film and tv

The Waters of Mars

  • Reading time:4 mins read

David Tennant’s penultimate story is probably one of the three to five best episodes since Doctor Who‘s revival in 2005, and just possibly one of the best since the show began in 1963. Structurally there’s nothing new or particularly interesting at play. Yet “The Waters of Mars” is one of the only stories in the history of the series to take that familiar base-under-siege format and use it as a canvas for larger things.

As a sketch, “The Waters of Mars” sounds exactly like the 2007 episode “42”. In “42” a small space vessel is overtaken by a living sun. One crew member after another is infected and begins to leak fire from every orifice, as the sun particles try to make their way back home. In “The Waters of Mars” a small Mars base is overtaken by a sort of intelligent water. One after another, the crew members get infected and begin to drip water from every orifice as the water tries to make its way to Earth.

“42” is content to assume that its premise is interesting in and of itself — as if none of us have seen The Thing, Night of the Living Dead, or fully 75% of the classic series of Doctor Who. The episode relishes in the familiar, not only retreading the format for its own sake but filling its empty spaces with pop culture references. The writer tossed in a trivia machine as a plot device, hoping to involve and distract the audience with $200 Jeopardy questions in place of genuine character or thematic development. Even the title is a reference to a certain US drama series. The episode takes place over 42 minutes, you see.

By comparison, “The Waters of Mars” hardly cares about the monsters, or the threat, or the fact that the crew members are getting picked off like so many randy babysitters. Oh, it takes the material seriously; it has to be amongst the scariest episodes of Who ever produced, and at times approaches a flat-out horror show like Supernatural. The tone is stark and somber, and — given that it’s set on Mars, about 50 years in the future — fairly realistic. Characters act rationally, and use all the tools and information available to them. Relationships and emotions are understated yet clear. Yet the episode isn’t about any of that. Rather, it’s about what all of that means.

There are a few things going on here, all intertwined. The events on the Mars base are important not just because they’re happening and we’re watching them; they’re important because, as established right up front, this is a critical moment in time. Within the first five minutes we know what’s supposed to happen, and we know that it will happen. The action, therefore, plays out as a tragedy. Since we know how these plots work, the next hour is consciously about seeing how the inevitable plays out, and growing to appreciate the characters’ vain, yet so very noble, struggles against their fate.

And then there’s the Doctor. For a show about time travel, Doctor Who is very seldom about time travel. Even less often does it address not just the logistical but the ethical and practical consequences of time travel. Here, for much of the episode the Doctor is as much a spectator as the audience. He has stumbled into a historical event, and however horrible it may be he knows what will happen if he interferes. The events then also become a catalyst for serious character work, as the Doctor struggles against his own impulses, wobbling between curiosity and guilt; self-respect and impotence. Ultimately, it’s a matter of pride. The Doctor never walks away from other people’s problems; he only walks away from his own. That’s the only way he can live with himself. And he lived for so many years.

Eventually the Doctor makes his decisions, and he reaps the consequences. And in the last few minutes the episode transcends probably everything else ever done with the show.

“The Waters of Mars” is about responsibility — big decisions with big, real consequences. In this case those decisions happen to involve monsters in a space base. You could plug in any threat, any plot; as well-told as it is here, it’s all beside the point. The Doctor isn’t the only character whose decisions matter, either; everyone makes his or her choices, and they all do the best they can under the circumstances. But when you get into something as complicated as time travel, and you think there are any easy answers, you’re one step away from becoming the problem yourself.

Underworld

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Browsing through my reviews, any hardcore Who fan would likely assume I’m playing the contrarian. X story is popular, so it must be rubbish. Y story is unpopular, so clearly it’s an hidden gem. No, that’s just my taste at work. I notice that fans of anything tend to be concerned with consistency. They became fans because of a static list of features; whatever fails to meet enough of those features is garbage, and whatever meets them all is perfect. There may be a small gray area in the middle. Usually not.

Me, I’m more interested in what could be than in what is. By nature the most interesting ideas tend to veer far from, or otherwise ignore, the status quo, so they’re rarely popular. By nature the closer you hew to the status quo, the more tedious you get as there’s nothing new to learn. On this basis I think I agree with the consensus about Underworld, but for the opposite of the usual reasons.

Underworld is a plodding mid-era Tom Baker four-parter by the writing team who dreamed up the Doctor’s robotic dog K-9, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. The common line is that the story fails because the special effects look awful, the sets look cheap, and a disturbing amount of humor has begun to creep into the show. If there’s a redeeming feature, it’s that the story is drowning in references to classical mythology and therefore can pretend to be educated.

Indeed the story is a bit of a failure, but I’d say that largely rests in Baker and Martin’s decision to truss up the myth of Jason and the Argonauts with some sci-fi trappings instead of taking a simple idea — such as the regeneration pods that have kept the crew alive for 100,000 years — and extrapolating it. For a small crew that has lived longer than most human civilizations, they all seem oddly… normal. We’re introduced to plot devices like a ray that makes people docile, and then the story never explains or explores them — what part they play in life, what their ramifications or consequences might be. Instead, we have an ancient plot to churn through and familiar symbols to quote so that the educated yet unimaginative can feel they got their license fee’s worth. Every time the story checks another box, I feel my eyes roll back into my head. Oh, look! The golden fleece! Sort of!

