Doctor Who

Tedium at the Core

  • Reading time:1 mins read

How many Doctor Who stories have at the heart of them a Problem Bureaucracy? I’m talking about a horrible central power, usually run by a paranoid and irrational old man who won’t listen to anyone, that serves mostly to string out the story’s run time or give it a reason to exist at all, by creating unnecessary and often unnatural conflict?

Often in these scenarios, everyone else in the story’s world seems more or less reasonable; it’s just this one bad apple, with a few of his puppets, who causes all the problems that allow the story to wheeze along.

At the risk of turning all Lucas…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It’s never really been quantified how regeneration works. People kind of assume there’s an objective limit, like he’s got so many magic potions in his inventory. Use one, and it’s gone. I dunno. That only makes sense as a plot device. Which, granted, is exactly what regeneration is. Still, no need to be that blatant.

The way I’ve taken it is that each regeneration is kind of like a mutation. You can only go so far before your system gets so screwed up that any further change is a humongous risk at best.

“The End of the World” implies that Eccleston has nine different DNA strands in him. Carry that forward, and I can imagine how that might get tangled after a certain point.

In that case the limit isn’t based in some kind of volume of opportunities for the spending so much as in the consequences of having regenerated.

There are other interpretations. Perhaps the cells of each incarnation are sort of impregnated with a certain amount of energy, that can be set off for regeneration. Once it’s spent, it’s spent. Let’s say that, as of “Journey’s End”, Tennant has now half-regenerated. To finish regenerating, perhaps he needs a kick-start from Donna, as he has already blown his proverbial wad. Which will leave each of his next two incarnations with a new set of cells, with their own preset regeneration bombs. As it were. Thus presently bringing him to thirteen.

Maybe there’s something kind of like super-mitochondria in a Time Lord cell. From my understanding, in a human cell the mitochondrion acts as a power source. If there were a similar sort of organelle in a Time Lord cell, that in an emergency were to rupture, releasing a certain potent energy, intended to completely reform the cell — well, that might work. The reformed cell would, naturally enough, have its own version of that organelle.

Actually, looking up mitochondria on Wikipedia — they deal with cell death, control of the cell cycle and cell growth… Yeah.

If we were to assume something like that, then Tennant will have perhaps wasted all that energy without it making over his cells — so therefore he can’t regenerate again until he has been regenerated. Which would still leave his future incarnations free to regenerate, as they would have fresh cells, with their own regeneration-energy organelles.

Earlier (unposted) grousing about Gareth Roberts

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Secrets of the Stars, Part 1

Rather better than I expected, actually. Though I’m starting to question the point of stories like this. What’s it trying to say, exactly? Why write something like this?

Next week, hey, another near-cataclysm that everyone will forget about the week after. More hypnotized people wandering out into the streets, more chaos.

Is Mr. Roberts just doing this because Davies has done it a few times, and he’s seen that it worked before? Or is this all crucial to some profound original thought that he’s trying to get across?

What’s the point in writing fiction if it’s just fiction for the sake of fiction? Isn’t fiction supposed to be metaphorical? Isn’t it supposed to be a framework to illustrate your observations about life?

Maybe I’m just grumpy today.

* *

The only two Roberts-related things that have impressed me are Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? and, somewhat, Invasion of the Bane. One of those was co-written with Davies, and I think Davies basically rewrote the other from scratch.

As I said earlier, I guess I don’t understand why he writes what he writes. He doesn’t seem to have anything of his own to say. The only motivation I can detect is a certain fetishism. Of Doctor Who, of Agatha Cristie, of Shakespeare, of certain pop culture references. It’s like his scripts are a collection of objects, that he points to as if it’s self-evident that they’re wonderful. Because, look! See!

You get that in his Agatha Cristie episode. “Awwwooh, you’re wonderful! You know why you’re the best writer ever? Because you’ve had your heart broken, so you understand people!”

What?

* *

If you were to hire the Comic Book Store Guy from The Simpsons, I imagine his scripts would be pretty much like this.

It’s weird how I feel patronized by his writing, considering it does little but emptily ape Davies’ mannerisms. I guess that’s it — all the froth of Davies without any of the lager?

“Whatever Happened” is the best Sarah Jane to date, and it really does not feel like Roberts’ other work. There was an aside a while ago — I think an excerpt from The Writer’s Tale — where Davies mentioned that he was about to go write those two episodes. So maybe that explains something.

I think the reason they keep him around is that Roberts gets the house tone down pat. If you don’t look too close, he does a very passable imitation of Davies. He would perhaps make a decent editor of some sort.

I should say that neither has he written anything really poor, exactly. It all passes the time genially enough. Sort of.

It just all seems a bit irrelevant.

Secrets of the Stars, Part 2

Aohhhhh, blood control?! I haven’t seen blood control in yeeeeeaaaaars! Weelll, three years to be precise. Well, thirty-four months. Give or take.

Hum.

The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, Part 1

That was pretty good, though I’ve a few problems with it. Most of the acting was off the mark. Sarah Jane’s parents were played a notch too broadly, for instance. Also, it didn’t do quite enough in tone to distinguish the past from present.

