where lives are on the line for essentially no reason, but too much of it is just descriptions of unbelievable video game style untouchable fighting skill where Dalinar and Kaladin especially run around as blazes of boring glory. Sanderson clearly thinks these fights are extremely cool and impressive but they're tiresomely predictable and they seem amateurish and indecisive compared to the much more effective scenes which depict war as horrific, dehumanising and pointless.

Frankly what I think Sanderson needed in this one was a good editor. There's tonnes of material which could have been scrapped - overwrought descriptions, overlong brooding, unending fights - to pace the narrative better. It's almost all slog for the sake of a handful of very quickly described twists at the end, which seems to be something Sanderson likes. He also loves magic systems, and this one has 'lashing', which I think is also called "Surgebinding" or something. It basically involves manipulating gravity using stormlight. It's kind of interesting but when you've read some Sanderson like Mistborn these arbitrary magic systems start to feel a bit convoluted and like he's just reaching for the next 'out there' idea for some wacky magic. While this might sound like an immense contradiction in terms I've never liked magic in Fantasy. It only works when it's, say, the Tolkien style of magic where it's not really magic it's just great mental/artistic/spiritual potency, or the Rowling style of magic where everyone has it and it at least partially relies on words more than some special secret, because little cliques of mages and so on are generic and these 'special powers' just aren't believable when they're so alienated from real human experience.

There's not much more to say about The Way of Kings. I really don't understand why it's getting such amazingly good reviews but I guess maybe the combination of its length and the incredible dullness of its prose means that anyone can read it and feel like a clever clogs. I've got nothing against Sanderson; he seems like a good chap and his work on The Wheel of Time was a breath of fresh air but this just doesn't cut the mustard. It's too long for what actually happens, it's too generic Sanderson and the characters are lacking in depth. It's stuff like this which has me increasingly convinced that Fantasy as a genre is probably just mostly bad. I read Eddings as a kid but going back now it's ridiculously cheesy, although what makes it easier to swallow is you know that Eddings himself was finding it all just as cheesy as, if not cheesier than, the reader. Pratchett is sometimes suffocatingly smug. Brooks has good ideas but the rest of it is unengaging. Feist is similar to Sanderson - too many superheroes, dull characters and not enough plot. If you want Fantasy, stick to the reliable ones: The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. If those are too mainstream, consider looking into Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind. If that doesn't wet your whistle for speculative fiction, do yourself a favour and go for some good sci-fi: Philip K Dick, Asimov or Vonnegut, for instance. One thing I'll applaud Sanderson for is the lack of sex in his novels. Too many Fantasy authors try to 'sex up' their books (I'm looking at you, Rothfuss) and it's normally uncomfortable and unwieldy, and at least he avoids that. That doesn't redeem it though. I don't care what the fanboys and sycophants have been saying online; it's boring, it's too long, the characters are flat and it has nothing to say. If you can't do it in one book, I very much doubt you'll be able to do it in ten.

Adaptation and the Death of Culture

Sure, it's a melodramatic title. Nonetheless I think it's a problem which demands a little bit of an emotive response. It's becoming increasingly evident in my opinion that art is starting to degenerate in Western culture. I think it's a side effect of a number of issues; I could blame consumer economics or capitalism but I'd probably be better off blaming human nature and our tendence for slipping. What I mean is that we're becoming lazy as a culture. People's lives are so easy that we expect recreation and pleasure all the time, and the simpler and more direct it is the better. What this results in is an environment where people are apathetic about quality; as long as something is entertaining then it doesn't need any greater value. Of course this is a great boon for the corporate sector because as long as people essentially want to be exploited then it's a great source of profit, and greed drives the engines of consumption at both ends. So much creative product exists solely for the sake of playing off people's base emotions, the primitive human urge for awe-inspiring spectacle, cheap thrills or any other form of exploitation you could think of. Then again the other side's not in the clear either. Opposed to popular culture we have the literati, the educated elite with inscrutable novels which are written for the sake of being studied, works where if you enjoy yourself then you're either not appreciating it on the same level or completely failing to grasp the purpose of the art in question.

This is perhaps poorly explained. To summarize essentially what I perceive is a widening gap. On one side we have mass entertainment: simple, digestible and profiteering. On the other we have what I will questioningly term "high art": impenetrable texts, literary snobbery and egoism. Both sides disdain the other; the entertainment side sees high art as pointless, dull and existing only for the self-aggrandising gratification of the authors and critics. The literati side sees entertainment as crass, facile and stupid: intellectually irrelevant, manipulative and valueless. In the middle we have a kind of no-man's land. I think that's where I'm standing at the moment, wondering if the ground will just completely give away.

Why can't we have both, I ask? It's not that this situation's deliberate, really. I suppose you can blame profiteering on one hand for entertainment becoming more brainless and movements like Modernism on the other for making art inscrutable and tedious. The problem is that both factions are dominated by the worst examples possible of their respective camps. On the entertainment side of things this is where Adaptation becomes problematic. Look at things like the films of The Lord of the Rings or the 2009 Star Trek film. They were wildly popular, but both of them completely missed the point of their respective source materials. The Lord of the Rings wasn't about big drawn-out flashy battles and being 'cool', it was about an adventure, and sacrifice, and the folly of trying to seek permanence in a mortal world. As for Star Trek, well... the numerous TV series' had something to say in a vast number of episodes. In 2009 we received one film which was about turning something inherently meaningful and artistically charged yet also engrossing and entertaining into a film about nothing, a series of fight sequences and explosions which were always so much more powerful in the television series due to their rarity and consequences. In a matter of relevance to this blog's previous entries, consider Doctor Who. I know I look back on the Classic Series with blinding nostalgia but once again it has numerous examples of a fulfilled argument artistically as well as successful entertainment. Consider the notions about bigotry and fundamentalism in The Curse of Peladon, the horrors of war in Genesis of the Daleks or turning real people's pain into entertainment in Vengeance on Varos. Now I would struggle to find any examples from the New Series which really say anything apart from the sadly abandoned threads of possibility we were given in Series 5. The problem is that having something to say doesn't get your average punter into the cinema or watching the show. Look at Avatar, a ridiculously successful film with absolutely nothing to say which hadn't already been said and with vastly deeper and better examination by others but was lauded based on visuals alone. Is this all we are as a society? Have we become so lax and degenerate that all it takes are some explosions and flashing lights to make us feel like we've experienced something truly incredible?

