The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.

Hereafter

If the word "ponderous" did not exist, one would invent it to describe Hereafter. "Ponderous" is such a great word: one cannot say it would communicating its meaning merely through diction. It forces one's register lower, forcing the short "o" sound out in booming baritone like the blast of a great war horn echoing around a mountain. It's such a noble word, in fact, that while anyone should be able to write it down, only the most refined and eloquent of British-accented speakers should be allowed to say it aloud.

If it seems I have lost track of the review before it has even started, that is because merely thinking about the word "ponderous" has given me more joy and provoked more thought than anything in the total of Hereafter's two and a half hours. If there is anything positive to be found in the movie's plodding, half-baked, hollow treatises on the possibility of life after death, it is that Clint Eastwood's lifeless direction may finally swing people around to my side. Perhaps America's most coddled filmmaker has at last pushed his luck too far.

It takes balls to open a film that has nothing to do with any real life tragedy with the real life tragedy of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the shamelessness of the opening segment sets a low bar the film never manages to clear. Focusing on Marie (Cécile de France), a French television journalist on holiday, the sequence plays out in clumsily animated CGI that leads to a choreographed setpiece that appears to want to excite more than terrify. As the water carries Marie and everything else in its unstoppable crush, we get cheap glimpses of cars crashing into people and power lines falling into the water and zapping nearby souls. Worse still, the POV shots of the camera moving through the water feel like a flume ride at Disneyland, and they're about as spiritually rewarding. Worse still, Marie drowns and spends a few moments legally dead, during which time she crosses over to the other side and sees the stereotypical bright light. The digital effects here are distracting, if more cleverly done than the cheap wash of water previously seen, and the tease of the afterlife does nothing to spark curiosity, much less wonder. Eastwood is clearly out of his element here, but no other film has more sorely tested the idea whether he has any directorial element at all.

Jim Emerson recently posted some serious thoughts on Eastwood's supposed legacy as a director that track closely enough to my own that I need not enumerate my issues with him here (or at least, not again). Where I disagree with Emerson is in his claim that, apart from the classicist gloss Eastwood paints over his films, there's nothing in them to make any one seem, on its face, a Clint Eastwood film. That's largely true, but there are a few recurring themes. Chief among them in his modern work is the idea of lost innocence, a realm Steven Spielberg has been plumbing his entire creative life. Eastwood, however, tends to enjoy more critical adulation for his supposed maturity on the subject where Spielberg is too much of a man-child. As it so happens, I recently returned to Sir Steve's Empire of the Sun, a film that depicts the decay of a boy's innocence through separation and atrocity, told almost exclusively though visual means that blur the line between subjective romanticism and objective horror in a way that would not be equaled until Guillermo Del Toro took it to the next step with Pan's Labyrinth. When Eastwood wants to communicate lost innocence, he lets it be known that a child was raped, or killed (or both). I posit the question: which of these approaches sounds less nuanced?

Hereafter, a movie about the possibility of a life after death, must naturally also concern death, and one of the several diverging and converging storylines -- yes, Peter Morgan saw Crash and Babel and apparently thought the network narrative had not sufficiently been snuffed -- involves two adorable, precocious twin brothers. Is one of them abused or killed? Check. Oh, and they also care for a mother who's an alcoholic (and a junkie, because when it rains it destroys beaches in Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands pours). The surviving lad, Marcus, cannot cope with losing his brother, and his numb reaction to being placed in foster care matches up with Marie's distraction back home in Paris.

Then, Eastwood introduces the main arc, that of George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a construction worker who, we learn, has the ability to communicate with the dead. No, really. You'd be forgiven for thinking he was a fraud, for the yes/no questions he asks his clients are of the same sort that charlatans use to lead gullible and vulnerable payers. In fact, when Morgan's script addresses the frauds, it must paint them in the most absurd light possible just to make George's style plausible, calling into question how anyone could be fooled.

