Friday, May 31, 2013

The Name of the Doctor (7.14)

There's something forgotten I want you to know
The freckles of rain are telling me so
Oh it's the old forgotten question
What is that we are part of?
What is it that we are?


The Half Remarkable Question




It didn't have to be like this.

I think that before 2005, most of us imagined that New Who would be Doctor Who: the Next Generation, or Ultimate Doctor Who. We imagined that it would be be like the Paul McGann movie or the infinite number of New Adventure. We expected someone to take all those years and years of disconnected storylines and build a modern TV SF universe out of them. We thought it would be like Firefly, only with jelly babies.

Some fans believe that that is what we got. But then some fans believe that is what we already had. Give a fan three wildly inconsistent dots and he will always be able to draw a line between them; and believe that the line he has drawn was there all along; and that the line is good deal more interesting than the dots themselves.[*] If you are one of those fans -- if you don't quite see why I think Star Trek: The Next Generation and New Who have radically different relationships to their source material (and that Star Trek and Doctor Who were very different beasts to begin with) then you'll probably be happier ignoring what I have to say here and remaining lost in miasma of your self-created universe. 

And I really do mean happier. I really do wish I could take the blue pill, or possibly the red pill, and rejoin you inside the collective hallucination. But I can't. I can only watch what's been put in front of me.


"You could have taken you hand out of the cuff at any time?"
"No, not at any time. Only when it was funny."

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?



I began this series of digressions by claiming that people ask three questions about Doctor Who: "What does this mean to me?" "What does this mean?" and "What is this like?" None of them can ever really be answered. That's why they are such good questions. 

People who ask "What does Doctor Who mean to me?" may very well embrace "The Name of the Doctor" as a validation, as the fulfilment of a promise, as proof that there really is some continuity between this show and the one which their ten or twelve year old self fell in love with. But they may just as well denounce it as a horrible violation of all their childhood memories; a trivial piece of graffiti scrawled across a sacred text. Clara -- Clara, who we only met last Christmas! -- watches the Doctor and Susan -- the Doctor and Susan! -- leave Gallifrey and cracks a joke. What next? Children's entertainers at the Last Supper? Lawrence Miles response to the episode was to post a colour photograph of a man's bottom on his website. You sort of see his point.

People who ask "What does Doctor Who mean?" will certainly be fascinated by "The Name of the Doctor". It's about as meta-textual as you can get, and it gives us dozens of hermeneutic knots to unravel. It reaches back to a point before Doctor Who started and forward to a point after Doctor Who has ended and sideways to a part of Doctor Who we have never seen before. It contains the whole of Doctor Who, including itself. At the same time, it undermines and destabilizes and changes everything which has gone before. God knows how much "canon" is left when you have had a Time War which changed history, a crack in time though which bad ideas like the giant Victorian Cyberman seem to have leaked out, and the literal, story-internal "rebooting" of the entire universe. But whatever canon is left has been overwritten. All the Doctor's victories are retrospectively revealed to have been caused by the self-sacrifice of Wonderful Clara. The Doctor has always had plot immunity -- we know that he can't ever be killed off 'cos he's the good guy and the programme's got his name on it. But that plot immunity is now part of the fictional meta-story: he can't be killed because Wonderful Clara will always and has always been there to save him. (The whole premise of Doctor Who, that the Doctor ran away from Gallifrey in a malfunctioning TARDIS, is revealed to be the result of a last minute whim of Wonderful Clara's.) The last 50 years are now to be understood as a manichean conflict, like Blake's angels struggling over a new-born child, where the Angel of Light is a Victorian baddie in a frock coat, and the Angel of Light is a Victorian nanny with a liking for egg products. 

"I was born to save the Doctor" says the Ultimate Final Archetypal Companion to End All Companions. To save the him? Isn't that getting everything a little bit back to front? 

These are relatively easy questions. It's the third one I have the problems with. "What is the 'Name of the Doctor'? What is it like?"

I think "Name of the Doctor" is like one of those playground puzzles in which the convict rubs his hands together until they are sore; uses the saw to cut the table in half; puts the two halves together to make a whole; jumps through the hole and shouts until he is hoarse and then jumps on the horse and rides away. Like that Salman Rushdie story where the car breaks down and everyone has to stand round it being really really quiet because it goes without saying. It is driven by the logic of language, the logic of puns, the logic of dreams, not the logic of science or the logic of logic. It is a world where things work if they sound as if they ought to work. Clara's Mum's leaf brought Clara into existence, in a manner of speaking, because if not for the leaf her Mum would never have met her Dad. Presumably, the world is full of magic bunches of flowers and magic banana skins and magical delays due to scheduled engineering works outside Didcot. But we are inside a dream and once you have spoken in that manner, it becomes somehow literally true and the Doctor can use that leaf to magically call Clara back from the wibbly wobbly time-world. 

I think that "Name of the Doctor" is like a cubist painting. where you can see the shape of the woman and the colour of her dress, but where any suggestion that a portrait might resemble its subject has been abandoned in favour of a celebration of pure form. There is no cause and effect in "Name of the Doctor", nothing resembling a normal narrative. It's just scenes and images. Condemned men bargain for their lives; there is seance in a dream world; there is a gothic graveyard in no particular place. Richard E Grant is allegedly playing the Great Intelligence, who is tangentially connected to a villain who appeared in two lost, or at any rate mislaid, black and white episodes. But he isn't really playing the Great Intelligence, or Dr Simeon, or anyone else. He stands at the Doctor's grave in his Victorian costume and demands the Doctor tells him his greatest secret. It's not a beat in a story. It's a scene that stands by itself, like a piece of fan art: the Doctor facing down a sort of generic universal spirit of our impression of what a Doctor Who villain should probably be like. The final moments of the episode are pure, abstract mindscape. 

It looks great. Many of us have imagined the Doctor's flight from Gallifrey in our heads, and the little scene looks exactly how we imagined it. If the Doctor has a final resting place then the weird graveyard stretching to infinity is what it ought to be. The Great Big Scene, in which we see the Mysterious Man and a caption confirms his identity, is undeniably powerful. But nothing leads up to it or follows from it. It just is. [**]



"My name is Slartibartfast."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Slartibartfast."
"Slartibartfast?"
"I said it wasn't important."
      The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

"But Andrew," you ask "What about the people who don't ask questions about Doctor Who? What about the ones who, you know, just watch it. What will they have to say about this episode?" 


Well, they are mainly saying that they didn't understand it. But then, that is what they always mainly say about episodes of this kind. I don't understand what they mean when they say they don't understand it.  

Are they complaining that there is too much sci-fi jargon: that when someone says "crossing my own time-line" their brain switches off, in the same way my brain switches off when someone says "but first, sport"?


Are they complaining that too much is left unexplained at the end of the episode? Soap operas have questions in them too, I suppose, but I imagine that the questions are more clearly signposted. When a character you thought was dead walks into the Rovers Return in Ambridge someone says "Oh my god! It is Bruce, former lover of Sheila who we all believed died in a bizarre sheep shearing accident five years ago but who's body was never found! How can he possibly be here?” Mysteries and loose ends and unexpected twists there can certainly be, but they must all come with neat, safe, friendly labels marked "mystery", "loose end" and "unexpected twist". [***] Doctor Who, bless it's hearts, still expects the audience to do some work.

