On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas
Gabriele Ferzetti and Ilsa Steppat
Screenplay by Richard Maibaum
Produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman
Directed by Peter Hunt

I can't help feeling sorry for George Lazenby. He's the forgotten Bond, only having done this one movie, and he's relegated to the status of afterthought, of interest mainly to completists. He's also generally considered a failure, and I think that's entirely unfair (but not entirely untrue). There's no reason why he couldn't have been a perfectly respectable Bond, but he never really had a chance. We take it for granted these days that Bond gets recast every few years, but Lazenby was the first to take over from someone else, and he was taking over from Sean Connery, the man who made Bond an icon. Naturally, there would be some audience resistance.

But Lazenby's misfortune goes beyond this. Judging from the previous five entries in the franchise, the three criteria for the actor playing Bond were, in descending order of importance, looking good in a tuxedo, being able to handle the action scenes, and having at least minimal acting ability. Lazenby meets all of those requirements. But this is the first Bond film where minimal acting ability wasn't enough. This film requires Bond to fall in love, get married, and grieve for his murdered bride. Lazenby does more acting in this one movie than Connery had been called upon to do in all of the previous movies combined, and he's not up to it.

The movie also could have done more to smooth over the transition. Other than a single line delivered directly to camera in the teaser, the movie is unambiguous that this is the same man. The movie goes to great lengths to make this clear (and yet some fans still imagine that "James Bond" is a code name passed from one agent to another). But it is never explained why Blofeld fails to recognize Bond, or (more crucially) why Bond wouldn't expect to be recognized.

The movie is also a bit more down-to-Earth than the most recent installments. Every once in a while, it seems, someone decides that the movies should be more like Fleming's books. This never goes well with audiences, who have little interest in Fleming's Bond. This movie relies far less on goofy gadgets, and also depicts Bond almost as if he was an actual person. Personally, I consider these to be very much in the film's favor. This is easily the best Bond movie since From Russia With Love largely because of this.

But it's not without its problems. The structure and pacing is just terrible, because the movie has to tell two very different stories that are only incidentally related to one another. If you consider the "primary" story to be the one about Bond stopping another one of Blofeld's mad schemes (and that's natural enough), you have to wait for ages for that story to even begin. And even when it does, it's a bit underwhelming, as Blofeld's scheme is evidently to have himself wrongfully declared to be some sort of Count. No, I don't know why. His scheme does get better. Somewhat. Eventually.

But the movie has some terrific action going on, once it gets going, including the first instance of what I consider one of the minor staples of the franchise: the ski chase. I don't know what makes chase scenes on skis so awesome, but they are really fucking awesome.

Contraception "Controversy"

There are at least three ways of approaching the recent Obama Administration decision of contraception. We can look at it in terms of health care policy, in terms of women's issues, and in terms of religious freedom. The media is overwhelmingly focusing on the religious freedom angle, so I guess I should address that.

The position of the Catholic Church on the issue of contraception is indefensible and utterly obscene. This should go without saying, but sadly, it does not. By demonizing contraception, the Catholic Church has caused suffering and promoted death on a vast scale. This is the very opposite of morality. But religious freedom is important, and it means that the Catholic Church is quite free to push their dangerously misguided and deeply immoral views on their unfortunate dupes.

Fortunately, very few American Catholics have been duped, since something like 98% of Catholic women use birth control, having apparently decided that an organization as blatantly and unapologetically patriarchal as the Catholic Church is not the final word on morality after all.

But the real question is whether Catholic hospitals should be granted an exemption from provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which require employer-based health insurance plans to cover contraception without a co-pay. Religious organizations have been granted many exemptions to various laws. We all understand that employment discrimination is wrong, but religions are allowed to practice it anyway.

But sometimes religions get involved in non-religious activity. Catholic hospitals are owned and operated by the Catholic Church, but they're not churches. They're health care providers. They hire non-Catholics, and they treat non-Catholics. They should abide by the same rules and regulations which pertain to all such health care providers. They should provide health insurance to their employees which includes coverage for contraception, as required.

