Buddy’s Book is a subtle one, setting up lots of details for later. But like every Connie episode the dialogue is just amazing. The kinds of things she gets wrong due to her rigorous and enthusiastic tunnel-vision. Also note the diamond theme here.
That’s a whisper of a detail. The music in this show is just so important for communication, and the choice to work in the Diamond music, quietly, while Steven and Connie mill around the library… it’s so fascinating, in terms of the signals it trickles in about what’s happening
Makes it sound a little Twin Peaks, if you’re not quite keyed into the cues.
Suppose it helps that this is one of the few times the show reflects something I recognize from my own childhood. When I wasn’t being dumped in a shopping mall alone all night, I used to wander the stacks of various libraries while my father researched forgotten publications.
Those goddamned stepstools. You can’t even push them effectively. And they smell and feel so odd.
The Crystal Temple was ruined even a couple hundred years back. Though, notably, the dunes didn’t yet stretch up to her entrance.
Hadn’t noticed the later call-back. When Steven first presents Connie with Buddy’s book, she gets all dramatic as she does. Then in “Steven’s Dream,” when he asks her to bring him the book — well, of course. It’s this attention to detail, you know.
The show is roughly 45% foreshadowing, 45% callback, and 10% tears.
Either Dewey’s name changed over time or Buddy isn’t so good at spelling.
Likewise their shared image of Buddy as Jamie in full “drama zone” harks back to “Love Letters” — even as the story here builds on the play in “Historical Friction.” Neither of those is particularly eventful, so it’s tempting to dismiss “Buddy’s Book” by association. But, no.
This is actually a super important episode not just for establishing the season arc that people insist doesn’t exist and setting up or contextualizing random bits of mythology, but for looping those earlier episodes back in and showing how they’re actually relevant.
And… I mean. Unreliable history, right? Everything about this episode deals with the ways in which we get the past wrong, and change stories for our convenience, down to picturing Buddy as Jamie and the CGs first by their modern incarnations then as shown in a painting earlier
Through the whole story, Buddy keeps recording details of Gem history all wrong. Some he gets right; not many. The very last beat in the story addresses how Steven and Connie pictured Buddy very differently from the reality, and how they kind of prefer their version of the truth.
Which as an opening volley to the show’s third act is pretty fucking important.
Half the episodes in this show seem to basically contain all the elements for every future episode. Like, pick any random episode and there’s a good chance you can work out an argument for why It All Starts Here. That’s more true than usual for “Buddy’s Book,” though. Endgame.
It’s not a particularly eventful episode, and maybe that’s the thing that trips people up this season. So much of the season is people sitting and talking and learning and thinking things through, and figuring out how they feel. It’s… drama, you know. As opposed to melodrama.
Guess I’m also always a sucker for ancient texts and maps and artifacts and whatnot. So wrapping the fragments of Gem history that we know in a human context, more clearly illustrating how they’ve affected and influenced the development of the world, is super interesting to me.
This is fun, speaking of new details. The beefsteak strawberry. I could do with a few of those.
“Fare-thee-well!” from a penny farthing. Have I mentioned the internalized wordplay on this show?
Wish I had a library near here. Wish I lived in a place that was livable.
For a show without scripts, this show really loves its words.
The next episode has its problems, but it also has this. (Just noticed Pearl getting protective over her sock after Smoky threatens to knock it off.)
In terms of characterization, it’s interesting that Smoky is the second fusion who isn’t named Garnet to be treated like their own person, rather than an ostentatious short-term mish-mash of personality traits. So far it’s just Stevonnie and Smoky. The Steven fusions.
Given the whole show is from Steven’s perspective, I guess it’s a given that his fusions will tend to *have* a perspective, but. I guess maybe his empathy gives them a level of stability that other fusions might struggle to reach? If he’s ready to fuse, it’s going to be complex.
Assuming this is anything like representative, one wonders where Amethyst and Steven would sit on this chart. Apparently Stevonnie is about halfway between Pearl and Garnet, in raw strength. Which is something, considering they’re 75% human.
The episode starts well, and then the ending… man. The middle doesn’t work at all, unfortunately. It’s one of those things that — it feels like it was carefully thought-out on paper so well in advance that it’s stripped down to nothing but an idea.
In a recent… thing, somewhere, one of the crew suggested Peridot eventually noticed the bubble in the barn and moved it over to the Burning Room. If so, did we see it in the fountain later?
Granted there’s a lot to go over in this scene.
Don’t see any green bubbles, but that’s hardly conclusive.
Anyway, the comedic timing in this episode is flawless. I know Fans In General (also see Doctor Who, anything ever) tend to be down on comedic episodes, so for them this must start off season 4 on a bum note, but… yo, this is how you do it. I don’t even mind the pastiche.
Talk about animal byproducts
Seriously, if you can’t appreciate this majesty, I don’t think we have much to talk about.
This isn’t a real sequence of posts, as such; it’s a collection of tweets, carried over and plopped in order in part for the sake of readability and in part to keep them from vanishing into the aether. So! Let’s talk about Steven Universe, huh!
I guess people don’t like season four that much? People are weird. I can understand how its scheduling must have been annoying, after getting all of season three in, like, a month, but season four is where the show really starts to become the psychologically intense thing it is.
A thing I’ve heard a few times is that it’s the only season without a plot. And, uh, what? The entire season is about Steven’s mental breakdown. It’s about his trying and failing to cope with all the things that have happened, the things he’s learned, and what they mean for him.
But then the same people who dismiss season four are the ones who describe “Storm in the Room” as a pointless filler episode. Which is… I mean. The actual fuck? I really don’t get how people interpret art, more often than not. Or, well, rather, don’t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmpprrp365g
Strikes me that too many people I’ve been close to, they’ve based their sense of right on whether a thing meets their expectations — as opposed to basing their expectations on whether a thing is right.
I take a special interest in art critique, as I… kind of have noticed that the way people respond to art is almost identical to the way one can expect them to respond to people. And, in particular, to me. You open them up to empathy for weird perspectives, you’re doing well.
I notice that some people, their notion of empathy is… it’s kind of like a sociopath’s concept of respect. Actual respect is about acceptance. Authoritarians will insist it’s about obedience. Actual empathy is about understanding. They’ll say it’s about meeting expectations.
Etiquette. To the authoritarian, empathy is the same thing as etiquette.
To the authoritarian, respect is a social game of doing what’s expected and empathy is a social game of saying what’s expected. Both are forms of manipulation, with end goals of winning in some way.
This, incidentally, is part of what growing up rich will do to a person.
To a person like this, empathy means you memorize this series of rules and follow them exactly, or else you’re demonstrating that you don’t care. As opposed to, you know, listening and validating one’s experiences, relating to them. Getting that people are people.
This twisted idea of empathy, it all cycles around shame rather than love. About performance. Ritual. Never putting people out, offending them, by breaking the rules of behavior put upon you. As opposed to… you know, being kind?
Which is, I guess, how you get here.
(Yes, I am speaking from experience, if you’re wondering.)
So what I’m saying is, White Diamond must have a really long TubeTube rant out there about season four.
It’s worth stressing that in a way, the show’s real hero is Greg. When you first see him, you’re probably tempted to dismiss him. The show sure sets you up to. A washed-up middle-aged rock musician, living out of a van. He let himself go years back.
And it’s not like the Gems are wrong. He clearly is a mess. He didn’t have much direction to start with, and since Rose died he’s pretty much given up. But as becomes clearer, the more one sees of him, he’s also preternaturally kind. And it’s his kindness that saves everyone.
Through the vehicle of Steven, mind you. But he didn’t get that from Rose, and he didn’t get that from the other Gems, who basically have no clue how to relate to others. When Steven talks down a family of intergalactic fascists, he’s working with the humanity he’s been handed.