George, of course, just wants to leave that side of his life behind him, saying on two occasions that his ability "isn't a gift. It's a curse." He takes night classes on cooking, where he meets nepotism personified, Bryce Dallas Howard, who shows up late to the first lesson because she was playing the Anne Hathaway role in M. Night Shyamalan's remake of The Devil Wears Prada -- the twist is that it's actually the Devil! Howard brings all her halting, overacted anti-charm to the part of Melanie, whose presence is cut mercifully short when she gets close to George and insists he read her when she learns of his powers. I don't want to give away what the reading reveals, but if you've been paying attention so far you can guess when I say "double check."

The problem with network narratives is that it's difficult to transition between storylines without editing arbitrarily, and rarely has this flaw been so evident. Before we spend enough time with anyone to care about their issues and their pain, Eastwood leaps countries and continents to deal with the most tenuously related bullshit. I've often been nonreactive to something meant to be sad in a film, but never have I been so utterly unmoved by the death of a child on-screen. All I could think about was the absurd editing of a van with a large grill braking before striking the poor British lad, who then somehow flipped up and over the grill to smash into the windshield. I couldn't be expected to believe in this film's vision of an afterlife because it doesn't have any care for physics in its life-life.

That laziness is rampant in this picture. Eastwood needs to stop scoring his films. There, the end. John Carpenter has a way with electronic minimalism. Robert Rodriguez has a raucous Latin-rock-jazz flare. Clint Eastwood perennially sounds like he's tuning the instruments for the actual musicians who never arrive. I always hold out hope for the films he scores that the three-note guitar and repeating piano chord will morph into something atmospheric in the vein of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score or Neil Young's haunting work on Dead Man, then I remember that those two are accomplished musicians with a deep knowledge of the craft and not some guy on a power trip trying to prove he can do it all. All exposition is handled through dialogue, including a medical diagnosis for George's ability to speak to the dead, and just when you've gotten over the offensiveness of using the tsunami to suck people in, Eastwood chucks in the London Tube bombings for added offensiveness. When Marcus looks for videos on YouTube that talk about death and the afterlife, he first watches a video by a Muslim who speaks of the Qur'an, then Marcus watches another video, this time by an evangelical. If you pay attention to the text of the video description, however, it does not change when Marcus picks another video, so it still talks about the Five Pillars of Islam leading to salvation as a man talks about Jesus. That little moment summed up the entire film for me: no effort whatsoever.

Worst of all is the depiction of the afterlife. It may sound childish and direct to say this, but there is a great charm in the blunt honesty of childish perception. So here it is: I despise this vision of the afterlife. Christopher Hitchens once hilariously described the Judeo-Christian conception of heaven as a "celestial North Korea," in which the supposedly blessed were charged with singing homilies to the "Great Leader" for all eternity. I am reminded of the old stories of Stalinist Russia, in which audiences clapped for hours because the first one who stopped would be sent to the Gulag.

Peter Morgan's vision of a pan-humanist afterlife is even more dull. Voices do not stay with George long because they want to get back to the wonderful existence of the afterlife, yet whenever we catch a glimpse of the world beyond, we see only silhouettes of people standing idly in pure white as if waiting for George to talk to them. They have no real wisdom to impart, because they're trapped in a film that doesn't have anything to say either. They stand in the Elysian Fields waiting for anything interesting to happen. I wonder, then, if they're a reflection of Hereafter's audience.

This is cardboard depth, typified by the emptiness of the character-building traits used to try to make these characters appealing. Marie's experience makes her the one person most worthy of our attention, yet Morgan defines her character in the simplest means, focusing on her reputation as a hard-hitting journalist until suddenly he doesn't, suggesting a breakdown from survivor's guilt until explaining away all the bad things that happened to her as the result of the actions of others. George's quirk is that he loves Charles Dickens, the relevance of which is never shown. I did, however, perk up when Eastwood included a scene of Derek Jacobi, as himself, reading excerpts from Little Dorrit. With Jacobi's classically trained voice and the enduring majesty of Dickens' prose, I had the same look of wonder on my face as Damon and wished I could have listened to that autographed book-on-tape George picked up instead of watching this tired hokum.

