Rants | When More is Less: Introducing 2:1

Some people like to end the year with a reflection on thankfulness; I’m more disposed towards ending it with a rant. Whilst on a personal level I’ve had a great twelve months, the world is in an even more shocking state than it was before. In his recent live show Humanity, Ricky Gervais talks about how in the past couple of years, for the first time in his life, civilisation has started to slip into decline. I agree, and think this is most evident in the sudden outbreak of the 18:9 (2:1) aspect ratio across television. People are so wrapped up in their worries over our failing government and the looming possibility of a no-deal Brexit, 2:1 has insidiously slipped in under the radar, undermining living-room tellies nationwide and ruining countless Christmases - mine chief amongst them.

 



The Star Trek: Discovery Blu-ray, Doctor Who, Click & Collect, The ABC Murders and just about every other major prime-time programme that I’ve watched over the last month has been missing 230,400 live pixels as their producers have embraced the chic new “cinematic” aspect ratio that’s unfriendly to even the newest 4K HDR TVs. It’s a good job my TV screen is 41.7” x 23.5” (a 50-incher when measuring from corner to corner as TV manufacturers obviously do) to start with as its watchable area is reduced to 41.7” x 20.85” with these programmes – that’s 110.5”² of missing picture by my reckoning.

 

What’s most irritating of all though are the long-term implications of this. Even if the next generation of TVs base their screen dimensions on the 2:1 aspect ratio, then legacy 2:1 media is still going to appear both letterboxed and pillarboxed on their displays, as current Blu-ray standards insist upon a 1920 x 1080 frame (3840 x 2160 for UHD) and iTunes downloads (probably Amazon etc too, though I can’t speak to this) adhere to the same conventions. This means that a 2:1 image is locked into its frame between two black bars, and so if it’s ever viewed on a 2:1 screen, then the only way it could fill that screen would be if it were enlarged, resulting in a softer picture. It’d be like it was watching a 2.35:1-letterboxed-in-4:3 VHS movie blown up on an early CRT widescreen telly - unremittingly bloody awful.

  



Apologists for 2:1 argue that there is no cause for concern as most modern TVs allow for custom zooming, giving naysayers like me the option to zoom in on the letterboxed image. Whilst this is true, it does not account for the fact that zooming loses the outer edges of the image - or that it’s a right bloody faff. I have my custom zoom set to automatically blow 2.35:1 movies up to 16:9, losing the edges off the picture but filling up my screen, and I don’t begrudge this one bit as films are made - at least for now - for cinema exhibition, and I can easily flick back and forth between 16:9 and 2.35:1 almost as effortlessly as if I were watching a Christopher Nolan or Michael Bay film (in which case I don’t have to press anything at all to see the aspect ratio shift from scene to scene). However, if I alter this setting to blow a 2:1 Discovery or Who up to 16:9, I’m going to have to tweak my zoom settings every time I watch a movie. Moreover, when zooming in on a movie I’m usually blowing up an incredibly detailed UHD image, and as a result any softening of the picture is imperceptible - at least on a 50” screen situated six feet away from me. But blowing up a 720p BBC iPlayer stream yields an only slightly sharper than DVD picture, which is surely at odds with the lofty ambitions of the producers who’ve adopted 2:1. Even zooming in on the otherwise stunning 1080p Discovery Blu-ray adversely affected the image quality.



And that’s just legacy 2:1 media; 16:9, 2.35:1, 4:3... there is not an old programme or movie that will fit a 2:1 TV properly. The only way that we’ll get to enjoy properly proportioned, screen-filling entertainment is if we limit our viewing to new material; discard the last vestiges of physical media (which is ironic given my shift back towards it following iTunes’ refusal to allow 4K downloads); and surrender to endless, rolling subscriptions. Maybe that’s the idea.