Obama made the right call, but he gave Catholic hospitals an additional year to comply. This is a perfect example of an Obama compromise: it annoys his allies without mollifying his enemies and completely undermines the principles upon which his overall policy is based. In other words, Obama concedes that Catholic hospitals are entitled to special privileges, but doesn't give them the special privileges they want. As an atheist and secularist, this upsets me.

But it's not just a religious issue. It's a women's issue, and women (including Catholic women) want access to birth control. Any individual women who are opposed to birth control are free to not use it, but it should be made available as broadly and as cheaply as possible. Right now, the Republican party is talking openly about their hatred of contraception, which they're usually quite reluctant to do. Contraception is a crucial weapon against patriarchy, which has always sought to enslave women through pregnancy. Santorum is refreshingly honest about this. Contraception permits women to have sex for pleasure, when they want, and with whom, and Santorum cannot abide this. This creates a big political opportunity for Obama and the Democrats, since contraception is so thoroughly non-controversial, except for a small minority of religious extremists.

As for health insurance policy, avoiding unplanned pregnancies saves money, which is one of the central aims of the PPACA. Securing the widespread availability of contraception is a good way to reduce unplanned pregnancies. That's a no-brainer.

In terms of morality, politics, and policy, Obama's decision is a clear winner. So why do the White House and quite a few Congressional Democrats sound so skittish about it?

"Ethics"

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Five

Airdate: March 2, 1992
Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner
Created by Gene Roddenberry
Teleplay by Ronald D. Moore
Story by Sara Charno & Stuart Charno
Directed by Chip Chalmers

I've gotten it into my head somehow that this episode is generally not well regarded, but I don't really know where I picked up that notion. I honestly don't recall how I felt about this episode when I was younger, but I quite like it now. It presents a simple inciting evident: Worf is hit by a big heavy barrel falling down in a cargo bay. As a result, his spinal column has been crushed, and he's going to be paralyzed forever. Damn. That's quite an inciting event. From there, the episode goes on to explore the consequences of this from a number of interesting angles.

The one most people tend to focus on is Worf, who quickly decides that it's time for him to commit suicide. This makes sense from a Klingon perspective, but a lot of the other characters don't much like the idea. He asks Riker to assist him, so that puts Riker in a quandary over what to do about it. Picard stops short of advising Riker to agree, but it's pretty clear that Picard isn't so startled by the idea as Riker. Clearly, Worf should have asked Picard to help him. It's actually a bit odd that he didn't, but it's better that way. For one thing, if he had asked for Picard's help, he'd be dead now.

Troi approaches it from a different perspective. Worf is the father of a motherless child. He can't just choose to make his son an orphan because he doesn't want to be paralyzed. What I like most about this angle is that it isn't a cultural argument. That was Picard's position, but Troi is more pragmatic than that. A father should not abandon his son, and Troi argues (not in so many words) that this is a moral principle which transcends culture. Worf's suicide will inflict a tremendous amount of harm on Alexander, both immediate and long-term, and Worf has no right to do that, notwithstanding the customs of his people.

And then there's the dangerously experimental procedure which could restore all of Worf's mobility. Wait, what? Yes, Dr. Crusher brings in a specialist, Dr. Toby Russell, to consult on Worf's condition, and she suggests a radical new treatment called the Reset Switch. Yeah, it's an obvious cop-out, and you can see it coming a mile away. That's not the worst of it, though. It's a high-risk procedure with a dubious chance of success and a considerable chance of killing the patient. In a sense, it's just a particular method of suicide, one which has an outside chance of making everything work out just fine. Of course, everything works out just fine. But the point of all this is the confrontation between Crusher and Russell over the issue of medical ethics, and that's all great. It's a shame that a cop-out like this is necessary, but Ron Moore deserves credit for making it work as well as he did.