But look at the other side, for instance. My favourite whipping boy for this is James Joyce's Ulysses. I was once legitimately told by a Modernist professor in a University English class that those of us who didn't find Ulysses to be anything special apparently hadn't grasped it or somehow hadn't read it properly. Joyce himself said he deliberately made it overcomplicated just so that academics would struggle for years to figure out what he meant. Parts of it are borderline incomprehensible and for significant sections you can lose all sense of who's who and what's going on, all in the name of self-conscious literary crypticness. That's not to say that it doesn't have some value, but it's vastly overrated, and so much of its praise clearly derives from an elaborate academic competitiveness seeking to outdo others by purporting to understand more about the novel. I could mention a number of the short stories of William Faulkner as a different example. I can't imagine how anyone could legitimately sit down, read them and derive any substantial kind of value from their content. They're mostly just beatdown tales of cynical nihilism and human degradation in the most perverse scenarios imaginable, and while I'm sure such situations do exist and have done throughout history the idea that they hold some kind of special place above other works is ludicrous. Indeed the very concept of "high art" is a ridiculous one, grounded in snobbery and pretension, egoism and self-gratification. If you could be bothered to read the whole thing then you can pretend you derived some unique artistic insight about reality or human nature and that makes you better than everyone else. At a basic level it's just as bad as populist entertainment. One is cheap and encourages human mediocrity and the other is at least subconsciously exclusionist and self-deceptive and is too emotionally dead to inspire or move.

The problem is that a human is a multinatured beast. We're animals, but we're also thinkers. It's in our makeup to be both pleasure-seeking and critical. In my view critical thought is irrelevant unless its attached to emotion and emotion is pointless and degrading if we're not critical about how we experience it. It is through the combination of the two that we learn and improve ourselves. That is why I seek the increasingly deserted middleground. I'd no more enjoy watching Avatar ever again in my life than I would having to suffer through rereading Ulysses. Give me Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? any day of the week. Give me Watchmen. Give me Dawn of the Dead. Give me something that will entertain me and make me think, and something that will make me think by entertaining me and entertain me by making me think. I consider that lately to be the great value of the speculative genre, as people broadly label science fiction, fantasy and all their permutations, in their best examples at least. Their unreal component entertains us and engages our imaginations, but it also lets us rethink and reinterpret our own nature and our own society and deliver an artistic message. And those examples up there, by the way? Give me all of them in their original format, after they were given limited attention by those scholars busy reinterpreting some inspid Jane Austen novel again, but before corporations took them and made them into mass entertainment (although I do like the film of Watchmen). To hell with entertainment and "high art" I say; give me True Art, which should do entertainment and argument better than either of the other two separately.

"Attack of the Cybermen"

What could be more appropriate for this blog than to start a foray into reviews of the Classic Series by looking at none other than the second ever Sixth Doctor serial? For some reason over the ages the Sixth Doctor has received an absurd amount of stick from some people for one reason or another and I cannot fathom why. I am certainly a Colin Baker fan. He's definitely the best of the Eighties Doctors, and while some would argue that's not saying much I'd have him up with the first four, P McG and the Smith in terms of Doctors who are more or less unimpeachable in my mind. People will have a big whinge about how his personality's too bombastic or his outfit is too ridiculous but you know what? His personality's that of the Doctor. So's his dress ensemble. Honestly he doesn't go wrong, and his performance in this serial is absolutely spot-on. He captures the sense of magnanimity, which is to say 'justified pride' as it were, perfectly, for which his appearance and expressions are completely perfect, yet he's also deeply compassionate and deviously clever. I'll get to all that.

Anyway, the Doctor and Peri show up on Earth and devious deeds are afoot. There's a lot of stuff about trying to find some kind of alien signal which might be a distress call and might not and isn't coming from where they think it is and it's being relayed and someone's watching to see who shows up and so on and it's not very well explained but it's covered up by lots of excellent banter between Peri and the Doctor as they stride about looking around which is rather funny and touching and does a good job of making you feel like something important's probably happening. I think it's meant to be that Lytton had been stealing stuff to build a transmitter for... some... reason...? It has something to do with sending a distress call to the Cryons for whom he was working but I'm not sure why he was doing it since they lacked the means to rescue him anyway. I'm not going to lie, the plot's pretty messy. There are these guys who want to steal the time ship the Cybermen have captured but it hasn't actually turned up yet, there's stuff about Cybermen wanting to blow up Telos as part of a science experiment and there's a rather awkward continuity tie-in where the Cyber-Controller is trying to prevent the events of "The Tenth Planet" from happening and while it's implied at one point that doing so would cause a paradox no one seems terribly bothered about the whole issue and that really it's a matter of the Cybermen being up to no good and the Doctor having to save the day. These elements have their place though. The plot with the Cryons raises the stakes regarding Telos. Similarly the two prison escapees, Stratton and Bates, as unrelated and pointless as their plot seems to be especially since they never encounter the Doctor and get shot and killed without ever impacting the main plot in a serious way despite quite a significant amount of screen time, do permit a nice exploration of life under the rule of the Cybermen, where failed Cyber-conversions are forced to perform mine-laying work in quarries which, as the Classic Series always does, somehow manage to convey an inexplicable sense of extraterrestrial alien wasteland.