More importantly… um. Okay, they did hang a bunch of lampshades on it, but golly was Sarah Jane written poorly. Her behavior here doesn’t at all fit her character, and the script (and show to date) hasn’t done enough to really justify her boneheaded decisions. If anything, the fact that she and everyone else keeps talking about how dumb she would have to do to do what she did just underlines how bizarre it is that she did it anyway.

This is a classic example of a writer coming up with a plot, then trying to justify the actions the characters need to take for the plot to work. The commentary on those actions just comes off as the author saying “Yeah, I know this doesn’t work — but I’m doing it anyway, because in a battle between plot and character, plot wins. Especially my plot, because it’s brilliant.”

It’s, you know, a better than usual episode. That’s mostly a factor of its ambition, though. Its basic concept is fine. I still remain unconvinced of Gareth Roberts’ skill as a writer. He seems to have little understanding of or interest in the way people work outside of film and TV cliche — which is maybe a problem in a script that depends entirely on character motivation. I’d like to see what would have happened if he’d handed this idea over to Mr. Lidster, for instance. James Moran might have been interesting.

I’ll admit also that I have extreme prejudice against stories that require a character to act like an idiot. So given that, it’s of some credit to the story’s ambition that it carries my attention nonetheless.

Also see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotPlot

The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, Part 2

So this episode it’s Rani’s turn to randomly act like a dolt, because they need (rather weird) exposition and a false emotional note with her mother to complete the dramatic arithmatic. Ho hum. At least it doesn’t lead to head-slapping consequences; just to tedium.

It’s becoming all the more clear to me how much of “Whatever Happened” Davies must have written.

Sort of interesting that the Graske is becoming a character now, rather than a random monster-thing.

You can tell that the Trickster is played by the head Futurekind fellow — such distinctive body language. I like the job he does, though he doesn’t have much to work with. Mostly growling and doom declaration. Lots of talking about doing.

Actually, this story is a lot of talking about doing. Talking about plot. Flatly directed, at that. Lots of medium shots.

The theme they’ve given Sarah Jane in high-drama moments — it’s very similar to a Danny Elfman cue, that’s on the tip of my mind. Is it from Edward Scissorhands?

Mind, it’s nice in principle to have stories that explore Sarah Jane’s backstory.

I assume the idea behind the police box is that the new TARDIS has been established as not looking exactly like a real police box? Except neither does this one.

That jogging UNIT fellow in the trailer — have we seen him before?

* *

it seems Gareth Roberts’ perspective as a writer rarely verges outside the experience of a fan. In his Tennant episodes (Shakespeare, Wasp) the Doctor becomes a dribbling fanboy of some public figure and spends the whole episode bursting with quotes and references to prove his affections for that person’s work. Story structure and thematic content hew to genre conventions, inasmuch as events happen because they tend to happen in shows and stories like this rather than because of a higher necessary function like character or conceptual development. Roberts just doesn’t have much to say as a writer except “I enjoy pop culture; here is what I enjoy”.

All that nonsense about the witches and the recitation of words being a science; it’s only there as a self-conscious reference to Logopolis. At no point does he use the notion to illustrate an actual theory or observation about life. It’s a throwaway reference to an old episode of a TV show, that didn’t really make sense then beyond a metaphorical reading of Buddhism, to explain why something that you’d expect to see in a Shakespeare play is happening then and there — as convention dictates that it must in a show like this, because this episode deals with Shakespeare.

And then it’s gone; he never explores it further, unless you count Tennant’s froth about Shakespeare’s brilliance with words. Even that is insisted in a reverent manner, rather than shown. When it comes time for Shakespeare to prove his brilliance, instead Roberts just quotes from Harry fucking Potter. And then the Doctor dribbles about J.K. Rowling’s genius, for the second time in 45 minutes.

Easter Desert

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Yes, that was about as sophisticated and original as anything Gareth Roberts has written.

Hum.

What was the point of the psychic woman? Even as an exposition projector, she seemed a bit superfluous.

Well, okay, so we’ve got prophecy again. In series two and three, it was the Face of Boe, in the year Five Billion (also in series one!), talking about the Master.

In series four and four-and-a-half, it’s the Ood, mostly in the forty-second century, talking about… well, the Master. Presumably. Again. With the woman channeling the Ood, who have a part yet to play.

Prophecy Planets. (Or time zones. Not as catchy, though.) This is a new kind of continuity. I’ve not seen this in other shows.

Other thoughts.

Shame about the fly people. Why kill them both? You’re just spoiling the potential for interesting scenes later. I’d have liked to see them join up with UNIT as mechanics.

Regarding the bus, how does that work, exactly? There’s no obvious means of propulsion or steering; it’s just got floaty things on its wheels. By what means is it moving around? I could maybe understand if the Doctor were adjusting the lift on the different hover pod things, to use gravity as a driving force — gliding, basically. That’s not what’s happening, though.

