Doctor Who

Blaring Orchestra in the Library

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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.”

The Soul Patch of Ire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So I’ve rambled about the Sontarans, and how essentially uninteresting they are as they have been portrayed and used: yet another proud warrior race, which, aside from being familiar and trite, means they’re rational and focused and therefore no particular threat unless you’re distinctly in their way — and even if you are, you just may be able to talk your way out of harm. Furthermore, they have usually only appeared one or two at a time, leaving them to waddle around in the place of any other generic monster. Not too effective!

Leaving aside the cosmetic update, which is half brilliant (the prosthetics) and half ridiculous (the suit), the new series team has done two things with the Sontarans, at least one of which should have happened thirty-some years ago. First, they’ve finally taken narrative and thematic advantage of the Sontarans’ nature as clones — which has, to date, mostly been background detail. This is a wealthy area to explore, and I’m really curious where they’ll go with it next week, up through episode thirteen. Second, and more immediately significant, is the adaptation of their “proud warrior code” into a relatable emotional threat.

It’s subtle; they’re not playing it up too much. Yet the Sontarans have been rejigged from their status as basically ineffectual boogiemen to fit alongside the Slitheen and the Daleks as somewhat ridiculous, somewhat imposing, altogether unreasonable adult figures. Where the Daleks represent wrath and the Slitheen, hypocrisy, the Sontarans are now spun as manipulative “tough love” paternal figures, full of their own unpleasant martial codes through which they measure everything and everyone. If you can adapt and get into their graces, which generally involves behaving in ways that don’t feel very comfortable, you’re all right. You get a certain amount of praise and appreciation. If you can’t do that or you can’t maintain it, though, you get stomped all over — and they try to tell you that it’s your own fault, for having failed them. For being weak. For somehow just not being good enough.

The point is driven home by the irritating “teen genius” in this week’s episode, who serves basically as the smug over-achieving suck-up that everyone hates, and everyone is measured against. “Why can’t you be more like Luke? Luke never fails me.” What Luke doesn’t realize in his smugness, of course, is that he’s just a tool for someone else’s ego and sense of righteousness. And the moment he stops serving his purpose, whether through his own doing or otherwise, he’s in for a huge fall.

It’s not as visceral a threat as some of the other adversaries, yet it is poignant. Combine it with the clone theme, and the Sontarans are suddenly a rather complex and nuanced device.

Incredulity as Metanarrative Itself

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I find it bizarre that people often describe the original series of Doctor Who as more sophisticated than the new one. For its time, depending on exactly what we’re talking about, perhaps there’s an argument. Yet TV writing has come a long way in the last twenty years, and the new series is right up there. Thematically, in terms of narrative and metanarrative and characterization, the new series is at times some of the most sophisticated stuff currently on TV. Especially Davies’ episodes.

As great as it can be at times and for its time (some of the Hartnell era and season seven in particular), the classic series rarely aspires to more than pulp and generally only transcends that through sheer force of good nature. What themes are there tend to be pretty much on the surface, or else rather clumsy and obvious. (See The Green Death, which is held up as a beacon of subtext.) In varying quantities, and again qualified by the standards of TV writing of the time, you can make some good arguments for parts of the Hartnell, Pertwee, and McCoy eras. I’m really not sure what hidden insights you might find in Fury of the Deep, however.

Not that this is a negative in its own right; something doesn’t have to be great literature to be entertaining, and the original series has charm by the bucketload. Usually. Whenever Philip Martin isn’t involved. Further, it’s senseless to criticize a thing for failing to succeed at that which it never even intends to do, especially if its ambition is respectable enough for its context. Yet, there we are. Different ambitions at play. And on a narrative level, the new series is, broadly speaking, both way more ambitious and far more sophisticated, as in part dictated by the different climate in which it’s being made.

Granted, most of the new series episodes not written by Davies or Moffat are also a bit skint on subtext that’s not so blunt it might as well be supertext. Scrolling, blinking captions, at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes they’re a bit skint on text, even. Even Cornell, as great as his stuff is on first viewing, has very little going on under the surface. I was a bit surprised that I still enjoyed “The Fires of Pompeii” after a couple of further viewings, and found some new things to focus on; it seemed like it might have blown its load (no pun intended) on the first impression, rather like “School Reunion” or “The Shakespeare Code”. Still, Davies forms the template. And Moffat plays along, as he simultaneously does his own thing.

One of the big dividing factors is that the new series has an overarching philosophy and message to it, instantiated, challenged, and developed to varying degrees in at least most “key” episodes — that being a postmodern, essentially atheistic critique of modern cultural tropes, weighed against a devout sense of humanism.

Taken from Wikipedia, Jean-François Lyotard wrote: Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements–narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?

Emphasis added. If there is one overt defining feature of the new series — one that annoys the hell out of some classic series fans (perhaps understandably, since the bulk of the “classic” series, especially in the more popular eras, does little but revel in metanarrative for its own sake, understandable itself for the context in which it was produced) is utter irreverence toward metanarrative, at times bordering on contempt. Thus, the “overuse” of the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper, flippant get-out-of-jail-free plot cheats like the cliffhanger non-resolution at the start of “The Sound of Drums”, and fast-forward exposition as at the start of “Rose”. Plus, you know, the lack of plot — plot being one of the huge metanarrative structures that has, as an institution, gone beyond its functional purpose for organizing the crucial subjective elements of story (themes and character development) into the sort of tool fetishism that makes contemporary videogames so very boring.