I think this episode was considered controversial by many because it contains the idea that a disabled person has nothing left to live for. I understand the concern, because that couldn't be further from the truth, but I think the episode handles this as well as it possibly can. First of all, everyone tells Worf that he can have a full and productive life even if paralyzed. This isn't even a question, it's just something that everyone knows to be true, so that's good. Second of all, Worf does indeed decide not to kill himself. There are two problems though. First, as I said above, undertaking a dangerously experimental high-risk low-probability medical procedure is an awful lot like suicide. Second, Worf recovers completely. That's not something that happens a lot in real life.

But I don't think it's fair to hold this against the episode too much. Worf had to recover completely. He just had to. That's the way this show works. Yes, this series has done some envelope-pushing work with ongoing storylines, particularly with respect to Worf, but there's no way this episode could get away with permanently and radically changing Worf's role on the show. That just wasn't a possibility. Given that quite serious constraint, again, Moore deserves credit for how well this rather sensitive material was handled.

"Power Play"

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Five

Airdate: February 24, 1992
Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner
Created by Gene Roddenberry
Teleplay by René Balcor & Herbert J. Wright and Brannon Braga
Story by Paul Ruben and Maurice Hurley
Directed by David Livingston

This episode is big on action and suspense, and it doesn't take very long to get started. In the teaser, the Enterprise detects a mayday signal from a ship lost two centuries before coming from a moon covered by electromagnetic storms which interfere with transporters and sensors. But Troi senses life on the moon, so an away team is sent down in a shuttle. On the surface of the moon, Troi, Data, and O'Brien are possessed by disembodied entities, and they attempt to hijack the ship shortly after they return. Even with the knowledge of the officers (and O'Brien) under their control, the entities fail to gain control of the Enterprise, but they do make it to Ten Forward, where they take hostages and begin issuing demands.

In that paragraph, I've glossed over a great deal of action. From the moment where not-Data slams Riker across the bridge until the aliens reach Ten Forward is a tense sequence reminiscent of when Data hijacked the ship in "Brothers". It's not quite that good, but it's in the ballpark. The episode slows down quite a bit after that, but it never loses that tension, which is the episode's greatest strength. The script also tries to generate some drama out of not-O'Brien threatening Keiko and Molly, but I don't think this comes off as well as it could have. It's a nice idea, though.

Once the episode gets into explaining what's really going on, it gets a bit thin. There are two explanations. First, not-Troi explains that he (yeah, Troi is taken over by a man, evidently) is the captain of the USS Essex, the long lost ship the disappearance of which the Enterprise was investigating. Picard goes along with this for a time, but he's convinced this is a lie, because a Star Fleet captain would not behave this way. (Frankly, I think he's assuming too much. I think that being trapped for 200 hundred years as a disembodied consciousness on a piece-of-shit moon could result in vast and unpredictable changes in personality.) The real story is that the moon is a penal colony for the disembodied consciousnesses of alien criminals, who hijacked the Essex like they tried to hijack the Enterprise, but were unable to escape the planet's electromagnetic storms.

My only real complaint is that the ending seems a bit too easy. By technobabble alone, the aliens' plan is foiled when all of the other disembodied consciousnesses are beamed aboard and caught in a containment field. Realising they are beaten, the aliens relinquish their hold on Troi, Data, and O'Brien and go back to their piece-of-shit moon. It's a little too easy, but that's okay. Overall, this is still a pretty good episode. I've always liked it a lot, and I still do.

So this next comment shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the script. But I find it really peculiar that Data can be taken over by a disembodied consciousness in the same way that Troi and O'Brien can. That's really surprising to me. I think it's just a matter of convenience for the episode to overlook the fact that Data's brain is altogether different from a living, biological brain. I don't think this really makes much sense, but I'm willing to go along with it because Brent Spiner makes such a good villain.

One thing this episode really does bring home to me is that my dislike for Counselor Troi is absolutely not a dislike of Marina Sirtis. This is not at all a good episode for Troi, who is as usual just barely on the good side of useless, but it's a great episode for Sirtis, who suddenly gets to play a driven, motivated, dynamic, and above all competent character, and she makes the most of the opportunity.