As some Internet people have noted in passing, on top of the dead end of the psychic woman — maybe more of a problem than the other forgotten passengers, or the pointlessly-killed fly men, as the mere existence of a psychic would seem to suggest some significant story purpose — is all the business about the dead people, the civilization that used to be here. They go into a mess of detail, and dwell on the subject for many grim and portentous beats. All to set up, what, that these monsters can destroy a world? Thanks for that.

This story is full of so many random details that go nowhere — and then the details that they do carry through don’t make much sense.

In the end, we don’t even hear much about these metal sting ray things except a few sterile facts. They’re nothing except a time limit to ensure that our heroes hurry in getting the bus back. Which they do only as slopplily as I’ve noted.

Just… what’s the point of this episode? That’s the problem I have with most things Gareth Roberts writes. They seem to exist just to take up space, throwing around random narrative objects and pointing at them as if they’re inherently meaningful.

This is embodied in all the fan-worship in his scripts — whether it’s the Doctor dripping nonsense over Agatha Cristie (“You know why you’re the greatest writer ever? Because you’ve been hurt, so you know how people feel!”) or the gratuitous Doctor Who Love Patrol, strung all through this episode.

In place of the most rudimentary thematic or plot or character development, Gareth Roberts’ scripts seem to consist almost entirely of people outright telling the viewer that things are important, hoping to catch the viewer up in naked faux enthusiasm. And then it’s that rapturous glee at particular things existing that saves the day. Every time! Good old JK Rowling! Good old Shakespeare and his words!

Ugh.

I’m assuming Moffat won’t hire this guy?

Before transmat, there was Travel-Mat (R)

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The Seeds of Death is the only Ice Warrior story that does much for me. It’s not like it’s amazing; it’s cordial, full of your lovely moments with the regular cast, and graced with a mix of halfway interesting ideas and uncommonly good acting and direction.

There is, for instance, the fellow up on the station — the spineless one, whose name I forget. The actor is handed a fairly one-dimensional role, yet he manages to inject an extraordinary amount of psychology into it. One tends to feel sympathy for him, until the plot demands he do or say something irredeemable. The result is nearly a Baltar-like character — you want to understand him, and his weakness, yet despite his guilt and fear it seems he really isn’t a good person. It’s a shame the script isn’t as smart about the character as the actor is.

Generally, that’s the kind of objection I have with this story. The world painted in this story is thoughtful, imaginative, and well-realized; there’s just a bit much of it, and for the time they’re given, the ideas and characters never really develop or go to much end besides driving the plot. It’s not a big deal, but there it is.

So it’s fine. Inconsequential yet cozy. The cleaned-up picture is also gorgeous. The most negative reply I can come up with is a shrug.

Eleven

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So Matt Smith is not at all what I was expecting — and this is good! In terms of his personality and mannerisms and appearance, he seems to have beamed in from his own universe. Combine that with the practical thematic aspects of going so young, and it really does feel like the character’s portrayal is getting rebooted. Or brought in a completely new direction, anyway.

Combine this with Moffat’s comments that he intends to focus on the logistics and consequences of time travel, and series five is starting to sound pretty fascinating. I don’t know what to make of it! I can only imagine.

Young, mercurial (as Mr. Hellman puts it) man who calls himself “the Doctor” (uh-huh…) and claims to be hundreds of years old. And who keeps getting involved in time paradoxes…

David Hellman thinks an older, more intellectual woman would make a good companion. I’m inclined to agree!

For a first episode, I’m thinking maybe of An Unearthly Child II, set in a university. A fortysomething college professor becomes fascinated by one of her students, and… oh dear, this is turning into a bad fantasy, isn’t it.

Thing is, for all the bravado he projects and all his knowledge, the Doctor is emotionally underdeveloped. And needy. In a way, shaping him as a very young man — which he is, in spirit — who has seen far too much, and is far too clever for his own good, is a good way to address the character’s demons. To allow him to mature somewhat, and move on.

Moffat, more than any other Who writer so far, seems interested in exploring what makes the Doctor tick. And this is a great opportunity for that. Giving him an older female companion who can take care of him as well as she can fend off his intellectual spurts and tantrums — well, it’s kind of a natural evolution of a theme, isn’t it?

Donna was very good for the Tenth Doctor, in part because of the standards that she held him to; similar deal with season-one Rose, and Ian and Barbara.

That would be so interesting: basically exchange Susan for the Doctor himself, and pair him with a new Barbara, and send them off to figure out what it actually means to be a Time Lord. Logistically and emotionally.

Pippenjane

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Time and the Rani doesn’t particularly try to be realistic. To start with, it’s clearly written as a farce. Beyond that, several times it deliberately breaks the reality of the situation to (not to make it sound more sophisticated than it is) make some kind of meta-commentary about the show and the way it’s perceived. There’s the business about the Doctor being horrified at a vision of Mel’s face, and whatnot. If that’s not the 1987 equivalent of “the windows are the wrong size”, I’ll eat my left shoe.

The unreality of the thing has always struck me as rather the point. All the awful things in it aren’t so much awful in their own right as they are, on some level, a commentary on the lazy way the show is often put together. And in that, I think it’s mostly pretty on-target and hilarious.

