TV REVIEW: Death Comes to Pemberley

Dear reader, I must begin this review with a confession. I have never managed to finish Jane Austen's classic Pride & Prejudice. I have attempted it three times and have slowly lost the will to live during each and every attempt. However, despite my ongoing internal battle with my determination to get through that book, I was mightily intrigued by the adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley, based on the novel by PD James, which follows on from the events of Austen's narrative but takes on the guise of a murder mystery. Coupled with the excellent cast and the high standard which comes with a BBC period drama, I settled down to the series with a little expectation and smidgeon of anticipation.

Set a few years after the events of Pride & Prejudice, Lizzie (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Darcy (Matthew Rhys) are happily married and residing at the Darcy family pile, Pemberley. The house is in the process of getting ready for a ball, with the majority of the Bennets on their way to attend, except of course, Lydia (Jenna Coleman), married to the wicked George Wickham (Matthew Goode) and therefore uninvited. Not to be outdone, the Wickhams set off for the ball with their friend Captain Denny (Tom Canton) but a fight along the way and a dastardly murder in the woods finds Wickham arrested and Lizzie and Darcy trying to solve the crime.

The first episode got off to a slow start, but it had so many pieces to put into play that it was a necessary beginning. Once they were all in place, the tension ramped up steadily to the series' slightly heartstopping conclusion. Fortunately those like me who had never managed to finish Austen's novel, an extensive prior knowledge was not required as flashbacks and other references in the dialogue give you enough information to provide a good background to these events. Usually exposition scenes tend to detract from the main event, but here they provided a nice link between the two works, as well as highlighting some of our characters' anxieties, particularly Lizzie's.

As with any good murder mystery, there were a few red herrings to be fished out amongst the other clues but what resonated most was the way in which the murder acted as a catalyst for an analysis on relationships, rather than simply driving the plot towards to its conclusion. Both the Darcys and the Wickhams achieved their supposed happily-ever-afters (one genuine, one as the result of some fast monetary intervention), but the murder pries open cracks in each relationship. For the Darcys, it comes back to the idea of status and Lizzie's worry that Darcy regrets their marriage because he married for love not money. With Lydia, it is trying desperately to keep up the charade that she and Wickham are happy, whilst possessing the knowledge that he's been unfaithful.

There is also a typical marriage plot buried in one of the developing narratives alongside the main one, that of Georgiana Darcy's desire to marry the lawyer Alveston (James Norton) whilst her cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam (Tom Ward) vies for her hand. Both relationships are disrupted as a result of the murder with Darcy forcing Georgiana into an engagement with her cousin before he realises that his cousin is just trying to keep his reputation untainted. It lends a fascinating element to what could have been just a straight murder mystery and one that is enhanced by PD James' decision to use these existing characters; we're offered a chance to see what hand life has dealt them and how in turn they respond to it.

It helped that the performances were all excellent with Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin bringing a lovely chemistry to one of literature's most famous couples. Though they remain the stoic centre at the heart of the chaos, they are never dull, always observing with a quick intelligence and Martin gets in some great one liners with Lizzie's trademark wit. Matthew Goode is another standout, carving a fine niche for himself in the charming reprobate category after this year's Stoker, whose Wickham may be all kinds of awful, but has enough charm and vulnerability about him that you keep rooting for him throughout. 

Trevor Eve made for a suitably gruff investigator, one whose motives remained in doubt throughout but ultimately came good in the end. Initially, Jenna Coleman and Rebecca Front hold up much of the comedic end in the first half of the series as Lydia and Mrs Bennet, but Lydia in particular far from one-dimensional. In just one scene she is transformed from a selfish, inconsiderate irritant to a put-upon wife determined not to allow her marriage to fall apart. It's a testament to Coleman's performance that this seen registered so strongly.

Finally, the most interesting element was the way in which Pemberley became a character in itself. Using the beautiful grounds of Chatsworth in Derbyshire (as well as interiors at Castle Howard and Harewood House), the estate itself became a crucial part of the narrative, not only as its location, but also because of the regard in which it is held by the characters. Whilst the murder itself was motivated more by individual concerns, the reason behind it, mainly the existence of baby George, was founded on Wickham's love of Pemberley and the memories he had of it. Darcy's attempts to rein in the scandal are to save its name as is Georgiana's decision to marry her cousin despite not really caring for him.

Much more than just a simple murder-at-a-country-house tale, Death Comes to Pemberley was a beautiful exercise in how to create a compelling story of family and scandal, with fantastic performances and a real dedication to bringing Austen's characters back to life. It may have just inspired me to give Pride & Prejudice another go. 

- Becky

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TV REVIEW: The Paradise - Episode 8

It’s here! The end is in sight! The Paradise’ glass doors swung shut on our screens for what I presume (read: hope given the exhaustion of all possible plotlines) to be one last time in episode eight of the department store drama.