If Rose had never met Greg, and Greg had never made such an impression on her, and then formed the basis of Steven’s understanding of the world, this conflict would never have been resolved. The Earth would be just gone. The Diamonds would still be expanding their empire.
In hindsight, this scene may be one of the most central to the entire story. This is where Greg saves the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC3UVEt-7G4
Smash that Diamond Authority, Greg.
Greg is kind of an ancillary character through most of the show, only popping up to spout advice or provide comic relief. In dramatic terms, he doesn’t want much. His main breakthrough is no longer feeling shunned by the people he’s closest to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06PIH5lTm1k
It’s a smaller arc for his smaller screen time, but it’s pretty distinct from the start. What’s interesting is that the Gems are themselves a group of misfits and outcasts, and never mind wider society, he’s an outcast even from the outcasts.
He’s a flawed character like any other, and this neediness (if that’s what we call it) helps to explain his one really big, selfish blunder, in “House Guest.” There, he’s just… Well, for context, check out the extended intro, and that last look before he hands Steven over.
“Okay, Greg. Thanks for building us this house. We’ll take it from here. Bye.”
Something else weird. So people rag on season four for having no plot, when it actually… is kind of the turning point for the story to get intense. But they also consider season three the show’s pinnacle. Yet it’s, like, all townie episodes. Which, they continually whine about?
I’m not saying I expect fan blargh to ever make sense. I’m just scratching my head at another aspect of its nonsense. “Obliterate all townie episodes! They are the plague!” “What, the best season? The one with all the townie episodes, of course!”
I’m not so wild about Moffat; as a writer, he’d pretty much used up all his ideas by the end of 2007, and from then through 2013 mostly set about remixing them in increasingly self-aggrandizing ways.
But from 2014-2017, something rather astounding happened: he started to listen to people, and he started to look inward. He was still Steven Moffat, but he began to question how and why he did the things he did, and out of that came actual art. Some of the best writing, and best creative direction, the show has ever had; better than nearly anything in the previous 50 years of the show. Granted, this energy began to taper a bit after 2015 — understandably given that 2017 was a padding year, after he’d already resolved to go but before Chibnall was able to take the show off his hands, and that Moffat suffered some personal issues along the way — but his final series was still stronger than anything else he’d done outside of the previous two, and stronger than most runs of Doctor Who in general.
Before 2014, Doctor Who on television hadn’t really been big on character development. I don’t mean growth here; characters had grown, as far back as William Hartnell’s Doctor and particularly over Davies’ time. Even Moffat’s previous writing, stilted as it was on a human level, had characters increasing their RPG stats, if you will, as they went along. But this goes beyond the (wonderful) melodrama of Davies or the later Cartmel era. This is more out of literature: defining a character trait, establishing its logical dimensions, and then spending a book’s length exploring what that means, both in terms of the character’s inner life and behavior, and its consequences when applied to a world defined outside the character.
It’s kind of basic stuff for serious fiction, but it’s not really where Doctor Who has ever gone before. The show has always been too focused on the moment, and how to play up the brilliant, often abstract ideas (or, more likely, plodding base under siege) that it’s exploring right now, to spend much time on the, for lack of a better phrasing, philosophy of its perspective. Even Davies’ characters, as gorgeously as he maps out their minds and reactions and speech patterns, are defined as simple declarations that we’re meant to glom onto and just carry forward, nodding as events bounce off of their defined personalities in ways we can easily trace.
And Moffat has never really been much for psychology. He’s not interested in how other people think, in the way that Davies is. It’s a bit of a truism, yet still mostly true, that as a consequence he has mostly written ciphers. His writing serves to deliver sitcom jokes, often with plot revelations as the punchlines. He’s so manic about control over the narrative and the notion of spoilers for the same reason a comedian doesn’t want you yelling out the punchline before he reaches the end of his joke. That’s his thing. It’s always been his formula as a writer, and he’s only ever had so many jokes to tell. His first three series as showrunner were labored attempts at building bigger, more complex versions of those same few jokes, each retelling more tortured than the last as he tried so hard to cast the structure in a new light. In this model, Moffat’s characters are as two-dimensional as the foils in a vaudeville routine. They’re not meant as earnest explorations of the human condition; their function is vehicles to deliver jibes. Which is why in place of Davies’ carefully blended dialogue with Moffat we mostly get one-liners, put-downs, and pure exposition.
His run from 2014 to 2015 changes all of that. He’s still Steven Moffat, and he’s still carrying around his well-worn sack of tricks, but here he approaches the show from a different angle entirely. He’s more settled, more measured. More thoughtful. And somehow out of that convoluted, often tortured long-joke structure he carves room for meditation. A kind of meditation that hadn’t come before, from any writer or era; not at this kind of a length, not with this much time and control to keep on dwelling and prodding. And out of this we have the most psychologically complex Doctor and companion, and Doctor-companion relationship, in the show’s history. With this as the show’s new story and narrative baseline, Moffat is free to Moff off and toss his toys around the room, as in otherwise by-then trad scripts like “Listen,” and suddenly they take on a greater significance by the tricks acting in aid of a greater narrative cause rather than simply to conduct the story in their own right.
Of particular note is series 8. On top of the sudden focus on character development, there’s this excited shift in narrative structure, with a mix of nonlinear scene editing (e.g., that whole sitcom sequence in Into the Dalek where Danny fails to ask Clara out on a date) and longer scenes with more dialogue, a pair of minor innovations that play out to their logical extremes early on, in “Listen,” but then continue throughout the run. And then there’s the way it revels in recurring thematic beats, in a way I’m not sure the show has before. Nearly every episode, leading up to the finale, involves one or more of the following:
Soldiers
Cyborgs
Cyborg soldiers
A companion who wasn’t, possibly for one of the above reasons
That’s off the top of my head. When I was watching the first time I had a longer list of things the scripts kept riffing on, prodding from different angles, lending the whole run of episodes an unprecedented sort of thematic unity. But I’m sure it’s clear what character and story elements the above serve to reflect.
That’s the thing about a good story: however complex it may be, it tends to be a fractal, with any part representing the whole and the whole representing any part. Again this is fairly basic when we’re talking about literature, but — well, Doctor Who has never really aimed for literature before. It’s been doing its own thing, often rather well. Here, Moffat takes aim with his golden arrow and nails that space ship right in the bull’s eye.
Series 9 is an astoundingly good sequel, exploring the fallout of everything that drives series 8, and the two of them make a greater whole, but series 8 is where most of the hard work happens. It’s where Moffat learned to listen. So that’s the one that really stands out to me as a revelation.
(Although Series 10 is in more ways than one Moffat’s hangover series, and both stretched thin and disjointed in a way the previous two aren’t, it’s also often the most refined culmination of Moffat’s artistry, and individual moments over these twelve episodes are some of the best moments of the entire show. It’s an afterthought, but also a worthy coda.)
It helps that at this time Moffat also found a new backing band; a more sympathetic stable of writers, interested in pushing the show to new extremes and exploring its creative fabric more than the ultra-trad fan contingent on whom Moffat had largely relied to that time (when he wasn’t chasing down one-off celebrity writers). The likes of Dollard and Mathieson embody Moffat’s own shift in priorities, and their earnestness mixed with roiling creative insight give the show the added boost of energy to really develop it into its own thing. It’s interesting to see that even as the first half of series 8 mostly uses “safe hands” to pedal in the new Doctor, Moffat still co-writes nearly every script, shaping it to be a bit more than it would otherwise be. This is unprecedented for him, and it shows the extent to which he actually had a vision for the show, that none of the familiar writers were of much help in capturing.
None of this is new from me. I play my own familiar tunes. But I really think the last three years have been a creative renaissance of the sort we haven’t seen since Andrew Cartmel. But it’s all the more remarkable, because it’s more like Andrew Cartmel had never existed, and instead somehow those last three years of the 1980s had been Saward all along, after some major revelation, and they had turned out exactly as they did. I’m not sure we’ll see a progression like this again, and it’s a pretty damned interesting case study.
