film and tv

Yes, well that was about what I expected on the basis of “School Reunion”: some fun, if vapid, character stuff and dialog; a completely nonsensical story; and a curious union of long, boring dialog scenes and rushed plotting. The centerpiece standoff between the Doctor and key foe is almost exactly like the pool scene from “School Reunion”. It’s also interesting that the most profound character observation was quoted almost verbatim from that earlier episode.

Anyway. Matt Smith is doing well as ever, though maybe not guided as well here as in the Adam Smith episodes (1, 4, and 5). He makes the most out of some absurd situations, and generally makes the show worthwhile on his own. Rory is going to be pretty good — we’re verging into 1960s companion territory now, between him and his fiancée. I also like that, in the abstract, he sort of understands what’s going on with the Doctor.

I am intrigued with next week’s episode. I like that it looks to be breaking the mold a bit, the way the show stopped doing after about 1970. Back in the ’60s, before the show was completely codified, there was stuff like The Mind Robber and Planet of Giants and The Celestial Toymaker. I’m excited at the idea that the format is starting to loosen up a bit.

Offhand this also brings to mind “Father’s Day”, a little. Toward the end of Davies’ era, I recall commenting a few times that I didn’t see a story like Father’s Day being done again, the way the show had developed since 2005. And yet here we are again, Matt Smith’s reminding me of Eccleston’s first (and only) series.

I notice I’ve barely talked, or thought, about today’s episode. Well, yeah. I guess it’s not very remarkable. In the most literal sense. New Who by numbers. Nothing special about it, though (as the template decrees) several nice things. Might as well be a Gareth Roberts episode.

It occurs to me how well the Angels, as iconic monsters in the way that we haven’t had iconic monsters or villains since the early ’70s, integrate with the show’s current format. We’ve got a showrunner who, to an extent not professed by previous producers or script editors, is making a point of highlighting both the time travel aspect of the show and its built-in fairy tale qualities (magical door in a junkyard that can open to anywhere you can imagine; ageless, cranky man who leads you into trouble; an individual monster to represent each of your primal fears). And so here we’ve got supremely memorable, carefully crafted baddies who are intimately entwined with time and whose power largely comes out of their overt fairy tale visage — to the extent that if they’re weathered, worn down, they lose their power. And there’s a certain fairy tale logic to dealing with them — face your demons, but don’t look them in the eye. The Angels basically are an icon of Moffat’s vision for the show.

What they remind me of is the way the Master was created to reflect and enhance Pertwee’s Earthbound super spy adventures. He was the iconic foe of the era, as Letts and Dicks weren’t fond of the Cybermen and the Daleks were slow and slim coming after their ’60s overexposure and Terry Nation running home with all his toys. And the Master was basically a summation of that era: a suave Bond villain to set up schemes for our suave Bondish hero to foil, week after week. Basically, if you’re stuck on Earth in one time period you might as well have a meddling Time Lord to provide an excuse for all the action.

It also strikes me how since the early ’70s no one has really put that much thought into creating a menace that really establishes the contemporary tone and concept and stakes of the show. And yet since the start it’s the baddies that have stuck in people’s minds, and brought them back. For a reason! They establish what the heroes are fighting against, what the nature of the struggle is. They provide the show a certain emotional context.

I guess with that in mind, the Earth Reptiles do a pretty good job of establishing some of the other stakes and themes of the Pertwee era — even though they’re not a consistent threat, or even inherently monsters or villains. It’s almost a shame they didn’t get a final appearance in his last season, to wrap up the ongoing threads in the way that they meant to do with the Master.

Whereas David Tennant often seemed to be giving a performance, sketching the Doctor out like a comic book character, and Eccleston — well, he performed in a different way; a more classical dramatic performance, where he tried to depict the script as written — Matt Smith plays the role as if he isn’t at all aware there’s an audience. When he speaks, he actually seems to be talking to someone. When he walks and gestures, he does so with a certain apparent obliviousness beyond his own motivation. And when other actors are talking, he listens. He processes what they’re saying. You can see him thinking it over, weighing possible responses.