Even as cynical as I am, though, I do believe that those who’ve adopted the 2:1 frame have done so with the best of intentions. High-end programmes are now utilising some phenomenal anamorphic lenses, such as the Cooke and Angénieux lenses used for the recent season of Doctor Who, and inevitably production teams don’t want to see their painstakingly-framed and often exquisitely beautiful shots cropped for transmission in 16:9. Though I sympathise with such sentiments, I take the firm view that if something is being made primarily for viewing in a certain medium, then its format should be tailored to that medium. Those looking to paint pictures on wider canvases should make films for theatrical release instead of subverting TV.

If TV is TV anymore, that is - I am beginning to worry that I’m proceeding from a faulty premise.

Perhaps the real question is, “Are TV programmes made primarily for viewing on TV sets, or the latest generation of 2:1 smartphones?” I know what I’d rather stare at, but I think what I’m really angry about isn’t so much the rise of 2:1 as it is the prospect of, for the first time in my life, being the dinosaur in the room.

The man in the picture (above) looms ever larger.

TV Review | Doctor Who: “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” by Chris Chibnall

Since it returned to our screens in 2005, each season of Doctor Who has ended with a bang. Their often multi-part finales would tie up all the year’s narrative threads, and sometimes more besides, while at the same time finally pitting the Doctor against a big bad whose footprints had covered the preceding eleven or twelve episodes. Each year seemed determined to outdo the last - Daleks? Pah! Daleks vs Cybermen! Daleks vs Cybermen? That’s nowt! Let’s see the Master ruling the world! How’s about a fully-fledged Dalek conquest of present-day Earth with every single modern-era companion on hand and an ersatz regeneration chucked in to captivate the media? Or the return of the Time Lords to the universe? Things had become so thrillingly and preposterously untoppable by the time that Steven Moffat took over as showrunner, he had to reboot the whole damned Whoniverse to be able to start the cycle up again, only this time with even longer-running and more elaborate arcs. Chris Chibnall, however, seems intent on going his own way. But then, that’s hardly surprising from Mr Sunday Night.

Chibnall’s approach is as commendable as it is daring. Before the season began, he promised ten episodes free from the encumbrances of pre-existing monsters and villains, and that’s exactly what he delivered. Instantly accessible wherever you jump on board, Chibnall’s Doctor Who is structured as much like the classic series as it is the new (we really need a decent retronym here; we can’t keep saying “new series” more than thirteen years post-“Rose”). To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter which order you watch these ten episodes in, provided that you start with the first two and end with the last two. It’s a timely and welcome reprieve after ten seasons of bad wolves, impossible girls and diminishing returns.



The price paid for such liberty, though, is the lack of a climactic feel to this closing episode - Chibnall’s model is underwhelming by design. Whilst outwardly “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” ticks many of the necessary boxes for a season-ending script, it does so only barely, even concluding with a wrap-up speech from the Doctor that evokes the Sylvester McCoy voiceover dubbed onto the end of Survival in an attempt to engender the closure that the preceding drama hadn’t. Whilst the stakes are high enough for a season finale here, the threat to Earth feels remote and nebulous. We have guest stars the calibre of Mark Addy and Phyllis Logan, but despite expectedly marvellous performances from them, there is little that is noteworthy about Addy’s gruff space captain, and Logan’s Ux is merely a new spin on rather a tired old sci-fi trope.



Most disappointing of all though is the season’s bookending villain, Tzim-Sha (“Tim Shaw” to you and me), the Hirogen Stenza hunter. Chibnall clearly flourishes telling stories about people, not monsters, and so naturally the new Doctor’s first big bad had to be an individual rather than a group or even an entire species. The trouble is that Tzim-Sha is by no means as well-drawn or alluring as any member of Team: TARDIS. As a monster of the week, he’s perfectly adequate, comfortable in the company of Sycorax and Atraxi, but as the chief antagonist for Jodie Whittaker’s dazzling Doctor, he’s a washout. Even (much) older and sporting a Darth Vader-like iron lung (at least when it suits the drama), embittered old Tim’s only real ‘virtue’ is his history with Graham, which allows Bradley Walsh to deliver one final, emotional performance to complete his character’s poignant and rousing arc.