The serial has its points of interest, though — most notably those unconvincing special effects. By the time the story went into production, the ferocious continual inflation of the pound meant the budget was devalued and they no longer had money for sets. Cue ingenuity; for one of the first times ever, the story was substantially shot against bluescreen, with the actors layered on top of scale models.

The effect rarely fools the eye, but so what. This is ingenious stuff, here. Decades before George Lucas shot his Star Wars prequels almost entirely against blue curtains, we get a prototype of the same idea — and done reasonably well, under the circumstances. We do have depth, and layers. Actors walk out from behind matted bits of the scenery, and then around to the front again. Someone meticulously planned their walk paths, and lined up real surfaces whenever the actors needed to touch something. The effect is a bit like those sections in Final Fantasy VII where you’ve got polygonal characters running around on top of a bitmapped picture. You know the elements don’t fit, but it works well enough to get the message across.

So that’s kind of neat. The modelwork and much of the acting is rather nice as well, at least considering what they were given. Tom Baker straddles the line between reading the lines as written and doing his own personal comedy routine, as he would later devolve into. You can tell he’s bored, but I think he has every right to be. His small larks do inject a bit of life into the dust, helping to carry the attention through.

Underworld is probably amongst the least necessary Who serials ever, but it’s no no means horrible. Tedious in some respects; technically interesting in some others. It’s just so very nothing. I always forget which story this is, and almost immediately after watching it I forget again.

The King’s Demons

  • Reading time:4 mins read

In retrospect people describe season 20 of Doctor Who as a huge flashback. They make pains to point out how every story features a returning character from the show’s history. In reality I only think two or three reappearances are worth noting. You’ve got the Black Guardian back for a three-serial arc, for the first time in four years. That counts as one, so far as I’m concerned. Then you’ve got Omega back from the 10th anniversary special, to lead off the season. That one’s pretty overt. And finally the season ends with The Five Doctors, which is sort of a menagerie of all the show’s history.

Other serials are a little more dubious. In one story we have the long-awaited return of a villain introduced just the previous season. And then we have The King’s Demons. Considering that the Master has been a semi-regular feature of the show since his reintroduction in season 18, and will continue to appear about once a season throughout the 1980s, I don’t see how he alone counts as a blast from the past. It’s more like business as usual, really.

I think I’m prevaricating to avoid the actual topic of this review. It’s not that there’s anything specially wrong with The King’s Demons. It’s more that there’s very little of note about it. It’s a short, two-episode pseudo-historical that seems to drag on for twice its length. The TARDIS crew touches down in medieval England, for no particular reason. They exit the ship into the middle of a jousting match, overseen by the figure of King John himself, on his way to sign the Magna Carta.

If this were a David Whitaker script, maybe we’d be onto something — a sensitive exploration of a cultural context that we tend to blur into stereotype. Indeed some of the disc’s special features adequately explain the situation that birthed the Magna Carta, and dwell on the daily lives of the various factions involved in the treaty. This is good stuff, and might well have been the focus of the story.

Instead, as in Terence Dudley’s earlier Black Orchid, the characters mostly stand, occasionally skulk, around and avoid talking about anything in particular, expressing any opinions or perspectives, or accomplishing much of anything. If you like, here’s the full story: our heroes get alternately accused and praised for various things not of their doing, and then one of the characters is revealed as the Master. The Master accuses our heroes of various things not of their doing, and then another of the characters is revealed as a shape-shifting android. Our heroes lock the Master in his TARDIS (I think) and then leave, the android in tow. The end.

This android is of course Kamelion, an ineffectual prop that the writers promptly forget about until they choose to kill him off about a season later, in Planet of Fire. The only comment I can offer is that their eventual solution to the Kamelion problem — substituting a man with silver face paint for the original prop — was actually rather elegant, and that if they had hit on that idea earlier they could easily have used Kamelion as a regular character. In that sense he was perhaps a bold missed opportunity. Given his actual on-screen use, however, the widespread tendency, amongst those even aware of the character, is to consciously forget that Kamelion even existed.

Given that the Kamelion’s introduction is perhaps the only memorable detail of The King’s Demons, you can see my hesitancy to get to the point. I guess the point is simple enough, though. You’re safe in skipping this one.

The DVD is fairly solid, though. As I said, the special features add wealth to a dreary production. The commentary, led by Peter Davison, is jovial as ever. The actual serial is also beautifully restored. I’m used to this serial looking like blurry, over-exposed mud. As tedious as it may be, at least now there’s plenty of production detail to distract the eye.

Run For Your Life

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Run for Your Life is a documentary of two halves, one more interesting and less developed than the other. It begins as a story of the New York City Marathon — how it came about, how its growth affected the city and paralleled other social movements of the early 1970s, and how it grew into the cultural monolith that we know today. Then somewhere around the half-hour mark, the film meanders into the personal life of marathon founder Fred Lebow.

Lewbow is a fascinating guy in his own right; he never knew how to have a personal life, and so he just kept running — both metaphorically and literally. There was always something new, somewhere new, someone new to chase after. The only thing that he never ran from was an idea. He was a brilliant guy, able to see to the center of complex problems and successfully argue for a solution before the problems were even on the radar of most people. More than brilliant, he was faithful to his ideas and principles to an extent that few people are. He came off as crazy, arrogant, and then visionary.