There are some pretty brutal moments in this serial, and I'm not surprised that it had people whinging back in the Eighties when people thought it was just a kid's show. The diseased, mad Cybermen who are covered in sickly green mold and stumble around attacking even their own kind are pretty horrific to watch and the scene where Lytton's hands are crushed by the Cybermen so that blood runs down his fingers and he collapses in pain is fairly intense. It's all very satisfying, actually. There's a pretty high body count and as usual any bit where a Cyberman gets killed is rather shocking. The effects of the green fluid squirting fountain-like from their bodies, the small explosions which break out everywhere along their limbs and torso and they way they moan, spasm and stagger about can be extremely grotesque and it all rather effectively conveys how much the Cybermen have made themselves into monsters. The bit at the end where the Doctor runs into Cyber Control and mows down about four Cybermen, including the Controller and Leader, on his own are pretty visceral and intense and it's disturbing to see a real situation where the Doctor's completely run out of options and it's kill or be killed.

The Cybermen are pretty well performed in this one, and with the addition of the black-coloured Cybermen along with the guards at the dig site, the operators on Earth, the corrupted ones in the Tombs and the ones in Cyber Control you get a feeling like this is a serious operation going on without needing to see masses of them all at once. The Cyber Controller and the Leader have plenty of good opportunities to say "Excellent!" and rub their wicket-keeper hands together with logical glee and the Cyber conversion process is made to look as unpleasant, undignified and degrading as ever. The bit where the Cyber Controller walks in at the end seemingly victorious and declaims without preamble that "Emotion is a weakness" to the Doctor is classic Cyberman behaviour and right on the money as far as the tone of the episode is concerned. Indeed I would have even liked more exploration of the issues surrounding Cyber-conversion but as such larger-than-life, self-assured villains they are perfect foils for the Sixth Doctor. It also only makes it funnier when, for instance, the Cyber Leader takes Peri away from the others for the express purpose of letting her get warmer clothing to wear on Telos or when, after discovering that the Vastial supplies are about to explode right at the end, one Cyberman makes the universally-recognised hand gesture to "leg it" to his buddy and they both plod out as fast as they can before an enormous explosion destroys Cyber Control. One thing which I found a bit confusing in the second episode is it's never entirely clear where the Tombs are in relation to Cyber Control. Are they directly underneath or connected by caves and tunnels over a certain distance? It all seems to depend on how quickly they want someone to get from one location to another.

Regardless the set-pieces are all done well, particularly the Doctor's frustration at the Time Lords for manipulating him into arriving and the scene where the Doctor and Peri take out the Cyber-converted Policemen, which is both funny and exciting. There was even a part when Lytton was grabbed by the Cybermen which genuinely made me jump. One thing I'll say about Lytton, though, is that while it's nice to have an alien on board and to have the Doctor thinking he's misjudged someone I'm not entirely sure how honourable Lytton's commitment to the Cryons was. I mean yes he was helping the underdog and not allying himself with the Cybermen the way he did with the Daleks but it's still implied that he was doing it for an absolute truckload of diamonds or access to the time ship, not just out of the goodness of his heart. I guess the point is that he stuck to his guns and was willing to help a noble cause for a price? Nonetheless it seems like helping the Cryons is a rather peripheral side-benefit to the fact that he's going to nab himself a time machine. Either way it was a very effective way of making the Doctor question himself and his normal behaviour. Lytton himself is well performed and manages to stop the fake heist scenes at the beginning from being too boring or annoying and he's a good addition to the episode.

As for other characters, I'm not sure how charitable I can be to the Cryons. I like their design, even if the costumes are a bit cheap-looking, and while I can imagine that people who lived in cold might move and speak rather slowly, at times they come across as kind of weird and inscrutable for no reason and it's not really clear what their motivations are. At times they seem kind of suicidal and like they've accepted the loss of their planet and the fact that it'll be blown up and at other times they want it back from the Cybermen. It's not really helped by the sheer complexity of the plot and the fact that it just doesn't get enough explanation. In spite of this you still have a reasonable sense of what's going on, and it does make me feel that the two forty-five minute parts is a good length for a story. That, however, is especially due to the complete change of setting from London in the first episode to Telos in the second which makes the scenario seem expansive and prevents the locations, especially the inevitably dull back streets and sewers, from becoming stale.

There's also Peri to be mentioned, and I really feel like there couldn't be a much more suitable companion for the Sixth Doctor. Although she fulfils the classic companion role of asking a lot of questions so that the Doctor can provide us with exposition her curiosity is well-lampshaded by the Doctor's occasionally exasperated responses and her conversations with the Doctor are, as I stated, very enjoyable to watch. She doesn't really have much of a role plot-wise besides as an observer but she does go above and beyond the call of duty by very generously being incredibly easy on the eye and working with the Doctor rather than complaining or second-guessing him too much. As I implied at the beginning, however, it's Colin Baker's performance as the Doctor which is the real stand-out and is what makes this episode so good to watch. The plot may not make too much sense but at least it's there and it's very watchable, and while the "The Tenth Planet" stuff is too much continuity the jokes with the Chameleon Circuit are nice nods to early concepts which were integral the show and grounded the Sixth Doctor well for his second adventure. I think that, rather than the obvious choices, and story issues aside, you probably couldn't go too far wrong with "Attack of the Cybermen" as a quintessential piece of Doctor Who and that it's a pretty strong indicator of how much more Colin Baker deserved in the lead role.

"A Good Man Goes To War"

Big.

That's a nice, neutral adjective with which to accurately describe "A Good Man Goes To War", and it certainly does feel big, this episode. It's not really big in the season finale sense of the entire universe being at stake, and indeed I'm not entirely sure what was at stake in this episode, but it did indeed feel big. You feel like there's a lot in it. That doesn't mean that there's a lot of story or a lot of content but just that it's crammed with... stuff. Now I for one have never been a particularly strong proponent of the artistic merits of spectacle even when it's done properly and I've got to say that it's not exactly happening in a great way here. Sure, there's a lot of action and we're fed a lot of new characters and concepts but it comes across as purposeless and rather self-involved. It's an episode which is big for its own sake and while it's not without good elements it's fairly disappointing in my opinion to see Doctor Who wasting its time on these kind of stories. I think my problem is that I love the current characters and their actors but I simply don't appreciate the way modern television writing operates and I think my ongoing dilemma with this series has been that I want to see the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory getting to do their thing in Classic Series-esque serials which give them room to breathe and aren't all about arcs and recurring elements so that we can just appreciate the show's strongest aspects together. Maybe last series felt more like that story-wise, and maybe that's why I haven't enjoyed this series as much.

