Androids of Tara [2]

As the curtain rises on Episode One, the Doctor is playing chess. Not deep in concentration across a table, but lolling on the floor of the TARDIS, one end of his scarf wrapped around K-9.

There is no reason for the scarf to be wrapped around the dog: the Doctor has done it pointlessly, like a teenager wearing his school tie as a headband. He's being more than usually petulant. He makes a rude face at K-9 after making what he thinks is a clever move. He patronises K-9 when the robot makes what he considers to be a terrible one. When, inevitably, the Doctor loses, he unsportingly claims that chess is predictable and uninteresting.

We saw the same dynamic at the beginning of the Sunmakers. K-9 is good at chess and the Doctor is a bad loser. We're on K-9 and Romana's side: it's funny when the show-off Doctor is hoisted on his own multi-coloured petard. But one can't help thinking that the format is undermining the hero.

Why chess? Is this week's story going to be about whether it is better to follow textbook tactics or think outside the box? Is it going to be about the limits of artificial intelligence -- about whether organic life-forms can out-think artificial ones? Will we see the people of the universe reduced to pawns in a game between the Black Guardian and the White?

None of the above. In fact, the chess game has no relevance to the rest of the action. It's filler; there to represent down-time. George Lucas also showed an alien playing chess with a machine in order to indicate a transition between two adventures. Chewbacca, like the Doctor, is a terrible loser.

It's also there to indicate the Doctor's mood. The Doctor is signalling to Romana -- and to the White Guardian, if he is watching -- that he is bored with the quest and wants to opt out of it. And David Fisher is making very much the same point to us viewers; and very possibly to Graham Williams as well. The Key to Time theme has been an abject failure; and we're all heartily sick of it. Androids of Tara is about what happens when the hero (and the writer) opt out of the meta-plot. The Doctor is playing chess at Romana. One thinks of Marvin phoning up Zaphod in order to wash his head at him.

*

In Stones of Blood, the voice of the White Guardian popped up in the TARDIS to remind us that Season 16 was all about the Key To Time. In Androids of Tara, it falls to Romana to do so. And she uses some very interesting language:

"Aren't you forgetting something."

"I don't think so."

"What about our task. The Key to Time, remember?"

"Oh that old thing."

"Yes, that old thing. The Guardian did stress the need for urgency." 

The idea of the Doctor forgetting -- or pretending to forget -- his mission is distinctly odd. I suppose Sir Galahad might conceivably have said "My task is to find the Holy Grail" and Princess Leia might possibly have said  "My task is to deliver the secret plans". But it is strange for the Doctor to describe the quest for the Key to Time as a "task" -- as if saving the universe from eternal chaos is a chore; a bit of busy-work that he can't quite be bothered to get around to. He calls the most powerful artefact in the universe "that old thing". Arthur Dent used the same words to describe the eponymous Guide.

In previous seasons, the Doctor has been motivated by his innate sense of right and wrong; and his innate wish to find things out. But he doesn't have "missions" or "tasks": he wanders the universe quixotically getting involved in whatever is happening. When he is given a mission, by the Time Lords or the Brigadier, he resists it and complains about it. Going around the universe collecting plot coupons -- however valuable -- is a chore.

And it's a chore for the writers too. We can see Mr Fisher and Mr Holmes reluctantly working the Key into their stories, before getting on with the tale they would have told in any case. Only Douglas Adams seemed interested in finding ways to use the Key as a jumping off point for a narrative that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been there.

So. The Doctor goes on strike. He opts out of the story. He delegates the job of finding the Fourth Segment to Romana. She has been acting as a kind of stand-in Doctor for the past twelve weeks in any case. He announces that he is going to go fishing and leave her to it.

Romana doesn't know what fishing is. Are there no fish on Gallifrey? Not even singing ones, in pools of liquid gold? Or are Time Lords vegetarians -- or opposed to even the mildest of bloodsports? (Romana has also never heard of horses.) The Doctor claims to have learned about fishing from Isaac Walton -- of course -- so maybe the sport is unique to earth. For once, he doesn't say that he taught Walton all he knew, so perhaps this particular name-drop is even true. On the other hand, Romana appears to be a pretty advanced chess player, able to spot checkmate a dozen moves ahead by glancing at the board. Is she so brilliant -- is chess so simple? -- that she can play like a master after observing a single game? Or is chess another of the things that humans learned from Gallifrey?

