The cast were fabulous and the story was pretty good (I mean for a horror b-movie). I was hoping it would equal Tremors, which is a little gem of a movie. I couldn’t say it did. James Gunn (the director) displayed a lot of skill and a lot of experience in the way he conducted much of the movie, but for my money he just blew too many of the little signposts and setups along the way. What I’m not sure is whether to blame him for that. I’ll outline a few things I think he bungled – or at least things I didn’t pick up when I first watched it; but whether they would have been obvious to anyone before the movie was finished I don’t know. I hate to argue in favour of test screenings because instinctively I feel that’s a bad path to take. I know several all-time classic movies would never have survived the dumbing down they would have received based on early audience feedback. On the other hand, how else do you spot that half the audience are reading a scene wrong? Here are the things I only realised towards the end of the movie or when I watched again with the commentary playing:

Grant and Starla are in a loveless marriage. He doesn’t really get her. He’s frustrated with her and toying with the idea of being unfaithful. She isn’t attracted to him and finds him a bit of a pig. She should never have married him. Bill Pardy has always been in love with her and he’s a great guy. Since the marriage is an empty shell, if Grant happens to disappear we won’t feel it’s wrong for Starla to end up with Bill. Except that actually it turns out that Grant really, really loves Starla. That fact explains most of the behaviour of the Grant/alien hybrid. Early on we needed a scene – even just a shot – where we realise that Grant truly loves Starla: a look, a gesture. But he pushes her for sex, stomps off to get drunk, goes for a midnight wander with a floozy and only just remembers to stop her kissing him. Where were the clues? I totally didn’t get that Grant really cared for Starla and so I had no understanding of why he has tears in his eyes when they make love. Something to do with him changing? He’s in pain? So more clues there would have got me on the right track much sooner.

Next, as is obvious from the outtakes and commentary, James Gunn has a much more vulgar way of expressing himself than either his actors, or to some extent his characters. Nathan Fillion makes his character a gentleman. Elizabeth Banks’s character, despite being pretty sure of herself, has a corny side (her choice of music) plus she’s a school teacher. The result of that is that some of the later funny lines weren’t as funny as they should have been because I was thinking how out of character the swearing was. Bill Pardy doesn’t seem like he’d say ‘Fuck you!’ as a joke. James Gunn would, but Bill Pardy would wisecrack, not swear. The characters were written and then acted far too sweet for some of the dialogue they either deliver or have directed at them.

Thirdly, and perhaps this is just me being dense, I didn’t know I was supposed to pay attention to who any of the ‘kids’ in school were so I had no idea we’d already seen Kylie before the slugs reach her house. (I put ‘kids’ in quotes because as usual we’re watching a student sitting in class played by an actress who’s twenty-four. She’s not unbelievable, but she’s not really a schoolgirl either.) So earlier, I just thought we were watching Starla teach. Then Kylie’s in the bar later I think and maybe somewhere else too. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but she looked so different in school, to later with her blue nails, to later in the bath that I didn’t realise I’d already been introduced to this character.

So a few miscues and fluffed set-ups there. As far as plot goes, the creature side of it seems pretty satisfactory, but there’s nothing to tie the personalities of the characters to the events. Maybe you don’t need that on a horror movie, but Bill doesn’t really change as a person. Maybe Starla does; she becomes so tough. But she wasn’t particularly looking to get tough early on; she wanted to give in to her more loving side. She was hoping to receive sensitivity, not gore. So she’s actually pushed in the wrong direction, kind of. With Kylie it’s difficult to figure out her journey. Her family have been horribly killed and she’s been tough as hell through it all. She’s learned that she has a very impressive survival mode she can go into when things get tough, but she hasn’t apparently reflected on recent events. Once the adrenaline subsides, after the movie closes, that’s presumably when she draws some lessons from it – and realises that her short-term future is looking very bleak. So, all in all, not much in the way of character development. The story happens, they fight back, and then it’s over.