What Davies has done that is clever on more than one level is that he has taken the incredulous structure of a postmodern approach, and with all the faith in the world anchored it with the one thing that he feels the most strongly about, and that he clearly feels defines Doctor Who as a narrative: an utter faith in humanity to find its way, at the end of the day, provided just enough of a window to see outside itself and its own petty momentary neuroses.

Of course, people are fragile and imperfect and there will always be a battle. The stupid apes need to be challenged, and that’s what the Doctor is for. (Of course, in this version of the show the Doctor equally well needs to be challenged, and that’s what humanity is for.) Yet given that opportunity, they are full of such potential. All it takes is a bit of insight and a bit of motivation, and you can break out of all the structures and guidelines that you think define your life (the postmodern part), and change the world. Or at least your own personal world.

And for a show fundamentally aimed at kids, this is a pretty amazing message to spin.

Nasty, British, and Short

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Following up a bit on an earlier entry:

The Sontarans are your generic Proud Warrior Race. Except they look like potatoes, which is a little different. Really, they’re nothing interesting. Just interplanetary thugs. Nevertheless (presumably because of fandom’s Bob Holmes fetish) they hold one of the high chairs in the Doctor Who rogues gallery.

This is weird, since even in a plot sense (never mind a psychological one) they pose little fundamental threat. They’re focused on their own agenda, which may or may involve the protagonists or anything that matters to them. Furthermore, however narrow they are, Sontarans are rational beings — so in theory, a clever person might persuade them into some alternative plan of action. Any peril, then, is contextual, and tends to amount to “danger of being shot, maybe, if you’re unlucky enough to be in the way and someone is feeling grumpy”.

The only pregnant thing (pun intended) about the creatures is the thematic issue that, in theory, they are all clones. (In practice, no two have looked remotely alike; chalk that up to the costume department.) Though it’s hardly a novel subject, that’s maybe got some story potential — yet to date it’s just background detail, as is everything else about them, except that they like to stomp around and shoot ray guns at our heroes. Sometimes.

For a year now fans have whined about the Judoon, claiming they’re just lame rip-offs of the Sontarans. If anything, though, the Judoon hold more story potential, in that as police-for-hire they represent a more usefully gray area, and that their extraordinarily procedural minds can lead to some amusing behavior and twists of logic. Plus, what a great prosthetic! Though in some ways they do fill the Sontarans’ practical role, they do it far more successfully (and more originally), following their orders (for good or ill) in a ridiculously literal manner. Lots you can do with that!

Again, if a new series writer were to go into the cloning business, maybe there would be a bit of a point to the Sontarans. Otherwise, I’m not sure why they need to be explored. (My guess: that’s just what’s going to happen this year. We shall see!)

On Monsters

  • Reading time:5 mins read

A good monster isn’t just a neat design and a memorable catch phrase; it taps into some deep and basic human anxiety and makes it animate. This is the nature of horror. The Daleks do this; the Cybermen do this.

The Master, as a villain, works dramatically because of his classic archetype: he’s just like the hero, except bad. He just serves to make the audience hate him, out of loyalty to the protagonist. Which is a strong way to go. Anger is just as good as fear.

Out of the new series, the Slitheen probably come the closest to something significant, in a children’s book sense: the idea of adults (especially petty, hypocritical adults) being ridiculous, childish monsters in disguise. Which children all know anyway, but here it is, made real! On that note…

Regarding Daleks

What makes Daleks work is that they embody more than pure nastiness. They’re pure, shrill, unreasonable nastiness. In theory at least, there’s no arguing with a Dalek; there’s no chance of discussion, no chance of compassion. They simply out-and-out hate you for the fact of being you. Whoever and whatever you are, if they get the notion and the chance, they will kill you out of that blind rage just because they can. And there’s very little stopping them.

This is the substance of many of my nightmares: accidentally crossing someone threatening, then doing everything I can to ease the situation, yet everything I say or do just digs me in deeper, makes the threatening person angrier, more violent, more crazed. And there’s nothing I can do to escape or halt the fury. This feeling is something that children, in particular, should understand well. Both the Slitheen and the Daleks call on senses of adults and authority at their worst; they just take different routes to a similar point.

Of course in execution they’re both more adorable than anything. Still…

While we’re here: although Davros is an interesting character, I’m not sure what he really has to offer on a primal level. He’s more of an abstract concept. And not even a very good abstract concept; I’m not sure that the Daleks need a creator, or that we need to meet him. That’s got nothing to do with what makes the Daleks work. Davros does have a right winning personality, of course. That’s pretty much what makes him. And that’s probably why the Big Finish audios are where he really shines.

The Boogieman vs. Dramatic Conceit vs. Mundane Menace

Doctor Who has a lot of “monsters” and villains like this, based on dramatic or thematic concepts rather than anxieties. Sometimes they can be rather sophisticated, as with the Silurians and Sea Devils: good conceits and neat designs, that don’t really have much in terms of boogieman credentials. So (aside from them looking and behaving oddly) there’s nothing really scary about them; they’re just interesting points of discussion.

Then there’s this third tier of monsters, just designed to look interesting and have a slightly alien culture or behavior. In the new series, the Ood are of about the same level as the Ice Warriors or Yeti or Sontarans. Well-developed and often nicely designed, yet (unless used in an insightful way) ultimately meaningless either from a primal or a dramatic perspective. They’re just pure abstraction, for the sake of having an original monster. With some of these, there is potential to pull a Silurians and justify them dramatically; it’s just not happened yet.