We know -- because Joseph Campbell told us -- that all moviefilms must begin at the very beginning and go though to the very end and leave no unresolved issues. This is the reason that we keep getting reboots and prequels. The Origin of Spider-Man fits, and the Origin of Batman can be made to fit, into the Journey of the Hero. We see Spider-Man before he was a crime fighter, we see the point of crisis which made him decide to become a crime fighter, and then we see him actually fighting some crime. If there was a scene in which he decided that he was finished with crime fighting, we would have the perfect circular narrative. That is why the Spider-Man franchise ended, which is to says started all over again, after only three movies. Spider-Man becomes a crime fighter is a Story. Spider-Man fights some crime is not a story. (The latest Batman series had to be presented as a limited three part trilogy, with instalments that were very nearly called Batman Begins, Batman in the Middle and Batman Ends.) There were, depending on how you count them, twelve Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. They never "rebooted". Even when Johnny Wiessmuller got too old to swing around the jungle in his knickers, they just wheeled on a younger man whose name escapes me and everyone else and carried on as before. They didn't feel any need to perpetually revisit the shipwreck and that landed little Lord Greystoke in the jungle. A fresh adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs book is on the cards, but a new series is unthinkable. Modern audiences would claim not to understand it. "We don't care about these sinister Nazi ivory hunters who are trying to rob the pretty lady of her inheritance" they would say "We want to know why there is a white man living in the jungle, how he learned to talk to the animals, if he will ever leave, and what it says about the human condition." [****]

But I think it is most likely that when the ordinary viewer complains that he doesn't understand "Name of the Doctor", he is making the same complaint that I am making when I talk about "magical realist" construction. 

Why can some of the Doctor's friends sniff a magic candle and meet up in a dream world; and if they can do this, why have they never mentioned it before? There isn't an answer, of course, any more than there is a physiological or genetic reason why Peter Pan never grows up. I don't think that the ordinary viewer can accept this. I think that the question occurs to him, and he assumes that there must be answer, but that the writer is withholding it from them for some reason. That's what a question without an answer usually means, isn't it? That someone is hiding something from you? 

"Why don't Mummy and Daddy love each other any more?"

"Why does God allow suffering?"

"Why was it necessary to invade Iraq?"  

Hush child. Just because.


"After all, you were with him from the beginning"
"From before the beginning, young fellow. And now, it's after the end."

Citizen Kane



"Just because" is used far too much in New Who, and far, far too much in "The Name of the Doctor". But, compared with the narrative-free "Hide" and "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", "Name of the Doctor" is actually relatively easy to "understand". As a public service, I shall therefore spend a few moments explicating it: 

The Doctor's Enemy knows that the means to destroy the Doctor is hidden in his tomb. 

The Doctor knows this too, but also knows that his own tomb is the one place he must never go.

Why? Well, if the Doctor could keep meeting up with himself then Doctor Who would get very complicated and very silly, so there is a rule that says that the Doctor can never meet himself, except in special anniversary stories. "Crossing my own time line" is a rather more sciencey way of saying "being in two places at once". We've all spent 50 years convincing ourselves that "being in two places at one is taboo" so it makes a kind of sense to say that "being at the place of my own death" is super dooper taboo. 

The Doctor's Enemy kidnaps the Doctor's friends and takes them to the place he mustn't go, so of course he goes there. 

It turns out that the Doctor's tomb is the TARDIS itself, grown to massive size.

Why? Well, the TARDIS has always been the biggest "just because" in the whole programme. 

"Why is it bigger on the inside than the outside." 
"Because it's dimensionally transcendental."
"What does dimensionally transcendental mean?" 
"It means it's bigger on the inside that the outside."

Inside the dream-world, it makes perfect sense that when the TARDIS dies, the magic should leak out and make it bigger on the outside as well. 

It turns out that it -- the tomb, the TARDIS -- can only be opened when someone says the Doctor's name.

Why? Up to now the Doctor has always opened the TARDIS with a yale key, or a strange alien key, or occasionally with a snap of the fingers or a magic ring. Just as the series increasingly fetishizes the Doctor himself, so it is starting to fetishize his name. It isn't just a thing which we don't know, or even a thing that we can't know. It's a thing which no-one knows, the biggest secret in the Universe. When Ace asked the Doctor "who are you" she was presumably asking what is identity was, what is role was in the universe, expecting an answer like "Omega", "The Other", or "Time's Champion". But it isn't the Doctor's identity which we are supposed to be worrying about. The name itself has become a Word of Power. Granted that, it makes dream-sense for it to be the magic word that opens the TARDIS.

Now it gets complicated. Several seasons ago the Doctor met a lady called River Bloody Song, who knew his true name, almost definitely. From this, we were supposed to infer that she was his wife, even more almost definitely. He didn't know her at all: they would meet in his future, but her past. (There is a book called The Time Traveller's Wife, which I have never read.) She apparently died, but the Doctor kept a sort of a copy of her in the computer in the Biggest Library in the Universe. He has met her several more times since then, always in the wrong order, and at the end of the last season, he married her, sort of. She also turns out to be the daughter of one of his companions, but that's not important right now, probably. She is one of the friends who is summonsed to the dream world, and it's the version of her from the after-life in the library computer which has arrived at the Doctor's tomb. At first it seems that only Clara can see her (Why? Because they are "telepathically linked".) Then it turns out that the Doctor can see her as well. (Why? This is a classic example of what I'm calling "magical realism". The Doctor says that "you are always here to me...I can always see you" which is, of course, the sort of thing which lovers say to each other, but it's only true in a manner of speaking. But in the dream world which is Doctor Who "you are always here because I am always thinking of you" becomes literally true..)

In order to save everyone's life, River Bloody Song says that Doctor's name and opens up the TARDIS. However, the Doctor's body is not in the tomb: instead we find a wiggly line representing all his journeys through time and space. But at some level this line actually is the journey itself, or the Doctor himself ("my own personal time tunnel"). So the Doctor's Enemy can physically jump into the line and appear in every place the Doctor has ever been, and either tempt him to do bad things or just interfere so he loses. This changes history (again) so the Doctor never existed (again) and the universe starts changing (again) — planets he would have saved blink out of existence, the good Sontaran turns back into a bad Sontaran, and so on. (Which is, being interpreted "Look after the universe for me, I've put a lot of work into it"; and in another place, it is written "Maybe the universe itself can't bare to be without the Doctor.")

But Clara realizes that she can save the day by throwing herself into the timey wimey line as well, so she will also appear at every place the Doctor has ever been, but to help him, not harm him. Copies of her appear all through history: the original is destroyed. It isn't exactly clear if she counteracts the bad things the Doctor's enemy did and returns things to the status quo, or whether she retrospectively changes things for the better.