Romana goes to a wardrobe and selects a new dress. The Doctor goes to a cupboard and selects a fishing rod. Romana's cupboard contains a selection of clothes, in alphabetical order; the Doctor's, naturally, is full of junk. 

Why do we need to see where the Doctor got his fishing rod, or indeed, where Romana got her frock? Last week, the Doctor produced a lawyer's wig out of thin air: if he had just emerged from the TARDIS with a fishing rod in his hand, we wouldn't have questioned it. When we first met Romana, she was wearing an elegant but impractical white gown. We didn't particularly wonder where she got the more sensible pink dress she was wearing in the Pirate Planet. But David Fisher apparently did wonder, because he dropped a tiny "Romana gets changed" sequence into Stones of Blood. She asks the Doctor if he likes her natty peach trouser-suit: the Doctor, of course, ignores her. So in this story, we actually see her choosing her dress.

I remember a bit of ephemera: a strip in a Countdown or TV Comic Summer Special in which the Third Doctor asks Jo Grant to change her clothes before travelling to the Olden Days. "My own clothes are suitable for any time period" he explained. Which makes sense. The Fourth Doctor's get-up is presumably equally inappropriate wherever he goes in the universe. 

It lampshades a problem that has never occurred to us before. very like Sarah-Jane suddenly wondering how she understands renaissance Italian. Maybe the same Time Lord Gift ensures that travellers always blend in with their surroundings. Or maybe it's a mechanism of the TARDIS: the Tomorrow People used to have Chameleon Circuits fitted into their spacesuits, I seem to remember. Back in the day, we tackled the question of "what does the Doctor eat" -- the TARDIS has a futuristic replicator which produces food-flavoured tablets. Much later, we learned that the TARDIS had a bathroom; although not, of course, a bathroom. The TARDIS was never just a travelling device: it is clear in Unearthly Child that the Doctor and Susan regard it as their home.

So: there could have been a futuristic Clothes Replicator which materialised genre-appropriate costumes at the push of a button. It could have been called the Loom. And I expect that canon-conscious fans would say that it does. The TARDIS can be what it likes, inside and outside, and it just so happens that, this week, the Time Lord Clothing Loom Interface has been configured to look like an old fashioned wardrobe. The console room in New New New Who seems to reconfigure itself on a season-by-season basis. 

But to me, that spoils the moment. Old Who is at its most sensible when it least makes sense. The TARDIS is a magic box, but it's also a rickety old machine that doesn't quite work. It's a piece of fabulously advanced Galifreyan technology; but it's also a sprawling, Hogwartian Gormenghast.

It certainly does have a wardrobe: Sarah-Jane once found one of Victoria's old dresses there. She also found a whole room full of wellington boots. The very first time we saw the interior, there were antique chairs, hatstands, and what looked like a wooden peacock positioned around the ultra-tech console. The TARDIS is very big, and the Doctor has been travelling for a very long time so of course he has acquired a lot of stuff. We first met him in a junk yard.

The final episodes of Invasion of Time weren't a one-off aberration. That's now what the TARDIS looks like. It's not a spaceship or a machine; it's where the Doctor and Romana go when they are not in a story. There is a sense that we are peeling away a backdrop, looking at a shabby bag-stage reality. Chess, fishing, clothes, bickering. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are killing time until the writer thinks up something for them to do.

It's silly. It will get sillier. It could validly be seen as undermining or parodying the premise of the show. Up until Ribos Operation there was a viewpoint character, a human in the TARDIS. Now there is the Doctor and the lady Doctor. So if we get to glimpse their off-stage existence, it has to be weird, surreal, ridiculous. Soon enough, things will swing the other way and Peter Davison will reduce the TARDIS to a time travelling Premier Inn. 

There was a popular children's TV series about a little man who tried on historical costumes; and found himself transported back in time to the period of the clothes: the Wild West if he was trying on a cowboy suit; Ancient Rome if he was trying on a toga.

