film and tv

When people ask about my favorite Doctor Who companion, I’m always tempted to say Steven Taylor — even if he’s not always right at the top of my list.

He’s a little overlooked these days, as most of his episodes are missing, but I find Steven one of the most important characters in Doctor Who. People make a big deal about the importance of Patrick Troughton’s performance, and they’re right to. Troughton not only made the show his own; he sold the idea that the show could continue without its title character.

The thing is, although the Doctor was the title character, until very late in Hartnell’s run he was never really the lead. The original protagonist of the show wasn’t the Doctor, but the team of Ian and Barbara. When they left, so left the audience’s main identification point — and at that time an unreliable, trickster wizard wasn’t a viable alternative. The Doctor was the foil, not the lead. He provided tension for the main character to butt against.

Following the tremendous success and goodwill that William Russel and Jacqueline Hill had brought to the show, Peter Purves had a huge burden to take on in becoming the show’s new de facto lead — and he succeded with aplomb, taking on both Ian’s action role and Barbara’s social conscience, continuing her work in confronting the Doctor, demanding that he become the unambiguous hero that he would have to by the time that Steven left.

Although his writing was famously inconsistent, as main companions go Steven is one of the most rounded in the show’s history. He is very outspoken and self-directed, but he is also reasonable and savvy, and quick to defer to the Doctor’s experience — at least, where he believes that the Doctor knows what he is talking about. His anger with the Doctor’s misbehavior is also a thing of legend, and after Barbara’s extensive lesson plan in humility, it served as the final blow to the Doctor’s outsized imperious streak. After The Massacre, the Doctor is a changed man — just a few serials before he would be literally, and this new perspective could bloom from within a new vessel.

I’ve always got time for Steven. Even if he’s not usually my favorite, he’s right up there. And I think his significance in the show’s history is far undervalued.

“Midnight” is a self-contained episode that tells a complete story within 45 minutes. That story has physical and emotional consequences, both in terms of the story’s own thematic and narrative context and in the broader contexts of the then-current character arc and the overall framework of the show. It’s an episode that’s About Something, in the way all the best fiction (and Doctor Who) tends to be, and that thing is a perpetually relevant observation of human nature.

Granted, the observation is a cynical one that to some extent refutes the main character’s constant, defiant argument about humanity that would seem to define some aspect of the show’s infrastructure. It’s an episode in which the Doctor loses, for all of the reasons why the show usually allows him to win. This is an atypical episode for any number of reasons, be it the lack of companion (though the Doctor tries so desperately to find a surrogate one) or its incredibly limited physical scope. Yet in that, I think it’s hugely representative of what the show is, and is meant to be.

Doctor Who is basically an anthology series, like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, except with a continuing central cast of characters and rarely the same strength of script. The Doctor is the Other, existing outside of each of these stories that he leaps into, and depending on the era he then sets about putting right whatever nightmare he has landed inside of, more to escape with his own life or to satisfy his curiosity or some other self-centered desire than out of any overt heroism.

Most of the problems that he stumbles into are dramas built of human pettiness, fear, and self-preservation. It’s not that he’s really all that much better than the best people in these scenarios; it’s just that he has an outsider’s perspective and a long lifetime of knowledge on his side. And indeed, much of the time everyone within the scenario resents his presence. Or his presence causes the problems in the first place. Or he imposes his own new order for his own reasons, but fails to stick around to see how tenable it might be. He tries to do good when it suits him, according to his own values — but it’s an incidental thing that he does on his way though.

Here we have an adventure where he is quite literally a tourist, in a place where (as with all of the supporting cast) by all rights he should not be. Things go wrong, as they do, and everyone is stuck within the smallest ever base under siege. I don’t mean the bus; I mean the head of everyone within it.