So, Clara gives her life to save the Doctor and becomes a sort of a godlike being, the lynchpin of history, in the same way that Rose and Donna and sort of Amy did. (Never mention Martha Jones, who only became the most important person on earth, and an alternate earth, at that.) However, she isn't really dead as long as we remember her, so the Doctor steps into his own Timeline (whatever that means) and uses the magic leaf to stop her from dying (whatever that means.) The timeline now appears as a sort of wibbly wobbly dimension, populated by force-ghosts of all the Doctor's previous selves. Through the magic of TV we see Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Davison, Colin Baker's clothes, a little bit of Eccleston, lots of Tennant, but no McGann. Then we see another person who Amy Clara doesn't recognize. The Doctor says that his name isn't important, because the Doctor is the name he chose, but this is a version of himself who disgraced that name -- the Doctors worst secret. We are left knowing that there is a twelfth version of the Doctor who will someday do a bad thing, but not when or what or why.

This is a cliffhanger, like "Who killed Laura Palmer" or "Will Dick Barton arrive in time to save Jock and Snowy from the bomb."

I honestly don’t see why anyone would find any of that hard to understand. 


Clyde: "Can you change color or are you always white?
The Doctor: "No
Clyde: "And is there a limit? How many times can you change?
The Doctor: "Five hundred and seven"
Clyde: "Oh."


The Sarah-Jane Adventures


Who is the Bad Doctor?

I see three options.

1: He is the 12th Doctor -- Smith's potential replacement.

At some point after he regenerates, the Doctor will do a Terbil Thing. We have been warned many times that the Doctor is only a slither away from turning into his enemy: well, it's finally going to happen. This could provide a recurrent bad guy to replace the Master. More likely, it could provide a running theme for season 8 (particular if Smith expects to have had enough by 2015) — the Eleventh Doctor trying to avoid taking the steps which turned him into the Twelfth. The Evil Twelfth Doctor will not be specifically identified with the Valyard, because only Doctor Who fans remember Trial of a Time Lord, and they think it was shit. On the other hand, and I realize that tenses are vague when you travel in time, the Doctor seemed to be talking about the Terbil Thing as something which he Has Done, not something which he Will Do.

2: He is the 8.5th Doctor — the one in between McGann and Eccleston.

We never saw the regeneration, after all, and we already know that the Doctor did Terbil, Terbil Things during the Time War. The trouble is, we know what he did -- he ended the war by destroying the Daleks and the Time Lords all at once. And although he regrets having dones this, it isn't a secret: he told Rose and Martha (at least) what he did, and and even boasted about it in "The Doctor's Wife."  I can't believe that the Big Secret That The Doctor Will Take To His Grave And It Is Discovered is something we already know.

3: He is the 0th Doctor: the person the Doctor was before we met him in 1963.

In which case the  Terbil Terbil thing he did was done on Gallifrey, and very possibly it was the reason that he ran away to start with. (His explanation "because I was bored" has always lacked a certain...gravitas.) Hints were dropped in the last days of Old Who that the Doctor had a dark secret related to the dark times and ages of chaos on Gallifrey, and indeed from the Baker era onwards the whole point of the Time Lords was that they had closets full of skeletons. I don't know how a Minus Oneth Doctor can be made to fit in with all the other things we have pieced together over the years about his pre-TARDIS life — his mysterious Mentor, his relationship with the Master, his not especially stellar academic career — and with the fact that the Time Lords themselves have referred to "Hartnell" as "the First". I imagine that the answer will be "by cheating". 





"Good. One more thing. Your name."
"What about my name?"
"It's too long. By the time I've called 'Look out...what's your name?'" 
"Romanadvoratnelundar."
"By the time I've called that out, you could be dead. I'll call you Romana." 
"I don't like Romana." 
"It's either Romana or Fred." 
"All right, call me Fred." 
"Good. Come on, Romana."

The Ribos Operation




What would have happened if Doctor Who had not been cancelled in 1989?

Well, it would have been cancelled in 1990 or 1991. 1993 would have been the best time to cancel it, on the 30th anniversary. But if, somehow, it had limped on, as fixed a point on the BBC schedules as The Archers and Blue Peter and very little else, you can be pretty sure that Season 49 would have been as unlike Season 26 as Season 26 was unlike season 2. If Doctor Who had not been cancelled, it is quite likely that we Very Old Fans might be sitting around lamenting those almost forgotten days when the TARDIS was still shaped like a Police Box, and smiling at the young whipper snappers who assume that the Doctor had always been a lady.

I suppose those changes would have been incremental; I suppose that successive producers would have put their stamp on the show, one deciding that it was too scary and the next deciding that it was too silly. We would have been unable to pin-point the moment when it stopped being as good as it used to be. It would -- like Superman or Bond or Catholicism -- have carried on being a process, a tradition, a tree which gives out new shoots from time to time. But the seventeen off-air years gave it a chance to freeze and harden in everybody's memory, to become something more than a television programme. It's a holy icon; the lovingly embalmed body of the Dear Leader. You can genuflect to it; you can get whip up a cheap sensation by desecrating it; but you can't bring it back to life. 

People will pay good money to hear good musicians doing good recreations of Beatles songs. If the musicians look and dress like the Beatles, so much the better. I think that being a tribute act is probably an honourable trade. But it doesn't leave much space for artistic development. I suppose that some clever musicians could try to imagine what John Lennon and George Harrison would look like if they were alive today, and dress like that; try to imagine what a group of elderly Beatles might have sounded like if the were headlining Glastonbury 2013; try to write a pastiche of what the Lennon and McCartney partnership might come up with it if it came back together. It might be an interesting thing to do. It might produce some clever tunes, or an interesting contribution to Beatles scholarship. But it obviously wouldn't be the same thing as a Beatles reunion. It is impossible to step into the same river twice. 

What is Doctor Who like

It isn't a programme in it's own right. It isn't a continuation of Old Who. It isn't a conjecture about what Doctor Who would have been like if it had never been cancelled. It isn't a critical comment on the old show. It isn't even a tribute act. 

What, in the end, is it? 

And why is it so very full of questions which cannot be answered?


[*] Where the dots are Dead Planet and Genesis of the Daleks and the lines are War of the Daleks and Legacy of the Daleks, obviously.

[**] It may very well go somewhere in the anniversary special, of course, and it may even go somewhere as interesting as some of the constructs which fans are building up in their heads. More likely, it will be a huge let down, like that-was-most-definitely-the-Doctor-and-he-is-most-definitlely-dead

[***] I have no idea if this is how soap opera are actually written. It is certainly how Harry Potter is written, and I think it is how Dan Brown writes.

[****] Did I mention Solomon Kane? Good movie, actually, based on a set of Bob Howard pulps that are rather better than Conan, probably because Kane was never as popular as Conan so Howard never had a chance to get bored with him. Like Conan, Kane is something of an existentialist, always look for the heroic acte gratuit, always in media res, always referring to previous, unseen adventures. Where Conan loves fighting for its own sake and is a mercenary, Kane is a Boy Scout, always in the middle of saving a lady he hardly knows from pirates or dusky skinned natives or devil worshippers or indeed dusky skinned devil worshipping pirates. We don't know why; we don't know how he comes to be a Puritan holy man and a magician, but when he claims to have helped Francis Drake sink the Armada and been at Flores in the Azores with  Sir Richard Grenville we are inclined to believe him. (There is a poem in which he quits adventuring and goes home to Devon.) The unique selling point of the character is his mysteriousness. The movie concluded that cinema audience would not understand a character who did not have a motivation or an origin, and gave him one. The whole film was his origin. He only turns into Robert E Howard's Kane in the final frame. Nice movie, actually, if what you felt the world most needed was Pirates of the Caribbean with sex and demons in it. I believe there is an American TV series about what Sinbad was doing before he became a sailor. 