It’s been a few years, and I imagine that this episode has rightly faded from memory for most people — and yet its writer, Toby Whithouse, is still regularly held in a mystifying high regard by Doctor Who fans, to the extent that many were disappointed he wasn’t picked for the new showrunner over Chris Chibnall.
To the best I can figure, this acclaim is based on two crutches: that he happened to write the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the show (along with K-9), and that since then he hasn’t done anything to dramatically upset the ship. At least, not until his series 10 episode, which I suppose stands most clearly in contrast with the two identical yet decreasingly interesting episodes that preceded it.
It’s in this light that I think back to “A Town Called Mercy,” one of my votes for worst-ever New Who episodes, yes. Only a couple of other clear contenders for the prize, and none has gone as far to disrupt my faith in the show and its creative rudder.
To quote another commentator, homunculette:
It’s like Toby Whithouse decided to write a Western without attempting to do any research into what Westerns are like or any historical research into the time period and instead just wrote it from his memories of seeing like one Clint Eastwood movie as a kid. It’s mind-numbingly boring, morally trite, and tosses off a casually transphobic joke for no reason.
This honestly describes so many scripts of the era (e.g., “Curse of the Black Spot”). But “Mercy” is just particularly vacuous, even for Whithouse and even for seasons 6-7. It doesn’t even begin to make an argument for its existence, beyond showing off a different location. One of the fun things about a tired form is that it’s ripe for deconstruction, or salvaging. Sergio Leone did this to astounding success, and there’s no reason a show like Doctor Who couldn’t find something to interrogate about the Wild West.
It’s done it before, of course. However one may feel about The Gunfighters, it’s a genuinely funny and unapologetically weird comedy that makes a point of playing off and against genre tropes, as with the Doctor getting increasingly exasperated that people keep putting guns in his hand. Even if the finished serial is an acquired taste (one I have acquired), it’s written with wit and observation, neither of which is in evidence with Whithouse’s work.
That lack of wit or observation — and lack of concern about that lack, which might spur curiosity and research — is to me one of Whithouse’s defining qualities. He very much reads to me as the kind of guy who takes a course in a subject, successfully follows a practice blueprint that was laid out for him, and decides he’s now got it down to a science. Every script of his, it’s like he’s playing Mad Libs with an entry level screenwriting textbook; just lifting stock conflicts and conversations and scenarios whole-cloth, and rearranging them according to the instructions. It’s the definition of mediocrity. And fandom being what it is, of course, for that he gets credit. Good job, Toby. You didn’t color outside of the lines. Solid work. What more could we reasonably ask?
Compared to some of the other modern-era mediocrity, which tends to exist in balance with some extenuating virtue, I find Whithouse’s total white-bread adequacy pernicious in regard to its stifling, blunting factor on the series. I nearly gave up on the fucking show, a show I’d obsessed over since 1999, after his cowboy episode. Others I know did give up on it halfway through his series 9 two-parter, and nothing can draw them back again.
Matthew Graham is a prime counter example. Everyone hates his first episode, and you’ll find few vocal defenders of his later two-parter. People will wonder why his Who work was so bad, compared to Life on Mars. But, seriously, take a look at how he writes. All his writing follows the same patterns, as does all of Whithouse’s, and your answers to his successes and failures are right there. Graham is also a deeply mediocre writer, who like Whithouse got lucky with a breakout genre mash-up sci-fi show. But Life on Mars is different from Being Human, and more substantial for its problems, in the same way his Doctor Who material is.
Graham is superb at coming up with pitches: visionary concepts, that he’ll flesh out with well-drawn characters, sparkling dialogue, and some astute thoughts about how and why they do what they do. This comes through in the main draw to Life on Mars — the scenario, the people who inhabit it, and how they interact — and in Rose and the Doctor’s dialogue in “Fear Her,” and all of the psychology of the Flesh duplicates. But then, once he’s sketched that basic picture, Graham has no fucking clue what to do next; where to go from there. So Life on Mars just ambles on, following no clear plan, reiterating its premise a couple times an episode for two years, until in a panic, when Simm’s had enough, Graham just picks one explanation and calls it done. Similarly, Rose and the Doctor arrive to investigate, then just mill around a suburb for 20 minutes, facing scribble monsters and other directionless first-draft material, and squandering what good will their best characterization all season may otherwise have earned.
Peter Harness is superb with coloring outside Whithouse’s carefully manicured lines, with bold, confident strokes that trace new and inspiring forms to expand the imagination and the boundaries of what the show can and should be… and then squanders much of that with a stultifying ignorance about the topics he so loves to explore. It’s exciting to see the show tackle the issues that he bring up, and then frustrating to see such a dangerously uninformed take on such prickly topics, be they science, politics, ethics. Less confidence and more research, even a modicum of research, would do Harness a wonder.
The thing about each of these cases is that the mediocrity is an end sum; a result of a real strength that benefits the show and an undisciplined tedium that nearly pulls it back to zero. In the process, though, there is dynamism. They do things with the show, that help to redefine it and internally that help to justify the effort even it it does level out in the end. Any next script might be the one where they learn to mop up their fog and their strong points will shine out clearly.
By contrast, Whithouse studiously avoids shining, in favor of an even, calculated mediocrity from start to end. This is true of his own show (compare “what if modern-day UK cop landed in corrupt 1970s department?” to “What if three monsters fashionable in other pop culture at the moment lived in apartment together?” in terms of the thought and thematic potential involved), and it’s true of his tediously recycled Lego kit Who scripts. The best you can reasonably say of the guy is that he effectively maintains the status quo and avoids making waves. And to my mind that’s also one of the most damning, and an imminent threat to a show as dynamic and reliant on vibrant change as Doctor Who.
“A Town Called Mercy” is the barest and most damning example of what he doesn’t have to say as a writer. Its only grace I can see is a ready case study for how to kill the show, or avoid doing so, to assign to future writers.
The casual transphobia is just the perfect garnish to its existential blight on the show at one of its more creatively vulnerable moments.
(On the topics of pernicious mediocrity, dangerous ignorance, and casual bigotry, I also have things to saw about Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts. But, not here; not now.)
On a Web forum that I will not mention, a viewer on a voyage through Classic Who asked a question, before he set forth through season 18. He understood that JNT was a topic of some controversy, and wanted to know what he was in for over the next nine seasons. Is it that everyone hates JNT? What’s the deal with this era, exactly? My response:
—
It’s a tricky and complicated question, and to answer it we need to be careful about what exactly we’re talking about. Are we criticizing JNT as a person? Are we talking about his creative judgment? Are we talking about his approach to being a producer? Are we using JNT as metonymy for the show itself under his watch? All of these are different questions, each with a complicated and inconclusive answer.
The easiest and least troublesome topic is the show that he presided over. To that end, obviously everyone has their own view but these days you’ll see a fair consensus that JNT’s Doctor Who both began and ended well; it’s the stuff in the middle that’s up for debate.
Others have said the same here, and to my view it’s true; broadly speaking, seasons 18 and 25-26 are amongst the best Doctor Who that’s hit the TV. They’re the most consistently authored portions of the classic series, with strong views about how to use the show as a platform to communicate ideas. You get that in bits and pieces elsewhere, particularly with writers like Malcolm Hulke, but it’s rarely this focused before Davies comes around.
Part of the reason for this is, as Homunculette says, JNT’s approach to his job. And here we’re starting to get a little dicier, in that we’re starting to approach JNT as a person. But we’ll come to that slowly.