Someone objected that the Ood are clearly on a level far below the Ice Warriors or Sontarans, because as with the Yeti or Autons they have no self-determination. Which kind of misses the point, I think; neither do Cybermen and Daleks, really, classically. If anything, Ice Warriors and Sontarans are less of an interesting threat in that they are rational and they have their own agendas that don’t necessarily have anything to do with you personally. Neat designs, certainly. Yet they’re not boogiemen; they’re not out to scare you or get you. They’re just bullies and jerks. Keep out of their way and you’re probably fine. And again, they’re pretty much just dramatic placeholders. One proud warrior race is as good as another.

On the other hand, Autons do work (though I keep forgetting about them) because mannequins are sort of creepy to start with. It’s pretty common to see one out of the corner of your eye and not realize it’s a dummy until you turn and look at it full-on. The Autons to some extent seem to justify that existing fear. It’s not even just about mannequins, though they’re a convenient embodiment of that kind of fear. Imagining that (plausibly threatening) things are animate. Signs of life where there shouldn’t be, yet you fear there might be. Ties in to fear of shadows and snapping of twigs in the forest.

Curiously, all three of Moffat’s threats have been of the boogieman variety. They’re just so story-specific that they can’t easily be used again.

Adrift, indeed.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Some good stuff in here. It kind of falls apart once Gwen actually finds the island. It becomes icky, and it seems like Chibnall was searching for an excuse for all of those people to be held there. Then since the excuses he found weren’t particularly persuasive, he lumped in some ham-handed philosophy about whether some things are too horrible to know. On the basis of the last part of the episode, and the lingering annoyance it’s left me, I’d say maybe. I’m not sure that’s the parallel he was looking for, however.

What a weak and uninquisitive mind Chibnall seems to have. One of the things I like about Doctor Who is its sense that knowledge and experience sets a person free. That whatever the hardship, however difficult the knowledge, it’s better to know and have done than not. It’s better to grow than to sit and cower about what might happen. But Chibnall… he consistently writes shrill characters who go histrionic when presented with anything they can’t immediately understand. And whose minds MELT when forced to deal with anything outside themselves. This… is not enriching my life.

Again, though. Some neat character and myth stuff in the first thirty-five minutes or whatever.

The Purple Rose of Cardiff

  • Reading time:4 mins read

This year, Torchwood has become a very entertaining way to make fifty minutes disappear. It has pretty much worked out what it’s doing, even if it has yet to figure out why.

Today’s episode, though (which deals in nasty people materializing out of old films), resembles a lot of series one episodes, or “42” from series three of Who, in that it feels like it could be an episode of nearly any TV show with a vague sci-fantasy bent to it. Although the hero roles are roughly adapted to the main cast and all their quirks (despite continued confusion about Owen’s current status; can he feel anything or not? Can he breathe or not?), the same script could have been tweaked for The X-Files or Supernatural or (yes) Hammond’s own Sapphire & Steel, or any number of other shows in this vein. And it might fit in any of those somewhat more mystical shows better than in Torchwood.

(Man, I wonder if Mark Gatiss is going to write for this show. That would have been so appropriate for series one.)

It’s just this narrative island, that sticks out from the relatively tight narrative this year. And it’s clumsily written in places. The ending, in particular, which pulls out that “The story isn’t over! Be afraid of everyday objects!” trope card (which worked well, for all its hammer-over-the-skull directness, in “Blink“), is just… Well, the whole episode feels like it was written for an audience of twenty years ago. Never mind that the premise is old hat in itself, and that film as a cultural and technological concept should long since be demystified; it’s just… hard to relate to a fear of something so specific and (by 2008 standards) so esoteric as old film cans that you might dig up at a rummage sale. How many people do you know who own their own film projectors?

As far as the story itself goes, were those images on the piece of film or not? The young editor claims they weren’t, when he spliced it together. Indeed, they continue to show on his monitor even after the film is unspooled. Yet when the Torchwood team takes the film can, the images do seem to be physically part of the reel. Granted, the story probably isn’t meant for rational breakdown; it’s B-grade mystical faff. Yet it is distracting when a story can’t even get its own internal logic straight.

The bad guys suffer from that ineffectual, poorly-defined TV villain thing. Why do they spend most of the episode looking bored, milling aimlessly through abandoned places? You’d think if they were motivated enough to escape from a bit of celluloid they would want to use their time more efficiently. If the undrownable woman needs or loves water so much, and they’re in Cardiff, why is she squatting around, guzzling from stagnant ponds and lying in bathtubs? They’re right on the Bay! As evidenced in all of those helicopter establishing shots. It’s even salt water, which seems to be her preference!

Julian Bleach is decent, if a bit unchallenged, in his role as the head villain. Going by his Shockheaded Peter stuff, he just seems to be stamping out his trademark performance. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he has a suit as specific as Davros to fill out.

Anyway. Harmless enough; just kind of irrelevant. Next week‘s looks interesting. From here on it seems like all the continuity guns are going to be blazing, on the road to a snazzy climax for the year. Though I doubt it will ever completely justify itself, this show has on a whole become a very genial piece of television.

Master Ham

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Cartmel certainly had the same basic idea as RTD: dial the show back to where he thought it worked best — that being the first six years or so. Mysterious Doctor-as-MacGuffin, developed companion-as-protagonist, more experimental storylines.

