Fish Custard (12)

So: the chief lizard man, dressed like a Bishop or a Time Lord or the Mayor of Balham walks into the big ornate MFI courtroom, and starts talking in a wise old lizard voice and I immediately knew that he reminded me of someone, but I wasn't sure who. (Now, of course, I realise that he sounds exactly like the man in the shack from the final episode of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which is to say, exactly like Marvin but without the ring modulator.) And before too long, he's freeing the Doctor and his friends from certain death, and being patronising to the evil warrior lizards and sitting down with Amy and the one from Goodness Gracious Me round a negotiating table to sort out peace between the lizard men in the earth.

If you had asked me to imagine what a 21st century reimagining of Doctor Who would be like, then I imagine that this is how I would have imagined them reimagining in it. Lots of men in jolly good prosthetic make-up and jolly good CGI backgrounds and corridors and thesps making speeches: like Star Trek the Next Generation, only with jokes. And if that were now the default for Doctor Who I wouldn't mind one little bit. Like slipping on an old pair of bed socks (do they still manufacture bed socks?) or sipping hot chocolate with your muffins.

Two years ago, in the dark ages, R.T.D. gave us a really perfectly okay earth invasion story, featuring a re-imagining of a minor Old Who monster, lots of UNIT solider boys and a fleet of flying saucers.

"Finally!" I cried out with joy "Proper Doctor Who! This is what we want more of!"

This week, at the height of the renaissance, Moffat gives us a really perfectly okay earth invasion story featuring a re-imagining of a minor Old Who monster, some friendly humans besieged in a church and an exploding drilling rig.

"Hmm." I found myself thinking. "Not too sure about this. Probably the weak point of the season so far."

So much the worse for Davies; so much the better for Moffat. Or possibly vice versa.

It's like that thing Alan Moore said that I keep quoting. "English children have the Beano in the same way that they have rickets." He meant that English comics were never a treat, but just a thing which happened, week in week out, like trips to the barber or bath-time. If someone took you for an ice-cream you might have said that it was a nice ice-cream, or even pass judgement about whether it was a nicer ice or a less ice than your last little treat. But you probably didn't say that today's bowl of rice crispies was nicer or less nice than yesterday's bowl of rice crispies, or even that rice crispies are nicer than oat crunchies. You just munch them before setting off to school without really noticing what you're eating, which is why the marketing department had to depend so heavily on little plastic self assembly replicas of ferris wheels.

That's what Old Who was like. Comics. Breakfast cereal. Saving the universe, week in, week out, 36 weeks out of 52. So if I say that the one with the Silurians felt a little traditional, a little plodding, a little run-of-the-mill then it doesn't necessarily follow that I am, as the Eleventh Doctor would have put it, but the Third Doctor rather decidedly would not have done, dissing the story. I may only be saying that it was the most Who like Who story so far.

When Matt Smith confronts the captive lizard warrior woman, he suddenly becomes impatient. No, not even impatient. Emphatic. He's like that very inexperienced maths teacher who suddenly turns round and says "Yes, I may indeed joke with you and let you fool about, and I am certainly not going to lose my temper with you even now but please don't ever forget that I'm still the teacher and I can still put you in detention." With the humans, he's even worse. He uses the "I'm very disappointed" gambit. "Make him the best of humanity, that you couldn't be." You've let me down, you've let the school down but worst of all you've let yourself down. And I've suddenly realised that that funny flop of hair makes him look like a much, much younger William Hartnell.

There was something a bit perfunctory about the ending, wasn't there? It felt like we'd beaten the end-of-level guardian and were now seeing the cut-scene and getting the plot coupon. But the same cut-scene could have been tagged on after any other encounter. I didn't even quite get why The Crack of Doom sucked Rory in. (Does it have particular thing about sucking in dead people? Did we already know that?) I was particularly suspicious when Amy asked why she was going to forget all about Rory (when she still remembered the soldiers from the one with the statues, who had also fallen into the Crack and been wiped out of existence.) I was rather disappointed that the Doctor resisted the temptation to say "I'll explain later."

Who else spotted the huge neon arrows marked "This will be important later!" around Amy's engagement ring?

No-one apart from me and six other asexual bus-spotters remember the Silurians. But that's fine because lizards are cool. Dinosaurs are cool. Dinosaur men who used to hunt humans for sport are cool. The original Silurians had a pet tyrannosaurus: the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth! as the TARGET novelization helpfully exposited. But the story didn't seem to be interested in the dinosaur angle, or the lizard angle, or even the "distantly related to the Sea Devils" angle. (Everyone remembers the scene where the Sea Devil come up out of the sea, even if they don't remember where they remember it from. It is, how you say, iconic.)

The main distinguishing characteristic of these Silurians (apart from the wanting to conquer the earth thing) is that they are divided into two castes, a scientist cast (good) and a warrior cast (bad). This isn't terribly interesting in itself. The warrior cast is female, but nothing comes of this. In fact, there's quite a lot in the story which nothing comes of. The young human kid (who clearly has a very decent acting career ahead of him) is dyslexic. When we first meet him his Dad is reading him the Gruffalo, and if I were old enough to quote from A Study in Scarlet, I'd be pretty unimpressed with my Dad reading me the Gruffalo. I kept thinking that there was going to be a point to this -- about disability or difference or imaginary monsters that turn out to be real but if there was I didn't spot it. [*] Which is fine. It's a good thing for characters to have attributes which aren't plot devices and for there to be characters with disabilities who aren't "disabled characters". But it was presented as if it was going to have a point.

I also thought that maybe the story was going to turn out to be about the middle east, when the Doctor tells Alaya that just because the Silurians owned the earth a long time ago doesn't mean they have the automatic right to it right now, but nothing came of that either, although I suppose we did learn that it would be better for apes and reptiles to share the world rather than fighting over it.

About the only thing that had been taken from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters was the idea that the Silurians were not just "monsters" but people with their own point of view, and the idea that humans, or some humans, couldn't accept this. In the old story, the Brig bombed them, after the Doctor had brokered a peace deal, because he's a solider and that's what soldiers do. In the new one, Ambrose shot the hostage because she was scared on behalf of her son. When we first see Alaya, she's wearing a mask, which makes her look scary. When she takes it off, she isn't actually all that frightening. The Doctor even goes so far as to say she's beautiful. There was a slightly going-through-the-motions scene of the boy being chased through the graveyard by a creature he can't see, very much the sort of thing that's meant to happen in the version of Doctor Who that children watched from behind the settee. (In the dining room. Damn these middle class sofas and lounges.) One felt that this should logically have lead to the monster unmasking in front of the boy, and the boy having to convince the grown-ups that it was a friendly monster. There's a precedent for boys called Eliot making friends with extra terrestrials, isn't there? But, in fact, it's the Doctor who straightforwardly tells every one that the monster is a nice monster, and that they mustn't kill it under any circumstances, because as long as she is alive there is a chance for peace, which pretty much tells us how the rest of the story is going to develop, which, of course, it does.

So. A Doctor Who story. Aliens and humans and little boys and ray guns and the worst use of the sonic screwdriver since we buried the R.T.D. era at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. No sub-text at all that I can find. And I'm really, really fine with that. Doctor Who stories can and should just be Doctor Who stories sometimes. But as a Doctor Who story, this one wasn't quite interesting enough. Which does make me wonder if we haven't all become a little bit too reliant on subtexts.

continues....