The House Next Door

By Todd VanDerWerff

Growing up fundamentalist is a tricky balancing act, as the fundamentalist teenager constantly dances between new and potent urges (to have sex or to rebel against parents) and the way of life he or she has been taught, since childhood, is the one true way to eternal life. Try though the teen might, the dance can only end in one of the two camps. It’s hard to stand in both. Either you give in to temptation and find yourself realizing there’s more in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of, or you give in to temptation and find yourself crippled with guilt, racing back to the comfort of what you have known your whole life. In one of this season of Big Love’s longest-simmering plotlines, Ben Henrickson (Douglas Smith, turning in his finest performance yet) is finally forced to choose between his way of life and his sexual relationship with his girlfriend, Brynn (Sarah Jones). This season of Big Love has been particularly skillful at illuminating the conflicts between creed and self (especially in the case of the Henrickson wives and teens), and the season’s eighth episode, “Kingdom Come,” written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Daniel Attias, turns this overriding theme into a character-specific plotline as Ben struggles to find a way to reconcile both sides of his life.

If Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton, almost scary when angered by his teenagers) has seemed blithely unaware of the way his plural marriage has hurt his first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn, giving her best performance since the season premiere), he’s completely oblivious when it comes to the way this life has affected his teenagers, who are still struggling to find some form of moral purchase in the world. His daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried) has already received a lecture from Barb on why she shouldn’t join a life of polygamy and joined a post-Mormon support group. When she and her boyfriend were threatened by Juniper Creek goon Alby Grant (Matt Ross), she didn’t even bother to report it to Bill, perhaps because the whole incident didn’t strike her as incredibly odd. Ben, meanwhile, has tried and tried to find a way to stop sleeping with Brynn, but it just feels too good. When he goes to his old pastor for guidance, the pastor comes to his house and nearly exposes the whole family (simply from Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) being in the wrong place at the wrong time). From there, Barb and Bill grill their son on why, exactly, the pastor felt they should talk with Ben.

Tearfully, Ben confesses to being a “deviant” and explains the whole situation to his father, who tries to respond with love at first, but later finds that drowned out by anger (even lashing out at Sarah, who knew of Ben and Brynn’s coupling, but didn’t tell anyone). He grounds Ben until further notice and stalks off. But when Ben comes to his parents later, it's to tell them that he has asked Brynn to marry him. When Barb expresses her concerns that he doesn’t know that Brynn is the one, Ben expresses that she is the one for right now. And later he would find another one, and she would be the second wife. And so on and so on.

The looks of horror in Bill and Barb’s eyes come from very different places. Bill can’t believe that Ben has gotten a fundamental precept of the religion he belonged to wrong (as we were informed while Bill was courting that diner waitress, the impulse to take another wife must come from the Holy Spirit and not from a lustful place). And Barb can’t believe that her choice to let Bill take a second wife so many years ago has reverberated out through her children, who now see this as the normal way of things, as the way that life has to order itself. The look on Tripplehorn’s face suggests that this is the first time Barb has ever considered this very natural conclusion her children would jump to (despite her success at warning Sarah away from the polygamist life). But it makes perfect sense for Ben to jump to this conclusion. With no organization to the religion he’s a part of and with no religious leaders to turn to outside of the family, Ben tries to find a way to forge ahead and keep the best of both worlds -- to blend the world and God into something more palatable. After all, mightn’t it seem that a long string of marriages for one man was just a case of that man getting tired of one wife and plucking up another?