So his story is interesting, and rather inspirational, just on the basis of his personality. Yet that story fairly well consumes the latter two-thirds of the movie, leaving several intriguing questions about the marathon itself to dangle in the wind. The film toys with the social effects of the marathon on the city, both in terms of its general reputation and in the practical effects on specific neighborhoods. Were the effects permanent? How did the residents of those neighborhoods feel? Are there any statistics on crime and demographics, or any representative anecdotes about the change in tone?

How did the route evolve over time? Why has it stayed the same basic shape since the start? Has it come into any criticism? If the marathon grew out of a Bronx running club, why is the route based mostly in Brooklyn, with only a few minutes each in the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens?

How has the public perception of running changed? The documentary states that back in the early ’70s no one thought of running as a serious sport. Let’s have some more details about the changes — some milestone moments that mark its cultural evolution. It also says that back then, running was all about going fast. So how has the science changed, and how has the marathon tied into that? Back then, some experts advised that women should never run more than a mile. Explain that, and explain some of the adversity that women had to face before the cultural and scientific mainstream accepted them as athletes. Lebow is supposed to have been a major catalyst in addressing all of this, so great. Address it.

The editing is dynamic and clear, which helps to power through exciting sequences like the history that makes up the first half-hour. When the film slows down to dwell on Lebow’s life, the constant cutting and animation begins to feel overly busy and distracting, making the slow portions feel all the slower.

The film gives a fair glimpse at a remarkable mind that thrived off of and in turn enriched a remarkable cultural context. For my money I want a little more of that context in the mix.

Psych

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Well. I can see why Netflix recommended this on the basis of Better Off Ted. I’m still not sure what to make of it, so let’s see what materializes as I type.

Psych is written, shot, and performed with a smug, self-consciously clever tone. Characters quip, smirk, make ironic observations about the nature of their current situation. They’re all conscious of the fictional conceits that they embody, and they carry out those conceits with a wink. “We know that you know what we’re supposed to say and do in a situation like this, in a show like this. And okay, we’ll play along. But we’ll be very wry about it, because maybe we’ve got something special up our sleeves to surprise you. Or maybe we don’t! You never know!”

Joss Whedon can get away with that, sometimes. In small doses. A show like Arrested Development is written brilliantly enough to transcend self-consciousness. Yet this is ground that a show has to tread with a caution that kind of negates the gonzo spirit of such a tone.

I guess… Think of it this way. There are actors who are naturally eccentric. They’re fascinating or hilarious precisely because they don’t know how odd or awkward they are. Then there are people who make a show of behaving eccentrically. They soon become tiresome, because you can feel the effort and after a while the effort feels like desperation.

Based on the pilot, em>Psych doesn’t exactly feel desperate. More… unctuous, perhaps. I can feel it trying to endear itself to me, like a con man. Maybe the desperation comes out later, when its first few passes miss the mark.

It is shot well, though, and some of the actors are very well-cast. The premise — a guy with eidetic memory poses as a psychic in order to solve crimes — is derivative but serviceable. At least at the beginning the show does a decent job of selling his gift, both empirically and logistically, without over-explaining it.

There’s all the potential for this show to settle into itself and become more than a tangle of autocongratulation and technical polish. It’s not particularly cynical. It’s smart enough. I just kept waiting for it to stop flirting and get on with whatever it really has to say. It didn’t within the first hour, and that’s the end of my patience. At least for the moment.

Planet of Fire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Planet of Fire kind of reminds me of the 2007 episode “Utopia” in that it wraps an unremarkable plot around a laundry list of practical concerns. It has to write out the Doctor’s shifty companion Turlough, write in new companion Peri, get rid of the Doctor’s flaky shape-shifting android passenger Kamelion, and kill off Anthony Ainley’s Master — all while finally giving Turlough a backstory and a first name.

Let’s see if this makes any sense. While the Doctor and Turlough take a break in Lanzarote, a young American named Peri comes across an enormous metal dildo embossed with the same symbol branded on Turlough’s arm. Turlough saves her from drowning, and takes her aboard the TARDIS. While she sleeps, Kamelion becomes infected with the Master’s influence, who forces the TARDIS to land on a desolate planet filled with extras from Lawrence of Arabia.

On exiting the TARDIS, the Doctor and Turlough get caught up in local politics. Meanwhile Kamelion starts to cycle amongst the forms of Peri’s stepfather, of the Master, and of Peri’s stepfather slathered with silver makeup. When he looks like Peri’s stepfather he’s benevolent enough. When he looks like the Master, he effectively is the Master. He chases Peri around Lanzarote-as-alien-planet until she stumbles into the Master’s TARDIS and finds the real Master inside a shoebox, shrunken down to a few inches in height. Cue lots of greenscreen hijinks with a tiny Anthony Ainley and a huge Nicola Bryant.

After some more tedious local politics, during which it turns out that this random planet houses both Turlough’s long-lost brother and his father’s crashed space ship, the Doctor destroys Kamelion with the Master’s TCE device and then watches blankly as the Master first is restored by some kind of healing plasma then is disintegrated by some kind of super flames. Before he dies, the Master very nearly claims to be the Doctor’s brother.

And that’s about it. Turlough stays behind to reunite with his people, and Davison’s Doctor takes off with Peri for his final adventure. Over the next few seasons Anthony Ainley keeps reappearing as the Master, with no explanation as to how he manages to be not-dead. So his role in this story is both strangely handled and kind of pointless.