I realize that the script was already sitting there and that Cartmel was less than thrilled with it, but the subversive, postmodern sense of humor strikes me as all him — rebelling against a by-the-numbers script that served no purpose and had nothing to say by turning those qualities on their heads. It calls to mind the “fanboy” in Greatest Show and the philosophical guard in Dragonfire, if a bit broader and less informed. More of an outsider’s perspective — which he was, at the time.

Davies does this all the time now — Love & Monsters, for instance. Which I realize isn’t everyone’s thing, but… well. Major difference is, he does it better.

The Humanism of Verfremdungseffect

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Objectively, most Doctor Who is pretty crap. So it seems silly to get particular about what’s more crap than what, when you can just be watching and enjoying it for what it is, and reading in what you want to read in.

It’s the spirit and the ideas behind any given serial that grab me. The execution is never even close to adequate in the best cases, so who cares if it’s a shade shabbier or shinier. You just have to be affectionate. It’s the only sane way to go.

Personally, I find the McCoy era warmer than any era since Troughton and more rich with ideas than just about any period since Hartnell. So it’s a winner in that regard.

Thing is, in the end objectivity is an absurd thing to take into account.

Rarely is Doctor Who directed well. Rarely is it acted particularly well. Rarely are the costumes or sets or effects close to convincing. When they are, the lighting gets in the way or the staging makes a mockery of any sense of verisimilitude. Only occasionally is it written with more than passable skill and the faintest inspiration to color outside the lines. Rarely does any story actually take advantage of the format.

Yet the show has heart, and sometimes it’s got some real ambition. Usually it’s in those moments that the practical elements all conspire to ensure failure. But so what?

You just have to watch the show as if you’re watching your local theater troupe. You know these people. You believe in them. You know the odds they’re up against, in portraying what they want to portray. So what if the lighting was a smidge more professional last week; it’ll never be Kubrick, and you’re only making an ass of yourself by expecting it. What you should be paying attention to is the humanity behind it all. And that’s where this show excels.

That’s also why I tend to find any flaws more hilarious than distracting. I’m not working under the bizarre notion that this show needs to meet any kind of objective standard to be worthwhile. All it has to do is engage my humanity — and there’s nothing more human than failure, or more funny than failure at something as unimportant as showmanship. Hell, Kurt Weill would be thrilled. Not all the praise for B-movies is ironic. See the affection in Burton’s Ed Wood.

The show’s abject failure at convincing showmanship is almost universal. It’s a bit more prominent in the late ’80s, but draw your own silly metaphor about degrees of gray. Again, I also find the same period warmer and more inspired than most. However poorly executed it is, it’s patently obvious that the show is being made with sincerity. And that’s the most important thing ever. That, there, is what life is all about.

Alan Wake

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, Sarah Jane is back in town. And Sladen is a bit less awkward in her acting.

I like the way (new showrunner) Phil Ford accounted for a rather tough list of ingredients — writing out Maria, giving a big role to all the Jacksons, reusing props and effects from Who, setting up some recurring story threads, following up on recent and ancient continuity without relying on it — and churned out a rather solid, pacey adventure at the same time.

Maria’s departure could have been handled so many ways, all trite, yet it felt organic, truthful, and not at all cloying. And I love the way it folds into the A plot, effectively giving her whole family a big farewell.

It’s all rather… snuggly. A shame to lose Maria and (especially) her dad. Ah well.

I quite like, also, that the story isn’t predicated on “big reveals”. Both the Sontaran thing and the America thing are unveiled halfway through the first episode (not that either was a secret coming in), leaving the rest of the story for the development of the characters’ reactions to these facts, and for the Sontaran’s own story. (The flashbacks are pretty great, too — especially the injury.) And those reactions (to start with, SJ’s coolness to Maria; the boys’ nervous yet restrained reaction to the Sontaran) were both pleasantly atypical and, again, true.

Chrissie is another example — how she gets roped into the story. Again sidestepping the tedious, she just squints at Alan and says she believed him, because his mouth didn’t twitch. Which was a bit pat, yes, but it both fit her character’s line of thinking and for the first time illustrated a good side to the way she processes things.

The story’s full of subtle little things like that, making grace of moments that should have been annoying. It was as if the story elements were there to explore how the characters might react, rather than the characters behaving in a particular way so as to allow Things to Happen.

Even the corridor-running has a nice lateral energy to it.

The only criticism I have, really, is that whoever did the production design for the inside of the radio telescope, and the computer graphics, really… sucks.

That’s something that always bothers me, the bizarre TV/cinema notion of how computers and computer displays work. It’s kind of amazing, considering that everyone working on this show and nearly everyone in the audience must use a computer constantly. What’s the point of the wacky-flashy graphics?

You have to shrug off some things, of course — the dad’s “hypnotized” acting, “totally creeped-out to the max”, constant potato jokes. Kind of the price of admission.

. . .

So consider this. The next full series of Who isn’t airing until 2010, leading people to label 2009 the “gap year”. Between December and then, there will be just five specials, a half-series of Torchwood, and probably a third series of SJA.

