The parent problem of Disney's Descendants films

I'm perfectly aware that I'm not the target audience for the Descendants franchise. These breezy fairy-tale-meets-high-school-rom-com flicks are aimed at young viewers, specifically teenagers – at a guess, closer to fourteen than nineteen. Nevertheless, I can't help enjoying them. 

The original premise of the films is to let the children of famous Disney villains attend the same high school as the kids of famous heroes and see what happens. For this scenario to come about, the creators had to dream up a land (Auradon) where all the heroes hung out, and The Isle of the Lost to which all the villains had been banished. It did not make a lick of sense, but it was fun and spawned a jaunty trilogy centering on the villain kid quartet Mal, Evie, Carlos and Jay and their hero-kid love interests. Mal especially, played by rising star Dove Cameron, was the heroine (sometimes anti-heroine) of this trilogy.

With the tragic death of one of the leads (Cameron Boyce who played Carlos), the franchise ground to a halt for a while. Then it started up again with what seems set to be a new, Wonderland-centred trilogy, where Red, the daughter of the Queen of Hearts, and Chloe, the daughter of Cinderella and her prince, get up to time-travel shenanigans in order to improve the present, and then have to deal with the consequences. Recently, the fifth Descendants film, Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, premiered on Disney Channel and (fortunately for me) Disney Plus.

To sum up, the franchise contains fairy-tale crossovers, (non-snide) Disney references, romances, bouncy hummable tunes and ongoing riffs on the hero-villain dynamic. It's basically five films' (and counting) worth of "you and I are not so different" storylines. Of course I'll keep watching! Heck, age is just a number.

There are problems, though, when a geek like me troubles her decades-too-old brain with the logic of a franchise that's only supposed to be a fun time for high-school kids. I'm not too concerned with the sloppy world building when it comes to timelines, the way the fairy-tale federation of Auradon is run or the morally questionable choice of assembling all villains and their children in a penal colony. Having the parent generation of villains and heroes attend the same magic high school doesn't add up, but I'll let that pass. I don't question the blending of modern times with fairy-tale narratives. What bothers me are all the missing parents. Who are they? Where are they?

It started in the very first Descendants film: while the hero kids mostly had two parents (as a carry-over from the original stories), the villain kids were only introduced as the kids of Maleficent (Mal), the Evil Queen (Evie), Cruella de Vil (Carlos) and Jafar (Jay). Not a peep about who their other parents were. While we eventually (in film number three) learned that Mal's dad is Hades, the rest of the quartet's second parents remain a mystery. It wasn't just the villain spawn either. Fairy Godmother has a daughter called Jane, and Dopey has a son called Doug. Nice to know that Dopey scored, but with whom?

If it had ended there, I could have lived with it, as it's quite fun to speculate and invent head-canons regarding probable pairings. But each film introduced new young protagonists, and almost every time only one of their parents (a famous villain, mostly) was mentioned. That way, the problem has grown exponentially to a point where even a whole film exclusively dedicated to tying up loose parent threads (which we're never going to get anyway) wouldn't be enough. For crying out loud, even Smee has twins. How did that happen?

What makes me mind this quirk of the Descendants films much more than I should is, I think, all the lost storytelling opportunities. I believe someone somewhere claimed that the films were to be considered as Disney canon, but come on, they're clearly not. Which means they could have gone nuts and fan-fictioned away by pairing Disney villains up any old way, which would then enrich the possibilities when it comes to the villains' offspring. The "VKs" (villain kids) would have two sources of villain genes to worry about rather than one. There could be clandestine villain-hero hook-ups, of the romantic or scandalous kind. Who is Jane's dad – is there perhaps a reason Fairy Godmother keeps her on such a tight leash?

Surely the target audience, consisting as it does to a great extent of teenage girls, has to wonder about this too and bemoan the lost opportunities for even more Disney-related "ships"? I'm at a loss to explain this storytelling nonchalance. Maybe, considering the young audience, the creators have chosen to be a bit shy when it comes to procreative matters. We learnt in Descendants 3 that Maleficent and Hades are supposed to have been married when Mal was conceived, although they then split up. Now, I can imagine the Disney versions of Hades and Maleficent having an affair, but married? It's as if the powers that be don't want to sully their viewers' minds too much with contemplations on the possibly irregular relationships which resulted in villain kids such as Evie, Carlos, Jay and many more.

To anyone progressively minded who feels the need to snigger at this and at Maleficent's and Hades's "marriage", I have a question: Who, exactly, is Bow's mother in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power? I'm not disputing that his two dads are super cute and shippable, but someone must have carried Bow for nine months in her womb, no? Sometimes, progressive media have their own problems with the birds and the bees.

An international fan's view on the state of Doctor Who

Argh, why is it so hard to blog during my vacation? Here I sit, rested and content, with oceans of time at my disposal, but will the inspiration come to write that exposé on different kinds of villain-loving (that don't always align with mine)? Will it heck. Therefore, after much deliberation, I will have to go nerdy.