It’s here that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” delivers.



Perhaps more successfully than any other in the history of the show, even the unforgettable 1963/64 run that kick-started it all, this season has introduced us to a TARDIS full of folk that it’s difficult not to care deeply about. The Doctor’s three friends are all down-to-Earth, relatable sorts, yet each is distinct with his or her own clear story arcs – arcs that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” concludes rather beautifully. For the bereaved boys, events come full circle, forcing Graham down a path that Ryan won’t follow him down. Their thread of plot feels tense, volatile and thoroughly rewarding, delivering the sort of punchline that only Doctor Who really can. It’s just as delightful to see Mandip Gill's PC Khan complete her transformation from Judy Hopps to poised interstellar adventurer, particularly as her development has largely mirrored the new Doctor’s. The self-assurance that seems to have eluded the titular Time Lord’s first female incarnation until very recently is now manifest; it’s as if, like Yaz, she’s finally learned to trust in herself and her judgements. Or maybe it’s just that I have, and I’m just projecting. Either way, it works magnificently for me.

 

That being said, Thirteen still lacks the gravitas of most of the male Doctors, particularly Sylvester McCoy and those that we’ve been blessed with since 2005. If we haven't seen it by now, I doubt that we’re going to - she is who she is. This isn’t automatically a bad thing; just another distinction to set her apart from her predecessors and further the reinvigoration of the series. Quite ironically, given his comments about the Doctor’s sex change, Whittaker’s Doctor seems to be most similar in nature to Peter Davison’s fifth Doctor, who survived his misadventures on “feckless charm” and wit as opposed to the fire and steel of later iterations.



Even so, I was hoping, even sort of expecting, that by this point I would have fully accepted the notion of the sex-changing Time Lord, but the reality is that my once-trenchant views have simply become... less so. The only real difference between my opinions today and those I held three months ago is that now, being quite taken with Thirteen, I want to like the idea. (Quite literally) nine times out of ten, the Doctor’s change of gender hasn’t affected my enjoyment of the programme at all; Whittaker’s been so very extraordinary that, while watching, my mind has seldom had the chance to wander onto the issue. The sting only comes when I revisit an earlier Doctor, as I’m currently doing with my David Tennant-mad eldest daughter, and the analytical fanboy in me can’t reconcile his long-held belief that the Doctor has always been the same man with the reality that ‘a Doctor Who’ can be whatever the BBC decide they need it to be depending on the politics of the moment. Time Lords, especially the Doctor, changing their sex just doesn’t concur with everything that I’d always understood about them. Yes, the Doctor was never a Hollywood dick-swinging character, but as my current revisitations are reminding me, he loved Rose. He got himself a wife. Once upon a time he even had a family. As a bloke, you could put yourself in his Converse. Now, you have to try bloody hard to stop yourself falling in love with your brilliant idol suddenly rendered woman. All I can do is try not to ruminate on it, because when I’m watching the show, I’m enjoying it so much that the issue scarcely enters my head. And, ultimately, that’s the only time that it would ever matter.

“It doesn’t fit my rule...”



And so Doctor Who’s finest season since Matt Smith’s first, if not David Tennant’s last, ends on an emotionally rewarding but somewhat subdued note, with an episode that, for better or worse, encapsulates all of the season’s pros and cons. This season’s few low points may have been excruciating, but most of its misses have been near ones, and audacious ones at that, and its high points stand up against even the most respected stories in the show’s fifty-five-year canon. “Rosa”, “Demons of the Punjab” and “Kerblam!” could hold their own against any story that you could pluck from the golden eras of Russell T Davies; Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks; even the unassailable Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. As the new Doctor might say, I really like it.