At twelve half-hour episodes, a season of SJA is nearly the length of a McCoy season of Who. This is more or less what aired each year, between 1986 and 1989.

At five hours, so, actually, is the rest of Davies’ Who run, through 2009.

At five hour-long specials, so is the length of Torchwood 3.

Altogether, that’s about 900 minutes (or fifteen hours) of Whoniverse programming in 2009. That’s compared with ~1000 minutes per season in the ’60s, 650 minutes in the ’70s to mid-’80s, and 350 in the late ’80s. And, of course, a total of 90 minutes between 1989 and 2005.

Some gap year.

Cybermen

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Mm. Tomb is really the only time I think they’ve been used well — as objects of creeping fear and mystery. There’s a sense they’re this contained force; they’re the snakes in this box that you absolutely must keep closed. And they just keep charging forward, blank, expressionless, incomprehensible. They’ll charm you, try the back door, use every crack to their advantage. (Much like Captain Jack?)

Mostly they’re just used as generic shuffle-monsters. Or, in the ’80s, alien race. Or as a droll bit of wank, as above.

Actually, I thought that Cyberwoman did a good job at capturing their threat. They’re like a plague, is what they are. A schlocky B-movie plague. The kind of thing you should be making up arbitrary rules to protect yourself from. Don’t dangle your feet over the bed. Don’t step on the red squares.

I’d like to see Moffat write for them.

The Threefold Plot

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So at the end of it all, “Turn Left” is pretty clearly the first fifty minutes of a three-hour epic. Though that wasn’t obvious at the time, now there should be no question. Thing is, it serves not only as the setup for Donna’s character arc; in story terms it serves to set up both the nature and the significance of the events to follow over the next 115 minutes. Without it, the final two episodes are just so much aimless bluster.

There’s all the foreshadowing of the supporting cast’s fates, were Donna not involved. Rose’s story is a straight through-line — she spends “Turn Left” righting events so she can get straight to work on the timeline in “The Stolen Earth”. They’ve all gone wrong because Donna wasn’t there to help. Heck, Rose tells her right off that she’s going to die — and that she isn’t talking about in the alternate world (where she is incidentally going to die, however). She means the version of her who travels with the Doctor — as becomes more clear in retrospect, especially with Donna’s meltdown about how she can’t die, because she was going to travel with the Doctor forever.

Ultimately, the biggest reason to connect it is that it gives us a starting place. It shows us who Donna was, and why she was as she was; how little support she got from anyone, least of all Sylvia. And then, the story comes full circle. In the first fifty minutes we saw what she might have been, what she was capable of even if she had never met the Doctor, if only someone had believed in her. Then she’s returned to that situation, and Sylvia is given a second chance to do right by her.

The point of the story is basically that the proposal in “Turn Left” is fulfilled. The Donna whom we leave is a Donna who has in effect turned right. Yet the distinction has been pointed out to all concerned parties. The Doctor put a big bullet point on it. If you think she was better with me, he tells Sylvia, then take care of her, dammit. That’s just who she is, if you’ll allow it. And for such an immense story to basically be about that… As a writer Davies really hammers on this issue of faith, doesn’t he. Though it’s always humanist; about how you treat others.

It’s just so much better and more complete a story, when you take it in full. Even the pacing makes more sense that way, with it getting more and more frenetic as it builds, keeping up the tension, keeping things from seeming like they’re dragging after you’ve been sitting there for a couple of hours already.

As a three-parter, I’ve got to say it has to be the most incredible epic the show has ever attempted — just on an emotional level, never mind the spectacle and sinks (and plungers). The scope is nothing to sniff at, of course. Yet without that episode… it’s just so much wank. There’s no anchor. It all seems so much smaller and more confused.

The Process

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Following some earlier points, a forum I frequent saw some discussion on the apparent deification of the Doctor over the last few series of Doctor Who. Someone strongly objected to what he saw as Davies’ “all-powerful, all-knowing, ‘he’s a Time Lord, he can do anything’ approach to the Doctor”. Thing is, that’s not really what’s going on.

Generally Davies tries to undermine that concept, and show that it’s just bravado. Both in and out of the fiction, that myth is just the way that people perceive him, and the image he tries to project.

There’s a long discussion of this on one of the Moffat commentaries, amongst Davies, Tennant, and Moffat himself. They talk about how, for all of the facade he puts on, all the mythology that springs up around him, some of which he encourages, there’s nothing really special about the Doctor. His only real asset is that he can (usually) talk his way into anything.

“He’s almost a charlatan,” Moffat said, “in a good way. He poses as this god-like figure, but he’s just a bloke under there.”

Man and Myth

So much of the new series is about people’s perceptions of the Doctor, counterposed with the reality of the Doctor. This is precisely what “The Girl in the Fireplace” is about. Look at the way Reinette mythologized the Doctor in her own mind, and turned him into this huge figure from her childhood, a man of magic and awe. And there he was, just bumbling around, doing his thing as best as he could. Occasionally showing off. Occasionally acting like a complete ass.