Because if it's one subject that it should be easy to have an opinion on, for a worried fan, it's the current state of Doctor Who. Even the most loyal admirers of the show have been up in arms after the Christmas special that was promised was cancelled – with Russell T Davies commenting defensively that he hadn't written anything of the script anyway, which directly contradicts previous statements from him and others – and BBC has announced that the series has been "put out to tender". 

Since the announcement, commentators have fallen over themselves to explain to us, the ignorant public, that putting a show out to tender does not mean putting it out to pasture. In fact it means the complete opposite, as the show is auctioned off, as it were, to the studio who has the best pitch for it going forward. Shows don't go through this process unless BBC expects it to run for years and years; it wouldn't make sense to invite pitches for a last hurrah. 

If BBC wanted to cancel the show, the commentators suggest, it would have done so outright. Instead, a new studio is needed anyway as Davies and his production company Bad Wolf is leaving the field, so putting the show out to tender makes perfect sense. Moreover, the cancellation of the Christmas special means the process of determining a new, shining future for the show can start sooner. Davies had frankly written himself into a corner by having Ncuti Gatwa regenerate into Billie Piper (whom we know as former Doctor companion and love interest Rose), and a future studio wouldn't want further messy lore on their hands.

All this sounds perfectly plausible as far as it goes. However, Doctor Who fans who have been in the trenches have pointed out that last time the series went off air, the BBC didn't outright cancel it either. The execs may just be trying to let a vocal fanbase down gently. For my part, I'm prepared to buy that the Beeb is acting in good faith and wants the show to continue. But as a foreign Who fan, I have two big concerns: will anyone bid for Doctor Who? And will anyone stream it?

Granted that the BBC wants to find the best studio for Doctor Who. But what good will that be if no studio wants it? The BBC has its own studio, separate from the rest of the organisation, and they've shown interest in Who. But it would look odd if they didn't, and if BBC Studios ends up producing the show, then why put it out to tender in the first place? Putting something up for auction is all very well, but the occasion turns into a disaster if no-one's buying.

The Doctor Who brand isn't strong right now. Whovians who were full of anticipation over Davies's second stint as showrunner have been struggling to defend the RTD 2 run. However much the more positive Who forums have tried to distance themselves from "toxic" fans, they've had to concede that the RTD 2 seasons of the series have overall not been very good. I'm not the only one who has gone from initial unease, to increasing bewilderment, to being close to giving up on the series altogether. To paraphrase Charlotte Brontë, whether it is right or advisable to create things like "Dot and Bubble", I do not know: I scarcely think it is.

What's potentially more dangerous for the series than griping fans – though, lest we forget, we're the ones supposed to be boosting the viewing figures – is the falling-out with Disney Plus. What with the streaming service dropping the series after two seasons and still not airing the spin-off series The War between the Land and the Sea (not that I blame them – it sounds eco-dreary), Doctor Who has been branded, in the eyes of the world, as bad business. Why would a streaming platform such as Netflix want to take on a show that's already failed on Disney Plus?

To a British viewer, this might not be a great cause for concern. YouTube channels such as Who Culture have waxed lyrical about the possibility of Doctor Who going back to its BBC roots of modest budgets and grounded stories and characterisation. But the most important thing about the Disney Plus deal was not the budget, it was the world-wide airing of the series. I don't need big-budget spectacles either, but I want to be able to actually watch the show. 

My foreign blood has been boiling while listening to burbling fantasies about how great it would be if BBC could do the series all in-house and not have to defer to those pesky international streaming services for anything. Yes, I expect it would be great for nostalgic Brits. But what about the rest of us? Do the limeys have any idea of what being an international Who fan was like, before the Disney Plus deal? 

In Sweden, Swedish television aired New Who's first series with Christopher Eccleston. For a while, some series (not the most recent ones) were briefly available on Prime. But apart from that, nothing. I had to wait for the DVDs, and meanwhile have salient plot developments spoiled for me. Some dunce spoiled the plot twist in "Amy's Choice" in a review, a move I have yet to get over. BBC itself put up a video on YouTube with the Sacha Dhawan Master reveal the day after the episode was aired in the UK. Of course, it made its way unbidden into my list of recommended videos because of the algorithm, and there was nothing I could do about it. Christmas specials were released on DVD in the spring, if one was lucky.

The RTD 2 run at least had this to recommend it: I could watch the new episodes the same day they aired if I wanted to. Granted, many of them were bad, but they were available. I don't want to have to go back to buying the DVDs once the whole series has already been aired in the UK, and unless I can be sure that a new incarnation of Doctor Who is better than RTD 2, I'm not sure the investment is actually worth my while.