Sadly the series’ traditional Christmas special will now follow Saturday nights, pre-title sequences and 230,400 pixels into the abyss. Particularly with no new Star Wars movie to fall back on, it’ll be lonely this Christmas, though with a title like “Resolution”, there is every chance that the series’ first New Year’s Day special since The End of Time might just provide us with the fireworks that “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” was missing...

Doctor Who will return to BBC One for a one-off special on 1st January 2019. This episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 155 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.

TV Review | Doctor Who: “It Takes You Away” by Ed Hime

Ed Hime’s first script for Doctor Who has managed to do something that only a few episodes in a thousand have ever managed to: divide opinion... within me. “It Takes You Away” is spooky, surreal and unsettling - yet at times laugh-out-loud funny. Silly and sinister, difficult to grade or quantify, this one is very much this season’s “Midnight”.

Beautifully shot by veteran series director Jamie Childs, the episode’s picturesque Norwegian setting continues this year’s trend of (quite literally) breaking new ground for the show, the isolated Scandinavian cabin joining the likes of Sheffield high rises and the freshly-forged India/Pakistan border on Chris Chibnall’s long list of fresh locales. But the location here is every bit as haunting as it is beautiful, even in the bright light of day which, if anything, only seems to add to the crippling tension. This story’s “monster” doesn’t need to wait for darkness to fall to take you away.



Similar could be said of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, who, for the first time in her reign, seems to completely own the situation from the outset. Indeed, her command of proceedings here is comparable to her four immediate predecessors’ default settings, as it were, which is especially important after last week’s much meeker interpretation. Hime has her acting quickly and decisively, even unravelling the mystery of - and agreeing terms with - the Solitract despite hardly breaking a sweat.

 

“It Takes You Away” is marked by some particularly arresting performances, young guest star Eleanor Wallwork’s chief amongst them. Apparently abandoned by her father to the mercies of a ravenous monster, the blind teenage character is brought to life with striking realism by Wallwork. An already well-written part is knocked out of the park as her initial terror recedes and her grief-fuelled teenage angst and misplaced aggression come to the fore. Tosin Cole deserves a lot of credit too for being such a great foil to her - “It Takes You Away” might be Ryan’s strongest outing yet, casting him in a pseudo-paternal role that achieves everything “The Tsuranga Conundrum” so spectacularly failed to.

 

Inevitably, though, a story built on remorse was always going dominated by Bradley Walsh's recently bereaved Graham. The temptation that he faces here might be the only thing in the episode not to smack of originality, but it’s undoubtedly its emotional high point, and its coda with Ryan would not have been out of place in next week’s finale, such is its resonance. Walsh is, once more, exceptional.

 

Flesh-eating moths, echoes of monsters, a woolly rebellion and a lonely and sentient universe in exile - “It Takes You Away” certainly delivers on the promise of its title, whisking its viewers away to an Anti-Zone where any conventions of tone or consistency are forsaken in favour of a high-concept antagonist, an antagonising protagonist and humour so silly that it makes farting Raxacoricofallapatorian seem high-brow.

The new series of Doctor Who airs on Sunday nights on BBC One and this episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 154 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.

Graphic Novel Review | Star Wars: Darth Vader - Dark Lord of the Sith #1 - #6 by Charles Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli

I’ve recently reconnected with a very old friend who’s keen to extol the merits of Marvel comics despite my mounting obsession with the DC Universe. I think he expected me to take up him up on his kind offer to loan me some of the much-loved X-Men titles gathering dust in his garage, but instead, to what I’m sure is a mix of both indignation and intrigue on his part, I’ve started down a very different path with Marvel, picking up the first volume of Charles Soule’s (Daredevil, The Death of Wolverine) highly-regarded Star Wars: Darth Vader - Dark Lord of the Sith strip which collects together the first six issues of the run (all six instalments of “The Chosen One”), under the – potentially confusing – umbrella title Imperial Machine.