Indeed, in this episode, it seems as though Bill is growing tired of his wives. He longs to have a night off every week, as work and his home life are taking their toll on him (his attempts to play both sides of the burgeoning war between Juniper Creek and the Hollis Greene clan are exhausting him). His desire to take a night off touches off a sexual power struggle, the likes of which we haven’t seen since season one. Barb simply refuses to agree to the plan, drawing a line as to which husbandly duties Bill can back out on (as well as a line in the sand at three wives -- insisting that he can’t take another in a scene where all four players get to play off each other heatedly). Margie stands firm with Barb at first, but she’s soon seduced by Bill. The two perform oral sex on each other as Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) looks on in shock. Nicki’s insistence that sex is only for procreation and not recreation later surfaces when Bill tries to perform the same act on her and she flails in anger, hitting him on the head and chastising him (she tells him she prefers it face to face and finds him too far away when he’s down there). This all resolves itself when a wounded Bill turns to Barb for forgiveness at the end of the episode (she agrees to two nights off per month, but he has to spend them with the kids), but the episode continues Barb’s evolution as someone who’s rediscovering a spine she seemed to have misplaced. The whole of season two has allowed us to see the hurt of Barb all over again, and Tripplehorn plays every little moment of hurt as a torrent that threatens to sweep her away.

In the midst of all of this domestic drama, the war between the Creek and the Greenes continued. This plot has dragged down the last two episodes, but it was subdued here, to the point where we didn’t get to see anything actually happen in the war, only the aftereffects as one side or the other called Bill to yell at him for misleading them. (This all changed at episode’s end as a tip from Bill sent the feds after the Greenes, though they had two agents out in the world who were able to shoot Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton).) I haven’t enjoyed this plotline very much, but I liked the way it tied in here as almost an afterthought, especially in the scene where Roman and Bill meet at the diner to discuss strategy, and Roman orders two butterscotch sundaes and two 7-Ups -- a somehow perfectly apropos choice for the character. And I must admit that the shooting of Roman has me intrigued -- the Juniper Creek setting is at its best when it threatens to infect the carefully cultivated suburban life that Bill has built. I’ve pooh-poohed commentors throughout the season who have said that the end of the series will be Bill taking the place of Roman, but they seem to be picking up on something I was missing because between Bill’s promise to his son of building a place where people could live the principle in peace and Roman’s sudden absence from UEB meetings, Bill’s certainly going to have to face that temptation.

But as wrapped up as the episode could become in these sorts of politics, it truly concludes with two beautifully executed and intimately shot scenes, one between Barb and Brynn and the other between Bill and Ben. The Barb and Brynn scene opens with a long shot that slowly pulls out and pans to reveal Barb speaking (to someone we don’t know the identity of at first), delivering a monologue about how hard it was to learn to share Bill and to learn to love Nicki too. Tripplehorn (kept slightly off-center in the frame throughout) offers a taste of weary defeat here, but also seems bent on preserving her family (and perhaps protecting Brynn, who quickly leaves Ben) and holding on to what little she remembers of her life before Nicki.

After Brynn leaves Ben, he sits, sobbing, in the basement. Bill finally finds the gentle love needed for the situation and goes to his son, explaining to him his plan for Weber Gaming. Then, in a rare moment when we get to see a bit of the religious ceremony of the principle, Bill ushers Ben in as a priesthood holder (with all of the responsibility that entails), also taking his son in as his confidante on the Weber Gaming matter. Black also wrote the episode where Margie was baptized into the principle (in season one’s tenth episode), and this episode once again combines the mundanity of every day life with that striving for the holy and the significant. Light trickles in to the ho-hum basement, and Bill and Ben both struggle to find something bigger and better than themselves, human failings be damned.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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By Keith Uhlich

Okay, seriously. What the fuck is going on?

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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

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1. "Tom Snyder, one of a kind": Missed this yesterday in all the brouhaha.

["Before he was encased in that peculiar amber known as the celebrity impersonation -- that is, before he became the late-late-night talk show host whose actual self was subsumed in Dan Aykroyd's famous parody in the early days of "Saturday Night Live" -- Tom Snyder was an L.A. anchorman."]

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2. "De Düva: The Dove": A parody of Bergman, featuring Madeline Kahn. And Rob Humanick reminds us of a time when you could meet Ingmar for a quarter.