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Spoilers!

1: pretty good
2: does the magical realist metaphor thing to a silly extent .... What does inside my time stream even mean....and the leaf.....
3: Does it strike you that  Moff imagined this as the anniversary special, and all the little cameos of past Doctors were planned as actual guest appearances?
4: DoctorWhoBuddy says " I can't remember the last time there was an episode with that much talking in it"
5: Really liked the idea of the Doctor's grave
6: Atmosphere of whole story very fine, actually.
7: Expected the mysterious man at the end to be The Great Intelligence who has after all been the Doctor twice, nearly
8: Actual ending genuinely surprising  although arguably more structurally surprising than anything  in the sense that it is not the way Who stories generally end.
9: In a sense it was one of those fan endings -- it isn't immediately clear what follows from it.
10: Are we supposed to think that Matt Smith is going, or are we actually getting the pay off on five years of hints about the Dark Doctor and setting up mysterious man at the end as a new ongoing baddy.
11: Congratulations on keeping it secret.
 12: All told, pretty good.

Nightmare in Silver [7.12]


Obviously, to say that a story scores 100% on the Ril/Moff scale is not saying a great deal. It's only saying that what we have just watched was a competently assembled piece of drama in which I could suspend disbelief from beginning to end. "Okay, you have just told me a story: now we can talk about whether or not it was a story worth hearing."



That said I am awarding Nightmare in Silver, charitably, a perfect score of 100%. I say charitably because, if I were feeling uncharitable I would say that the two kids were such caricatures of knowing drama school brats that one could hardly take seriously a single scene they were in.

Neil Gaiman's last outing felt very much like a Neil Gaiman story into which Doctor Who had accidentally materialized. Nothing wrong with that: we have established that  Gaiman is the Second Greatest Living Writer. But I was more interested in finding out what  a Doctor Who story written by Neil Gaiman would be like and that is what this piece essentialily was. It had a lot of recognisable Gaiman themes -- fairgrounds, whimsy, victoriana, grotesques, silly costumes -- a sort of gypsy steampunk vibe. But it was recognisably a Doctor Who story in which the Cybermen get defrosted, try to take over the universe, and get defeated.

I am not sure why it is was set in a themepark, but I can't think of any particular reason why it shouldn't have been. I am pleased that the parallell worlds theory has been abandonned and we just kind of accept that there are Cybermen and they are baddies. I liked the fact that, given that this was the best theme park in the universe and the Doctor is (as has been established) somewhere between Father Christmas and WIlly Wonker, he would naturally have a golden ticket, and therefore forgot that "gold" is one of the things Cybermen are vulnerable to. I thought the idea of the Doctor playing chess against himself was clever and funny, although it went on for rather too long. Warwick Davis is always good value, and no, I didn't see that coming, although probably I should have done. 

So. To keep old Doctor Who fans happy -- to keep this old Doctor Who fan happy, at any rate -- you don't need to do a pastiche of Old Who. (I expect Neil Gaiman could have written a pastiche of Old Who if he had wanted to, and I expect that might have been fun.) There were a few odd references to the Old Days: Cybermen waking up from their tombs, and a million cyberboots stomping across the landscape -- but arguably those have stopped being references to old stories and are now just part of the vocabulary from which cyberstories are constructed. All you have to do to keep an old Doctor Who fan happy is to drop the soap opera and the post-modern bullshit and the foisted-on story arc and just tell us a bloody story.

100%, Neil. You have Made. Good. Art.

*

Which leaves us with the extended prologue for next week. Clara and the Doctor do a monologue to camera, in which they both say that they didn't know very much about the other before the season finale, but then they found out, and were quite surprised. (Rather well done.)

It doesn't tell us the answers, but it drops some pretty broad hints about the ball park in which the answers will be found. Clara is not mysterious merely because she keeps dying and coming back: she is mysterious because she is exactly the sort of companion that the Doctor wants and needs. Since Wonderful-Rose, every companion has been exactly the kind of companion the Doctor most needs; but granted that what the Doctor wants is a facility with wisecracks and that quality which, if possessed byba female, is always called "fiestyness" -- a sort of heroic joy -- I'm happy to accept that Rose was special and Donna was special and Amy was special and Clara is a special replacement for Amy that he acquired "on the rebound." So, fairly clearly, it is going to turn out that Clara, being The Perfect Companion, is actually part of a trap that someone has set for him. Not a person at all, but a Plot Device disguised as a person, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Sister. It is also pretty clear that Clara's Thing is related to the TARDIS because we keep being told that Clara and the TARDIS don't get on; and I think it will be something to do with the kids, because I can't see any reason for their being in the One With The Cybermen except as a set-up for the metaplot.

As to the Doctors thing, we ae being led down a fairly tranparent garden path. The title of tomorrow's story is The Name of the Doctor and Moffat has repeatedly said that the story will reveal the Doctors greatest secret. What he has pointedly not said is that the Doctor's greatest secret is his name. The expression "Doctor who?" has been very heavily lampshaded all through this "season": the One With The Daleks ended with Him jumping up and down in the TARDIS saying "Doctor who?" over and over again, and when Wonderful Clara asks his name, he says "I love hearing her say that." At the end of last season, the Doctor removed all references to himself from history. That idea has not really been followed up on on. I liked the Cyberplanner's remark that he was still visible in the universe by the shape of the gap.

So. Predictions.

The Doctor's name used to be reasonably well known. When he turned up on planets and said "I'm Doctor Fooblenurdle" people said "Fooblenurdle -- not Fooblenurdle who has a Terrible Secret associated with something he did in before, during or after the Time War?" "Yes, that Fooblenurdle" replies the Doctor. When he removed himself from history, he also removed all knowledge of his name. As part of the season finale, we will learn what the terrible thing he did before, during or after the Time War was (which will, of course, have another even deeper and darker secret hidden inside it); but it will turn out that his name is literally unknowable. This is why he likes it when people ask him what he is called: it reminds him that he's covered his tracks successfully.

Clara is a construct, created by the TARDIS, based on the Doctor's memory of souffle girl, in order to prevent him going to the only place in the entire universe and world where his most deepest and darkest secret can be revealed. That's why she can't die: the TARDIS keeps rebooting her and reinserting her history at a different point.

Also: River Song is Amy Pond's daughter.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Dinosaurs on Spaceship

When we met Amy, she was a little girl writing a letter to Santa. Well, not so much writing, as praying: a sort of farewell to the RTD era which had embarrassingly re-branded the Doctor as a Jesus figure. 

Of course, the Doctor turns up in answer to her prayer: her imaginary friend, the Raggedy Man of her dream. This becomes one of the new new show's running themes. Last Christmas, the Doctor was a gift-bringer somewhere between Santa Claus and Willy Wonka; this year he was a sort of male-Mary Poppins, living on a cloud. It's an established part of the mythos that if children wish hard enough for the Doctor, he will sometimes hear them. 