The return of French rabble rouser and all round libertine Clemence (Branka Katic) was the main driving force behind the plot, as she turned up with controversial products rouge and dice to be sold at The Paradise. However it transpires that she is deeply in debt, leading to sneaky villain Tom Weston (Ben Daniels), in one of his more oddly Gothic moves, offering to buy all of her debts from her in return for her becoming his mistress. And that’s putting it delicately for Sunday night audiences. Meanwhile, the estranged Denise (Joanna Vanderham) and Moray (Emun Elliott) continue to pine miserably for each other, not appearing any closer to a resolution in their relationship. Things do not appear any closer to being resolved for Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and Tom Weston either, as even a surprise pregnancy does little to mend their broken marriage. Denise gets involved with Clemence’s plight, and Moray resolves to use the dice to win back both his shop and his friend’s freedom. Hearing the passion and strength which has been missing from his character all series, Denise softens towards him, cooking up a plan which would allow them both their professional freedom, whilst being together again after all. After the wounds on his back are proven to be the marks of cowardice, Weston returns to his wife a broken, humiliated man, and is all the better for it. Denise and Moray are allowed a quick snog as the credits roll, and suddenly that’s it! It’s all over.

Sad as I am that I will no longer be able to visit the department store’s well decorated halls for a bit of well-earned escapism any longer, I’m actually rather pleased it has come to an end. It had begun to wane a little, despite its attempts at darker storylines. It also successfully resolved the career versus marriage theme which had been hanging over the show for weeks, with bright spark Denise managing to find a way to satisfy both sides of her life. I always liked her. Clemence’s re-appearance felt a little too plot device like for me, however without her I’m not entirely sure how everything would have been resolved, so I suppose I must let that one go. The theme of possession has been an interesting one throughout, with Moray’s feelings of ownership towards free spirit Denise causing all manner of problems in their engagement, with this wrapped up nicely in this final episode with him fighting for Clemence’s right not to become a possession, not to mention the question of who owns what bits of The Paradise cropping up at every turn. All this, of course,  was played out in an environment entirely centered on buying and selling.

I’ve always thought The Paradise might be cleverer than it gave itself credit for. It’s been one of the better period dramas in recent years, totally un-overshadowed by ITV’s annoyingly similar Mr Selfridge. Will the latter be able to live up to the gauntlet thrown down by its predecessor’s recent finale?

Only time, and the ringing of the cash registers, will tell.

Jen

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TV REVIEW: Doctor Who - The Time of the Doctor

With the dawning of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth hour, Matt Smith’s time as The Doctor has drawn to a close. Which leaves me with the unenviable task of attempting to summarise one of the most complex episodes in Doctor Who history, ‘The Time of the Doctor’, lest we all spend the next few weeks completely and utterly bamboozled.

Along with his new friend Handles, a friendly severed Cyberman head, The Doctor begins the special hour long episode flitting between different ships orbiting an unknown planet, from which an, also unknown, message is being continually broadcast. After visiting both the Cybermen and Dalek ships, as unsuccessfully as would be expected when unwittingly carrying broken parts of the occupants, The Doctor heads off to Earth to pick up best pal Clara (Jenna Louise Coleman). She, meanwhile, this being a Christmas special, is attempting to roast a turkey for the family she suddenly seems to have. After a brief stint of pretending, badly, to be Clara’s boyfriend at her behest, the two set off in the direction of the mysterious message. Handles suggests that the planet is in fact Gallifrey, an idea The Doctor naturally and passionately rejects having previously locked Gallifrey safely into a time pocket outside of the Universe. Next, he and Clara are invited onto a church spaceship run by cool space lady Tasha Lem (Orla Brady). Having somehow secured the unknown planet, Tasha asks The Doctor if he fancies having a butchers before anybody else does. Naturally, he does.

On arrival, he and Clara find themselves in a snowy town called Christmas, again, it’s Christmas Day, people! It appears that no one in this town can tell a lie, although this potential plotline is quickly dropped. They follow the message to the town’s church tower, and find a crack in reality through which, it transpires, the Time Lords of Gallifrey are asking the question ‘Doctor who?’ over and over. It is a request for him to speak his real name and thereby confirm his presence and location. However, this confirmation would bring the lost Time Lords hurtling back into the present Universe, causing all manner of timey-wimey chaos, not to mention re-starting the Time War, especially with all those spaceships hovering just above the planet. Alarmed, The Doctor asks Tasha to tell him what planet they’re on. By now, of course, it can almost be nowhere but Trenzalore, the planet The Doctor is buried upon. Tricking Clara in returning to Earth, The Doctor spends the next 300 hundred years of the siege as a sort of stalemate sheriff, protecting the townspeople from attack, whilst simultaneously refusing to answer Gallifrey’s message.

