Trollheart

Oops!
Surely one of the biggest errors, and one that was sure to set the seal on the failure of this task, was Mark's decision not to go back and purchase more stock, and to quit selling so early? With a mere fifteen Euro in the difference, even another half-hour's selling could have taken them over the line and won them the task. But Mark “didn't want to take the risk”. When he said “It's too late to go back now” I thought it must be about 3pm, but no: 1.30! Plenty of time. How could he even think of downing tools so early, when it was clearly evident that no matter how well or badly they did, anyone staying the full period of time stood a far better chance of winning. How often have tasks been potentially won in the last ten minutes? But quit early and you give yourself no chance, as indeed Mark's team did, and it's odd also that nobody challenged his decision. Not a good sign for the boys for the future.

The trek up Grafton and Capel Street in search of hairdressers who would buy their fruit was another place the boys slipped up. It should have been obvious, from the reaction they got at the second one, that the rest would see their deal as not worth what they believed it was worth. Let's not forget (as Dynamo obviously did) the first deal was sweetened by the addition of the champagne; without that, it's very doubtful indeed that they would have got the hundred Euro that was agreed. They were, literally, not comparing apples with apples (sorry, sorry)!

Take me to your leader
Dynamo: though he threw his weight around a lot and in fairness worked his arse off, Mark didn't seem to have a proper, clear strategy. He let the subteam wander off where they would, no instructions and no guidance --- to say nothing of nobody being in charge --- and he didn't even ensure the fruit was priced before they started selling it. When it came time to accept responsibility for the loss, he refused to and basically sulked, and then brought in one of the people who had made the largest single sale of the day, without any real explanation. Pretty poor leader altogether.

Phoenix: Joanna had much more of a handle on what was going on. Being older, and already running her own business, she knew the basics of what had to be done. She delegated well, praised good ideas and encouraged her team, and had enough business savvy and basic common sense to see that the Moore Street pitch was not working, and decide to move. Even then, she chose a spot that would attract some interest and attention, though she did I believe screw up with the assignment of the Garda station. Overall though, a far better leader who led her team to victory.

May the best team win?
For all the reasons above and more, yes. Phoenix were the better team. The boys sort of stumbled around in the darkness, trying to find a strategy that worked, while Joanna had her team organised and pumped, knew who was doing what, and came in very slightly ahead of her rivals, but in this contest a few Euro can make the difference, as indeed it did here.

Sight adjustment?
From everything he was saying, from his body language and the way Bill interrogated and blamed Mark for the failure of the task, to say nothing of the way the PM received that criticism, almost as if he resented it (“Who does he think he is, talking to me like that?” etc) I felt certain that Mark was about to walk. I was really surprised when Bill took a sharp left turn, almost at the last minute. I understand David was weak and nearly invisible, but he was not I believe responsible for the failure of this task. That blame lay squarely on the shoulders of a timid PM who did not want to take a risk and couldn't wait to get off the streets and back to the Boardroom, even though there were yet almost three hours left in the task. I know often the boss will not fire the PM on the first task, as they see it as a gutsy move for someone to stand up, but I really feel there was no excuse here and Mark should have been fired. Even his attitude led me to believe he was going, and I think he expected it himself.

Adjustment needed: 80%

The one that got away?
Obviously, from what I said above and before, Mark was very lucky to retain his place and get through to the next round. He's living on borrowed time already and he is going to have to really get his head in the game, to use his own phrase to David, if he wishes to remain.

Weeding out the weaklings
Just from the standpoint of how much, if at all, I heard from them on this first task I have questions about Derek, Avril, Orla (both of them), Stuart, Brenda and Shane. Of course it is only the first task, so we'll see if they step up, but haven't been impressed by any of these so far.

The front runners
Joanna obviously, as she won and made a good PM, but also Ronan, who negotiated the deal with the hairdresser (even if the rest of their similar deals failed badly) impressed me with his attitude and his ability to make deals. Nobody else really.

Famous last words?
David: “I don't come across as someone who shouts the odds, but then, sometimes it's the quiet ones you have to watch!”

You're fired!
Name: David Neary
Age: 25
Occupation: Assistant Brand Manager

Not a whole lot I can tell you about this guy. He gave the impression of being very uncomfortable selling, not knowing prices and having to get other team members to confirm them. The fact that he's “only” an “assistant” doesn't, or didn't, speak well to his qualities as a leader: if you're a true candidate for the Apprentice one would assume you would be the top man or woman; nobody wants to deal with a right-hand-man (or woman). David also displayed something of an attitude of distaste towards the louder, more outgoing members of his team, especially Mark (shall we start calling him Lucky Mark? Let's start calling him Lucky Mark) who reciprocated; he could see David was a quiet, ineffectual man who would add little if anything to the team. He even remarked upon David's quietness before they arrived at the pitch, knowing that this would be a task in which loud, brash, confident patter would be required to sell on Moore Street, and he saw none of those qualities in the man sitting in the front of the car.

Whether the candidates actually give up their jobs or just say they do I don't know, but if they actually do jack it in then they're idiots, as there's a thirteen-to-one chance of their gamble not paying off. Who's going to bet on those odds? If David is one who decided to take the gamble, for real, then on the basis of his performance --- or lack of it --- here, I don't think they'll exactly be lining up to offer him a new position!

__________________
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Trollheart

Episode Four

Thanks to the opposition of His Majesty, opinion polls report a thirteen percent swing against Urquhart’s government and dissatisfaction with his policies. Urquhart agrees to give the BBC an interview, which interestingly the King has declined to take part in. A chance explosion at a block of flats however affords him an even greater platform, but people are more interested in the reactions of the King, who simply offers his assistance and says, and it becomes his unintended catchphrase, “Please let me help”, whereas Urquhart does not want to roll up his sleeve and get stuck in. The gulf between the two men, the different ways they approach and see things, could not be more clearly defined. Urquhart sees the disaster as nothing more than a photo opportunity, a chance to be “seen among the people”, whereas the King does not care about the political advantage of being there, he only wishes to help and do what he can. Urquhart can begin to feel a very cold wind blowing. He knows he is losing the people, and whether he cares for them or not, without them he is finished. It is their votes, after all, who put him in power, and they have the ability to topple him.

Elizabeth, seeing the sudden weakness in her husband, counsels him to hit back, and hit back hard. The first salvo is to leak to the press the rumour (which is actually true, but they neither know nor care) that David Mycroft is gay. Not a crime, certainly, but something that will hopefully shake the public’s confidence in His Majesty. “King’s best friend a shirtlifter?” crows Stamper. “How low can Palace morals sink?” Urquhart smiles his shark’s smile. He has something now to get his teeth into. Oh, something small, certainly, but the smallest wounds can be torn into huge, gaping gashes, given enough time. Stamper is, however, less than pleased to hear of his boss’s plans for him, should they win the election. Urquhart wants him to remain as Chief Whip, which does not at all fit in with Stamper’s plans, or validate what he believed he has been promised. Urquhart does not seem to care either way.

When he finds Sarah rifling through his filing cabinets looking for a file on Mattie Storrin, Stamper believes the time has come to play his hand, and has her brought to him, where he plays her the recording of what really happened just prior to Mattie’s death. It becomes clear now that this was the gloved hand that picked up Mattie’s dictaphone after she fell, and now he intends using it to bring about Urquhart’s downfall. Urquhart, meanwhile, goes to see the princess, to impress upon her in no uncertain manner that should he engineer the ascension of her son to the throne he will expect the new king to take, and follow, his “advice” ---- basically, toe the line and do as he is told. He does not want to replace one problem with another, younger one. The princess assures him their interests coincide and she will make that plain to her young son.

Back at the Palace, Chloe warns the King that trouble is brewing and that riots are foreseen. She suggests he go on a nationwide tour to try to get the people behind him and calm the tensions. He agrees, as she reveals her feelings for him and he reciprocates. Urquhart does his television interview, using the opportunity to drop the bombshell that has been uncovered by Sarah in her research, that the reason the gas main blew in the flats was because one of the residents was trying to bypass the meter. “Reckless greed”, he says stonily “and irresponsibility killed those people.” He then goes on to announce the reintroduction of National Service, in an effort to “Get our young people off their backsides.” It’s a pretty clever plan: if all the young people are serving in the military there won’t be too many of them protesting and rioting and causing trouble on the streets. And a spell in the army will soon knock the rebellious feelings out of them as they fall into line.

The King’s tour of the underprivileged areas goes well until a kidnapping of the monarch is staged (obviously Urquhart’s people) and then the Prime Minister is able to reveal that, despite His Majesty’s orders to the contrary, a crack team of SAS men has been shadowing the King and are able to spring into action when needed. It is a masterstoke: it turns the king into a pompous, naive, too-trusting fool and the Prime Minister into a pragmatic experienced man of the world who has only the safety of the royal personage at heart. The opinion polls begin to climb again in favour of the government. David Mycroft, under increasing pressure, resigns his post and reveals he is gay. Stamper tells Sarah he is going to wait until the result of tomorrow’s election is no longer in doubt, and when Urquhart has been re-elected he will go to the police with the tape. This will of course force the resignation of the Prime Minister and Stamper will take over his job.

