OK, let's get on with this, I've got two episodes of DW and a Christmas special to write up as well as several months' books. Readers should not take the three-month delay in writing up these episodes as any sort of reflection on my current feelings towards New Who. Well, maybe they should, but let's not get bogged down in that now.
Closing Time
Lightweight but entertaining. Gareth Roberts gets to have his gently mocking self-aware cake and eat it: Craig blows up the Cybermen with love (the only officially endorsed method for defeating the New Cybermen), then points this out in exactly those terms, at which the Doctor claims he's being ridiculous before finally conceding that, fine, whatever, he did indeed blow up the Cybermen with love. And he's being stared down by Lynda Baron as he says it, which adds to the general comedy value.
Having the Doctor working in a superstore toy department is only a diminishing-returns follow-up to having the Doctor working in a call centre (The Lodger). It's tempting to claim that the entire episode is the diminished return of The Lodger, but eh, it's got a charm of its own and (just) enough fresh material to see it through. 7 out of 10, perhaps.
Note the latest awful twist in the Ballad of the Ponds: their daughter was kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because the Doctor gave them a nice house and a sports car, and Amy went on to have her own range of cosmetics. And I have to wonder, is "the smell of rain on dry earth" really going to be a best-selling perfume?
The Complete Final Apocalyptic End of the Entire Universe with Stuff Blowing Up and That
No, wait a minute, that was last year's finale title.
The Wedding of River Song
40 minutes of busking before we finally get to the cop-out for the season arc. I mean, some of it's quite nice busking, and I guess it's a (small) step above the 2008 finale, but nonetheless. We don't know any more than we did before about the Silence's motives, and we still know nothing whatsoever about Blackhat McEyepatch's interest - will we ever? No time for that, we were far too busy playing electric chess with a Viking and trolling about with Winston Churchill and laying out doomy foreshadowing for next year's bloody arc with Mr Blue Severed Head to worry about a trifling thing like the story.
The cop-out was pretty much as telegraphed in Series 6 Part One, with only the small tweak that Steven Moffat walked away from the obvious set-up with the Flesh and replaced it with an equivalent obvious set-up not revealed until the start of Series 6 Part Two - the only way he could possibly salvage any claim to have kept us guessing. River Song monologuing at the Doctor about how he's pissed off the entire Universe in A Good Man Goes to War is balanced here with an opposite but equally trite scene of River Song monologuing at the Doctor about how the entire Universe loves him and wants to have his puppies. Basically, some nice visual moments, but the episode in total doesn't warrant much above a 4 out of 10.
Series 6, Aftermath
And so the Doctor fakes his death, which opens up fresh possibilities for the show. It could be a new age of whimsical weekly adventure, but with the new twist of the shadow of the Doctor's legend hanging over him. Or it could be just like 2011, but with the Doctor being all coy about his name and everybody else pretending they've never heard of him.
I have two predictions for the next series. Number one is that the in-series grapevine will continue to make its annoying presence felt. I'm referring to the unknown means by which people all across time and space in recent series have known all about the Doctor and that year's series arc and god knows what else that they shouldn't rightfully have known about at all. Expect one-off bit-part characters all through the next series to say things like "But I thought you were dead?"
Number two is that the Question That Must Never Be Answered - Doctor Who? - will be answered by the Doctor springing onto the scene and saying "Doctor Me!" Although I'm less certain about that one than about the first prediction.
The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
Erk. I'm looking for a place to start on this, but there isn't much for me to latch on to. Bill Bailey, why not. Bill Bailey and Arabella Weir are thrown in for about two minutes of comedy cameo, and yet they serve two key plot functions: they explain the threat that's led the living forest to grow a magic dimension-jumping puffball escape pod or whatever it is, and their walking machine gets Madge from A to B. The only reason function #2 needs to happen is because they've delayed Madge with function #1, and given that they're about to bombard the forest with acid it's not clear why they're hanging about to fulfil function #1 in the first place. Apparently they can teleport from (and presumably to) the forest, but can't take their walking machine with them and thus have to abandon an expensive bit of machinery when the acid bombardment starts, which is convenient for Madge but not readily explicable.
The forest's escape pod thing needs a human pilot - why? Why would the forest trust its survival to something that it can't pilot for itself? I'm also not clear on why the forest suddenly doesn't need the escape pod once it somehow enters the time vortex and vanishes from the episode.
Well, as we know, it's all just a bit of disposable wafer-thin side material to facilitate the real story, or at least the fuzzy, sentimental, vaguely associational story-like thing that fills this hour of telly like narrative candy floss. (Which, as New Who's producers keep telling us, is what drunken bloaters want on Christmas Day when they're semi-comatose and in no fit condition to follow a story anyway, and I'm honestly not sure what to think of that. I can only point to The Christmas Invasion and go "But... but...") The Doctor does something brave on some spaceship or other and falls out of the sky, Madge doesn't tell her kids the bad news about their father, the kids lark about in the house the Doctor has kitted out with magic model planes and dancing chairs and so on, and Reg flies his Lancaster bomber through the gigantic holes in the story (echoes of Planet of the Dead's London bus, there) and lives after all. And spends the holiday season in the country with his family while his flight engineer, navigator, wireless operator, bomb aimer and rear gunner bleed to death in the plane and his superior officers prepare to court martial him for desertion. Something like that, anyway. Happy Bastard Christmas.
Of all the fluffy, passive-viewing Christmas specials, this is the least coherent yet by quite a margin. I guess the fluff is preferable to the nastier undercurrents of 2010's A Christmas Carol, but at least that one had its good points and a few stand-out moments as well. There's nothing really good that I can point to here. It's incoherent and mediocre. I'm leaning towards a 4 out of 10. I'm tempted to rate it lower, but then I'd have to go back through the previous year of DW and re-rate all of the genuinely bad episodes even lower, and that's more effort than I'm willing to spare.
Showing posts with label 2011 Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2011 Who. Show all posts
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Just Me and the Minibar
Finally! I've found a title that doesn't involve Hotel California!
That's what The God Complex is, though, isn't it? DW's answer to Hotel California. Other thoughts on the episode follow.
Wouldya look at that - just four episodes ago (in the comments) I was saying we needed a scene of the Doctor psychologically breaking his companion (cf The Curse of Fenric) to round out this year's collection of Doctor Who's Greatest Unethical Hits, and pow! here's an episode that pays tribute to that exact scene in Fenric! I'm claiming extra Uncanny Points for this.
This scene's important, though, inasmuch as this episode forms a kind of diptych with The Girl Who Waited. There, too, Amy came to understand that she couldn't rely on the Doctor, but she learned that by being trapped on her own for forty years, and that version of Amy doesn't exist any more. It was more of a lesson for Rory. Now Amy - the "real" one, if you like - has to learn it for herself.
There's a subtle link back to The Horns of Nimon in the title - just as the energy-eating Nimon lived in a Power Complex ("That fits!"), so the faith-eating Minotaur-like creature here lives in his God Complex. The way is open for fannish consideration of the subtextual parallels between the two stories. But overtly relating him to the Nimon - like overtly relating the Ood to the Sensorites - is just a bit of gratuitous wank that forces the point.
At the very end, we're given a horrifying new twist on the Pond family situation: "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because the Doctor gave them a nice house and a sports car." I don't think there's much I can add to that, or should need to.
Thing is, that is easily one of the best companion departure scenes ever. It's stone cold brilliant - apart from the unfortunate idea of the Doctor buying off the bereaved parents, I mean. My only worry is that it won't stick and Amy and Rory will be Rosed back into the series (again and again, possibly) with complete disregard for the dramatic worth of this farewell scene. News this week: Karen Gillan tells reporters she thinks Amy should be killed off. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, eh?
I liked this episode a lot, just not quite as much as I'd expected to, given the extreme surreal potential of the trailer images. Perhaps a borderline 8/9 out of 10. The surreal business was certainly there, the acting was all good, the directing was amazing and the Minotaur was indeed beautiful. Just something slightly off somewhere in the execution of the story, and so it's pipped to the post by The Girl Who Waited. We're on the comedown now.
That's what The God Complex is, though, isn't it? DW's answer to Hotel California. Other thoughts on the episode follow.
Wouldya look at that - just four episodes ago (in the comments) I was saying we needed a scene of the Doctor psychologically breaking his companion (cf The Curse of Fenric) to round out this year's collection of Doctor Who's Greatest Unethical Hits, and pow! here's an episode that pays tribute to that exact scene in Fenric! I'm claiming extra Uncanny Points for this.
This scene's important, though, inasmuch as this episode forms a kind of diptych with The Girl Who Waited. There, too, Amy came to understand that she couldn't rely on the Doctor, but she learned that by being trapped on her own for forty years, and that version of Amy doesn't exist any more. It was more of a lesson for Rory. Now Amy - the "real" one, if you like - has to learn it for herself.
There's a subtle link back to The Horns of Nimon in the title - just as the energy-eating Nimon lived in a Power Complex ("That fits!"), so the faith-eating Minotaur-like creature here lives in his God Complex. The way is open for fannish consideration of the subtextual parallels between the two stories. But overtly relating him to the Nimon - like overtly relating the Ood to the Sensorites - is just a bit of gratuitous wank that forces the point.
At the very end, we're given a horrifying new twist on the Pond family situation: "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because the Doctor gave them a nice house and a sports car." I don't think there's much I can add to that, or should need to.
Thing is, that is easily one of the best companion departure scenes ever. It's stone cold brilliant - apart from the unfortunate idea of the Doctor buying off the bereaved parents, I mean. My only worry is that it won't stick and Amy and Rory will be Rosed back into the series (again and again, possibly) with complete disregard for the dramatic worth of this farewell scene. News this week: Karen Gillan tells reporters she thinks Amy should be killed off. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, eh?
I liked this episode a lot, just not quite as much as I'd expected to, given the extreme surreal potential of the trailer images. Perhaps a borderline 8/9 out of 10. The surreal business was certainly there, the acting was all good, the directing was amazing and the Minotaur was indeed beautiful. Just something slightly off somewhere in the execution of the story, and so it's pipped to the post by The Girl Who Waited. We're on the comedown now.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Wait Watchers
Thanks, IT helpdesk! By unexpectedly junking my LAN account and taking a week to create a new one for me, you've afforded me some time at home to catch up on my blogging! And so, after the mayhem and shenannigans of the last few weeks, I can at last return my attention to The Blog Readers Who Waited.
As with last year's DW, my favourite episodes of the run seem to be clustered in the final third. The Girl Who Waited is another step up after Night Terrors' improvement on Let's Kill Hitler - I'd say it's a 9 out of 10, a genuine high mark this time that isn't subject to allowances for sheer bloody relief. In hindsight, it's my favourite of the 2011 series (so no, there won't be any 10s this time round). The story is simple at heart, but presented in a way that takes full advantage of DW's format and that I don't think any TV series but DW could do justice to. The premise of the Two Streams Facility is clearly laid out in visuals and dialogue that complement each other nicely. A story calling for a collection of clinical white and generic industrial sets probably didn't do the budget any harm, and in fact the on-screen realisation is striking in a minimalist kind of way. Ditto the medical robots. Effectively minimalist, that'd be one way of summing up this episode. It's a very confident, very competent bit of Who.