Basically, he plays it for real. And it is play; it’s just so completely method. It goes beyond his physically hitting his head, hard, and biting his co-star — hard — and all the food acting in episode one. He seems to inhabit every scene he’s in. The verisimilitude to his performance — it hasn’t been present since the 1960s, when every episode was shot more or less as-live, and everyone was in fact reacting to his or her environment in real time.

It’s so real that the heightened performances of the guest actors — which would have seemed perfectly normal in the last few series — seem like they’re coming from a different universe, and Murray Gold’s music — which I have always enjoyed — seems as out-of-place and bombastic as people have often complained in the past. The rest of the show just isn’t geared to his level, as yet.

I’m really curious where he’ll take this once the writers stop writing him as David Tennant.

I love how the Angels are extrapolated here. I had actually wondered before about what happened if an Angel were, say, under video surveillance. And what happened if the Angels got weathered or broken while in stone form. And I had wondered about the logistics of the Angel who puts out the light in the basement.

Now we know that they just absorb all kinds of energy — electricity, radiation, potential energy of life forms. We know about the image business — including, apparently, a mental image. Which is amazingly freaky. Just for the kids, the concept that the Angel can now come out of the TV and get them — yeah. And then this clarifies that cheesy tag to “Blink”, where we saw all these statues that clearly weren’t Weeping Angels. Turns out, hey… any statue could actually be one of them.

And I just love the weathered, decayed Angels — all the creepier. This is basically Tomb of the Cybermen for the Angels — solidifying them as an ongoing threat, illustrating their background and a bit more of how they work and what their actual threat is. It makes them feel well-rounded in a way I didn’t imagine they could be from their earlier appearance. Before, yeah, they were clever. Now they feel rather brilliant and dangerous. More than just a gimmick, as it were.

I hadn’t quite hit on it, or hadn’t thought of it in ages, but the perfectly sculpted design was always a problem for me. Everything about the Angels, the first time around, was a little too cleanly designed, from their appearance to their abilities. This story roughens things up a bit, gets under the surface, without undermining them at the height of their presentation. There’s something more unnerving about an organic, imperfect thing — especially if its imperfections make it all the more desperate.

It’s the imperfect, organic element to the Cybermen that makes them fascinating. Not necessarily seeing a rotting chin, but the knowledge of what they are and what their motivation is. Nothing is creepier than the rather pathetic mantra “We muzzzzst surviiiiiiive…” and then knowing what that entails. There’s almost a certain sympathy for them, which is all the scarier because you know that won’t be reciprocated. You’re being played on several levels.

Likewise, what makes the Daleks fascinating is their intense, blinding emotion and the way it manifests itself — in their schemes, in their voices, in their mannerisms. It’s an imperfection that they refuse to admit, as it defines their being. Again, you can kind of understand their way of thinking. What makes it scary is that, like an angry parent, there’s no arguing with it.

For a monster to get under the skin, I feel like one needs to be able to get under theirs — just enough to understand what you’re up against, and why. It’s the futility of reason that leaves us stranded.

And I think that’s why, after this episode, the Weeping Angels feel to me like the first proper, classic Who monster to come around since the early ’70s.

After Pertwee’s era, we got a few interesting one-offs and a few so-so recurring characters or monsters. In the new series we got some decent stuff like the Ood and Judoon. But no really powerful recurring monsters or villains, with their own mythology. The kind of thing where you watch just because they’re going to be in this episode. Never mind Dalek/Cyberman/Master level; I’m talking about the second tier — the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, Yeti, Silurians, Autons.

Right now, I think the Angels may hover just a little below that first tier. They’re not Daleks or Cybermen, but they’re more memorable, more fleshed-out, and have more draw than Sontarans or the Yeti. If they appear again over Matt Smith’s era, I think they may be permanently associated as his antagonists, the way that we associate the Cybermen with Troughton or the Master with Pertwee.