Corder has had people monitoring the conversation though, and word gets back to Urquhart, who knows there is only one way to ensure his survival. As the results come in, a victory for the government, he sets about getting rid of the only two who could rain on his parade. As Sarah goes to meet Chloe at the Palace, believing that what she has is best in the hands of the King, her car explodes and Stamper is similarly dealt with as he arrives at the police station. Having won the election, Urquhart goes to the Palace to demand the abdication of the King. He refuses, but in his heart he must know it is the only course left open to him. He has lost the popular support: the people have spoken, and they have spoken for the Prime Minister. He has failed, and Urquhart will not suffer a monarch who opposes him, nor, at this point, will the people. He is finished.

And Francis Urquhart has, once again, triumphed.

QUOTES
Urquhart: “You do need me, you know; otherwise you haven’t really got a programme.”
BBC man: “True, but if I may say so Prime Minister, your need is the greater at the moment.”
(How true: Urquhart has lost touch with the common man --- not that he ever wanted to be in touch with him, Heaven forbid! But it must look like he cares, even if he does not. This interview will, if nothing else, get people to listen to him and allow him a platform on which to defend his government’s policies, and perhaps take a few shots at a defenceless king, while he’s at it).

Urquhart (to camera): “It’s not as easy as we thought, to fight a king. But I will not let him conquer me. Nothing will prise me loose. I am ready to do anything.”
(To underline the point, we see a replay of Mattie Storrin’s death plunge. Yes, in order to hold on to power, the PM is ready to do absolutely anything.)

Urquhart (to camera): “Every event is a photo opportunity in disguise, playing right into the hands of the king.”
(Urquhart cannot see, comprehend or believe that His Majesty, visiting the site of the disaster, is doing so for other than political reasons. He genuinely cares. See “A boy in a man’s world” for more on this)

The King: “I have no intentions of speaking to the press, or anyone else, other than the victims of this bloody disaster!”

Urquhart: “Your Majesty.”
The King: “Prime Minister.”
Urquhart: “We could have done without all this public posturing, Sir.”
The King: “I came to comfort my people, that’s all.”
Urquhart: “I’m sure they’re thrilled to bits, Sir. Pat a few heads if you must but no public speaking please. We don’t want you making an issue out of this now do we?”
The King: “Damn you, man! Don’t judge me by your own degraded standards! You may wish to make political capital out of tragedy; all I want to do is help.”
Urquhart: “You bloody hypocrite!”

Urquhart: “I thought Chief Whip again.After all, it’s what you’re best at, isn’t it?”
Stamper: “You led me to expect it would be a senior cabinet post. You led me to expect it would be Home Secretary.”
Urquhart: “Did I? Well, perhaps it will. But you’re such a good frightener, Tim. You’d be wasted in one of those kid gloves jobs.”
Stamper: “Has it ever occurred to you that you presume too much?”
Urquhart: “Not in your case Tim, no. I think I know you rather well, don’t you?”
(He may think so indeed, but here is one of the few times Urquhart is underestimating his underling. He cannot even conceive of Stamper turning against him, and thinks that he can keep kicking him like a dog, that he will never bite. He believes he has him totally under his control, and does not see him as any kind of threat. He’s also correct: Stamper is not suited for higher office; he simply has not the finesse required for such sensitive posts.)

Sarah: “We don’t have to be enemies, Tim. I’m not going to be here for long.”
(Oh, how prophetic those words are, though she has no idea how literal that sentence will turn out to be!)

Stamper: “All I ever wanted to do was serve him, be close to him. But I see now what I should have seen all along. I was entirely instrumental to his plans. Disposable, like those little plastic razors you can get now. Apparently, you can get a couple of good shaves from them and then you just throw them away.”

Urquhart: “We are not a nation of social workers, or clients of social workers! We are not, please God, a nation of deserving cases! We are a fierce, proud nation, and we are still, God willing, a nation to be reckoned with!”

Urquhart: “We talk a lot about freedom, but do any of us really believe in it?”
Sarah: “I do.”
Urquhart: “Yes, perhaps you do. But most people don’t want it at all. Most people are weak and stupid and cowardly and contemptible.”
(Never has he been more honest about what he thinks of his fellow man. And there’s more. In one of the most chilling speeches --- private, of course: he would never dare say such things in public -- Urquhart outlines his thinking behind conscription...)
Urquhart: “The great beauty of conscription is that we can use these eighteen to twenty-three years olds to subdue their younger brothers in the towns and in those ghastly estates, and then we can think about exporting them: use the British fighting man to redress the balance of trade.”
Sarah: “You really mean that, don’t you?”
Urquhart: “Why not? Nobody wants these young people, not even their own parents. They have no skills, they have no education, they have no self-discipline. They are utterly useless, but were going to make them useful, Sarah. Like factory farming.”

THE FINAL CONFRONTATION BETWEEN URQUHART AND THE KING

The King: “Congratulations, Mr. Urquhart.”
Urquhart: “Thank you Your Majesty. Frankly, I would have thought you would have preferred to dispense with such pleasantries.”
The King: “Oh by all means. I’m heartily sorry that you’re still Prime Minister, but I’m not in the least downhearted. The tide is turning against you and I’m happy to have been able to have played my part in that. I believe you’ll be out within the year.”
Urquhart: “Your opinions, Sir, are no longer of any interest to anyone but yourself. You have risked everything in opposing me, and you have lost. I have come here to demand your abdication from the throne.”
The King: “The people won’t back you, Urquhart.”
Urquhart: “I shan’t need to consult them again, Sir. They have re-elected me. And I cannot and will not tolerate a monarch who is bitterly and publicly opposed to me. You must abdicate Sir; it is the only honourable course. You must see that.”
The King: “Oh well I don’t think you’re in any position to speak of honourable courses. I’ll continue to oppose you openly and publicly while I remain on the throne, and if I am forced to relinquish the throne I shall continue to fight you as a commoner. I shall welcome the opportunity, and I shall take very keen pleasure in defeating you in the polls.”
Urquhart: “I wouldn’t bet on it, Sir. I’m afraid you won’t be of much interest as a commoner. I doubt if anyone will be particularly interested in what you have to say. You have no constituency, you see. No powerbase. You represent nothing but one talentless and discredited family, and very soon you won’t represent even that. You will represent nothing. You will mean nothing. You will be nothing.”
The King: “Well, we’ll see. I spent my whole life preparing to be king.”
Urquhart: “I feel no compunction, Sir. You tried to destroy me.”
The King: “I didn't want to destroy you man! You wanted to destroy the monarchy!”
Urquhart: “Not at all sir,! Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? I have no wish to. It is you I wished to destroy, not the monarchy. My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the crown before your family were even heard of. It is to defend the idea of a constitutional monarch that I now demand your abdication.”
The King: “You’re a monster, Urquhart!”
Urquhart: “You might very well think that, Sir, but your opinion doesn’t really count for much now, does it?”

URQUHART’S CLOSING SPEECH (TO US)
“Well, what would you have? Britain must be governed, and you know who will do it best. If you will the end, you must will the means. These things happen all over the world. Believe me, it’s all for the best. What’s the matter? You do trust me, don’t you? Of course you do!”

A boy in a man’s world?
Urquhart sees it as political posturing, and he does so because he is doing the very same thing when both he and the King visit the site of the gas leak at the flats. But the King genuinely does not see it as such. To him, this is almost as if he is not the king, and is just a private citizen offering his condolences and any help he can. Because Francis can conceive of doing nothing without there being something in it for him, some advantage, some payback, some sort of political capital he can cash in on, he does not believe that anyone --- never mind anyone in power --- would make such a journey without milking it for all it’s worth.

When he sees, to his horror, that the King is in fact true to his word --- he doesn’t talk to the press, makes no statements, not even to criticise Urquhart’s government, and this would be the perfect chance to do so --- he begins to realise that for the first time since he decided to take on the Palace he may be in danger of becoming out of his depth. If this is a war, then in this one almost random act of kindness as he runs down the embankment and asks to help with a stretchered victim, His Majesty may have scored, even unwillingly or unwittingly, something of a major victory.

And all of this happens because of the King’s naivete and his basic humanity. If this has been planned it could not have gone better, but it was not planned. It just happened, as things often do, and the popularity of the government, despite no actual conscious effort on the part of the king, begins to plummet.

But when the PM turns the King's innocence and gullibility against him, and turns the tide in the process, as he is so adept at doing, public opinion reverses as the people realise, or are shown, that this is not a man they can really trust to make the right decisions. His fight against Urquhart is in ruins, and when the newly-elected Prime Minister comes to demand he step down, there is no lonelier figure than his as Urquhart leaves the Palace, having explained why there is no alternative for the young king. At this point, he truly is a boy in a man’s world, and he is alone.