"Conundrum"

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Five

Airdate: February 17, 1992
Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner
Created by Gene Roddenberry
Teleplay by Barry Schkolnick
Story by Paul Schiffer
Directed by Les Landau

This is another episode with a strong and straightforward premise. After the Enterprise is scanned by a mysterious alien probe, everyone on board loses their memories. They can still remember how to operate the ship, but no one remembers anything personal about anyone, nor does anyone remember what their mission is supposed to be. And there's a character we've never seen before. That's suspicious.

At first, it seems possible that this guy might be just the random ensign of the week, so to speak, but sharp-eyed viewers might have noticed he was wearing three pips on his uniform. Once La Forge gets limited access to personnel information from the computer, we learn that this is Commander Kieran MacDuff, Executive Officer, which puts him above Second Officer Will Riker in the chain of command. Ok, that clinches it.

Of course, no one else has any reason to suspect MacDuff of anything. I often complain about having to wait for the characters to work out something the audience already knows, but it works when it's used to generate suspense. That's exactly how it works here. Not only is the crew unaware that MacDuff is an intruder, there doesn't seem to be any way for them to discover this. And whatever he's up to, it can't be good.

As a kid, I enjoyed this episode for the story alone, but now I'm more interested in the characters. As we've discussed previously in reference to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel", the whole point of a memory loss episode is to explore how the characters are different from their usual selves, and in what ways they stay the same. There's clearly lots of humor potential here, and the script does not leave this unexploited. Worf assumes he's in charge, and he acts like a complete dick, while Riker and Ro get very friendly indeed when they forget how much they dislike one another.

At the risk of overstating the importance of this small point, I think Riker gets let off too easy in this episode. He pursues a sexual relationship with Ro even after he has reason to believe he's involved with Troi. He also seems to be quite happy to get involved with them both. That's not a result of memory loss. That's just Riker being Riker. Which is to say, promiscuous.

But that's a small thing, and it's more than made up for by Picard's heroic restraint. Not only is he clever enough to notice that every avenue he might use to confirm or disconfirm his orders is closed off to him, which is rather suspicious in itself, but he's willing to take a pretty big risk on a point of principle. I imagine that under those same circumstances, I would feel tremendous pressure to carry out my orders, because there was only flimsy evidence at best that the war with the Lysians was bogus. But Picard stood up for a principle. That's what I mean about the aspects of a character that don't change. Picard is a man of principle, even when he doesn't remember who he is.

And Riker's a whore.

"The Masterpiece Society"

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Five

Airdate: February 10, 1992
Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner
Created by Gene Roddenberry
Teleplay by Adam Belanoff & Michael Piller
Story by James Kahn and Adam Belanoff
Directed by Winrich Kolbe

This episode is largely premise-driven. The idea is to present a society which has been engineered in every way. The people have all been genetically engineered in order to be optimized for the tasks they will need to perform. Their leader, Conor, has been "bred" to be a leader, and he's a very good one. The precise planning that has gone into this society means that disruptive influences (e.g., visitors) are shunned. But an unanticipated catastrophe approaches in the form of a stellar core fragment which will pass close by the planet, causing calamitous seismic disruptions. The Enterprise is ready to give assistance, of course, but will their help be as destructive as the core fragment after all?

With a premise like that, I think this ought to be a really good episode. The idea of a meticulously planned society is fascinating, and it raises a number of issues. A concept like that could be used to explore the limitations of scientific Utopianism, for example. Or to explore the old question of nature vs. nurture. A more political angle would be to consider the issue of individual rights as it pertains to a society that functions collectively or not at all. If this episode deals with any of these issues, it is in passing.

We are constantly told how crucial it is that the society remain free from external influences. Within minutes of the away team's arrival, we are told that the "balance" of the colony is already being effected. Really? After only a few minutes? I'm willing to be convinced of this, but the script never tries to convince me. We are just expected to accept, as the regular characters do, that this is the case. I just can't see by what mechanism the mere presence of strangers would upset the "balance" of the colony, or even what "balance" specifically means in that context.