That’s how well Moffat has extrapolated them. And likewise, many of Moffat’s other monsters remind me of all the attempts in the 1960s to find a follow-up to or replacement for the Daleks — the War Machines, the Quarks, the Krotons; the Vashta Nerada, Prisoner Zero, the Smilers. Two of them call on the same everyday edge-of-perception quality that makes the Angels so interesting; the other just stands there and stares at you, apparently inanimate but creepy.

Yes, all right.

You will notice, in place of any real measured analysis or criticism I have been reacting in a fairly facile, judgmental tone to the new series and incarnation of Doctor Who.

I’m not sure how much I want to analyze the show, right now, as it is and as I am and as my world is arranged. Maybe that will change. At this point I’m letting it wash over me. Rather than stopping the flow and picking over points and dwelling as I do and have and no doubt will, I’m letting it exist as a contemporary, writhing thing and I’m letting my emotions guide me to what scattered path that may be.

This is the first incarnation of the show which has organically ambled along and presented itself to me in its natural state as a cultural entity and an ongoing piece of fiction. The old series, it was a sort of archaeology for me. Davies’ series, it was a lesson in reinvention and postmodernism. I was more fascinated with it, in the fact that it existed at all, than I was engaged with it as a fact.

I’ve never been good with facts. I tend to brush them aside, as clutter to the fundamental point at stake. With me, there’s always some grand point at stake. Why it’s at stake, I haven’t the foggiest. I don’t know why I get so wound up in this pursuit of feeble strands of the grand Truth of Being. I never really enjoy things, or accept them at face value; it’s all puzzlework for some game I’ve yet to completely work out. If the facts are illustrative, then great — more pieces on the board. But it’s the rules that matter.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting around to living my life now. I’ll never avoid that puzzle; it’s the shape of my being. But maybe I don’t have to take it always so seriously. Maybe, to take a leaf from wiser and older philosophies than my own, that ability to let go and actively experience and enjoy the objects and events and details I’m handed — it seems likely that’s another whole level to the game that I’ve yet to master. I’m reminded of Ikaruga.

See what I did there? I can’t ever turn it off completely. The game is always in play. So maybe that’s the point. I don’t really have to think about it so actively, do I? It will present itself when it’s relevant, and everything will add up when it needs to.

So the last couple of episodes… well, they kind of sucked, in one way or another. That’s okay, though, because “The Time of Angels”? Well. There we are, then. If this is a sign of the future direction of the series, then… that’s nice. As much as this borrowed from Moffat’s earlier work, it significantly built on that work and took it to a level of internal complexity and broadness of implication that you only really get rarely. There’s a certain breathless virtuosity in the way the ideas seem to stack up and suggest a bigger, more active universe than we usually see working in this show — the kind of canvas that I have always liked to imagine.

I love captions like that — One Thousand Years Later, and whatnot. It’s simple and a bit silly, and almost a bit of a piss-take, yet it’s effective. Just implicitly, the suggestion that things can be relevant and connected by huge spans of time and space, from one scene to the next — why have a show about time travel, if you don’t do this stuff? It would be like watching an episode of Connections where James Burke wanders around a village and talks to people about Gordon Brown. I suppose that could be interesting, but you’re missing a few tricks with the format.

The thing that attracts me to Doctor Who, the thing that attracts me to any system, is the sense of scope and implication. Most of that has been left implied. Historically, before 2005 I think the show actually dealt with time travel about half a dozen times. And… sure, okay. That just leaves space to read in the margins. Davies occasionally played with the concept, as did Moffat under Davies’ supervision. Probably the most eventful use of time was that first series, with Eccleston — everything was important, and toward the end, yes, we even get those title cards. 100,000 Years Later; Six Months Later. It starts jumping forward, in large and small intervals, breathless to show the grander consequences of what we already know.