More than any other producer on the show, JNT kept rigidly to the letter of his role. He was not a creative person, by any stretch of the imagination, and his only input to the show’s content tended to be superficial: how things looked, how they were presented, what kinds of gimmicks might get people talking and increase viewership. JNT came up through the system, as a floor assistant, floor manager, and so on. When he took over the show, it was because he had put the work in and it was his time — not because he had a creative vision. The BBC was concerned about giving him the job, so for his first season they set up Barry Letts to oversee. From season 19 on, though, JNT was on his own.
With JNT’s focus almost exclusively on the practical nuts-and-bolts of balancing the budgets, networking, and getting the show made, with a growing side shift of promotion, that left the burden of the show’s “content” almost exclusively with the show’s script editor. So from a creative standpoint, under JNT the script editor basically is what we would now call a showrunner, except with little tangible executive power. They were solely responsible for the show’s creative vision.
Ergo, under JNT the show is only ever as good as the script editor. Beyond just the high-level vision and practical talents, the script editor’s relationship with JNT, and their ability to cope with the logistical demands of the job, tended to determine the show’s ultimate quality. Bidmead had a strong idea for what to do with the show, and was able to both cope with and incorporate JNT’s odd executive decisions and to push back when JNT’s decisions weren’t going to work in the show’s best interest. Cartmel had one of the most intense visions of anyone who has had creative control over the show, had a very strong knack for finding and nurturing talent, and had the fortune of landing his job in an era where JNT had pretty much checked out, allowing Cartmel to proceed without the degree of weird micromanagement that Bidmead and Saward faced.
Eric Saward is… a very polite man, and a reflective one. He’s also a perpetual victim. You listen to him long enough, and somehow through all his self-effacing eloquence he has an explanation for how everything is someone else’s fault. This negativity and lack of ownership comes through in his work; where Bidmead or Cartmel would find a way to work with and incorporate JNT’s dictums, Saward would just push back, say, “Oh, that’s awful,” and then fold and stand away, with the attitude of “Okay, you brought this on yourself.”
You do this enough, on enough levels of production, and it’s going to affect what ends up on-screen. And boy howdy, does it. Increasingly, as Saward’s resentment grows over the years. This is not to say that Saward is without talent or virtue, and that nothing good ended up resolving under his tenure, but for whatever reason there’s a lack of creative guidance here. Whatever coherent voice comes through tends to do so accidentally, and it’s not very pleasant.
Which brings us to JNT as a person. Accounts here vary widely depending on who’s speaking, but it’s fair to say that JNT was a strong personality. He had his views and his notions, always presented as a strong, definitive objective yet often based on a whim or whoever talked to him last. (E.g., he cast Colin Baker as the Doctor after enjoying his company at a wedding reception.) Again he had no understanding of the creative process, which could make him paranoid about what writers and artists were “up to.” He was terrified of someone trying to sneak a message into the program that he didn’t understand, that might make for a PR disaster.
JNT’s judgment tended to reflect what made for an easy production and clean books, and not having to deal with tempermental artists and things that were beyond his understanding. So, for example, regarding the end of season 21, he considered Caves of Androzani something of a disaster because of Graeme Harper’s unconvential behavior, Saward’s commissioning of an established writer who had more political pull than JNT, and generally a sense that the whole production was out of control. Meanwhile, he thought that The Twin Dilemma was the best thing he’d ever overseen, because it was produced with no fuss, it came in under budget and to technical standard, and it reflected well on him with upper management.
So, he was a tempermental person of questionable judgment and fitness for his job. He was loud and assertive, and due to his own prioririties often focused on the least helpful of all possible topics. Like when he demanded that Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, and everyone stop wasting time researsing for the show because he wanted to do a highly public Christmas panto. Promotion always trumped production, and production always trumped creativity.
He became obsessed with the growing fan community, and started to weigh decisions based on how they would go over with the convention crowds, the fanzine editors, the letter writers, and particularly the alpha fan hangers-on; the people who would regularly come by and hang out in the viewing gallery at Television Centre to schmooze with cast and crew and watch the show being filmed. The Ian Levines and company.
Which brings us to Marson’s book. JNT was of course openly gay at a time when this was still socially, even legally, dicey, and so understandably he indulged in the gay community that surrounded the show at the time. Which is neither here nor there, except that when you’re in a position of power and you use that position as a tool to exert that power over those who are vulnerable… it creates a problem.
It’s unclear that JNT was ever explicitly predatory, though he certainly enjoyed the fruits that his position brought him. However with his partner, Gary Downie, there is no mistake. He was a sexual predator, who used his position on the show to actively, aggressively pursue underage boys. Richard Marson includes in his book an anecdote from his youth where he personally had to run into an empty room and hide under a table to escape from Downie. Marson plays off his own experience for the surreality of the moment, but throughout the book he makes a damning case against Downie, all the time sketching JNT as an elusive, all but unknowable figure behind all that bluster.
So, the JNT era of Doctor Who is… controversial. As is the man who oversaw that era. My suggestion is to keep JNT in mind as a background notion, but in viewing those last nine years of the show to focus more intently on the script editor. The show’s whole creative model shifted over that period, and you can’t look at it in the way you’d look at any other period of the show, or draw conclusions the exact same way. More so than any other period of the show, before you make up your mind about what you’re seeing, there’s a tangle of asterisks to consider. Why are you seeing what you’re seeing? Why was it made the way that it was? Well, let me tell you a story…
Bad-ass title sequence aside, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is the period that nearly broke Doctor Who. Same as the Lennie Briscoe era of Law & Order. It’s where the show found its successful formula, settled in, and learned to coast. This is Doctor Who at its most dangerously comfortable. (Note how many people perceive this era as “correct” Doctor Who, and extrapolate or compare its tendencies to the show as a whole.) It’s not until circa 1987 that the show started to get systemically weird again, in a way that let the show continue to grow and breathe and live (Much like seasons 18-20 of Law & Order!), and led into its modern-day incarnation. (Unlike Law & Order!)
It’s not that the era is awful; it doesn’t do much for me, but there are some nice parts (Deadly Assassin, say). If I’m hard on it, it’s less about the era in itself than about the negative influence it had on the show going forward. Like, if after Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the show had gone in a wildly different direction again, then fine. Things change; they move on. We try things, then we try something else.
But this is where the show achieved a sort of stasis, both in terms of its future creative momentum and its public perception. It’s not even the most interesting stasis they could have picked for the show. Yes, let’s rip off a popular horror movie and put the TARDIS in the middle. Inspiration incarnate. What galls me is how quickly this became What Doctor Who Is, and anything that varied from the formula was wrong. It’s so daft that even the serials within the Hinch/Holmes era that don’t match the template (e.g., Android Invasion) are considered awful, no matter what neat ideas they may bring to the table. They’re different, so they’re wrong.
Which, for a show like Doctor Who, which more than any TV program I can think of, embodies and glorifies change, is very nearly a profane mode of thought.
Again, it’s not like the Hinch/Holmes vision is invalid. It’s as worth exploring as anything, and resulted in a few epiphanies (Deadly Assassin, again). But then it had to keep moving, and it didn’t. It started into a downward spiral of trying to maintain or replicate or work against these few months of production. All of Doctor Who became a precursor to or an attempt to return to this supposed glory period, when the show had become so very small and isolated. It nearly destroyed everything.
There are other weird things that crystallized here as The Way Things Are Meant To Be, even though they never really were before. Like, the way old-school fans today muse and scoff about the notion of story arcs and long-form storytelling. Doctor Who stories are all supposed to be self-contained! That way you can watch them in any order and nothing matters! But… until season 13, that was never the case. In the 1960s, serials all ran into each other; characters often harked back to events from weeks earlier, even if it was a different story entirely. The Hartnell era is full of rather complex character development. The Pertwee era makes far less sense out-of-sequence, as stories are constantly referring to what happened before, and B-plots develop over the course of multiple seasons. (See the Mike Yates thread in the last couple of seasons.) The Doctor’s situation, and its relation to the Master’s situation, are in a state of continual development. It’s all vibrant, alive. Then after Barry Letts moved on from his supervisory role in season 12, the show just became a movie-of-the-week thing, with little to no context. And, Bidmead and Cartmel aside, this largely became the status quo for the remainder of the original run.