Keeping up?

Eventually, having grabbed on to the TARDIS like Captain Jack Harkness before her (I miss him), Clara arrives back on Trenzalore, to find a visibly aged Doctor who knows he has now used up all his re-generations, and doesn’t, ironically enough, have much time left. Back on the church ship, now ominously named The Church of the Silence, Tasha explains that Madame Kovarian (eye patch lady, remember her?) broke away from the main Papal Mainframe, and attempted to kill The Doctor to prevent the siege ever happening – hence River Song and the original appearance of The Silence etc etc. Tasha then turns into a Dalek having had her consciousness invaded by the tricksy blighters. Eventually, after a little more to-ing and fro-ing which as far I can see was wholly unnecessary, a frail and elderly Doctor faces his old enemies in a sort of last stand. A distraught Clara pleads into the time crack, asking the Time Lords to save their old countryman one last time. Fortunately, they send a last bit of regeneration energy through the sky, allowing The Doctor to defeat the Daleks and pop back up in the TARDIS as his younger self, just in time to say goodbye to Clara, as well as a hallucination of Amy Pond (Karen Gillan).

Finally, he regenerates into a bewildered and slightly manic looking Peter Capaldi, who, worryingly, begins his tenure by asking a terrified Clara if she knows how to fly the TARDIS. And so the thirteenth age begins.

Phew. For a moment or two there I didn’t think we were going to make it through all that. Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly how I felt when watching the episode. All plot holes and references to prior events felt at best, shoe-horned in for the sake of wrapping them up. At worst, they were damaging to the episode's plot, taking attention away from Matt Smith’s exit and totally ballsing up his one chance to say goodbye before the start of Capaldi’s reign. Smith has been a fine Doctor, playing the part with a lovely mixture of playfulness, mischief, bravery and brains. It's shame the episode appears to have been planned out without nearly half as much care and attention as Smith has put into his performance week after week. In fact if it wasn’t for the lynchpin of Clara Oswald, the whole episode would have spun off into a vortex of confusion faster than an out of control TARDIS. Thinking back to David Tennant’s final moments as our Gallifreyan hero, I can help but think it’s a shame Matt Smith didn’t get the same treatment. Sure, the re-appearance of Amy and young Amelia was tear-jerking, but only for about ten seconds, that being the only breathing space Moffat’s over-full episode was left with.

It was an exciting start to Capaldi’s career in the TARDIS, true, but overall it was a badly paced, impossibly complex and deeply unsatisfying ending to the storyline of Smith’s Doctor. And he deserved better than that if you ask me, and I'm still a Tennant girl at heart.

Jen

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TV REVIEW: Ripper Street - Our Betrayal Part 1

‘Our Betrayal, Part 1’, was by enlarge the Ripper Street episode we’ve been waiting for all series. With a strong character focus and a reasonably simple plot, free from overly flowery language and crowded narrative arcs, it was actually rather enjoyable to watch. And just as I was beginning to doubt I would ever type those words.

The tortured and bereaved Sergeant Drake (Jerome Flynn) having not been seen since the death of his wife six months ago, Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and young Flight (Damien Molony) have been left to run H division without him. Despite Bennett never having seemed to play too vital a role in proceedings before, it seems that in his absence this is easier said than done. A jewellery conman is on the run, and it is left to Flight to find him. However, when the search takes him into the territory of Inspector Shine, played by Joseph Mawle with as effective a sly menace as ever, we are presented with a man who, at best, has divided loyalties, and at worst, is a traitor and a mole in the camp of the hand that feeds him.  Meanwhile, life gets even trickier for Jackson (Adam Rothenberg). Still living with Reid, having been kicked out by Lazy Susan – sorry, Long Susan (MyAnna Buring), it is understandably awkward when his trouble-making long lost brother turns up from South Africa sporting a rather large uncut diamond.

This diamond however, at least in Jackson’s eager eyes, could be the very thing to save Long Susan and her brothel from the slimy clutches of Silas Duggan (Frank Harper). Things haven’t improved much in that department since last week’s episode,  with Duggan moving into a room in, as he puts it, ‘his house’. His bargain to Susan remains on the table (thankfully that’s all he puts on the table) – namely that he will lift all debts should she agree to spend just ‘one night of pleasure’ with him. Yum. He has made it clear, too, that he wants no one but her. Susan is understandably concerned about this, as unlike poor former employee Rose (Charlene McKenna), who has been wandering Whitechapel in search of Drake for months, Susan knows ‘what it is like to lie with the man she loves’, and is anxious about selling her body –despite having built a career overseeing dozens of girls doing that very thing.

