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The Well Review

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More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t say I liked it. I stared bitterly at the sequence of mounting realization. Especially because it’s so unprompted. “We don’t know what it is”? Seriously? That’s what tips the Doctor off and starts the “do you recognize the plot of Midnight” run, saying “XTonic” and “diamond mine” before doing the title drop and running the quick clips of a, and I’m sorry to do this to you, seventeen year old piece of television. Now, admittedly that seventeen year old piece of television was seen by more than twice as many people as The Robot Revolution, so maybe it’s fair enough to do a throwback seven years longer than bringing back Omega for Arc of Infinity, the previous benchmark for “wait, seriously?” in sequel reveals. 

But, to quote the trolls on GallifreyBase, this is cancellation shit. I mean for gods’ sake, it’s even a fucking Saward homage. By the time we’ve gotten to this reveal absolutely nothing in the episode had come close to “something I haven’t seen before,” and my memory only really needs to go as far back as Flux for that to be true. After a cold open TARDIS scene recapping the season and doing an arbitrary needle drop on “Toxic” (I suppose that I need to go back to The End of the World for) it’s just twenty minutes of standard issue sci-fi gubbins—running around on a video game set pointing guns at things. It’s clearly working its way towards horror because modern Doctor Who only uses military sci-fi for a few things, and besides it’s called The Well, but it hasn’t even gotten around to being scary yet. The only interesting material comes in the grace notes around Aliss and her deafness, another example of his determination to virtue signal leading Davies in a useful direction by reminding him that some human drama might be worth adding. And then we get this bland callback reveal. Reader, I am making a face.

It’s not even the same monster! Midnight is vocal repetition; the thing that’s behind you is Hide, which you’d be hard pressed to do a callback to. I’m utterly unsurprised that what’s happened is they belatedly threw out Sharma Angel-Warfall’s actual script, which was an attempt at giving Gatwa his “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Orisha” request, and just subbed the Midnight explanation in, because it’s an absolute fucking nothing that reeks of a desperate 48 hour rewrite. There’s no reason for it other than giving them something to hype in the behind the scenes footage. Which, I suppose once again making episodes with legs for streaming is a sound strategy. If we get a third season out of Disney it’ll probably be down to the long tail numbers. But I am still just not vibing.

Ironically, then, the back half is rather good.…

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Lux Review

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Well it’s nice that Gatwa gets a perfect episode. He’d not really had one yet, save perhaps Dot and Bubble. But here we’ve got one that it’s legitimately hard to see getting unseated as my season favorite. More to the point, we’ve got one you can just unapologetically hand to your lapsed fan friend and go “look, it’s good again.” It’s probably even worth doing—boosting the Disney+ numbers can’t hurt lolsob. Just a stone cold classic, everything you want from Doctor Who episode. I’m still grinning. Best episode since Hell Bent. 

In terms of actually reviewing it, let me take a moment from my notes document and unpack it for you. I’ve just transcribed the we just end/but that is death deadline, which I followed with, and I quote, “RUSSELL WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” I stress that this is entirely affectionate—a fannish love of the writer of It’s a Sin and Cucumber taking his stock imagery of death and doing a speed run remake of Love and Monsters with it. On the television, the tempo kicks up a bit for our promised third act change, and I’m all but liveblogging: “The Doctor crying, Murray Gold having a nervous breakdown, Penn cackling on the sofa.” It’s absolutely ecstatically good—the triumphant capstone to a fifteen minute showpiece of ostentatiously clever bullshit reaching back to a Scooby-Doo pastiche animated Ncuti Gatwa fretting that he has a two-dimensional brain. Technically, if I wanted to be a complete hardass, I could complain that I have, in fact, seen this before, but come the fuck on. I’m not going to complain about burning up another pile of Disney money on a Mind Robber remake. I’m going to cackle with my husband.

Literally everything about this episode is great. Mr. Ring-a-Ding is simply one of the greatest visuals in the history of the series, and I cannot wait to get to Doctor Who Confidential and watch Russell use a bunch of superlatives about how they did it. From his opening appearance, casually rendered in pitch perfect Ub Iwerks loops to him facing off with the Doctor in the lush art deco cinema to his ascension into the realms above Kether he simply always looks good. The script dances through its set pieces with a nimbleness not seen since at least The Giggle, if not World Enough and Time. Gatwa and Sethu absolutely kill it in every scene. It does not remotely make it look easy, but it oozes with casual confidence at every turn. 