The difference is that whereas RTD goes after all this from a populist perspective, by stripping things down and creating a new space, Cartmel was more… well, I wanted to say academic. I guess, that plus brute force. His whole idea was to twist and bend what was already there into a shape that he personally liked better. A relatively clumsy method to reach the same shape.

And yeah, the method seems to mostly be what’s at issue. RTD’s methods tend to engage and inspire, whereas Cartmel’s tend to disgust and confuse. And that is understandable.

Cartmel came to the show as an interested outsider, without much writing experience. Davies was an enormous fan, yet a disciplined (cue the snide remarks) popular dramatist. What Cartmel lacked was the affection for the material that softens Davies’ approach, and the experience to tailor his vision for mass consumption.

On the other hand, Cartmel’s insight is rather cutting and immediate, and it probably would have taken someone like Davies years to come to similar conclusions. Going by Davies’ earlier proposals, it seems to have!

Me, I don’t care so much about how either of them got there; I pretty much agree with their conclusions. I don’t have any investment in the material that they dismiss. I’m not so much interested in execution as the ideas at work, so both eras feel pretty darned similar to me — and hiccups aside, they do feel largely successful in what they set out to do. It’s almost like you could chop out seasons 7-23, and hey presto the show would be consistent.

Which of course is the portion of the show most fandom tends to put on a pedestal, so I can also understand why people would balk at this vision.

Still, hey. I’m with Cartmel. I don’t have the personal attachment. Or rather, what I do have is recent and entirely of my own creation. Whether that means it’s not “my” show or not, I don’t know. I’m just being analytical. It’s what I do. Luckily, I don’t have an army of fans to answer to.

As far as McCoy goes: the role (and the show) hardly calls for dramatic skill; what it demands is a certain off-kilter charisma and warmth. McCoy has more of a “Doctor” (read: professorial, avuncular) persona about him than anyone since Troughton. He’s also the first Doctor since the ’60s to take more of a back seat in the action, which is tremendously welcome after the previous decade and a half of ham.

An aside: Colin Baker is sort of neat in that he wears his bacon right on his sleeves. One can forgive his character his brashness, as he’s so upfront with it — whereas Pertwee and Tom Baker are more covert asses. Here, as with Sherlock Holmes, it’s portrayed as an actual character flaw. Unfortunately, not only did he never get much of a decent script; he never got a decent Watson (or Barbara) to round him off. Not until Big Finish, anyway. And now it seems like Catherine Tate will do something similar for Tennant. But back to the main discussion.

Again, frankly, with a show like classic Doctor Who, why should anyone give a shit about execution? It’s all rather low crap anyway, so it boggles my mind when people go on about the rat like it’s something tortuous and embarrassing in the middle of a piece of serious high drama, or about McCoy rolling his “R”s and garbling his lines as if Ian McKellen in his place would have transformed the show into high art.

There’s nothing objective about something like this. Watching the show is, in the first place, an exercise in transcending a charmingly tatty exterior in search of some warmth and inspiration. When you accept that, arguing about degrees of tattiness is absurd. The lighting and direction and prop and set design was often lousy in the late ’80s? Well, guess what? Twenty years on, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between a Cartmel-era set and one from the mid-’70s.

Once you’re past the superficialities, all you’re really left with is how interesting you find the things the production team is trying to do, and whether or not you’re fond of the characters.

As far as I’m concerned, anyway, Cartmel was the first period since the ’60s (with maybe exceptions for early Pertwee and the Bidmead season) where someone really tried to do something interesting with the show’s basic premise. Maybe it didn’t always work perfectly; still, the effort is neat to see. And it had the first really well-developed main characters played by likable leads since the ’60s.

And… I mean. I don’t think this is an unreasonable or especially bizarre perspective to take. It’s certainly not an unusual one in my circles. If anything, it strikes me as a result of my lack of long-term nose-to-the-grindstone investment in the show. Which… though not necessarily a superior position seems at least a somewhat more balanced one, compared to the acid or the faux superiority that gets slung about. For whatever that might be worth when making judgments on a tatty twenty-year-old TV show.

“All My Love to Long Ago”

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whoa, uh. Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer (and at the time the youngest, and first female, producer in the BBC’s history), just died. On the day before the show’s 44th anniversary — its first broadcast also being one day after JFK’s assassination. She wasn’t that old; seventy-one. I guess that’s old enough, though.

The show was such a strange force back then; all staffed and conceived by twentysomething women and minorities and foreigners, working under the auspices of a department that was ashamed of them all and what they were doing, in the face of another department that was deathly jealous of them and what they were doing, both mostly staffed with old white men, most of which did all they could to interfere. That the show was a success was all the more an embarassment, as it meant they had little excuse to sweep it under the carpet.

It was over four decades ago, though. I guess it’s surprising so many of the cast and crew have hung on this long. Ms. Lambert last appeared all over the special features and commentaries to the “Beginning” box set, in which she gushed her appreciation for the new series and all its nods back to her era — from which she felt the classic series had drifted away a bit much for her liking. This past spring, she was even name-checked as John Smith’s “mother” in Paul Cornell’s “Human Nature” two-parter.

I guess things turned out pretty well, in the end — at least so far as that business goes. And who knows how large it loomed in her life. She seemed grateful, though. And it seems she was creatively active up to her death. I understand she just produced a new series of a show I’ve never heard of. Looks like it’s a criical success, too.