Readers may wonder how I plan to finesse this into my opinion of the first half of the 2011 series, given the large moral dilemma at the heart of this story. It's not so difficult. I see a definite difference between the dilemma here - which is deliberately set up, examined and played on - and the moral quirks of the earlier episodes, which just look like fumbled bits of unintended subtext. With the benefit of having seen the whole of the run, I now know that this isn't some kind of risky recurring motif built into the series that gets addressed in episode 13, but merely something that happens in various episodes to varying degrees of competency depending on the degree of author involvement. So here a large part of the Doctor's lifestyle and modus operandi are called into question, but because it's done knowingly, it's done with skill and in a way that doesn't completely drop the bottom out of the narrative. It's pretty much the polar opposite of the end of Day of the Moon.
The flipside of this is that writer Tom MacRae spares (some of) the Doctor's blushes by pushing the decision onto Rory, and then by having 60-year-old Amy take responsibility for it from him anyway. This is kind of a cop-out, and although it doesn't greatly diminish the dramatic power of the story, it does take the edge off it a bit. (Given my reaction to earlier episodes, I'm not likely to complain about it too much in this instance.)
I have two nits to pick - not exactly flaws or even bum notes, just oddities really. Number one is that 60-year-old Amy doesn't look a hell of a lot different from 20-year-old Amy, just a bit more puffy about the face. They might at least have done something with the hair, y'know? Number two is the strangely abrupt ending. The Lovely Jo considers this a good point about the episode, and fair enough, but I did wonder whether there was a second half to that scene that ended up on the cutting room floor.
So there it is, the episode of 2011 Who that I'm most likely to go out of my way to rewatch. Yet more good material for Arthur Darvill, the sleeper star of Moffat Who; another fine performance from Matt Smith, albeit there isn't much of him in this one; even (startlingly, and far too late) some solid character material for Karen Gillan to work with. Did someone mention the Melody Pond arc? Oh, wait, no they didn't, and thank Bod for that. Hurrahs all round.
As with last year's DW, my favourite episodes of the run seem to be clustered in the final third. The Girl Who Waited is another step up after Night Terrors' improvement on Let's Kill Hitler - I'd say it's a 9 out of 10, a genuine high mark this time that isn't subject to allowances for sheer bloody relief. In hindsight, it's my favourite of the 2011 series (so no, there won't be any 10s this time round). The story is simple at heart, but presented in a way that takes full advantage of DW's format and that I don't think any TV series but DW could do justice to. The premise of the Two Streams Facility is clearly laid out in visuals and dialogue that complement each other nicely. A story calling for a collection of clinical white and generic industrial sets probably didn't do the budget any harm, and in fact the on-screen realisation is striking in a minimalist kind of way. Ditto the medical robots. Effectively minimalist, that'd be one way of summing up this episode. It's a very confident, very competent bit of Who.
Readers may wonder how I plan to finesse this into my opinion of the first half of the 2011 series, given the large moral dilemma at the heart of this story. It's not so difficult. I see a definite difference between the dilemma here - which is deliberately set up, examined and played on - and the moral quirks of the earlier episodes, which just look like fumbled bits of unintended subtext. With the benefit of having seen the whole of the run, I now know that this isn't some kind of risky recurring motif built into the series that gets addressed in episode 13, but merely something that happens in various episodes to varying degrees of competency depending on the degree of author involvement. So here a large part of the Doctor's lifestyle and modus operandi are called into question, but because it's done knowingly, it's done with skill and in a way that doesn't completely drop the bottom out of the narrative. It's pretty much the polar opposite of the end of Day of the Moon.
The flipside of this is that writer Tom MacRae spares (some of) the Doctor's blushes by pushing the decision onto Rory, and then by having 60-year-old Amy take responsibility for it from him anyway. This is kind of a cop-out, and although it doesn't greatly diminish the dramatic power of the story, it does take the edge off it a bit. (Given my reaction to earlier episodes, I'm not likely to complain about it too much in this instance.)
I have two nits to pick - not exactly flaws or even bum notes, just oddities really. Number one is that 60-year-old Amy doesn't look a hell of a lot different from 20-year-old Amy, just a bit more puffy about the face. They might at least have done something with the hair, y'know? Number two is the strangely abrupt ending. The Lovely Jo considers this a good point about the episode, and fair enough, but I did wonder whether there was a second half to that scene that ended up on the cutting room floor.
So there it is, the episode of 2011 Who that I'm most likely to go out of my way to rewatch. Yet more good material for Arthur Darvill, the sleeper star of Moffat Who; another fine performance from Matt Smith, albeit there isn't much of him in this one; even (startlingly, and far too late) some solid character material for Karen Gillan to work with. Did someone mention the Melody Pond arc? Oh, wait, no they didn't, and thank Bod for that. Hurrahs all round.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Young Man, There's No Need To Feel Down
A strange and sensitive boy who's scared about what he's keeping in the closet seeks acceptance from his father. No, I can't see any kind of subtext in this episode at all...
To say that Night Terrors is an improvement on Let's Kill Hitler would be a gross understatement. Night Terrors is pretty comfortably the best episode of DW so far this year.
(Pause on that thought. We're nine episodes into the season, and the best episode so far is the Mark Gatiss one. Erk.)
The only one that might give it a run for its money is The Doctor's Wife, but I'd suggest that Gaiman's episode is a story about DW as much as an actual DW story, possibly more so. Whereas this is unquestionably DW, original flavour. That is, after all, what you get when you commission a DW script from Mark Gatiss - a conventional, some might say workmanlike, but undeniably Who-scented adventure story. If New Who were a pub food menu, Gatiss' writing would be the beef and ale pie, and it'd be described as "hearty fare". Cast into sharp relief by the rest of the season to this point, that's unusually welcome.
It helps that this is also Gatiss' best DW story to date. It's his first not to be set in a queasily nostalgic theme park version of Britain's recent past. There's no sign of the reactionary politics that laid a steaming subtext on The Unquiet Dead and neutered Victory of the Daleks. This leaves us free to enjoy the stuff that Gatiss genuinely excels at: witty showcase scenes for the Doctor plus guest actor, character gotchas that are simply conceived and easily realised in an eye-catching way, and of course four-square spooky Who action.
The directing deserves a mention too - I actually noticed the directing this week! It was better than average! The materialising TARDIS' image caught in a puddle and the scene of George's bedroom being sucked into his cupboard were notable moments, I thought. Nice guest turns from the kid playing George and the guy playing his dad. In fact, I wouldn't say anything about this episode was really wrong - again, this is refreshing even as we quietly acknowledge that it really ought to be the baseline for DW. Some more information about the dolls might have been helpful - were they all just bystanders who got sucked into the representation of George's fear, and if so what started them turning into dolls? and if not, where did the first dolls come from? - but this is a great gaping hole in the plot that I somehow find I can forgive. This is Mark Gatiss' hour of glory, bless 'im.
Random observations:
A couple of Moffat-era motifs make their presence felt once more. The giant glass eye in the doll's house, incongruous as it is, harks back to last year's recurring business with eyes. The other revenant device is the use of crap nursery rhyme as a substitute for story-telling, although in this case it's specifically substituting for the equally crap doomy foreshadowing, so I'm less bothered by it than I could have been.
That surely wasn't the estate where they filmed the video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy"? (In which a snarling face inside a TV set steals kids' faces and threatens to eat your sooouuuul... sound strangely like The Idiot's Lantern?) Be a bit of a laugh if it was.
People on the Who forums have criticised the fact that this story contains absolutely no follow-on from Let's Kill Hitler in terms of Amy's and Rory's character - as if that weren't a f*cking blessing. I'll actually be able to watch and enjoy this story again in years to come, hurrah. By now it's a given that week-on-week character development in DW is non-existent, so we might at least cherish the episodes that don't stomp all over the characters. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a niner, but I'd certainly give it a high 8 out of 10.
To say that Night Terrors is an improvement on Let's Kill Hitler would be a gross understatement. Night Terrors is pretty comfortably the best episode of DW so far this year.
(Pause on that thought. We're nine episodes into the season, and the best episode so far is the Mark Gatiss one. Erk.)
The only one that might give it a run for its money is The Doctor's Wife, but I'd suggest that Gaiman's episode is a story about DW as much as an actual DW story, possibly more so. Whereas this is unquestionably DW, original flavour. That is, after all, what you get when you commission a DW script from Mark Gatiss - a conventional, some might say workmanlike, but undeniably Who-scented adventure story. If New Who were a pub food menu, Gatiss' writing would be the beef and ale pie, and it'd be described as "hearty fare". Cast into sharp relief by the rest of the season to this point, that's unusually welcome.
It helps that this is also Gatiss' best DW story to date. It's his first not to be set in a queasily nostalgic theme park version of Britain's recent past. There's no sign of the reactionary politics that laid a steaming subtext on The Unquiet Dead and neutered Victory of the Daleks. This leaves us free to enjoy the stuff that Gatiss genuinely excels at: witty showcase scenes for the Doctor plus guest actor, character gotchas that are simply conceived and easily realised in an eye-catching way, and of course four-square spooky Who action.
The directing deserves a mention too - I actually noticed the directing this week! It was better than average! The materialising TARDIS' image caught in a puddle and the scene of George's bedroom being sucked into his cupboard were notable moments, I thought. Nice guest turns from the kid playing George and the guy playing his dad. In fact, I wouldn't say anything about this episode was really wrong - again, this is refreshing even as we quietly acknowledge that it really ought to be the baseline for DW. Some more information about the dolls might have been helpful - were they all just bystanders who got sucked into the representation of George's fear, and if so what started them turning into dolls? and if not, where did the first dolls come from? - but this is a great gaping hole in the plot that I somehow find I can forgive. This is Mark Gatiss' hour of glory, bless 'im.
Random observations:
A couple of Moffat-era motifs make their presence felt once more. The giant glass eye in the doll's house, incongruous as it is, harks back to last year's recurring business with eyes. The other revenant device is the use of crap nursery rhyme as a substitute for story-telling, although in this case it's specifically substituting for the equally crap doomy foreshadowing, so I'm less bothered by it than I could have been.
That surely wasn't the estate where they filmed the video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy"? (In which a snarling face inside a TV set steals kids' faces and threatens to eat your sooouuuul... sound strangely like The Idiot's Lantern?) Be a bit of a laugh if it was.
People on the Who forums have criticised the fact that this story contains absolutely no follow-on from Let's Kill Hitler in terms of Amy's and Rory's character - as if that weren't a f*cking blessing. I'll actually be able to watch and enjoy this story again in years to come, hurrah. By now it's a given that week-on-week character development in DW is non-existent, so we might at least cherish the episodes that don't stomp all over the characters. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a niner, but I'd certainly give it a high 8 out of 10.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Hitler: His Part in Who's Downfall
All right, enough procrastination - Let's Talk Hitler. Now that I've seen Night Terrors and as we drift further into Series 2011 Part Two, I'm feeling more positive about the show and so more able to take on the write-up for this episode. Having had a week and a half to mull it over helps too. Readers are thus spared my initial response to Let's Kill Hitler, although if you're interested, my second response was "Tired... so, sooo tiiiiired...".
Let's get this clear first off: this is not the second part of the story begun in A Good Man Goes to War. We have yet to see that second part, if indeed we will ever see it. The trailer suggests that Blackhat McEyepatch will return, and I sincerely hope she'll bring her motivation with her this time, but there's no trace of her here. Let's Kill Hitler is not interested in following up on any of the threads left hanging at the end of the previous episode. It's also not interested in Hitler, title notwithstanding - he's dumped in a cupboard at the first opportunity and never seen again. Perhaps a title like Let's Use Hitler As Gratuitous Story-Tinsel would have given too much away.