["This short film is a parody of some of Ingmar Bergman's best known films, including Wild Strawberries (Smultronstaellet) and The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet). The dialog, seemingly in Swedish, is actually a Swedish-accented fictional language based on English, German, Latin, and Swedish, with most nouns ending in "ska". The principal character, Professor Viktor Sundqvist, 76, is being driven to a lecture at the university, when dove droppings splatter the car's windshield. Detouring at his uncle's old house, his mind wanders back to his youth, when Death came to a family picnic to claim his sister, Inga. Knowing that Death is a gambler, Viktor has Inga challenge Death to a single-point game of badminton for her life."]

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3. "Police attack gangs with Bach, Beethoven": The original gangstas.

["City authorities, fed up with gang activity in public places, are taking Bach their bus stop."]

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4. "Colossal Youth": Fernando F. Croce reviews Pedro Costa's film for Slant Magazine.

["Walking into Colossal Youth without any knowledge of Pedro Costa's work feels akin to watching The Mirror without having ever seen a Tarkovsky film; in both cases, there's the shock of an augustly personal, even private style that would have been impenetrable if not for the piercingly fierce emotions that pull the viewer into them."]

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5. "Brendon to ‘Online Film Community’: “Seriously, dudes?”": Brendon Bouzard reacts to the Online Film Community's Top 100 Movies list. Also Edward Copeland.

["Let’s stir up some shit."]

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Clip of the Day: Psycho Waldo (danke Jim Emerson)


Wheres Waldo? - Watch more free videos
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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By Keith Uhlich

That was most certainly the voice of the Creator taunting the fragile Barry Cunningham in the dilapidated barroom of the Snug Harbor Motel. Figures that Barry’s momentary epiphany about his surroundings (which he parallels to a catbird seat anecdote about Daniel Frohman's Lyceum Theatre) would be so suddenly quashed by a sentiment from the void. Milch gives voice to the fears that hinder us all – there’s a touch of the misanthrope in how his characters come off as puppets constantly in service to an unfathomable Divinity, but he likewise recognizes that, every now and again, we are capable of breaking through the programming, becoming, even if only for a moment, our tried and true selves.

Based on episodes seven and eight of John From Cincinnati (entitled, respectively, “His Visit: Day Six” and “His Visit: Day Seven”), I’d posit that the characters who most often transcend their hardwired natures are Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) and Palaka (Paul Ben Victor), the former by celestial (and hormonal) default, the latter by naïve virtue. More and more apparent that Shaun is some kind of divine instrument, born of a porn star Magdalene (Chandra West’s Tina Blake) and set for some purportedly greater purpose outside the border town boundaries of Imperial Beach. “Shaun will soon be gone,” is the echoing refrain, courtesy John Monad (Austin Nichols), through these two episodes, though it’s impossible to get a clear read on his declaration: is it a warning or merely an irreversible statement of fact?

When John’s proclamation becomes a matter of public record, via a video message sent to Butchie Yost’s (Brian Van Holt) “hairlip” webmaster Dwayne (Matt Maher), numerous characters scramble to-and-fro, attempting to head off this perceived threat at the proverbial pass. The results aren’t pretty: tensions rise, accusations fly, misunderstandings abound – imagine a Pirandello play populated almost entirely by freshly beheaded chickens. John even stages a miracle for the benefit of shell-shocked former policeman Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill), as well as an off-screen one for Hawaii-based drug dealer Steady Freddy Lopez (Dayton Callie), that only confuses this Neanderthal odd couple more. In the absence of answers and awareness, which can never be forced, they accept their role as protective muscle. “Whatever the fuck he [John] is, he’s got to come through both of us,” says Freddy.

