Christopher Eccleston – Memphis Flyer

Since its debut on HBO in 2014, True Detective has been a galvanizing show. Showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s first season featured Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives searching for an occultic serial killer in Louisiana over the course of two decades. It was unique in television, in that Pizzolatto wrote all eight episodes himself, and Cary Joji Fukunaga was the sole credited director. (Normally, TV shows have several writers who collaborate on scripts. The mandatory minimum size of these writer’s rooms was a major issue in last year’s Writer’s Guild of America strike.)

Each subsequent season of the anthology show has featured a different pair of detectives who can barely stand each other solving weird crimes. For season 2 in 2015, it was Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams; season 3 featured Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo in 2019. Pizzolatto started to develop season 4, but then left HBO in favor of a new deal at FX. Barry Jenkins and Issa López took over as executive producers, and took the show in a new direction — or least to a new locale.

Season four carries the subtitle Night Country because it is set in the fictional Alaskan town of Ennis, located above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn’t rise at all during the depths of winter. Jodi Foster stars as Liz Danvers, Ennis’ chief of police. It’s a major casting coup, since Foster hasn’t been a regular in a TV series since the mid-1970s. And it pays off. Foster is one of the best actors of her or any other generation, and the greatest pleasure of Night Country is getting to spend six episodes watching her construct and tear down a complex character.

If I had to describe Capt. Danvers in one word, it would be “harsh.” She’s hard on everyone, from her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc) to protege Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), to her off-and-on lover of twenty years, Capt. Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston). But Danver’s harshest of all to her former partner, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis, a former professional women’s boxing champion.) Navarro and Danvers split after their response to a murder-suicide case fell under scrutiny from their superiors, and led to both being reassigned to the backwater (or should I say “back-ice”) of Ennis.

Navarro sees ghosts, but that’s apparently not unusual in this town, where the veil between worlds seems thin. The former partners are forced back together when the entire crew of an arctic research station is found dead on the ice, frozen together in what Danvers calls a “corpsicle.” One of the few clues is a severed human tongue left behind in the station which belonged to a Native American woman named Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen), whose murder Navarro has been obsessively investigating for years. How are the two crimes connected, and what do they have to do with the mining company that is polluting the community’s water?

Foster’s virtuosic performance brings it all together, even as some of the subplots spiral off into the arctic darkness. She’s a manic ball of snarling energy, hinting at the secret pain that causes her to lash out at everyone around her.

Lopez’s direction on all six episodes is exceptional. She brings elements of Lynchian surrealism (quiet northern town exists in uneasy proximity to an ancient supernatural force) and the John Carpenter horror classic The Thing. She knows how to produce a good jump scare, and how to hint at unknowable horrors lurking just offscreen. Like True Detective’s first season, Night Country benefits greatly from being the product of a singular artistic vision.

Doctor Who is now entering its 51st year. The BBC sci-fi TV show is older than Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Its first episode, which was delayed because of BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy asassination, debuted in England the same year that Astro Boy, the first ever anime, debuted in Japan. Can a show that is as old as an entire genre still have something to say?

The first actor to play the Doctor was William Hartnell, who was 55 years old at the time of the 1963 debut. After three years galavanting through time and space in the TARDIS, Hartnell’s deteriorating health forced him to retire. So the writers came up with a way to keep the popular show going without its star. When Time Lords like the Doctor are near death, their bodies regenerate, changing appearance and giving them new life. The number of total regenerations a single Time Lord could get was set at 12, which, in 1966 probably seemed like a large enough number that the writers would never have to deal with what happened when the Doctor ran out.

BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who

After being cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who regenerated in 2005. For the first 26 years of the show’s run, it was a series of half-hour cliffhangers that bound five or six episodes together under one long story arc. When it returned, it was as series of one-hour, stand-alone episodes with only the loosest of a season-long arc. The new Who was instantly popular, thanks in large part to the onscreen chemistry between the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper), the Doctor’s human traveling companion. When Eccleston decided that one year as the most recognized man in nerddom was enough, he was replaced by the 10th Doctor (David Tennant), and Piper stuck around long enough to get the new guy established and set the new Who up for its best years. Long-form television was back in fashion, and Doctor Who‘s plot machinations became increasingly byzantine, as the Doctor’s troubled past in the Time War caught up with him. When Tennant left the TARDIS in 2010, he was replaced by the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), who was initially well received but never achieved the same depth of fan love as Tennant. Smith stayed for three years until being killed off during the show’s emotional 50th anniversary special. And so, here we are, with Peter Capaldi premiering as the once-thought-impossible 12th Doctor.

Doctor Who fandom is the oldest and most fanatical of the nerd subtribes, and during the run up to the 50th anniversary, showrunner Steven Moffat seemed determined to serve up as much red meat to the fans as possible. The series immersed itself in its own mythology, becoming a show mostly about itself, a recursion that the character of the Doctor, who once famously described the universe as a “big ball of wibby wobbly timey-wimey stuff,” would appreciate.

Moffat surrounds the new Doctor with fan-favorite characters Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, their Sontaran comic relief. But Moffat doesn’t give the new guy much to do. When Capaldi is finally unleashed late in the show to confront the cyborg villain, he hints at a new iron hand under the Doctor’s jolly velvet glove. But overall, Capaldi’s first episode seems flat and uninspired. If he is to be the actor to regenerate a franchise crushed under the weight of its own history, Moffat is going to have to find new places for the TARDIS to go.