I actually liked bits of the episode, specifically the bits involving the Tesselecta. I liked the concept and the execution, and could have done with a full episode based around it. But Let's Kill Hitler isn't even interested in that. It's interested in one thing only, and that's River Song. What we've got here is roughly 30% of a potentially interesting DW story that's hijacked by you-know-who - we don't want any nasty moral debate getting in the way of our hi-jinks - and so the confrontation between the Doctor and the captain of the Tesselecta over just what the Justice Department are doing is wrapped up as quickly and as glibly as possible to make way for yet more ker-razy River Song action.
I realise that many people would say that River Song is the story, and the whole business with the Tesselecta is just bolted-on filler, but that's a view I'm never going to subscribe to. Old Who (and especially early-to-mid-1980s Who) routinely gets kicked for suborning all considerations of plot, character and sanity to the showrunner's urge to bring back Character X (or, under the rules of modern TV drama, to grind out the next gristly bit of arc exposition) - and rightly so. When, say, the inevitable return of the Master is the sole driving force within a story and any original ideas are used (/wasted) as the disposable wrapping for that, you end up with Time-Flight. It isn't pretty. Well, I don't see why New Who should be judged differently.
So anyway, the Doctor grumbles out of the side of his mouth that the Justice Department are playing God, and the matter is shelved there. At first glance (or rather, at first subtextual glance, so I suppose really at second glance) it appears as if Steven Moffat is suggesting that tracking down war criminals who've evaded justice is a bad thing. But I don't want to go there, because it's just too damn easy. It's also not strictly accurate. After all, the Justice Department aren't hunting down living, present-day war criminals - they're going back in time to find long-dead war criminals before their documented death. And when they find these criminals, they're not taking them back to the Time Hague to face trial in a transdimensional equivalent of the ICC - they're torturing them for an indefinite period, then (presumably - we're not told) leaving them to the death that History has waiting for them. This is a far more ambiguous set-up, and it really needed to be laid out and examined in a more than superficial way, which makes it all the more frustrating that it was crumpled into a ball and thrown over the writer's shoulder the minute it was raised.
It's clear that Melody Pond/River Song is the important bit of the story as far as Moffat is concerned. So what has he got for us this time - what does he want to say about baby Pond? Sadly, bugger all that we haven't already heard as of the end of the previous episode. It was a given that at some point we'd see her turn from brainwashed Doctor-killer into familiar (semi-)heroic River Song, although I wasn't expecting that to centre on such an abrupt and limp change of heart. The only new arc material we're given is Mels, a character that makes my brain want to vomit. She's apparently Amy's closest childhood friend, even though this is about as plausible as Rupert the Bear growing up with Rorschach from Watchmen, and she has no existence whatsoever outside the quarter-hour of this episode that she appears in. No groundwork has been laid for her, and I somehow doubt she'll ever be mentioned again. There's not even any effort to bridge the gap between the little girl being raised by the Silence in 1969 Americaville and Mels appearing out of nowhere at Amy's school in 1990s Leadworth - that just sort of happened. Never mind my own viewpoint, I find it hard to believe that even Steven Moffat genuinely cares about this rancid stuff based on the evidence on screen.
And at the end, we (or perhaps I should say the Ponds) are left in the same position as at the end of A Good Man Goes to War, just with an additional galling twist. We've gone from "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because she grew up to be River Song" to "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because she spent years with them as Amy's staggeringly unlikely psychopathic criminal friend, and then grew up to be River Song". None of the trauma Amy and Rory were put through in Series 2011 Part One has been resolved - in fact, watching their best childhood friend threaten the Doctor with a gun and get shot herself would add to that trauma if anything - but you wouldn't know it from their behaviour here. It's more obvious than ever before that these characters are empty ciphers - the fact that a character like Mels can be jammed into Amy's backstory without anyone turning a hair speaks volumes. This episode hasn't progressed the characters or the story arc in any meaningful way at all. That makes two disposable arc-significant episodes in a row.
If this story had turned up in another season, with all of the arc stuff gone and the spare thirty minutes spent examining the ethics around the Tesselecta, maybe letting Hitler back out of the cupboard, maybe - who knows? - fleshing out some of the regular and secondary characters, then I think I could have rated it quite highly. As it is, I'm plumping for a low 3 out of 10. I'm also going to have to retroactively downgrade Good Man from a 5 to a 4, because without a resolution it can only stand (or rather, fall) on the set pieces. On the plus side, it looks as though the bloody tiresome story arc will be taking a back seat for the next few episodes.
Let's get this clear first off: this is not the second part of the story begun in A Good Man Goes to War. We have yet to see that second part, if indeed we will ever see it. The trailer suggests that Blackhat McEyepatch will return, and I sincerely hope she'll bring her motivation with her this time, but there's no trace of her here. Let's Kill Hitler is not interested in following up on any of the threads left hanging at the end of the previous episode. It's also not interested in Hitler, title notwithstanding - he's dumped in a cupboard at the first opportunity and never seen again. Perhaps a title like Let's Use Hitler As Gratuitous Story-Tinsel would have given too much away.
I actually liked bits of the episode, specifically the bits involving the Tesselecta. I liked the concept and the execution, and could have done with a full episode based around it. But Let's Kill Hitler isn't even interested in that. It's interested in one thing only, and that's River Song. What we've got here is roughly 30% of a potentially interesting DW story that's hijacked by you-know-who - we don't want any nasty moral debate getting in the way of our hi-jinks - and so the confrontation between the Doctor and the captain of the Tesselecta over just what the Justice Department are doing is wrapped up as quickly and as glibly as possible to make way for yet more ker-razy River Song action.
I realise that many people would say that River Song is the story, and the whole business with the Tesselecta is just bolted-on filler, but that's a view I'm never going to subscribe to. Old Who (and especially early-to-mid-1980s Who) routinely gets kicked for suborning all considerations of plot, character and sanity to the showrunner's urge to bring back Character X (or, under the rules of modern TV drama, to grind out the next gristly bit of arc exposition) - and rightly so. When, say, the inevitable return of the Master is the sole driving force within a story and any original ideas are used (/wasted) as the disposable wrapping for that, you end up with Time-Flight. It isn't pretty. Well, I don't see why New Who should be judged differently.
So anyway, the Doctor grumbles out of the side of his mouth that the Justice Department are playing God, and the matter is shelved there. At first glance (or rather, at first subtextual glance, so I suppose really at second glance) it appears as if Steven Moffat is suggesting that tracking down war criminals who've evaded justice is a bad thing. But I don't want to go there, because it's just too damn easy. It's also not strictly accurate. After all, the Justice Department aren't hunting down living, present-day war criminals - they're going back in time to find long-dead war criminals before their documented death. And when they find these criminals, they're not taking them back to the Time Hague to face trial in a transdimensional equivalent of the ICC - they're torturing them for an indefinite period, then (presumably - we're not told) leaving them to the death that History has waiting for them. This is a far more ambiguous set-up, and it really needed to be laid out and examined in a more than superficial way, which makes it all the more frustrating that it was crumpled into a ball and thrown over the writer's shoulder the minute it was raised.
It's clear that Melody Pond/River Song is the important bit of the story as far as Moffat is concerned. So what has he got for us this time - what does he want to say about baby Pond? Sadly, bugger all that we haven't already heard as of the end of the previous episode. It was a given that at some point we'd see her turn from brainwashed Doctor-killer into familiar (semi-)heroic River Song, although I wasn't expecting that to centre on such an abrupt and limp change of heart. The only new arc material we're given is Mels, a character that makes my brain want to vomit. She's apparently Amy's closest childhood friend, even though this is about as plausible as Rupert the Bear growing up with Rorschach from Watchmen, and she has no existence whatsoever outside the quarter-hour of this episode that she appears in. No groundwork has been laid for her, and I somehow doubt she'll ever be mentioned again. There's not even any effort to bridge the gap between the little girl being raised by the Silence in 1969 Americaville and Mels appearing out of nowhere at Amy's school in 1990s Leadworth - that just sort of happened. Never mind my own viewpoint, I find it hard to believe that even Steven Moffat genuinely cares about this rancid stuff based on the evidence on screen.
And at the end, we (or perhaps I should say the Ponds) are left in the same position as at the end of A Good Man Goes to War, just with an additional galling twist. We've gone from "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because she grew up to be River Song" to "Rory and Amy's daughter has been kidnapped by evil cultists, but it's all right because she spent years with them as Amy's staggeringly unlikely psychopathic criminal friend, and then grew up to be River Song". None of the trauma Amy and Rory were put through in Series 2011 Part One has been resolved - in fact, watching their best childhood friend threaten the Doctor with a gun and get shot herself would add to that trauma if anything - but you wouldn't know it from their behaviour here. It's more obvious than ever before that these characters are empty ciphers - the fact that a character like Mels can be jammed into Amy's backstory without anyone turning a hair speaks volumes. This episode hasn't progressed the characters or the story arc in any meaningful way at all. That makes two disposable arc-significant episodes in a row.
If this story had turned up in another season, with all of the arc stuff gone and the spare thirty minutes spent examining the ethics around the Tesselecta, maybe letting Hitler back out of the cupboard, maybe - who knows? - fleshing out some of the regular and secondary characters, then I think I could have rated it quite highly. As it is, I'm plumping for a low 3 out of 10. I'm also going to have to retroactively downgrade Good Man from a 5 to a 4, because without a resolution it can only stand (or rather, fall) on the set pieces. On the plus side, it looks as though the bloody tiresome story arc will be taking a back seat for the next few episodes.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Doctor Who 2011, Part One: Postamble
I don't know if anyone else noticed it (either consciously or, as I did, in a way that fermented in my mind for a couple of weeks and then burst out fully formed one fine morning), but there was a bit of a theme running through the demi-season. Not an intentional theme, perhaps, but definitely there. Consider this: The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, The Doctor's Wife and The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People all feature characters using other sentient characters as tools. And I don't mean in the old-school DW sense of downtrodden workers or oppressed serfs, I mean literally as tools - as objects being put to a purpose. In all three cases, this is specifically presented to us as abuse. Let's just take a look at the Doctor's response to the situation in these episodes.
In the Silence two-parter, the Silence are getting humanity to do all their work for them through mind control - the Doctor defeats them by getting humanity to do the job for him using the Silence's own mind control. In The Doctor's Wife, House uses Idris as a receptacle for the TARDIS's soul (for want of a better word) so that he can possess the TARDIS - the Doctor defeats House by allowing Idris to die in exactly the same way that would have suited House, except that he makes it happen in a place that suits him.
The Ganger two-parter is a somewhat different case, because nobody's presented as an outright villain (until one of the victim characters turns into a CGI effect, anyway), and the Doctor doesn't use the Gangers as tools against their human templates - rather, it's his job in this story to point out to the human characters that they're objectifying, exploiting and even causing suffering to the self-aware Flesh. However, in the arc-related bit at the end he does treat Ganger Amy as a disposable tool - not a tool he's used, granted, but a tool to be discarded nonetheless. We could work around this if we made the same speculative assumptions that would allow us to reconcile that scene with the story leading up to it - in other words, it's the editorial bungle that makes the Doctor zapping Ganger Amy look like a complete contradiction of the story's apparent message that also makes it part of my argument here.
