Resolution Review
*sigh*
I mean, it was fine in the sense that this is clearly as good as we’re going to get within Chibnall’s bold five year plan of “what if Doctor Who, only bad.” This is him firing on all cylinders, making a confident piece of self-consciously major Doctor Who that struts around like it knows it’s in its imperial phase. It’s the best script he’s written all year. And it’s perfectly entertaining, in a sort of straightforward junkfood television way. There are even a couple of bits—most obviously the parallelism between the Dalek making its shell and the Doctor crafting her sonic—that are actually intelligent, subtle, and interesting. As the Chibnall era goes, this is a triumph worth celebrating.
It’s still fucking crap TV Movie-tier television. I mean, you can see this from its basic conception. There’s no idea here other than “what if we brought back the Daleks with a real make them scary again vibe?” And so we get the bog standard tricks for that: one Dalek, its identity revealed fifteen minutes in, and we don’t actually see it in its case until fifteen from the end. There’s no larger concern here. This is just a story about how badass the Daleks are. We might fairly ask why, for the tenth Dalek story in fourteen years (and that’s ignoring loads of things like Day of the Doctor, The Pilot, and Twice Upon a Time where they appear in major roles) anyone thinks the Daleks need this sort of back to basics approach, but hey, we’ve had four completely distinct Spider-Man film franchises in that time so maybe that’s just the world we live in. Apparently it’s not one where we can use the Daleks in the course of, like, an actual idea. Instead we have to do this sort of sterilely self-conscious “event” that has no content beyond the franchise-level “the monster, it scary.” Except, no, this doesn’t go for any sort of emotional affect as nuanced and carefully crafted as fear. It’s just “the monster, it important.” In 2019, the Dalek is not a metaphor for fascism or for Nazis. It’s not even an existential threat to the series offering a narrative collapse. It’s a big bad in the sense that it is big and it is bad and there’s nothing else to it. This is Doctor Who reduced to pure spectacle, with no job to do other than sell toys. Except they don’t actually make a toy line anymore it looks like, so really it’s just selling itself, a serpent eating its own tail.
Meanwhile we have the Ryan’s dad plot, which makes up the episode’s drive for emotional resonance and aboutness. The actual resolution, with Ryan forgiving his dad to stop the Dalek, is certainly a successful firing of Chekov’s gun, but… I dunno, I just kind of feel like there are probably more people who need to be told that it’s OK to walk away from their abusive and neglectful family than who need a rousing message about forgiving them whenever they hit that part of the abuse cycle.…
Hi, everyone. 
Thoughts on Series 1 of Legion
Owing to a decided – and entirely understandable – lack of enthusiasm for the project from anyone else, I embarked on a solo commentary on the 1984 movie version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. Luckily, I’m quite capable of wittering on for 90 minutes unassisted. 
There is, however, another important sense in which Rorschach represents a myopia within Watchmen and, more broadly, Moore’s larger artistic vision. As mentioned, a crucial part of Rorschach’s psychology is his tortured relationship with sexuality. Sex is a major theme of both Watchmen and Moore’s career, and one that he has much of value to say about, but there is something unseemly about the directness with which Rorschach’s disgust with sex is pathologized, not least because it’s a character trait inherited from his underlying relationship with the apparently asexual Steve Ditko. More broadly, there is something oversimplified and unsatisfying in Moore’s approach to sexuality—a flaw intimately connected to his persistent inadequacy on the subject of sexual assault. This would be a relatively minor issue were it not for the awkward fact that the relationship between superheroes and sexuality is one of the comic’s major themes.
The theme of sex within Watchmen ignites in the seventh issue, “A Brother to Dragons,” which forms, along with “The Abyss Gazes Also,” a symmetrical axis at the center of the series. Watchmen can be divided into two types of issues: ensemble pieces that feature a large cross-section of the cast, and character-focused issues that provide backgrounds and meditations on individual heroes. The first half of the book alternates between these two types, with “At Midnight, All the Agents,” “The Judge of All the Earth,” and “Fearful Symmetry” jumping among multiple points of view while “Absent Friends,” “Watchmaker,” and “The Abyss Gazes Also” focus on the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach respectively. The second half also alternates back and forth, but here it is the odd-numbered issues that are character-focused, looking at Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, and, in “A Brother To Dragons,” Night Owl.