Then there’s the cast makeup. Pertwee had changed the dynamic by turning the Doctor into an individual action hero — the star of the show, rather than the anchor of an ensemble cast — but he still was surrounded by an expanded regular or semi-regular cast, to flesh out storytelling as needed. This is I think an element that allowed the Pertwee era to be so much more sophisticated, on a narrative level, than what had come before: it had more roles to employ, in a greater number of capacities — and you didn’t necessarily have to use them all, every week. It’s even more of an ensemble than it was before. Hinchcliffe and Holmes strip that right away, especially after the Letts legacy of season 12, and again basically boil the show down to the bare necessities and divorce it of any greater context or narrative potential or significance. One Doctor, who now is very clearly the show’s hero rather than a catalyst for the main character(s), and one lady who’s largely there to make the Doctor look smart and give him someone to talk to.
To my view, this is just as damaging a systemic collapse as the absolution of continuity. We’re going down a path to an unsupportable level of stasis, which will lead to the exact kind of irrelevance that plagued the show throughout the 1980s. Granted, someone of greater creative talent could still elevate the show, as happened in seasons 18 and 24-26, then again from 2005. But if you will, the entropy had now set in. Everything else would be a struggle, and the show’s end was ordained. What had to happen in 2005, for the show to work again, was to strip away most of the damage done during seasons 13-14, and return it to a model more closely aligned to the last time the show worked under its own steam — namely the Pertwee era. Which Davies has made a point of declaring, over and over, what he was doing. Making a new Pertwee era. Ergo his quoting the start of Spearhead at the start of each new series.
The Pertwee era was, more often than not, about something larger than itself. It used Doctor Who as a platform for social, political commentary. Explorations of colonialism, capitalism, indigenous rights, apartheid, consumerism, the military industrial complex, environmentalism, early feminism, isolationism. Dicks and Letts go on the record that they felt there was no point in telling a story unless it was about something. And then there’s the Malcolm Hulke influence.
By comparison, the Hinch/Holmes goal was to “scare the little fuckers,” as phrased on one of the DVD extras. And it largely approached this narrow goal through borrowed glory, hollowing out existing horror stories and putting the TARDIS in the resulting cavity.
This is not as sustainable a mission. It’s a smaller view. It’s an easier view. It’s a safe template because it means you can just plug things in without having to worry about any greater significance.
This is the era when Doctor Who began its descent into irrelevance because of its conscious self-isolation from structural and thematic elements that would allow it to meaningfully grow or adapt.
This is where the cult of No Meaning finds its roots.
No continuity in MY Doctor Who!
No character development in Doctor Who.
No cultural commentary.
No political commentary.
The Doctor must be the sole hero.
The sole assistant must keep to her place.
The show must not challenge my preconceptions or make me think about anything other than plot.
Doxtor Who is entertainment only. It must not try to engage me in a discussion. It must hew to my specific desire.
This is poisonous.
From here, development becomes a simple question of how “light” or “dark” the show can afford to be, which leads to decisions like putting Eric Saward in control for half the 1980s.
Though you lose a few nice trinkets here and there (The Deadly Assassin, season 18, Douglas Adams), the show would be so much better off to just regenerate Pertwee into McCoy. I honestly don’t think you lose much, and you retain the momentum built up through the first 11 years, that the following 12 so thoroughly squandered.
So, yeah. DuckTales 2017 is, as many predicted, almost more of a re-adaptation of the Duck comics than of the 1987 show. It has the optics: Donald is present as a key team member, Scrooge is in his Comic colors, there are Ben Day dots all over the place. Whatever. But, Jesus.
I mean, seriously, this goes straight back to the comics. And not just Carl Barks. I mean Don Rosa. The first episode combs through Life & Times, with portraits of Scrooge’s parents, a lineage chart for the nephews that includes Hortense and Quackmore, and just generally way more awareness of and investment in the comic mythology, as focused and enhanced by Rosa.
Scrooge and Donald carry something more like their comic personas. Donald is about 60/40 Comic Don versus Cartoon Don here — still recognizably the guy who you can depend on to throw walnuts at Chip & Dale out of spite, but also a more layered character. The Comic Donald is a simple, lazy, fairly unlucky guy way out of his depth in every part of his life. Part of his laziness seems to be a zoned-out avoidance because he can’t handle the life he’s been dealt. But, importantly, when he’s really needed he always steps up and is willing to get, you know, shot in the face if need be to live up to his obligations or protect the people he cares about. He’s a sympathetic character in the way that Cartoon Donald could never be. He also speaks like a normal person, with his own curious idioms and speech patterns, as opposed to an incomprehensible squawkbox. That cartoon element is still present in 2017 Don, because people would flip out if they changed it, but it seems to be played as one more of a million things that makes the poor guy’s life hell. He can’t even get a sentence out, and his lack of an ability to communicate only fuels his bad temper.
Scrooge, meanwhile, is back to being the largely self-centered, irresponsible figure he is in the comics. The first episode goes to great lengths to contrast the two uncles’ parenting styles; whereas Donald is paranoid and overprotective because of his own experiences with life, always on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, always sleepy from his against-his-nature vigilance against the horrors of life that may at any moment pounce on his nephews, Scrooge just doesn’t give a damn. He has no regard for danger, and often stirs more trouble than he expects or immediately knows how to handle. But he’s sure he’ll think of something. Which totally Freaks Donald Out.
Long ago he used to assist Scrooge on his adventures, but by the time we catch up here he’d long since distanced himself from Scrooge, to the extent that the nephews barely seem aware that Scrooge was a relative.
Since this is 2017, there also seem to be some ongoing story threads. The very final shot of the pilot ought to be interesting, as it dives right into the biggest unexplained mystery in all iterations of the Duck universe. This is like “why exactly did the Doctor leave Gallifrey?” business. A thing that even Don Rosa steered way clear of touching, except in a passing manner in a late chapter of Life & Times.
It also is consciously DuckTales, in that it borrows from the earlier show’s iconography enough to call itself DuckTales. And then borrows from Darkwing Duck, and TaleSpin, and Goof Troop. More than just DuckTales, the show seems to be quietly setting up a new Disney Duck Animated Universe.
You’ve got most of the original DuckTales characters who aren’t useless or annoying (no Doofus or Bubba, I so hope — have yet to hear anything), but they’re remixed and employed in functional roles here. Duckworth is pretty much gone (though I’ve read he’ll appear in some form, later?), while the more-vital Launchpad and Ms. Beakley step into that void and split his duties. Beakley is more vital because she comes with Webby — who now, instead of being, uh, plot luggage, has been upgraded to an audience surrogate — so she’s been made a more general and much more capable personal assistant. Launchpad is just a general hired hand/chauffeur, no matter the vehicle or task. He’s incompetent at everything, but he’s game and presumably he’s inexpensive.
Then you’ve got the odd changes brought about by the 1987 series, which the 2017 one just runs with. Glomgold is not just Scottish (instead of South African, as in the comics); he’s so Scottish that he constantly talks about how Scottish he is. Which… come to think of it may be overcompensation. Is he genuinely Scottish? The way this is set up, I’d be unsurprised to see a long game in here.
Anyway. This is really well-done. The pilot at least is very smart and well-written. They seem to have thought this project through in insane modern showrunner sort of detail, with hints and seeds of future adventures and character development and revelations strewn all over. And nearly everything the characters do, every plot that they embark on, has its roots in character, and in the show’s basic themes (which are themselves rooted in character). You know how Buffy‘s monsters are all projections of the characters’ anxieties and the emotional things they’re going through that week? This is kind of like that, except with Barks/Rosa style adventures that illuminate family tensions and anxieties.