So in the first two instances above, the Doctor strikes back at his opponents by using their victim-tools against them. Again, I don't mean in the old-school DW way that the Doctor would encourage and empower the oppressed characters to express their own independence, or otherwise convince them to act against their oppressors, but by exploiting them as tools in the exact same way that the villains have exploited them. In the third instance, which I think of more as supporting than as prima facie evidence, he treats a character in an unpleasant, objectifying way in the same way that Madame Eyepatch has, although there's no suggestion that this will harm Eyepatch or undo her schemes.
(In this light, the little sick joke in The Doctor's Wife when the Doctor lands the junk console on top of Nephew and quips that that's "another Ood I failed to save" starts to look more sick than joke, since the whole set-up of the Ood was that humanity was exploiting them as tools, and it fell to the Doctor first to get the humans to regard the Ood as sentients in their own right, and second to bear witness to the Ood revolution.)
(I might also reiterate my objections to the treatment of Abigail in A Christmas Carol at this point. Where the hell is this series going?)
It's typical for the Doctor to use an enemy's tools against them, and I think this is how this sort of thing might slip under Steven Moffat's mental radar and find its way into an episode (or several episodes in close succession, as it turns out). But of course, in these cases it does involve the Doctor callously treating sentients in a way that doesn't cast him in a great light by comparison with the people he's fighting. I think what we're dealing with here is basically an inability to see the boundary between the Doctor hoisting villains with their own petards and the Doctor committing some of the same ethical crimes as the villains. These deeply queasy moments could easily be mistaken for more typically Doctorish activity, which makes them doubly insidious.
So whaddya know, it turns out that I do have one more positive thing to say about The Curse of the Black Spot - it's the only story out of the four and a half presented thus far this year that unquestionably falls outside this worrying pattern. It may see the Doctor consorting with pirates (although they're not a very bloodthirsty mob, and Wikipedia suggests that the historical Cap'n Avery was actually quite a nice pirate, relatively speaking), but there aren't any real ethical gaffes on display.
A Good Man Goes to War isn't in the clear yet, though. Until we see the episode currently billed as Let's Kill Hitler, we won't know whether the Doctor ends up using Amy's daughter in some way in order to defeat Madame Eyepatch, but we know Eyepatch was planning to use Amy's daughter as a tool, specifically as a weapon against the Doctor, so we're already halfway into the pattern as well as the story. It's possible that Moffat has been building this up deliberately, and that, with his own putative future love interest at stake, the second demi-season might see the Doctor stop, think for a bit and acknowledge the error of his ways. (A bit like the end of Resurrection of the Daleks, only with more than one story's build-up.) We shall see. I'm inclined to say that the damage has been done.
And that's where Series 2011, Part One leaves me - staring down once more into the pit of the Gaping Depths of Horror. It's getting crowded in there. Series 2011, Part One also leaves me still waiting for a real sock-knocking-off humdinger of an episode, but that's no cause for concern - I've often found my favourite episodes of New Who in the second half of the season. According to the spring trailer, there's an episode still to come that involves a hotel, a Minotaur, a clown and a restaurant full of ventiloquist's dummies, and I've tentatively pinned my hopes for this year on that one.
Let's close with some predictions for the second half of the series. Rumours and spoilers about these episodes are surprisingly few at time of writing, so we can have an honest punt at second-guessing the shock twists that Steven Moffat believes are the very essence of storytelling. It'll be interesting to compare notes in four months' time.
I think it's extremely likely that the Ganger Doctor will make a return, specifically to resolve the Doctor's apparent death - why even suggest that he could be brought back from his slushy disintegration at the end of The Almost People, if it's not significant? To mention the possibility at all is to make too much out of it for me to ignore. I'd be surprised and amused if the Ganger Doctor didn't do the actual dying. Well, anyway, that's the most obvious thing that Steven Moffat could do.
The second most obvious thing would be to have the Ganger Doctor take over after the real Doctor's death. But I'm inclined to go with Plan A, because...
...I think if we are going to see a genuine, no-bluffing lead character death this year, it's going to be Rory - it's now pretty much a running joke that he keeps dying-but-not-really, so properly killing him off with no returns would potentially have shock value. The single image teaser for Series 2011, Part Two shows us a skeletal hand clutching the sonic screwdriver - and who had the most use out of that in A Good Man Goes To War? Rory, that's who. I'm not sure, but he might even still have it at the end of the episode. (And while we're led to assume that the Good Man of the title is the Doctor, it might just as well be Rory. River Song's supposedly going to kill "a good man", isn't she?)
One thing that does seem to be on the cards is that Moffat will address the problem of the "celebrity Doctor" that's developed in recent years, with species all over the place fearing him as a great warrior and trying to lock him up or develop weapons to use against his possible attack. It seems obvious that the Doctor's "death" has been staged to allow him to sink back into obscurity. Presumably the lone Silence on the hill is supposed to bear witness to this, and then pass word down through the magic grapevine that keeps the entire universe up to date with DW's latest plot developments.
In the Silence two-parter, the Silence are getting humanity to do all their work for them through mind control - the Doctor defeats them by getting humanity to do the job for him using the Silence's own mind control. In The Doctor's Wife, House uses Idris as a receptacle for the TARDIS's soul (for want of a better word) so that he can possess the TARDIS - the Doctor defeats House by allowing Idris to die in exactly the same way that would have suited House, except that he makes it happen in a place that suits him.
The Ganger two-parter is a somewhat different case, because nobody's presented as an outright villain (until one of the victim characters turns into a CGI effect, anyway), and the Doctor doesn't use the Gangers as tools against their human templates - rather, it's his job in this story to point out to the human characters that they're objectifying, exploiting and even causing suffering to the self-aware Flesh. However, in the arc-related bit at the end he does treat Ganger Amy as a disposable tool - not a tool he's used, granted, but a tool to be discarded nonetheless. We could work around this if we made the same speculative assumptions that would allow us to reconcile that scene with the story leading up to it - in other words, it's the editorial bungle that makes the Doctor zapping Ganger Amy look like a complete contradiction of the story's apparent message that also makes it part of my argument here.
So in the first two instances above, the Doctor strikes back at his opponents by using their victim-tools against them. Again, I don't mean in the old-school DW way that the Doctor would encourage and empower the oppressed characters to express their own independence, or otherwise convince them to act against their oppressors, but by exploiting them as tools in the exact same way that the villains have exploited them. In the third instance, which I think of more as supporting than as prima facie evidence, he treats a character in an unpleasant, objectifying way in the same way that Madame Eyepatch has, although there's no suggestion that this will harm Eyepatch or undo her schemes.
(In this light, the little sick joke in The Doctor's Wife when the Doctor lands the junk console on top of Nephew and quips that that's "another Ood I failed to save" starts to look more sick than joke, since the whole set-up of the Ood was that humanity was exploiting them as tools, and it fell to the Doctor first to get the humans to regard the Ood as sentients in their own right, and second to bear witness to the Ood revolution.)
(I might also reiterate my objections to the treatment of Abigail in A Christmas Carol at this point. Where the hell is this series going?)
It's typical for the Doctor to use an enemy's tools against them, and I think this is how this sort of thing might slip under Steven Moffat's mental radar and find its way into an episode (or several episodes in close succession, as it turns out). But of course, in these cases it does involve the Doctor callously treating sentients in a way that doesn't cast him in a great light by comparison with the people he's fighting. I think what we're dealing with here is basically an inability to see the boundary between the Doctor hoisting villains with their own petards and the Doctor committing some of the same ethical crimes as the villains. These deeply queasy moments could easily be mistaken for more typically Doctorish activity, which makes them doubly insidious.
So whaddya know, it turns out that I do have one more positive thing to say about The Curse of the Black Spot - it's the only story out of the four and a half presented thus far this year that unquestionably falls outside this worrying pattern. It may see the Doctor consorting with pirates (although they're not a very bloodthirsty mob, and Wikipedia suggests that the historical Cap'n Avery was actually quite a nice pirate, relatively speaking), but there aren't any real ethical gaffes on display.
A Good Man Goes to War isn't in the clear yet, though. Until we see the episode currently billed as Let's Kill Hitler, we won't know whether the Doctor ends up using Amy's daughter in some way in order to defeat Madame Eyepatch, but we know Eyepatch was planning to use Amy's daughter as a tool, specifically as a weapon against the Doctor, so we're already halfway into the pattern as well as the story. It's possible that Moffat has been building this up deliberately, and that, with his own putative future love interest at stake, the second demi-season might see the Doctor stop, think for a bit and acknowledge the error of his ways. (A bit like the end of Resurrection of the Daleks, only with more than one story's build-up.) We shall see. I'm inclined to say that the damage has been done.
And that's where Series 2011, Part One leaves me - staring down once more into the pit of the Gaping Depths of Horror. It's getting crowded in there. Series 2011, Part One also leaves me still waiting for a real sock-knocking-off humdinger of an episode, but that's no cause for concern - I've often found my favourite episodes of New Who in the second half of the season. According to the spring trailer, there's an episode still to come that involves a hotel, a Minotaur, a clown and a restaurant full of ventiloquist's dummies, and I've tentatively pinned my hopes for this year on that one.
Let's close with some predictions for the second half of the series. Rumours and spoilers about these episodes are surprisingly few at time of writing, so we can have an honest punt at second-guessing the shock twists that Steven Moffat believes are the very essence of storytelling. It'll be interesting to compare notes in four months' time.
I think it's extremely likely that the Ganger Doctor will make a return, specifically to resolve the Doctor's apparent death - why even suggest that he could be brought back from his slushy disintegration at the end of The Almost People, if it's not significant? To mention the possibility at all is to make too much out of it for me to ignore. I'd be surprised and amused if the Ganger Doctor didn't do the actual dying. Well, anyway, that's the most obvious thing that Steven Moffat could do.
The second most obvious thing would be to have the Ganger Doctor take over after the real Doctor's death. But I'm inclined to go with Plan A, because...
...I think if we are going to see a genuine, no-bluffing lead character death this year, it's going to be Rory - it's now pretty much a running joke that he keeps dying-but-not-really, so properly killing him off with no returns would potentially have shock value. The single image teaser for Series 2011, Part Two shows us a skeletal hand clutching the sonic screwdriver - and who had the most use out of that in A Good Man Goes To War? Rory, that's who. I'm not sure, but he might even still have it at the end of the episode. (And while we're led to assume that the Good Man of the title is the Doctor, it might just as well be Rory. River Song's supposedly going to kill "a good man", isn't she?)
One thing that does seem to be on the cards is that Moffat will address the problem of the "celebrity Doctor" that's developed in recent years, with species all over the place fearing him as a great warrior and trying to lock him up or develop weapons to use against his possible attack. It seems obvious that the Doctor's "death" has been staged to allow him to sink back into obscurity. Presumably the lone Silence on the hill is supposed to bear witness to this, and then pass word down through the magic grapevine that keeps the entire universe up to date with DW's latest plot developments.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
(A Good Man Goes to) War, huh! What is it good for?
What does A Good Man Goes to War have to offer, exactly? A handful of set pieces, a big fight, a bit of exposition... not much more than that. I will say that I liked the set pieces. I want to start this review on a positive note, or as positive as it can be, so let's admire the set pieces.
