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Bigshotte Rayles in Wokingham, Berkshire, England

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Wokingham, England, UK

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Cabin Pressure Advent Day 23: Wokingham

WOKINGHAMMMMMMMM!

I absolutely love everything about this episode. Literally everything. It's just basically perfect.

It's also, like Vaduz, an episode that would never, ever, EVER have happened in S1. I mean, S1 had a dude literally die on the plane and "it "what to do" was turned into a comedy routine... this is a much more, Idunno, humanist approach, I guess. It's hilarious, but it takes its humor from things other than the actual medical situation itself.

But even beyond that- would S1 Douglas have played along when Carolyn said that he cried when confronted by the bird strike in St Petersburg? Would he have even put a pause on the game? Would he have even shown up? Almost definitely not. The only constant, of course, is Arthur, who would have been equally willing to show up to keep Martin's mother busy in any season you can name. Lovely, lovely Arthur, and what an absolutely perfect scene by the way.

Now, there's the meta way of looking at it where people are like "I appreciated it when JF was writing a darker and more cynical show," which a) I disagree with factually (I think there were always hints of what the show would become from the beginning- I mean, as far back as Abu Dhabi, Douglas helped Martin out with the match) and b) I disagree with as a matter of taste (the heartwarming episodes are GREAT). But I have to hope that the meta people at least concede that the development FROM S1 to S4 in terms of the very different ways that people behave is extremely consistent with the character development. Douglas and Carolyn have both made some strides in the way that they relate to Martin that allow them to go run interference for him, but at the same time Martin has grown to become the kind of person who they mind less running interference for. He's mellowed, he's started to be less hung up on his rank for the most part, he's less obsessed with his self image. S1 Douglas would have never done it- but S1 Martin would have given him little reason to, and we've seen that change pretty organically.

It also helps, obviously, that Douglas and Carolyn know exactly what they're dealing with. Some of it, maybe, is seeing how Martin (and, to be honest, Caitlin!) ended up that way, with Simon to cut him down to size- and, as we've heard, his dad as well back when he was alive. (Incidentally, I meant to mention this in Uskerty but I found the fact that Martin has worn his dad's signet ring since the funeral to be both really sweet and just... gah. Emotional.) I feel like we've also all, at some point, met people who are, if not Simons themselves, have Simonistic qualities, so to speak. Carolyn and Douglas, as people who love to put on performances like this and have a bit of a proprietary feeling about Martin (in an "only we get to tease him" kind of way), presumably did it at least partly for the fun of it!

That said, this episode would not have been what it could have been without Wendy. Prunella Scales is amazing, and it's worth noting that (as JF mentioned in a podcast interview I heard once) she was in the early stages of dementia and, according to JF, was not always with it offstage but was just absolutely astonishing as soon as they started performing. She plays every note so perfectly, and adds a really interesting note of, well, momness (or I guess I should say mumness) that is really easy to identify with and also a VERY striking contrast to Carolyn, both for better and, occasionally, for worse- Carolyn would have never said anything remotely like "maybe Simon knows best" lol.

All in all, just really really good fun, hilarious, well plotted, all the usual... oh, and with another amazing audio humor joke with the doctor asking about the costume party. Just perfect.

Important question though: how on earth in this whole brag-off with Simon did Martin never slip that he's dating the freaking Princess of Liechtenstein?! How?!?! I'm not going to call it a plot hole because that's not how these things work, but I can imagine that he had to REALLY hold himself back from blurting it out.

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