Some interesting commentary from “superfan” Ian Levine.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, sort of, I just noticed that Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor), Sophie Aldred (his companion, Ace), and Anthony Ainley (the ’80s incarnation of the Master) all share the same birthday (August 20th). This show seems to attract bizarre coincidences both in birth and in death.

The Unheralded

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It seems like Who fans are bizarrely rigid and humorless in their idea of a “good” story. Anything held up by characterization is a failure. Anything held up by humor is a failure. Anything held up by concept is a failure. Anything held up by warmth is a failure. Anything that isn’t spelled out, point by point, is a failure. If it’s not a straightforward story with low lighting, told with a serious tone, preferably with a lot of violence, it’s not Doctor Who.

Just lovely.

So far as I’m concerned, Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity are two of the four most enjoyable and/or intriguing Davison stories. The standout Hartnell serials, to my mind, include The Keys of Marinus and Planet of Giants.

The Mutants and The Time Monster are amongst the Pertwees I most see myself rewatching. Though there are a few decent stories before it, season seventeen is more fun and clever than Tom Baker’s period had been to that point.

With the exception of the icky Mindwarp, season 23 is one of the most droll and warm things to come from the ’80s. And then there’s the whole McCoy era, including season 24, which I find refreshing as all hell.

Then likewise, with a few exceptions (including the Pertwee reptiles), I find most of the “good” stories extremely tedious: predictable, samey, slow, long. Full of stock elements, played straight. Little attention to psychology or human behavior. How many plots have relied on one unreasonable hothead in a position of command? How many alien cultures consist of flyspeck feudal European kingdoms with political or social issues (mostly put forward or maintained by one unreasonable hothead)? How many ’70s stories rely on plots ripped from B-movies, in place of the speculative concepts of (for instance) the Hartnell era?

For the most part, the stories I enjoy are the ones that take advantage of the format to try something unusual — be that conceptual, comedic, or dramatic. By nature, these will also be the least balanced stories. Who cares about that, though — or rather, who should care? Part of the reason why season sets make so much more sense to me than individual releases is that, like the tracks on an album, it allows serials to lean on each other to make a larger point and explore a greater spectrum of ideas without each one necessarily having to stand on its on feet.

Would you release “Cars Hiss By My Window” or “Been Down So Long” on their own, to fight their way up the charts? Of course not. But as parts of L.A. Woman, the album, they’re very welcome pieces of the overall picture; they cover ground that wouldn’t make sense to cover in other songs.

By and large, excepting some accidents of fan taste, it’s the “classics” which to my eye tend to specialize in nothing and do nothing to stretch the format. And frankly, I can’t see the appeal there. Maybe it’s comforting. Maybe it’s nostalgic. It just feels like wasted opportunity, though.

Eight

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I’ve said this before; the new series seems to go a long way toward redeeming the TV movie. From a continuity perspective, very little in it seems controversial anymore (“half human” issues aside); as a production, it’s always been great (Vancouver aside). The only obvious problem remaining is the pacing. The story isn’t even all that bad in the abstract; it just isn’t told well, getting caught up in procedure instead of development. Indeed, it’s full of great little moments — the kinds of scenes that people often claim to lift dry (and poorly paced) stories like Genesis of the Daleks out of the mire. And it’s these that tend to stick in my mind — the “shoes” scene and the glass-morph scene and the introduction — rather than the narrative faults.

Honestly, time has turned it into just another Doctor Who story. Any remaining continuity niggles are hardly any worse than Brain of Morbius or Mawdryn Undead; any script issues aren’t all that different from other classic stories; the acting is almost certainly superior to half the classic serials; the set design and photography are amongst the best ever. And to top it off, it’s introduced a bunch of ideas that — through their unconventionality — have in retrospect enriched the continuity more than the whole final decade or so of the original series.

So. Yeah. It’s certainly earned its place. Still. If I were to play script doctor, I’d suggest the next draft might go like this:

At the start, it would have made a lot more sense for the Doctor to have been fatally wounded in the crossfire, and to have regenerated right there — maybe when Chang Lee ran out to call the ambulance. Chang Lee could be directing the guys with the stretcher: “He’s right over… here?” And there McGann is, instead of McCoy. The attendants throw him in the back of the bus; Chang Lee just stares, confused. By the time they get to the hospital, the Doctor is ice cold; they deliver him straight to the morgue.

Perhaps before the ambulance arrived, Chang Lee rifled through the Doctor’s pockets — finding the TARDIS key, the watch, the Sonic Screwdriver. The Ambulance leaves him behind; he stares after it for a while, then turns to survey the TARDIS — this huge, blue… thing, that just saved his life.

Grace — how would she come in, if not in the operation theater? Perhaps she’s called in to do an autopsy? That would work. Would also seem to fit Fox (and her apparent Scully template) a hell of a lot better.

This already speeds up the episode a bunch. Imagine the Doctor waking on the autopsy table, and the introduction that would be. She could be shocked to discover that the John Doe was completely uninjured, despite supposedly being a multiple bullet wound. She could have her Puccini, and have the Doctor make his comment.

This would also save a hell of a lot of running around with the Doctor trying to convince her of things. It could even be sort of an intimate introduction, in place of his freaking her out entirely. To save even more time from the amnesia, he could quickly explain some of the necessary plot details, and she could be something other than a complete bint by observing that he just came to life and seems to have two hearts, so might be worth listening to with at least one ear.