The betrayer betrayed

If he was thinking of turning against Francis before, the hammerblow of being told he is not going to get a senior cabinet post after the election makes up Stamper’s mind for him, and he decides to play his ace in the hole. He brings Sarah in on the fact that he has possession of the cassette out of Mattie Storrin’s dictaphone, a ticking time-bomb, a smoking gun that can shoot Francis right though the heart. Not only will it force his removal from the top office, it will land him in jail for murder, as he freely confesses to one and perpetrates the other on tape. Why does he use Sarah as his agent? You would have to think that he sees delicious irony in using both the object of FU’s obsession and the perceived rival for his place at the Prime Minister’s table to depose him, a female Brutus for Julius Caesar, and also, he knows that it will hurt Sarah, finding our that the man she professes to be in love with is a self-confessed murderer. It will either make or destroy her career, but to do either she will have to play the part Stamper wishes her to play, that of Judas. There is, for Stamper, a savage symmetry in that.

And now, as Sarah listens to his heartless plan for the youth of the nation, Sarah too know s that she must turn against Urquhart. The man is completely unprincipled, ready to sell the flower of their youth into eternal bondage, serving in foreign wars and essentially being hired out to the highest bidder, government-sponsored mercenaries, probably all under-the-table, very hush-hush, but he fully intends to do it. When he asks her the question he asked Mattie, just before he threw her off the roof, “I can trust you, can’t I?” she must fear for her life, but she keeps her feelings hidden, knowing that to show weakness now would be to sign her own death warrant, quite literally.

But it's at an end now: the idyllic romance, the thrill of it all, the proximity to power she has craved, all of that matters little now. She sees she is lying in bed beside a monster, a monster who will happily sell his country into slavery, install a police state if it means he can hold on to power. If he beats the King, if he manages to swing the election and is returned to power, there will be no way to stop him. He will ride roughshod over the populace like a dictator/emperor the likes of which the Western World has never seen, never mind the United Kingdom. She must stop him. Her heart has turned to stone, and it’s just as well, because this task is going to require one, to match that of the man who was her lover and is now her sworn enemy, the enemy of freedom, the enemy of all British people, and the enemy perhaps of all men.


The real Urquhart
We see again the true face behind the mask, as Sarah casually asks if it is ok if she doesn’t stay overnight with him and his face immediately darkens. It is very much not okay! How dare she have a ife? How dare she refuse to give him what he wants! What does she think she is: a free agent? Does she not know she belongs to him now, mind body and soul, and he should be the only one in her thoughts at any time? Husband? Who cares about her husband, or anyone else? She is his, and he should be able to command her any time he likes. She of course crumbles to his will, but now there’s something else in her eyes: fear. And he sees it. “Something’s happened”, he muses. “What is it? You’re not bored with me are you?” As if such a thing could be allowed to happen. But knowing incontrovertibly now what she does, she has much to fear. What lengths will this man go to to protect his secret, if he discovers she knows it? She recalls the words of John Krajewski: “They’ll probably kill you too.” Yes. Indeed.

We also see the Prime Minister’s true face when he realises he must destroy both his lifelong friend and his newest acquisition in order to ensure his own safety. He moans “I am in blood steeped so far” but he will not shirk this final task. Elizabeth helps bolster him against the pain, but once he has made the decision, we see his eyes turn to steely flint, and the man we know and loathe is starting directly out of those eyes, reminding us that nobody, no matter who they be, gets in his way.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

“I couldn’t possibly comment”
Although the actual words are not used here, Urquhart floats out the old phrase one more time in his interview after securing the King’s safety, against the monarch’s stated policy.
Interviewer (of the king): “Heart of gold, but not safe to be let out on his own? Would that be a fair comment, Prime Minister?”
Urquhart: “You might very well say that. I could not possibly say that: I have far too much respect for His Majesty.”
And so, at a stroke, Urquhart shows himself to be a tough, no-nonsense man, ready to get in there and get his hands dirty, ready to risk all to save his “beloved” monarch. How could you not trust such a man? And how, after this, will or could anyone place any credence in anything the king says again? He could have been injured, or worse, had the PM not seen fit to disregard his orders and provide a safety net for him on his tour. THAT, surely, is the kind of man we want running this country, not some well-meaning but ultimately clueless king. It’s all going exactly to plan once again.

He also uses the phrase when he has his last meeting with the King, though it’s used in a different way. He says to the soon-to-be-abdicating king, “You might very well think that, but it doesn’t really matter what you think now, does it?”
And it does not.

The Urquhart body count

Lethal
Sarah Harding: Executed by car bomb, blamed on the IRA. Sarah has become a liability, and has damning evidence that could land Urquhart in prison. He simply cannot afford to let her pass that information on, and, knowing what she knows, he can’t allow her to live.

Tim Stamper: Thirty years of “friendship” or at least mutual respect (no, not even that: Urquhart never respected Stamper) means nothing to Urquhart when placed against his own survival, and he has Stamper killed by car bomb too, thus removing forever the possibility that anyone might uncover his dark, murderous past.

Nonlethal
David Mycroft: Although he does not die, his career is finished and he will be something of a pariah in the circles in which he used to move, and this is all down to Urquhart’s having his sexual preference leaked to the press.

The King: Of course, the biggest non-lethal casualty of Urquhart’s campaign so far. The Prime Minister has succeeded in doing what no other politician since Cromwell has done, forcing the abdication of a sitting king, taking on the Palace and winning. The ex-King will now be forced into normal life, have to get a job perhaps (though you would assume he would have money stashed away. Then again, he’s so naive you would wonder) and he certainly will never again be a problem for his erstwhile adversary.

The tower block deaths: We can’t in fairness (who ever said this was fair?) blame those on Urquhart. Even if the accident was due to poor maintenance and a lack of proper housing brought about by his government --- though if we are to believe Sarah’s research it was a jury-rig job gone wrong --- it’s too vague and indirect, like the way I released Alan B’Stard from responsibility for the possible deaths of the schoolchildren under whose school he stored the nuclear waste. With Urquhart’s bodycount, it has to be personal, more direct. And this isn’t.


Non-lethal Bodycount: 7
Lethal Bodycount: 5
Total Bodycount: 12

A final word
So, after successive attempts to thwart his return to power, after the very monarchy has been ranged against him, and with the possibility of his murderous past coming back to haunt him, Francis Urquhart has again wriggled free and come up trumps. If he could be compared to any insect it would have to be a cockroach: he flourishes in the dark and does not like the light, he scuttles here and there, spreading his disease and it looks like even a direct nuclear strike would be insufficient to kill him. He’s a survivor, almost always at the expense of others, and as we see here, he has no compunction whatever about sacrificing his allies, colleagues or even the very few who may mistakenly believe they are his friends, on the cold hard altar of his ambition. Slick and sticky with blood, this altar has seen many a victim, and will see many more before the man is finally brought to justice.

For now, Britain can look forward to another period of raw, naked consumerism, rising taxes, poor housing (not for the rich, of course), spending cuts and the slow and deliberate attrition of its youth as they are ground under the heel of Urquhart and his policies. Orwell once wrote: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping endlessly on an upturned human face.” Such is the vision that now greets a weary and weak Britain, as its new ruler in all but name tightens his viselike grip on the nation’s throat and stamps down hard.

The concluding chapter, “The Final Cut”, will show us how Urquhart stoops to new lows, and ascends to new highs as he prepares to feather his nest before retiring, having bled the country dry. But first, there’s yet another mind for him to mess with, another body to warm his bed, before the final reckoning is to be had, before Francis Urquhart, the untouchable man, has to finally face his past, pay for his sins and watch in horror as the books are finally, and ultimately, balanced forever.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

1.1 “Good luck, Father Ted”

The boring, dreary, barren Craggy Island is about to be livened up by the coming of Funland, the local funfair, and Father Dougal is excited about it. He tells Ted they have a “spiderbaby” in it, but the older priest is not convinced at Dougal's description of the thing. He's not interested in going to the fair, which disappoints Dougal, who's just a kid at heart. Ted then receives a phone call from the TV programme “Faith of our Fathers”, and is asked if he would take part in an interview, as they are making a special about priests in isolated communities, and you don't get much more isolated than Craggy Island! Ted, a shameless media hound at heart, is delighted at the opportunity to be on telly, but concerned as to how his fellow priests could screw things up for him if they got to talk on the programme, he pretends he is living alone.

This of course means he then has to lie to the other two (well, Dougal anyway: Father Jack lives in his own private drunken world and is barely aware of anything going on around him) when he sneaks off to do the interview, raising suspicions. Lucky for him Dougal takes Father Jack out for a trip in his wheelchair to see the local cliffs, however to Ted's dismay the young priest takes the opportunity to visit Funland, which coincidentally is where Ted is meeting Terry, the man from the TV. Unfortunately, due to a series of mixups Terry runs into Dougal, and only calling him “Father”, seeing a priest in front of him (and as Ted has said he lives alone) he assumes this to be his interviewee. Ted pales when he realises his curate is being interviewed in his place, but he has other things to worry about, as a bench he has sat down on turns out to be a makeshift fairground ride, and suddenly it's being hauled up into the air! He can only stare in horror as Dougal airs all his controversial views on air.

In desperation he falls off the bench to the ground, but the damage has already been done. The reputation of Craggy Island's priests may never recover!