It might have been nice if maybe the threat of death had been more of a catalyst for Bill and Starla to tell each other how they feel. I mean, you know they’re going to get together, but it’s more a sense of Grant being out of the way than that they’ve professed their mutual love. If you got the impression that they’d never have got it together except for the imminent threat of death then you’ve got something relevant to their personalities coming out of the drama and there’s more of a sense of it being ‘for’ something and not just a bloodbath. Horror stories don’t need to be ‘for’ anything, but I think they’re better to watch if there’s a character dimension too.

I’d also have liked the dialogue to be better. Most of it was unremarkable, besides the half a dozen moments where the humour and the dramatic impact were all about a cool line being spoken. But most of the cool lines seemed inappropriate for the characters saying them. Mayor Macready was an exception: he could rant and swear and it worked. But Bill Pardy would have been funnier with understatement and a twee turn of phrase than with the things he actually said. ‘All this going on and he’s still trying to be polite,’ you’d think – and that would have given those pivotal lines much more of a kick and made us like his character more. Nathan Fillion could watch a man be cut in half and his guts tumble out and then he could say, ‘Well, well’ or ‘That’s… unusual’ in a panicked sort of way and it’s funny. Or he could have sworn and then tipped his hat to the ladies and apologised, that sort of thing. We don’t want to think he’s becoming savage, we want to think he’s just about keeping a grip on it all. So the big lines didn’t really work for me and the background stuff didn’t grab me. In fact a reasonable amount of it was kind of muffled too. Lots of missed opportunities there, I’d say.

All in all, I can’t put my finger on any one reason why I didn’t like it better. I think they might have been better served to push the humour a notch higher and back the gore a notch down: say, cut down the rape scene and the mayor eating someone’s arm, and let Nathan Fillion improv his way to half a dozen of the brilliant comedy quips he’s entirely capable of. Rather than a horror movie with humour, this actually seemed like a damn fine family movie with some rather jarring material added. The director didn’t want to make a comedy but I think he should have relented. If James Gunn had watched Tremors one more time before he’d started shooting I think he might have nailed it.

He follows it up in ‘End of Days’ by saying he’s not listening to any more of Jack’s orders, he doesn’t trust him and he’s not even sure who he is – oh and plus he’d like to do the most dangerous thing he knows how to do, which is open the rift. The next second he’s incredulous that he’s being fired. Where did he work previously? Tell your boss you won’t do anything he says, you mistrust his motives and you want to do something that will probably destroy everything his organisation works for; can you really just expect a written warning?

Yet again, the story gets its dramatic tension entirely from squabbling within the team. I’m telling you, pick any two people off the street and they’d do a better job than the Torchwood team. A couple of schoolkids, a couple of little old ladies: almost any group of people would be better than the current team. The only thing they don’t seem to be is power mad – but I’m sure it’s coming.

It all seems so perverse. When Owen fires up the rift manipulator and lets the Black Death and various other nasties through, against common sense, over the most furious objection of his team-mate and the express instructions apparently drilled into him from day one to leave the rift alone, he gets a telling off from his boss. How does Gwen react to Owen blindly unleashing chaos on the world? She’s annoyed with Jack for dressing Owen down in public. Sure, his recklessness might unleash what many think is the end of the world, but why hurt his feelings? He’s a selfish and unstable psychopath with all the charm of a rattlesnake, but does he rely deserve to be told off in public? If this is Gwen’s gift, her emotional insight, I don’t see the value of it.
The only possible glimmer of hope in all this is that for a split second, after Jack’s resurrection, the team stopped fighting. They even appeared, momentarily, to be open to the idea of working for him instead of against him. I don’t suppose it will last, but it was great that the makers of the show gave us a ten second peek of what the series could have been like if it hadn’t been made as some sort of sci-fi homage to Eastenders. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that’s what the show is trying for: Eastenders with aliens. All that arguing, all those threats, recriminations, illicit couplings, bitter rebukes and punch-ups – it’s Albert Square, if they had the job of saving the planet.

So what’s in store for next year? I have to say, I kind of hope the Doctor (for was it not he who stole Jack away at the end of Ep13?) will move Jack to a new era where he can set up a new team and leave Owen, Tosh and Gwen to drift back to civilian life. I see Gwen working in a chippie, Owen driving a mini-cab (until he ends up in prison) and Tosh working in a call centre. They’ll be happier and the world will be better off. Fingers crossed.