For Shaun, the stir of activity surrounding him takes something of a toll, though, ever the adolescent, his emotions are raw and amorphous. “I wish Zippy hadn’t kissed me,” he says of Bill’s curative avian companion before breaking into tears. Bill comforts him, casting a scowl up towards the spiral staircase that serves as a constant reminder of his deceased wife Lois. In this moment, Bill’s refrain from the series pilot comes to mind: “When you’re older you’ll understand.” This is exactly the situation he wanted to prevent – to his eyes, Shaun is not ready to experience adulthood’s twin pains of responsibility and regret. But the elder characters on John From Cincinnati tend to be prisoners of their own perspectives, and so when Shaun later lays a confidently benedictive hand on his father Butchie, Milch and his editors insert a cutaway to Bill, shaken, nervous, and uncertain. Age does not necessarily beget wisdom.

But it does increase one’s sense of foreboding. By the end of episode eight, the momentary threat of Shaun’s disappearance has dissipated, yet members of both his immediate and surrogate family gather round him like hawks, waiting for an outcome they must subconsciously recognize to be inevitable. One particularly intriguing scene sees Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay), Shaun’s live-wire grandmother, sign his sponsorship over to Stinkweed surfwear CEO Linc Stark (Luke Perry), a Faustian culmination of two episodes' worth of corporate machinations that have seen Linc ousted from his own company, and Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt) prepped for some sacrificial lamb treatment at the hands of his former employers. “Lawyers together. Can’t be good,” says Ramon Gaviota (Luis Guzman) of the meeting between hospital liability attorney Mark Lewinsky (Stephen Tobolowsky) and ambulance chaser Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), their business tellingly transacted in the Snug Harbor Motel’s much-feared Room 24. There’s room within both these storylines for caricatures (between this and Deadwood, Tobolowsky is now the go-to performer for obsequious notaries) and shades of grey (one step outside their devilish professions, and both Dickstein and Stark reveal all-too-human concerns).

Milch rightly questions corporate structures, but he never loses sight of the people inhabiting them, and this essential humanism extends to all his characters, even to a fumbling second banana like Palaka. The trials and tribulations of Steady Freddy’s (broken) right-hand man take precedence in John From Cincinnati’s seventh episode, as he becomes the unwitting victim of a tattooing gone wrong. It threatens to be a tangential comic aside stretched to the breaking point, but Milch is after something more. In Shakespearean terms, Palaka is the clown, the character everyone else either abuses or ignores. Yet this seemingly lower-class station has its advantages, as humor is perhaps the greatest guise with which to force introspection and revelation, if not always of the individual self, then of the numerous currents in the community at large.

The clown rarely accomplishes this consciously. Palaka’s poisoning puts him in a regressive trance state where he mumbles about his mother and confesses, in childlike terms, his love and admiration for Freddy (his tattoo was meant to emulate one of Freddy’s own). Freddy is clearly touched by the sentiment, even though he can barely muster any words of appreciation. And after Palaka makes a full recovery, courtesy Dr. Smith (who takes his patient’s slow ice-bath recovery as an opportunity for pensive monologue), he once again becomes Freddy’s punching bag. Palaka’s importance to the Imperial Beach rogues gallery will never be explicitly stated – he’s background through and through, and he knows it. But the benefit of occupying that space in a Milch narrative is that it you will very likely, and more often than you realize, come to the fore. The image of Palaka at the end of episode eight is one such profound aside. “You keep watch on that boy, boss, and I’ll keep watch on you,” he says from his hidden vantage point as Freddy and Bill camp expectantly outside the Yost residence. Through all these layers of perspective, it’s clear that no one knows what it is, exactly, they’re supposed to be waiting for, though a seemingly harmless, yet all too hypnotic game of juggling (reminiscent of an anticipation-laden Sopranos climax) serves as ample evidence that a reckoning is upon us.
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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications. John From Cincinnati recaps run every Monday for the duration of the series.

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By Keith Uhlich

Well, goddammit.

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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

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1. "Hollywood pigeons to be put on the pill": It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

["Hollywood residents believe they’ve found a humane way to reduce their pigeon population and the messes the birds make: the pill. Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders."]