I’m not sure what role the dildo plays in the story.

Probably the best part of the serial is Mark Strickson’s performance as Turlough. With little more than body language, he steals just about every scene he’s in — as he tends to. He and Peter Davison’s Doctor have such an interesting dynamic. For all the prickliness of their relationship, you can sense irony and suppressed comic timing thrumming below the surface of every interaction.

The production had plenty of talent on board, and I guess they did the best they could. For all of the scripting problems during the early 1980s, they were probably wise to bring back Turlough’s creator Peter Grimwade to develop the character and get rid of him. Likewise they brought back one of the more artistic directors, Fiona Cumming — I believe the only female director to work on the classic series — who had previously worked on Castrovalva and Enlightenment, among other serials. Combine her talent with unusually extensive location work, and you’ve got one of the most visually striking stories of the 1980s.

Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to suggest this story, it would be a hoot on a quiet evening with a glass of red wine, a comfy sofa, and a bathrobe.

What Lies Beneath

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The redesign of the Silurians in the most recent series of Doctor Who was both perplexing and inane. Instead of weird orange reptiles with a third eye and puckered mouths, we got busty women with green bumps on their faces. Oh, the extras wore monstrous battle masks to avoid having to make up a dozen actors. Basically, though, they looked like generic reptile people as seen in every sci-fi show ever. Except less convincing.

As it turns out, the prosthetics team did a sculpt that closely resembled the original 1970 Silurians, except tastefully updated. They were going to go with that until the writer, Chris Chibnall, stepped in and vetoed it. Why he had that power as a mere writer, I don’t know. I can see why he did it; his script presents several distinct Silurians, and the masks would make them all look like the same, all like monsters.

That might help the point of the story, though. They’re alien, and therefore very difficult to empathize with — yet for the humans, and for the audience, it’s worth a try anyway. Despite the difficulty, they’re not necessarily all bad and it may be possible to work with them. Or not. It’s all about stretching the imagination to accept that one’s self is not the center of the universe.

I think making them more human essentially takes out the barrier. All we have to hold against them then is their behavior, rather than our preconceptions. Good thing then that they’ve got irrational zealots as emissaries, or the story would have gone nowhere.

I realize this is the opposite of what I was saying around and before the broadcast of the episodes, as I could understand the mentality of wanting to make the Silurians more like characters than creatures. In retrospect I’m not sure that the method was constructive. If anything it undermines the intended message.

Thank You For Smoking

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Nobody smokes in this film. At least, I never saw it. The closest we get are old advertisements shilling the medical value of one cigarette brand over another, a vague haze in some of the indoor scenes, and a nicotine tinge to the film processing.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, aka Harvey Dent/Two-Face) is a PR representative for the tobacco industry. His talent is debate, and his secret is that he doesn’t really care about his topic, his opponent, or the outcome of his argument. All that he cares about is that he not lose. For an industry with the bulk of public opinion against them, not losing is about as good a defense as Big Tobacco could want.

For Naylor’s part, there’s no more challenging or rewarding an argument than defending an indefensible position. It’s not that he’s amoral. It’s true that he meets with representatives of the alcohol and firearms lobbies, and jokes with them about which of their products kills the most Americans on a day-to-day basis. (Of the three, it’s cigarettes by a wide margin.) Throughout the movie, his actions, reactions, and manner portray him as warm, fascinated with life, even idealistic. It’s more that he feels that every perspective, even and perhaps especially the most ludicrous or amoral, needs an equal airing. So on the one hand this job allows him to defend some of the least loved opinions on the planet, and on the other the sheer impossibility of the task gives him a thrill not unlike a nicotine high.

The story skips along at a comfortable pace, and progresses logically from the characters’ personalities. The cast is mostly character actors, well-chosen and well-performed. The script is witty and nuanced, much of the dialog delivered either directly to camera or in voiceover. The cinematography is some of the best in recent years.

There are revelations later in the film which, as the movie currently stands, feel like they come from nowhere. Associated with those revelations are some apparently profound changes that, to the audience, never feel like changes at all.

It comes back to the cigarette thing; why, in this of all movies, do we never witness the characters smoking? Not even representatives of Big Tobacco? And as far as sacrifices go, is it possible to miss something that we’ve never known?

This is a smart movie. It avoids getting trapped in the specifics of its subject matter, preferring to observe characters, their motivations, and the way they present their claims, both to each other and to themselves. The cigarettes are there to give the characters something to form opinions and talk about. The story is there to give the characters a canvas in which to interact and explore their dynamics.

If you’ve seen the TV show Better off Ted, that is to Thank You For Smoking what Parker Lewis Can’t Lose is to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is to say, it’s a TV adaptation in all but name. The movie lacks the smug desperation of the TV show, probably for the better.

The Chase

  • Reading time:3 mins read

This is an odd one. It’s the third Dalek story in two years, and the third directed by Richard Martin. In the previous Dalek story (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) we saw the Doctor abandon his granddaughter Susan on a future post-apocalyptic Earth for what he felt was her own good. This time we say goodbye to the show’s original protagonists, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, as they are granted an opportunity to return to mid-1960s Britain.