Like, in the pilot, Donald reluctantly leaves the nephews with Scrooge, whom again they’d never met and it seems like Donald has rarely if ever mentioned around them, issuing him (not them) a stern warning to behave while he’s off, because he needs someone to watch them while he goes off on a job interview. That interview happens to be with Glomgold, who Donald is dense or self-absorbed enough not to clock as Scrooge’s arch-nemesis. So while Scrooge gets carried away and winds up on an adventure with the nephews and Webby, Donald ends up becoming Glomgold’s own personal Launchpad. All of which is structurally really cool and which serves as a perfect canvas for exploring what’s going on within and between all the characters, and why it is that Donald is so pissed off with his uncle.
Which… may or may not have something to do with that final shot, again, and that unspoken mystery at the heart of Duckdom.
I’m staggering into well-trod ground here, I realize, but bear with me. I’m going to lay out a series of thoughts, and let’s see where they may lead.
Thought #1: Steven Moffat has been on a mission lately to wrap up dangling story threads, from River Song and her screwdriver to Simm’s regeneration into Gomez, to the “missing” regenerations between old series and new, to generally resetting the show to its factory settings (as well as that’s even a thing) for the next show-runner to make use of at will — putting Gallifrey back in the sky, putting the Doctor on the run, returning major foes to recurring status. Not all of these threads are his own; some, he inherited from Davies. Some predate Davies, to an extent. If there’s a loop to close, late-era Moffat has gone out of his way to close it.
Thought #2: Moffat also has gone out of his way to cater to Capaldi’s whims. Capaldi said over and over how much he’d like to face off against the Mondasian Cybermen; how if he was to go out, how great it would be to be done in by one of them. Moffat scoffed, and he scoffed. But, look what happened. He’s been sending the scripts (e.g., the upcoming special) past Capaldi for review, taking on board minor and major suggestions, and altering them accordingly. In turn, Capaldi, being a fan since the show’s beginning, has his share of suggestions — not all realistic, but many well-informed and well-intentioned.
Thought #3: In wrapping up his era — in fact, the whole “revival” era of Doctor Who — Moffat is not only returning the show to its factory settings. He’s bringing Capaldi back to his own first memories of the show. Capaldi gets his own Mondasian Cybermen, which is fine — and then as he denies his regeneration he’s transported back to the Doctor’s first encounter with those same Cybermen, which is in turn the Doctor’s first regeneration. Dramatically, this is some good stuff: some by-the-book thematic mirroring, to draw clear metaphors and enhance semiotic coherence amongst far-flung events, creating a sense of epiphany and oneness. It’s kind of like Chekhov’s Gun, or advanced intercutting (a technique with which Moffat overtly experimented throughout series 8, e.g. in “Listen” and “Into the Dalek”), in terms of James Burke-ing a sense of holistic significance on the chaotic and often desperate causality that tends to define the show’s narrative.
Thought #4: Moffat not only hews to Capaldi’s whims; he also seems to take an impish glee in running with off-handed remarks that tickle him enough for Moffat to make mental notes, e.g. the Doctor’s electric guitar. There were no plans to insert an electric guitar into the show, but after the first series Moffat asked Capaldi what changes he’d like to see; Capaldi had no clue, so, being an ex punk rocker, he joked about putting a guitar amp in the console room. Of course that would be silly; he just didn’t didn’t know how to respond to the question, in that moment. So, for no reason other than to rise to the ridiculousness of the suggestion, Moffat did as he wasn’t really told. Likewise at a convention panel, in response to Moffat’s canned joke about Hartnell not returning his calls for the 50th anniversary special Capaldi fleetingly suggested they could have got David Bradley in. And Moffat had a Larry David moment, staring off into space and thinking, “Oh.” So, lo, William Hartnell’s impostor is the Fender Stratocaster of series 10.
Thought #5: There is one glaring, famous unresolved thread of continuity to this series that presents itself in every clip show, at the show’s every anniversary, that people tend to collectively pull up their collars and avoid mentioning, lest they stray into “Paul McGann is the Rani” territory. You just don’t go there, for some reason, like it’s an unwritten law. For someone of Moffat’s impulses and humor, that challenge must seem awfully tempting.
Thought #6: Moffat is not exactly known for the expansiveness of his toolbox. In Capaldi’s era he’s become more adept at using his few tricks more constructively to tell meaningful stories, as opposed to flashing them around at the audience to show how shiny his tools all are (see: the Matt Smith era). Still, his scripts are typified by a few concepts that he uses over and over again. For instance, out-of-sync relationships with extreme time gaps. We first see this with Reinette, where we meet her as a girl, then a few minutes later as an adult, then eventually the Doctor pauses too long yammering about the plot only to find her dead — that he just missed her by moments. The same concept is remixed a bit for River Song, is worked into a monster-based story for “Blink” (e.g., when Sally turns her back only for Kathy to turn up dead, her note for Sally as delivered by a relative echoing Reinette’s for the Doctor), becomes basically the entire basis for Amy Pond, nearly becomes Clara’s exit in “Last Christmas”, and has some of its final echoes in the way Capaldi’s Doctor misses Bill by just a few hours, as a result of getting distracted by exposition back at the top of the ship. Moffat has a half-dozen patterns that he uses over and over, but this one seems to be his favorite.
Thought #7: Earlier, between the filming of series 8 and 9, a certain actor from the show’s past visited the current production and was shown by Capaldi around the TARDIS set. He said to that actor, oh, you need to come back, seriously. Then he went to Moffat, and said, oh, Steven, wouldn’t it be great to see them back? Moffat gave a non-committal response, as one does to that luvvie nonsense. Yeah, sure. Everyone should come back. Put them all in a boat with a single oar, and see what happens. We’ll broadcast it exclusively in IMAX at 2 a.m. Apply in the affirmative; nod and smile; yes, of course, let’s do it. Now let’s move on.
Thought #8: As further evidenced by the selling point of the forthcoming Christmas special, Moffat sort of a has a thing for screwing around with Hartnell’s continuity. He’s had Clara visit the Doctor as a young boy, then several hundred years later shown a splinter of her interfere with the Doctor’s choice of an escape capsule. Outside of the modern era, there’s no other part of the classic series that Moffat has shown such a significant and repeated interest in reinterpreting. This interest is starting to border on an obsession, and considering that Moffat is now brazenly dancing into the events surrounding Hartnell’s regeneration — something already fairly well-documented if one ignores that the episode in question is in fact missing — one wonders how deep this obsession will go.
Thought #9: Throughout series 10 — and here, if you’ve somehow been glazed over with my argument so far, you should be ready to groan — the Doctor has two photographs on his desk, representing the painful dangling threads of his family. One of those, Moffat took the care to resolve two Christmases ago, so for us her portrait is more of a recent, rather warm, reminder — though for the Doctor it’s a certain recent and raw trauma, as obliquely addressed in his Missy flashbacks. The other portrait is the one we’re not supposed to talk about, lest we look like total loons. And yet there it is, receiving regular camera focus — a recent continuity reminder, sitting with equal status beside what we must interpret as another deep-dive continuity reference, of the sort the show seems to do more and more under Moffat (e.g., Hartnell’s face turning up on that dingy machine in “Vincent and the Doctor”). Which is fine. Though, the camera really does like to focus there.
Thought #10: It has become something of a modern series cliche at this point that at the moment of regeneration the Doctor revisits the companions of his recent past. David Tennant’s narcissistic Doctor claimed his “reward” by visiting every major companion of his era, including threatening to bring on a paradox by visiting Rose several months before she ever met him — or, rather, met his previous incarnation. Smith’s Doctor had his weird “Head Amy” moment while Clara stared on. The recent trailer confirmed that Pearl Mackie is making one last round this Christmas, despite apparently having left in the previous episode, and well-informed whispers suggest that her predecessor has also put in at least a cameo.