And if network narratives diverge on the shakiest of grounds, they fare even worse when everything comes together. A film about death and the afterlife can have no truly explosive dénouement -- I was deeply amused, as ever, by David Edelstein, who wondered aloud if the film might have tried for a big ending by making a metaphysical version of the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of the characters stepping into a mother ship of death -- but the uneventful finale only underscores the uselessness of what preceded it. Hereafter doesn't have a damn thing to say about death, or life, or life after death, and the maudlin pablum Morgan uses to justify why people might need to believe in an afterlife serves only to throw his fellow atheists under a bus (at which point they would presumably somehow bounce back up into the bus' windshield). Eastwood gets more solid work from Damon, who can make a splash in seemingly anything, and his work with the young, non-professional actors who play the boys stands in sharp contrast to the atrocious job he did with child actors on Gran Torino. But it's all for naught, a decorative flourish on something terrible, like spraying Febreeze on dog shit. Earlier this year, I let Inception off the hook for some of its issues because the ambition and the effervescent cheek of it carried me past the tin-hollow psychology on its questions of reality and surreality.

The problem with Hereafter is that, for its weighty idea, there's no ambition on any level of the project. Not in the tack script, not in Eastwood's workmanlike direction, not even in the performances. It's as if everyone realized halfway through that this picture had no point and went right into CYA mode. The result is a rumination on mortality that makes The Five People You Meet in Heaven look sophisticated and genuine. If nothing else, its lack of narrative cohesion, two-dimensional characters, shameless attempts to elicit an emotional response and clueless depiction of the afterlife proved one thing: Clint Eastwood totally could have directed the finale of LOST.

Doctor Who — Series 3

I must admit that the degree to which I enjoy Britain's campiest export, the legendary Doctor Who, completely surprises me. After all, even this rebooted version has a Star Trek sort-of feel to it, right down to showrunner Russell T. Davies' utter lack of subtlety when it comes to getting across any sort of message. But it also shares some traits with its clear inspiration Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly its ability to turn on a dime between comedy and tragedy. The previous series' finale, "Doomsday," was one of the most moving non-Whedon fantasy episodes I've ever seen, even if it suffered from some serious bloating. Losing Rose deeply upset the Doctor, setting up a potentially great emotional fallout for the third series.


Sadly, Davies seems to have come to the conclusion that the proper way to advance from "Doomsday" was to fall back into pure camp, which he does with vigor. Supposedly, the ballyhoo over the selection of comedienne Catherine Tate as the guest Companion in the series-bridging Christmas Special "The Runaway Bride" rivalled the uproar over Billy Piper's casting as Rose, because the internet, despite being the ultimate repository of human knowledge, never truly learns. Funnily enough, she's the only good aspect of an otherwise forgettable 45 minutes. I'm not kidding: I had to look up the wiki page for the episode to remind me of some of the plot points. Nevertheless, the final moments uncover some of the Doctor's lingering anguish over Rose, leading Tate's Donna to rightly prompt him to find another person to keep him company.

That person turns out to be Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, a medical student who finds herself partnered with the Doctor when an interstellar police force illegally warps the hospital where she works to the Moon in order to search for a murderous alien. Even though she winds up on the TARDIS at the end, a moody Doctor quickly informs her that he's just taking her on one trip because he has no intention of replacing his last Companion. Of course, she sticks around, as, whether he can admit it or not, he needs someone to help him out, not just with his missions but with his grief.