"Romana gets changed." At the beginning of the next series, we will see Romana emerging from a changing room in a series of different bodies.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

Androids of Tara [I]

No corridors. No invasions. No space ships. There is one more than usually ridiculous monster -- which gets only thirty seconds of screen time and could just as well have been a wolf or a boar. No ray-guns. There are swords which zap people with electricity, but it isn't clear why: everything would have come out the same if they had just been swords. But there are Androids. So we know we are watching science fiction and not, say, an affectionate parody of a famous swashbuckling novel.

We're on the planet Tara. The technology is clearly early-modern: crossbows and horses and fireplaces and castle gates which operate on winch systems. But there are also super-advanced robots which are indistinguishable from humans. One waits in vain for the big reveal: has the Key to Time gifted Tara with super-tech? Have they somehow salvaged robots and zap-swords from the remnant of a previous civilisation? Are we, perchance, inside a Westworld simulation of an Errol Flynn movie?

There are hints. We're told that only peasants know how to build and repair androids; and the Evil Count's chief android-wrangler has strange markings on her face. That could be a hint that she's an alien. We are very briefly told that Tara started to use androids to replace people after a plague. But where did the technology come from? Did the peasants develop advanced science while the nobles cos-played court politics? The Evil Count claims not to know how horses "work" ("I'm a knight, not a farrier") which makes us think for a moment that the planet's livestock are going to turn out to be robots as well. The novel suggests that the Very Silly Monster is a robot.

The Doctor says at one point that androids dislike people as much as people dislike androids. Later on he says that the robot duplicate of the Good Prince is cleverer than the actual Prince. But there is no sign of the androids having sentience or agency. These aren't the art-deco serving caste on the Sandminer; they are more like the Kraal's artificial human duplicates. Or perhaps even like the Nestene's shop-window dummies. Certainly, the Doctor has no moral compunctions about destroying or dismantling them.

The story is not interested in why there are androids. The story is not even interested in the fact that there are androids. The androids are there only to be decoys, doppelgängers and doubles. To be plot devices in a Wurwitanian Womance.

*

If you asked a hundred and seventy six Doctor Who fans what they thought of Androids of Tara, then a hundred and fifty eight of them would say "Well, it's a fun story, but it's not really a Doctor Who story."
To which the only response is to stroke one's beard, tap one's pipe and say thoughtfully "Well, it depends what you mean by 'a Doctor Who story'..."

What do we mean by a Doctor Who story? When we think of Doctor Who, we probably think of a story in which a flamboyantly dotty science boffin and some English squaddies fend off an alien invasion in front of some famous London landmarks. Or else we think of a story in which a wild Bohemian man-child strides along a fake corridor pursued by homicidal muppets. Which is to say: we think of a Season 8 story (Jon Pertwee, Jo Grant, and the Brigadier) or a Season 17 story (Tom Baker, Romana II and K-9.) And if that is what we mean by a Doctor Who story, then Androids of Tara quite definitely isn't one.

But Doctor Who didn't start with the Invasion or the Silurians or Nightmare of Eden. It started with the Tribe of Gum and Marco Polo and the Reign of Terror. Terrance Dicks used to say that Auntie Beeb invented Doctor Who to entice the kiddies into paying attention to their history lessons. Seduce the little'uns with giant insects and flying saucers, but feed them Aztecs and Crusaders. And yes, indeed, olden days BBC had a mandate to Educate as well as to Inform and Entertain. Blue Peter used to interview boy-band heart-throbs on their way through to Top of the Pops, and segue straight to a picture story about Florence Nightingale or the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Pausing only to step in some elephant mess. ("And now, over to Val.") But the idea that Doctor Who was invented specifically in order to teach the kids history seems to be an urban myth.

Still: twelve out of the first thirty stories were set in the past. And all but one of those stories was purely historical: there was no science fiction element apart from the presence of time travellers from the future. (The exception, the Time Meddler, involved a second Time Lord buggering around with Earth history.)

Subsequently, "historical" adventures came to mean stories about alien invasions and time travelling war criminals that happened to be set in the past rather than the present or the future. And they became rarer and rarer. Doctor Jon visited the Olden Days once, fighting Sontarans in the Dark Ages. Doctor Tom only had one story, Masque of Mandragora, in the properly olden days, although he did do Victorian times once and Edwardian times twice. In the final years, there was generally one historical story per season: John Nathan-Turner was quite proud of the fact that Black Orchid was a period whodunnit with no science fiction element, although it did use the TARDIS extensively as a plot device. The last purely historical story, the Highlanders, was transmitted in 1968, well within living fan-memory when Androids of Tara came out.