Historically, and even now, Doctor Who is a pretty cheap show. Words are cheaper than action; sets are cheaper than locations. For 26 years, but especially for its founding six, the show was written as an astoundingly well choreographed stage production. And so we have it here. We’ve got the Doctor, in a scenario representative of some aspect of life that the viewers will recognize, as an alien interloper — and all he’s got is a single set and the force of his character to go on. This situation calls for psychological horror, and that’s what we get — as we get at the best of times. Yet both unusually and appropriately here the horror is all from the premise rather than extra junk grafted on top. There are no physical monsters. Although there is a largely unexplained malevolent presence, it is as passive as a thing can be. All it does is reflect. Rather, the monster is in all of us.

Which, really, is what all of these stories are about. Even the overt monsters are manufactured representatives of some aspect of humanity or the human experience that has the capacity to trouble us. This is why facing those monsters can be so rewarding. Again, though, rarely in a Doctor Who story is the actual monster the Doctor’s greatest threat. Usually it’s the culture into which he has landed; it’s the very people who he attempts to help (again, mostly for his own ends) who stand in his way, put him before the overt monster’s face, and generally create the situation that has ensnared him.

Here we just get the raw version of that. Everyone is scared. He’s the outsider. Ergo, in their eyes he is the danger. Ergo, to him they are the danger. Yet they clearly all… well, most of them have such good to them as well. It’s not that these people are evil, or that evil is even a real thing within the context of this episode. It’s that they’re human, and they’re under duress, and they’re trying their best to deal with concepts beyond their understanding. And they do what people tend to do, at times like that.

In illustrating that dynamic, the episode gives relief to the basic message of Doctor Who — namely the glorification of curiosity; of asking the right questions, and trying to understand things beyond their surface. Here the people do earnestly try that, and the Doctor, being the mysterious central character — the eternal outsider — has to knock them away, and put himself forward as their agent of change. After he repeatedly refuses to account for himself, quite naturally they refute the imposition — and quite naturally, as the Other that he both is and sets himself up to be, he becomes their major object of suspicion. Again, and as usual.

By illustrating these dynamics, their ramifications, and thereby what they can easily mean in context, “Midnight” does more to illustrate what Doctor Who is about than nearly any other single episode. Just as the Doctor lends context by his outlier status, so “Midnight” does by its own.

I have made no secret of my annoyance with Steven Moffat’s oversight of Doctor Who. The problems aren’t the ones that you will see people citing in British op-ed columns or fan surveys; they have more to do with Moffat’s personality, or rather the aspects that seep into his work. To my eyes he is desperate to seem clever, and he seems to actively court the adulation of the obsessive. The pursuit of these goals often seems of a greater priority than exploring new concepts, using the show’s structure to explore familiar concepts from a new perspective, communicating to the audience in an emotionally comprehensible way, or even sorting through the logic of his own overwrought plots to make sure that it all adds up.

Davies’ era may have gotten cozy and familiar by the end, and it may at times have over-egged the bold concepts in favor of sensible storylines, but through his entire tenure I always felt that something new was around the corner. Even when the show didn’t work, it felt brave and adventuresome — eager to explore new things. On the successful side we have episodes like “Gridlock” and “Midnight”, that throw caution to the wind to play with big themes, big images that explore the spectrum of human response under extreme conditions. One is erupting with event and scenario; the other is perhaps the single most focused episode in 50 years of Doctor Who. On the problematic side we have things like “Aliens of London”, “Love & Monsters”, and “Last of the Time Lords” — each of which flounders in several respects, but which operates under a stable internal compass: their goal is to explore the consequences of extreme situations so as to examine and, where possible, satirize the mechanics of the world that we live in today.

Davies’ work is outward-looking. Moffat’s stuff is very, very insular.

Case in point — and this is why I’m writing any of this now; I just noticed this on the bus today — is the infusion of new perspectives.