The script doesn't squander the premise entirely, but the issues it chooses to examine are less interesting, in my opinion, than the ones I mentioned above, and they're dealt with rather heavy-handedly. I understand and appreciate that La Forge wouldn't look too kindly on a society which would never have allowed him to be born. This is a powerful moral objection to this society, and that's important. But when through a fluke of technobabble plotting La Forge's VISOR holds the key to saving the colony, La Forge wastes no time at all in pointing it out. I'm glad it was pointed out, but it should have been handled in another way. As it stands, it's kind of tacky and (as I said) heavy-handed. La Forge didn't need to be the one to make that point, and he didn't need to make it when and how he did.

I also think the script puts too much emphasis on the harm done to the colony. When some of the colonists decide they've had enough of their carefully ordered existence, Picard is almost regretful that he is forced to respect their human rights. At the end of the episode, Picard even speculates that the Enterprise may have done as much damage to the colony as the stellar core fragment would have if they hadn't intervened. That's absurd, and somebody really should have fuckin smacked him upside his head for saying something so insanely stupid as that. Especially since earlier in the episode, Picard was one of the only characters willing to voice skepticism about a genetically engineered society. It's one thing to mourn the end of a way of life, but no mere way of life is as important as actual lives. After preventing loss of life on a grand scale, Picard shouldn't bother eulogizing this rather troubling social order.

"The Seeds of Doom" - Part Six

Doctor Who (1963) - Season Thirteen

Airdate: March 6, 1976
Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Written by Robert Banks Stewart
Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe
Directed by Douglas Camfield

As you can see, the Krynoid is now as big as (a model of a) very large house. It can control all plant life in the vicinity, it's ruthlessly lethal to humankind, and soon it will release more pods to spread rapidly over the whole of the planet. It also has Harrison Chase completely in its thrall, also working to kill the few remaining humans (plus the Doctor) trapped in the house. It's good that this is the last episode, because I don't see how things could get much worse.

If I know the Doctor, he's bound to come up with some ingeniously clever but appallingly dangerous plan to defeat the Krynoid. Without regard to the danger, he'll probably heroically risk his life to save the world via some combination of intellect and courage. Or possibly this episode aired in 1976 won't have spontaneously acquired a new ending since the last time I watched it, and we'll be stuck with the original ending, in which the Doctor does nothing at all and the Krynoid is defeated by Major Beresford calling in an air strike. I lack the vocabulary to explain just how disappointing this is to me.

Despite the fact that this story is wrong for this series in terms of tone and (especially) characterization, it's still a good story. Scorby and Chase are both wonderful characters, there's tremendous tension, and the special effects are actually quite credible for such an ambitious undertaking as a giant plant monster. For it all to end on such an arbitrary and unsatisfying note is a real shame.

Regardless, that brings us to the end of Season Thirteen. Despite some unevenness along the way, this is still one of the strongest seasons the series has seen thus far, where the Hinchcliffe/Holmes vision of the series reached full maturity. The series was also tremendously popular at this point. But in the world of "Doctor Who", the status never stays quo for very long. Season Fourteen will usher in a bunch of changes. But for millions of people who watched this show as it aired, and for millions more (like me) who watched it years later,Season Thirteen seems to be the narrow moment in time that has somehow come to represent the whole of the classic series.

"Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible"

The New Adventures
By Marc Platt
February 1992
Virgin Publishing

You're on your own, Ace.

The TARDIS is invaded by an alien presence, and is then destroyed. The Doctor disappears.

Ace, lost and alone, finds herself in a bizarre deserted city ruled by the tyrannical, leech-like monster known as the Process.

Lost voyagers drawn forward from Ancient Gallifrey perform obsessive rituals in the ruins.

The strands of time are tangled in a cat's cradle of dimensions.

Only the Doctor can challenge the rule of the Process and restore the stolen Future.

But the Doctor was destroyed long ago, before Time began.