Sadly however I can merely dream of greatness as far as Doctor Who is concerned and must instead content myself with that with which Moffat chooses to feed us each week. What does this episode do well? Firstly the acting's great of course, it answers a few questions and it has a few cool moments. What does this episode do badly? The story's not exactly very, well, good, it doesn't answer enough questions and it doesn't make its points strongly enough.

The problem is that we're meant to spend our whole time going "Damn, that was cool!" every time something happens and while there are some nice set pieces it all feels kind of insubstantial and like nothing is actually happening. We know the Clerics have kidnapped Amy so that they can raise this child with a time head and use it as a weapon against the Doctor but it doesn't feel relevant. It feels like it's just about the Doctor defeating this army for essentially no reason. Yes, it was a dick move to kidnap Amy and it's all very dashing that the Doctor didn't cause any casualties to rescue her and so on but it doesn't really have that much to it. Amy's been kidnapped, the Doctor and Rory go rescue her. That's basically the entire story of a whole forty five minute mid-series finale and I just found it a little hollow. There's a lot of faffing around gathering allies and tricking armies and so on and while it is in some respect impressive there's only really so far that the rule of cool should be applying. Maybe it's too much of me to expect speculative fiction like this to actually deal with issues or strive for some kind of artistic meaning every week but I just feel like Doctor Who's premise and characters are wasted on these kinds of epic episodes, because there's no place for a statement amid the bombast and frantically-arranged set-pieces.

The allies, too, are a little unimpressive. Having a Victorian-era Silurian sleuth, a Sontaran nurse and that fat blue guy from "The Pandorica Opens" just seem like they're meant to be weirdly incongruous and mismatched for the sake of it, possibly so that an action figure set of "The Doctor's Army" could be released with the Doctor, Rory in the Roman garb he wore again for rather weak reasons this episode, the Silurian detective and her maid, the Sontaran, fat blue man and maybe like the Pirate captain who has a totally arbitrary cameo and one line. His presence would have been way cooler if the episode he'd been in hadn't been so crap. Speaking of which, how did the eye patch lady, Madame Kovarian, escape with the real baby if Captain Avery and his annoying son had the ship? Maybe it'll all get explained in the next half of the series as that the Silence did it and made everyone forget or something. Then we'll see a Silent walking away from an explosion in slow motion adjusting his tie while the James Bond theme plays.

In this way even more questions were raised. So what is in Melody Pond's future? Yes, we now know River is Amy and Rory's daughter and that she is indeed in possession of an apparently rather curly-haired time head, but we still don't know what the dealio is with the Doctor's death or the astronaut or whatever. I know Moffat wants people to keep watching but shouldn't he be doing that by making people go "Wow, this show is really good, I want to see more" rather than "I wonder what happens next time"? I realise cliffhangers and unanswered questions are a big part of maintaing interest but doesn't it seem like the easy option rather than the best one? I suppose it's not really Moffat's fault. If it's what he wants, and what the BBC wants, and what the public wants, and with the combination of those three things means that the show will keep going then it makes sense. He's not been taking the outright piss by having the Doctor in love with his companion or writing his lead like a complete buffoon or having the Daleks responsible for every damn thing that happens but it's still a shame that it can't do something more experimental. I suppose in a sense this wasn't like your average episode of Doctor Who, but at the same time it wasn't what it could have been. Again, however, it's pointless to speculate. This is what we've got, and while we've got three cracking lead actors and at least a bit of restraint it has its place. I guess I just have unrealistic expectations.

Anyway. River's Amy and Rory's daughter. Big whoop, I'm afraid. It wasn't exactly a surprise, but I guess we have to say fair dos to Moffat for actually giving us an answer even if it was a bit of an anticlimax rather than spinning it out even further into realms of speculation and mystery. We're not watching "Lost" yet. They also suggest that her regeneration powers, as presumably witnessed from the same girl in "Day of the Moon", are a result of being conceived in the TARDIS, which is another reasonable bit of explanation. I find it odd that they beat about the bush so much regarding the term conception but are willing to have a cross-species lesbian cunnilingus joke featuring the Silurian and her maid and two guys called the Thin Fat Gay Married Anglican Marines or something which, apart from beating us over the head with the whole "homosexuality will be accepted in the future and our contemporary heteronormative society is so horrible" thing which I think Moffat pushes not out of concern for the issue in question but rather because he wants to annoy people and get cheap laughs, suggests a bit of a mixed message about sexual liberation in this series. It's okay to crack gay jokes but we can't be open about the scientific nature of the process of human reproduction? Bit odd in my opinion.

Anyway what else is crap in this episode? The Headless Monks are pretty stupid. I would have liked an explanation of how they work and it was extremely predictable that the Doctor would disguise himself as one of them. There's also something kind of dull about having the Clerics as the army stealing the child. I know it represents the fact that humanity in the future has turned against him but there's just something incredibly incompetent and naff about the Clerics which I find unappealing. Maybe that's the point - even the weak fear him. The Headless Monks' power swords are ripped straight from Warhammer 40,000 in case anyone was interested. There's a lot of guff about the Doctor not giving a straight answer about whether he's ever had kids even though he obviously has, his very first companion was his granddaughter for heaven's sake, and he scarpers at the end alone without much reason. I guess answers will be forthcoming. Oh, and one other thing - that warehouse where they seem to film every vaguely military-industrial human setting of the present or relatively near future these days? It's overused and boring. I honestly do not believe that a futuristic asteroid base would look like that inside. Then again, why do the Clerics dress like modern day soldiers? I doubt that current military fashion will survive the next two thousand years. That's quite a long time. Maybe, assuming it's the 51st Century when every damn future story takes place and where the Clerics from "The Time of Angels" originated, and at that battle with the Sontaran at the beginning it's the 41st Century and they're wearing 17th Century garb somehow fashion runs in cycles? Who knows. Also, "The Battle of Zarathustra"? Really? Sounds like something from Warhammer as well. One last thing - where does this whole army of Silurians come from which the Doctor uses later? Was the detective woman keeping them in her airing cupboard or something? The Judoon show up for literally about a second too and then waltz off. It's weird.