And we, as adult viewers, see both sides. We know that the Doctor is just this guy, doing the best he can, yet we also know him as a figure of myth and legend who brings us monsters and death, because that’s what he chases and that’s what we tune in for — but then he does his best to put it right, and usually succeeds.

It’s not that he’s innately special; he just operates on a different plane from what most people see as normal life. Specifically, he lives the life of the protagonist to a long-running TV fantasy adventure. In that, he sees things that most people don’t see, and does things that most people don’t do. And to be credulous and put ourselves in the weekly companion role, that allows him to introduce us to fear and wonder, and just maybe expand our perspectives, with the assurance that everything will be all right in the end. Roughly. Usually.

So basically the new series is just being postmodern, and aware of itself as a modern myth. And it toys with that. (See “Love & Monsters”, that Clive guy in “Rose”.) Granted, in execution it’s gotten a bit lazy of late… But going by the commentary, everyone still seems to be working on the same wavelength they were in 2005.

Jesus Guises

Of course, “Forest of the Dead” plays a lot with the notion of an all-powerful Doctor, from River Song’s tale of the man Tennant becomes to his apparently new ability to enter the TARDIS by snapping his fingers. As far as River Song is concerned, though, that’s her mythologizing him again. It’s just her own personal impression of the man. Assuming she’s referring to a particular event, and knowing how the Doctor does things, you can imagine the sort of circumstance in which a whole army would run from him. As much as she talks it up, the actual event was probably some bizarre and desperate slight of hand on the Doctor’s part. Yet it sounds impressive if you don’t know the details! As things do.

Everyone believes in the Wizard of Oz, but he’s just a schmuck behind a curtain.

The snap is a little different. I halfway expected that to be revealed as Donna opening the door for him, but no. Then again, you know. TARDIS. It likes him. If anything is truly special, it’s his box. With a little thought, given the Doctor’s bond with the TARDIS, the snapping really isn’t that remarkable. It’s a bit of a parlor trick, really. Consider that Rose flew the thing just by staring into its console and wishing.

Then there’s that ridiculous floaty denoument from last year, which a lot of people point to. That’s not a good example either. It really, really wasn’t executed well, but that’s supposed to be about the power of humanity and hope and faith (to contrast with the Master’s message of despair), with the Doctor as just a focal point of all of those emotions. It’s only in encouraging everyone to believe in him, in becoming a legend, that he gained his power — which is sort of the concept I’ve been talking about, except made clumsily explicit and practical.

Bibliocranium

The encyclopedic knowledge business is getting tiresome, however. “Silence in the Library” is probably the worst offender yet, on this front. As “Midnight” shows, often it’s dramatically better not to have a clue what you’re facing.

The problem, as I see it, in the Doctor already knowing what he’s facing most of the time is that it removes a sense of discovery and danger and wonder from the proceedings, and all the emotions and ideas those might conjure up, and skips right to the business of solving things — a process that the new series (rightly) considers so obligatory as to use all of these shortcuts (sonic, psychic paper) to speed it along.

It’s meaningless to hear someone name something fictional, then watch him fiddle together some random fictional nonsense to defeat it. What really gets the head and heart going is something like The Empty Child, where — although there are hints along the way, and the Doctor may have more or less figured it out by halfway through episode two — the threat largely remains undefined until the end of the story, leaving the protagonists to react the best they can to their immediate circumstances.

Which isn’t to say that every story need be a mystery; it’s just that having bottomless resources is boring, especially when all you’re conjuring up and babbling about is fictional fact. Show, don’t tell! If the Doctor has seen it all before and can defuse any situation by pulling random convenient facts out of his hat, that basically tells us that what is happening right now doesn’t actually matter; that the show is just a sequence of doors and keys, and the Doctor already has most of the keys on file. So why are we watching it?

Keys are for Doors; Heads are for Thinking

You can do a certain amount of this with a smirk and call it postmodern, but you have to be deliberate and do it well — as in “Rose” or “Aliens of London”. “Doomsday” treads a bit close, but gets away with it on the basis of sheer chutzpah. Lately, I think the handwaving has just become a smug excuse.

It’s a similar feeling to what I get with post-NES era Nintendo games — Zelda, Mario, Metroid. It’s all about hunting for the correct key to pass the appropriate tile, and moving on to the next section. Interpretation, picking away at the cracks, the sense of endless possibility you get in something like the original Zelda or Metroid — all gone, in the face of cold, arbitrary mechanics. Which ties into the whole modern fallacy of the Videogame, that assumes that doing things, simply pressing buttons, is and should be rewarding in and of itself.

Mind, this isn’t a crippling problem with the show — yet. As I said, though, it is getting a bit tiresome. And I think this year in particular, it’s starting to undermine the storytelling. As with the dismissal of killer shadows as “Vashta Nerada — the piranhas of the air!” God, what’s more interesting: shadows that can KILL you, or some kind of gestalt entity with a pretentious name, that the Doctor conveniently knows how to detect and whose canned history he can spin off at a drop of his bottomless hat?

