Jubilee

 


Jubilee by Robert Shearman 

A pretty great story in it's own right, Jubilee is just the worst Robert Shearman story by process of elimination. Yeah, I don't know how much I can stand to add to opinions on Jubilee, as it is very good (in an incredibly uncomfortable way) and frankly, it's been analyzed and praised to death. 
A problem to me, is the things that I really love about Jubilee, are done better in the modern story Dalek with Chris Eccleston, and minus a few new additions, it makes it hard for me to view Jubilee as anything but a first draft. Well, not a first draft. The things It does do better than Dalek, are pretty amazing, including Shearman's usual unencumbered pitch black comedy, which I will never get sick of, especially the opening trailer, Dalek song, and Dalek Marriage. Colin Baker is on top form, but his flippancy towards the Dalek doesn't have as much emotional weight as Eccleston's angry performance in the stories successor. Jubilee makes up for this by giving Colin Baker a nice weird future self locked in the tower of London, which as you could guess, is played incredibly depressingly, and rather magnificently too. The final thing Jubilee has over Dalek is Evelyn > Rose. Once again, Maggie Stables breaks my heartstrings in far too many scenes. 
The final choice of having the humans in this story be the monsters, whereas the Dalek gaining somewhat a semblence of humanity, is somewhat odd, and not the one I would have gone for, although it is very interesting in that it does say some fascinating stuff about how we treat Nazis in media, and what that says about us. This is the crux of Jubilee's best scenes, especially the crowd at the end. 
But even if Jubilee is rather great by every means of the standard, my brain will always continue to compare it to Dalek, and to be frank, few stories ever written can compare to that one. 8.5/10


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