I've argued that Stones of Blood is a parody of a Doctor Who story: a sequence of tropes with very little coherent narrative stringing them together. Which makes it very tempting to say that David Fisher, a decent enough script-writer but no Whovian, was given Androids of Tara as a consolation prize. He shunted the Doctor and Romana sideways into an entirely different genre -- one that he was much more comfortable with.

But that doesn't quite work. Because the "entirely different genre" is quite clearly historical fiction (with the merest fig leaf of science fictional gloss) and historical fiction is where Doctor Who started. Stones of Blood may have been a parody; but Doctor Who had been teetering on the edge of self parody for three seasons, parrots and space marines and Time Lord newscasters and all. So an anti-Doctor-Who story arguably takes us back to something much more like what Doctor Who originally was. Intrigue and betrayal. Sword fights on the battlements. An historical costume drama in all but name. A return to the infinitely remote monochrome world of very nearly ten years ago when Doctor Who still retained its Elusive Magic.

*

So: we have Prince Reynart, the good guy, impossibly handsome and prone to say things like "How dare you lay hands on a lady!" We have Count Grendel, the bad guy, impossibly evil and prone to say things like "I will have you flogged and don't imagine that I won't!"

Baddies always seem to be Counts in this sort of thing, don't they? I suppose that's because no such rank exists in the English aristocratic system. Bram Stoker has a good deal to answer for. Peter Jefferey's Grendel doesn't look entirely unlike Christopher Guests's Count Rugens. Neville Jason doesn't look entirely unlike Cary Elwes, come to that. (This was before the Princess Bride.)

Prince Reynart is due to be crowned King; and Grendel is planning to murder him on the way to the coronation. But the good guys have a robot duplicate of Reynart, which they plan to use as a decoy to foil the assassination attempt. The bad guys have an android which looks exactly like Princess Strella, who is second in line to the throne. Grendel is planning to forcibly marry the android. Or force the prince to marry it. Something dastardly, at any rate. Due to a huge and unexplored coincidence, the Princess Strella, and the android Princess Strella, both look exactly like Romana. Mary Tamm only gets one credit, though. [1]

In Episode Four one of Reynart's merry men describes the castle where the coronation will take place as "Tara itself". I suppose there is no particular reason why you shouldn't name a castle after a planet. Equally, there is no reason you might not name a planet after a castle. The British Galactic Empire might decide that Planet Earth is henceforth to be known as Planet Buckingham Palace. Elon Musk might build an opulent dwelling on his space colony and name it Mars Mansion.

But in point of fact, this remark is part of the fossilised remains of an earlier script, in which the Prince was going to have travelled from his home planet to a totally different planet in order to get crowned. The planet he travelled to, Tara, was possibly going to have overtones of Irish Folklore.

Had this plan gone forward, the Prince's original planet would have been called Zend. Or possibly even Zenda. "The Androids of Zenda" was even a working title for the story.  Anthony Hope only died in 1933, so from a copyright point of view, this would have been rather courageous. But no-one has the slightest interest in concealing the tale's source material. When the Doctor hears of the scheme to substitute the robot prince for the original, he says sagely "Well, it's been done before."

*

So: Romana is captured by Count Grendel, the baddie. The Doctor is the unwilling ally of Prince Reynart, the goodie. He is persuaded to repair the Prince's android double, which has been malfunctioning. The plan seems foolproof: all seems ready for the coronation. So everyone (including the Doctor) drinks a toast. There is just that little bit too much emphasis on the quality of the wine.

Sinister music plays. The Prince looks at his wine. He falls unconscious across the table. The Prince's swordsman, Farrah, draws his weapon, and collapses. Swordsman Zadek is clearly not so good at taking theatrical falls, so he slumps unconscious onto a chair. You half expect Percy and Baldrick to run in shouting "Don't drink the wine". (This was before Black Adder.) The Doctor looks very mildly surprised, and cracks a weak joke. ("Potent stuff".)