It is in fact four perfectly executed acts. A cold open establishing the villain in the bonkers poetry of moonlight reflecting off a silver spoon, a tight investigation of, as Gatwa delightfully summarizes it, “literally an old caretaker in a haunted cinema,” the metafictional ecstasy of the middle, and then an nicely paced denouement in which the guns on the mantlepiece go off in well-structured sequence. Each one could be unpacked at length, and I look forward to going back and doing so in the context of Gatwa Eruditorum, whenever that may be.…

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Retrospective: Twilight (and baseball)

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As someone with my finger on the pulse, I naturally watched Twilight for the first time in 2025. It’s OK — trashy pulp romance. No worse than anything else Hollywood was pumping out in the Aughts, or even the Forties. Chicks in 2008 needed a fantasy where their dirtbag boyfriend was transgressive and actually sex. There’s nothing wrong with vampires for the Jonas Brothers generation — at least Edward’s shiny due to vampirism and not because he’s never met a conditioner he liked. That Twilight hatedom was mostly misogynistic backlash to a pop culture phenomenon about a woman who wants something dangerous is hardly a novel insight — nor, probably is the fact that Edward is probably no worse a boyfriend than half of Twilight‘s critics. In 2025, it’s hard to get mad about Twilight. I can’t fathom watching the sequels — two hours of Twilight is plenty. But I can’t say I minded watching it.

Now let’s tackle the real evil of Twilight: the fact that the Cullens are resolutely, horrendously bad at baseball. Let’s leave aside the Cullens’ profound failure to grasp the importance of position players, or even what position players do. We can ignore the fact that the offense and defense are played by the same vampires almost simultaneously. Hell, I’ll even set aside my theory that the Cullens have infiltrated the Seattle Mariners and are the only reason they’ve never appeared in a World Series.

No. The abomination here is that the Cullens think they’re hot shit for playing baseball in a physical space without clearly delineated boundaries. It’s not fucking impressive for Superman to catch a high fly ball. Edward Cullen cutting off a more-or-less homer is not an act of skill. There are no rules in vampire baseball. It’s a travesty of American’s finest invention, the greatest game ever invented. “Oh, I can homer in a space without boundaries!” Get fucked. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have redeemed themselves with Love Lies Bleeding and The Lighthouse. The rest of the cast and crew need to tour the U.S. to visit every Minor League Baseball clubhouse and apologize at length. We should have known something was wrong with American men when their objection to Twilight was the girliness of it and not the awful baseball. We know American patriarchy is about misogyny and not real strength or achievement, but the Twilight hatedom, with its nauseating silence about the fatal flaws of vampire baseball, proves it.…

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The Robot Revolution Review

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It’s strange, in many ways, to be back, or at least back under these circumstances, watching Doctor Who tick down to the first time since Time of the Doctor  that an episode will air when the next episode hasn’t been shot. And that was a two week period towards a commissioned episode—Deep Breath shot in January. Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before.

What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance. As far as the show knows, Davies is still the triumphant returning hero. In the latter stretches they’ll know the 60th Anniversary stuff landed. This is, I suspect, to the series’ benefit—it’s in no position to second guess itself. It doesn’t know it’s going to be going out under cancellation fears as the global economy collapses and the United States succumbs to fascism. So it just comes out swinging.

The result has pleasing Cartmel vibes. “Planet of the incels” is the obvious line to point at, and Davies is plainly fishing for praise with it, but the point remains: Doctor Who is aiming at the right fascists here. It’s angry and has a head full of steam. This is good and as it should be. On top of that, it’s pretty well assembled, especially by the standards of the Gatwa era to date. Obviously it’s gorgeous, with a lushly camp 50s retro-future. The basic idea of a star registry certificate being a real and valid document is great. “Belindachandrabombs” has a delightful frisson of comedy and barbarity. There’s lots to love here.

It also doesn’t bottle the ending as badly as much of Series 1 seemed to. In some ways this is me in the odd position of praising the show for the fact that the Alan reveal and the use of the star certificates to defeat him were both extremely obvious, but in an era where the episode resolutions have so frequently been off it’s nice to have everything successfully telegraphed. To some extent this is accomplished by moving the duff bit of pacing to the midpoint instead—the beat where Belinda reactivates the polish droid so she gets captured doesn’t feel entirely earned. But the middle of the episode is a good place to bury your sketchy beat.