QUOTES
Dougal: “They've got a spiderbaby.”
Ted: “What's a spiderbaby?”
Dougal: “Well, it has the body of a spider, but it's a baby.”
Ted; “How is it a baby? Is it wearing a nappy?”
Dougal: “Em, no.”
Ted; “Well, does it have the head of a baby?”
Dougal: “Em, no.”
Ted: "Well, if it looks like a spider, and it doesn't actually gurgle at your or anything, how do you know it's a baby?”
Dougal: “They keep it in a pram.”
Ted: “Dougal, are you absolutely sure of this? You're not mixing it up with a dream you had?”
Dougal: “No, honestly. I saw it on the news --- oh wait, actually now that you say it, it was a dream.”

Ted (catching sight of Dougal, with Jack, on a merry-go-round): “You were supposed to be taking Jack for his walk!”
Dougal: “Ah no, the cliffs were closed for the day.”
Ted: “How can cliffs be closed, Dougal?”
Dougal: “Okay, no, they weren't closed. They were gone.”
Ted: “The cliffs were gone? How could they just disappear?”
Dougal: “Erosion.”

Dougal: Look Ted! A fortune teller! Come on, we'll just go in and have one.”
Ted: “Don't be wasting your time on that sort of stuff, Dougal.”
Dougal: “Ah come on Ted! Sure it's no more peculiar than that stuff we learned in seminary --- Heaven and Hell, everlasting life and all that: you're not meant to take it seriously!”

John and Mary: A lovely couple!
Two of the funniest and most spot-on supporting characters are John and Mary, a middle-aged married couple who have about as much love for each other now as Hitler had for jews. They fight with alarming savagery but whenever Father Ted approaches they put on the most sickening show of affection for each other. A perfect and incredibly well-observed view of how people will --- or used to --- behave differently in front of a man of the church, afraid either of giving offence or having gossip spread about them.

John: “Will you get out of me way ye fat cow!”
Mary: “Ye've got a face on ye like a bag of tits!”
John: “Well at least that's one pair between us!”
(Mary goes for a knife and attacks John. Enter Father Ted and she hides the knife behind her back, the two cosying up to each other with tight smiles forced onto their faces.)
Ted: “Hello Mary.”
Mary: “Ah hello Father!”
Ted: “Hello John.”
Mary: “Will ye have a pack of toffos Father?”
Ted: “Ah no thanks, I'm actually on the way to be interviewed for a television programme.”
John: “Really? Ah, that's fantastic!”
Mary: “You know Father, I think you'd be brilliant on television.”
Ted: “Thank you.”
John: “Ah, I'd say you'd be a match for Gay Byrne or Terry Wogan, or any of them!”
Ted: “I think it'd take me a few weeks to get to their level! Have to go now, I'm trying to track down this film unit, and they probably want to do a few close-ups, master shots, this and that, sort of thing. Don't want to be late on set, get a reputation as a kind of Marilyn Monroe type. See you soon.”
(Departs)
John: “Good luck, Father Ted!” (Removing his arm from around Mary as if he's afraid he'll catch something) “Get them feckin' Crunchies out of the car!”


Those clever little touches
Tom tells Ted “Father, I killed a man!” but Ted ignores him, and later Terry remarks on a scar that he has. Tom is meanwhile reading the headline of the newspaper which announces “Madman killer still on the loose!” It's not remarked upon at all, and it's a pity they didn't carry it through as a running joke --- Ted and Dougal wondering about the killer and Tom constantly trying to confess while being ignored --- but they didn't.

When Dougal sees Ted through the window, he being outside, he decides to play a trick on him and takes a statue of the Virgin Mary, holding it up at the window and causing Ted to almost drop to his knees in fright. As Dougal apologises later, Ted opines “I thought it was Herself! That's the last thing I need right now!” Not the best thing for a priest to say, I would have thought!

Those not-so-clever touches
They're really reaching for material in this first episode. The opening joke sees Ted trying to arrange who will take mass, with Jack growling and glowering each time he's asked to oblige, and Ted agreeing to take each mass. Then Dougal comes down with shaving foam all over his face, and when Ted tells him about it he says he never even shaved this morning! To say nothing of the “joke” when he stands at the window looking out, and says “God it's lovely out!” and we see footage of a tropical storm. Yeah, hilarious.

But the worst and most pointless sequence is at the fairground, where for reasons unknown to me at least, a sort of guitar battle takes place between what looks to be one of the sound crew for the TV programme and a bald kid on a banjo. To make it even more awkward, some old fella is dancing to their shared tune. Huh? Did they really need to fill in that much time?

Notes
You are probably reading this and thinking “What? This is what it's all about? This? That was terrible!” And it was, I agree with you. The day after this aired, the general concensus at work was that it was crap. However, in a feat of almost miraculous (appropriate, I guess!) turnaround, the second episode improved vastly, and pretty soon Father Ted was the number one comedy on TV. Its Irishness is of course what makes it, and as it goes on and more characters and introduced and the humour becomes sharper and more on the nose, the situations get increasingly bizarre and we get to know Ted and Dougal, it all seems to make a crazy kind of sense. But this opening episode, were the series to have lived or died by it, would probably have damned “Father Ted” to cancellation before it even hit the air.

Luckily, it was given its chance and by the end of season one it was winning hearts and minds all across the British Isles, and of course in Ireland, and is now a cult phenomenon which has led to people saying “That's a very Dougal thing to do” or just yelling “FECK! DRINK! ARSE! GIRLS!” and everyone knows who and what they're talking about. Stick with it: it gets better I promise.

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I guess everyone's seen The Matrix by now, and agree it was a special film, at least the original was. But when you watched it first, for a short while it was hard to see where it was going. Everything seemed a little “hacker-takes-on-the-sytem”-ish until this scene made us all sit up and take notice, and realise that this movie was going to be just a little different. I'm talking about this one, where Neo, being interrogated by Agent Smith, suddenly loses the use of his mouth, as Smith smiles, in response to his captive's demand for his phone call, “Tell me, Mr. Anderson: what use is a phone call if you're unable to speak?” Whereupon Neo's mouth suddenly starts to close up, and then his face is completely smooth from his nose down. As he panics, disbelieving, Smith takes out some sort of mechnical/robotic probe, that looks like a huge dragonfly or something, and drops it on his belly, the loathsome creature scuttling along until it enters via his navel.

(from about 3:10 in)
We're then hit with a double whammy as we see him wake up, and think “Oh well, it was all a dream” before we realise that the world he is living in is the dream, and the cold harsh reality of the Matrix is about to become the most real nightmare he has ever had.

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Episode Three

One of John Boy’s big drugs shipments has been intercepted by the Guards and Fran is not a happy man. However there were two containers and one has got through. John Boy decides all of this is his --- Fran’s got impounded. He says that’s how it is and nobody is going to dare to contradict him or point out the very clear fact that this was all one shipment and Fran should be due some of the gear that escaped the attention of the Gardai. John Boy has already lost money, and he doesn’t intend to share any of his good fortune with his partner. In an unusual move, he pays Darren for the hit on Stumpy, which was supposed to have been part of what the young lad owed John Boy.

When Fran learns that one of the containers got through without being seized, he’s rightly angry and believes he should be getting his cut. Nidge discovers something distressing in the shower, but he has to rush to join Tricia, who has gone for an ultrasound. Darren, wracked with guilt over the killing of Stumpy, goes to see his mother, who has of course no idea that the young man who stands on her doorstep offering his condolences, and who she invites in to look at baby pictures of her son, is the very man who pulled the trigger that ended his life. Disconcerted with what he sees as blood money from John Boy, Darren gives it all to Stumpy’s mother. Nidge heads to a tryst with Linda, and she confides in him that she --- or Fran --- one of them anyway is unable to give her a baby. So his talk of his son-to-be really cuts her, not that he cares.

There’s a confrontation when Fran appears at the pub where John Boy and the gang are drinking, demanding his cut of the drugs.But he’s outnumbered and has to slink away, as they all laugh. He’s back soon enough though, and armed. John Boy is hit but only in the shoulder. The brief partnership is obviously dissolved in the most violent of manners. Fran is now an enemy. After Mary gives Darren an old kettle she had for Luke, remembering that he had said he had none, the young transient is so delighted that she remembered that he immediately takes it as a sort of love token, and begins to form ideas that, were Darren to be able to see into his friend’s mind, would probably get him more than a severe kicking. John Boy comes up with a savage plan to draw Fran out of hiding. He tells Nidge to throw a pipe bomb into his house, and he specifies that it must be when Linda is there. He wants a body. This is no idle warning, no empty threat: he wants to hurt Fran, and knows how to do it.

This will have massive repercussions for Nidge, though he does not know it, in season five. But for now, although he doesn’t really want to do it he knows he has to, and to him it’s just really another fuck-hole lost; he doesn’t care a scrap about Linda --- we saw that when she started getting upset about not being able to have children. he is, and always will be, only ever interested in himself. But he doesn’t want to do it, and he seeks advice from Darren, who tells him that if he has to bomb the house he must make sure to do so when Linda is not there, and to hell with John Boy. He can always say he thought she was there. What’s John Boy going to do? Have another hit taken out on her? Once Fran’s house is bombed he’ll come out of hiding, and that’s the whole point of this. Isn’t it?