Maybe a scene where he asks for his clothes; they’ve been burned or discarded; he can’t find anything except a ridiculous T-shirt and flip-flops, and has to wear those until she smuggles him back to the TARDIS — from which he discovers the Master has escaped, yet which in his place has a new and unexpected occupant in the form of Chang Lee (who might or might not make his presence known).

Maybe Chang Lee sneaks out while the Doctor and Grace are rummaging around, changing, and talking about the plot; he runs off to do his thing. The Master homes in on something or other Chang Lee snatched from the Doctor’s pocket; when he finds the kid, he does his “you will obey me” routine, and has a minion. By the time he leads the Master back to the TARDIS, the Doctor and Grace have moved on to look for the beryllium clock.

The Master can then try to steal the TARDIS; it won’t go anywhere thanks to the beryllium thing. And then he realizes he couldn’t go anywhere anyway, as the TARDIS is coded to the Doctor’s DNA — so he’d need the Doctor’s body. Thus he dreams up a neat plan: open up the Eye of Harmony conduit, thereby sending the Cloister bell ringing and the fabric of reality all inside out. Doing this will give the Doctor some problems to work out, with the world around him falling apart, yet will ensure that he returns to the TARDIS — where the Master can use the Eye of Harmony to aid him in taking over the Doctor’s body. If his plan works, great — he’s alive again, and outta there. If not, hey. What a swell final gesture, huh?

The Doctor has his misadventures on the way out and back, has his struggle; something previously establish intervenes to cause the Master’s body transference to go awry, causing him to be absorbed into the Eye of Harmony and the Doctor to be left unharmed. The Doctor muses on the theme of rebirth then makes his goodbyes, with the promise of an impending BBC/Fox/Universal TV series in the wings…

Losing the plot

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I think the thing I enjoy about the black and white period of Doctor Who is that it’s so much more ambitious than the later eras. Ambition returns in a form during the ’80s, though for different reasons and to different results. There’s a distinct difference, though, between the day-to-day approach to stories during the ’60s and ’70s.

During the Hartnell era, nearly every story was high-concept speculative fiction of some sort. Here’s the story where everything is as alien as it possibly can be; here’s the one where the TARDIS and its occupants shrink; here’s the one where we revisit a location hundreds of years later, to see the consequences of the Doctor’s actions. Even when they’re not speculative, they’re still high-concept: here’s the one introducing a meddling counterpart to the Doctor; here’s the musical; here’s the ridiculously long and serious epic.

Troughton curtailed that trend a bit, with a bigger focus on pulp “monster of the week” storytelling. There was still room for a few speculative stories, like an acid trip to the land of fiction or to a place where all the wars in history are being fought at once. In general, though, energy was devoted to creating new creatures to frighten the kids — preferably recurring ones. Repetitious, yet fun.

Pertwee turned the show into a spy show with aliens and mad scientists, with the Doctor as the hero with the cape and the gadgets; every week there was a new evil scheme to foil. The one story that’s really stood out to me during this era is Inferno — a story where the Doctor visits a parallel Earth in order to witness what happens when he fails, then has to relive the nightmare back in his own reality. It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode. Though the costumes and set design kill it for me, Carnival of Monsters also is pretty imaginative; it deals with the TARDIS materializing inside a miniaturized habitat trucked around the galaxy by a couple of carnies. Likewise, The Green Death is basically an allegory for the environmental movement.

Tom Baker is kind of where the series loses itself. The early, Hinchcliffe era is dominated by pastiches of whatever Hammer horror movie happened to be in theaters at the moment: travel from Sherlock Holmes Land to The Mummy’s Tomb Land to Frankenstein Land. Slap onto that a deliberate attempt to arbitrarily rewrite series continuity for short-term dramatic ends, and you’ve got a horrible mess — one which, to note, the hardcore fans generally consider the “golden era” of the show. It’s horribly dull; instead of putting creative energy into new concepts to explore, or even into creating new and original monsters to play with, or even-even new threats to London every week, this era funnels its energy into tearing down and rebuilding the series itself — whereas the stories framed by this new and hypothetically improved series are both unoriginal and told in the driest, most self-serious manner possible. The arrogance and ill handling of this era, more than anything, are what bother me about the ’70s stories.

After the BBC dumped Hinchcliffe and Holmes, with the suggestion that the show pull its head out of its ass and do something positive for a change, Graham Williams took over and generally lightened the tone of the show, turning it into a campy romp. He introduced K-9 and Romana, and hired Douglas Adams first to write for then to manage the writing of the show. The series became loopy and irreverent, and although the production values began to go down the toilet, at least the series was original and vibrant again.

Baker’s final season coincided with a complete change of direction for the show, with the oft-reviled, usually misunderstood John Nathan-Turner taking over the show. Granted, JNT had a lot of weird ideas about the show; he was a master at getting the show made, not at managing the creative side. As far as he was concerned, that was the script editor’s job. Whenever he was graced with a script editor with a strong plan for the series, the show was nearly as strong as it ever was. When the script editor was an uninspired douchebag who was more interested in squabbling with the producer than in drawing out a plan (or even managing the scripts), the show was about as awful as it ever was. Season eighteen was Bidmead’s turn, and his idea was an entire season dealing with the concept of entropy. The result: an uncannily consistent and well-conceived string of episodes, in some ways harking back to the Hartnell era.