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2. "Days of Whine and Roses": James Wolcott responds to David Denby's romantic comedy essay from The New Yorker. Do check out the other links he cites.

["Who knew that an essay by David Denby could induce more than groggy nods from readers fortunate enough to make it across the finish line? Yet his New Yorker "Critic at Large" cogitation-lamentation on romantic comedy in the gastrointestinal era of Judd Apatow has incited quite a salon exchange over at Emily Gordon's Emdashes, with Katha Pollitt dropping into the comments section to reiterate her recoil at Seth Grogen and the stunted, grubby man-boyhood of Knocked Up."]

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3. "Shirley Temple: America's Sweetheart Collection, Volume 5": A special Film Freak Central review, by Alex Jackson, from the deck of the good ship Lollipop.

["As you might know, Shirley Temple had been considered for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz but was eventually passed over either because her singing voice was inadequate or because MGM and 20th Century Fox couldn't come up with a satisfactory trade. In an attempt to beat MGM at their own game, Fox bought the rights to playwright Maurice Maeterlinck's "L'Oiseau Bleu" ("The Blue Bird") with an eye on Temple for the lead. Ironically, The Blue Bird became her very first box-office dud and signalled the end of her career as a child actress."]

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4. "Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)": Edward Copeland remembers the bloody Swede.

["What a startling way to wake up in the morning. Just weeks after I wished the great filmmaker good wishes on his 89th birthday, he has lost the figurative chess game with Death. Still, Ingmar Bergman will live on forever with his remarkable body of film work. What worries me is how his stock has fallen over the years and how many younger film buffs have little exposure to his works. Sadly, not one of his many remarkable films made the final 100 on the list put together by The Online Film Community announced yesterday. Hopefully, in my just-waking-up haziness, I can do at least a somewhat reasonable tribute to the Swedish filmmaker."]

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5. "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Catch Us If You Can'": Glenn Kenny on John Boorman's feature debut.

["The downbeat flipside to Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, released less than a year after the Beatles-starring picture, John Boorman’s 1965 Catch Us If You Can (the director’s feature debut) sees the Dave Clark Five—at the time the Beatles’ most formidable rivals in what we in the States called the British Invasion—trying to get away from it all in the dry chill of a British winter."]


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Clip of the Day: Adolf Hitler, heartbreaker (Sims 2 style).


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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Each year sharks attack 50 to 70 people worldwide, killing 5 to 15 of them. That’s bad news for the poor souls who get bitten, but for the rest of us, it means death by Jaws is extremely unlikely. Compare the 300,000 fatalities that result annually from automobile accidents, and the whopping 3.5 million from smoking-related illnesses. Yet the rare violence caused by razor-toothed fish has for 20 years inspired Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, the network’s highest-rated regular programming event—a marathon of mayhem whose offerings have included Great White! Parts One and Two, Sharks of the Red Triangle, Great Shark Hunt, Anatomy of a Shark Bite, Shark Attack Survivors, Perfect Shark and Air Jaws: Sharks of South Africa, which included never-before-aired footage of great whites jumping from the water like Flipper.
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1. "The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer": Michael Joshua Rowin covers the retrospective, Part 1 & Part 2. Also see our Clip of the Day.

["If there's one film in the Mistress & the Muse series that should convince you that Norman Mailer's foray into filmmaking was not in vain, it is Maidstone. Nay, more than that, I'll go so far as to say that Maidstone is an extraordinary film, maybe even a masterpiece, the sort of passion- and ambition-fueled endeavor that through the madness of unguided improvisation arrives at truths movies infinitely more seamless and desperate for importance fail to even touch."]

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2. "Not That There's Anything Wrong with That...": Fernando F. Croce on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Hairspray, and Goya's Ghosts.

[""What you shove up your asses is your business," Dan Aykroyd declares in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and damned if that isn't the most progressive sentiment to come out of a Hollywood film so far this year."]