These almost came on like mini-pilots for new spin-off series - the Napoleonic Wars in space with Sontarans, and the Victorian Silurian adventuress with her Quatermass and the Pit knock-off back story and her plucky maidservant sidekick. Indeed, I know there'd be a very enthusiastic audience among the online Who forums (and Jo seems keen, too) for a whole series of the latter. Bod knows I'd rather have seen that origin story than last year's two-part Silurian mess. And I'd certainly rather have seen the story in which the Doctor institutes nursing as a "punishment" for dishonorable Sontarans over the mess of 2008's two-parter, or just about any two episodes from this year's series for that matter. The comedy Welsh Sontaran nurse was, beyond all question, the single best thing about this episode, and by a very comfortable margin too. It's a pity to lose him, but who knows, perhaps we'll see more of the arse-kicking Victorians in the second half of the series?
Oh yes, and "Colonel Run Away". I liked that as a way of dealing with that character, very satisfying.
I'm withholding judgement on Madame Eyepatch for the time being - I'm waiting to see whether we learn anything about her motivation or the actual details of her plan in the next episode(s). Presumably she does have some sort of grievance against the Doctor - she wouldn't go to such extreme trouble to obtain a weapon against the Doctor just because she's heard stories about him, surely? (Perhaps we'll find out what her motivation is at the same time that we find out what the Silence's motivation was, hmm?) Or perhaps she's working for "the Papal mainframe herself"- now that could potentially be another interesting story, assuming for a minute that it isn't just a throwaway joke. I'm guessing we'll find out exactly how she thinks baby Pond can be used as a weapon against the Doctor, although it'll be disappointing if "stick her in a spacesuit and get her to shoot him" is the entire plan.
Of course, we know it'll turn out all right because of the revelation that baby Pond is none other than River Song (presumably the spacesuit girl as well, and that's certainly the way this episode's visuals play it, but best not to assume it). On the squib scale, this registers as "damp" - River being Amy's daughter became the number one most obvious possibility the moment the whole Schrodinger's Bun-in-the-Oven arc-thing kicked off. And let's face it, it's just not that extraordinary. (A friend suggests the revelation should have been followed with the EastEnders theme.) I'm just glad we weren't presented with the original number one most obvious possibility, that she was your choice of female Time Lord in disguise.
In conjunction with the big overblown reveal, we've got the second instance this series of Amy threatening someone (her own daughter in both cases, as it turns out) with a gun. Didn't actually shoot her this time, at least. Yes, kids, if your best friend suddenly runs out on you, if you're having trouble getting information out of someone, or even if you're just having difficulty with your foreign languages homework, guns are your problem-solving tool of choice... This partly bothers me because it's the wrong thing for the show to do, and partly because there's absolutely no reason at all here for Amy to do it. Apparently she's just someone who picks up guns and waves them around in a stressful situation. Bang, so to speak, goes all of this year's hard work making Amy a more tolerable character - quick, bring back the Ganger version!
My other major issue with this episode is the whole business with The Fat One and The Thin One. When RTD included a gay character in a DW script, they would always be a character who happened to be gay. Character first. Even in this very series, Steven Moffat managed the same with Delaware in the Silence two-parter and the Victorian duo in this one, although in both cases he revealed their sexuality in order to make a quick joke out of it rather than merely revealing it. The Fat One and The Thin One, on the other hand, are defined entirely by their sexuality. They're the gay married Anglican marines, and that is literally all you need to know about them. Why, they don't even need proper names - there's a thin one and a fat one - characterisation done! Let's laugh it off, eh? This bothers me immensely, and it doesn't help that in whatever year it is (the appearance of the Clerics and the big blue merchant guy suggests it's the permissive 51st century), in a Church that's so futuristic it defers to a female e-Pope, the number of gay men in a stable relationship is precisely two. It's a hell of a comedown from RTD's gonzo liberal vision of the future. I'd be pretty confident in betting that there's more than two out gay clerics in the world today, never mind in Space Year Upyours.
Beyond that, it's just a loose string of visual baubles, a bunch of barely connected stuff that somebody thought would look cool. The headless monks are a prime example, and it's telling that the director has taken what looks like the one shot of three Dementors sparking up their crackly electric swords and jammed it in at every requisite point with bugger all regard for visual editorial coherence. As long as it'll look good in a clips show, who cares? We also have the narrative equivalent of this, in the "He'll climb higher than ever before, then fall so much farther" line - a nice soundbite for the trailer, perhaps, but ultimately just empty hyperbole. And then bloody Danny-boy turns up, in what is now apparently a time-travelling space Spitfire - please, please make it stop.
Destroying an entire fleet of Cybermen just to extort some information out of them (or possibly just "to make a point" if the Clerics are right) - not only is it out of character for the Doctor, it's an extreme waste of effort. Couldn't he just have hacked into their server or something? But then that wouldn't have looked cool, would it? Granted, it's the moment Rory will forever be remembered for, and if DW were a Guy Ritchie heist movie it'd fit right in. Perhaps that's what this is, the DW story that parodies Guy Ritchie's heist movies, who knows? That's probably more true than I imagine.
I'd also be interested to know which particular army of Silurians owes the Doctor a favour, because it certainly isn't one that we've seen recently. Perhaps they're all out and about in the 51st century, and he just picked a squad up in passing?
Finally, I really hope Steven Moffat isn't developing a taste for cheesy voiceovers in verse. First The Beast Below, and now this. I dread to think what the one for Let's Kill Hitler might sound like.
We've got a little while yet to wait for the completing part of this story, so I'll go ahead and rate the episode at hand. I'm leaning towards 5 out of 10, and that's mostly for the character set pieces. For an arc-significant episode, it's surprisingly disposable. Next, the post-demi-season ramble.
These almost came on like mini-pilots for new spin-off series - the Napoleonic Wars in space with Sontarans, and the Victorian Silurian adventuress with her Quatermass and the Pit knock-off back story and her plucky maidservant sidekick. Indeed, I know there'd be a very enthusiastic audience among the online Who forums (and Jo seems keen, too) for a whole series of the latter. Bod knows I'd rather have seen that origin story than last year's two-part Silurian mess. And I'd certainly rather have seen the story in which the Doctor institutes nursing as a "punishment" for dishonorable Sontarans over the mess of 2008's two-parter, or just about any two episodes from this year's series for that matter. The comedy Welsh Sontaran nurse was, beyond all question, the single best thing about this episode, and by a very comfortable margin too. It's a pity to lose him, but who knows, perhaps we'll see more of the arse-kicking Victorians in the second half of the series?
Oh yes, and "Colonel Run Away". I liked that as a way of dealing with that character, very satisfying.
I'm withholding judgement on Madame Eyepatch for the time being - I'm waiting to see whether we learn anything about her motivation or the actual details of her plan in the next episode(s). Presumably she does have some sort of grievance against the Doctor - she wouldn't go to such extreme trouble to obtain a weapon against the Doctor just because she's heard stories about him, surely? (Perhaps we'll find out what her motivation is at the same time that we find out what the Silence's motivation was, hmm?) Or perhaps she's working for "the Papal mainframe herself"- now that could potentially be another interesting story, assuming for a minute that it isn't just a throwaway joke. I'm guessing we'll find out exactly how she thinks baby Pond can be used as a weapon against the Doctor, although it'll be disappointing if "stick her in a spacesuit and get her to shoot him" is the entire plan.
Of course, we know it'll turn out all right because of the revelation that baby Pond is none other than River Song (presumably the spacesuit girl as well, and that's certainly the way this episode's visuals play it, but best not to assume it). On the squib scale, this registers as "damp" - River being Amy's daughter became the number one most obvious possibility the moment the whole Schrodinger's Bun-in-the-Oven arc-thing kicked off. And let's face it, it's just not that extraordinary. (A friend suggests the revelation should have been followed with the EastEnders theme.) I'm just glad we weren't presented with the original number one most obvious possibility, that she was your choice of female Time Lord in disguise.
In conjunction with the big overblown reveal, we've got the second instance this series of Amy threatening someone (her own daughter in both cases, as it turns out) with a gun. Didn't actually shoot her this time, at least. Yes, kids, if your best friend suddenly runs out on you, if you're having trouble getting information out of someone, or even if you're just having difficulty with your foreign languages homework, guns are your problem-solving tool of choice... This partly bothers me because it's the wrong thing for the show to do, and partly because there's absolutely no reason at all here for Amy to do it. Apparently she's just someone who picks up guns and waves them around in a stressful situation. Bang, so to speak, goes all of this year's hard work making Amy a more tolerable character - quick, bring back the Ganger version!
My other major issue with this episode is the whole business with The Fat One and The Thin One. When RTD included a gay character in a DW script, they would always be a character who happened to be gay. Character first. Even in this very series, Steven Moffat managed the same with Delaware in the Silence two-parter and the Victorian duo in this one, although in both cases he revealed their sexuality in order to make a quick joke out of it rather than merely revealing it. The Fat One and The Thin One, on the other hand, are defined entirely by their sexuality. They're the gay married Anglican marines, and that is literally all you need to know about them. Why, they don't even need proper names - there's a thin one and a fat one - characterisation done! Let's laugh it off, eh? This bothers me immensely, and it doesn't help that in whatever year it is (the appearance of the Clerics and the big blue merchant guy suggests it's the permissive 51st century), in a Church that's so futuristic it defers to a female e-Pope, the number of gay men in a stable relationship is precisely two. It's a hell of a comedown from RTD's gonzo liberal vision of the future. I'd be pretty confident in betting that there's more than two out gay clerics in the world today, never mind in Space Year Upyours.
Beyond that, it's just a loose string of visual baubles, a bunch of barely connected stuff that somebody thought would look cool. The headless monks are a prime example, and it's telling that the director has taken what looks like the one shot of three Dementors sparking up their crackly electric swords and jammed it in at every requisite point with bugger all regard for visual editorial coherence. As long as it'll look good in a clips show, who cares? We also have the narrative equivalent of this, in the "He'll climb higher than ever before, then fall so much farther" line - a nice soundbite for the trailer, perhaps, but ultimately just empty hyperbole. And then bloody Danny-boy turns up, in what is now apparently a time-travelling space Spitfire - please, please make it stop.
Destroying an entire fleet of Cybermen just to extort some information out of them (or possibly just "to make a point" if the Clerics are right) - not only is it out of character for the Doctor, it's an extreme waste of effort. Couldn't he just have hacked into their server or something? But then that wouldn't have looked cool, would it? Granted, it's the moment Rory will forever be remembered for, and if DW were a Guy Ritchie heist movie it'd fit right in. Perhaps that's what this is, the DW story that parodies Guy Ritchie's heist movies, who knows? That's probably more true than I imagine.
I'd also be interested to know which particular army of Silurians owes the Doctor a favour, because it certainly isn't one that we've seen recently. Perhaps they're all out and about in the 51st century, and he just picked a squad up in passing?
Finally, I really hope Steven Moffat isn't developing a taste for cheesy voiceovers in verse. First The Beast Below, and now this. I dread to think what the one for Let's Kill Hitler might sound like.