Thought #11: At the start of the recent trailer, we were graced with a tampered Hartnell quote. It wasn’t the quote, the quote that you’ll always expect someone to use, for instance at the start of The Five Doctors (the previous time that Hartnell’s Doctor was recast with a not-quite lookalike); it was a moment from Hartnell’s final serial, into the final moments of which Moffat has chosen to insert his own final script for the show — in much the way that Hartnell’s visage weirdly morphs into David Bradley, to misdeliver his last few words. The quote used for the trailer was appropriate for its provenance, and yet because of its positioning and because of the expectations set about by prior art, it is conspicuously not the quote that we’re looking for. If anything, it seems to undermine that expectation. To read in some possibly unwarranted motivation, almost to misdirect from that expected quote — and by so doing, to create a dissonance that sets up a certain subconscious expectation.
Thought #12: In the recent past, Moffat has shown great willingness to bring back old characters when it suits the story, and to totally refuse to unless it does. In the forthcoming special alone, we’re already bringing back the (recast) first Doctor, and — to enormous surprise — a recast Polly Wright in some capacity. Clearly bringing back the two of them suits the story that he wants to tell about Capaldi’s Doctor. About facing the regrets and the pain and exhaustion that prevent him from feeling entitled to, or even to want, redemption. It seems to me there’s one deep regret that the Doctor has never addressed, that his fourth and twelfth incarnations may both share with a similar (if in one case more present) ache. If the Doctor is going to move on, and unreservedly accept a new, unburdened life, it may be some therapy to release that pain.
All of which is to say, the Doctor never did come back, did he. At least, not in dramatic terms, in the primary continuity of the television show. He made a bad call, and he knows it, and he’s been avoiding it ever since.
And, all things considered, it seems to me this may at last be his moment of catharsis.
The more I think about it, the more I like about the premise of Class as well. It’s like tragically, grimly accidental continuity.
Coal Hill is just this school, in a formerly working class, quickly gentrifying area of London. Full of kids, teachers, living their lives. But, a jerk in a time machine has punched enough holes in the universe that unspeakable horrors have begun to pour in.
So the school has turned into a place of incomprehensible danger and fear, that people have no rational way of quantifying. What can you do? Put up a memorial to the dead and the vanished, renovate and modernize, try to rationalize, try to keep living. But everyone knows. What had just been a normal school has turned into an urban legend, a place of dread… that still remains in operation.
What had randomly been the location for Doctor Who’s first episode, then a subtle continuity touchstone for decades, is now a character. Coal Hill has become mythologized in its own right, as a casualty of the cavalier adventure narrative of the parent show.
And into that mythology step a few brighter-than-average kids, who through it face horrors they are unequipped to cope with. THANKS DOCTOR.
When you see the Coal Hill emblem now, it comes not just with dry geeky recognition but with a sense of living menace. It has been corrupted. What had been benign, slightly wonky continuity has become a hostile mythology. It has taken on its own life, and that life is tragic.
As a writer, Patrick Ness regularly emphasizes the words that we’re using and the weight that we give them. In episode one, Ram’s father interjects about his son’s sloppy word choice.
RAM: Oh, my God! If you tell me one more time, I might literally go insane.
VARUN: Don’t abuse the word literally. It’s a good word that young people squander.
Note that he doesn’t criticize Ram’s misuse of the word; rather, the lack of consideration that seemed to go into its selection. The point isn’t a prescriptive approach to language, but rather a deliberate one.
In the case of this show, I think the most important word may be its title, Class. I think that the conflicts in the end will be less a matter of malevolence than about the consequences of righteousness and entitlement.
There are some key elements that the show has set up already: Charlie’s justified attitude toward slavery; his imperiousness when questioned on it by Tanya; that telling early moment where Ram asks him why he sounds like the Queen; his detachment, that initially we read as dorky obliviousness, upon walking into the conflict of Matteusz’s family; his calm and calculation in bringing the Cabinet with him, and in his following demeanor — on which Quill checks him in the first episode; the failure of the… whatsit in episode three to tempt him with visions of his parents.
I’m starting even to question his actions in slapping away April’s hand when she shoots at Corakinus. He justifies it by saying he hesitates in killing a friend, but at that point he hasn’t really done much to suggest he thinks that much about April. Really, his whole attitude toward the others is genial but disinterested. He’s fascinated with them, particularly with Matteusz, but they’re just tools to entertain him while he bides his time.
What have I been waiting for?
Been wasting all my time,
Watching my youth slip away
Surely is a crime.
It’s not that Charlie is an evil, malicious person out to do harm. It’s a matter of class. As Charlie loves to remind everyone, he is a prince. He is above everyone and everything, and he has his entitlement. Whatever he does, it is just — because of who and what he is. He simply is better than everyone. It’s the way he was raised, and it plays deeply into his understanding of the world. Within that framework he’s easygoing and pleasant enough, and seems willing to listen to others and entertain their views to a point. But, he’s not even the same species as these people.
To that end, it’s a little unclear what his motivation might be, but it is telling that he has this box on Earth that can in effect empty out all of the people on the planet and replace them with his own people. He’s already wearing a human skin, so it’s not like the concept is that much of a leap for him.
The issue about his parents, we can read a few ways. The initial viewing gives us a sad sentimental glow; he was the poor little royal boy who nobody really loved except as a tool (aside: how might that have affected his views of others?), and here he’s found a real family. Take another look, and we see that maybe he doesn’t miss his parents because he has a plan and he’s not so bothered that they’re gone for the moment. Dwell a bit more, and you start to wonder if the Shadow Kin were on his planet altogether by their own device. Did he play some part in orchestrating what happened? Is there a strategic reason why he might want Corakinus around?
I’m not sure that the story will go as far as that, but I think it’s becoming clear that the big turmoil in this show is going to be around Charlie’s ethics and his decisions about who he wants to be, what he cares about, how he wants to behave. And I don’t think he’s going to come to (what we would consider) the right decision very easily. “Nice” he may be, as with April, but he’s not exactly kind. It’s not natural for him to relate to others as equals. And it may take something big to force him to accept that leap.
Probably involving a few slaps from Quill.
Afterthought: Most of the sense in the main cast comes from the people of color, and the immigrant boyfriend. In the first episode Ram and Tanya joke about how glad they are to talk about something other than what the white people are up to. Ram is clearly the main character of the show; he is most affected by what’s happening around him, and goes on the most visible personal journey. The first episode opens to Ram, engaging Charlie in petty conflict — or rather, Charlie being lightly “terrorized” by Ram (see his excuse about the Quill) — and that conflict continues for some time.
Even in episode two Ram is reluctant to get involved with the chosen ones, a status that he scorns yet Charlie wears more naturally than his human skin. This really all is happening because the Doctor plopped Charlie down in the middle of Shoreditch, and being an alien — a royal alien, at that — he’s pretty tranquil about the whole thing.
So, yeah, Charlie is a problem. That’s going to be the big thing to unpack by the end of the season.
That first year of RTD’s Who is acidic about social justice. There are other things going on, but one major nerve is the contempt of the upper classes for the cannon fodder underclass. Whether we’re talking the Slitheen/politicians, the Daleks/mass media, the likes of Lady Cassandra — or even the aspirational Rose, talking to Gwyneth. Rose is working class and should know better; indeed she chided the Doctor one episode earlier. But she so wants to pass as middle-class. This aspiration, or vague sense of entitlement, is one of her major character flaws that gets her into trouble again and again.
“Why do you sound like you’re from the North?” she asks, unsure whether someone with an accent like that could genuinely have as much authority as the Doctor seems to. That he could really be someone. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it’s part of her preconceptions. One more beat among many.