Everything has its time, and everything ends. Still I cling on to the hope that out of all this upheaval, Doctor Who will rise like a phoenix and be watchable once more. But what will I call this hypothetical new version of the series? I shouldn't have blown the label New New Who on the short-lived Disney Plus era. Surely New New New Who is too much?

Hats off to Pixar: somehow, they pulled off Toy Story 5

There were many reasons why I was sceptical (much like the rest of the world) about the very idea of a Toy Story 5 film. The franchise already had two endings: it was clear both from the way Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 ended that they were, at the time, expected to close out the story. That made Toy Story 5 an obvious cash grab from a studio spooked by the modest box office numbers of its films based on original ideas. 

What's more, I've never been sold on the original premise of the Toy Story films. Even at their peak – perhaps especially at their peak – I thought their messaging peculiar, bordering on downright harmful. What does Pixar think it's doing, guilt-tripping kids (and nostalgic adults) for abandoning their toys? When in the future the Toy Story characters enter the public domain (by a process I don't fully understand), a horror film version will not be far off. For example, the notion that toys in storage stay sentient while being packed up in the dark is creepy in the extreme.

But would you know it, the creators of Toy Story 5 made a virtue of necessity. It turned out to be a good, solid Pixar flick, better than a lot of nostalgia bait out there and a lot better than it needed to be to draw the crowds. These past months, I've watched more films on the big screen than I usually do, among them Super Mario Galaxy, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Mandalorian and Grogu. I had a good time with all three of them, not least Mandalorian and Grogu (yes, it's like a couple of episodes of the TV show squished together, but I like the TV show). They had one thing in common, though: they weren't big on plot. They were clearly "hey, don't you just want to hang out for a time in this world with these characters?" kind of films.

Toy Story 5 could have settled for the same experience, but Pixar chose to aim higher. Maybe the studio has learned something after traumatising a whole generation with the plight of toys neglected by callous youngsters. In the latest two "cash grab" instalments (let's not deny this is why they were made) the Toy Story franchise has tiptoed away from the toys' more selfish motivations (basically "play with me or I'll diiiieee") and instead focuses on their mission to make their kid happy. 

In Toy Story 4, Woody unselfishly struggled to keep Bonnie's favourite toy Forky at her side; in Toy Story 5, Bonnie's remaining toys are more worried by her lack of friends than by the possibility that she could get tired of playing with them. When she gets an iPad-like device called Lilypad, they do feel threatened ("Extinction! Not again" Rex the dinosaur laments), but mostly they're worried about its effect on Bonnie. Jessie, the clear leader of the toys now that Woody's gone away, sees it as her task to find at least one suitable friend for Bonnie, someone she can really connect with. Lilypad blithely gets Bonnie three "friends" online, but they don't seem to be doing her much good.

The whole "tech vs toys" question that's emphasised in the trailers is actually the least interesting part of the film, at least until the message is nuanced by Jessie's reluctant team-up with another girl's "old-tech" toys ("the AA team") and Lilypad's earnest desire to be of use to Bonnie. The best takeaway message-wise from the film, in my view, was its argument for how playing with actual toys stimulates children's imagination. The sequences where Bonnie's or Blaze's (the other girl's) play-time is animated in a particular, colourful manner are a delight. Toy Story 5 acknowledges that playing a simple game on a device can be fun too, though.

For long-time Toy Story viewers, it's a relief when Jessie's old trauma of being given away by her first owner, Emily, is finally overcome by a moving realisation that she did make a difference to Emily. It leads her to a conclusion I wish the Toy Story films could have articulated long ago. When faced with the possibility of Bonnie outgrowing her, post-epiphany Jessie is chill: what's important is that she was there for Bonnie "when it mattered".

It's not a perfect film by any means: what with a few new toys being added to the roster each film, the Toy Story franchise now has bit player overload. Even when the focus is on the children's happiness rather than the toys', the supposed bond between toy and kid can still come across as a little eerie. When Lilypad suspects she does Bonnie more harm than good, she flings herself in a donation box: sweet or a kamikaze move? There are a lot of subplots going on, neither Buzz nor Woody is in any way essential to the plot, and the whole thing's a bit messy, albeit in a fun way.

For my part, I enjoyed this film more than Toy Story 4, and I especially appreciated how we get to become invested in Bonnie and Blaze and root for them to become friends. It was hard to warm to Bonnie in Toy Story 4: sure, she has no obligation to Woody (he's a toy!), but forgetting about him so soon after Andy gave him to her, and after Andy was so reluctant to let him go, did come across as a bit ungrateful. Here, Bonnie is allowed to be a sweet, if insecure, kid, and you're left hoping that the association with the more confident, quirky Blaze will do her all the good in the world. Another film with Bonnie as the toys' owner would give a certain symmetry to the franchise, which could then be divided into two trilogies. I can hardly believe I'm writing this, but I'm ready for Toy Story 6.