So we’ve got this new concept for the show. Sort of. And we’ve got this new Doctor, who is also my first active Doctor (by the above logic), who I do quite enjoy in the role. And I’m not just obsessing about this show in my own bubble; it’s something to watch on a Saturday, with my fiancée. That on its own brings a different perspective and tone to the show.

So on other topics — okay, maybe I’ll be my familiar, mental meat grinder. On this topic, though, I wouldn’t expect anything profound. I don’t need to do that anymore. Probably. Here, in this expansion of my mental space, I’m just going to let go.

So.

That episode was totally rad, wasn’t it.

So I have mulched a bit on “The Beast Below”. On first viewing I was just perplexed with it. I didn’t think I liked it much, despite many neat elements. Second viewing, the problems were still there but they didn’t bother me so much and I was better able to appreciate the good stuff.

The episode doesn’t hang together very well; it’s got all of these elements that it doesn’t bother to stitch together, or even use properly. So the Smilers… I sort of get why they’re there, even if they never do much, but what are the Winders for? I get that they’re basically the Queen’s secret service, but… what do they wind? The Smilers? What purpose do they serve in the story, besides a bit of exposition toward the end? What purpose does it serve to reveal that they’re also Smilers, when we don’t have much of a clue about either of them?

And that’s just to start with.

I also wasn’t convinced by the tragedy and shame of the society built on the whale. I mean, yeah. It’s unfortunate. But really? Why does this fact freak people out so much? And the whole reason the whale is there in the first place is because he can’t stand to hear children cry? Okay. And then there’s the tenuous comparison with the Doctor, that the script drives home over and over again.

Davies’ episodes were often sentimental, and sometimes that went too far, but it always felt honest. I’m not sure that Moffat really has the knack for this stuff.

The ideas and images, though — yeah. Some really good stuff in here. The political and social allegory, I’m not really in a place to weed out on my own. I’ve read some eloquent breakdowns of that aspect, and it seems that the episode is ripe with meaning. That’s nice. I don’t know if it’s as interesting as people make out, but I’ll process it eventually.

It doesn’t help the weird pacing and structure and lack of cohesion, but maybe I’ll grow to appreciate the other levels more as time goes on. Problems with structure and execution — sure; so long as they’re honest mistakes, who cares.

I think it’s the false emotion that blindsided me the first time through, and I think that’s what I’m still working to get past. Moffat is fine with his intellectual puzzles — more than fine. Yet when he tries to ground any of his games on a human level, he almost offends me.

We’ll see where he goes with this over the next eleven episodes.

Well, good grief. What was that?

I feel like I’m missing something important. Or several important things. Matt Smith continues to be excellent, and is on a progressive trend in that regard. Karen Gillan is… fine. As for the story, though… what?

I just don’t understand how the elements go together, or why. The Smilers are a neat piece of design, but why are they there? The whole premise of the episode seems… It feels a bit forced. And there’s not much to it beyond the analogies the script insists on whacking around like a mallet toward the end.

During the mid-’80s, when the show was almost canceled the first time, there was supposed to be a story about a star whale. Maybe it had been delayed from the late Tom Baker era. My chronology isn’t what it once was. Steven Moffat would have known this, and this episode is probably a reference to that unmade Colin Baker serial. And I guess that’s… nice. In an irrelevant way. It’s like the Macra. Before this episode aired, I was thinking it looked a bit like “Gridlock”, maybe crossed with a Cartmel-era political allegory. And in that sense, I guess I was right.

I’m rambling. I’m perplexed. That episode… it feels like it hid how little it had to say under a confusing structure and sense of pace. Alternatively, it feels like a much longer script that was cut down to forty-five minutes and no longer makes any sense.

Vapid, fast-forward, obvious, complicated, cloying, disjointed.

I’m going to have to watch it again later, and see what I can take from it. Right now… that is one of my least favorite episodes since the show has returned. I do appreciate the way the end trails into the following story, much as with the 1960s serials.