And to comment on Ep 11: Combat. I definitely think I’m hating the show less (not that I can stop watching it either way) but the episodes I’ve enjoyed most so far are ones that have momentarily suspended the bickering and the self-destructive obsessions and told a story with at least some pretence that Torchwood is a team and not just a group of neurotics who hate each other. ‘Combat’ tried to take Owen’s character to the darkest place yet: he was about to let himself be killed. Not really sure what his problem is. Were we supposed to put all this down to Diane from last week? Or does he have another reason to be moody, obnoxious and flakey? Would it really have been so boring, when planning Torchwood, to have gone with a slightly larger team of competent people who loved the experiences they were having – at least 50% of the time. I don’t get why Tosh or Owen stay. They’re miserable and they approach their work with grim joylessness. I don’t want all happy families and holding hands, but how can the Doctor’s companions have so much fun and Torchwood be so bloody miserable and pity-me-won’t-you about it all?

Cap’n Jack desperately needs a new team. Gwen can stay if she sorts herself out but the team needs three or four new interesting characters to replace Owen and Tosh – and to be credible for the job they do, there needs to be another dozen or more team members in support roles. Every week trouble is taken to show that the Torchwood team are incompetent and emotionally unstable. It’s just not as much fun to watch as the BBC imagine.

Commissioning something for Christmas seems to me (who knows nothing about the economics of TV) to be a grand idea. And to make it Christmasy, something with a fantasticial element to it makes sense. So very disappointingly there was the Hogfather as one example of the genre, and the Doctor Who Christmas special as the only other I spotted. My pal Em described the Doctor Who special as ‘adequate’ and I think I’d have to agree. I was delighted it was on, and I tried to like everything about it, but it had a curiously hollow feel without Rose. And I think it was tactical error to temporarily insert an annoying companion in Rose’s place. It was a useful source of comedy, but with the Doctor suddenly on his own and pining, having some selfish, dimwitted troll bellowing demands at him grated a bit. In fact I think it might have grated under any circumstances. It gave her character a place to go to – an eventual intimacy with and acceptance of the Doctor – but it was hard work getting there. I think Caroline Tate should have been told, ‘make it clear that you’re lashing out because you’re feeling vulnerable’ and a few script changes made to match. Then a) she’d have been less annoying and b) there’d have been a lot more resonance with the Doctor’s situation.

On to other things. When I mentioned the high-concept Torchwood episode, Out of Time, I said that few shows could have followed up the initial pitch (‘a plane takes off in 195x and finds itself coming in to land in 2006, to be met by the team’) but Stargate Atlantis could have done it. I haven’t checked into it, but I suspect the Atlantis team took some good people from the SG:1 side of things which has flagged a bit since it got a sister show. If a story seems to have shot its bolt in the opening teaser, and just to be playing out the consequences after that, then SG Atlantis will spring a plot revelation on you in the second act. If they’d written Out of Time, there’d have been a third act climax that retained some of the same emotional crises, but made the cause of their time jump a danger to the world. Or one of the travellers would turn out not to be human – perhaps something living in the rift hopped on board and took possession of one of the travellers. Perhaps they would have hinted at that in act one: a mention of anomalous readings in their bio-scans, leaving you to guess at the cause. Or, since both of those are fairly well worn ideas, there’s a good chance the Stargate Atlantis team would have come up with something even better. I don’t suppose they would have kept the assisted suicide scene, but they’d have put a rocket under the second half of act two.

Finally, I was very disappointed to see that Standoff is in trouble in the States. I discovered this when I was looking for clues as to why Sky One have no more episodes of it in their schedule. Still don’t know the answer to that as there’s still half a dozen left to screen that have already been made – but I’ll be very sad if the show is cancelled. It’s a very daunting premise – to come up with novel hostage crises every week – and not just to fall back on the inherent drama of a ‘standard’ HT situation (if there is such a thing as ‘standard’). At any rate, it seems like a daunting challenge to me. And the point being that they’ve done a nice job in giving each crisis a twist so far. And a good job of tying in the solution to the hostage situation with the inter-relationships of the negotiating team. I can’t see how that can go on for very long, because you can only fix so many relationship problems, but it’s wonderfully tidy and satisfying while it lasts. And I would have expected viewers to be lapping it up Stateside, but apparently they’ve been drifting away in worrying numbers.