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3. "Generous ATM dispenses an extra $7,000": You lucky bastards!

["An ATM at a northwest Louisiana truck stop gave out $20 bills instead of $5s, but authorities say they know who used it and plan to purse the extra $7,000 the machine spit out."]

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4. "Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator": Sal Cinquemani better prep for an unannounced visit from Chris Hansen.

["It's kind of like the MTV Beach House, only instead of teenage sluts flashing their tits and muscled-up boys licking whipped cream off girls' stomachs, the house is filled with creeps whose kismet is public humiliation, divorce, and probably some jail time."]

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5. "Whoopi Goldberg joining 'The View'": And Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg as the Hollywood liberal...

["ABC's daytime show "The View" appears close to adding Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd as regular cast members following a year with more plot twists than a soap opera."]


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Clip of the Day: Mailer vs. Torn in Maidstone


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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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1. "Muppet Reunion, with Paul McCartney, in the Works?"

["Sure, they’ve had their share of squabbles over the years. But that hasn’t deterred Kermit and Miss Piggy from rekindling their romance. TV Guide has learned that a digitally enhanced pilot for a new version of The Muppet Show is in the works at Jim Henson Studios. “The show will have the original puppets but they’ll be able to walk around,” says a source close to the project. “It’s going to be like the original variety show, not the cartoons that came out afterwards.”"]

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2. "Report Uncovers Astronauts’ Heavy Alcohol Use": Less filling. Tastes great.

["NASA administrators promised fast action today in response to an internal investigation that said astronauts had flown after drinking heavily on at least two occasions."]

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3. "Tuning in and flipping out": A blast from the past, courtesy our editor-in-chief.

["Something about this war is making TV newspeople think like movie directors. When that happens, it's worth asking why."]

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4. "Suspect in custody after 2 choppers crash covering chase": Anything for the shot...

["Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live television collided and crashed Friday, killing all four people on board in a plunge that viewers saw as a jumble of spinning, broken images."]

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5. "Firing Back": A Newsweek interview.

["He will go down in history as the guy who called the victims of September 11 “little Eichmanns”—a reference to the notorious Nazi bureaucrat who helped ship hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Ward Churchill’s comment, included in a long-forgotten essay dug up by an enterprising journalism student, stirred a national debate about the power of unpopular words—and the proper consequences for those who use them."]


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Clip of the Day:: Mark Malkoff visits every New York Starbucks


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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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by Ross RuedigerSomeday I wanna make a list of celebrities who’ve “admitted” to loving Doctor Who. The Brits on the list wouldn’t be quite as impressive, because in a lot of ways, they’re a given. Last week I met Joel McHale of E’s The Soup and I don’t recall how Who came up, but he immediately confessed rabid adoration for the show – especially the classic series (weird, huh?). He gave me permission to spread it out amongst the world, so that’s what I’m doing. A quick look at Joel’s IMDB page reveals that he’s a mere 6 days younger than me. Maybe we went through the same teenage Who experiences? I wonder if some asshole on the school bus ever grabbed his novelization of "The Five Doctors" and waved it around, threatening to throw it out the window (as high school jock dickheads like to do)? This has nothing to do with "Daleks in Manhattan" -- but the recap needs some padding since it's Part One of Two, and it seemed a more interesting intro than rehashing the finer details of those metallic bastards from Skaro.

“Daleks in Manhattan” -- what a great title! It holds the distinction of being the first new Who story written by a woman, Helen Raynor, yet there isn't anything intrinsically feminine about the goings-on (certainly no more than any other episode). It’s a bang-up intro for a two-parter; nicely paced, sufficiently moody and never too busy. All that said, the title could be a killer for certain viewers. Daleks? Come on…haven’t we seen enough of them? My first reaction was, “Yes”.

The Doctor: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They survive. They always survive, when I lose everything.”