Soule’s Dark Lord of the Sith series is very much in the public eye presently, given the upcoming release of its potentially contentious final issue on 19th December. Not to be confused with Kieron Gillen’s earlier run, which takes place after Soule’s series in the new Disney canon, Dark Lord of the Sith actually begins before Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith has even concluded, with (at least) this opening six-issue story taking place between the often-lambasted, “Noooooooo!” Vader wake-up scene and the Sith apprentice’s more composed, more imperious, presence on the bridge of a Star Destroyer alongside Palpatine and Tarkin nearer the end. It’s a critical chapter in the story of the Dark Lord, and as such, one that’s been told before, most notably in James Luceno’s frustrating but insightful 2005 novel, Dark Lord – The Rise of Darth Vader, which “The Chosen One”, and no doubt Soule’s subsequent stories in the series, will now overwrite.

Despite both stories sharing the same goal, and even walking a very similar path, “The Chosen One” succeeds in almost every area that Dark Lord failed – but unfortunately the reverse is also true. In Luceno’s book, the eponymous Sith Lord is absent from the narrative for great swathes of the action, but when he does appear we are privy to every aspect of his inner turmoil and physical agony. Luceno devotes considerable chunks of prose to Vader’s gradual acceptance of his mechanical limbs and life-support suit; he even delves into the Dark Lord’s built-in colostomy bags and details the daily, painful skin-scrapings that he must endure. Yet Luceno’s novel lacks anything even approaching shock or spectacle – something that “The Chosen One” delivers relentlessly. It does so, however, at the expense of finesse, and so at times it proves to be just as maddening a read as Luceno’s Dark Lord.

Buoyed by the jaw-dropping, cinematic artwork of Giuseppe Camuncoli (Hellblazer, The Amazing Spider-Man), “The Chosen One” proves instantly irresistible. Its receding opening crawl effortlessly sucks the reader back into that galaxy far, far away where they see a recognisable scene playing out... with a twist. Here, on that stormy Coruscant night in Palpatine’s medical tower, Vader doesn’t limit his wrath to medical bots. As the famous scene continues beyond the film’s curtain-close transition, he uses the Force to throw his master right out of the panel – an act that would surely have earned any other man an on-the-spot death sentence. Darth Sidious strikes back, of course, and in so doing makes his apprentice’s first assignment all the more pressing: the construction of a Sith lightsaber. Vader must carry out his mission alone, and without a ship. He’ll have to take on Imperial Forces, and he’ll have to find a living Jedi whose lightsaber’s crystal he’ll need to “make bleed”. And he’ll have to do it all whilst acclimatising to a suit that’s seemingly unable to tackle rough terrain without one of its legs breaking off.

It’s an arresting, urgent start to the story; one that puts an exciting new spin on the Vader/Sidious relationship whilst expanding upon Sith mythology in a fascinating way. Where it falls down, ironically, is in its breakneck pace – a trait that Dark Lord sorely lacked. Events move so quickly that the reader doesn’t have the chance to process them, never mind Darth Vader himself. In one panel he’s bringing the whole might of the dark side down on his master as he rages against the death of the woman who meant everything to him – the woman that he burnt down the Jedi Order, and indeed the Republic at large, to save – and six panels later he’s chosen life. And that’s not me arbitrarily bludgeoning in a Trainspotting reference just to plug my old Irvine Welsh reviews; he literally, explicitly choses to live without Soule us offering any real clue as to his motives.

The remainder of the story lives and dies in the same vein. Vader’s Jedi hunt is the stuff of many a fan’s fantasy, and the fact that he’s battling Imperial forces with a green lightsaber for half of it only serves to make it all the more illicit and alluring. The trouble is, we don’t know what’s going on in Vader’s head. Even when he has a droid to talk to, his dialogue is purely procedural, and when he has someone to fight, any lines the calibre of, “When I left you, I was but the learner...”, or even the pithy-but-powerful, “Impressive. Most impressive,” are eschewed in favour of utterances like “Hssssssk!” and “Nnnngh!”, which I don’t recall existing in James Earl Jones’ goosebump-raising repertoire.