And then we see Grendel standing in the doorway.

I was about to type "This is genuinely dramatic" or "This is a good twist", but neither of those things would be quite true. It's cheesy, melodramatic, and predictable. But we've swiftly moved from laughing at the theatricality of the poisoning -- and smugly nodding along with the Doctor when he takes the rise out of it -- to laughing with the scene: because the arrival of Grendel is so obviously and exactly the precise thing that we would expect to happen at this point in a story of this kind. On one level, his arrival has derailed the plot, as all good cliffhangers should. The question is no longer "How do the goodies get the Prince to his coronation in safety?" It is now "How do the goodies stage a coronation with no Prince?" But on another, it has directed the plot in precisely the direction it was always bound to go in. Reynart is now the The Prisoner of Tara; and the good guys are going to try and get his double crowned king.

[1] Of all the planets in all the universe, the fourth segment just happened to be hidden on the one which had an exact likeness of Romana living on it. Perhaps Romana was recruited for precisely that reason? Interestingly, at the beginning of next season, Romana is going to casually regenerate into the form of another Princess, Princess Astra of Atrios. Did the White Guardian, in fact, ask her to wear Strella's body for the duration of the mission, and allow her to choose another one when it was over?

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

Deadpool vs Wolverine

First X-Men movie; first modern superhero movie; first summer of the second millennium. Our mutated heroes go into action in smart shiny leather uniforms. Logan the cool tough one with claws demurs; and Cyclops, the strait laced one says "Would you prefer yellow spandex?"

Wind forward a quarter of a century. 

My life flashes before me like Huge Ackman's showreel over the closing credits. Seven years old: Grandad brought me a Spider-Man comic and no-one in the world knew who Spider-Man was. Eleven years old: Nicholas Hammond is on the TV and Don McClean and Peter Glaze are making jokes about the Incredible Hulk. Twenty three years old: Watchmen and Dark Knight: zap kapow comics aren't just for kids any more. Early middle age: SIR Patrick Stewart and SIR Ian McKellen are openly treating mutants as a metaphor for Dr Martin Luther King. Samuel L Jackson pops up at the end of a Hulk movie and births the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardian's actual proper grown up movie critic compares Avengers: Endgame with Sophocles. And suddenly I'm sitting in a movie house full of old people watching a movie entirely made up of comic book in-jokes. Comic book in-jokes and jokes about wanking and blow jobs. Comic book in-jokes, jokes about wanking and blow jobs and incredibly over the top violence. And Wolverine actually is wearing yellow Spandex.

How could you do this? How could you take a story which is of such very deep importance to millions and millions of people and use it as a vehicle for fifth rate undergraduate humour?

No, I'm sorry. That was Malcolm Muggeridge talking about Life of Brian.

Think of it: through the golden years of Marvel Comics, the whole Stan and Steve and Jack era -- there was no such character as Wolverine. Wolverine is from a historical perspective a johnny-come (fnarr-fnarr) lately. But if there had been no Wolverine there would have been no Chris Claremont, and if there had been no Chris Claremont the Marvel universe would have trundled to an end before the 80s were out and the Marvel Cinematic Universe would never have existed.

"This movie acknowledges Len Wein, for the significant contribution he made to the X-Men ."

Well, quite.

I'm truthfully not sure that I can remember who Deadpool originally was. I think I saw the first movie, though not the second one. I think he started life as a perfectly serious second tier X-Men bad guy? (But then Wolverine started life as a perfectly serious second tier Hulk bad guy.) He pretty rapidly became a meta fourth-wall breaking har-har stop it you're killing me spoof character. The most recent graphic novel has him invading the cover of a Classics Illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer.

Yeah, meta-textuality and deconstruction. Grant Morrison did it very well in Animal Man. Chuck Jones did it in Daffy Duck. John Byrne's She Hulk knew she was in a comic, could comment on the cliches of the genre, an on one occasion, escaped from the baddies by tearing through the page and running across a spread of adverts. She does a similar trick in the TV show, getting out of the episode and running through the Disney+ menu screen. Deadpool's whole existence is a commentary on Deadpool. No scene passes without him pointing out that someone is doing exposition or that such-and-such an object is a McGuffin and that the people being killed are only extras. When he does, finally, fight Wolverine, he not only tells us that this is the scene we bought our tickets to see, but that "nerds will be getting out their special sock".