Anyway what does this episode do well? I'll tell you what it does well. The freaking Cybermen. That bit where the Cybermen are stomping around in their spaceship is just cool and I know I like to hate on the cool stuff but it of all things did convey an accurate sense of scale. Lots of narrow corridors and windows onto space and light tables with no actual visible buttons or anything? That's the kind of Doctor Who future technology I like to see, simple and understated, although they could do without the big vats in the background which make it look like they're just standing around in a factory rather than on the bridge of an advanced Cyber ship. It is however helped by the fact that in spite of retaining the Cybus design their lack of logo and large fleet, coupled with their Classic series style round control desk suggests that these are my buddies the real Mondasian Cybermen, which hopefully is made clear at some point. The bit where the ship is wobbling and the Cybermen somehow manage to look bothered in a constipated kind of way brings a warm feeling to my heart as well. I'm not going to lie, I just love the Cybermen. Plus this brief cameo lets us have an awesome scene with Rory being bad ass. It's very nice to see how much his character has developed. Rory and the Cybermen? I'm not sure there could be anything better.

I would have really liked to have seen some scenes of the Doctor and Rory together in the TARDIS figuring out their plan because I really don't think they get to engage with each other enough as characters. In many ways I think it would have been better if the Doctor and Rory had managed to use their shared centuries of knowledge and experience to attack Demons Run on their own without these newly-invented allies but it was nice to see Amy bigging up Rory to her baby, and it was a very clever subversion of the traditional New Who melodramatic waffle about the brilliance and amazingness of the Doctor, which we unfortunately did receive later from the rather unsatisfyingly predictable Lorna Bucket. Wouldn't it be more interesting and supported Moffat's argument better to have someone who had met the Doctor briefly and rather than being fascinated by him and affectionate for him was deeply afraid of or antagonistic towards him and the Doctor had to deal with that? Rather than just have River tell us that armies turn at his name and so on, why not have weak and vulnerable individuals characterised for us reacting to the Doctor with fear or antipathy and see how distressing that could be? Imagine if instead of desperately wanting to meet the Doctor again, he'd run into Lorna and she'd freaked out and begged him not to kill her or something. I'm just speculating here but that could have put the message across better. While I like that Moffat's now playing up the Doctor as an object of fear and terrifying rumour rather than the baseless, undeserved and nauseatingly sycophantic adoration and worship which was used for the Tenth Doctor, I just feel like it could be played up more effectively. Did the Clerics really leave purely for fear of the Doctor? Not really, more because they were disarmed and had just been massively ambushed by a huge army of Silurians. There was just something more to be done here. I'm probably going to be saying that forever, though.

Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are all as good as ever, especially in the scenes where they're all together with the baby, and the performances generally are good. The Doctor's desire to rename Colonel Manton as Colonel Runaway is portrayed with vicious intensity, Rory's strength and determination are believable developments and we see Amy as a natural mother. There are laughs and memorable moments. I won't deny that there's still something missing, however. It's just not as cohesive and expressive as it could be. Again, character drama can't be everything in a good show. What's more, next episode is called "Let's Kill Hitler" of all things. That sounds like dubious ground for me, but I suppose the Doctor's no murderer and there'll be more to it than meets the eye. I just want something which works without the wait.

"The Almost People"

Well, at least Matthew Graham's absolved himself of "Fear Her". This conclusion improves upon "The Rebel Flesh" in a number of important ways, although it continues to make some of the same mistakes. The character development and thematic content are improved but the story becomes pretty insubstantial and they still can't get the companion balance right. It also concludes with a cliffhanger which, while an impressive spectacle, emphasises perhaps more than ever how stealth-soapy this series has been. Nonetheless it's probably one of the best episodes so far along with its prior episode but is similarly hampered by the occasional dryness of the plot, although there's a fair bit less faffing around in this one than there is in the pevious part. It certainly fits the inconsistent and never-quite-right mood of this series pretty well.

So first of all we have a duplicate Doctor, which can be done well in situations like "Meglos" and can be done abominably badly in scenarios like "Journey's End". This one is an example of how to do a duplicate Doctor properly, and seeing Matt Smith getting to act with himself is a pretty impressive dramatic opportunity and one he fulfils with his usual aplomb. There's some weird stuff in the pointless section before the titles, however, involving a lot of needless screaming and dramatic chords from the Ganger Doctor for essentially no reason. While it's nice to hear the Fourth Doctor's voice, and to know that Tom Baker recorded that line especially, and not especially nice at all to hear the Tenth Doctor's voice, it seems pointless. He has different vocal chords. Why would his Ganger need to deal with the regenerations or whatever as well given that it's based on the Eleventh Doctor's genetic structure, which would be unique to him? It's also a bit duff that he's given the "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" line as a nod to the Third Doctor because while I know it's a sort of lame Who in-joke it's just a bit of a clunky and rather unsubtle reference to give. I did like the slightly misquoted First Doctor line, however. Anyway, the interactions between the two Doctors are really satisfying to watch and when it turns out that they pulled the old switcheroo on Amy, if we really want to stretch the friendship, it was reminiscent of some of the manipulations pulled by the Seventh Doctor.

What about our valiant companions, however? Well last week it was all about Rory with Amy frustratingly sidelined, so this week they bungle it yet again and make it all about Amy with virtually no Rory. It's nice to see Amy's offhand prejudice against the Gangers emphasised but Rory starts to just seem gullible. Nonetheless Amy's interactions with the Doctors are good and it presents an interesting argument in regards to how people will tend to favour what they consider truth even when the distinction is barely relevant. I did notice, however, that Amy barely interacts with the other characters at all and she seems weirdly distracted from the action, mostly just worrying around the Doctors when not looking for Rory. It's a bit of a strange incongruity and it kind of reinforces the feeling this episode has of being slightly fractured.