These moments of interplay are, unfortunately, the only consistently rewarding aspect of the early part of the series. "The Shakespeare Code" gets points for introducing the idea of the Bard tackling a sequel -- I must admit I laughed pretty hard when he proudly announces his intention to produce "Love's Labour's Won" (apparently a genuine unfinished transcript bears this title, though whether or not Shakespeare meant it to be a sequel remains a mystery) -- but as a whole it just gets off some half-hearted references to the man's work and just sort of expects us to believe that Martha, a black woman, is treated with the same level of respect as the Doctor, despite the time period. "Gridlock" is even worse, with Davies' wretched script not so much trying to teach us about increasingly clogged motorways as bashing us about the heads like Paul Haggis with a bad case of 'roid rage.

Things pick up slightly with the first of three multi-part episode arcs, this one concerning the re-emergence of the Daleks, who just don't seem to understand the term "extinction." Their appearance offers a much-needed boost, and their plan to combine human DNA and Dalek machinery is sufficiently nefarious after the opening episodes failed to give us a standout villain. Sadly, it falls apart in the end when, as with so many of these arcs, the reach exceeds the grasp and all the fun seems to fizzle out just as you're about to reach it: the hybrid, Sec, obviously must reconcile human emotion with his Dalek coldness, but the conclusion he reaches made me wonder why I just sat through these two episodes. I suppose its airing position (in the middle of the season as opposed to the end) should have clued me in to the fact that such a seemingly grand development would actually have little impact, but it's still odd that the writers would so casually throw away such a promising story.

The jumbled end of the mini-arc sends the show right back to into its early-season morass, tossing out a horribly paced take on the Fountain of Youth and parody of the American series 24 that is so wrapped up in "satirizing" the style and tone of that show that they neither advance an interesting plot nor even send up 24 that viciously. Both "The Lazarus Experiment" and "42" (see if you can spot that reference) represent everything that grates in the series' weaker moments: laughable villains failing to personify even the obvious messages they're meant to teach us. Not even Tennant can salvage these, as both episodes box in his manic energy and his ability to turn on a dime, forcing him to simply lead the plot home.

Ergo, it should come as little surprise that, when they let Tennant have an entire mini-arc to play more or less an entirely different character, Doctor Who leaps back up to the level it enjoyed with its previous series. In the opening moments of "Human Nature," Martha and the Doctor escape an attack by the incorporeal, telepathic Family of Blood, who require the Doctor's Time Lord life force to save themselves. To protect himself, he places his force inside a watch he entrusts to Martha and must live as a human for three months. The TARDIS lands in 1913 England, and the Doctor lives as John Smith, a teacher for a military school while Martha works as his maid. Completely unaware of his true identity, Smith has a spark of the Doctor's affability, but as filtered through the mindset of old England: he gives his consent to several prefects to beat a young boy -- who has ESP and sees his future involvement in World War I when he touches a gun -- for freezing up in a shooting exercise, and his interactions with Martha have more than a little tinge of the casual racism permitted by society.

Smith falls for the school's nurse, Joan, played by Spaced's very own nerd goddess Jessica Hynes. Hynes plays Joan as a proper matron, but she brings a warmth to the role that makes you care about her despite the fact that she only just appeared. When the Family of Blood tracks the Doctor down, Martha must convince Smith that he must give up Joan and even life as he knows it to become the Doctor again. Tennant's acting in these moments is downright incredible, turning what could easily have been a mere plot point into an agonizing decision: when he asks Martha "Why can't I just be John Smith? Isn't he a good man?," it's heartbreaking, and the moment when Tennant switches back into the Doctor's mannerisms ranks as one of the more impressive 180s this side of Jossverse personality shifts. Collectively, the Family of Blood two-parter represents some of the strongest writing and acting to grace the series, with the kind of emotion that previously only graced finales.