The Doctor as Santa Claus. Hold onto that concept, as we turn to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship the episode when new new new Who finally figures out what it was supposed to be about, and then hopelessly buggers it up. 

When the Doctor arrives on the space ship, we see him running across the floor and then skidding to a halt. 

Later on in the same episode, we see the Triceratops do the same thing. Run; stop suddenly; skid to a halt. 

When the Doctor hitches a ride on the back of the dinosaur he cries out "I am riding a dinosaur!" 

Later, when Rory and Ron Weasaley's Dad are, as a result of a perfunctory plot device, left flying a space ship, Mr Weasley cries out "we're flying a spaceship!" and "this is better than golf!". 

Indeed, when the spiky dinosaur shows up in the pre-cred, the Doctor cries out the name of the episode, with evident delight. 

And when The Great White Hunter is making his dramatic last stand, he announces that he's never been happier. 

(Last week, when Amy found herself in incredible danger from the most evil creatures ever invented, she exclaimed "Is it bad that I've really missed this?") 

Summary: everyone is having fun, and everyone knows that they are having fun. 

Now: even when you were a little kid, you probably knew perfectly well that real war was no fun at all, without pompous grown-ups telling you. The difference between playing "war" and having a war is obvious to everyone, except Miss Walker and certain Guardian columnists. I am quite sure that there were lots of kids in January 1964 having a great time "playing" Daleks; but you could hardly imagine Ian or Barbara saying "whoopee! This is fun!" as something scary chased them down a corridor. It was fun for us because it was scary for them, and we knew that it was scary for them because they were treating it as if it was real, not as if it was a game. 

We are asked to pretend that you can make a triceratops go where you want it to go by throwing a golf ball: the big lizard smells the grass on the ball and chases it. This is there primarily so they can do the "What have you got in my pocket?" "My balls" joke, which isn't funny. The second time they try the stunt (though not the joke) the dinosaur catches up with the ball, picks it up, and drops it at their feet. 

Now, I don't know much about the behaviour of triceratops, but I am pretty sure that that's not what a rhino or an elephant would do. Or a crocodile. We've forgotten for a moment why the big green chap was chasing the ball, and made him into a puppy chasing a stick. Because it's fun. Because we're only playing. 

What is John Riddell doing in the story? He's a contrast with Queen Nefatiti, I suppose: there is a certain amount of mileage to be got out of Classically Chauvinistic Male and Powerful Historical Female. And Moffat wants to give us the impression that the Doctor has a life apart from the little slice that Amy sees -- other companions that we've never heard of. A lady from ancient Egypt and a man from the Olden Days are too cool, off-the-wall semi-companions for him to have. But I rather fear that the main reason he is there is that someone start brainstorming "dinosaurs" and immediately came up with "wassisname, Muldoon, from the good Jurassic Park film."

Which is not a bad reason, actually, providing what you doing is playing at dinosaurs. 

So a playful version of Who, a cartoon Who, a bunch of adults where are quite clearly kids having a great time, being delighted by each new danger. And it really is playful and fun: like a child excitedly making up stories about his favourite characters, not like a geek joylessly putting the Jurassic Park Action Figure next to the Queen of Egypt Action Figure. The whole of the Third Doctor's era was a game, after all: the relationship between Roger and Jon makes no sense if you believe for one moment that the Master really was a psychotic mass murdering villain next to whom Hitler was basically just a bit naughty. Sword fight in a castle? Leaving the pretty lady in a death trap? They are playing at goodies and baddies, and loving every minute of it. 

And that's the problem. If you are playing at Doctor Who, you have to do it playfully. You can't drop a serious villain who had done something seriously villainous into the middle of it. You can't make him pathetic and evil at the same time. You can't make cold blooded genocide the subject of a game. 

Was there really no better way to manoeuvre the Doctor into a spiffing yarn with cartoon dinosaurs than wiping out the Silurians? We are meant to like the Silurians. The idea that they've hung around in caves for a zillion years, been nuked by the Brigadier, only to get casually wiped out by a travelling junk-dealer seems unfair. And don't say "life isn't fair": we don't want to learn harsh life lessons during a game of dinosaurs, thank you very much. The Doctor treats the whole thing oddly lightly; when he's setting up the McGuffin in which Rory and Brian fly the spaceship home, he makes a weak joke about monkeys and then laments that he didn't have a Silurian as an audience. That makes him seem callous. Under the circumstances, that's like sliding straight from the liberation of Auschwitz to the one about the the comedy Nazi and Jewish mother-in-law. 

Some people had a problem with the Doc killing the baddie at the end. That didn't worry me so much. Haven't the people who said it was out of character spotted that acting out of character is part of the Doctor's character? The question of whether the Doctor does or does not show mercy to his enemies, and the question of whether that does or doesn't make him a bad guy himself has been the main thing the show is about since Boom Town at least. Next weeks episode is called "A Town Called Mercy", for fred's sake. In the same way that Amy and Rory are endlessly trapped in the moment of falling out of love / falling in love and Amy is trapped in the moment staying with the Doctor / leaving the Doctor, the Doctor, this Doctor is trapped in the moment of becoming the dark Doctor / stepping back from brink. But it sits badly in a story in which people run around and banter with the comedy Dads while admittedly having a great time. 

Which is a shame, because it seems to me that "Doctor Who is a silly, crazy romp in which you get away with things you could never get away with in any other kind of drama" is a refreshing, fun model of what the series could be. If we can't have Moorcockian insanity like Let's Kill Hitler and The Marriage of River Song every week (and I think it would get tiring if we did) then at least let's have this kind of mad silliness. 

So. Fun romp. People playing at Doctor Who. Clash of registers between the silly and the serious. What does that have to do with dinosaurs skidding to a halt, or, indeed, Santa Claus?

Well, obviously, people are shown running like that because that's how people run in cartoons, and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is "coded" as a cartoon, in the same way that Asylum of the Daleks was "coded" as being frightening. Once the Doctor has gathered the pulp fiction characters and various Amy's and Rory's into the TARDIS, he remarks, and I do not quote: "I have a gang now. Gangs are cool." 

A gang? 

Well, we know that since 2003, Doctor Who has been modelling itself on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, without ever managing to be quite as good. Buffy was always about a group of friends, and the changing cast of gay witches, mortal demons, reformed vampires and teen werewolves which made up the supporting cast was occasionally referred to as "the Scooby gang." And of course, the non-existent companion Emma famous told the non-existent Twelfth Incarnation of the Doctor "You can't die.....You're like Father Christmas! The Wizard of Oz! Scooby Doo!" 

"Like Father Christmas and Scooby Doo."

Father Christmas.

And Scooby Doo.

We knew that Curse of Fatal Death was Moffat's personal love letter to the show and letter of application to the BBC. But we probably never realized how literally he was going to end up taking it.

Asylum of the Daleks 7.1 (cont)


Terrence Dicks used to say that the point of a Dalek was that it was pure evil with no redeeming features, but that you wished you could be a Dalek and exterminate bully or teacher or policeman or whoever was being rotten to you that week. Yeah. But that's just as true of the Cyberpeople and the Icepeople and every other damn creature ever to appear on Doctor Who and there wasn't Icewarriormania in the 1960s and there was arguably Dalekmania, which was a bit like Beatlemania. I don't remember that, but I do remember Womblemania. Then we decided we'd had enough manias. 