That notwithstanding some of the others get their time to shine. I'll deal with Jennifer first, because unfortunately she is a complete ham and cheese sandwich and all her rubbish about war and "it'll destroy them all" and all this sort of cackling-villain absurdity, coupled with that incredibly irritating accent, make her very hard to take seriously. Her motivations seem so abstract and idealistic as to be unbelievable and while it's nice to see the role of antagonist shifted to her from the increasingly grounded and ultimately rather interesting Cleaves it's done in a fairly silly way, especially when she turns into a big monster which briefly, mid-transformation, looks like the Spitter from Left 4 Dead 2. The CGI's pretty atrocious and I don't know what it was really needed for unless they realised they'd done a whole parter without any visibly-recognisable villains and panicked that having action figures of all the workers in those power-armour acid suits weren't going to sell enough on their own. Speaking of which, it looks so lame when, having marched up to the door in slow motion in their acid suits with the poles raised like standards and so on, the Gangers stop in front of the closed door, notice it's closed, don't even bother testing it, shrug their shoulder and walk off. The absurdity is reinforced when once the group inside have conveniently escaped they then manage to easily ram the door down.

Anyway, now that I've dealt with the annoying one, what about the two stiffs? First off, there was Buzzer. Who on earth made the decision to waste Marshall Lancaster in this story? Why did they throw him away on a handful of lines and no good chance to interact with a Ganger of himself? While he does get the occasional funny moment he just feels like an arbitrary thug and his presence is disappointingly limited. As for Dicken... wow. I mean seriously, this guy was completely pointless. He even loses his sneeze, his one character trait from the previous episode, and does absolutely nothing except sacrifice himself for basically no reason to slow Monster Jennifer down so that various duplicates can have a massive chin-wag at the second door. Even his Ganger is only purposeful so that Ganger Jimmy doesn't have to admit to being Flesh when they make the story public. Didn't Dicken have any reasons to want to be accepted either? His character is not developed in the slightest and his presence is virtually needless.

Jimmy, alternately, gets to do more good stuff here. It's especially good when Ganger Jimmy sees his son and decides to halt Jennifer's plan, presumably to save the "real" Jimmy, and while I think human Jimmy's death scene was dragged out a bit too much nonetheless it was good to see the fulfilment of the Ganger's claims to humanity and parenthood from the previous episode come through. Isn't it convenient, though, that the acid crisis he ran off to stop seems to just stop itself while he's cradling his primogenitor on the floor? Nonetheless it's done well and it's a good way of developing the theme of what it means to be human substantially more. It seems to have been a big thing in Moffat Who so far, with Bracewell and Auton Rory fulfilling similar roles. Cleaves is also developed much more effectively than last episode, translating smoothly from a bothersome obstacle to a much more balanced and interesting character due to her continued interactions with herself. We probably would have benefited from seeing more of that in the previous episode. It does, however, make Ganger Cleaves' sacrifice seem a bit unnecessary and I think Cleaves would have been a good character to have had return to society with a Ganger duplicate. The fact that no duplication exists at the end of the story I found to be rather frustrating and I think it would have been a much more challenging notion if they'd had at least one pair have to deal with some kind of consequences at the end.

As I said at the beginning, however, there are parts much like last episode where it can feel dry or dull, not helped by the uniform orange jumpsuits, dim lighting and dreary stone interiors, as much as I'm sure this was to an extent deliberate. The plot just isn't as snappy as it could be, and at times it cuts too often between Rory stumbling around, the humans with the Doctors and Amy, and the Gangers having repetitive discussions about survival or tapping at computer screens. I almost feel like it was a good idea which could have been done in one episode. Altogether "The Rebel Flesh" and "The Almost People" are about the length of an average four-part story of the Classic Series and while they have some reminiscent aspects in terms of atmosphere and storytelling they lack the richness and complexity of narrative which a good Classic Series story could often manage. It's probably not helped by the small but still partially underused cast and the rather limited objectives of the episode. What everyone's trying to achieve certainly seems to become very vague, abstract and slightly irrelevant by the end and when the TARDIS, and hence the end of the story, just spontaneously shows up from conveniently sinking through the right amount of acid into just the right tunnel you can't help feel like the episode has been trying to get its point across without bothering to express it through an interesting story with distinct parts. It's not helped that the whole issue of Rory's compassion and concern, which was so played up last episode, is given relatively little attention, and his feelings of betrayal or their consequences are not exactly dwelled upon with any great focus. Once again it's a tick for message and a mostly a tick for character but the story box isn't checked. A relatively neat point of comparison is, say, "The Robots of Death", which does all three of those things, or to give a more modern example, say, "The Beast Below". I think it's often in the nature of these New Series two-parters to drag a bit, and I think Moffat has the right idea where he makes stories like "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang" and to a lesser extent "The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon" where while the story is relatively continuous the two parts are radically different. It's interesting to note with that in mind that "The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone", while a Moffat two-parter, is a bit dry and padded out like most New Series two parters tend to be.

Regardless, it's a good conclusion to the previous episode and together they form a relatively high point for this series. It's just a shame they couldn't have been a bit pacier. We're still having an awkward time of it this series and while I hope things step up I'm rather worried that at the end of the year it'll be this episode and the one prior, despite their noticeable dryness, which we'll look back on with slightly forced fondness.

"L.A. Noire"

No, it's not a scathing critique of an episode of a TV show I purport to love. It's a video game review! L.A. Noire is, of time of writing, basically the "next big thing" and is getting a lot of attention in the game community and elsewhere. It's pretty innovative as they go, combining the popular open-world sandbox gameplay typical of its publisher, Rockstar, with the normally rather niche concept of the detective game. It's set in Los Angeles in 1947 and you play (mostly) as Cole Phelps, an uptight by-the-book detective newly promoted to the ranks after returning home from the Second World War. Over the course of events you work several desks within the police department, investigating Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson cases. You get called out to crime scenes, have to find evidence, interview witnesses and interrogate suspects, and often you'll get involved in shootouts with crooks or car chases with felons hell bent on escaping justice.