The superficiality at play here — it reminds me a bit of Neil Gaiman. Which is appropriate enough. Maybe I’m just not seeing something, but from my impression of other Moffat scripts, I doubt it.

See, back when Davies was in charge I liked Moffat’s episodes about as well as Davies’. The difference was, I felt that Moffat put everything interesting on the surface. There wasn’t really much to get out of a second or third viewing, beyond appreciating the same cleverness over again. With Davies, even his worst episodes, every time I watch them I feel I’m watching a new script. I see levels I had missed before, and make now connections. There are all of these buried, subconscious themes in his writing, that allow his scripts to work even when they don’t actually work at all.

Say, “Last of the Time Lords” — a lousy episode. Yet when you consider the thematic interplay it’s depicting, with the Doctor representing hope and the Master representing despair, each one struggling all these years to bring the other to his own level, and to make him see the world through the other’s eyes, suddenly the bizarre plot falls to the side and you can see the broad strokes of the character interaction and the story machinations. Then when you think about the threads woven through the season about the power of faith, the strength that even misguided hope brings to people, and the innate power of words — yeah, there’s a bit more meaning. The episode makes a little more sense still. And then if you imagine the whole story as a fairy tale, perhaps with a narrated introduction, rather than thinking of it as a literal depiction of events, it almost becomes a demented kind of genius. Almost.

The shriveled Doctor is still nonsense, of course. And it doesn’t forgive establishing the Archangel network as a purely psychological phenomenon — hypnosis — then suddenly building on it as a psychic one. But if you ignore the details and the plot, you can see how the story fits together as a machine. And on a few levels, it does actually work.

Even Moffat’s best episodes, I’ve never gotten anything like that. And this is not one of Moffat’s best episodes. At least… I don’t think it is. I’m terribly confused. Maybe I’ll have more to say later.

I can’t believe I’m more looking forward to a Mark Gatiss episode than the next two Moffat ones.

Oh, The Eleventh Hour? It had its nonsense. Several scenes went on too long, the story was a bad caricature of Davies-style handwave (minus the glee), and the pre-titles sequence was unnecessary. Yet tonally, it was just great. And though it’s a bit trite to say now, I rather wish the Doctor had taken little Amelia with him instead of Amy. What a lovely little actress. She’s probably the best thing out of the last two episodes.

Well. We’ll see where this goes.

Yeah, this is sort of Top of the Pops with your host Pat Troughton as John Smith. Simultaneously very much like the First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh Doctors’ outfits; just a mild shuffle into dorkitude from Tennant, and, curiously enough, with elements of Eccleston.

Anyway, yes. About right. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious; a take on your stereotypical dusty British professor. Curious that the character hadn’t quite hit it before.

I wonder if tweed will be back in, next year.

EDIT: So, with a day to reflect.

From his body language and the look in his eye, filtered through some of Moffat’s old comments, Matt Smith’s Doctor seems more investigative than action-oriented; like an actual traveling scientist, perhaps with a student in tow. In a way it harks back to the show’s original remit: Peter Cushing as Ian Chesterton as the Doctor, showing you the way it is.

I already had a good feeling about Matt Smith. Now this outfit, in its deliberately uncool way, is straight on its way to my favorite Doctor getup. If anything, it brings into relief the sharp style and extraverted yippiness of Tennant’s Doctor. David Tennant has been probably the best ambassador the show has had, or could ask for. And with thirteen masks, the Doctor can be trendy and sexy and dynamic sometimes; sure. But this, here — it peels away the layers and reveals the affably awkward teacher and researcher that, in my mind, the character is supposed to be.

George McFly … Matt Smith
“Would you still love me if I were no longer cool?” this depiction asks. “What if I weren’t so sure of myself?” And dude, yeah. I’d rather you weren’t, frankly. Just do your thing. Sincerity trumps all.

Considering what Moffat has said about his idea of the Doctor’s personality, and what he did in his earlier scripts, this all seems intentional.