The point of the Daleks is that the actual physical nuts and bolts look and feel of the design is incredibly cool. I don't know why "thing which glides", "thing which has no legs", "thing with hidden wheels" is such a great idea, particularly. But when the Daleks are being well operated, gliding around in formation in Planet of the Daleks or the bits that are left of Masterplan, it never fails to make me smile. 


R.I.P, Ray Cusick. The nicest, most modest, most deserving Gold Blue Peter Badge Winner I ever saw from some distance on a panel at the National Film Theatre. 

If I told you that there was an axe murderer in the next room and you believed me, you would be scared. If I told you that there was a ghost in the next room and you believed me, you would also be scared. You would be scared of the axe murderer because he might kill you; but you would be afraid of the ghost just because he was a ghost. 

I suppose that most of who hid behind the sofa during Doctor Who were experiencing the second kind of fear. We were afraid of the idea of monsters -- strange weird funny looking things. We weren't following closely enough to know that what was actually frightening about them was that they are a metaphor for anti-Semitism or that they were going to put a neutron bomb in earth's magnetic crust. 

Sofas generally have their backs to the wall. It is more or less impossible to hide behind them.

But there is probably not much point in talking about why, or if, the Daleks are scary. Fifty years of pop cultural history says that these rather old fashioned outer space robot people are the most evil creatures ever invented. 

Nothing wrong with a baddie who is pretty much just a symbol for evil. That's what we have baddies for. 

Evil. Cool. Metaphorical. 

When we first met them, rather before my time, they were intolerant, inflexible, bigoted people in general, and the Nazis in particular, although they were also pathetic, little school bullies hitting back at the Thals because the Thals hit them first. By the time I arrived, they were a nasty fascist technological empire, which was a metaphor nasty, fascist, technological empires. This week it turns out that they are all about the-evil-that-we-carry-within-us, or part of a discourse about what-it-means-to-be-human and, in particular what-it-means-to-be-the-doctor and what-it-means-to-be-a-human-asking-what-it-means-to-be-the doctor. Which is what Doctor Who is now about, and the only thing it can be about it. And I think that it very nearly almost works. 

Daleks hate; humans love; when humans are turned into Daleks, all the love is taken out of them; which is why we have a lady who likes soufflé who who has been turned into a Dalek, except she still loves, so she hasn't. 

And the Daleks admire the Doctor, because of the purity of his hate for them. Which, of course, was a big, big, clever, clever twist in 2003, when the only-Dalek-in-the-universe turns round and says to the just-turned-out-to-be-the-only-Time-Lord-in-the-Universe "You. Would. Make. A. Good. Dalek." But now it's just one of the things which is taken for granted and has to be re said in every episode. 

I preferred the model in those Big Finish Dalek Empire plays, which argued that the Daleks understand love very well: love is not that much different from hate. It's friendship they find completely impossible to understand.

If you were following the plot, then part of what made the Daleks frightening was the idea that the creature inside the machine was so terrifying and disgusting that you could hardly bare to look at it. The dying Dalek's claw coming out from under the cloak in episode 2 of Dead Planet caused more nightmares than a hundred extras going into negative and falling down. 

Season 1 of New Who gave us a single Dalek that could threaten a big military installation and wipe out a whole city of it escaped, and finished on a pretty convincing Dalekageddon; Season 2 reduced them to silly robots trading camp insults with Cybermen; by the end of Season 3 they were back to their accustomed roles as canon fodder who can't shoot straight and can be picked off by any amateur with a zap gun. I suppose this is part of the process: figures of horror in Dead Planet, mocked in Dalek Invasion of Earth, comic relief in the Chase; evil fascists in Genesis, hopeless slaves of logic who can't go upstairs in Destiny. 

But it is really really odd that Asylum of the Daleks, the nineteenth  story whose stated aim is to make the Daleks scary again, has so little confidence in the creatures that it treats them mostly as figures of fun and offers us completely different things to be scared of. 

The "fear" element comes from a space ship full of undead humans; a sort of combination of the spacesuit zombies from Silence in the Library and the Are You My Mummy zombie from the Empty Child. It's not actually scary, of course but it uses images which are "coded" a frightening. The "fear" element comes from the use of images which are "coded" as frightening. 

Children are told from an early age that ghosts are scary, which means, I think, that they play a game in which when one of their friends puts a sheets over their head they have permission to scream. (I have literally no idea what a sheet-ghost is meant to represent, by the way: a corpse in a burial shroud?) TV shows like Scooby Doo and Rentaghost are based on the idea that ghosts are frightening, but treats them as funny. If they actually thought about what a ghost represented, they might find it sad or upsetting, but they wouldn't necessarily be scared. A lot of people felt that the movie version of Caspar the Friendly Ghost-- in which Caspar is the ghost of a specific boy who has died -- took all the fun out of Caspar. My sister was inexplicably annoyed when I referred to the cartoon that my nephew and niece were enjoying as "Caspar the Dead Baby". 

The one bit which is actually "scary" in the sense of possibly catching us an making us think "that's a nasty idea" is the conceptual, mind control twist: the idea that Amy might be turning into a Dalek without realizing it, the idea that you could be losing your memory and not knowing. This is scary. But that has nothing particularly to do with Daleks. The idea of the Daleks sucking out people's emotions so they become Daleks is not really the Daleks usual schtick. It's much more a Cyberman thing. 

So maybe I'm actually misreading this. Maybe I am assuming that because there is so much talk about Amy and Rory, that the episode is about Amy and Rory. But perhaps it isn't. Perhaps Steven Moffat is one of us, and is really interested in the Daleks because they are scary-cool, and perhaps the object of the exercise is to show us as many Daleks and as many types of Daleks as he possibly can. Perhaps he is putting in the human back story to misdirect grown ups in the expectation that is target audience (eight years olds and geeks) will identify it as mushy stuff and ignore it. 


Fans always ask "Will there be any old monsters". John Nathan-Turner, in the olden days, took this to mean that fans liked the idea of old monsters and started to put lots of old monsters into Doctor Who. If the new race of snarling fibreglass fascist stormtroopers had the label "cybermen" on them, then this was fantastically exciting. Never mind that they had nothing to do with any previous version of the monster. They were Cybermen. The show was Honouring Its Past.


So: can we tune in, sit back, geek out, and love Asylum of the Daleks because there are mad Daleks, emperor Daleks, a whole parliament of Daleks, references to previous Dalek stories and a really, really silly joke about eggs. A thousand Daleks are a thousand time more exciting than one Dalek, yes? No?

Asylum of the Daleks (7.1)

But your anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam
And I wouldn't trade your life for one day of home

I've been watching Merlin. It's often funny and sometimes exciting. 



There was an episode in Season 4 where Morgana Le Baddie stole a magic cup from the druids. The magic cup made her soldiers immortal, as long as it had some of their blood in it. So Merlin had to go and upset the magic cup. There were lots of scenes of knights fighting immortal soldiers, which were quite fun, but everything depended on Merlin. (The fate of a great kingdom rests in the hands of a young boy, apparently.) 