It's an interesting game in that unlike most sandboxes you're on the side of law and justice, so while it's certainly possible to drive recklessly and damage public property you are also protecting the public and so you can't just run around killing people in a wanton fashion. Nonetheless the huge world map and its enormous levels of detail greatly enhance the realism and sense of place in the game. You won't find many cars on the road if you're called out to a scene at 4AM, for instance, and you experience a wide variety of weather during various cases. The city has apparently been recreated from thousands of photographs of LA from the period and it certainly seems evident in how incredibly full and devoid of placeholder or repetition the streets are. Similarly, entering buildings reveal clearly lived-in, believable environments with discarded clothing, full drawers, an immense variety of patterns and styles of architecture and products, photographs, paintings and so on. It's obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been put into building this game's setting. Everything is accompanied by a period soundtrack heavily composed of Jazz and scores reminiscent of old-timey films, as well as genuine contemporary songs and programmes on the radio when you're driving any of the game's hundred real cars. In this sense it's an extremely impressive game, and one of the biggest points in its favour is just how very atmospheric the whole thing is. It really feels like 1947 LA, from the fashions and speech patterns to the heavily war-related themes and the numerous nods to broader historical events.

The story can be frustrating at times, however. While the cases themselves are internally quite interesting and can be even moreso when, normally at the end of a desk, cases begin to be linked together into an overarching narrative or in relation to a wider crime spree, there are several strange incidents. Perhaps the most notable of these is the point at which Phelps elects to cheat on his wife with the German femme fatale Elsa. This happens with little to no explanation for why it occurs and is present in the story regardless of the choice of the player. There are implications in the one major scene featuring Phelps and his wife that the trauma of the war has left him in a state where he no longer feels for his wife but we see nothing of his home life and while his hard-assery can be argued as deriving from the guilt he felt as a result of his brutality and ruthlessness during the war it leaves a fair bit to be desired in terms of believable character development. Too much is left to the imagination and it feels rather jarring and incongruous. A similar narrative issue results from the fact that with three cases remaining in the story the player switches to controlling non-police investigator and Phelps' old war rival Jack Kelso. While Kelso himself is an interesting character and playing as him can come as a welcome relief after having to participate in the downfall of the increasingly unlikeable Phelps it feels as if we are alienated from the original structure by the end, almost as if we are playing a different game. Similarly while Phelps and Kelso both fulfil the traditional Noir style, more or less, in being the one or in this case two "good men" in a corrupt world they lack the smoothness and charisma of great Noir protagonists like Philip Marlow or Holly Martins and in Kelso's case we simply don't spend enough time with him to fully get to grips with his character. Nonetheless the minor street crimes which you can help solve during the course of main cases do reinforce the sense of the 'Mean Streets' but again these are not present when playing as Kelso and towards the end of the game the actual detective work seems rather sidelined in favour of action-packed car chases and gunfights. The motion capture and the acting are all very good and work in the favour of enhancing the story and the believability of the world, however, so it's ultimately a bit of a mixed bag. Additionally, the storyline, like many crime dramas, becomes a bit bogged down with names, locations and faces you're supposed to be familiar with across an overarching plot but might start to become confusing if you don't pay detective-like levels of attention to the various persons of interest in the cases. It really doesn't reward a particularly casual approach, although I suppose this is arguably a point in its favour. Nonetheless it can become irritating when the cops all start discussing some case or suspect, sometimes even ones which are part of a backstory in which you yourself were not involved, and you're expected to keep up with what's going on and immediately rush off to question someone about people or events you may have forgotten in the intervening time or not actually experienced firsthand.

I suppose this leads us rather neatly to the gameplay. Apart from the fairly unchallenging task of walking out of the police station at the beginning or your assignment and driving your car wherever you want to go it's essentially divided into three components, which are clue-finding, interrogation and action sequences. Now that I mention it though, the police stations themselves can be annoying, especially when you're dumped into a new one you've never entered before at the start of Vice and Arson desks and are expected to know the way out or where the interrogation rooms are based on squinting at tiny little in-game signs which are not easy to read on a normal low-def TV. Anyway, moving onto the main activity of the game I'll mention the action sequences first as they're not as ubiquitous as the other two components and are arguably less important. Fighting is pretty good, and generally happens with guns. You take cover, lean out of cover to shoot the bad guys and nab weapons from dead enemies. One bothersome element of this is the awkward behaviour of the minimap during gunfights, which shows your enemies as red dots but doesn't seem to orientate in the direction you're pointing so that often you have to judge the position of crooks based on the direction your character is pointing in cover rather than where the camera is facing, which is difficult because the camera likes to give you a nice dynamic side-on of your Hat Man while you're lurking behind crates and concrete columns. Nonetheless you regenerate healthy pretty easily and once you get the hang of it it's pretty fun. Again, it's really just one of those things which requires patience. Fistfights are also quite enjoyable, as you both put up your dukes like you're in a Victorian bareknuckle arena and do the diarrhoea dance until you take a pop at your enemy with your huge manly fists. You can also dodge, which looks pretty bad-ass if executed properly, as well as take out your enemies with a big whack or a headbutt if you've done enough damage. One annoying thing I would mention, however, is that (on the Xbox 360 at least) you have to hold down the left trigger to stay in "Brawl mode" or whatever it is called or otherwise Phelps will stand there like a lemon getting hit. It's pointless since there's nothing else you can really do in the fistfight situations anyway and it can be rather frustrating the first time you enter one as a detective when you haven't been in one since a single incident as a patrolman in the tutorial section of the game several cases earlier and have forgotten what to do.