There’s definitely something wrong with the business model for making TV shows when anything that’s good enough to appeal to the hard-to-please, non-brain-dead viewer gets cancelled because it’s not pitched squarely enough at the ordinary American and so isn’t bringing in the viewing numbers. There has to be a way to make smart shows on the understanding, going in, that they’ll seem too much like hard work for the largest demographic but attract loyals fans in a smaller niche. I’d have thought advertisers would have been giddy with the thought of separating out people who appreciated smart, deadpan dialogue and a higher level of craftsmanship in the storytelling – after all, wouldn’t they be targeting the over-educated, innovative thinkers in the audience – and aren’t there a lot of very important and rich people in that group? Isn’t it a relative of the unique demographic that the X-Files first attracted? Maybe not.

Update: Just watching the Xmas Doctor Who again. I’m noticing that Catherine Tate rampages through her lines, braying some reasonably good material with such deepthroated, combative yelling that she destroys 90% of the humour. I reckon, delivered by someone with a little flair for comedy, the script might have sparkled. I’m now prepared to believe that she is largely to blame for the flatness of the first 30 minutes of the episode.

Captain Jack (possessed of exactly the same ‘lovable rogue’ energy as that other famous Captain Jack – just without the rum-soaked delivery) was a very winning character in Doctor Who. I’m sure someone has spotted it, but he was Johnny Depp’s swagger in Han Solo’s role. But by the time he arrives at Torchwood he’s somehow a man with a past. (No wonder the scripts make regular jokes about RetCon.) It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good one. Captain Jack is supposed to be the link, the way in, the thread. You knew him in Doctor Who, now here he is in his own show… except that he’s totally changed. He seems to have had at least a hundred years of unpleasant experiences since then, so actually he’s a virtually unrecognisable character who happens to have the mannerisms and the face of his old self. So he’s the central character and yet he’s now an unknown quantity – quite intentionally so. He’s the one we want to follow most closely and who we initially care most about, but we don’t know who he is any more – we don’t even know if we can still trust him.

But maybe that’s OK because there’s a second way in to the series: the old new recruit ploy. If you bring in a newbie you have a chance to explain to them – and hence to the viewer – what’s going on and what it all means. The viewer not only gets their mega-dose of exposition this way, but they have a ready-made character to empathise with. Gwen and the audience are both learning the ropes. The audience see through Gwen’s eyes and it’s a good fit because she’s just as new to it all as the viewer. The downside with that is that the viewer is latching on to someone who can’t yet be the hero. Gwen could have come to the team with impressive skills, she could have used them, but in the interests of making her more of an everyman, she’s actually clueless. Even what she does know – about policework and chasing criminals – is irrelevant: Torchwood don’t follow the rules, they rarely hunt ordinary humans and they don’t prosecute. Any instincts or experience that Gwen can bring to bear is as likely to be counter-productive as it is to help. Find a role for the newbie quickly, before the audience tires of her being adrift – that’s the advice I would give. But the role for Gwen seems to be the conscience of the team – and we’re left wondering whether they really need an infusion of conscience. And if they do, Gwen’s character is hardly in a position to provide it – she’s not especially moral herself. But if Jack, who we last met as a nice guy who can’t help but do the right thing (despite his roguish ways), has lost his moral compass, he’d better find it quickly because he’s the only one who knows what Torchwood is about. And if he hasn’t, if he’s pushing the moral envelope because he knows it’s necessary, then Gwen’s just a bleeting nuisance.

On the one hand, Torchwood has got a lot of conflict (which they equate with good drama) out of this situation – and they’ve got to ‘explore’ various moral dilemmas – but the cost of it is too high. It leaves us lost. Is Jack right, so should Gwen shut up? If Jack is wrong, then why should we root for this immoral organisation and care about any of the other characters? We want to take a side so we can root for someone but they both seem wrong and watching them bicker doesn’t help.

