Doctor Pikhto – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Devil’s Hour is a British TV series produced by Stephen Moffat on Amazon Prime Video, in which Doctor Who gets lost in the twisted world of David Lynch.
Single mother Lucy (Jessica Rain from Call the Midwife) has nightmares every night and wakes up at exactly 3:33 a.m. – the so-called “devil’s hour”, when the forces of evil reign supreme. Perhaps the precarious marital status contributes to such anxiety – she kicked out her husband Mike (Phil Dunster from “Ted Lasso”) for almost a year for a clear dislike of their young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers). In fairness, falling in love with Isaac is really not easy: the boy never cries, laughs, or feels physical pain. He just does what he’s told, stares straight ahead, and converses with ghosts that Lucy thinks are imaginary friends. Mike thinks that Isaac’s developmental features have something to do with the fact that Lucy’s mother suffered from schizophrenia and almost committed suicide – but this is not certain, and Lucy has already bypassed six psychiatrists to help Isaac revive at least a little. Lucy’s work is also nervous: she is a juvenile inspector and spends her days protecting dysfunctional families from domestic violence. One day, Lucy comes to the aid of a ward, terrified to death by a drunken ex who breaks into the house with threats, and finds that the police are already taking away the body of a dead brawler – someone saved the unfortunate family from him.
The murder is being investigated by the caustic police inspector Ravi Dillon (Nikesh Patel). He will find in the suspect’s apartment the inscription on the wall: “Where is Lucy Chambers?” Here, their paths will cross with Lucy, and together they will go on the trail of the mysterious maniac Gideon (Peter Capaldi), who is guilty of several murders and kidnapping of children. The only question is, with what telepathy did Lucy see him in her nightmares before she met him. And why, when they finally see each other in person, will the bloody monster claim to be a time traveler?
The series was conceived by British screenwriter Tom Moran and is his first own show, made with the reckless audacity of a debutant. The Hour of the Devil is cut from different motifs and genres and looks like everything at once: Twin Peaks, confusing concepts of time travel films, dark Scandinavian film noirs about children in danger, harsh social dramas about domestic violence in the spirit of “kitchen realism” . Surprisingly, this eclectic poison cake doesn’t fall apart, but is an utterly breathtaking sight. The cherry on it flaunts the sinister character of Peter Capaldi, who knows how to shift his eyebrows in such a way that it becomes very scary. The series is produced by Steven Moffat, who had Capaldi play the Twelfth Doctor in Doctor Who, and the similarities between him and the current Gideon are striking, although Moffat denies everything.
A newly minted clone of the Doctor finds himself in a twisted, absurdist Twin Peaks detective: when sensitive DI Ravi examines a crime scene with headphones playing sweet 1950s retro, Agent Cooper is the first thing that comes to mind. The police orientation also looks like it was copied from Lynch: the cops are arguing furiously about what color the boxes for important and unimportant reports should be. “Red for urgent matters!” “No, for them it is green, because the green color of the traffic light means action, and the red one means its termination.” Ravi, like Cooper, conducts an investigation based on his own intuition and the dreams of Lucy Chambers, and angrily reminds his colleagues that there are no minor details in it: “The name of the teddy bear that belonged to the murdered boy is Hobson!” Okay, we’ll remember that.
At first, for some reason, you hope that all this devilry will roll somewhere into the realm of rationality: Ravi doesn’t smell anything special, he’s just a bore and a pedant, Lucy’s nightmares are just nightmares, and Gideon is a psycho who fools them. But for the seasoned Moffat and the debutant Moran, this would be too easy, they are not interested in tricks with subsequent exposure. They need all the fragments of this motley story to stick together in the finale into a clear picture and it turns out that not a single episode was superfluous. All the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place: the strangeness of little Isaac, as if he had escaped from films about demonic children, and an episode copied from A Clockwork Orange, where Gideon tries to inspire an unknown guy tied to a chair to abhor violence. And also Hobson bear, Lucy’s maiden name, strawberry ice cream, gun wad, red laces and memories of the future.
Cosplaying the Doctor, mimicking Lynch, stealing from Kubrick – this is not plagiarism here, but a tribute, because pop culture is a common territory that each author inhabits in his own way. And to the question “What, it was possible like that?” should be answered in the affirmative. This, apparently, is the essence of creative freedom, one of the few remaining freedoms in the world.
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