Whereas the Doctor started off hostile, even violent, toward the pair, and at best he treated his granddaughter with indifference, by now the Doctor had softened toward the pair and indeed become a more sympathetic character in general. He shows genuine distress at their choice to leave him, which he expresses with his usual petulance. From here on the Doctor remains a softer character yet he becomes rather melancholy, prone to musing about his losses.

On that level, and in the introduction of one of my favorite companions, Steven, the story is a success. And indeed the first two episodes are pretty solid stuff, despite some shaky studio work with the regulars casting shadows on matte paintings mere inches behind them, and despite the hilarious make-up of some incidental alien peoples. The final two episodes are passable as well, with an android duplicate Doctor and a fun dilemma where Vicki gets left behind by the TARDIS — and of course the introduction of Steven. In the Mechonoids we also see an unsuccessful, yet interesting, attempt at creating a nemesis to the Daleks.

It’s the middle two episodes that try on the patience. On paper they sound wonderfully bonkers; Daleks versus rednecks on the Empire State Building; Frankenstein’s monster lifting and pile-driving whole Daleks; a Dalek landing party causing the desertion of the Mary Celeste. There’s a year’s worth of comic strip material in these two episodes. Unfortunately none of it really comes off on-screen. Whether it’s a lack of comic timing on the actors’ part or proper framing of the action on the director’s, it all comes off as tedious and directionless. If it weren’t for the rather wonderful cliffhanger to part four, which results in Vicki’s travel predicament, I’d say it’s possible and desirable to just skip the middle two episodes entirely.

This is also the first Dalek story not to be adapted into a feature film starring Peter Cushing. Pervasive as the movies would later be on TV, apparently they weren’t such hot stuff at the box office. Also, the Dalekmania bubble was quickly deflating. The following year would be Hartnell’s last, and would very nearly be the end of Doctor Who — that is, until a new production team hit on the concept of regeneration. All the same, despite later ratings spikes in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, it took another forty years for the show to regain this height of popularity and cultural saturation.

This story sort of forms the middle block of a trilogy, with The Space Museum to the left and The Time Meddler to the right. The latter is one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who serials, and I think the first hint at something greater for the format. I think it’s fitting that with the departure of the original leads, and therefore the shift of loyalties to the Doctor himself, the show would immediately start in on hints at his personal background. But that’s a conversation for another review.

Sock me in the stomach three more times

  • Reading time:3 mins read

In retrospect some elements of Big come off creepier than they were intended, or would have been perceived at the time. In the early ’80s when children vanished, people weren’t so much worried about molestation as they were about bodily harm. The assumption was that the motive for kidnapping was financial gain, rather than a personal drive. What other use is a kid, really, than ransoming him off?

Naive, maybe. But look at the way that products were advertised even back then. Would you buy something based on those ad campaigns? The 1980s may not seem that long ago, but our assumptions and attitudes about the world have changed so much. Racial, sexual, cultural understanding and acceptance are becoming more the norm. Taboo subjects have become everyday discussion. Even things like basic psychology have developed and spread so far.

This movie is grounded in the same mid-’80s American middle-class mindset as much children’s entertainment of the era, written by baby boomers more inclined to reflect on their own rosy memories of childhood than to observe the world and the real logistics around them. The kids don’t speak and interact like kids; they behave the way that adults remembered themselves in the 1950s. Hell, the whole theme of the movie is some baby boomer yearning for his own youth. Except sort of inverted.

I think I can appreciate this movie a little better as an adult, even given its weird cultural obliviousness. As a kid I remember it annoying me to no end. Everything was wrong. Why was everyone so excited about insect Transformers? Insecticons had been around for years at that point. The bulk of the oh-so-droll jokes about social security numbers and workplace politics bored me or went over my head. The only appeal the movie had for me was the setpieces like the FAO Schwartz piano duet, Tom Hanks’ apartment hijinks, and all the Zoltar business. It was all flash and curiosity. Was that really what it was like to move into your own apartment? Was that really what it was like to get a job? Wow, it would be great to be left alone to wander around in FAO Schwartz, or that carnival.

Now I can stand back and understand the movie’s ambition. I still marvel at its blinkered vision, but from within a cultural context that I can appreciate. As a case study, it gets a person thinking.

The Space Museum

  • Reading time:3 mins read

You may remember some of my advice on this show. If the fans love a serial, you’re probably safe in skipping it. If they despise or ignore it, it’s probably worth a look.

To give an idea of The Space Museum‘s reputation, the main extra on the disc is a short monologue from new series writer Rob Shearman in which he half-heartedly defends the story. He grasps to fit the story with a retrospective literary justification, and doesn’t quite succeed. It’s an interesting feature, but so far as I’m concerned it’s unnecessary. This is one of the more creative and fascinating stories of one of the show’s more creative and fascinating eras.

The first three or so years of the show are closer to literary science fiction than anything that has followed. Nearly every story is based either on some theoretical premise or on attempt to push the boundaries of the show’s format. Add in a cast that is fascinating to watch no matter what they’re up to, and there is room to push the show very far before it starts to get too experimental, too odd to work.

The Space Museum begins on a weird note; the cast, battered, bruised and torn from misadventures in the Crusades, suddenly finds itself standing around the TARDIS console, dressed in tidy new clothes. Dropped glasses bounce back into hands and repair themselves. Walking in heavy dust leaves no footprints. And then, spoilerphobes be warned to skip to the next paragraph, toward the end of the first episode, is one of the show’s greatest cliffhangers. The four regular cast round a corner to find their own embalmed bodies as exhibits in a space museum.