But he goes ahead. To be honest, he must see her there as he walks up to the window of the sitting room and she’s watching TV. The explosion leaves her with severe facial injuries, and she can see from Fran’s reaction that he’s more concerned with how she now looks --- she’s also had to have her breast implants removed, as they had been punctured and the silicone was leakign into her bloodstream --- than how she feels. He never once touches her, apologises (though he must know it’s because of him she’s lying in a hospital bed and could have been lying on a slab) or offers any support. It’s like one of his favourite toys has been broken, and now he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. Nidge and Trish have to move to a safe house in case of retribution, which does not go down well with his wife.

Now as far as Fran is concerned all bets are off, and he will go after John Boy, Nidge, their families, anyone connected with the gang. He’s actually ready to die if he can take JohnBoy with him. But again it’s not about revenge for Linda; it’s a case of wounded pride, tit (sorry) for tat and a chance to get his own back for this attack on, literally, his own front door. John Boy sets Tommy the task of eliminating him, while Darren gets word from Rosie that she is on her way home. Debbie continues to spiral into a nightmarish descent into drug dependency, and John Boy continues to believe the ghost of his brother is haunting his apartment.


QUOTES
Nidge (looking at the ultrasound): “It’s like Alien!!”
Tricia: “Would ya shut up?”
Nidge: “It is!”

Luke: “How much is in there?”
Darren: “Dunno. A couple of grand at least. It’s blood money is what it is.”
Luke: “Sure it’s only money.”

Nidge: “Don’t you think we should cut him in on a quarter though?”
John Boy: “What am I now? Vincent de Paul? You give him your money if you feel so bad about it. You gonna do that? No, you’re not, ya fucking prick. You’re a great man at telling me I should be giving shit away… Stupid fuck! I mean, who are you to be telling me what to do with my money anyway? Christ, Nidge: you slow or what?”

Darren (talking to Nidge about his dilemma): “I don’t see what the problem is here. Just wait till she’s out and bomb the place.”
Nidge: “Nah. He’ll know.” (John Boy)
Darren: “How will he know? He’s God now is he?”
Nidge: “No. No, but he might be the other fella!”

John Boy: “You know in Sicily they write everything down. Don’t even trust the Pay-As-You-Go. That’s how they never get caught.”

John Boy: “Don’t give this to someone else. You take control of it. And don’t be coming back to me if all you did was wreck the gnomes in their front garden. I want blood on the floor. Think you can do that, Nidge?”

Fran: “Anyone who’s anything to him (John Boy) is fair game now.”
Dean: “They’ll have contracts out on you.”
Fran: “I’ll be on the move 24/7. They’ll want to get up very early to catch me out.”
Dean: “And how are we gonna get him?”
Fran: “I’ll do it meself. I don’t give a bollocks who he has protectin’ him. They don’t wanna end up dead takin’ a bullet for that scumbag. They’ll take his money but they’ll duck under the table if anything happens . And I don’t care what happens. I’d die a happy man if I could get him first. I would.”


Fran the man

We see Fran cutting up meat for his dogs, blood and all, and from the cold fury with which he attacks the meat it could be John Boy’s corpse he’s hacking up. To be honest, it could quite easily be human meat, the body of someone who pushed him too far, owed him money or just looked at him the wrong way. He’s obviously adept with the meat cleaver he uses, and you’d have to accept that it’s been employed in other than butchering animal carcasses.

Mirror, Mirror
When Nidge accompanies Trish to the hospital they decide that they want to know the sex of her baby, and are told it’s going to be a boy. Nidge is delighted --- “I knew it! Another little Nidge!” --- but there is hurt and disappointment in his wife’s eyes. Having to live in a harsh man’s world, and knowing that the chances are that Warren will one day end up participating in “the family business”, it’s clear that she had been hoping for a girl. A girl is less likely to be pressed into the service of the gang, less likely to be pulled into the dark world Nidge inhabits and which casts a cloud over Trish’s life every day. Also, a little girl would have been just the thing she needed to take her mind off what her husband does, and give her someone to lavish her love on. Not that she doesn’t love Warren, but a mother and her daughter have a very special bond, one it now seems Trish is not due to forge.

When Darren goes to visit Stumpy’s mother, he’s perhaps struck by how little she seems to know of the life her son led. She talks about “all his little friends” coming round to the house, and how some of them were at the funeral. How would she feel if she knew that almost all of them considered her son a rat, and that one of them decreed a hit on him, and that the man sitting smiling in awkward sympathy across the table from her is the man who put the bullets into his brain that took his life? She talks about the alarm system Stumpy had installed in the house, almost immediately prior to his murder. The irony couldn’t be clearer: he could protect his mother but he could do nothing to protect himself from the gang once it was decided that he had betrayed them, whether it was true or not.

FAMILY

It’s funny in a twisted kind of way that as Nidge gets stripped, preparatory to having sex with Fran’s girlfriend, he starts talking about the baby that’s on the way, sharing his thoughts about the woman he is about to cheat on with the woman he is cheating on her with. Talk about ironic! It’s also a really good touch that, as Linda confesses she would love to have a baby and waxes all thoughtful about it, Nidge glances at his watch! He’s only short of saying “C’mon willya? I’ve places to be, and Fran will be back in an hour!”

MONSTER BEHIND THE MASK

For a man who sneered at him at the end of season one, “What do you think I am? An animal?” when Darren tried to ensure that John Boy would not go after his sister while he was away, the gang boss is quite ready and willing to perform the most heinous deeds to achieve his ends. Earlier he warned Stumpy not to run, as if he did “Who’ll take care of yer ma?” pointing to the very clear threat that his mother would become a target if they could not get Stumpy himself. And now he calmly and with a smile arranges for Fran’s wife to be killed, or at least very seriously injured. It doesn’t matter a thing to him that Linda has nothing to do with the gang, has done nothing to them, and if he knew Nidge was screwing her that would mean nothing either, except he might not trust him to carry out the bombing.

John Boy is perfectly willing to sacrifice an innocent --- a woman, who has done him no harm and whom he may have passed the time of day with at some point, or been introduced to --- in order to flush out Fran and allow him to get his revenge. When it comes to his agenda, and his wishes, people are just pawns to John Boy, to be moved, taken, sacrificed as he sees fit. It’s all a game to him, and he’s intent on being the winner every time. So now, who’s the animal, and was Darren right to fear for Mary’s safety?

And then there’s Nidge.Though he agonises over the bombing and even confides to Darren that he doesn’t want to do it (though he stops short of telling him why: Nidge doesn’t trust anyone, and won’t give them any ammunition with which to cripple him) he still goes ahead, knowing that he is at best maiming and at worst causing the death of the woman he’s having an affair with. Of course, we don’t ever once think he’s in love with Linda --- he’s already told us that he “doesn’t give a fuck about anyone, not even Trish” --- Warren is the only one he cares about. But given that he’s screwing the woman you would think there would be some small scrap of emotion there. And in fairness there probably is, but when it comes down to a choice between his life and hers --- he probably feels John Boy will have him “clipped” if he fails him, and we would not be surprised ---he’s prepared to sacrifice her, just as his boss has said.

Darren, on the other hand, as Mary has pointed out, really is not cut out for this life. Though he can be a cold-blooded killer when it’s needed (and truth to tell, he probably relished the opportunity to settle the score with Stumpy on one level) he later feels terrible about it, so much so that he goes to Stumpy’s mother and tries to comfort her, eventually giving her the blood money he got from John Boy for killing her son. You can’t help but think this is not going to end well for Darren. He’s already living on borrowed time, and the one thing you can’t have in this criminal gang is a heart. It will eventually get you killed.

Chasing the Dragon
One fatal mistake everyone (except, it seems, Darren) make here is to “sample the merchandise”. If you’re going to sell drugs it’s probably best to keep a clear head, but everyone from John Boy down indulges. We even see here that his lawyer takes a snort when invited. This sort of handing over of control to the drug has already resulted in one of the operations getting busted because the guys were too stoned or high to get out when the Guards arrived, is slowly killing Debbie and is messing up John Boy’s head. We’ve seen Nidge partake and although I can’t remember, I think Fran does too.

When your life may depend from day to day on having your wits about you, it’s probably counterproductive to be messing with the shit, but then again, when it’s all around you and everyone is doing it, avoiding it may become a harder task than it would seem. Nevertheless, in the end it will be instrumental in bringing down everyone, from the highest to the lowest.

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1.3 “The unquiet dead”

Having travelled to the very limit of the future (for Earth anyway) and to the point of the destruction of our home planet, we're now back two hundred years, in Victorian Britain, where we see a man mourn the passing of his grandmother. But all of a sudden, the corpse reaches up and tries to strangle him! The undertaker, seeing this, greets the scene with the air of a man who is thinking “not again!” and indeed calls to his assistant, as he tries to wrestle the lid back onto the coffin against the struggles of the recently dead grandmother, “We've got another one!” He is however unable to prevent the corpse from overpowering him and heading out onto the street. He takes his assistant, Gwyneth, with him to retrieve her, but they have no luck locating the old lady until Sneed, the undertaker, tells her to “use the sight”, whereupon the young woman seems to be able to see into the mind of the recently-deceased older one, and sees that she had been, before she died, looking forward to meeting a “great man, all the way from London”.