And it's not even the strongest part of the third series. If Russell T. Davies serves as Joss Whedon's British counterpart -- I'm speaking in terms of aspiration, certainly not skill -- then Steven Moffat is his Tim Minear. But where the Davies-Whedon connection falls down when the issue of quality and skill arises, Moffat might just live up to the comparison. Outside of Who, he penned the "British Friends" hit Coupling (I can only pray that, when I get around to that series, it really isn't like that ghastly program) and the acclaimed miniseries Jekyll. But it's his work on Doctor Who that'll win him a special place in the heart of the internet for generations to come. His previous offerings, the astounding two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" and the bittersweet "The Girl in the Fireplace," each won Hugo awards and remain high points of the series.


This season's offering, "Blink," might just be his best yet, despite the fact that the Doctor barely features at all. Instead, we follow Sally Sparrow, a young woman who receives strange warnings about some creatures known as the Weeping Angels in the form of pre-recorded messages from the Doctor hidden away as DVD Easter eggs. Whenever Sally attempts to solicit help from someone, they disappear only to write her a letter from the past talking about the Doctor and their new life. One police officer even meets her again, albeit as an old man with a fulfilled life. It's a masterpiece of disorientation that is nevertheless not quite as impressive as the fact that Moffat makes the villains of the episode, which are statues that can only move when nothing can see them, truly terrifying. The strange messages work in the early bits, but when we see just how the Doctor's message came to be recorded, the explanation only makes the previous stuff even better. "Blink" won Moffat his third Hugo for the episode, but honestly, I just feel sorry for the people who were in his category.

The third series ends with a three-part episode that brings back the Doctor's arch-foe, The Master. The first two episodes of the arc, "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums," continue the momentum of the previous episodes; the former features Derek Jacobi as a Professor in the far future attempting to save mankind, only to reveal himself as the Master when the Doctor's presence reawakens his true self, hidden in a watch of his own. The Master, now played by John Simm, steals the TARDIS and, by the time the Doctor and Martha make it back to the present via a returned Captain Jack Harkness' Vortex Generator, he's Prime Minister of England -- something hinted at in brief moments throughout the series.

He's even got a better laser tool.

Sadly, it all falls apart at then end, despite a climactic and revealing showdown between the Doctor and the Master. A battle of wits over brute strength, it manages to be funny, insightful and gripping, culminating in wonderful moment of clemency that, in its own way, is harsher than the bloodiest revenge. Then the writers, by sheer necessity of the hole they placed themselves into, must literally hit a 'reset' button at the end. An unfortunate way to cap off a strong second half.

Despite its late-series upswing, the third installment of New Who lacks, especially when compared to the previous two series. Agyeman pulls off the agony of Martha's unrequited love for the Doctor with aplomb, but she never has the independent strength of Rose, and her family certainly never grows as Rose's did. I know that she's meant to be filler as the Doctor never considered her more than a replacement for the Companion he came close to loving, but the role still confines an actress who seemed aching to bring something more to the table.

Because Martha is so under-written, Tennant must pick up the slack, which he of course deftly manages. Strange then, that the best episodes are the ones where the Doctor plays little role. Tennant may be on the screen in 1913, but he's John Smith, through and through. And he's at his most interesting (this season, at least) with his pre-recorded dialogue in "Blink," set to a drab background that made me think of the trigger video from Videodrome. If the first series of the reboot focused on the big heroes, and the second on those who accompany them, I don't quite know what the focus of this set of episodes is. Perhaps it's the villains; despite the weakness of most of the enemies in terms of being memorable, but the villains call the shots throughout the series. The Family of Blood forces the Doctor into hiding, the Weeping Angels strand the Doctor in 1969 after stealing the TARDIS and The Master leaves him in the distant future.

Yet, even if the villains form the nucleus of this series, it lacks the focus to flesh out this core. It's still an enjoyable season, but no longer one that flirts with greatness, as the last two series did. I've heard good things about the subsequent series -- at the very least, Moffat scored yet another Hugo nomination, though the competition looks pretty fierce this time around so his streak may end come August -- so hopefully it rebounds back to previous heights.