We've got a little while yet to wait for the completing part of this story, so I'll go ahead and rate the episode at hand. I'm leaning towards 5 out of 10, and that's mostly for the character set pieces. For an arc-significant episode, it's surprisingly disposable. Next, the post-demi-season ramble.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
I Think I'm A Clone Now
As I write this, I still have yet to see a single minute of Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes, so the only other work of Matthew Graham that I can compare against The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People is his previous Who episode, Fear Her. (This year's story is an improvement.) However, knowing as I do that his two hit series are homages to the Sweeney-esque cop shows of the '70s and '80s, I believe that I can feel their lingering influence in some of the awkwardly macho dialogue on display. There's so much corn in this pair of scripts that they could have used the Jolly Green Giant for the big CGI monster in the second half.
By and large, this is a passable two-parter - not great, but good enough. Probably in the region of 6 out of 10. What lets it down isn't really the dialogue, but the sheer mess of it all.
Is it the Flesh or the Gangers that are the victim here? The script keeps changing its mind about this. We're told several times about the Flesh's grievances, but it's the Gangers and their struggle for equality with the humans whose minds they share that we're invited to sympathise with. Are they actually perfect copies of their originals, or are they just autonomous parts of a Flesh gestalt? Do all their assertions of ownership over their duplicate memories, their disagreements and in-fighting actually mean anything? I think the whole business about the Flesh being self-aware and suffering in its own right is a dead end in plot terms - the Gangers are quite definitely individuals by the end, and all the talk of a Ganger revolution suggests a population of individuals that has to be organised - but so much is made of it that it muddies the whole issue.
Speaking of muddying, how about that final scene? So the writer spends ninety minutes telling us that clones made out of chip shop batter are real people too and deserve our courtesy and compassion, at the end of which the Doctor turns round and shoots one with his sonichandgun screwdriver. I know we can, if we so choose, devise our own theories to cover this - the technology's moved on, Ganger Amy isn't self-aware as a Ganger - but it looks grievously wrong, and we shouldn't have to make our own apologies for it simply because nobody else has bothered to. (And besides, she's had a lot more of the TARDIS' reputed stablising influence than the Gangers who survive this story - shouldn't she be as "real", or more?) Taken at its face value, in the context of its parent story, it's a complete volte face and a bit of a moral pratfall. It's a bit like the Doctor's vivisectionist fistbump in last year's Silurian story, except that in this case it's clear where the blame lies. Since it's a series arc scene that's been tacked onto the end of the story, I think we can pin it squarely on Steven Moffat - it's his scene, and in his capacity as showrunner and visionary-in-chief he's done a poor job of integrating it into Matthew Graham's story.
In case it wasn't already nauseatingly obvious, I'm not loving this series as much as previous series. More on this in due course.
Much of The Almost People is given over to Wouldn't It Look Cool If scenes that don't make a lick of sense - all the eyes gummed to the wall, the big pile of fused melty Gangers in the basement, and of course the lumbering Jennifer-beast. Jennifer's snakey-neck moment in The Rebel Flesh should also be mentioned. The Ganger Doctor's fan-servicing blast of previous Doctor impressions, possibly. These all have the feel of images that Matthew Graham started with, tried to fit a story around and couldn't bear to lose in the final draft - they don't add a hell of a lot to the story.
I'd be interested to know if acid actually is or can be produced by mining. I freely admit that I know nothing about this, but I always imagined it was synthesised in labs. Any passing scientists reading this, please feel free to comment.
What else? It's easy not to notice in hindsight, once the Doctor switcheroo has been revealed, that we actually saw the real Doctor roughing Amy up in a corridor. In his defence, he had just found out about his death (or at least, he'd found out what Amy thought about it). The business of Amy not trusting (what she believes to be) the Ganger Doctor on principle is laboured well beyond necessity. On the other hand, I felt that the handover of Dad duties from the Scots guy to his Ganger (and the way the Doctor used this as leverage in his relations with the Gangers) was handled very nicely. But just how did the Doctor know to arrange that phone call so far in advance?
By and large, this is a passable two-parter - not great, but good enough. Probably in the region of 6 out of 10. What lets it down isn't really the dialogue, but the sheer mess of it all.
Is it the Flesh or the Gangers that are the victim here? The script keeps changing its mind about this. We're told several times about the Flesh's grievances, but it's the Gangers and their struggle for equality with the humans whose minds they share that we're invited to sympathise with. Are they actually perfect copies of their originals, or are they just autonomous parts of a Flesh gestalt? Do all their assertions of ownership over their duplicate memories, their disagreements and in-fighting actually mean anything? I think the whole business about the Flesh being self-aware and suffering in its own right is a dead end in plot terms - the Gangers are quite definitely individuals by the end, and all the talk of a Ganger revolution suggests a population of individuals that has to be organised - but so much is made of it that it muddies the whole issue.
Speaking of muddying, how about that final scene? So the writer spends ninety minutes telling us that clones made out of chip shop batter are real people too and deserve our courtesy and compassion, at the end of which the Doctor turns round and shoots one with his sonic
In case it wasn't already nauseatingly obvious, I'm not loving this series as much as previous series. More on this in due course.
Much of The Almost People is given over to Wouldn't It Look Cool If scenes that don't make a lick of sense - all the eyes gummed to the wall, the big pile of fused melty Gangers in the basement, and of course the lumbering Jennifer-beast. Jennifer's snakey-neck moment in The Rebel Flesh should also be mentioned. The Ganger Doctor's fan-servicing blast of previous Doctor impressions, possibly. These all have the feel of images that Matthew Graham started with, tried to fit a story around and couldn't bear to lose in the final draft - they don't add a hell of a lot to the story.
I'd be interested to know if acid actually is or can be produced by mining. I freely admit that I know nothing about this, but I always imagined it was synthesised in labs. Any passing scientists reading this, please feel free to comment.
What else? It's easy not to notice in hindsight, once the Doctor switcheroo has been revealed, that we actually saw the real Doctor roughing Amy up in a corridor. In his defence, he had just found out about his death (or at least, he'd found out what Amy thought about it). The business of Amy not trusting (what she believes to be) the Ganger Doctor on principle is laboured well beyond necessity. On the other hand, I felt that the handover of Dad duties from the Scots guy to his Ganger (and the way the Doctor used this as leverage in his relations with the Gangers) was handled very nicely. But just how did the Doctor know to arrange that phone call so far in advance?
Friday, July 08, 2011
"It's like kissing, except that there's a winner!"
And so to The Doctor's Wife. Atmospheric, witty in a slightly grim way, more than a touch of melodrama (dare I say Grand Guignol?) about it. There was no particular theme that I noticed, and the story itself was pretty straightforward - in fact, I'd say the episode didn't present so much a story as a platform for some character interaction, some zingy dialogue and the broad elaboration of a high concept idea (sentient asteroid from another dimension eats timeships!). It'd probably make a good 30-odd-page comic book. (I say that... it very nearly already did. See footnote.)
In other words, this is pretty much what you might expect a one-off DW story written by Neil Gaiman to look like. It even has a powerful abstract entity embodied as an attractive Goth-lite young woman, although the TARDIS's dialogue comes across as more Delirium than Death. I'm not aware of any evidence either way as to whether Death had a posh accent. Another Gaimanism in evidence is the inversion of a familiar bit of mythology, and so here we're presented with the suggestion that the TARDIS stole the Doctor, rather than the other way around. Works for me.
This is clearly the best episode of the demi-season, but the competition isn't the fiercest on record, and on balance I might only give it an 8 out of 10. Observations follow.
The guest characters in this are brutally used. It's not clear whether we're expected to feel sympathy for Auntie and Uncle - the Doctor's angry at them because they're largely made of cannibalised parts of his old friends, but that's not exactly their fault, and they're clearly House's victims as much as anyone here. Still, no sympathy is shown in-story - if anything, they're presented as figures of macabre fun - and they're pretty much forgotten the minute they tragicomically keel over with multiple organ failure. Idris' fate is similar - in fact, we don't get to know the character of Idris as anything more than a physical vessel for the TARDIS' soul/mind/whatever-it-is. Her death by organ failure is more tragi- than -comic, but clearly seen as necessary and desirable in story terms. Once Nephew the green-eyed Ood has lured the Doctor into House's trap, he serves only two purposes - to give Amy a creepy moment in the dark, and to give the Doctor an opportunity to make a sick crack about his track record vis-a-vis saving Oods. Beneath the jokes, this isn't a pleasant story.
That the TARDIS is sentient in some way is old news, nearly as old as the show itself. That contrary to the Doctor's wishes, it always takes him where he needs to go, is also old news, speculated if not openly stated (and I think it may have been stated in Old Who on occasion). Having the TARDIS interact with the Doctor as a person is a novelty, but the only real revelation apart from the who-stole-whom reversal mentioned above is that the TARDIS expects to be referred to as... Sexy? The Outer Limits meets Top Gear, perhaps. Well, I suppose it does play up to all the times we've seen the Doctor petting the console. And as the final scene shows, we've known all along where the Doctor's room was.
Finally, how good is Arthur Darvill in the hallucinatory freakout scenes? This good, that's how good.
Next episode, a story about clones with CGI monster overtones of The Lazarus Experiment. Sadly The Sontaran Experiment has already been used as a title in DW.
Footnote: Well, let's not clutter up the main bit of the blog post too much. Waaaay back in the misty dawn of the mid-80s when Colin Baker roamed the Earth, Doctor Who Magazine ran a comic strip story called Fun House. The resemblance is patchy and debatable, but well worth a mention.
Fun House sees the Sixth Doctor and his companion Frobisher (a shape-changing alien stuck in the form of a penguin - those were the days, by thunder) land inside a sentient House that attacks them psychologically through hallucinations. Included is a disturbing vision of a contemporary companion - Peri, in this case, who was travelling with the Doctor in the TV stories. The House lives outside the regular universe, and wants to use the TARDIS to escape and/or feed on it. Here, it attempts to absorb the TARDIS into itself rather than the other way around. No mention is made of the TARDIS's mind/soul, and the Doctor repels the hijacker by regressing time inside the TARDIS until the House is shaken off, but the upshot is the same - the House is flung out into the Time Vortex.
On an extremely tangential note, during the time-regressing bit Frobisher is seen to collapse into a pile of goo - now that's what I call foreshadowing!
In other words, this is pretty much what you might expect a one-off DW story written by Neil Gaiman to look like. It even has a powerful abstract entity embodied as an attractive Goth-lite young woman, although the TARDIS's dialogue comes across as more Delirium than Death. I'm not aware of any evidence either way as to whether Death had a posh accent. Another Gaimanism in evidence is the inversion of a familiar bit of mythology, and so here we're presented with the suggestion that the TARDIS stole the Doctor, rather than the other way around. Works for me.
This is clearly the best episode of the demi-season, but the competition isn't the fiercest on record, and on balance I might only give it an 8 out of 10. Observations follow.
The guest characters in this are brutally used. It's not clear whether we're expected to feel sympathy for Auntie and Uncle - the Doctor's angry at them because they're largely made of cannibalised parts of his old friends, but that's not exactly their fault, and they're clearly House's victims as much as anyone here. Still, no sympathy is shown in-story - if anything, they're presented as figures of macabre fun - and they're pretty much forgotten the minute they tragicomically keel over with multiple organ failure. Idris' fate is similar - in fact, we don't get to know the character of Idris as anything more than a physical vessel for the TARDIS' soul/mind/whatever-it-is. Her death by organ failure is more tragi- than -comic, but clearly seen as necessary and desirable in story terms. Once Nephew the green-eyed Ood has lured the Doctor into House's trap, he serves only two purposes - to give Amy a creepy moment in the dark, and to give the Doctor an opportunity to make a sick crack about his track record vis-a-vis saving Oods. Beneath the jokes, this isn't a pleasant story.