Finding and Doing

So basically, yeah. I see the things that people are complaining about. I just think the explanation is a bit off. The Doctor isn’t particularly powerful; he’s just arrogant. The sonic screwdriver and psychic paper and occasional ironic doodad like anti-plastic work in the favor of efficient storytelling. Take away his ability to quickly solve problems and the story will become cluttered with meaningless procedure.

Take away his ability to quickly identify problems, though, and stories may become far richer. Allow him to dismiss any scenario by identifying it off the bat, and unless the writer really knows what he’s doing, the entire story is in danger of collapsing into meaningless procedure.

I’m reminded of an old review of the Dreamcast version of Ecco the Dolphin (narrated by Tom Baker, don’t you know). It’s a beautiful, atmospheric game with a clever story by David Brin. I’ve described it more than once as an underwater Shenmue. The problem is that it’s just about imposible to play. You can know exactly what you have to do (and it’s usually not that tricky to figure out), and still you need to fight with the game for half an hour, trying and dying and trying and dying and waiting for the game to reload each time, to get through a simple hazard.

I think it was an IGN review that praised the game’s difficulty, saying it was the perfect balance — you always know what you need to do, and the challenge just comes in doing it!

… What? Just, what? I mean, granted, IGN. These guys probably give extra points to a game that comes in a bigger box because it looks more impressive on the shelf. But what?!

Meaning comes from extended and nuanced exploration of a topic. Yet you have to balance the reward of any insight against the frustration involved in realizing it. You don’t want to labor too much in the exploration or in the solution; smack your hand too long on anything, and you will lose grip on the threads you’re grasping, along with any sense of perspective you might have been developing. What you want is to cover as much ground and see as many sides of the issue as you can, collecting strands and weaving them together until you’ve completed the picture as well as you may.

In all things, logic should be always a method; not an impediment, not an answer. When process becomes a barrier to development, or is mistaken for development itself, there is an inherent flaw in the system.

Retro-Futurism

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So apparently the guy who designed the current Battlestar Galactica sets also designed the 1996 TARDIS interior.

Makes sense!

Half-Human On His Superego’s Side

  • Reading time:8 mins read

Regarding the Valeyard, he makes a little more sense if you recall Planet of Spiders and Logopolis. (And just perhaps Destiny of the Daleks, while we’re at it.)

Recall that Time Lords can, as they near regeneration, sometimes project a corporeal future image of themselves, who will then assist in their regeneration.

Cho-Je is an independent, self-aware projection of the future incarnation of K’anpo. He exists to help K’anpo when he regenerates into the incarnation resembling Cho-Je.

The Watcher is essentially the Four-and-a-Halfth Doctor; a projection of the Doctor from halfway through his next regeneration process. He has been projected backward to help the Fourth Doctor regenerate into the Fifth, by merging with the Fourth Doctor.

By a similar logic, the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor from somewhere in the middle of his final regeneration — except this projection has [artificially] taken on all of the bad qualities of the Doctor, and has developed its own ideas. Rather than assist his earlier self, this projection means to manipulate the Doctor in order to ensure that he becomes concrete, and real. You could say that the Valeyard is basically a Dark Watcher.

Which is a rather interesting concept. It’s just… very convoluted and strange, and it requires that you embrace the projection business, which is weird to start with.

Curiously, the Master was originally a similar concept: in Pertwee’s final serial, he was to be revealed as a projection of the Doctor’s id, who ultimately would sacrifice himself to allow the Third Doctor to regenerate. Delgado’s death prevented that plot thread from resolving itself, which has led the Master down a very different charater path. Yet thematically it still kind of ties into the discussion below.

This is all the more interesting when you add it to something I posted somewhere else, in regard to “The Forest of Death”.

This is just my reading, but it seems to me there’s an impossible sort of shame attached to the Doctor’s name. Like he did something horrible at one point, and now that name is pariah. So he took a new name, as a mask. And the new name came to define who he wanted to be, whereas the original name threatened to define who he was by virtue of who he had been and done.

I guess sort of like Human Nature. You could say that same psychology trickled up into John Smith.

If that’s what happened, I wonder if the Master was involved somehow… It sounds like Davies was implying they chose their names for similar reasons, at around the same time.

On further thought, this would explain a lot of things about the Doctor. Why he does wear this mask all the time. Why he seems so committed to righting things, even sometimes against reason. It’s as if he’s trying to redeem himself. There’s his exile, and the Time Lords’ particular suspicion of him — which seems to go beyond mere bureaucracy. The early, “bastard Hartnell” fits in pretty well.

And then there’s all that business about the Doctor’s personality being mostly a facade, that he puts on to impress others. As Moffat says, “He’s almost a charlatan… in a good way. He poses as this god-like figure, but he’s just a bloke under there.”

Shadows of the Past

So… extrapolating a bit, perhaps the Doctor and the Master were both involved in something rather horrible. They were both a little bad. As established, the Doctor was always an outsider, always rejected, always looking for meaning in his life. That can lead to all kinds of delinquency. The Master was worse, he probably was a little older, and helped to goad on the Doctor. Whatever they did, they became persona non grata to Time Lord society. The Master, having been more directly responsible, may have been more severely punished. The Doctor more or less “got away” with what they’d done, yet was shamed by his actions and marked as a renegade.

