Blaring Orchestra in the Library
Why is it that, in Doctor Who, emergency messages are always repeated over and over and over, in the same tone? It seems to happen every other episode. Combine it with “HEY WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHT?!” and a cliffhanger, and it’s like that scene in Transformers the Movie where Wheelie and the Dinobots get into a debate.
Speaking of audio, I realize that Murray Gold often gets flak for his bombastic scores; this, however, is the first time he has annoyed me in particular. The scene with the TV — man, that’s some intense channel flipping there. Well, sort of. Whereas as written and shot the scene is a bit of a “Wait, what was that all about?” moment, the music is screaming “OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!!1“. Really, silence or a quiet, confused theme — music box, perhaps; he’s put it to good use elsewhere — would have been plenty peachy.
This episode is full of tiny, unimportant annoyances — irritable motes* — more so than in any Moffat episode yet, few of them of Moffat’s own doing. Even the interminable “first woman down” scene was largely an afterthought of Lyn’s. The commentary is a bit awkward and strange to listen to; basically the gist is that neither Collinson nor Lyn really “gets” what Moffat is doing, as a writer (Lyn asked Collinson what he thought distinguished a Moffat episode from a Davies one, and Collinson was completely stumped; “maybe they’re a bit faster?” he suggested), so they kept deviating in arbitrary directions, occasionally knocking over all the carefully landsaped hedges around Moffat’s path, whenever they hit a strange obstacle.
I wonder what the… face-node things would have looked like, by Moffat’s original design.
Whereas Lyn may have artsy ambitions, and he may have directed a couple of great episodes, I often feel like the episodes he directs work more in spite of his choices than because of them. Mind, he’s nowhere near as bad as Matt Jones or Colin Teague. I just get the impression that most of his reputation amongst fans comes from the rather gorgeous set design and lighting in “The Unquiet Dead”. Which… weren’t really his responsibility. And God, was that a boring episode.
Well. Production problems aside, here we have yet another Moffat episode that plays up the duality between the “reality” of the audience / an observer — for whom the Doctor is a secret, special object of apparent fantasy — and the “real world” of the Doctor’s, that starts to overflow from the audience’s fantasy into its real life. In other words, the fairy tale / audience / myth business again.
It’s this thing he does (as does Davies, sometimes, a little differently), where the show is more clearly laid out as a fiction, as having a fictional relationship with the audience — yet there’s that suggestion that the lines between fiction and fact are not so solid as one might be taught to understand. The implication being that in a sense, if you believe deeply enough, the Doctor is real — as real as the monsters under your bed or phone calls in the night, shadows, statues, blinking. All primal stuff, imbued with a new nervous energy and linked back to the show, firing the imagination, asking people to look beneath the surface of their world.
“The Girl in the Fireplace” is basically a manifesto for this view of the show — this fantastic intimacy.
“What do monsters have nightmares about?” “Me!”
“The monsters and the Doctor. It seems one cannot have one without the other.”
“Stranger? I’ve known you my whole life.”
It’s pretty great.
His only story so far that hasn’t overtly done this is “The Empty Child”. I’m wondering if this fairy tale business — which is, as far as I’m concerned, the proper way to frame the show — will take priority in two years’ time. If so, that explains why he may or may not have (i.e., has) invited Gaiman to participate.
Not entirely successful. Pretty good, though. And full of rampant implication, as it should be.
*: Vashta Nerada yourself. That name, incidentally, sounds like a term I would have made up in high school. For an AD&D campaign. 2nd Edition, of course.
EDIT: And there Moffat is on Confidential: “What works for Doctor Who is you take things from the real world and you twist them a bit. It’s like a fairy tale in that sense. Not.. I, I don’t mean a fairy tale in the sense of something sort of light and fluffy; I mean a fairy tale in the sense of something twisted and dark. […] Putting monsters in the safety of the home is Doctor Who’s mission statement.”