After the first episode, the mystery element diminishes and the story becomes more about the characters interacting with the world and trying to prevent the future from occurring. Though the rest of the serial is rarely as heady as the first episode, the character dynamics are always fun and the story is scattered with great moments such as a guard’s attempt to mind-probe the Doctor.

After a short 100 minutes the serial ends with an overt transition into the following story, and Ian and Barbara’s farewell after nearly two years as the show’s protagonists, The Chase.

This one is a keeper. If you want an example of a Hartnell-era story that overstepped its bounds, try The Web Planet. Ambitious, creative, and such a curious disaster.

Downloading Daleks: The Conundrum of Public Funding

  • Reading time:7 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by GameSetWatch, then republished by GamaSutra.

Doctor Who is perhaps the BBC’s biggest worldwide brand. For nearly fifty years the British public has drowned in Doctor Who merchandise and tie-ins: novels, audio plays, comics, toys, and T-shirts. Yet when it comes to new media, the BBC has been curiously slow to act. In the 1980s there were a few Doctor Who text adventures, and in the early ‘90s a pair of dubious licensed games for the PC. Since the show’s successful 2005 revival, Eidos has released a collectible card game across several platforms. Their individual merits aside, none of these games or genres really reflects the show’s talky, exploration-heavy premise.

By comparison, Doctor Who: The Adventure Games is a venture of the BBC proper, and a collaboration with the current TV production team. Over the last few years the BBC’s website division – also paid for through the TV license fee – has experimented with Flash games and animated episodes. Some of those efforts resulted in, for example, the reanimation of lost Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s. All these efforts, however, have been tentative and have skirted the edges of procedure.

With The Adventure Games, the BBC has some motivation – namely competition. Channel 4, the TV station established some thirty years ago to provide an alternate perspective to the cultural mainstream represented in ITV and the BBC’s two channels, has recently begun to expand its remit to cover videogames.

As a broadcaster, Channel 4 is required to air less enfranchised voices and to commission its programming from independent bodies. By the same reasoning, of late the Channel 4 website has become a significant source of funding for British indie games. To keep speed, the BBC seems to be responding to its competitor in familiar BBC style by luring huge and established talents to develop broadly appealing in-house entertainment — as when seven years ago they brought in Queer as Folk creator Russell T Davies to revive Doctor Who.

In this case, the BBC has contracted one of the most respected adventure game authors and perhaps the most respected nuts-and-bolts development crews in Europe. For their part, Broken Sword designer Charles Cecil and OutRun 2 developer Sumo Digital have digested and translated the show’s appeal in a way that spin-off and licensed material – including much under the Doctor Who banner – rarely does. Granted, the actors’ line readings sound like the first take for an audio book and the story itself perhaps borrows too liberally from Back to the Future – yet at no point does the game feel throwaway.

The question is, why? To quote Tom Baker’s Doctor, as he gawped at the remains of planets shriveled into gallery exhibits, what’s it all for? It’s all well that audiences now have a decent Doctor Who game, and it is curious to see the level of collaboration from the show’s production office, but what does the BBC hope to gain from the project?

Surely the game is more than a competitive response to Channel 4. Granted they’re both public broadcasters with a certain remit, and the lack of direct commercial concerns means that not every move has to be absolutely sensible so long as they can argue its creative or social merit — but likewise, it’s not like they’re chasing a buck here. There’s no market to corner, and nothing really to compete over. The games are effectively free to their largest and primary audience, and any foreign sales would be hard pressed to justify the expenditure.

Then again, lately the BBC has been in a weird place culturally and financially. There are growing movements to abolish the TV license fee, meaning that to avoid defaulting to a commercial broadcast model the BBC more and more has to justify its funding. In an era where fewer and fewer people watch TV, and those who do generally record it or download it later, the BBC seems to be constantly experimenting with format and new forms of publicity and new ventures (many of them, such as 3D theatrical trailers and week-long event programming, spearheaded with Doctor Who and its spin-offs), all to ensure the corporation’s tentacles remain genially laced through every aspect of British culture. When TV ceases to be a part of everyday life, every bit of mindshare helps.

To that matter, even for public service broadcasters viewing figures and audience share have taken on an importance far apart from the early ‘80s, when Channel 4 was more or less created with the intent that nobody watch it. Instead of a battle for ad dollars, the BBC is in a battle for relevance. And the moment they slip, they could be in big trouble.

The dilemma is not unlike the spot that print publications are in now, and that Steve Jobs is doing his best to exacerbate. If a magazine or newspaper fails to keep up its mindshare, and make itself a crucial part of people’s lives, then it’s in trouble. When people are turning to the web and to the iPad more than print, the publications have to assess their likely audience and how much of their energies to divert. The problem is that publications have no extra budget to spend on iPad development. Many of them can barely maintain their web presence. Yet without that presence, maybe people will forget them. Maybe they will lose their relevance, their importance. There’s a bit of desperation at work.

You might also think of the situation in terms of the browser wars. It’s not like Microsoft and Google and Mozilla are selling their applications, so why are they so hot on trouncing each other? Because everyone uses a web browser, and whoever controls the browser – both the technology and the branding and feel of the thing – controls the user’s experience.