Did you get that, guys? You bought a ticket for the movie and the main character just called you a wanker. Except, obviously, he meant present company accepted: it's everyone else in the cinema apart from you who is going to enjoy the big fight scene in exactly the wrong way.

A lot of Radio 4 sketch comedy writers have a fallback gag in which characters in some TV show comment explicitly on the conventions of the genre that they are in. You know the kind of thing. "I'm going to drink half a bottle of whisky before the big match, because this is a sports movie and I'm the one with inner demons." It can be perfectly funny. I am fond of John Finnemore's cynical hard bitten won't play by the rules store detective trying to work out who stole the jaffa cakes from the biscuit aisle. The famous Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies?" skit is a smarter take on the same joke. But it's a bit obvious. Even a bit cynical.

Deadpool vs Wolverine is just an incredibly cynical piece of film making. Which is not to say that it isn't funny: it is funny, very funny indeed in places. And I'm not saying that it isn't entertaining: it's lively and inventive and I was never bored, although, like many superhero movies, a certain desperation sets in when the last plot thread is tied off and you realise there is still forty minutes to go. The action sequences in serious action movies have become so unreal and  so over the top that parodying them or exaggerating them seems gratuitous; but the fight scenes in Deadpool vs Wolverine (and there is hardly anything but fight scenes) are kinetic and exhilarating and ludicrous and very, very, very, violent. Deadpool and Wolverine are both indestructible, and spend much of the movie sticking claws and katanas into each others face, arse, and groin with very little ill-effect. It's graphic enough to merit a 15 cert but honestly feels more like a Road Runner cartoon than a video nasty. I remember when you couldn't legally buy the Lone Wolf and Cub movie in this country because of all the tomato ketchup.

I kept thinking of Kick Ass, in which the violence made you wince and an eight year old girl said "cunt" and which still ended up feeling like a joyous love-letter to comic books.

The meta-in-jokes are very meta, very in-, very clever and very, very funny. We get a forced perspective Huge Ackman, because at one point Wolverine was said to be very short; we get a drunk Wolverine going by the name of Patch, because in the 1980s mini-series he used that identity; we get a Wolverine standing in front of a graffiti strewn post-apocalyptic wall because Days of Future Past. (We get jokes about Huge Ackman's singing career.)  After about ten minutes it all becomes a bit relentless and over-whelming and exhausting. Like being beaten not unpleasurably over the head with the Complete Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

In the 50s and 60s there was an academic thing called New Criticism which said that you had to look at the actual texts of poems and plays, and talk about the actual words on the page and damn what the author might have meant by them. Damn, indeed, the whole concept of the author and the whole concept of a world outside the book. I have often thought that modern science fiction franchises could provide a test case for this kind of thinking. Is Ahsoka intelligible if you have never seen a Star Wars cartoon? Is the Acolyte intelligible if you didn't know there was such a thing as Star Wars? It is probably feasible to watch a cowboys in space TV show and tacitly say things like "This is obviously a good guy, who has presumably had previous adventures which I don't know about; and the guy with the black cloak is obviously a bad guy who she's encountered in the past." You probably don't miss too much watching in that spirit. You might miss some nuances if you didn't know who Anakin was. But I must admit that I have sometimes been put off watching new episodes of Marvel TV shows (I am looking at you, Secret Invasion) because I have lost track of who everyone is and don't have time to put in the necessary homework. 

Do you need to know who Gambit is to understand the scene with Gambit in it? Probably not: he's introduced as a French superhero with magic playing cards, and  that's really the only thing you need to know about him. For the purposes of the scene she appears in, Elektra is a tough martial arts lady with not enough clothes on; you don't specially need to know that she's Daredevil's lover and a key player in ninja politics and once recovered from her death. Although for those of us who were traumatised by Daredevil #181, the reduction of Elektra to a tough martial arts lady seems a bit of a shame. A bald telepathic lady bad guy turns out to be related to a bald telepathic male good guy. Probably the scene loses some of its sting if you're reaction is "Who is this Charles Xavier of which you speak?" But you can deduce from internal evidence that Wolverine had a very close relationship with the baddies brother and feels he let him down, which is strictly speaking all you need to know. (Did Prof X have an evil twin in any of the comics? I know he had an evil step-brother who smashes through walls a lot. It may not matter.) A huge punch line depends on the fact that we, and therefore Deadpool, assume that a certain famous actor is cameoing in a particular role which he is very strongly associated with; but turns out to be playing a different role he is associated with much less strongly. If you don't know, you don't know. But then if you don't know you probably don't know you don't know. He swears a lot and dies in a particularly horrible way.

