film and tv

Desaturation

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Generally, I find whenever something is stylistically heightened to the point where it’s difficult to take seriously, ditching the color immediately improves my suspension of disbelief. There are, I think, two aspects to this. One is that a black-and-white world is clearly not reality; this is an idealized, simplified dream world, that must be taken on its thematic strengths rather than its plausibility. The other aspect is that a loss of color helps to blur the edges. When everything is reduced to light and shadow, CG no longer looks so false. Wonky sets and costumes are easier to take at face value.

Basically, black-and-white strips away the distraction of an expectation of realism. Which in most cases, to my mind, can only be a benefit to storytelling.

Now don’t get me started on sound…

Midnight Mulling Moldy Mulder

  • Reading time:3 mins read

The X-Files‘ time really is past. When I was in high school and college I adored it as I had never adored a piece of pop culture — except maybe the Sega Genesis. Between “Shapes” (the werewolf episode, and the first I saw) and the middle of season eight, I only missed two episodes on first broadcast. Then I just stopped, and have never made up the final season and a half. I really liked the first movie, and I’ve got the full set of action figures. Three Scullies, even, in two outfits! Yet I can’t even watch the original show now.

In tone and pacing and theme, the show is such a 1990s phenomenon. A product of the Clinton era (which the new movie seems to wink at), and an age just before people figured out how to write for television. Yes, it helped to bring this age on; that doesn’t make it part of it. And the new movie is an epilogue to the TV show. It’s shot the same way; it uses the same subtitles; it’s got the same ambling Chris Carter pace and tone and cluttered sense of theme to it.

It works as a movie; it works as an afterthought to the TV show. It is distinctly not a relaunch of the franchise. It’s tired, and it makes no attempt to be current or vital, or even to reach outside its core audience. It’s basically just saying goodbye, and wrapping up some character threads. After an hour and a half of genial if not particularly interesting story, the best part is hidden after the credits. In context especially, it alone is near worth the admission — provided you care for the characters.

I went to the 9:45 showing at the Grand Lake. They had free popcorn, and a balcony! And flirtatious concession stand women. I think there were three other people besides me, and none who stayed through the credits for the Cracker Jack prize. One of the ushers came in toward the end and sat in the rear corner; when it was over and I stood up, he bade me good night. And… it was 11:40 exactly. It’s a twenty-minute walk from the theater. I walked in silence. Though I had my mp3 player, midnight in Oakland is no time for clouded senses.

Quiet is never so loud as when there is no noise.

I think work is progressing…

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.

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.

Grit

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Why does every single thing filmed in the 1970s look like it belongs in a horror movie?

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.