And yet there’s a sense of the episode as a bunch of parts in search of a whole. The moment I find telling comes at the beginning. Davies does a quick set of establishing beats for Belinda—stuff we’ve seen a thousand times, and that he does as well as ever. We get her harried at work, then straight to a flatshare situation, and with that we’ve efficiently sketched a skilled career woman in a world where that gets you fuck all.…

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Doctor Who Reviews Update

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Just wanted to give the note that the Patreon is currently slightly short—about $20—of the threshold where my Robot Revolution review will be posted publicly. I’m reasonably confident that gap will be bridged some time in the next five days, but it’s where we are.

In any case, reviews should go out Saturday mornings/afternoons at some point. With episodes dropping at 3am my time, I expect to watch them when I get up on Saturday. The exact shape of this is going to be a bit tricky, as Saturday is also the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, where I do my shopping, and also I have prior commitments for the first two weeks that were on my calendar before we had a launch date, but I’ll figure out the routine that works best, and getting reviews out as fast as possible remains a priority for me.

A final note that this is the last season whose “post publicly” threshold will be $2850. That number’s always been keyed to my rent, and that’s going up at the end of the summer, so by the time The War Between the Land and Sea airs, the public review threshold will have jumped to $2920.

In addition to helping reviews be public, of course, my Patrons already have access to the first chapter of Last War in Albion v4, early chapters of my Blake book, the magical zines Penn has been working on, and will be getting a pair of politics/AI/fascism essays in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and I’m sure I’ll see you all on Saturday.

And here’s that Patreon link again.…

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Review: The War of the Rohirrim

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Roughly half of The War of the Rohirrim‘s best decisions surface in its first scene. The opening gorgeously pans from a map of Middle-earth to its 3D details to a photorealistic shot of the Misty Mountains before being disrupted by a majestic eastle. The appearance of Héra establishes Shieldmaiden of Rohan as a tradition rather than a one-off title, permitting Éowyn (whose reprisal by Mirando Otto is immensely welcome) to belong to a larger history. Éowyn’s voiceover narration establishing that no songs have been written about Héra both builds a tragedy into her story and provides a hefty critique of Tolkien, who only identifies the character as “Helm’s daughter” in Appendix A.

The War of the Rohirrim establishes itself as a minor tale in the Legendarium, a trend Tolkien pioneered long before every attenuated nerd franchise latched onto it. And The War of the Rohirrim somewhat effectively utilizes the ambiguities of the three-page story from The Lord of the Rings by focusing on an unnamed character who’s tragically permitted to fall out of history. The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien’s use of deliberate gaps and ambiguity in the historical record, is suited to the Rogue One approach. With Rohan, a crucial but less chartered territory of Middle-earth, that approach is a solidly logical idea.

Sadly, probably less than half of The War of the Rohirrim serves that end half as well as it deserves. The characters, while well-portrayed by their voice actors, are reducible to a handful of traits that rarely break out of two-dimensionality. Héra is Éowyn minus the everything, Helm’s mournful relationship with patrilineality is woefully underdeveloped, and Wulf is little more than a reactive revenge monster. At two hours and 14 minutes, The War of the Rohirrim has plenty of time to take its characters to interesting places. Instead we really needed to faff about with a Watcher in the Water eating a mûmak in Fangorn.

There are solid moments of pathos — a couple of character deaths bring some genuinely fantastic imagery. And a second act subplot featuring Helm leads the movie on a fun (if sadly aborted) detour into the numinous. But on the whole, this feels more like an elevated animated Superman movie than a worthy entry in the Legendarium. The hobbits’ description of Helm’s Deep’s founding in The Red Book of Westmarch probably packed more of a punch.

…

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The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which, for complicated reasons involving William S. Burroughs and the weak nuclear force, ended the Cold War and replaced it with a magical one with Grant Morrison. That story continues in Book Three. This, meanwhile, is a new epilogue to Book Two, which I hope to have out in print later this year. 

In terms of import, at least, the end of the Cold War and commencement of the Last War in Albion was by some margin Watchmen’s biggest consequence. It was not, however, its only significant one. Moore drew the magical theories that fueled Watchmen from William S. Burroughs, but Burroughs had drawn them from L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology, and there were debts to be paid.

And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.

Gaiman was born in November of 1960 in Hampshire, above his family’s grocery store. He was a third generation immigrant, his grandfather (who opened the grocery store) having been of Polish-Jewish descent. In 1965 his father David decided he wanted to go into business for himself, and moved to the town of East Grinstead in West Sussex, in part to open a vitamin shop, and in part to study at the Scientology Center in town. Both ventures would prove tremendously successful—the shop grew into a major vitamin manufacture company called G&G, while David Gaiman quickly rose through the ranks of Scientology, eventually becoming the the Church’s primary media spokesman in the UK.