Davies revived the show, came up with a brand new context for it that managed to provide a brand new start for everyone — old viewers, new viewers, the writing staff, the production crew — while allowing space for its history. He then brought in a bunch of people to work on it, because there were too many episodes to write for himself. That first year he brought in four other writers: Moffat, Gatiss, Rob Shearman, and Paul Cornell. Fine, lovely. Despite a few hiccups, he put out one of the best seasons of Doctor Who ever.

The next year was problematic, mostly because of production problems carried over from that first year — so again Davies wound up writing more than he intended. Even so, he brought in four new writers. Of the previous stable, only two returned this year. Year three, he brought in another four writers. By year four the show was about as stable as it would be, and he brought in only two new voices. For the 2009 specials there were only five episodes, and yet for the best of those — “The Waters of Mars” — again he brought in a new writer.

That’s sixteen writers over four and a half production runs. If we ignore the Eccleston series, which to be fair we should, that’s eleven new writers that Davies introduced as the show went on.

Since Moffat has taken over he has introduced five new writers: two in his first series, two in his second, and one in his third (whose work will be broadcast in the spring). That’s nearly as many as Davies would introduce in a single year. Altogether, over three production runs Moffat’s stable consists of just ten writers. Out of 42 episodes, 33 have been written by the same six returning writers — Moffat, Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Chris Chibnall, Toby Whithouse, and Matthew Graham.

Aside from Moffat none of these writers is particularly bold, dynamic, or visionary. At best they churn out mathematically coherent scripts based on stock themes, character archetypes, and textbook story templates. Although they have written a few surprisingly functional episodes of late (“The Lodger”, “The Power of Three”), Chibnall and Roberts seem to draw from no more practical knowledge or life experience than what it means to be a fan of a TV show. Though more competent, Gatiss is only really interested in pastiche of existing literature. Whithouse and Graham are to my mind interchangeable; creators of successful genre series (Being Human, Life on Mars) that consist of a random fantasy twist applied to a familiar template. The only difference is that Whithouse uses bottled story structure and low-hanging themes to provide his stock characters space to talk at each other, while Graham seems to have no idea how to develop his stories, themes, or stock characters beyond the initial pitch.

Out of Moffat’s five new writers, three have written more than one episode. Gaiman is Moffat’s mirror in inward-looking fan service. Stephen Thompson’s one episode so far has been possibly the least competent or imaginative since the show’s revival, constructed as it is almost entirely of genre cliches with little attempt to examine them, the characters, or the audience’s expectations beyond the surface description. Neil Cross, well! We haven’t seen either of his yet.

So what do we have left? Two new writers, and then one anomaly. Simon Nye, the creator of 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, wrote “Amy’s Choice”; Richard Curtiss, writer of countless romantic comedies such as “Love Actually” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, wrote “Vincent and the Doctor”; and Tom MacRae got his start in screenwriting with the unfortunate 2006 two-parter that reintroduced the Cybermen. Then after five years of experience in the field he came back with the best episode of Moffat’s era, “The Girl Who Waited”.

Each of these guys has only written one episode to date, and it seems unlikely that any of them will write again soon. These are also the only three episodes in Moffat’s era that bring a sense of a distinct outside perspective — and thereby a thematic and emotional inroad to the show. To an extent it makes sense; two of the writers come from different disciplines entirely, and bring with them their training and observations from those fields. MacRae has just grown a hell of a lot as a writer, after jobbing around the TV landscape for half a decade.

I think I’m getting away from my point a bit. What I’m trying to illustrate here is just how insular the show has become since 2010. Under Moffat, the show has become a splatter of self-serving fan-fiction. It’s not just Moffat’s writing; it’s that the show displays little vision aside from Moffat’s writing. Nearly everything points inward; toward fandom, toward prior expectations, toward a celebration of a very narrow, unexamined perspective and experience of life. It’s like someone locked a small group of drop-out nerds in the basement and told them to write to their greatest fantasies. The only outsiders who get to play along are the ones who either cater to or neglect to challenge that nuclear fervor with the burden of context.