Of course we could set aside the characters and look at the world they live in. The BBC clearly loved the hackneyed old idea of a series about a top secret squad of Cool People With Special Skills who battle behind the scenes to save the world. Men in Black meets CSI. They have gadgets, they have secret knowledge and they have unlimited authority to interfere with the everyday workings of more familiar government organisations. But they’re a luke warm bunch. A doctor – kind of. An earnest woman who dresses a bit too young and who’s quite good with computers. And a smartly-dressed young butler who buys the stationery. The only compelling character was Suzie – who they killed. They really needed her to add some weight to the team, to make it seem solid, and to make up for Jack’s sparse leadership, but she went psycho for poorly understood reasons.

Before I say any more about the characters, I want to mention something that made my heart sink when I first saw it: the Torchmobile. The team have a car that was clearly fantasised into existence by a nineteen-year-old drug-dealer. It’s stupid looking. Though we haven’t heard it yet, I bet it has a really, really loud stereo. It also has the name of the super-secret organisation who own it embossed into the body panels. It’s a black Range Rover with a plastic body kit added to make it look more, erm, what? Memorable? Expensive? Well-wicked? As we learn in the awful, awful, unforgivably awful Countrycide, it’s even pretty easy to steal.

But back to the characters. How best to learn about them? Well good drama as we all know is all about conflict and conflict is all about bickering, so have the characters bicker a lot, picking on a different one each week. Ianto is probably my favourite character, except that he went mad one week and was happy to kill everyone to save his laughably-kinky, murderous sex-robot. Then Toshiko read everyone’s minds, found out that everyone thinks she’s pathetic, acted out a scene from Unbreakable and then went a bit funny for a while too, jeopardising the team she no longer felt loyal to. Owen’s crisis was the most bearable so far: love stopped him being a dick for a few days. Sadly for him – and for the rest of us – Diane, his love interest, couldn’t stay. She could have been a good permanent character. She could have filled Suzie’s shoes in a way that Gwen doesn’t seem able to (despite dozens of references to the contrary).

I find I keep waiting for them to mention that Owen dropped out of med school and never qualified, but so far they keep pretending that he’s a proper doctor. He’s perhaps the least believable doctor on TV. He plainly never studies. He’s not interested in science. He’s lazy and snide. If he’s qualified then it’s a safe bet he was bottom in his year. Cool, eh? But at least he has a big chip on his shoulder to make up for his lack of other positive qualities. Oh wait, that’s a bad thing.

And Gwen’s got a heart. Kind of. Though she’s not especially kind. And you can’t trust her. And her long-suffering boyfriend will either get killed (by something that followed her home from work) or will get his heart broken. Like if he finds out that she’s not faithful. She must realise all this but she doesn’t do anything about it. Perhaps she really doesn’t have a heart.

And no one trusts Jack because you can’t. He’s cruel and mysterious and cryptic and ruthless, though sometimes he smiles and makes a joke. As we’ve learned, pretty much the whole team resent him – and no one knows what to make of him. But that’s OK because it’s not clear he cares about them either. He didn’t spot Suzie going psychotic (or Ianto or Tosh). Not quite the Captain Jack who danced with Rose.

So none of the permanent characters are likable. None of them (except Jack) does much that’s heroic. We can’t tell who is right. And they’re utterly devoid of any scrap of team spirit. They’re loners who stick around because of the power and excitement. We don’t even really know what Torchwood is up to, besides reacting to things and having adventures with confiscated alien artifacts they don’t understand. If they’re all that’s protecting Earth, we’re in so much trouble. They’re not too bright, not too organised and they’re kind of a pushover in a fight. If we were in any doubt that they’re lightweights, Countrycide set about proving that the Torchwood team can barely hold their own against ordinary humans. The baddies in Ep 6 are revealed to be… middle-aged, slightly overweight Welsh farmers. Evil ones, mind you. But how exactly that evil translates into an ability to disarm and capture any member of the team at will without even being seen we never learn. The episode was at some pains to point out that these weren’t supernatural forces at work. Not, it’s possible for an ordinary, out-of-shape, middle-aged human to sneak up behind any member of the Torchwood, steal their gun and knock them out without being noticed first. After seeing that episode I’d say that Torchwood should only confront little kids, just to be on the safe side, but they were beaten by a little girl the previous week (though she needed lots of supernatural help, I’m pleased to say). Countrycide also used the worst slo-mo I’ve seen in a long while. If Torchwood had borrowed the camera that the Planet Earth team used to film Great Whites attacking seals we could have had something. But no, they used the same camera that Blake’s Seven used in their finale shoot-out. To much the same effect. It was a tired old chestnut then; it’s beyond tired now.