In the official version of Gaiman’s biography—the one he offers to Hayley Campbell in her coffee table hagiography The Art of Neil Gaiman—he has what seems a largely happy childhood defined almost entirely in terms of his engagement with arts and language: dictating poetry to his mother before he even knew the alphabet, into Enid Blyton’s Noddy, British comics like Sooty and Pippin, watching the 1966 Adam West Batman series and Doctor Who at his grandparents, then reading Marvel reprints in Odham’s titles like Smash! and Pow!, getting The Penguin Charles Addams at age seven along with the Narnia books and Ray Bradbury, then Gilbert and Sullivan, proper American comics, Michael Moorcock, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Burroughs, and then into proper literary fiction like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and, as he finished school in the late 70s, finally into punk. It is a story that seeks, first and foremost, to explain how someone became a writer.…

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Review: The Substance

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As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley.

The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about how men look at women while women watch themselves being looked at. In the first act of The Substance, we accompany (Demi Moore in perhaps her most meta role) through her decaying world. Elisabeth’s world is one where her body is commodified, where she is forced to look at herself as a spectacle everywhere she goes. Like all spectacles, she wears down; she’s treated as disposable, ephemeral, like a piece of chicken rotting in her apartment.

When Elisabeth’s double Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, we first see her from her own perspective: we see her through her eyes, as the object she was created to be. Sue and Elisabeth’s connection is symbiotic-turned-parasitic-turned-symbiotic-again. Elisabeth’s curse is to see herself as the world sees her: something to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of. It’s body horror, but equally, it’s economic horror, depicting a Hollywood where women are a prized commodity — a world that enlightened, post-#MeToo Hollywood pretends not to be anymore.

Imagine Cinderella meets The Metamorphosis crossed with Sunset Boulevard via Videodrome mixed with Twin Peaks: The Return, and you’d have something almost but not entirely unlike The Substance. It’s bizarre, disgusting, and one of the only intelligent statements about Hollywood this side of the turn of the century. Watching this movie slowly turn into a grosser Carrie is delicious. I giggled at some of the nastiest bits — always a sign that a movie is really effectively horrific. What a beautiful year for horror.…

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.

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  1. Succession

As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation.  This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown.  It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.

It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder.  But is this correct?  His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right.  All he did was hasten the event.  He achieved his post but the post was always and already his.  How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force?  By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving?  Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview.  Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?

Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder.  He is destined to be king.  We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written.  And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him.  As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.

Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil.  He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both.  And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical.  Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.…

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Review: Conclave

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Carlo Maria Viganò will never recover from being portrayed as a guy who vapes in the Vatican.

In the wake of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young/New Pope, there’s been ample room for more political dramas about the Holy See. Conclave takes the route of the paranoid thriller, treating St. Peter’s Basilica as the Washington of All the President’s Men or the London of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and indeed, TTSS co-writer Peter Straughan scripted this). Conclave is low on original insights into the Catholic Church, but when the results are this much fun, that’s an easy shortcoming to forgive.

Conclave makes for a fun two hours of intrigue and deliciously Catholic doubt, rife with allusions to the Vatican Leaks, John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s neglect of clerical abuse victims, and the fascism of Piuses XI and XII. My friend Shea Vassar has described it as Mean Girls in the Vatican, and if that appeals to you, this is probably your movie. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati, and Isabella Rossellini make the already solid script absolutely sing. Fiennes’ character Lawrence articulates the role doubt has in faith, both explaining an important part of belief and comforting himself for his uncertainty about the Papacy. Like most good paranoid thrillers, Conclave is a story about political power where the greatest institution is rudderless, struggling under the weight of an empty throne, a sede vacante. In a post-Benedict XVI world, it’s not exactly a new insight, but it’s visually poignant and well-visualized by director Edward Berger.

The ending left me slightly cold — “what if we just got a nice Pope?” is a weak response to the ongoing plutocracy and colonialism of the Catholic Church. But seeing a movie about the Vatican take on the damage caused by Humanae Vitae and traditionalist Catholicism was healing for me, and it seemed to be fun for everyone else. If Conclave is what we get instead of The Young Pope Season 3, stories about the Vatican are in good shape.…

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