Tag: David Tennant

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Good Omens

David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale in Good Omens.

If there’s one specific genre trick the British seem to do a lot better than Americans, or any other English-speaking writers, it’s combining comedy and sci fi/fantasy. The quintessential example is Douglas Adams. He was a writer and story editor (what we would now call “showrunner”) for Doctor Who in the late 1970s whose speciality was punching up scripts where the Time Lord slyly acknowledged how silly it was to be saving the world from stuntmen in rubber suits. He originally pitched The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy as a BBC radio play, and it metastasized into a bestselling book and hit TV series, before becoming, after a long delay, a mediocre-at-best film in 2005.

Neil Gaiman was Adam’s biographer before becoming a one-man publishing juggernaut with the seminal Sandman comics series and a run of novels such as American Gods. Early in his career, Gaiman had the incredible good fortune of co-writing a novel with Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld novels were the underground darling of the fantasy community. Pratchett’s work has plenty of social commentary, and they’re dripping with British wit, but they’re not, strictly speaking, satire, because he was able to make you care deeply about his comic characters, even as they fell down and humiliated themselves in baroque manners.

The novel they wrote together was Good Omens, and it’s been a classic for two decades. Pratchett died in 2005, and since Gaiman had good fortune converting American Gods to TV (at least one season of it), Amazon and Aunty Beeb teamed up to create a big-budget adaptation.

Remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where the sheep dog and the wolf are friends until they clock in to their respective, adversarial jobs? That’s pretty much the relationship of the two co-protagonists of Good Omens. Crowley (David Tennant) is a demon from hell who took the form of a snake and tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) is the angel who was given a flaming sword and tasked with keeping the fallen humans out of the Garden. They’re minor characters in a famous, sweeping story — in this case, the traditional Judeo-Christian narrative of creation and revelation or at least the Anglican/Catholic version. Like Rozencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play, they take a jaundiced view of their role in the sweep of cosmic history. After being on Earth for a few thousand years, they come to like the humans they’re tasked with helping and/or tempting. And more importantly, they like the finer things in life the humans have invented. Since their respective home offices don’t really care too much about the details of what happens on Earth, occasionally they fill in for each other when one of them, say, wants to see this excellent new play called Hamlet that is currently playing at the Globe Theatre in London.

They’ve got a pretty good scam going on until it hits a snag. Crowley is tasked with delivering the baby antichrist to his prospective parents, an American diplomat who will be well positioned to help kick off Armageddeon. Unfortunately, there’s a mixup at the Satanic convent masquerading as a hospital where the baby switch is to take place, and the son of Satan goes home with the wrong set of parents—an average English couple who make the Dursleys from Harry Potter look positively fascinating.

Crowley and Aziraphale, faced with the possibility that they won’t be able to get good sherry in either heaven or hell, conspire to stop Armagedeon by subtly sabotaging the Divine Plan. Their biggest enemy turns out not to be The Adversary, but their own decadent incompetence. By the time they realize, 11 years too late, that the Antichrist has been misplaced, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are getting saddled up.

Josie Lawrence (right) as Agnes Nutter

And there are other complications. The subtitle of Good Omens is “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.” Nutter (Josie Lawrence) was the last witch burned in England, and the only person who ever wrote a book of prophecy that was actually accurate. Her distant descendant Anathema Device (Adria Arjona) has the only remaining copy of the book and, since Agnes specifically told the family to invest in Apple early, a lot of money. It’s her job to stop the Antichrist, while the descendant of the Witchfinder General who burned Agnes, played by Michael McKean, searches England for her.
Good Omens has the kind of byzantine literary plot that inevitably gets flattened into incoherence when you try to make a two-hour movie out of it. The six-part miniseries is the perfect amount of time to devote to it, and Gaiman, who wrote the scripts, knows exactly how to use the format. With Frances McDormand narrating as the Voice of God, the result is like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Apocalypse.

Tennant, the best 21st-century Doctor Who, absolutely shines as Crowley. He puts his whole lithe body into the performance. Even glimpsed in silhouette as he rescues his friend from Nazi spies during the London Blitz, he’s instantly recognizable. Sheen, a veteran actor who has done everything from Emperor Nero to a minor part in Twilight, is his exact opposite, a twee goody-goody who secretly wants to be talked into some fun. The par are like an infernal/holy version of Molly and Amy from Booksmart, and every minute they’re on screen together is electric.

Gaiman and Sherlock director Douglas MacKinnon fearlessly play with form, such as in the third episode which stretches the cold opening out for 25 minutes before rolling the opening credits. It looks great, it’s full of twists and turns, and most importantly, it’s subtly hilarious. Some may find Good Omens too twee and byzantine for their tastes, but I’ve loved every second of it.

Good Omens

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Film/TV TV Features

Jessica Jones

As Marvel continues to infect our lives with stridently competent comic book adaptations, it’s nice to see what they produce actually be about something. Previous incarnations dealt with joy (Guardians of the Galaxy) and the security state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Jessica Jones deals with rape.

Kilgrave (David Tennant) is a walking nightmare. His power is mind control. He’s constantly using and throwing away people to serve his immediate needs, sexual and otherwise, which results in support groups, self-medication, discussions of the cycle of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is unique for a mainstream narrative. Like Preacher‘s Jesse Custer, he can compel someone to his will just by speaking to them. At any point in the story, he will walk into the room with a purple suit and a sneer and demand strangers do his bidding. His attitude is one of entitlement to other people’s bodies, and dismissive sarcasm to empathy. His most frequent dictum is a short, curt “Leave.” His one passion is stalking Krysten Ritter’s title character, a superpowered private eye who deals with having been in his mental grasp by descending into alcoholism.

Krysten Ritter in Jessica Jones

Jones is a Hulk-Buffy variant wrapped in friendly Marvel packaging. She can’t kill her nemesis because she needs to prove he compelled a victim to murder; he won’t kill her because he professes love. This makes for a wonderful fluidity between hero and villain. He shows up to talk, and it’s terrifying. We could have gotten a version of this character that delves into the mind control aspect as wish fulfillment, and his British accent as suave. (He is often seen with women and money, or having people take his insults literally.) Instead the emphasis is on what it feels like to have your mind scrambled.

In the support group Jones starts, victims talk about a loss of identity and being overcome by shame for things as simple as Kilgrave asking for their jacket. Ritter is great at both snappy dialogue and weightier PTSD moments. She enlists a large number of allies, including fellow comic book heroes Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor). Kilgrave’s horror is the show’s star, unusually scary for a Marvel villain. His dialogue is often textbook chauvinistic defenses of sexual assault, and his psychology based on abuse as a child: the medical experiments which gave him his powers, done by his parents.

Like other Marvel entertainment, there are tonally off supporting characters, once and future comic-book plots awkwardly grafted on, and wastes of good actors. The ending is anticlimactic, the action repetitive kick-punching.

Overall, it says something. Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has said she was trying to make a blatant corrective to the use of sexual assault as a plot device on shows like Game of Thrones, where no time or realism is given to the psychology of victims or perpetrators. The result is a corporate product that has the ring of something honest and direct.

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Film/TV TV Features

TV Watch: Doctor Who

CREDIT: BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

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.