Consider. Who in Torchwood do we support? Why do we support them? What’s interesting about hunting aliens and what’s not? What’s believable in a world like that? What feels satisfying? What will kill our connection to the characters? Someone should answer these questions and apply what they learn to the show. Even when they get some of these things right, the show is often sloppy about it’s pivotal moments: the shifts in tone and direction are often a struggle to follow and the pacing can be erratic. There are plenty of people working for the BBC who can bring clarity to a story, but they’re not on the Torchwood team. Torchwood reeks of inexperience. One positive sign of this is evidence that the second half-dozen episodes are looking better than the first.

Greeks Bearing Gifts was the first episode that I’d say was ‘OK-ish’ rather than just ‘Bad’, or even ‘Awful’. If it hadn’t continued the counter-productive undermining of the team’s cohesiveness and inter-relationships, I might have thought it was worth a ‘Not Bad’ rating. They Keep Killing Suzie was better still, but when it was revealed that Suzie had supposedly planned it all many months ago I couldn’t help but be momentarily disgusted with that insult to the intelligence. Sure, plan a way to come back from the dead. It’s a cool idea. But then why kill yourself? Why not skip the whole resurrection plot and just, you know, not shoot yourself in the head. It’s what the rest of humanity does on a daily basis.

Random Shoes was like an episode from a different series. It was closest to Love & Monsters, the Rose and Doctor episode, which Rose and the Doctor aren’t really in. Paul Chequer’s character and voice-over seemed very reminiscent of Marc Warren’s. But it wasn’t bad. It was too homely for Torchwood. It didn’t even need to be supernatural – it could have been an episode of Cold Case or CSI (just leave Eugene himself out of the scenes). And I was pleased to see that Gwen was finally behaving in a way we could respect. Russell Davies plainly thinks she’s the heart of the show, but doesn’t give her the necessary credentials. Here she begins to earn that role. She’s an understated hero, who does what’s right, without going over the top. At long last, it’s a good start.

Out of Time was good too. Not amazing, but good. It was clearly a high-concept pitch: a plane that took off in 1953 lands in 2006. Nice idea. But that only gets you as far as the opening credits. If they could have come up with a little more plot to go along with the character piece it turned into, we could have had a little adventure, but it’s very difficult to follow up on a cool opening idea. And you don’t want to undermine the importance of the emotional journey. But it would have been nice if they could have found a way to end it which didn’t require all three characters to simply leave. But then Jack holding the hand of a man as he kills himself was damn close to touching. You might even call his behaviour heroic. Finally. And, as I said earlier, love largely stopped Owen behaving like a dick for a while. You have to be pleased about that. (Though for a grumpy smartarse with a face like a frog, he does awfully well with the women.) But overall, if they can push the series in this direction for a few more episodes, it might begin to erase the bad taste of eps 1-6. I have my fingers crossed.

More on this series at the end of the season.

The Hogfather is a difficult one because even as I sat watching I was trying to work out what they were doing wrong – and they were definitely doing something wrong – but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That’s actually the first clue right there, though: I was supposed to be absorbed and instead my mind was wandering and I was trying to find the mistakes. Normally I have to look back on something I’ve seen to understand the way it worked, but The Hogfather had acres of breathing space in which the viewer could reflect and review, before the story took another step forwards. Somehow a good story with good actors became a disappointing and dull muddle. I’m going to go back over Vadim Jean’s approach and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem, at least to my own satisfaction.