We quickly find out this is none other than Charles Dickens himself, as the scene changes and we see him preparing to go onstage, world weary and bereft of ideas, feeling worn out and as he says himself, “like a ghost trapped and doomed”. But the show must of course go on and so he walks out onstage to read from his classic favourite, “A Christmas Carol”, it being Christmas Eve. However as he comes to the part about Scrooge's knocker turning into the face of Marley, the elusive corpse, which happens to be sitting in the audience, glows and from it issues forth a noxious gas, which approaches the stage, scaring (if you'll pardon the terrible pun but I couldn't resist!) the Dickens out of the narrator, who steps back in horror.

Both Sneed and Gwnyeth, tracking the old lady's corpse, and the Doctor and Rose, newly arrived, hear the screams of panic at the same time and rush into the theatre. As the Doctor leaps onstage, asking Dickens where the phantom, which is now streaking around the theatre like a bat, came from, Rose, investigating the corpse, is knocked out by Sneed who tells Gwyneth “She's seen too much!” and they take her with them as they depart with the corpse. Inside the theatre, the phantom seems to be sucked into a gas lamp, and vanishes. Rushing out onto the street the Doctor is just in time to see Rose being carried away and grabs a hansom cab to pursue it. When Dickens remarks that the cab is his, the Doctor has him come with him, still not knowing who he is. When the author's identity is revealed, the Doctor is beside himself with joy. He gushes so much and compliments Dickens on his books, and seems to have such a knowledge of them, that the writer thinks better of his original intention of calling the police, and, especially when he realises there is a lady involved, settles back for the chase.

Back at the mortuary, it seems whatever was onstage and lately in possession of the old lady has returned with them, and as Rose regains consciousness it flits into the bodies of two other corpses. The Doctor and Dickens arrive, demanding entry, and the Doctor notes the unusual activity in the gas lamps, and rescues Rose just in time. The corpses say something about opening a rift, and that they are dying. They plead for help before leaving the two bodies, which then collapse, dead again.

When things have settled down, Sneed tells them that this sort of thing has been happening for a while, that the house is rumoured to be haunted --- which is a good marketing tool for an undertaker, certainly provides the correct ambience! --- while the Doctor says the activity is due to a rift, a weak point in time which is separating dimensions, and through which these gaseous beings are coming. Dickens doesn't believe a word of it: he may write such fanciful tales but he puts no store by them in the real world. To him, there is a vast difference between the world of fantasy that he writes about and real life. Rose finds out about Gwyneth's “sight” when she realises that the serving girl has correctly deduced that Rose's father is dead, though nothing has been mentioned of him. She also probes deeper, unwittingly, almost involuntarily, seeing through Rose's eyes the city of London in her time, and further, to the TARDIS and the infinities of space.

Just then the Doctor appears; he's been listening and he tells Gyneth that she is the key to this whole mystery. Growing up right on top of the rift, she is the only one who can solve the puzzle. He decides to hold a seance, and during this alien beings appear, first as only gaseous entities like they saw in the theatre and the mortuary, but as Gwyneth, under the Doctor's urging, allows them through her, they stand as blue outlines of humanoids, and ask the Doctor to take Gwyneth to the rift and make the bridge. They explain that they are a race called the Gelth, whose physical form was destroyed during the Time War. They are now trapped in a gaseous state and want to use the bodies of the dead to clothe themselves.

Rose is shocked. The aliens say “your dead go to waste”, but she doesn't see it that way. The Doctor, without human morals and ethics, can see nothing wrong with this. He does not believe in a god, and even if one exists, what would he need with the empty shells of people who have died? All they're going to do is rot in the ground. Why not let these disenfranchised aliens use them, if it will help save the last of their race? They argue, to the point where the Doctor makes it very clear that his word is law, and if Rose does not like it he can drop her home. However in the end, as it should be, the choice is Gwyneth's to make, and she decides to help. The weakest part of the rift is of course in the morgue, so that's where they go and Gwyneth establishes the bridge through which the Gelth enter our world.

But all is not as it seems. Once across, the Gelth reveal that there are indeed only a few of them --- a few billion! --- and their aim is not salvation but conquest! Far from being a poor dying race they are alien invaders who now intend to make Earth theirs. The Doctor is suitably chagrined to find he has been lied to and fooled so easily. What do they say? There's no fool like an old fool? Trapped by the aliens, the Doctor and Rose are in a bad situation but Dickens has run off, spooked by what he has seen. Unnoticed, he has made it out to the street where inspiration strikes. Turning the gas laps off he forces the gas into the air, drawing the creatures out of the cadavers...? I don't really follow that logic, but anyway it happens and the Gelth are reduced to their gaseous forms. Now all that remains is for Gwyneth to return them whence they came.

But there's a problem. She isn't strong enough. She does however, at the Doctor's urging, realise that millions will die if she can't stop the Gelth, and so she agrees to hold them in this place, in their gaseous form, and produces a box of matches... As the trio run for the door, she strikes the match.
Dickens, his ennui thoroughly banished now, and assured by the departing Doctor that his books live, literally, forever, returns to London reinvigorated, and with many new ideas for forthcoming stories. Sadly, he is due to die next week and so he will never write them. But he will never forget either the time he met the mysterious traveller and his glamourous companion, nor the servant girl who saved the world, even if nobody will ever know of her heroic sacrifice.

QUOTES
Sneed: “The stiffs are getting lively again!”
(These are the words of a man who is above all things pragmatic. He has seen other corpses left in his charge walk, and though he can't explain it he seems to somehow accept it, and it just becomes another burden, another onerous part of his job)

Sneed: “Now hurry up! She was eighty six: she couldn't have got far!”

Sneed: “Stop prevaricating, girl, and get the hearse ready. We're going bodysnatching!”

Rose: “Leave her alone. She's exhausted and she's not fighting your battles.”
(The Doctor and Rose have obviously had a conversation --- a heated one, by the look of defiance and exasperation on Rose's face --- about this, and while he wants to use Gwyneth to allow the Gelth to cross over and save them, she is against the idea. But more than that: it's not just what would be seen as the desecration of human corpses, that the dead would walk again, reanimated by an alien force, and how that might be explained in Victorian Wales. There seems to be something inside Rose telling her that this is what this man does. Even though she has known him only for a short time at this point, she recognises that he uses people; he moves them like pawns on a chessboard, in this enormous and galaxy-spanning contest he is playing, and if sometimes they have to be sacrificed, well, that's just the game, and the ends justify the means. But she is a simpler entity, and does not see why those who have nothing to do with these intergalactic intrigues must be pulled into them. In time of course she will see she is wrong, and that the Doctor strives to preserve all life, but that he just sees things differently from his perspective, one we could never hope to understand or share.)

Rose: “You can't just let them run around inside dead people!”
The Doctor: “Why not? It's just like recycling.”
Rose: “Seriously though: you can't.”
The Doctor: “Seriously though: I can!”
Rose: “But it's just ... wrong! Those bodies were once living people. We should respect them, even in death!”
The Doctor: “Do you carry a donor card?”
Rose: “That's ... that's different!”
The Doctor: “It is different, yeah. It's a different morality. Get used to it or go home!”
(This is the first time we really see the Doctor angry. The petty ethics of this human are getting in the way, complicating what, to him, is a near-perfect system and clouding it with superstition (as he sees it), morality and judgement. He can see no downside, but Rose can. In the end, she will be proven to have been right, however right now the Doctor is warning Rose that there is more of this to come, and that if she can't cut it out here, where the rules are different, she may not be the right stuff for this kind of life. As Q once said to Picard: it's dangerous out here, not for the faint hearted! In other words, if you want to play with the big boys, toughen up and face difficult decisions.)

The Doctor: “What about me? I saw the fall of Troy! I saw World War V! I pushed boxes at the Boston Tea Party! And now I'm gonna die, in a dungeon. In Cardiff!”
(It's clear this last is the most galling of all to the time traveller. What a way to go!)

The Doctor (on seeing Rose in her dress): “Blimey! You look beautiful! Considering...”
(He qualifies this as “considering you're human”, but you can see the sudden hesitation, even fear or uncertainty in his eyes. He realises he's paid this girl whom he hardly knows quite a compliment, and the Doctor is not known for such extravagance and displays of emotion. He's not used to it, and quickly looking away he shuts it down immediately, but both of them know that something very special has happened, and unspoken words have been said.)

Questions
Why is it that the Doctor never seems to have to change, to fit in with his surroundings, yet his companions do? As Rose goes to run out into what is now Victorian Cardiff, he checks her, in her sweatshirt and jeans, and advises her she had better change into a dress. Yet he goes out dressed exactly as he always is. I know the idea of psychic paper: is the entire form of the Doctor a kind of variant of that? That people see what he wants them to see? Can he bend their reality, their perception of him, so that he seems to fit in, seems to be wearing clothing appropriate to the time and/or planet he is visiting?