I’m not saying that Davies’ other fifteen writers were all brilliant. Heck, six of them make up the core of Moffat’s gang. I’m saying that the variety of voices during Davies’ era — including the touch of the insular — reflects the outward-looking stance of Davies’ own writing, which as a whole makes for a more relevant, inviting, and to me inspirational piece of television. It’s the numbers that justify all of this in my head; noticing the pattern over the years. You can see the sphincter clinching shut, and with it all sense of perspective.

Series 1: 5 new writers
Series 2: 4 new writers
Series 3: 4 new writers
Series 4+specials: 3 new writers
Series 5: 2 new writers
Series 6: 2 new writers
Series 7: 1 new writer

The show dearly needs new writers, from different disciplines, with their own original views on life. Under the current stewardship it’s going down the genre drain. Key question: will Moffat allow in another strong voice to clash with his own? To my eyes that’s the main hurdle here.

Slight addendum: Notice also that up until 2009 Davies managed to produce fourteen episodes a year, and also produce and write for two spin-off series — meaning at the show’s height there were 39 new episodes of Doctor Who in a given year. Even in calendar year 2009 we saw 20 episodes, when you throw in Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Moffat struggles year-on-year just to get a single fourteen-episode series out the door. Between Christmas 2011 and Easter 2013 he has completed just six episodes of Doctor Who. Every month we hear a new excuse, but the problem seems to be a conflict with Moffat’s other series, Sherlock — which itself only runs for three episodes every couple of years.

Seriously? Is that how tightly the sphincter has closed now? I can’t help but correlate the slim quantity with the slim quality, even if I’m not totally sure how one leads to the other. There’s something here, though.

In the event that I write about Doctor Who on this blog, usually I’m complaining about something. That goes double since around 2010; I’ve made no secret of my dislike for the show’s direction under its current creative team.

The weirdest thing, though — some of the least offensive, by which I mean at least moderately creative, episodes are by writers who have in the past done little but annoy me. “The Lodger” and its slightly less successful sequel are the best things that Gareth Roberts has written for the show. Whereas MacRae’s 2006 Cyberman story was a big waste of time, “The Girl Who Waited” is probably one of the best episodes of the revived show. And now there’s the curious case of Chris Chibnall.

I have no doubt that I have written of him, or more specifically my views on his writing, before. I have said that he doesn’t seem to have an original thought in his head; that all he seems capable of is digesting other people’s work and then rearranging it in a less interesting or meaningful configuration. I also have said that, as with Gareth Roberts, all he seems to have to discuss as a writer is his affinity for other TV writing. He’s a professional fan, basically, let loose in a toy store with the full range of action figures. The result is some of the most abominable writing in Doctor Who’s history, by which I include the first two years of Torchwood.

So what do I make of this year’s crop of episodes? So far we’ve got one of Moffat’s worst scripts yet, and the worst of Toby Whithouse — one of the show’s least outstanding writers in any respect. Someone on a message board described his writing as painfully functional. I can be no more eloquent. Next week we’ve another Moffat script that promises more than I have faith in the writer to deliver. Interspersed amongst these dubious fruits are two Chibnall episodes, which it turns out are the highlights of the run.

I didn’t really comment on “Dinosaurs On a Spaceship”; it didn’t compel me to say much. It was adequate, which for Chibnall is an achievement. Considering its writer, and all of its associated problems in tone and pitch — the testicle jokes, the gun cocking, the pointless and wasted supporting characters — it is a great compliment to say that I didn’t hate it. The good parts — the gormless family member, the total rotter of a villain — were largely borrowed, and possibly successful for reasons outside the script itself, yet they did work. I also enjoyed a few things that almost suggested thought or imagination, such as the idea of Silurian arks launched way back in Earth’s history, when most of the race went into a deep sleep.