Despite the obvious hypocrisies of her position, however, the storyline is a moving one. In fact it’s been one of the better storylines of the series, as well as one of the most underused. Her final resolution on the matter is little short of heart-breaking, particularly as she has always been one of a very small number of women in the show with any kind of independence or freedom. To watch that being slowly eroded does not make for easy viewing. Her relationship with her estranged husband underpins it all of course, although again we’re left unsure whether their marriage is indeed broken beyond retribution. Set alongside the relationship between Rose and her beloved Bennet, we’re left wondering if there is any hope in Whitechapel at all for wives, husbands and would be lovers. Never fear though, Inspector Reid is on the case, with amorous feelings of his own… I don’t really want to discuss that any further as I found it more than a little awkward.

Moving on, then, to new boy Flight, who in all honesty as had plot device sewn into his waistcoat since he first stepped on the screen, particularly as he has been perpetually  picked up and dropped like a yo-yo depending on what else has been happening in the episode. To that end, his involvement in the betrayal was one of a few elements to the episode which did not feel wholly believable. There needed to have been at least a couple of signs along the way that he was not to be trusted, and, unless I nodded off for half the series, which admittedly is quite likely, there have been none. Also feeling unbelievable were the series of co-incidences which brought Bennet back to H division. Epic as the moment of his prodigal return felt, it was all just a little, or a lot, too convenient. I also found it rather amusing that it had seemingly  taken Rose six months to notice that Jackson was no longer living at the brothel, but in the grand scheme of all things Ripper Street that’s probably by the by.

Fingers crossed this momentum can be kept up for tomorrow night’s finale- that way I might even depart the series with a couple of positive things to say.

Jen

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TV REVIEW: Ripper Street - A Stronger Loving World

I would apologise at the lateness of this review of Ripper Street, ‘A Stronger Loving World’, but to be honest it’s taken me this long to get my head around the different broken fragments of the episode.

Racial tension began as the order of the day, when a Church is torched, leading to widespread blame of the Jewish community. A subsequent attack on a synagogue as well as some crafty pamphlet font comparison work (as you do) leads H division to investigate the possibility that both attacks were carried out by the same party. Rose (Charlene McKenna), after the discovery that Long Susan (MyAnna Buring) can no longer financially support her, left brothel for slightly less green pastures, which consisted largely of her drinking gin alone in a public house. Befriended by a mysterious cult-like group, Rose finds herself in an oddly luxuriously decorated abandoned building, with food and a roof over her head for as long as she needs it. Only the pages of religious doctrine littered about, as well as all the references to ‘Father’ suggest that anything sinister is afoot – but are the cult too good to be true? Meanwhile, Bella Drake (Gillian Saker), wife of Bennett (Jerome Flynn) mysteriously disappeared, only to return a day later with her strange long lost Uncle, Gabriel Cain, played be a gloriously Captain Hook-like be-bearded Paul Kaye. It’s up to Bennett and Rose to figure out what’s going on, conveniently bringing together the (vague) threads of the storyline in the process because, of course, they are were all connected.

In another vastly confusing episode, Paul Kaye was able to really stand out as the sinister cult leader, creating an artificial family of followers all of whom, naturally, adore him. He looked every inch the part (the inches, of course, being the beard) and was wholly believable as a man capable of manipulating not only poor innocent Bella but an entire group of people into a deluded suicide pact at his behest. Second only to this performance was that of Jerome Flynn, who was heart-breaking as the distraught newlywed who finds his happiness disappearing in front of his eyes almost as quickly as it materialised in the first place. It was just a shame that, having been so, er, shortlived, (bit of a spoiler there, I apologise), the happiness itself, in the form of Bella, didn’t quite pack the emotional punch it could have had she been a more established character. Again with Ripper Street, the detective’s wives are little more than expendable plot devices, doomed to further the action with graceful deaths and emotional breakdowns, but never to add anything to it. In a stunning act of self-awareness, however, Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) seemed to begin to realise this here, giving Bennett all the time he needed to mend his broken personal life. I couldn’t help but wish that this had been the focus of the storyline instead, but alas no such luck, especially with the homeless Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) drunkenly stumbling about the place like a dodgy Jack Sparrow impersonator.

With such a potentially interesting start, we were once again sent spinning off into a wild vortex of a tangent with this episode. As has so often been the case with Series 2 of this show, the episode we ended up with was completely different from the one we signed up for at the start of the show, to the detriment of any themes established in the first quarter of the episode. Present as ever was The Scene, in which all the confusing madness is explained, although here this served more to frustrate than inform.

I really hope it can get enough of a grip on one single narrative thread to make the final episodes work. With the recent announcement of the cancellation of Series 3, it would be cheering if the show could go out with more of a confident bang than a perplexed whimper.

Jen 

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