The key attribute that “The Chosen One” shares with Dark Lord is the notion that Vader is, as you might expect, really rather feeble at this time in his life. The guy’s just been burned alive and lost his remaining three limbs, not to mention the ability to breathe unaided. Even when pit against weaker opponents on paper, he’s hopelessly outmatched, as Luceno explores through prose and Soule and Camuncoli depict pictorially. Both interpretations see Vader gradually develop both his suit and his mastery of it, so that by the stories’ end he is on the cusp of becoming the seemingly invincible enforcer of the first Star Wars trilogy, but there is one key difference in his journey between them: the role played by Emperor Palpatine in his transaction from crippled Jedi traitor to eponymous Imperial machine.

Luceno’s novel depicts Sidious as an almost fatherly figure to Vader, continuing along the Anakin / Palpatine trajectory as if they hadn’t just conquered the galaxy together to perpetuate an evil sect. When Vader looks up at his master through burned, hollow eyes and asks, “Are these the faces of victory?” in Dark Lord, he receives a surprisingly stirring pep talk from his master that could just have easily come out of Yoda’s mouth. In “The Chosen One”, much more logically, Sidious drops this fatherly façade, abusing and belittling his apprentice at every turn. He shocks him with lightening. He maroons him without weapons on a barren world. He scoffs at him as he bathes naked and limbless in a bacta tank, ridiculing his ruin. As such, the progress that Vader makes in “The Chosen One” is all of his own making, and it’s all the more potent for it.

And as Soule and Camuncoli’s assault on the eyeballs reaches its crescendo, it finally offers us a fleeting glimpse into Vader’s fragmented psyche. Having retrieved a kyber crystal from the blade of a Jedi that he’s defeated, Vader pours every ounce of his angst into it in an attempt to make it bleed red. And he fails.

The next thing we see is Vader marching into Emperor Palpatine’s office, green blade in hand, the wreck of his armour revealing an exposed eye gleaming with murderous intent. Within the space of a few spectacular panels, the broken body of Darth Sidious is lying on the ground and Vader is walking away triumphant. When we next see Vader, helmet in hand and prostrate, he’s begging Obi-Wan Kenobi to end him, and if there had been any doubt it’s now crystal clear that the mystical act of bleeding the kyber crystal is forcing Vader to confront the part of Anakin Skywalker that still exists within him. He must either surrender to it or bury the former Jedi’s impulses for good, and of course we all know how that story ends.

Were “The Chosen One” a Doctor Who story, it would probably be labelled ‘fanwank’, because it delivers pretty much everything a fan could possibly want from it, but often at the expense of plot or character. The story’s emphasis on shock eventually becomes jaded, and whilst Vader’s development is not without substance, in the absence of any meaningful dialogue or thought boxes it leaves our tormented protagonist’s motivations largely a mystery. Yet the sheer visceral force of Camuncoli’s artwork, coupled with Soule’s inspired reimagining of the Sidious/Vader relationship, ultimately gives these six issues the edge on the novel that they’ve ousted. Indeed, Star Wars seems innately suited to the comic-book medium, and if this series can demonstrate just a little bit more logic and transparency, I can see how it could have developed into the all-conquering juggernaut that it’s now purported to be.



Star Wars: Darth Vader - Dark Lord of the Sith: Imperial Machine is available to download for £8.49 from the iTunes Store or £7.49 from Amazon’s Kindle Store. A trade paperback is available to order from Amazon for twice the price. Alternatively, Star Wars: Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader is available to download for £4.99 from the iTunes Store and Amazon's Kindle Store. A paperback is available to order from Amazon for £8.39 plus delivery.