Then there was the Doctor’s reaction to the villain — actually, their whole dynamic throughout the episode. The Doctor can be ruthless, and when he is, then he just is. Where lesser writers like Whithouse (and increasingly, Moffat) go on about how old the Doctor is, how tired and bitter he feels, and how he’s capable of doing anything, writers like Davies just let him go merrily about his way until he stumbles across something that offends him — which he then steamrolls without a second thought. See Eccleston’s response to Cassandra in “The End of the World”; he sees that she is irredeemable, so he has no compunction about letting her explode.

Though there is reason to his response, it’s moments like this that make the character dangerous and unsettling — as he has been since the days of Hartnell nearly bashing in that caveman’s head with a rock. The Doctor is not a heroic figure; he’s a man who stumbles into situations that demand his involvement, often just to extricate himself. Often if he does good, it’s a side effect of his basic efforts to survive. He does have a deep moral core (at least, ever since Barbara drilled it into him), but it tends to take a passive role in his decisions. Actually, his most radical or startling decisions are often his most passive. Here as in many 20th century stories that escape me in the early morning, he simply allows things to happen. He lets the villain die. He watches it happen, then he turns his back and forgets all about it. All continues as normal. Which is all the more disturbing.

It’s curious that Chibnall is the one current writer who seems to get this part of the character, considering his previous record for character and motivation. Right now everyone else seems to write him as an ineffectual braggart, quick to threaten people on the basis of his reputation and slow to actually follow through.

So, that was a decent episode. Certainly Chibnall’s best script to date. And then there was yesterday, and “The Power of Three”…

Okay, parts of it are derivative. You can’t get around that with Chibnall. In basic shape and detail you could easily rebuild the script from pieces of “The Lodger”, “The Christmas Invasion”, “Army of Ghosts”, and “Children of Earth” — all Davies scripts, you will notice, except for the first one, itself a surprisingly original episode by a writer previously distinguished by his poor imitation of Russel T Davies. Also, the supposed “A” story — the invasion plot — doesn’t really hold together and is very rushed toward the end. After the basic idea is established, the script glosses over most of the development and resolution.

Otherwise — well, look at that. Chibnall is turning into a real writer now. I realize that I sound patronizing; instead of justifying it, let’s change the channel and throw him a real compliment. Out of the Moffat era there are really only about four episodes that stand out to me as exceptional. Preliminary to a second viewing, I’ll say that this makes five. There’s a level of ambition and a degree of awareness here that I have to respect.

The key moment for me is where the cubes cease to be a novelty, and the episode traces out the extent to which people have begun to take them for granted — using them as paperweights, as table decorations; filling the trash with them. The concept of the slow invasion is fine; it’s the kind of thing a person might think up on the toilet and think it sounds amazing. What impresses me is the extent to which Chibnall thought out its logistics and ramifications, in particular the human response. It’s maybe a small thing, but for a writer like Chibnall this awareness of human nature signals a big change. For once, here, he actually is writing about something. He has something to say. And it’s kind of interesting.

There are lots of other nice touches. I like the basic structure where the front-window story is actually just a backdrop to or catalyst for the real discussion — that of the Ponds and the consequences of living with the Doctor. Or more often, waiting for him. Or more rather, waiting for him to disrupt their lives. Or even more, putting their lives on hold because they never know when he will show up to disrupt things again.

Again we have some deeper thoughts and something approaching insight — in this case specifically about Moffat’s pre-established characters and their make believe world, but again filtered through and then reflecting observation about human nature and what I like to call the General Way of Things.

So, I don’t know how to get out of this discussion. Remember how I said that even the most dire of things are better than mediocre, as at least they provide something to think about? I’m starting to think that there is an added dimension in there somewhere. Something about great things having the potential to be awful and awful things having the potential to be great, but the mundane being beyond dynamic range and therefore beyond help. Five to seven years ago, Moffat had great things to say and Chibnall was a blight on the show. Now the positions look like they’re slowly flipping. Meanwhile writers like Whithouse just grind around in the dust, never bad enough to fail and never good enough to succeed.