One theory I’ve got is that hacking it down from 172 minutes to somewhere in the 100-120 min. range might have helped. Certainly long periods of time pass in which nothing becomes clearer and none of the characters appear to move closer to their goals. But then it’s difficult to be sure, because the goals of each of the three main characters remain opaque almost to the end. Susan has some unspecified problem with her Grandfather (Death) and wishes to have nothing to do with him, but she changes her mind. Is her big problem just the desire to be normal which she mentions? Only she’s not exactly normal when we meet her: stand-offish, forceful (in a fetching way) and spending as much time battling supernatural creatures as caring for children. So why she does she change her mind about avoiding her Grandfather’s world? And what’s motivating her from then on? It’s unclear. It might be curiosity, but then for a curious person, the world Death inhabits should always have fascinated her, so why was she initially so reluctant? Her powers, too, remain undefined. She’s not exactly human, but what else – besides walking through walls and being able to stop time (but only when it’s of no help to her) – she might be capable of we never learn. She’s certainly got slower reactions than Teatime despite what you might have imagined was a bit of an advantage: her occasional ability to control the flow of time.

Death too is a difficult character to follow. We gradually learn that he’s rather a nice guy, but I don’t know what’s driving him most of the time. He’s covering for the Hogfather, but the circumstances are difficult to follow. The Hogfather disappears well before Teatime’s plan gets anywhere near fruition; why is that? Someone broke his hourglass early on and by the end I’d concluded that Death must have done it – but why? And what effect did it have? Or did it break on its own for some reason? I assumed at first that it was either the Auditors or Teatime who broke it, but by the end there was no mention of that, so belatedly I decided Death must be to blame. Breaking the hourglass seemed to remove the Hogfather from the world – which was what the bad guys were trying to achieve – but why would Death help them and then try to foil their plan. Teatime’s roundabout plan seemed an attempt to achieve something that Death had already made happen. Or was the broken hourglass nothing to do with the Hogfather’s absence? Was it actually an attempt to protect the Hogfather? And did Teatime’s plot somehow start eroding belief in the Hogfather long before he had the teeth and the spell was cast? The plot hinges on these things, but they are never clearly explained.

With Death’s role in the disappearance of the Hogfather such a muddle in my mind, the fun of him dressing up as the Discworld Santa and trying to be jolly was somewhat reduced because it was unclear what he was trying to achieve and why. He needed to keep belief in the Hogfather alive, but why couldn’t the Hogfather himself do that? The tooth spell hadn’t yet been cast which lead me to wonder at the nature of the problem that Death spent so much of the movie trying to overcome? Was he merely trying to undo his own earlier actions? Argghh. It’s all so unclear.

Teatime was the only one of the three main players whose plan was eventually revealed, but that didn’t make him much less opaque as a character. Marc Warren’s choice in how to play Teatime resulted in a performance both irritating and boring. I couldn’t wait for each of his appearances to come to an end. But, setting that aside, by the time the credits rolled we were still none the wiser about his personality. He killed and was good at it and took it seriously, but in his frequent confrontations with others it was difficult to tell if he was enjoying his attempts at intimidation or indifferent to them. Was he killing for fun or simply a professional taking a pride in his work? He remained an unknown quantity throughout. Was he intended just to be a cipher? A plot robot with no story of his own?

Opaque baddies can sometimes be forgiven (that’s why Hollywood invented the psycho), but without any understanding of the missions that the two good characters (Death and Susan) were on, there was little excitement to be had from trying to follow their progress. Susan’s initial set-up as a tough, capable, impressive character gave way to confusion and reluctance on her part as she began to investigate the Hogfather’s disappearance. For a long while she ceases to be a dynamic character because she doesn’t either understand what’s happening or want to be a part of it. When she finally tracks down Teatime, it is her first chance in a couple of hours of screen time to take firm action and to do something other than pull back from her mission – and instantly Teatime disarms her. In fact all she succeeds in doing is taking an unstoppable psychopath and giving him a weapon of incredible power. So when she’s not clueless, she’s a phenomenal screw-up. And she’s the centre of the story. She has the attitude of a heroine, but her actions are anything but heroic – until the end of the story, that is. In the penultimate showdown, she rides a large pig for a while (which you’d think would really slow him down) encourages him to jump a chasm (with her on his back which can’t be helpful) and then defends him – except it seems actually he’s dead and so doesn’t presumably need defending. And once she’s protected a dead pig from wolves for a few moments, Death takes over and destroys the attackers – and that’s Susan’s role almost concluded. Not that impressive for all the sleuthing it required to get her there.