Art is contrivance; this kind of thing is certainly contrived. It's how computer games are written: you want the hero to be rushing through the castle avoiding immortal knights, so you come up with a silly plot device to give him an excuse to do that, as opposed to working out what the baddie might plausibly try to do and then work out what Merlin might plausibly try to do to stop her. 

But throughout the episode, I was thinking: Merlin is trying to spill the blood from Morgana le Baddie's magic cup. I wonder how Merlin is going to get past all those immortal knights and spill the magic cup. 

I get Merlin.

I know what Merlin's for. Saturday tea-time fantasy for kids and big kids. The characters are well drawn enough for me to care. I've even come to terms with the way they say "And I'm like, so, "fie on thee", innit?" At first I pretended it was a way of showing that the young people spoke a mix of Latin and French, or possibly French and Vernacular. Now I think it's just the way speak on Merlin. 

But Doctor Who? I love it to bits, but I increasingly just don't get it. 


The Doctor and Amy are climbing down the rope ladder. 

I catch myself thinking: "Why are they here?" 

I realise I have no idea. I wonder if it matters. I think probably not. 

I think they have beamed down to a planet full of mad Daleks to do something real important. 

And there sure are lots of Daleks. 

And there are little in-jokes for Doctor Who fans. (That's me! They still believe in me!) The doors in the corridors are triangular -- Dalek shaped -- not human shaped. And the surveillance cameras are shaped like Dalek eye-stalks. And the mad Daleks look like all the different Dalek designs there have been right back to the 1960s, which is kind of cool, but also kind of an admission that the recent vacuum cleaner / tellytubby design was a mistake, which is a shame, because I rather liked it. 

I do not know why there is a Dalek parliament when up to now they have always been an Empire. I just watched the footage of the two old special effects guys talking about making the big battle from Evil of the Daleks in 196something (a DVD extra on Revelation of the Daleks.) They refer to the Emperor Daleks as the Dalek Queen. That's about right, isn't? Mad insects? The Red Tellytubby Dalek was said to be the Drone. I suppose if RTD could make them religious fantastics, SM can make them democrats. Evil democrats. Evil fascist democrats. 

What are we doing here? Trying to shut down a force field, I think, because a space ship crashed through and made a big hole in it, so all the mad Daleks could get out and the sane Daleks would like to blow up the whole planet, but they can't because of the force field, which can only be shut down from the inside and Daleks are too scared to shut it down themselves so they kidnap their worst enemy and force him to do it and also his best friends because they know he needs friends and there is a lady who is going to be the next companion who keeps going on about soufflé. 

So, anyway, the Doctor and Amy are on the end of a rope, and it isn't about why they are there or if it makes sense, because Doctor Who is not about scaring kids with scary monsters (the Daleks are not scary) or exciting excitable geeks with cool hardware (the hardware is undeniably cool). All that is just a mechanism to get to the big Soap Opera moment.

Watching Doctor Who because the Daleks are scary-cool? That's crazy talk. 

Thing is, I think I get soap opera. I may not listen to much Archers or any Eastenders, but I think I get what it's for and things I like like Spider-Man and X-Men and Buffy are basically soaps. 

You have a character. And they have very strong, very fixed personalities; and each character has a very strong, very fixed relationship to each other character. And something happens which disrupts the status quo, and everyone worries about it and talks about it a lot and then they come up with a solution which either creates a new status quo or returns us to the original status quo; so there is perpetual change but perpetual staying the same. Bruce is the studious, well-behaved one, but this week, he doesn't hand in his homework and skips school. And it turns out that this is because he has a crush on Sheila who's not so clever and hangs out with the wrong crowd. So there is conflict between Bruce, the tough teacher who wants to kick Bruce out of school, and Bruce, the young teacher who wants to give him another chance. So maybe in the end Sheila, Bruce's sister, goes and talks to Sheila and persuades her that she's no good for Bruce and should break up with him. So the status quo is no re-established except that Bruce is now studious but sad, which makes him vulnerable to Bruce, who wants him to experiment with marijuana. (On Radio 4, that would be six months of story; in Australia, it would all be sorted out before the first advert break.) But it always cycles back to where it started. The characters don't change: if they did it wouldn't be a soap opera it would be a novel. 

Back in Season Five the Doctor whisked Amy away to have wonderful adventures on the night before she was supposed to be marrying Rory. Her whole fictional being is defined by this moment: will she stay with the Doctor forever, or go back and marry Rory. (There was an episode helpfully entitled Amy's Choice to clarify the point.) We know what she will eventually chose -- the rules of the show say she can't stay with the Doc forever; but we know that if she actually makes up her mind, she'd be out of the series. So she has to be permanently frozen in the moment of not making the choice. 

And, as we are going to carry on seeing, the choice between "staying with the Doctor" and "leaving the Doctor" is now what Doctor Who is about and almost the only thing Doctor Who is about. 

In The One With the Cybermats, last season, we discovered that since the Doctor left them on earth, some time had passed. Amy had become a successful model. Rory was still a nurse, but was still happy being a nurse. 

If this were a soap-opera we would have seen how Amy's glamorous lifestyle puts pressure on her relationship with Rory, and we would see this come to a crisis, and there would be a resolution. (Option 1: Rory quits nursing and becomes a model. Option 2: Amy quits modelling and becomes a nurse Option 3: They have a chat and discover that they are both in fact pretty happy with the way things are.) In fact, we skip over the whole soap opera and rejoin the story when Amy and Rory have already split up. The whole edifice of insane Daleks is only there to engineer the big scene when Amy and Rory realise they want to get back together so they can carry on failing to decide whether to stay with the Doctor or have a settled life at home. 

Because that's all they can do: that's all that ever happens to them. Their entire raison d'etre is to be perpetually separating and perpetually realising how much they love each other. They are like Itchy and Scratchy, never dead, but perpetually frozen in an infinite number of variations on the moment of killing each other. 

The Doctor talks about his life being made up of a succession of high points and interesting days -- living outside of time he can skip the boring ones. And this is increasingly SMs philosophy of narrative: straight from point A to point C without any need to pass through point B. We don't see Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall; we don't even see Humpty Dumpty having a great fall. We just see him in an endless state of having just fallen and being put back together again. 

But point B is where everything happens. Point B is what we normally mean by story. 

When Amy notices that the Doctor notices that she and Rory have fallen out, she also notices him straightening his bow tie. Straightening your bow tie is the sort of mannerism any actor might give a bow tie wearing character, like Captain Picard pulling his tunic down in ever scene of Star Trek. First the audience starts to notice it; then the characters start to notice it; then the writers start to notice it; and if you are not careful the whole character becomes Bow Tie Straightening Guy. When Amy tells the Doctor that she and Rory have actually divorced, and the Doctor is sad, she says that it isn't something he can sort out as easily as straightening his bow tie. 