When Davison came on board, the show was still coasting from JNT and Bidmead’s smash debut: full of intriguing experiments, carried by a continuing storyline, and even graced by a historical or two — for the first time since season four. It only took about a season, however, for new script editor Eric Saward to exert his own entropy on the series. Don’t draw out a solid plan, don’t seek out new and talented writers, don’t commission enough scripts, don’t edit what you do have — then see where the show winds up. It’s not that the rest of Davison’s and the start of Colin Baker’s eras don’t present some interesting ideas; it’s just that they’re isolated within a series that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why, and within individual scripts that haven’t received the care they require. By season twenty-two, there’s not a good story in the bunch. It’s this, more than anything, that gives Colin Baker the poor reputation he has — and it’s this that nearly got the series cancelled, for the first time.

After Michael Grade gave the production team a year and a half to get its act together (I believe those precise words were used, somewhere or other), they returned with Trial of a Time Lord. As it happens, Saward had spent that time doing… almost exactly nothing. He and JNT came up with a grand concept for the season; I guess that’s one thing. When production began, however, lo — no scripts! Last minute scrabbling and angst and anger. Result? Colin Baker got fired, and the show received one last warning.

What they did then — besides hire McCoy, who was at least very well-received at the time (even if current fans consider him the antichrist, for some reason) — was install a new script editor. As it turns out, Andrew Cartmel had almost no experience even with professional writing, much less managing the narrative direction of a TV series. What he had was a sense of perspective. His first season was a period of postmodern weirdness that fans couldn’t and can’t tolerate. Still, it was one of the most imaginative and downright intelligent periods in the show — the first breath of fresh air since Bidmead, and probably the most ballsy thing the show had done since the ’60s. Then when Cartmell settled in, watched all the old (surviving) episodes, and got a hang for what had been done before, he made a deliberate effort to bring back the ineffable qualities that he perceived had been lost over the intervening years (read: during the Hinchcliffe era). He put more of a focus on characters and long-term story, and went out of his way to find and nurture the brightest new talent available. Result: if you ignore the production and occasional casting problems, the series ended on a high nearly equal to its inception.

Now, the integrity and vision that Davies brings to the show should be self-evident. With his deliberate focus on “big ideas” (“Queen Victoria, a werewolf, and kung-fu monks!”) as a framework for character development and long-term continuity, it’s like a blend of the best from the ’60s and the late ’80s — albeit lacking a bit on the speculative end.

It’s this, here, that leads me to constantly compare the New Series to the ’60s series — before color, before the watering down and tearing down and budget and ego and focus problems. I seriously think you could watch the first six seasons, then the final three, then skip right to the new series, and not miss much of anything important.

Apply the above discussion to the Big Finish audio range and you’ll also be able to weed out the essential problems there. Whenever they do go for the big, brave, simple ideas — Scherzo or Natural History of Fear or Omega or Davros — they hit gold. Most of the time they’re content just to waddle forward with cookie cutter plots involving the Doctor and Companion arriving on X world with X political or social problem, that they need to solve. That Big Finish outwardly requests new writers not to specify what Doctor and they’re writing for should give an idea where they’re going wrong. It’s not about ideas or characters; it’s all about plots. Commodity.Words and actions taking up two hours of space, and leaving no one fictional or actual the better.

That’s not to say that Doctor Who has ever been particularly deep or substantial; it’s a children’s TV show. That, however, is all the more reason to be childlike. It’s a series about wonder and fear and finding new perpectives from which to view the world — all presented in the simplest, most digestible form. It’s basically a trainer for how to feel awe and respect for the world around us — and then to subvert it. When it (or anything else) doesn’t hit those goals, the world is deprived a little bit more.

Changing Faces

  • Reading time:4 mins read

After dwelling a bit, I am surprised by the consistency of the Doctor’s character under Russel T. Davies (and within his scripts in particular). Once again the Doctor is left ambivalent about getting close to anyone — alternately clinging and avoiding — yet now has been advised as to his objective need for someone to watch over him, setting up a rather different framework for his upcoming meeting with Martha Jones.

When we first saw the Ninth Doctor, he was shellshocked from the Time War; from losing everyone and everything he perhaps never appreciated — so of course he was both emotionally needy and reluctant to get involved, especially with anyone who wouldn’t stick around and try to understand his world, his life. He became unhealthily attached to Rose, then was reborn healed — at least outwardly — from most of the demons. As he became more dashing and confident, Rose became unhealthily attached to him, placing her desire for him above his objective needs, thereby putting his ego in a strange place. By the end he didn’t subjectively need her so much as he was used to having her, and didn’t objectively need her in that she did little to keep him in line (as she generally had the Ninth Doctor). When he lost her, he was sad and dispossessed — yet more than anything struck again with a sense of failure, of emptiness. It was a different emptiness from the Ninth Doctor’s; in place of desperation was an arrogance. Subjectively he’d shifted from need to want, and he couldn’t step outside himself. Nobody could give him what he wants, everyone leaves in the end, so to hell with everybody. What’s the point.

What Donna does is kick him in the head. “Look, Bozo”, she says, “who gives a damn what you want; it’s obvious from here that you need someone who isn’t going to fawn over you, who’s going to challenge you, and keep you from slipping into your weird place. To keep you human, as far as that goes.” That’s not going to be her, because she’s got better things to do than flit around the universe, playing nanny to a thousand-year-old god; still, she says, go find someone. And right there is an interesting point; there’s a tangible argument for the Doctor not to get too involved with his assistants. It’s an unequal relationship, where the Doctor is in effect in the inferior position. It’s been this way ever since Ian and Barbara, teaching humanity to the Doctor’s veritably antisocial first incarnation (at least, in the first several stories). When Rose lowered herself to his level, that caused problems. She was supposed to be watching over him, and she failed him. In losing her, the Doctor felt failure for his own sake — which is bad enough. For the state she left him in, however, he felt betrayal from the universe in general. And that’s not a good position for a Time Lord to be in.