When Dickens, shaken by what he has seen and worried that he may have “got it wrong”, asks has his life been wasted, both in the charitable causes he champions and his writings, why does the Doctor not reassure him that, far from being a useless or misguided or wasted life, his destiny is to become one of the true immortals, to live forever in the hearts and minds of people and to be forever copied, translated, imitated and celebrated as long as humans are around? Yes, he does so later, near the end, but right now, at this moment, the greatest author of our time is having a crisis of confidence. Why does the Doctor not give him the reassurance he needs? Perhaps it's because he has yet to drop the bombshell of being a time traveller. Yet, he could certainly give some words of comfort, and he does not.

When Rose makes the very pragmatic observation that the Doctor's idea to allow the Gelth to inhabit corpses is doomed to failure, as there were nothing of the sort in 1869, he gives her an irritated speech about “everything being in flux”. He says time can change like that (snaps his fingers) and yet much of his personal mission is to stop things occurring that are not meant to have done, as we will see in future episodes. So if this happens because the time lines are changed, surely he should be trying to prevent it? Or is this just lazy storywriting? As A Time Lord, the Doctor has control over time, but that does not mean he can change it, or allow it to change, willy-nilly. What about cause and effect? Has he considered that if the Gelth survive they may turn out to be evil (as they do) and may in fact alter the very course of galactic history? Has he thought about the ramifications such a momentous decision may have on the future? Has he worked out all the pros and cons? No: he sees an alien race on the brink of extinction and his innate (for want of a better word) humanity makes him want to do all he can to save them. But even more importantly than that, he is determined that he will force his will on anyone who gainsays him, and he always --- always --- believes himself to be right. Today, that will change, as his immovable certainty and confidence in his superiority will be shaken to its very foundations, and he will find that, even though he has lived for almost a thousand years, even he can make a mistake, make the wrong call, and sometimes it needs another living being, who is seeing the situation from a different angle, to show him he is wrong.)

Laughing in the face of death
The Doctor: “I'm such a big fan.”
Dickens: “How are you a fan? In what way do you resemble a means to keep oneself cool?”

Dickens: “What the Shakespeare is going on?”

The Doctor: “Now don't antagonise her: I love a happy medium!”

Evolution of a Timelord
At this point I think we can see that the Doctor is still relatively alien --- compared to how human he ends up after a while. He sees the idea of using human corpses as “vehicles” for the Gelth as not only not abominable, but as quite clever and even useful. He sees it as a solution to a problem, a justified use of resources. He can't see beyond the logic and pragmatism of the approach to be able to even begin to understand Rose's horror at the idea. His interaction with humans has been, up to now, so far as I know from the older series, rather minimal in that he spent a lot of time on alien planets and never really crossed paths with humanity, other than his companions. But as this series is going to involve a lot of human interaction, he is going to have to become less the alien Timelord and more the understanding human. He may wish Rose (and later companions) to follow his code of conduct, think as he does, reason as he does and have the same values and ethics as he, but in time he will realise that it's a two-way street, and if he wants to keep company with humans he is going to have to start to think, act and even reason like one. What may seem perfectly acceptable to him may be abhorrent to his human companion, and this is the first example of such a thing, if you discount his rather so-what attitude to the destruction of the Earth in the previous episode.

The look on Rose's face when she sees the Doctor emerge from the house, alone, tells you all you need to know about how she feels at this point. The Doctor had promised to save Gwyneth, but he never really had any intention of doing so. Well, maybe he had but when push came to shove he knew he had to leave her to her fate. Rose is crushed: this man she had believed could fix anything, make anything right, do anything, has failed her. He has been unable to save Gwyneth, and Rose can begin to see that, brash and confident as he may be, the Doctor is not omnipotent. Sometimes, he's just a man.

And sometimes he is the Doctor, and knows all. Or thinks he does. Perhaps in these instances he's unintentionally being more human than he realises, as it's basic compassion that leads him into believing that the Gelth are deserving of a chance of peace. Despite what he says about animating human corpses, he realises that this cannot be a long-term solution, and offers to take the aliens somewhere that they can rebuild and fashion proper bodies. He doesn't realise he's being played, and that Rose, the stupid, inexperienced, emotional Earth girl, was right all along when she opposed the plan. As she will be again. And again.

This is not the last time that the Doctor will be fooled by perhaps listening too easily to a creature's pleas, or more likely, believing he knows better than everyone else. At times, his arrogance will very nearly be his undoing, and by extension, that of those close to him.

Enemy mine
We're not told a whole lot about the Gelth, just that they were involved (possibly on the fringes of, or even as victims of) the Time War and that the ones that remain are the only survivors. Of course, they lied in order to try to trick their way into invading Earth, so that may be horse hockey too, but it's clear that the mention of the Time War has a profound effect on the Doctor, as he is known to have fought in it, been a central figure in it. Was it used as another ploy? Did the Gelth know who the Doctor was? Beings of pure energy, existing in gaseous form (at least, now) they cannot gain a foothold in our world without using host bodies, and when it becomes clear they are going to get what they want, a bridge to the other side, they reveal themselves to be a violent, hateful, warmongering race of conquerors. It seems unlikely that they were in any war they did not triumph in.

In the end, they are presumably all destroyed when they are held in the arch, the weakest point of the rift down in the morgue, the point at which they crossed over, and Gwnyeth destroys the house. It's interesting to note, though it was probably only done for effect, that when they seem poor, doomed, homeless souls they manifest as blue, and when their true nature is revealed not only do they turn red but they sprout horns! Labouring the point much?

I do wonder though how long they've been trying to get through? Gwyneth says they have been speaking to her all her life --- she calls them “her angels” --- and her mother knew of them, so it's possible they sang to her, too, just waiting for the time when someone with the proper knowledge, experience and technology would come along and allow them to be released, or as it turned out, unleashed. Perhaps they've been trying for centuries.

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A long and lonely life

In his time, the Doctor has done many things, most of them good, but there are things he would change, and times when he has had to do that which goes against his nature. The Time War is one of those, and although I don't know the full details I do know that he virtually wiped out the Dalek race --- and one would assume there was a lot of collateral damage involved in that. So when the Gelth mention that they were left homeless thanks to the Time War, he feels responsible. This is probably a calculated ploy: the Gelth know who he is and how to push his buttons. Trying to make amends, the Doctor agrees to allow the aliens to cross over, and too late sees that he has indeed been played. But when you have the deaths of countless billions on your conscience, this is always going to be a trigger word.

True Companion
Again Rose demonstrates that she is not just along for the ride. The Doctor has had feisty companions before, certainly, but most of them have seemed to accede to his authority, bow to hs wisdom. Rose is the first of a new breed: a modern woman for a new century and a new millennium, and she will be more instrumental to his plans than he could have ever imagined. Really, at the heart of it, all the Doctor wants is company on his lonely, seemingly endless voyage through time and space. But Rose will turn out to be much more than that.

Here, she openly defies his plan to allow the Gelth through, seeing it as a horror when he sees it as practical. She stands up to him --- something few of his previous companions have done --- and he, angry at her for not toeing the line and bringing what he sees as outdated moral baggage along with her, snarls that she can go home if she doesn't like it here. But in the end he has to apologise as it turns out he has made the wrong decision and it looks very likely that they will both die at the hands of the Gelth. It's only the quick thinking of Charles Dickens --- a man from the nineteenth century able to see a solution where a man who has all of time and space at his command cannot --- that saves the day, and that must humble him. It's vindication for Rose though, vindication she would probably have preferred not to have, given that it's meant the death of a girl she was beginning to see as a friend, an innocent, and the near enslavement of the Earth.

But she's learned now that she can challenge him. The Doctor, despite his age and experience, is not infallible. He is not a god, and he sometimes gets it wrong. And she must be there to point out when he does, and to resist him, explain her position, propose an alternative course of action, or just simply dig her heels in and say “No!” when necessary. Although he is technically her protector --- she knows little of the vast realms of time and space, and he seems to know all or most of it --- she must also at times act as his guard, against his overconfidence, his arrogance and his belief in himself when she knows he is wrong. She must be the little pin that bursts the balloon of his self-confidence, and not be afraid to deflate his ego when it needs taking down.

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2.3 “When aliens attack”

Tagline: “Proudly made on Earth”

We’re briefly back in 1999 as Fry delivers a pizza to a TV station run by Fox. As he accidentally spills beer over the console the screens go blank: he’s knocked Fox off the air! He’s not that bothered though, until our old friend Lur from the planet Omicron Persei 8 arrives with a fleet in tow, complaining that the show “Single Female Lawyer” has been interrupted and that his fleet will attack Earth unless something is done. Unfortunately it is Zapp Branigan who is put in charge of the defence of Earth, and the effort fails miserably. It’s not surprising, since his great strategy is for all the ships to fly directly into the path of their enemies’ weapons, clogging the area with wreckage! Even Bender, who cares little for humans, has to comply as his, and every other robot’s patriotism chip has been activated.