At the close of last season’s “Doomsday”, Dalek Sec disappeared into thin air amongst the madness. Where did he go? 1930 Manhattan it seems, and the other three members of the Cult of Skaro (Caan, Thay & Jast) went with him. The Cult are an ingenious invention as they’re not like other Daleks. They possess the capacity for thought, imagination and reason. It’s a diabolical Dalek development, and perhaps what most excited me about “Manhattan” was the presence of only four phallic symbols; a limited number is dramatically engaging, however a bazillion of ‘em seems too easy. The Cult of Skaro is desperate for Dalek survival. They’ve finally glommed onto the notion that humans are far better survivors -- and perhaps warriors -- than they. (Though what are the human race’s odds without the Doctor’s protection?) I’ve come to be excited by the Daleks through the new series. They’re not like anything you’ll see on any other sci-fi show, which gives them a televisual edge, and this two-parter is their most intriguing outing since “Dalek” back in Season One.

Dalek Sec: “The Cult of Skaro was created by the Emperor for this very purpose: to imagine new ways of survival.”
Dalek Thay: “But we must remain pure!”
Dalek Sec: “No, Dalek Thay. Our purity has brought us to extinction! We must adapt to survive. You have all made sacrifices and now I will sacrifice myself, for the greater cause, for the future of Dalek kind.”

The Daleks’ hatred of humankind manifests itself in the bizarre concept of the Pig Slaves – humans who’ve been genetically manipulated into grotesque animals. It’s easy enough to ask, “But why pigs?” My answer is that it’s one of the most degrading forms the Daleks could foist upon humanity. Again, the Cult possess imagination, and this particularly ugly sidebar of their ultimate scheme demonstrates contempt for the entire operation and an amount of self-loathing at “How far we mighty Daleks have fallen”. They can’t afford to merely exterminate at this point, so they do the next best thing by removing what makes a human a human. Laszlo (Ryan Carnes of "Desperate Housewives" -- which just feels weird to type) is the human caught somewhere in between and his and showgirl Tallulah’s (Miranda Raison) storyline is a tragic nod to The Phantom of the Opera. Indeed, the story pulls from numerous sources including The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and even classic Who’s “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, which is Top Ten material for many a fan. Heck, I’d even argue that a story featuring The Empire State Building owes just a little bit to King Kong.

The production values are mighty fine and the team does an excellent job of recreating a believable 1930s New York on a limited budget and by setting the story in only a handful of locations (most of which are interiors). Central Park’s Hooverville was an inspired choice given that from a location standpoint, it could be recreated in the UK without too much problem -- although, believe it or not, there was some filming done in New York for this story.

The characters are strong here, despite the guest cast mostly being drawn in a broad, stereotypical fashion. Eric Loren’s Mr. Diagoras is probably the most over the top, but that’s exactly the sort of guy the Daleks would choose to do their bidding. It’s unfortunate we don’t get to find out a little bit more of his backstory, but then again, he’s written very much in the classic series’ megalomaniac vein – the powerful, rich human who thinks helping the aliens will get him somewhere. As the episode draws to its peculiar close, Diagoras is absorbed by Sec, and the resulting hybrid could very well elicit a few giggles as might his line of dialogue leading to the cliffhanger sting: “I am a human Dalek. I am your future!”

Having reached a point where little more can be said until next week’s conclusion, I’ll go full circle and point out that Joel McHale’s got a cameo in Spider-Man 2. Could the guy be any cooler?

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Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based critic and columnist, a contributor to The House Next Door, and publisher of The Rued Morgue.

NEXT WEEK: Find out if the weirdest Dalek story ever filmed sinks or swims in “Evolution of the Daleks”.

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “Spearhead from Space” – a story of firsts: The first story televised in color, the first Jon Pertwee story, the first story of the ‘70s, the first appearance of the Autons & the Nestene Consciousness, and the first and only classic Who story shot entirely on film.

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