A Town Called Mercy
It’s been a few years, and I imagine that this episode has rightly faded from memory for most people — and yet its writer, Toby Whithouse, is still regularly held in a mystifying high regard by Doctor Who fans, to the extent that many were disappointed he wasn’t picked for the new showrunner over Chris Chibnall.
To the best I can figure, this acclaim is based on two crutches: that he happened to write the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the show (along with K-9), and that since then he hasn’t done anything to dramatically upset the ship. At least, not until his series 10 episode, which I suppose stands most clearly in contrast with the two identical yet decreasingly interesting episodes that preceded it.
It’s in this light that I think back to “A Town Called Mercy,” one of my votes for worst-ever New Who episodes, yes. Only a couple of other clear contenders for the prize, and none has gone as far to disrupt my faith in the show and its creative rudder.
To quote another commentator, homunculette:
It’s like Toby Whithouse decided to write a Western without attempting to do any research into what Westerns are like or any historical research into the time period and instead just wrote it from his memories of seeing like one Clint Eastwood movie as a kid. It’s mind-numbingly boring, morally trite, and tosses off a casually transphobic joke for no reason.
This honestly describes so many scripts of the era (e.g., “Curse of the Black Spot”). But “Mercy” is just particularly vacuous, even for Whithouse and even for seasons 6-7. It doesn’t even begin to make an argument for its existence, beyond showing off a different location. One of the fun things about a tired form is that it’s ripe for deconstruction, or salvaging. Sergio Leone did this to astounding success, and there’s no reason a show like Doctor Who couldn’t find something to interrogate about the Wild West.
It’s done it before, of course. However one may feel about The Gunfighters, it’s a genuinely funny and unapologetically weird comedy that makes a point of playing off and against genre tropes, as with the Doctor getting increasingly exasperated that people keep putting guns in his hand. Even if the finished serial is an acquired taste (one I have acquired), it’s written with wit and observation, neither of which is in evidence with Whithouse’s work.
That lack of wit or observation — and lack of concern about that lack, which might spur curiosity and research — is to me one of Whithouse’s defining qualities. He very much reads to me as the kind of guy who takes a course in a subject, successfully follows a practice blueprint that was laid out for him, and decides he’s now got it down to a science. Every script of his, it’s like he’s playing Mad Libs with an entry level screenwriting textbook; just lifting stock conflicts and conversations and scenarios whole-cloth, and rearranging them according to the instructions. It’s the definition of mediocrity. And fandom being what it is, of course, for that he gets credit. Good job, Toby. You didn’t color outside of the lines. Solid work. What more could we reasonably ask?
Compared to some of the other modern-era mediocrity, which tends to exist in balance with some extenuating virtue, I find Whithouse’s total white-bread adequacy pernicious in regard to its stifling, blunting factor on the series. I nearly gave up on the fucking show, a show I’d obsessed over since 1999, after his cowboy episode. Others I know did give up on it halfway through his series 9 two-parter, and nothing can draw them back again.
Matthew Graham is a prime counter example. Everyone hates his first episode, and you’ll find few vocal defenders of his later two-parter. People will wonder why his Who work was so bad, compared to Life on Mars. But, seriously, take a look at how he writes. All his writing follows the same patterns, as does all of Whithouse’s, and your answers to his successes and failures are right there. Graham is also a deeply mediocre writer, who like Whithouse got lucky with a breakout genre mash-up sci-fi show. But Life on Mars is different from Being Human, and more substantial for its problems, in the same way his Doctor Who material is.
Graham is superb at coming up with pitches: visionary concepts, that he’ll flesh out with well-drawn characters, sparkling dialogue, and some astute thoughts about how and why they do what they do. This comes through in the main draw to Life on Mars — the scenario, the people who inhabit it, and how they interact — and in Rose and the Doctor’s dialogue in “Fear Her,” and all of the psychology of the Flesh duplicates. But then, once he’s sketched that basic picture, Graham has no fucking clue what to do next; where to go from there. So Life on Mars just ambles on, following no clear plan, reiterating its premise a couple times an episode for two years, until in a panic, when Simm’s had enough, Graham just picks one explanation and calls it done. Similarly, Rose and the Doctor arrive to investigate, then just mill around a suburb for 20 minutes, facing scribble monsters and other directionless first-draft material, and squandering what good will their best characterization all season may otherwise have earned.
Peter Harness is superb with coloring outside Whithouse’s carefully manicured lines, with bold, confident strokes that trace new and inspiring forms to expand the imagination and the boundaries of what the show can and should be… and then squanders much of that with a stultifying ignorance about the topics he so loves to explore. It’s exciting to see the show tackle the issues that he bring up, and then frustrating to see such a dangerously uninformed take on such prickly topics, be they science, politics, ethics. Less confidence and more research, even a modicum of research, would do Harness a wonder.
The thing about each of these cases is that the mediocrity is an end sum; a result of a real strength that benefits the show and an undisciplined tedium that nearly pulls it back to zero. In the process, though, there is dynamism. They do things with the show, that help to redefine it and internally that help to justify the effort even it it does level out in the end. Any next script might be the one where they learn to mop up their fog and their strong points will shine out clearly.
By contrast, Whithouse studiously avoids shining, in favor of an even, calculated mediocrity from start to end. This is true of his own show (compare “what if modern-day UK cop landed in corrupt 1970s department?” to “What if three monsters fashionable in other pop culture at the moment lived in apartment together?” in terms of the thought and thematic potential involved), and it’s true of his tediously recycled Lego kit Who scripts. The best you can reasonably say of the guy is that he effectively maintains the status quo and avoids making waves. And to my mind that’s also one of the most damning, and an imminent threat to a show as dynamic and reliant on vibrant change as Doctor Who.
“A Town Called Mercy” is the barest and most damning example of what he doesn’t have to say as a writer. Its only grace I can see is a ready case study for how to kill the show, or avoid doing so, to assign to future writers.
The casual transphobia is just the perfect garnish to its existential blight on the show at one of its more creatively vulnerable moments.
(On the topics of pernicious mediocrity, dangerous ignorance, and casual bigotry, I also have things to saw about Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts. But, not here; not now.)