But when it turns out that there are only two oxygen masks between the three of them, Rory says that he loves Amy more than Amy loves him, which causes Amy, who divorced him not an hour and a half ago, to say that in fact she loves him more than he loves her which is WHY she divorced him. She loves him so much that she thinks he'll be happier without her, because (pulled out of thin air) he wants kids and she can't have kids due to (pulled out of thin air) what eye-patch lady did to her last season. So they are both trying to give the other one the only oxygen mask, and it turns out that in fact there are two oxygen masks because the Doctor doesn't need an oxygen mask due his special Time Lords Lungs so the whole silly mess with the divorce is solved. And as Rory goes off and sells his watch to buy Amy some hair and Amy goes off and sells her hair to buy Rory a watch, we get a close up of the Doctor straightening his bow tie; from which we infer: he deliberately gave them the impression that there was only on oxygen mask, in order to force them to admit that they are still in love. He planned the whole thing. He did sort it out. All of which, you have to infer from the tie straightening motion. Which, on a first viewing, I didn't. 

They aren't oxygen masks but special time lordy bracelet thingies to counter act special turn-humans-into-daleks-pixie dust. Oxygen masks will do. 

Is there a good literary critical word for overloading things with symbolism in this way? Over-coding, perhaps, or entanglement? Is this the sort of thing which young people who are used to moving pictures find very intuitive, and us oldies struggle with? Or perhaps it is there to be spotted by people who are nearly as old as Doctor Who, and completely missed by the young people who may be visually literate but only ever half-watch anything, having a blackberry in their eye and an an Ipad in their ear? I'm not saying it isn't terribly, terribly clever. 

Or is it, like, "There never was a tie-straightening scene, Andrew, oh ghohhhd if you want Doctor Who to be like Crime and Punishment go and read Crime and Punishment and stop finding things in a kids cartoon show that are Just. Not. There." 

I do not want Doctor Who to be like Crime and Punishment. I want Doctor Who to be like Merlin. What I would like best of all would be for it to be like Doctor Who.

The Crimson Horror [7:11]


This is going to be a very boring essay.


The Crimson Horror scores a massive 95.42% on the Ril/Moff scale. It follows that I am not going to have anything particularly interesting to say about it. 

Critical analysis tends to kick in when you are thinking "Ooo...look at those people acting / singing / doing special effects very well / quite well / badly". And if the acting, singing and special effects are doing their jobs, then you shouldn't be aware that you are watching Actors, Singers or Special Effects. You should only be aware that you are watching Sherlock Holmes, Brunhilde or Archie the Inventor doing the kind of stuff that they do. This is why it is possible to love something terrible, like Flash Gordon, and hate something excellent, like Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It is also (come to think of it) why so many theatre critics seem to hate plays and so many restaurant critics seem to hate eating out. And why the True Fan sees everything from Star Trek to the Clangers as providing documentary information about "real events" which "really happened".

So, an actual honest review of the Crimson Horror would go something like this:

Woot! Woot! Funny Sontaran. 
Woot! Woot! Scary lady. 
Woot! Woot! Quite good joke about Sat Nav. 

If a Doctor Who fan from 1983 who knew nothing of Paul McGann or Big Finish could be whisked forward and told "This is a piece of TV from 30 years in your future" he would instantly recognise The Crimson Horror as Doctor Who: a mixture of silly comedy and fairly dark horror; with a recognizably crackers super-boffin in a silly costume at the centre of it all. (What a relief that for the last three weeks Matt Smith has been mostly willing to bounce around be clever and brave and out of his depth and mostly avoided going on and on about how the universe is big, so big, so lonely, lonely, I can't tell you how, big, lonely, I'm so, very very sorry)

But equally and more importantly, if it could be contrived that someone from 2013 were completely unaware of there ever having been a programme called Doctor Who but nevertheless turned their TV on at 7PM on last Saturday, I think that they would have had a very good time, and wanted to come back this week for more of the same. (The fact that "more of the same" is the one thing Moffat is congenitally unable to provide can be discussed in a different seminar.)

Whacky action; part Avengers, part Holmes; full of mad sci-fi trappings but not trying at any level to be "science fiction"; excited by the characters and situations, definitely not taking itself seriously but not exactly taking the piss either. Joyful allusions to vaguely Victorian imagery — dark satanic mills; terrible revivalist meetings; the strange factory, part prison, part health farm; the blind daughter;, the monster in the attic, sort of; the people in suspended animation, kept under class covers, like taxidermists displays. All held together by a science fiction premise that's so perfunctory it's practically not there. And at the centre, the absolutely spot-on decision to hire one of the world's most famous actresses to play — there is no other way of saying this — a pantomime dame. 

The thing it resembled most was "Talons of Weng Chiang", and it was absolutely nothing like that. The last two seasons of Who have consistently made me say "This is doing the same kind of thing that the the Moffat / Gatiss 21st century Holmes reboot does so very much better". This episode made me feel "Why would anyone now want to go back to Sherlock, which is exactly the same thing but without lesbian Silurians, pacifist Sontarans and jurassic shrimps?"

Fans notoriously like closure and completeness. They like to feel that it would be theoretically possible to read every episode of Captain America that there has ever been, and that if they did, it would all hang together as one huge epic cycle, even though it isn't and they wouldn't. New Who, when it has it's head screwed on, resists that kind of closure. Vastra first appeared in "A Good Man Goes to War"; but had no real introduction scene -- she was presented in such a way as to imply that we ought to already know who she was. She then appears as if she were a long-established character in the 2012 Christmas special. Although there is some duterocanonical material explaining where she comes from, there is no real point of origin to follow her back to. There never is. We are always in media res. (We always have been, of course. This is why telling us the Doctor's name would be a really. stupid. idea.)

I suppose you could say that the whole idea of a Silurian operating as a detective out of Victorian London, and the whole idea of a Sontaran driving a hansom cab are just as much fan-pleasing references to Doctor Who mythology as a long wander round the TARDIS with quotes from old episodes playing in the background. But it doesn't feel like that; I suppose because the idea of a soldier who has ostensibly become a pacifist but who still thinks of every problem in military terms is intrinsically funny, even if you have never seen Time Warrior. You and I know that the Silurians have appeared many times in the past but the red leech has never been mentioned before; but if the red leech were an old foe and the Silurians a new addition to the the mythos, "The Crimson Horror" would have been pretty much the same story. Fans have no advantage over casual viewers; it's a glorious silly muddle whatever your starting point. References to old stories are the icing on the cake. In fact they are the tiny little silver balls that are sprinkled on at the last minute to make it look pretty. In Journey to the Center of the the TARDIS, they were the whole cake. 

"The Crimson Horror" is clearly the kind of thing that Moffat wants to be doing; this is the kind of thing that Moffat ought to be doing. Fun, bonkers, deconstructed, non-linear narratives in which loads of clever ideas are chucked out at a pace you can't quite keep up with. Dear Mr Moffat, please make Doctor Who like this one and like the one with dinosaurs and maybe even like the one with the cowboys and never ever make one even a little bit like the one with the TARDIS ever ever again.


NOTE: The only thing which keeps the story from scoring a maximum 100% is the epilogue in which Clara's terrible kids realise that she is a time traveller because they have found pictures of her in the olden days on the Marvelous Mechanical Internet and have never heard of cosplay. And they are in it as supporting characters next week. Oh, god.