Adam’s contempt comes back and bites him. Jack’s almost sets off an apocalypse — but he manages to ground himself, and find redemption. For Rose’s part, the first chance she gets she also turns her new status to her own advantage — or tries to — by changing her own past. That doesn’t go well either.
That whole run of episodes is threaded with this subtle point of distinction between putting on airs, acting better than others, and actual self-improvement. Which is to say, seeing beyond the lot you’ve been handed and working toward good, versus trying to climb the ladder by putting your boot in people’s faces, knowing that your new status will protect you from the consequences.
That ongoing discussion of our social roles and responsibilities to each other, mixed with flimsy satire about the structures that make us turn against our own self-interests and those of our neighbors, is just… important. Paper-thin jabs about massive weapons of destruction aside, the basic discussion at hand is wound so tightly into the stories and the characters and the way that they speak to each other that it doesn’t stand out as outright grandstanding — but rather a sort of furious lead by example.
Davies is an angry man, extremely cynical about the world that he lives in, and it comes through in his urgency for us to just treat each other as people and to be curious and interested in what’s happening around us, and why, and how.
The casting of Eccleston as the Doctor just anchors all of this discussion — as does Piper’s depiction of Rose. No other Doctor/companion combination would really lend itself to the discussion that goes on over these thirteen episodes.
The biggest problem with New Who lies in the writers pool. With the exception of the two showrunners, few unusually talented or original writers return after writing one or two scripts. With the exception of the two showrunners, every writer who has contributed more than two scripts has demonstrated a talent somewhere between mediocre and diabolical. Many of those have improved over the years; since 2010 Gareth Roberts has shown competence bordering on genuine artistic value. With each script, Mark Gatiss grows less disposable. Others, like Toby Whithouse, seem unable to think in terms outside of a writer’s course he took fifteen years ago. (Yes, lad. You would make Robert McKee proud. You nailed every item on that list, and failed to fall down the stairs along the way. Good job.) Yet every time there’s a fresh voice, offering a life perspective outside of the experience of a middle-aged white male middle class sci-fi fan with few other interests, he delivers one script, maybe two, then vanishes forever. (And yes, it has always been a he. The only female writer to date was on the diabolical end, edging toward mediocrity, and she was at the time the show’s primary script editor — so not exactly an outside perspective.)
What was rather distressing is that prior to 2014 the number of new writers seemed to diminish with each passing year. Over Moffat’s tenure the cast of characters became even more entrenched than in Davies’ era. Aside from a few glorious (often celebrity) one-shots like Simon Nye (Amy’s Choice) and Richard Curtis (Vincent & the Doctor), mostly we just see the same few uninspired names over and over — sometimes growing and improving their craft, sometimes not so much. Series 6, the year of Moffat’s horrifying sci-fi rape plot, was where the situation became really clear: this show is no longer about new or novel perspectives on life. It’s about dumb sci-fi nerds, and what they think is cool or surprising. At that point that status quo wasn’t much better than videogame or American comic book fandom.
The second half of series seven was a little better, thanks to the deeply ingrained efforts of Neil Cross — whose other show, Luther, has never quite clicked with me, but it’s a hell of a lot more literate than Life on Mars or Being Human — but the show was still treading water, relying too much on familiarity and gimmickry.
Then came 2014, and the show became something else. Moffat seemed to clue up to all of his own bad habits and tackle them head-on. In the first half of the series he took an active role in co-writing most of the old guard’s scripts, all of which manage a refreshing layer of character or thematic resonance despite the familiar nuts-and-bolts story material underneath. In the second half, it’s all new guys — plus Moffat’s ballsiest story ever. Most of the scripts are brilliant. The ones that don’t work are at least brave. They go for something bizarre, and if they don’t nail it — well, okay. At least they use their premises to ask interesting questions, make unusual observations. Kill the Moon has the worst understanding of grade school physics that I’ve ever seen, to the point that it makes me a little angry to think about — yet the basic idea is so bewilderingly strange that I applaud the effort, and it contains a couple of the best individual dramatic character moments that the show has ever presented. Peter Harness needed an editorial pass from a third-grader, but fuck if he didn’t bring something new and useful to the show. Jamie Mathieson came straight from screen-adapting Douglas Adams to write two of the best episodes of 21st-century Who — one on the basis of good ideas well explored; the other on exquisite control of his craft. Frank Contrell Boyce wrote some of the most observant, believable lines given to a child character in a TV show. If he also failed basic physics, he at least did it in the name of (seemingly sincere) poetry.
So, we now seem to know the script roster for 2015. It’s all two-parters this year, which means six stories of 90 minutes in length. The first and last are by Moffat, naturally enough. On recent form, I figure he’s got things under control. We’ve got a two-parter by Whithouse, which… I hope will be enough to convince anyone that his biggest successes have been flukes due to factors outside his actual authorial value. There’s an apparent two-parter by Gatiss, which I actually anticipate — maybe with that amount of space he will be able to explore the nuances of his perspective rather than just wallow in nostalgia and hit plot points.
That leaves two out of six stories, four out of twelve episodes to fill. Well, we know that one of them is split peculiarly between a Mathieson/Moffat team and Catherine Tregenna — Mathieson of the two series 8 stunners, and Tregenna of the absolute best Torchwood episodes to lie outside of Children of Earth. That may sound like faint praise, but Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness are truly lovely, nuanced scripts and the only times that the show actually lived up to its ostensible premise. I always wondered why she never graduated to the main show — and now she has, granted in a peculiar script arrangement. So this should be interesting.
Now we know the final author — and it’s our Moon Dragon Man. Peter Harness is back to alternately infuriate and inspire. Given the scope of his last script (in which the Moon is revealed as an egg — and then when it hatches, threatening the entire planet, the Doctor deliberately runs off to force Clara into deciding for herself how to handle the situation), I am curious what he will do with 90 minutes. This seems like an experiment worth undertaking. How whacked-out is this going to be, and how will it use that to explore characters and consequences? And how simultaneously unsubtle and confusing will its metaphors be, this time around? I don’t really like his last script, but I respect his voice — and I want to see more of it. It’s so strange, and what it lacks in logistical rigor it more than makes up for with human insight. Which is what the show has substantially lacked under Moffat, and up until last year.
So, yes. This year looks like it will be interesting. An experimental structure, which simultaneously brings us back to 20th century Who and offers a chance for unusual breadth and consequence and exploration of topics promised in the previous series, with its long lingering scenes and extended conversations, that thanks to its development environment 20th century Who mostly only hinted toward. We’ve got fewer writers than most years, yet a good balance of dull and pointed and more space for each to make its case, use its voice to do something distinctive. I know to only expect four episodes of tedium, and even then with all of the pressure of filling 90 minutes of screentime they can’t possibly be throwaway stories. So even that will be curious to see.
Rewatched Death in Heaven on the way to work. Enjoyed it even more the second time — though those last 15 minutes are interminable. And if there is a logic behind the bracelet and Danny’s last wish, the script makes no effort to establish it. I could do without that whole beat. It’s bad enough to nearly undermine the previous two episodes’ worth of loveliness. Nearly a Doctor Dobby/clap if you believe in David Tennant moment. But it’s small enough to mentally blink while it passes. Whatever.
Otherwise, this is probably the strongest series finale yet — both unto itself and as a conclusion to the previous eleven episodes of character and thematic development. For all its missteps, the show is working on another level now. Rather than glib and facile, it feels brave and confident — ready to use its format to explore notions outside itself, instead of spiraling into a shrinking well of self-recursion. I’m excited to see where it goes next, now that the transition is done.
Lord, I don’t know what Moffat was doing the last four years, but it looks like we’re out of the tunnel now. I’m still astonished how fresh this all feels, considering how much is built with familiar pieces, by familiar hands.