That the TARDIS is sentient in some way is old news, nearly as old as the show itself. That contrary to the Doctor's wishes, it always takes him where he needs to go, is also old news, speculated if not openly stated (and I think it may have been stated in Old Who on occasion). Having the TARDIS interact with the Doctor as a person is a novelty, but the only real revelation apart from the who-stole-whom reversal mentioned above is that the TARDIS expects to be referred to as... Sexy? The Outer Limits meets Top Gear, perhaps. Well, I suppose it does play up to all the times we've seen the Doctor petting the console. And as the final scene shows, we've known all along where the Doctor's room was.
Finally, how good is Arthur Darvill in the hallucinatory freakout scenes? This good, that's how good.
Next episode, a story about clones with CGI monster overtones of The Lazarus Experiment. Sadly The Sontaran Experiment has already been used as a title in DW.
Footnote: Well, let's not clutter up the main bit of the blog post too much. Waaaay back in the misty dawn of the mid-80s when Colin Baker roamed the Earth, Doctor Who Magazine ran a comic strip story called Fun House. The resemblance is patchy and debatable, but well worth a mention.
Fun House sees the Sixth Doctor and his companion Frobisher (a shape-changing alien stuck in the form of a penguin - those were the days, by thunder) land inside a sentient House that attacks them psychologically through hallucinations. Included is a disturbing vision of a contemporary companion - Peri, in this case, who was travelling with the Doctor in the TV stories. The House lives outside the regular universe, and wants to use the TARDIS to escape and/or feed on it. Here, it attempts to absorb the TARDIS into itself rather than the other way around. No mention is made of the TARDIS's mind/soul, and the Doctor repels the hijacker by regressing time inside the TARDIS until the House is shaken off, but the upshot is the same - the House is flung out into the Time Vortex.
On an extremely tangential note, during the time-regressing bit Frobisher is seen to collapse into a pile of goo - now that's what I call foreshadowing!
Friday, July 01, 2011
They Just Arrr
We're about five years late for the pirate craze, aren't we?
A lot of other viewers have pointed out the Moffatiness of The Curse of the Black Spot. It's not one of Steven Moffat's episodes, and yet it is extremely Moffaty. The "monster" is a bit of technology gone wrong (and specifically a bit of medical technology, as in The Empty Child), it uses mirrors as portals to menace characters in the past (just like in The Girl in the Fireplace), it looks like a creature from human mythology and zaps people away across the dimensions with its touch (a bit like the Angels in Blink)...
And yet, throw in the fact that it's an emergency medical hologram and suddenly you're looking at a Star Trek sequel series. Star Trek: Voyager, I think. The juxtaposition of spaceship and olde worlde starts to look a lot like one of those many, many episodes in which the Enterprise's holodeck goes wrong, and the native characters fly off in a spaceship at the end just like Professor Moriarty did in that one Next Generation episode I distinctly remember seeing. It's a bit of a shame that we've come to this, sweeping up Gene Roddenberry's leavings.
There's not a hell of a lot else to say about this one. It's lacklustre. It passes the time, and it doesn't make any horrific gaffes (with the possible exception of Amy saving Rory's life with some CPR performed very badly and less than believably). It's just bland. Bland and a bit like Star Trek. Perhaps a 5 out of 10, perhaps less.
A lot of other viewers have pointed out the Moffatiness of The Curse of the Black Spot. It's not one of Steven Moffat's episodes, and yet it is extremely Moffaty. The "monster" is a bit of technology gone wrong (and specifically a bit of medical technology, as in The Empty Child), it uses mirrors as portals to menace characters in the past (just like in The Girl in the Fireplace), it looks like a creature from human mythology and zaps people away across the dimensions with its touch (a bit like the Angels in Blink)...
And yet, throw in the fact that it's an emergency medical hologram and suddenly you're looking at a Star Trek sequel series. Star Trek: Voyager, I think. The juxtaposition of spaceship and olde worlde starts to look a lot like one of those many, many episodes in which the Enterprise's holodeck goes wrong, and the native characters fly off in a spaceship at the end just like Professor Moriarty did in that one Next Generation episode I distinctly remember seeing. It's a bit of a shame that we've come to this, sweeping up Gene Roddenberry's leavings.
There's not a hell of a lot else to say about this one. It's lacklustre. It passes the time, and it doesn't make any horrific gaffes (with the possible exception of Amy saving Rory's life with some CPR performed very badly and less than believably). It's just bland. Bland and a bit like Star Trek. Perhaps a 5 out of 10, perhaps less.
Everything Under The Sun Is In Tune, But The Sun Is Eclipsed By The Moon
Thoughts on the Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon two-parter. Not a bad couple of episodes - the Wouldn't It Look Cool If tumour is still in evidence, probably inoperable by now (qv episode 7); and perhaps Moffat is playing the I'll Explain Later card just a leeeetle too much; but it has a clear and coherent theme, that of conspiracy theories, so at least there's something clear and coherent about this story.
Consider: it includes grey bobble-headed aliens, Area 51, subliminal messages coded into TV transmissions, the once-popular idea of a Hollow Earth, the Moon landings, Men in Black (both US agents and the grey aliens), faked deaths, Nixon's paranoia... perhaps just a touch of von Daniken as well? They're all crammed in there, so it's no accident if this looks like someone's attempt toknock off pay homage to The X-Files - someone's worked very hard to achieve that result.
So our heroes wander around America, blurting out the unbelievable truth, before finally seeing off the Silence in an appropriately conspiracy-ish way, by subliminally programming humanity to kill them on sight. (Ah yes, that's another one - The Manchurian Candidate.) So, um, I realise the Silence themselves very conveniently said the words, but that's a little discomfiting, isn't it - the Doctor using the human race as his mind-controlled assassins? OK, the Doctor's wiped out alien factions before, but he doesn't usually get an entire species to do it for him. I mean, he actually induces systematic xenophobia in the human race so that they'll commit genocide on his behalf. Perhaps this bit of the story might belong in the Gaping Depths of Horror.
I have two other concerns with this story, and the first and more predictable is that it shows the Doctor palling up with Richard Nixon. More to the point, it portrays Nixon as a lovable old goof and goes so far as to actually have the Doctor tell him to trust no one and tape everything, essentially laying the blame for Watergate on the Doctor's shoulders. That's probably a set-up that sounded funny to Steven Moffat, but I wonder if he ever thinks through the full unsavoury implications of some of his jokes. I thought the same about the most recent charity skits, which we are Not. Going. To. Discuss, and I suspect this is something endemic to Moffat's writing, that he loves a joke but has no way of gauging how appropriate it actually is in a given context. Which was paradoxically a good thing when it came to Coupling, I suppose. Well, anyway. It looks iffy to me, and the "Hippy!" "Archaeologist!" exchange in the first episode looks like exactly what it is, a worthless token effort to acknowledge those nasty moral issues one certainly wouldn't want to examine in the innocent venue of Doctor Who (qv the waste of airtime that was Victory of the Daleks).
My second concern is that we don't actually have any real idea of the Silence's motives. Granted, we might expect them to turn up again later in the series, presumably around the same time that we deal with the Doctor's supposed assassination, and perhaps then we might find out what they're actually up to. Apparently they have an interest in Amy, although given later developments, we may look at her kidnapping in a new light. We may ask whether they're in league with Evil Eyepatch Woman, although they may just as plausibly be working against her. All we're given for now is that they're a kind of cultural/technological parasite, although that isn't applied consistently within the story - they need the humans to create a spacesuit, but they're then going to modify it with their own gonzo alien technology? Perhaps it's more of a symbiotic relationship - the Americans seem to have got hold of some dwarf star alloy somehow, even before they've landed men on the moon. All the Silence seem to be getting in return, apart from the spacesuit, is a lot of shabby second-hand suits.
Still, they do arbitrarily blow someone up, just so that we know they're not nice.
Some other observations:
It's nice to see the production team getting more use out of their American locations than they got out of filming in Dubai two years ago.
It may be a bit late to talk about Moffat Who eating itself - one look at Silence in the Library should remind us that Moffat Who was eating itself before Mr Moffat had even taken over as Who's showrunner - but let's have a shout out for a malevolent spacesuit, an ominous tape recording of a child's voice, and of course that perennial favourite, the child in danger. We'll be seeing some more of that last one as the season arc unfolds.
Let's talk about the Doctor's apparent death. No, obviously Steven Moffat isn't going to literally kill off Doctor Who. And while he went to great lengths to assure the genre press that he really wasn't bluffing this time, and he really was totally going to kill off a lead character... I mean, come on, this is Steven Moffat we're talking about here. The man's cheapened death in his stories to the point that it's given out free in cereal packets. (And the fact that the second episode opens with the other three leads carefully staging their own faked deaths is highly suggestive.) It's a given that he had his fingers crossed behind his back, but will subsequent episodes give any sort of clue as to what he might have in mind?
Hmm, could Henry the mild-mannered janitor really be Hong Kong Phooey? "Could be!"
My only other thought at this time is that that beard kind of suited Matt Smith. I was hoping, as a beardy m'self, that we might have a bearded Doctor for at least some of this year, but alas...
What'll that be then, a 7 out of 10? It's not really an 8, but it probably deserves more than a 6... so a 7 it is.
Consider: it includes grey bobble-headed aliens, Area 51, subliminal messages coded into TV transmissions, the once-popular idea of a Hollow Earth, the Moon landings, Men in Black (both US agents and the grey aliens), faked deaths, Nixon's paranoia... perhaps just a touch of von Daniken as well? They're all crammed in there, so it's no accident if this looks like someone's attempt to
So our heroes wander around America, blurting out the unbelievable truth, before finally seeing off the Silence in an appropriately conspiracy-ish way, by subliminally programming humanity to kill them on sight. (Ah yes, that's another one - The Manchurian Candidate.) So, um, I realise the Silence themselves very conveniently said the words, but that's a little discomfiting, isn't it - the Doctor using the human race as his mind-controlled assassins? OK, the Doctor's wiped out alien factions before, but he doesn't usually get an entire species to do it for him. I mean, he actually induces systematic xenophobia in the human race so that they'll commit genocide on his behalf. Perhaps this bit of the story might belong in the Gaping Depths of Horror.
I have two other concerns with this story, and the first and more predictable is that it shows the Doctor palling up with Richard Nixon. More to the point, it portrays Nixon as a lovable old goof and goes so far as to actually have the Doctor tell him to trust no one and tape everything, essentially laying the blame for Watergate on the Doctor's shoulders. That's probably a set-up that sounded funny to Steven Moffat, but I wonder if he ever thinks through the full unsavoury implications of some of his jokes. I thought the same about the most recent charity skits, which we are Not. Going. To. Discuss, and I suspect this is something endemic to Moffat's writing, that he loves a joke but has no way of gauging how appropriate it actually is in a given context. Which was paradoxically a good thing when it came to Coupling, I suppose. Well, anyway. It looks iffy to me, and the "Hippy!" "Archaeologist!" exchange in the first episode looks like exactly what it is, a worthless token effort to acknowledge those nasty moral issues one certainly wouldn't want to examine in the innocent venue of Doctor Who (qv the waste of airtime that was Victory of the Daleks).