I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea of a cool psychotic mercenary with a soft interior, and I absolutely grant that that's the whole point of the movie. It's not like "charming bastard" is a particularly new idea. James Bond was a charming bastard; so was Han Solo. So is Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy and so is the Chris Pine character in the much-better-than-it-ought-to-have-been Dungeons & Dragons movie. (Peter Quill's name literally and intentionally means "prick".) I preferred D&D: it is quite clear that Edgin is a good guy pretending to be a cynic; where there is a suspicion that we are supposed to think Star Lord is cool because he is an immoral psychopath. Deadpool is vulgar and psychotic and cynical but he likes kids and puppies and sacrifices himself to save the universe. (SPOILER: He gets better.) But he kills a lot of people a long the way. A lot. I bet there is a trivia page where someone has worked out the body-count.

The movie insulates itself against criticism. It's in terrible, offensively poor taste: but it's supposed to be. It's cynical and amoral and undercuts the whole genre it's celebrating -- but it's supposed to be. To complain about it is to reveal yourself as a humourless old such-and-such. The opening scene -- in which Deadpool overtly asks if the film is going to respect the memory of Logan and proceeds to desecrate his corpse, comprehensively, literally, and in slow motion, is a masterpiece of terrible taste.

Fuck the whole idea of the multiverse. No, that isn't nearly vulgar enough for a Deadpool review. "Give the multi-verse a blow-job up the arse while suffering from an incurable sexually transmitted disease." The many worlds hypothesis has some narrative uses: of course it does. It's fun to jump timelines to universes where Hitler won the war; where all the mutants have been exterminated; or where Superman landed in Weston Super-Mare as opposed to Smallville. And yes, the multiverse has been a convenient way to iron out inconsistencies, to say that those comic books over there are set in Universe A where these comic books over here are set in Universe B and that's why Hyperman's underpants are three different colours. Into the Spider-Verse is the most interesting thing that anyone has ever done with Spider-Man, or indeed, with superheroes more generally. I didn't even hate the Flash, though everyone else seems to have done. 

But oh, how wearisome the thought that all the different versions of Wolverine there have been over the years must of necessity be actually-existing-Wolverines-in-different worlds. How wearyingly obvious the idea of a Time Police patrolling the time lines for inconsistencies as a sort of metaphor for comic book continuity. I know the original thought was "It would be cool if all three cinematic Spiders Man were real, but in different dimensions" but the overall result is remind us that nothing we are currently watching matters, that every death is temporary and can be easily undone. 

And underneath it all, there is an actually quite good superhero yarn; which kind of manages to take itself seriously despite it all. Huge Ackman has the micky extensively taken out of him; but he never takes it out of himself. Wolverine diminishes and goes into a different continuity but remains Wolverine. Some of his Big Character Moments  -- about how this version of the character failed to prevent the deaths of the X-Men, and how he wants to live up to the faith that Prof X put in him -- are actually well done and quite effective. And the climax, in which, for good an adeqaute reasons, our heroes have to mutually sacrifice themselves, has a bonkers epic morality that reminds us why, in a peculiar way, superhero movies still matter. 

A serious epic wrapped in a violent, smutty action movie wrapped in an infinitely prolonged meta-joke? I don't know whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe can ever recover from this. It probably doesn't matter very much if it can't. I actually enjoyed Deadpool vs Wolverine  quite a lot. But oh dear oh dear. If the Dungeons & Dragons community is allowed an Old School Revival, can those of us who still enjoy the funny books hope for a Silver Age Revival? A line of superhero comics and superhero movies that actually, you know, told stories about superheroes? I propose calling ourselves the "Pre Watchmanite Brotherhood."

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