I've long considered "Timewyrm: Revelation" to be the first "true" New Adventure, but that's not how I experienced it at the time. These books weren't always easy to find when they were originally published, at least not to me. So it wasn't until several years after it was published that I first read that extraordinary, landmark "Doctor Who" novel. For me personally, "Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible" was the first "true" New Adventure. And it remains controversial to this day. To understand why, we need to talk about the Cartmel Masterplan.

Andrew Cartmel was the final script editor to serve on the classic series. He was heavily involved in charting out a new creative direction for the series in it's final two seasons. He also brought in a batch of fresh, young writers, including Marc Platt, who contributed "Ghost Light" to Season Twenty-Six. In the final two years of the classic series, several stories included some rather heavy-handed hints to the effect that the Doctor is more than a mere Time Lord. The idea was to introduce some mystery back into the character. But then the series never returned for its 27th season, and then these novels started. The Cartmel Masterplan was to be retained, in some form, and would play out over the course of these novels. Not, however, in novels written by Andrew Cartmel.

This novel has a lot to do with the truth about the Doctor's mysterious origins, and fans who feel that this whole idea was misguided from the start tend to write-off the entire book on tat basis, and it all comes down to one word: looms. This book establishes that Time Lords do not reproduce sexually, but are created by genetic looms. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The novel involves a catastrophic collision between the TARDIS and one of Gallifrey's earliest prototype time machines, called a Time Scaphe. The operators of the Scaphe are not Time Lords; they are Gallifreyans. Time Lord society had not yet begun, and Gallifrey was ruled by the Pythia, latest in a long line of mystics who could see the future. But Rassilon was threatening to overthrow the status quo by instituting a new age of science and reason. The Time Scaphe was one of his early experiments.

Much of the book is devoted to this gradually unfolding political story on ancient Gallifrey, but the A-story takes place in a bizarre wasteland where the Doctor and Ace are trapped with the Chronauts, the operators of the Scaphe, and they're all at the mercy of the Process, a grotesque datavore which invaded the TARDIS. This story is pretty long, pretty slow, and very dense. It involves some really wonderful ideas. The wasteland is made up of three phases divided by rivers of mercury, and each phase is at a different point in time. Ace wanders through the phases backwards, meeting the Chronauts at different points in their lives. This has some tricky implications for causality, and that can make the narrative a bit difficult to follow, but it rewards close reading.

The book clearly has an agenda that many fans clearly don't like. I expect it would be hard to enjoy the book if you weren't on board with that agenda. But I absolutely adore this book, and always have. This is the book that made me a fan of the New Adventures specifically. Eventually, my enthusiasm for the books would come to exceed my enthusiasm for the show they were based on, and that started here.

I suppose I should mention that this is the first book in the three book "Cat's Cradle" series. This book is tied together with the two subsequent books, but this connection is much less overt than what we saw with the "Timewyrm" series. All three book covers include a silver cat, and this cat does make appearances in each book. But it's all very vague, and it's very much a background detail as far as this book is concerned. This book is directly connected to the next one in one way: there's a bit of foreshadowing at the very end of this book. It's basically the novelistic version of the "Next Time..." trailer.

Amarcord (1973)

Pupella Maggio, Armando Brancia, Magali Noël
Ciccio Ingrassia, Nando Orfei, Luigi Rossi, Bruno Zanin
Story and Screenplay by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerra
Music by Nino Rota
Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno
Directed by Federico Fellini

I had to struggle with this movie for quite some time before I learned to appreciate it. This took place over a period of quite a few years, after watching the film on several different occasions. The movie sailed entirely over my head the first time I saw it, which in retrospect is a bit embarrassing. This is not by any means a cerebral film. Indeed, much of it is devoted to a critique of intellectualism as empty, cold, and ultimately divorced from the reality of people's ordinary lives. And yet, Fellini also has intellectual points to make about Italian culture, society, and recent history. He walks a fine line between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, supporting the insights on culture that are available to a reflective mind, but at the same time skewering the self-seriousness of intellectualism itself.