It sort of makes me wonder if the only real difference between the Doctor and the Master is that the Doctor met Ian and Barbara, and has since generally had the benefit of an emotional compass in some form or another, honed and calibrated by an endless stream of confidants-slash-secretaries-slash-nursemaids, each one adding another nuance, giving the Doctor another bit of self. (Heck, occasionally even giving him their accents.)

Martha seems calculated to both gently kick the Doctor’s ass and to take an active interest in his affairs, without the danger of girly crush to get in the way of business — in a way, a more traditional companion for a more traditional Doctor. The Watson role, as played by a posh ninja lesbian.

Who indeed

  • Reading time:1 mins read

And the show *is* called Doctor Who, not Rose.

This is something people keep pointing out, often mingled with displeasure at Rose’s prominence.

Thing is, the title is a question. It’s not called “The Doctor” or “The Amazing Adventures of the Doctor” or “The Doctor Saves the Day”. It’s called “Who the Hell Is This Guy?”. And for that to be the title, the implication is that the focus will be on whoever’s doing the asking — on the impression the Doctor makes on said inquirer. Rose’s role was to act as the audience’s eyes and voice, to explore and maybe to some extent answer the question — though even at the end she never really got a full answer. And we probably never will! He’s the enigma at the center of the series; his companions are in effect the protagonists.

When a job is more than a job…

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So JNT didn’t have a strong creative vision guiding him. Well, sure; that’s obvious, considering where the show went (or didn’t) during the ’80s, until Cartmel came around. In that sense his approach — being so hands-off — was significant. So were his ideas about casting, his ideas about presentation, his ideas about continuity, his feel for showmanship, the way he tried to spin the show for various groups (in particular the increasing fanbase and the BBC management). There’s a pretty good story to be told here, and it needn’t be altogether negative. If anything, there’s more drama here than in most earlier periods.

As with any other era, the way JNT handled the show (or didn’t!) clearly led to the way it turned out and was ultimately perceived. It’s the mechanics of this that it would be enlightening to see illustrated, especially in contrast to other production eras.

I mean, even this discussion right here has made some connections in my brain that I hadn’t made before. Yeah, of course; JNT didn’t pay much attention to the creative ins and outs, did he — though he had some vague and shaky concept of a “big picture” he wanted for the show, and he had a few arbitrary things he felt he wanted to see. That would explain why it kind of went in circles, and why it kept referring to the past so much instead of moving forward. And why he made so many apparently odd demands. And why it was so terribly uneven, jumping from brillant to questionable to conservative to oddly progressive. And it would also explain why Cartmel was able to have so much influence when he came aboard, as there were no real creative conflicts (aside from JNT’s random specific demands). The show was just something to produce, with certain production concerns, according to a form he was familiar with.

Everyone was looking to the producer as a creative force, a guiding spirit for the show — and he was just expecting everyone else to get on with their creative work, while he paid attention to the mechanics of getting the show made and selling it to his bosses, the fans, and the general audience. After season 18 and until the McCoy era, no one was really driving. The real problem in the ’80s seems like it was one of communication — with perhaps a side order of organization (though that’s kind of a facet of communication).

That right there — that’s fascinating as hell.

Or to put it another way, this was the era where the script editor became the supreme creative force over the show — whether he appreciated it or not! Both Bidmead and Cartmell had distinct ideas what to do with the series, and went about implementing them with little interference; Saward… well, I’m not entirely sure what he was doing. There was obviously a huge communication issue here, in terms of what each party expected of the other, that wasn’t present with the other two editors, that just led to escalating frustration all around. Again: drama! Needn’t be dirty; if anything, an even analysis of the situation could defuse a lot of tension and anger that still seems to lurk around this area. Clear up a lot of misconceptions, and open it up for rethinking.

Dwelling a little more, this lack of communication on JNT’s part (though again there are two sides to any exchange, and neither Bidmead nor Cartmel seemed to have all that much difficulty, comparably speaking) might to some extent explain why he was stuck with the show for so long.

It’s often struck me as odd that JNT kept asking the BBC to reassign him, yet was continually refused. Looking back, I realize in most cases the sitting producers and script editors tended to have successors in mind who they preened for the role before themselves moving on. JNT didn’t approach it this way; again, it appears he was all business. When he decided he wanted to quit, he figured he could just fill out the forms and trot along; he’d done his part of the picture. The problem was, he was leaving to other people the task of continuing the show — much as he generally left the creative duties to the script editor, writers, directors, and cast. Of course the BBC wouldn’t have that; they probably felt it was his job to get the show’s affairs in order. Indeed, if JNT didn’t do it I can’t imagine who would.

Though JNT’s approach didn’t seem a very good fit for the show, I’m not sure if he can wholly be blamed. He just seemed to have different expectations from everyone else — and in another situation, his expectations might have been essentially reasonable. And they might have worked, if everyone wasn’t looking to him to make decisions that he wasn’t prepared to make and had simply let him do what he was good at — an area where, from what I understand, he was indeed quite skilled.