When Fry realises that the aliens want to see a TV show that has been off the air for a thousand years, he hits upon a crazy plan, but it’s the only one they have. They must act out the episode and transmit it to Omicron Persei 8. Leela takes the role of the Single Female Lawyer and they act it out. Terribly. But the Omicronians seem satisfied, until the end, when Leela ad-libs and they don’t like what she does, saying it is against the whole ethos of the show.

QUOTES:
Fry: “So, this is really a TV station?”
Tech: “Ah, it’s a Fox affiliate.”

Tech: “Oh my God! You knocked Fox off the air!”
Fry: “Meh, like anyone on Earth cares!”

Amy: “How do I look?”
Farnsworth: “Like a cheap French harlot.”
Amy: “Ewww! French?”

President McNeal: “Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to really knuckle under. To get down on all fours and really lick boot, give our alien masters whatever they want…” (After Lur makes it clear it is “McNeal” they want) “Er, as I was saying, Mankind would rather die than kowtow to outrageous alien demands for this McNeal. Whoever he is.”

McNeal: “And now, the man who will lead us in our struggle against these aliens, fresh from his victory over the pacifists of the Gandhi Nebula, twenty-five-star General Zapp Branigan!”

Lur: “We will raise your planet’s temperature by one million degrees a day for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow. 8 Central!”

Amy: “There aren’t any copies.”
Farnsworth: “No, there wouldn’t be. Most videotapes from that era were damaged in 2444 during the Second Coming of Jesus.”

Lur: “Prepare the water cooler, that we may gather around it later to discuss things.”

Lur: “If McNeal wishes to be taken seriously why does she simply not tear the judge’s head off?”
Lur’s wife: “It is true what they say: Women are from Omicron Peresi 7, men are from Omicron Persei 9!”

Leela: “Fry! There’s nothing else here! You only wrote two pages of dialogue!"
Fry: “Well, it took an hour to write: I thought it would take an hour to read!”
Leela: “What are we supposed to do now?”
Fry: “I don’t know! Just say anything, as long as it’s compelling, mesmerising --- a tour de force!”

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Where all the world’s greatest monuments now reside in New New York, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Big Ben and The Sphinx. Seems in 2600 they elected a supervillain president and he stole them all. They are now on permanent display at “Monument Beach”.

Also, beachwear is now in a can. When Nibbler eats the top part of Amy’s bikini she simply sprays another one on.

A new business venture has also sprung up: Professional Beach Bullies. using the time-honoured kicking-sand-in-the-skinny-guy’s-face routine, big burly guys antagonise smaller guys with hot girlfriends, allowing the guy the chance to take them on. The Bully takes a dive, and the skinny guy pays him fifty bucks. The girl then thinks her man is a hero. Everybody wins!

PCRs
The biggest of course is the quite obvious reference to Ally McBeal, that bloody show with Calista Flockhart about a “single female lawyer”.

Laughing at the mirror
A new section wherein I’ll catalogue the amount of self-referential and self-deprecatory jokes that are made in the show. It’s said that if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at, and “Futurama” proves very much a case in point throughout the series.

Here, general TV (with a heavy emphasis on their network, Fox), is shown up several times. When Fry spills beer over the console and knocks Fox off the air he shrugs that nobody cares, and before that when he comes into the TV station the guy at the desk qualifies the station’s being a “real TV station” as “Well, it’s a Fox affiliate!” Later, Fry explains about TV audiences: “People don’t want clever and unexpected! Clever makes them feel stupid and unexpected scares them”, backed up by Lur’s almost immediate broadcast from the ship that the changes in the episode are unexpected and scare them. Later again Fry says he knows the secret of TV, that by the end everything is back to the way it was, as the episode underlines this by returning Fry to the state he was in at the start of the episode, lounging around watching television.

Branigan’s Law
Zapp as ever steals the show, with some memorable and stupid quotes, such as

Branigan: “If there’s an alien out there I can’t kill I haven’t met him and killed him yet! That’s why I’m ordering all available ships to report for duty. Anyone without a ship should acquire a weapon and fire wildly into the air!”

Bender: “Permission to volunteer for a suicide mission!”
Zapp: “You’re a brave robot son, but when I’m in command, every mission is a suicide mission!”

This total beauty:
Zapp: “If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!”

Zapp: “What the hell is that thing?”
Kiff: “It appears to be the mothership.”
Zapp: “Then what did we just blow up?”
KIff: “The Hubble telescope!”

But you have to wonder why anyone would put him in charge of anything, least of all the defence of the homeworld. His campaigns all seem to have taken place against much weaker and possibly defenceless opposition (The Retiring People of the Assisted Living Nebula, New Eden, and now The Pacifists of the Gandhi Nebula) and he has not the slightest idea about strategy, his plan being to attack in wave after wave of ships until the wreckage clogs the way.

A robot called Bender
In fairness, this is not a Bender episode, it’s very Fry-centric, but we do learn that all robots on Earth (and presumably elsewhere too) have an inbuilt Patriotism chip, which can be activated in times of war or national emergency, overriding their software and making them into soldiers, whether they want to volunteer or not. The chip does not impact upon their intelligence, only their free will, as Bender, having volunteered for a sucide mission, goes “Oh crap! Stop it!” realising the chip is controlling what he says.

We also learn from this that Bender can cook food and make drinks in his stomach, as he makes burgers when they go to Monument Beach and later in the ship is drinking a Martini he has made. He harbours a desire to be a TV director, something that will surface again, and he is of course not in any way averse to using the opportunity to advertise his wares: “We’ll be right back after these messages from Crazy Bender’s Discount Stereo!” He has of course great admiration for the unnamed supervillian who was elected president in 2600 and whose face now adorns Mount Rushmore beside the other four presidents (he probably dreams of one day joining them, though being Bender he would likely have all the other faces removed and four of his own set in the stone!)

Those clever little touches
When the monuments are being destroyed by the alien attack fleet, one tiny ship comes and destroys the sandcastle Fry had built: “This is the sort of castle King Arthur would have lived in”, he had said proudly before its destruction. “If he was a fiddler crab.”

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A while back I checked out the music parodies that cropped up in The Simpsons, but owing both to the small amount of them and the lack of decent YouTube availability (honestly? Holding the phone up in front of the TV and you can't even hold it still for a minute or two? Why bother?) it died a fairly quick death.

But songs weren't the only things this show put its own spin on. Come with me now as we explore how Groening and Co. lampooned pop culture and shamelessly ripped off scenes from some of the best, and worst, to hit the silver screen. Grab your popcorn and join me as we check out

The first one I want to look at is a movie I personally have never seen, but that doesn't matter, because I know the final scene and it's this that has made the movie famous, along with a song or two.

You know the bit I'm talking about, I'm sure, where at the end Richard Gere goes into the factory and sweeps Debra Winger off her feet, carrying her out of the factory to the guitar theme of “Up where we belong”? Yeah, we all know it, or know of it. In case you don't, here it is.

The Simpsons then parodied this when, after having a fight and not talking, Homer is working in the nuclear power plant when Marge walks in (reversing the gender roles here, but that's The Simpsons for ya!) and kisses him. Naturally, she can't carry big fat heavy Homer out, so he picks her up and yes, she takes his safety helmet off and puts it on her own head, just like in the movie. Here is their version.


Then of course there's their classic homage to this suspense thriller. I've only seen the 1991 remake but thought it was bloody hilarious (wasn't meant to be, but DeNiro just hammed up the role so well I couldn't help but laugh) although it's originally a sixties classic starring the one and only James Stewart.

There are too many scenes to do them all here --- The Simpsons episode was based more or less on the movie, and was even entitled “Cape Feare” --- but the one I really like is this, when DeNiro is in the cinema, trying to make things uncomfortable for Nick Nolte and his family, smoking a big cigar and laughing uproariously. This is it.

Now, when The Simpsons do it they again reverse the trend. Sideshow Bob is in the cinema in front of the Simpsons, laughnig and smoking a cigar. Homer is getting annoyed and leans forward to tell him to knock it off but then sees something funny on the screen and laughs even louder, lighting an even bigger cigar and causing Bob to turn around and drawl “Oh now really! That is too much!” Sorry there seem to be no clips of it but I've managed to track down two stills, which hopefully will convey the idea to both of you who have not actually seen the episode.


The last one I want to look at this time is the infamous movie that really propelled Sharon Stone both to almost instant fame and into deep controversy, and made her a pariah among lesbians, gays and transgenders for her depiction of a bisexual killer in

There's really only one scene that could be taken from this pretty terrible movie really, like the bunny boiling in Fatal attraction, and we all know what it is. But in case you don't, here's the infamous leg-crossing scene that wore out a million videotape heads and made men around the world delighted that such a feature as PAUSE existed...

Oddly enough, it seems hard to find the scene in English, but I got it here in Ukranian. And anyway, you don't care about the language, do you?

Then the Simpsons briefly but very cleverly parodied this, having Groundskeeper Willy being interrogated in the episode “Who shot Mr. Burns?” Willy is of course wearing his traditional kilt, and again in a reversal of the original, when the cops watched lasciviously as Stone crossed her legs, the cops here grimace and try to look away as Willy does the same. Eddie, one of Wiggum's officers, actually points a gun at him and snarls “This is your last warning about that!” Classic.

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