My second concern is that we don't actually have any real idea of the Silence's motives. Granted, we might expect them to turn up again later in the series, presumably around the same time that we deal with the Doctor's supposed assassination, and perhaps then we might find out what they're actually up to. Apparently they have an interest in Amy, although given later developments, we may look at her kidnapping in a new light. We may ask whether they're in league with Evil Eyepatch Woman, although they may just as plausibly be working against her. All we're given for now is that they're a kind of cultural/technological parasite, although that isn't applied consistently within the story - they need the humans to create a spacesuit, but they're then going to modify it with their own gonzo alien technology? Perhaps it's more of a symbiotic relationship - the Americans seem to have got hold of some dwarf star alloy somehow, even before they've landed men on the moon. All the Silence seem to be getting in return, apart from the spacesuit, is a lot of shabby second-hand suits.
Still, they do arbitrarily blow someone up, just so that we know they're not nice.
Some other observations:
It's nice to see the production team getting more use out of their American locations than they got out of filming in Dubai two years ago.
It may be a bit late to talk about Moffat Who eating itself - one look at Silence in the Library should remind us that Moffat Who was eating itself before Mr Moffat had even taken over as Who's showrunner - but let's have a shout out for a malevolent spacesuit, an ominous tape recording of a child's voice, and of course that perennial favourite, the child in danger. We'll be seeing some more of that last one as the season arc unfolds.
Let's talk about the Doctor's apparent death. No, obviously Steven Moffat isn't going to literally kill off Doctor Who. And while he went to great lengths to assure the genre press that he really wasn't bluffing this time, and he really was totally going to kill off a lead character... I mean, come on, this is Steven Moffat we're talking about here. The man's cheapened death in his stories to the point that it's given out free in cereal packets. (And the fact that the second episode opens with the other three leads carefully staging their own faked deaths is highly suggestive.) It's a given that he had his fingers crossed behind his back, but will subsequent episodes give any sort of clue as to what he might have in mind?
Hmm, could Henry the mild-mannered janitor really be Hong Kong Phooey? "Could be!"
My only other thought at this time is that that beard kind of suited Matt Smith. I was hoping, as a beardy m'self, that we might have a bearded Doctor for at least some of this year, but alas...
What'll that be then, a 7 out of 10? It's not really an 8, but it probably deserves more than a 6... so a 7 it is.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Doctor Who 2011, Part One: Preamble
So, I'm moderately busy these days. I'm working full time (although still as a temp), I've mugginsed myself onto three (count 'em!) SF-related committees, I'm contributing a regular column plus irregular other items to the Wellington Phoenix SF group's monthly circular, and book reviews (typically one a month) to the SFFANZ website. Then there's the weekly evening fixtures.
These are my freshest and (hopefully) most convincing excuses for not having blogged during the first three months of this year, and for only now blogging about the latest crop of DW episodes. It's also worth mentioning the circumstances in which Jo and I got to see the episodes: Prime has, in its wisdom, decided to broadcast the current series on Thursdays rather than Sundays, which doesn't suit us, so we've been getting e-copies from the UK via a local friend in fortnightly servings. When we've actually watched the episodes has then depended on what other social commitments we've had to fit them in around.
The upshot is that I've seen the full demi-season before having a chance to blog about any of it, and am thus in a position to approach the stories in that broader context. I plan to take advantage of this by dealing with the two-parters as single stories, just for a change. This foreknowledge of the episodes does also mean I'm less likely than ever to take care over potential spoilers. Readers should assume that crucial details of any of the seven episodes may be blurted out at any time. That was your fair warning right there.
Before tackling the individual stories, let's get some preliminary observations out of the way. As ever, no complaints about Matt Smith's performance as the Doctor. Still hum-ho about Karen Gillan - I think she's doing a better job this year, and I can see that some work has been put into refining the character of Amy, but in a way it's too little too late for me. Arthur Darvill has stepped up to the plate now that Rory's a full-time companion, and I've generally been impressed with his performance over the demi-season.
Breaking the season into two halves (whatever the actual reason for doing so) was an interesting move. One positive result of sticking a finale halfway through the year is that the arc stuff, or at least large bits of it, didn't have to be stretched out with those awkward little weekly reminders over the whole year's run. We only got the exact same routine of the Doctor pregnancy-testing Amy and the eyepatch woman sticking her face in four times - it could have been ten times, so count your blessings, folks. On the downside, it did mean that the arc stuff accounted for a larger proportion of what we got: two arc-heavy two-parters and the finale, with only two completely free-standing episodes in the middle.
Now, what I think could work well for this show - and it's a crazy idea, but bear with me here, folks - would be to take this idea of sub-seasons with mini-arcs even further, and have thirteen self-contained one-episode arcs. Or "stories" as they're sometimes known. Just thought I'd run that one up the flagpole. I'm waiting for your call, Steven!
One of the most interesting developments in Wholand this year happened outside the series itself, when someone leaked the entire plot of the first two-parter online, and Steven Moffat gave BBC Radio his views on the matter. Leaving aside the reprehensibility of the plot-leaker's actions and the broader debate over the merits or otherwise of spoilers, what I find interesting is the bit down at the bottom where Moffat claims the following:
Now, this is worth noting for two reasons. Firstly, it's wrong. And I don't mean that I personally, subjectively believe that it's wrong, I mean that it's demonstrably wrong. Wrong wrongitty-wrong wrong.
For instance, I know that I'm not the only person in the world who enjoys re-reading Murder on the Orient Express. So where's the appeal in it, or in any crime novel, once I know whodunnit - one the shock is gone and I can see it coming? Perhaps in going back and seeing how the clues were laid out on a second reading, but what about the third reading? What about the tenth, or the twentieth? That's about the writing, about the prose and the characters and the plotting, and if a book is going to last, it needs to depend on those things and not on "shocking people".
Or what about the Star Wars films? Don't depend on shocking you with the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke's father, do they? They depend in large part on visual spectacle, but that alone doesn't account for their continuing popularity - it's surely more that there's something timeless and mythic about the story, something universal, something Hero-With-a-Thousand-Faces-ish about the characters and the basic plot. The Sixth Sense, now there's a film that depended on shocking people, that quite honestly had bugger all else going for it. Does anyone care about The Sixth Sense today?
Or what about children's bedtime stories? Do children demand to be shocked and surprised each bedtime? No, far from it, they demand the same familiar stories over and over, and they complain if the story changes at all from what they remember.
Shocks and surprises are well and good in a story, but they're only one of many things that help to sell it to the reader or viewer. What Moffat's talking about there isn't story, it's purely disposable entertainment. One-off, watch-it-once-and-never-care-about-it-again telly depends on shocking people. Soap opera depends on shocking people. But in the age of the DVD, it's not enough for a drama series to depend on shocking people, and god help any story that does. So, wrongy wrongness there, Steven Moffat.
And secondly, it's a pretty ironic thing to have said considering just how easy it was to see some of this season's most loudly trumpeted moments coming. Of which, more anon.
These are my freshest and (hopefully) most convincing excuses for not having blogged during the first three months of this year, and for only now blogging about the latest crop of DW episodes. It's also worth mentioning the circumstances in which Jo and I got to see the episodes: Prime has, in its wisdom, decided to broadcast the current series on Thursdays rather than Sundays, which doesn't suit us, so we've been getting e-copies from the UK via a local friend in fortnightly servings. When we've actually watched the episodes has then depended on what other social commitments we've had to fit them in around.
The upshot is that I've seen the full demi-season before having a chance to blog about any of it, and am thus in a position to approach the stories in that broader context. I plan to take advantage of this by dealing with the two-parters as single stories, just for a change. This foreknowledge of the episodes does also mean I'm less likely than ever to take care over potential spoilers. Readers should assume that crucial details of any of the seven episodes may be blurted out at any time. That was your fair warning right there.
Before tackling the individual stories, let's get some preliminary observations out of the way. As ever, no complaints about Matt Smith's performance as the Doctor. Still hum-ho about Karen Gillan - I think she's doing a better job this year, and I can see that some work has been put into refining the character of Amy, but in a way it's too little too late for me. Arthur Darvill has stepped up to the plate now that Rory's a full-time companion, and I've generally been impressed with his performance over the demi-season.
Breaking the season into two halves (whatever the actual reason for doing so) was an interesting move. One positive result of sticking a finale halfway through the year is that the arc stuff, or at least large bits of it, didn't have to be stretched out with those awkward little weekly reminders over the whole year's run. We only got the exact same routine of the Doctor pregnancy-testing Amy and the eyepatch woman sticking her face in four times - it could have been ten times, so count your blessings, folks. On the downside, it did mean that the arc stuff accounted for a larger proportion of what we got: two arc-heavy two-parters and the finale, with only two completely free-standing episodes in the middle.
Now, what I think could work well for this show - and it's a crazy idea, but bear with me here, folks - would be to take this idea of sub-seasons with mini-arcs even further, and have thirteen self-contained one-episode arcs. Or "stories" as they're sometimes known. Just thought I'd run that one up the flagpole. I'm waiting for your call, Steven!
One of the most interesting developments in Wholand this year happened outside the series itself, when someone leaked the entire plot of the first two-parter online, and Steven Moffat gave BBC Radio his views on the matter. Leaving aside the reprehensibility of the plot-leaker's actions and the broader debate over the merits or otherwise of spoilers, what I find interesting is the bit down at the bottom where Moffat claims the following:
"Stories depend on shocking people," he said.
"Stories are the moments that you didn't see coming, that are what live in you and burn in you forever."
Now, this is worth noting for two reasons. Firstly, it's wrong. And I don't mean that I personally, subjectively believe that it's wrong, I mean that it's demonstrably wrong. Wrong wrongitty-wrong wrong.
For instance, I know that I'm not the only person in the world who enjoys re-reading Murder on the Orient Express. So where's the appeal in it, or in any crime novel, once I know whodunnit - one the shock is gone and I can see it coming? Perhaps in going back and seeing how the clues were laid out on a second reading, but what about the third reading? What about the tenth, or the twentieth? That's about the writing, about the prose and the characters and the plotting, and if a book is going to last, it needs to depend on those things and not on "shocking people".
Or what about the Star Wars films? Don't depend on shocking you with the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke's father, do they? They depend in large part on visual spectacle, but that alone doesn't account for their continuing popularity - it's surely more that there's something timeless and mythic about the story, something universal, something Hero-With-a-Thousand-Faces-ish about the characters and the basic plot. The Sixth Sense, now there's a film that depended on shocking people, that quite honestly had bugger all else going for it. Does anyone care about The Sixth Sense today?
Or what about children's bedtime stories? Do children demand to be shocked and surprised each bedtime? No, far from it, they demand the same familiar stories over and over, and they complain if the story changes at all from what they remember.
Shocks and surprises are well and good in a story, but they're only one of many things that help to sell it to the reader or viewer. What Moffat's talking about there isn't story, it's purely disposable entertainment. One-off, watch-it-once-and-never-care-about-it-again telly depends on shocking people. Soap opera depends on shocking people. But in the age of the DVD, it's not enough for a drama series to depend on shocking people, and god help any story that does. So, wrongy wrongness there, Steven Moffat.
And secondly, it's a pretty ironic thing to have said considering just how easy it was to see some of this season's most loudly trumpeted moments coming. Of which, more anon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