When Death steps in, he gives a speech about how the wolves/auditors broke the rules thus allowing him to intervene, but which rules they broke is not made clear. If they broke them early on, then presumably Death could have cleared the whole mess up before it got started, so we have to assume it wasn’t the plot to kill the Hogfather that was their crime but something they do right at the end. Was it taking the form of wolves and trying to do their own killing instead of hiring a third party that broke the rules? Who knows? And why was the Hogfather back in his primal form at this stage? Was it the tooth magic at work? But weren’t the teeth cleared away and that threat eliminated by then? And what allowed the Hogfather to rise again? Was it something that Susan and Death did? The good guys won, but why remained unclear.

Other plot points that eluded me included the reason Teatime appeared in the Unseen University after falling to his death. Everyone else who died landed on a roof somewhere. Was there a reason? And did the wizards bring him back to life? I wasn’t sure.

Have you noticed how sometimes people living in a foreign country revert to their mother tongue when swearing or distraught? Well, lately I’ve noticed period characters seem to do this in historical dramas, reverting to modern English when they get worked up. Susan spoke like a Victorian governess until menaced by wolves, at which point she demands to know ‘Who else wants some?’ like the feisty, 21st Century London actress she is.

So, looking back on it, how could things have been improved? I think three things needed to happen. First we needed to understand what each character was trying to achieve and why. That wouldn’t mean giving away everything at the start: you could know that a character had a cunning plan to achieve a clearly defined end, without revealing the plan’s details. Secondly we needed to understand the rules. I suspect that Susan couldn’t stop time in the Tooth Fairy’s castle because Death has no hold there. But having her click her fingers and say stop – only to have the world continue – in contrast to having her do it earlier, when it works – would have made things clearer. Otherwise you wonder why she doesn’t sort out Teatime and his thugs. Death too could have been challenged (perhaps by Susan) to explain his actions and spelled out the limits to what he was allowed to do. And finally, when an important plot point occurred, like the breaking of the Hogfather’s hourglass, it would be nice if we understood as much about its significance as the story would allow. I suspect if I knew how and why the hourglass was broken, I’d have been able to follow much of the rest of the plot, but nothing within the story seemed designed to answer that question.

One way to achieve a little more clarity might have been to use close-ups a little more. Many scenes had a half a dozen characters in motion, making noise. Belatedly I’d realise one of them had just muttered something important. Maybe plop them square in the frame and have them speak their line occasionally. Just to make sure no one gets totally lost. The camera can stagger around drunk the rest of the time.

And as a general rule, it’s nice to know whether a character is looking for clues or has worked it all out. Other characters can ask that question on our behalf, if needs be. If it’s the former, have them respond with something like ‘None of this makes sense, but I’m going to get to the bottom of it’. If it’s the latter, have them say ‘Just wait and see. All will be revealed’. Then we know what we’re watching. Then we can root for our heroes. Then we understand what’s a setback and what’s a victory. Then we’re involved.

And while all that was being sorted out, I’d give Ridcully a proper job to do. He’s a supporting character, but he still needs a mission. The bath scenes need to go – they tell us nothing. Ridcully must realise something is going on. He must look for answers. By the time he meets Death he can have information to share. And his tasking of Hexus to believe in the Hogfather works far better as part of that arc. By the time he meets Teatime he should have a real stake in the outcome and realise he must oppose him. He should have tried to capture Teatime – who could then have revealed Susan’s captured sword and cut himself free. Ridcully’s final words would be that he hopes someone will foil Teatime’s plan. Cut to Susan.

Of the remaining blunders, the badly cut/shot leaping of a pig over a chasm I can forgive.

After the dust settles, I do hope poor Vadim Jean is sacked and someone with a gift for solid storytelling takes over before Terry Pratchett lets someone try again with any more of his stories.

P.S. In case it’s not clear: I know I could watch it again more carefully; I know I could read the book it’s based on, but I shouldn’t have to. If the reasonably attentive viewer is confused then that’s the fault of those telling the story not the fault of the audience. As it happens, I’ve read a dozen or so Discworld novels, so it should have been easy to keep me up to speed.