Everyone has a different idea of making over the world in his own image. Right now Google wants to move everything to the cloud, and kind of return computing to the old PC terminal days where the data is all “out there” somewhere. “Out there,” of course, being in Google’s hands. In all probability, Facebook is hard at work on its own browser and operating system.

How does the online push relate to the BBC, beyond the cultural tentacle thing? Maybe it’s got something to do with the iPlayer, which might be described as the BBC’s own proprietary Hulu. Maybe it’s got to do with the shift away from TV and toward computer screens.

Common wisdom says the test of any new medium is its suitability for porn, and that the spearhead of most computer technology is videogames. These days the BBC says the test of any new venture is its suitability to Doctor Who – and much like The New York Times or Wired, the BBC really wants a piece of your computer. It’s got to survive somewhere.

Maybe in the future, when we get all our TV through the Internet, it will be hard for entities like the BBC to resist the old multimedia chestnut. And maybe, freed of the boundaries of CD-ROM and ridiculous production companies, there will be a time for… well. Something more advanced than the alternate angles you get on DVD and Blu-Ray. And maybe, through one insidious high-quality download at a time, the BBC is preparing itself for that eventuality.

Fire and Ice and Gristle and Fat and Blood and Wine…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

That scene at the end of “The Family of Blood”, when the Doctor distributes weird Old Testament punishment to the antagonists of the piece? We never properly see what happened. It’s just narrated in voiceover — from the villain of the piece, no less. And it’s accompanied by over-the-top visuals. So I’m not sure how much weight we’re really supposed to give that version of events.

If you ever look in a mirror, any mirror, that’s where the sister is? Really? The son is left to dangle forever in a village cornfield — that presumably someone owns and will tend to eventually, or at least stumble across? Trapped forever in the event horizon of a star — and that’s keeping her alive? Likewise, kept alive by impossibly heavy chains? That somehow he’s just collapsing under as the Doctor walks away? The punishments don’t make the slightest sense, except in allegorical, fairy tale terms. And yet up to that point, the story tries to be fairly realistic within its own terms.

Furthermore, the way we’re shown the events, it’s all heightened. The colors are washed out, it’s grainy. The performance is all done for the camera, as if it’s illustrating the narration, rather than simply showing us a sequence of events. It’s a huge stylistic difference from the story to that point.

Anyway, how is the son narrating, and who is he narrating to, and why, if he was frozen forever?

It’s not just that the deeds don’t fit the character who we know, or who we’re shown throughout the story; it’s that the mode of storytelling doesn’t fit what we’ve seen first-hand to that point. If the sequence were intended literally, there would be much more to explain.

Maybe the Doctor did something to punish them, and maybe it was something along the lines of what we’re told, but all we have is this legend of the events, that seems to serve more to illustrate an impression or a concept of the Doctor, and of his behavior toward the antagonists, than it serves to illustrate a matter of fact. And frankly, again, we’ve just got the villain’s word for it all.

Unless there’s a sequel, we’ll never really know what happened; just that the Doctor impressed the hell out of Son-of-Mine.

Primal Urges

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Chris Chibnall’s style is hugely sensationalist. You can see it in Law & Order: London, where he sorted through the archives of the original show to find the most sensational handful of scripts possible, then ramped up the sensational qualities within them, and the emotional response of all the characters in the show, such that often it all can feel a bit… icky, to my tastes. Everything that he writes seems to be a canvas for characters to make bad decisions and scream at each other.

The thing is, if that’s what you’re looking for, Chibnall is very good at it. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to write; it’s that his taste and style and judgment aren’t the kind of thing that I like much, and I’m not sure if they’re all that appropriate for Doctor Who.

It’s easy to get the two mixed up. I know I tend to dismiss anything I feel is crass or tawdry. But any aesthetic can be done well, and Chibnall has consistently shown that he knows what he’s doing and can translate his vision into any genre that’s thrown at him.

Taking this in another direction, I’m rather afraid he may be taking a note from Gatiss and Roberts here, as from the clips and the previews this episode sounds like basically a pastiche or conflation of all the fan-favorite Pertwee stories. We’ve got the town trapped under a bubble from The Dæmons. We’ve got the experiment from Inferno. We’ve got the antagonists from The Silurians.

I’m always apprehensive about stories that people describe as delightfully old-school, as it tends to mean they’re more concerned with evoking memories of past stories by quoting huge swaths of them than with taking the show into new and interesting directions. I’m sure it’s possible to make a story that evokes classic Who without simply remaking it. “Amy’s Choice” feels very 1960s to me, for instance, as does “Midnight”. That comes out of working creatively within similar logical constraints — budget, limited sets and effects — rather than rote imitation.

Of course I’ve not seen it yet, so I’m just voicing apprehensions. One sign that this story may be a bit more advanced than I fear is, perhaps unintuitively, the makeup. The original Earth Reptile stories were great, but considering the neutral line they tried to walk they were somewhat let down by the difficulty in making the antagonists individual, identifiable characters. The Silurians and the Sea Devils all look the same, and any characterization is let down by the immobility of their masks.

Of course it’s unfortunate that for a character to be identifiable that means, in cosmetic terms, to make them more like us, basically people with green bumps on their faces. But outside of complex animatronics or something, the most elegant solution is to show us the actors’ faces — their eyes and mouths and facial muscles — and to dress them individually. Then the dilemma becomes not just an intellectual exercise where, yes, in theory we can understand the Doctor’s argument that these are intelligent beings with their own legitimate argument that we ought to take seriously. Instead we might have a chance of giving a damn about the Silurians ourselves, on an emotional level.