The much more irritating action element are the car chases. While it's quite cool to hare down the street with no regard for traffic laws while your partner fires a handgun wildly out of the passenger side window and shouts encouragement, let alone permission, for you to ram the fugitive's car keeping everything under control can be quite difficult and the runners seem to have pretty perfect steering until the point where the game elects that the chase has gone too long and has your criminal get hit by a tram or something. For your own part it's easy to gun at top speed after the bad guy, thankfully with a siren you can blare so that civilians get out of your way, and then immediately crash into a tree, barely-visible chain-link fence or inexplicably rock-solid hedge and have to restart the chase from the beginning. Even in a chase you have to be reasonably slow and cautious. I guess it's just another way that the game rewards patience but it can seem like a stretch when, after an enjoyable but inevitably fairly staid investigation, a bit of white-knuckle rubber-burning can seem like a welcome relief yet you still have to tone it down if you don't want to have to repeat the sequence several times to get it right. What's more, if you fail the same action sequence several times the game rather condescendingly asks you whether you'd not feel a lot better if you just skipped the whole thing and moved onto the next cutscene. It's a not entirely subtle way of the game suggesting that you're impatient, uncoordinated or both. That notwithstanding when it does come together it can be pretty fun, and both the same complaints and same compliments can be offered to the on-foot chase sequences. There are also related stealth sections where you have to follow a suspect without drawing attention to yourself and these can be frustrating for similar reasons in that you can't get too close or too far away or cause any ruckus, and while that's all fair enough it'd be a lot more reasonable if suspects didn't somehow notice you running a red light two blocks behind them or adjusting your fedora from your stalker nest behind a parked car at the other end of the street. Again, there are times when the game seems to cross the line from encouraging patience to being fairly arbitrarily fiddly and reliant on trial-and-error tactics to reach the goals.

What about the investigations, then? Well there's clue finding for a start, which normally involves ambling around a crime scene which can be littered with debris, footprints, dead bodies and so on while 'evidence music', often a rapidly repetitive series of low bass notes, plays in the backround. Phelps will look at everything from victims' wounds and the contents of their pockets and wallets to footprints, blood spatters and dropped items to completely unrelated pieces of junk like discarded beer bottles and the decorations in people's houses. Everything with which you can interact is indicated by a musical chime and a vibration of the controller, so while there can be obvious sources of evidence it can also be the case that you end up just brushing up against every solid surface in the room hoping for vibrations until the evidence music stops, indicating that you've found everything there is to find. Of course you can turn these options off so that the game doesn't tell you what's active and what isn't but it doesn't change the fact that you're not really left to draw your own conclusions, which is something I'll discuss further in the interrogation section. It's entirely possible to miss or ignore evidence if you so wish and this can affect the case later but often you can't progress further until you've found everything. There is also one moment, in the final homicide case, which relies on you identifying landmarks using rather literal references from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" and if you haven't encountered those landmarks in your exploration of LA up to that point, resulting in them not being marked on your map and therefore the corresponding descriptions, or the fact of their mere existence, not being obvious, you literally just have to drive around doing nothing for several minutes until Phelps figures it out for himself.

The problem is that the cases inevitably drive towards a pre-set conclusion, and while sometimes there can be two suspects from which you have to choose the game essentially tells you where to go and what's going on. Of course there are obvious lines of inquiry in a real case but at the same time it can feel like you're just going through the motions, steering Phelps between a series of pre-set incidents with your own impact on how they play out feeling increasingly limited as the game continues. It's not helped by the fact that besides having to choose one suspect or another to charge the only other consequences of a given case are a ranking based on how much evidence you found, how many interrogations you got right and how much you minimized costs to the department. It's all seems rather forced and odd that the game keeps tabs on how much of the evidence you find as some of it is certainly less relevant than others and surely in a real case conclusions could be drawn from a variety of sources. It's not helped by the interrogation system. Every time you question a suspect or witness about an issue pertaining to the case, you have to choose three responses to their answer. You can elect truth, essentially accepting their testimony, doubt it if they seem to be hiding something or are obviously lying, or lie if you have a solid piece of evidence which blatantly disproves their statement. At the end of each interrogation it tells you how many questions you got 'correct'. Am I the only person to whom this doesn't make much sense? How can a question be right or wrong? Often it's very unclear which option you're "meant" to pick or, in the case of lie, which particular piece of evidence of several seemingly relevant ones you should choose. It's not helped by the fact that sometimes when a witness just seems to be holding back and you want to give them a nudge in the right direction and pick doubt Phelps flies off the handle and starts hurling threats and dark insinuations at them. It's also frustrating that people who are doubted when they're telling the truth, for instance, always always become super defensive and are never intimidated or apologetic. Surely a lot of these average joes and young people would be quite scared of police questioning? There's also the fact that if you accuse a suspect of lying they inevitably go "Where's the evidence?" like they're the voice of the game telling you what to do next. They never just get flustered or don't know what to say. It gets even weirder when you pick Truth and it's the wrong choice and witnesses make these weird cryptic remarks about you being naive or that essentially you're doing something incorrectly, and often what 'Truth' actually means becomes pretty fuzzy. Often the only difference between Truth and Doubt is that in the former Phelps is fairly friendly and in the latter he starts chewing the carpet. You often have to judge statements based on facial reactions which are well captured using the motion scan technology employed in the game but even these can be misleading or difficult to read. Again, it encourages patience, although sometimes it can still be irrational or confusing and the 'correct question' can seem very arbitrary.

Ultimately I think L.A. Noire is a step in the right direction. While the detective work itself can feel rather restrictive and limiting at times and the story and characterisation occasionally feel overcomplicated, vague or fractured, it's compelling and incredibly atmospheric and its relative novelty and exciting case narratives cause its good points to generally outweight its more frustrating elements. What it arguably does best is make a very strong and critical message about the aftermath and consequences of war for the individual and I would propose war as really its central theme. In this way if none other it could be recognised as a work of art. Games in the future need to build on this game's aesthetic and intellectual quality with innovative and artistic gameplay and if it's true that a sequel might be in the works we can only hope that something truly phenomenal could be built on these rudimentary yet nonetheless inspiring foundations.