Their names went down in infamy, and effectively came to define who they were. So each took a new name. The Master was fueled by contempt; the Doctor was fueled by regret. Despite efforts and the change of name, there was no more place for the Doctor on Gallifrey — so he decided to steal an old, broken down time capsule that no one wanted — rather like himself — and go out into the wild, perhaps to find a new direction for himself. To escape, and to find himself some meaning.

He was still a bit of a nasty item, of course. Just being a Time Lord, being raised in their society, probably didn’t help. And then there were his friends… Yet being the best of bad company is still a relative thing. His granddaughter — whenever it was she came into the picture — was some voice of conscience, of course, yet she was young and naive and easy to ignore. Easy to manipulate, as the Doctor, like his friend the Master, was so adept at doing.

Then he was forced down off his pedestal, and began to interact with “lower” people, like Ian and Barbara. And gradually he found a new moral compass and meaning. And he began to remold himself. To become The Doctor, as it were. Though he knows full well that it’s mostly an act.

He really does mean well, and he really does try — yet there’s a reason for that. He’s fighting against something. Against the person who he might be, who he once nearly was before he was humanized (as it were). He takes on all of these human, very mortal companions, who take him at face value, reminding him that what matters is not who he is, it’s what he does. And who can stop him, if need be. Yet the memories of Time Lords are long.

You can see it in how defiant the Second Doctor is at trial, at how desperate he is to justify himself and his attempts to do what he considers right. All the Time Lords see is the Doctor breaking their laws again; they take some effort to convince of his sincerity. Was he really acting in good faith?

Shadows of the Future

Going with Barry Letts’ Freudian model, you could say that before he met Ian and Barbara, the Doctor was essentially a balance between an ego and an id, with the Master prodding on his worse side. Who cares about practicality: think of what you can do! Interacting with humanity imparted him with an overwhelming superego, which tipped the balance of his psyche. And it is that which has been dominant ever since.

Which is where the Valeyard comes in. All of that potential for wrong, buried and suppressed for twelve generations, that very real core to the Doctor’s personality, his burning id — and this is its last chance to assert itself, and paradoxically claim the Doctor’s future generations, and a dominant personality. The last chance for the Doctor to be who he might be, who he fears he always has been behind all the facade. The person who the Master saw in the Doctor so long ago, when they were such close friends.

It also seems to explain the Master’s resentment toward the Doctor. Beyond anything specific he might blame on the Doctor, you always get the sense that he feels somehow rejected. And in a sense, that’s exactly right. Although there is still some affection at the core of their relationship, the Doctor found his own compass, and doesn’t need the Master anymore — which only makes the Master all the more bitter, and amplifies all the feelings of despair that the Doctor has learned to fight against.

And then there’s his apparent responsibility for the loss of the Time Lords. All that time trying to redeem himself… and that’s where he ended up? That’s the decision he was forced to make? No wonder he’s so suicidal recently.

This is all just me, of course. Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to start to wrap things up around the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors? To bring all that had happened into a grander context? All this certainly ties in with the themes of the show. As I said a while back,

It’s about a man who looks human but isn’t, traveling through time and space in a ship that looks like a police phone booth but isn’t. The title is the show’s central question: who is this guy, anyway? Hints have trickled out over the show’s forty-some years, but they generally just raise more questions.

As he explores, the Doctor recruits traveling companions — usually pretty young women from modern London — and tries to show them the universe. Instead, he tends to stumble into crises that he feels obliged to put right, using little but his wits and a startling audacity. Then he takes right off again, always moving.

The point of the show is that what matters is not who or what a person is; it’s what he does right now, and how he does it. With enough curiosity and persistence, even a nobody can change the world. Yet to find that wonder, and become more than you seem, you must leave your comfort zone.

And what a story it could be… if it just had two more points: a pivot, and an end.

4.09

  • Reading time:2 mins read

“I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth. I am brilliant, and unloved”

That goes well with:

“I like old places. They make me sad.”
“What’s good about sad?”
“Sad is happy, for deep people.”

You know that early X-Files episode, called something like “Darkness Falls”? The one about the man-eating tree mites that live in the darkness — as it turns out, released when people cut down old-growth forest?

…

In other news, in the commentary, Davies, Moffat, and Tennant discuss at length the issue that the Doctor is in fact both written and performed as if he’s putting on a facade. Everything that he does is intended to be just a little disingenuous.

Which is interesting, as largely Eccleston at least tried to play the character “for real”. That sincerity is the fascinating thing about his Doctor.

They also talk about Troughton’s sending up his own performance in his later appearances, and how when he was in the role he was actually a bit scary. Really, they discuss a lot of interesting things.

I wasn’t absolutely convinced by last week’s episode. The conclusion is good, though. I could probably pick at a few things, but I’m not motivated. It is indeed packed full of self-consciously “cool stuff” — like the snapping. Dear Lord, is that ever exhibit A. Unlike Lawrence Miles, this does not bother me. Rather, it fills me with a Davies-like glee. I’m a sucker for self-conscious structural shenanigans, though.