Considering the emotional level that Chibnall likes to work on, that also makes me wary. But we’ll see.

Plague of Options

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So The Vampires of Venice didn’t offend me as much as episodes two or three; it wasn’t so much offensively poor as it was deeply mediocre. In modern Doctor Who terms, it has to be the epitome of nothingness. It is practically the same as half the episodes made to date, and in that sense it’s a bit of a shame. It’s a shame because the writer and director were handed piles of bountiful, pregnant, deeply fascinating material and then they came up with… this.

I’m just now watching the Confidential. The writer, Toby Whithouse, is in Venice, chatting with a historian about the city’s relationship with the plague. This brings up a bunch of information from my own plague research — such as the islands off of Venice where, over the years, one fortress after another was built to house plague sufferers. They were sort of horrible leper colonies, where it’s said that today the ghosts of plague victims, tortured and anguished, practically own the place. The historian gets into that, a bit.

Actually, the first thing he asks is, this Doctor Who character — he’s a plague doctor, is he? And Whithouse is a little confused. “Uh, no,” he says, and starts babbling about sci-fi concepts. You can see the historian’s face fall. So to try to bring things back into an interesting realm, he starts talking about plague doctors — you know, with the bird masks and the robes and hats. They’re iconic as hell, and practically ready-made Doctor Who characters. Hell, the secret could be that, behind those masks, the plague doctors were in fact vampires. Wouldn’t that be something.

As they talk, the historian actually has a mask at hand. The writer sort of shrugs and changes the subject. It goes on like this. I feel embarrassed for the guy.

There are at least three areas in which this episode criminally squandered its potential. First, the whole setting and premise — plague, in Renaissance Venice. These horrible plague colonies, filled with victims. That’s neat, and relatively unexplored territory. Next, add in vampires. Vampires are, of course, historically associated with the plague. People have blamed the plague on vampires, and there’s thought that vampire lore exists largely to rationalize, put some comprehensible narrative to, the plague. Also this is Doctor Who. Plague doctors. Imagine a couple of mistaken references in there, crossed wires about which doctor is which. How is it, then, that the only reference to the plague is a line or two at the start, explaining… well, nothing, really. It’s just there to namedrop the villain, to get the Doctor on her track without any effort.

Next, vampires. Aside from their deep relationship with the plague, they are an important, if fairly unexplored, part of Doctor Who lore. They are, in fact, the ancient enemies of the Time Lords. We’ve only seen them once on-screen because the Time Lords thought they killed all the vampires off. The last time we saw them, they were in E-Space, a bottle universe that… well, never mind. Too complicated. They were in another universe, that was locked away. This is, incidentally, the same universe in which Romana was locked away.

So think about this for a minute. Instead of wasting half the episode establishing the vampires then saying, hang on, they’re not really vampires at all; they’re some other kind of alien-of-the-week that nobody cares about in the least, we could have had real (in Doctor Who terms) vampires. Which opens the question: how did they get here? Where did they come from? Well, they probably came from E-Space. What, E-Space is open? What else does that imply? Could… no, Romana couldn’t still be alive, could she?

So the episode squanders the historical and thematic premise it sets up. It squanders some potentially momentous Doctor Who continuity and mythology. And in shooting the story as if it was based entirely on a set, director Jonny Campbell squanders an absolutely gorgeous location. This is some of the flattest direction I’ve seen since “Daleks in Manhattan”; even though the compositing was, in truth, fairly limited, my first impression of anything interesting was, oh, there’s another bad greenscreen shot. There was no dynamism or genuine sense of place. It was all so… matter-of-fact. How can you give a director architecture and spaces like that and come out with something so fake and forgettable?

The only thing that raises this story is the regulars. I’m going to just stop talking about how wonderful Matt Smith is, in his every motion and gesture. How delightfully awkward. Instead, I’ll talk about how refreshing Rory is as a companion. A good male companion always balances out the TARDIS crew anyway — most of the men have been amongst my favorites. Ian, Steven, Ben, Jamie, Harry, Turlough. Not a bad lineup there. And Rory, as awkward as he is in his own way, seems to “get” the Doctor and his world in a way that I’m not sure any new-Who companion has. From the bit when he first walks into the TARDIS to his analysis of the Doctor’s effect on people, Rory is a sharp guy and he makes the Doctor work a bit in the way that none of the female comanions, or Jack, have.

So that’s all nice, though it’s got little to do with the episode per se. Ah well. Toby Whithouse is on my dud list, I guess, next to Chris Chibnall, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss, Tom MacRae, Matt Jones, Helen Raynor, and Matthew Graham. And Johnny Campbell is on my dud list next to Andrew Gunn, Colin Teague, James Strong, and Keith Boak.

Guess what? After next week’s episode, which looks swell, we have:

1) Two Chris Chibnall episodes, followed by
2) a celebrity historical (always a bit dubious anyway) directed by Johnny Campbell again, followed by
3) Hey, a Gareth Roberts episode.

Previously, the two weakest stories this series were directed by Andrew Gunn — the weaker of which was written by Mark Gatiss.

So, basically between next week and the two-part finale we’re on thin ice. Oy.

Why don’t people always consult me before making any creative decisions?