This is about as tedious as the show has been since its return. Even very bad episodes can be entertaining in their way. Toby Whithouse… God, does he ever make a surprising or difficult decision? On purpose, I mean?

It’s not just that the plot is obvious, though that’s certainly true. It’s that it’s written on the most dim, simplistic level I can imagine and treats the platitudes that take the guise of themes as if they are deep and meaningful insight.

I mean, hell. Amy actually says (in whatever phrasing the script uses) “No, don’t kill him; you need to be better than he is!” As if there were the slightest concern that this would actually happen — which is another problem. Nearly every dramatic moment falls flat because there is nothing to back it up. There is no real peril, and the one casualty — the sheriff — just feels arbitrary. It looks like we’re meant to mourn his loss, but we’re never given anything about him except that he seemed to be a pretty good guy, and his death doesn’t come out of any kind of tragedy; it comes out of his arbitrarily throwing himself in front of a gun because That’s What People Do at moments like this in scripts like this.

Things happen not out of actual character or thematic development, but because those are The Things That Happen in scripts like this. People do things not because they actually make sense given their personalities and the present circumstances but because those are The Things That People Do in scripts like this. Dramatic situations arise not through the natural clash of characters and contextual conflicts, but through the insertion of stock dramatic concepts that the writer felt that the script should exhibit. And having made that decision, he didn’t — you know — try to integrate the concepts and explore them in an organic way; he spelled them out verbatim, as if he were actively leafing through his screenwriting 101 textbook. “Aha!” Whithouse yelped. “I will use that one!”

The end effect is that the plotting is obvious. Sure. Who cares; most plotting is. Who cares about plot anyway. What’s insulting is the presentation of all of this facile, half-assed, superficial garbage as something meaningful and original. It’s transparent. It’s cloying. It’s vapid. And the fact that this is essentially a kids’ show makes it even worse, as children’s entertainment should be better than this. It’s so insulting to fob off the kids on any old piece of shit because, hey, they don’t know any better. It’s so insulting. And the thing is, if kids know one thing they know when they’re being talked down to. Usually better than adults.

Under Davies (and nearly any previous era), even at the show’s most daft or bizarre I always felt that there was something of substance underneath. Even The Sarah Jane Adventures explored difficult, even painful concepts in terms that children could understand. To contrast, what is the takeaway from Whithouse’s writing? That… what, people aren’t always all bad or all good? That sometimes they have two stark, diametrically opposed aspects to them? Brilliant insight, there.

It’s a totally reasonable theme, but a theme like that needs more than lip service for it to carry more weight than a fortune cookie. The way that it’s handled here is so simplistic as to be ridiculous, and thereby — in this context — to render the question risible. There’s no gray at all, in a scenario that connotes an infinite monochrome spectrum.

It’s so weird. It’s like Whithouse took the yin yang absolutely at face value. Characters can be a mix of black AND white!

Something odd, and to me suggestive: just a few years ago one of Davies’ scripts made a really big point about the precise definition of “decimate” — so why does Whithouse make a reasonably big point of using it incorrectly? Unless by “decimating half the planet” he meant killing off 5% of the population.

It’s not just recent continuity, of course; the script also seems to forget its own premises, so it keeps boring us with scenes like the one where the Gunslinger storms into the crowded saloon and stomps around, assessing the townspeople. Is there supposed to be tension in that scene? We (again) know he’s not going to do anything, so why does it take so long?

For me another problem is that the script gives Rory almost nothing to do. Considering that he’s the only thing that I really enjoy about the show right now and that he’s going to be gone in two weeks, that kind of annoyed me. It’s just one more waste among many.

So. As usual for Whithouse, that was a tired lump of facile storytelling bulwarked by trite platitudes presented as sober insight — this time, infused with clumsy Holmesian pastiche.

Not terrible, but pretty boring. Actually a little insulting. Someone I know commented that until this series they never understood why people classed Doctor Who as a kids’ show. That’s about right.