The film doesn't have a single coherent story, but represents a year in the lives of the residents of a small Italian town, based on Fellini's own childhood. This is a less strictly autobiographical film than Truffaut's The 400 Blows, which was itself not strictly autobiographical. Truffaut transplanted his own childhood experiences into a contemporary setting. This film is set in the early Fascist period before the Second World War, but it's presenting its setting through the recollections of the director, not as a realistic depiction of life at that particular time and place. Memory doesn't simply record present experiences for later recollection. Memory functions presently to recreate past experiences. Fellini's approach reflects this, as he's specifically presenting nostalgia rather than history. This isn't a film about a coastal Italian town in the 1930s. It's a film about how Fellini sees such a town from the vantage point of 1973.

The story is structured as a series of vignettes. Characters drop in and out of the story as Fellini explores various institutions of Italian life, including family, community, politics, and religion. Gender politics is an important focus, but Fellini seems to resist imposing his own point of view. This is neither a commentary on Italian society nor a simple depiction of it. It is a subjective depiction of it ultimately inseparable from Fellini's perspective, but Fellini doesn't tell us what to think of it, and he doesn't tell us what he thinks of it. That makes this film extraordinarily open to a wide range of interpretations. This is a movie that never tells you what it's supposed to be about, but rather invites the audience to find meaning in it. Once again, the commentary (by film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke) included on the Criterion Blu-ray is invaluable.

I haven't seen a great deal of Fellini's work, but I've seen a few, and I've seen lots of films that refer to Fellini in various ways (principally films by Woody Allen and Terry Gilliam). This film is shot through with Fellini's distinctive style of humor. Characters are exaggerated to emphasize their most prominent features, creating a kind of caricature. Every impulse is presented as obsession, every argument is pitched at a near hysterical level. The commentators speculate that Italisn society to this day tends to be viewed by outsiders through the prism of Fellini's films.

The aspect of the film that is most personally salient to me involves the rise of fascism, and the way that social and cultural institutions are complicit in this. One might think (and would certainly hope) that institutions like public education, religion, family, and community would resist the imposition of fascism, but they do not. I'm reminded of the depiction of Italian adaptability presented in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22". These institutions continue largely unchanged by the changing political circumstances of Italy as a whole, while individual dissenters are marginalized, isolated, and powerless to resist to any meaningful way.

Despite the heaviness of some of these themes, Fellini's light comic touch keeps the film pleasantly amusing from start to finish. This is a film that can be enjoyed in a very passive way, in addition to being available to all manner of interpretive commentary. I think that more than anything is why it was such a successful film for Fellini, who received two Academy Award nominations, marking this as one of the greatest entries in his later period.

"The Seeds of Doom" - Part Five

Doctor Who (1963) - Season Thirteen

Airdate: February 28, 1976
Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Written by Robert Banks Stewart
Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe
Directed by Douglas Camfield

What this episode has going for it is tension, but sadly little else. The early scenes of the Doctor and Ssrah trapped in a cottage with Scorby as the Krynoid waits for an opportunity to kill the Doctor are very good indeed. Scorby was a good villain from the moment he appeared, a cut above your usual henchman thug. He's even better when forced to cooperate with the Doctor and Sarah. The script is also at its best when it focuses on the tensions between these reluctant allies.

The script also does a nice job of raising the stakes, establishing that the Krynoid can control nearby vegetation to lethal effect, and that it will soon release thousands of pods which will spread all over the Earth. While we get some scenes of the lush, aggressive vegetation in and around Chase's estate, much of this stakes-raising is accomplished through exposition alone. A number of off-screen deaths attributable to the Krynoid are mentioned.

The Doctor spends the episode escaping from Chase's house to go and argue with Sir Colin Thackeray of the World Ecology Bureau some more before returning to the house in time for the cliffhanger. Again, this is padding. What the Doctor accomplishes is convincing Sir Colin to call in support from UNIT, making this another not-quite-UNIT story, like "The Android Invasion", only this time without Harry or Benton or any familiar faces at all. Instead, we get the discount rack versions of the Brigadier and Benton in the for of Major Beresford and Sergeant Henderson, who fail to make much of an impression.