Doctor Who Season 36

10.1 - The One With the Pool ***
10.2 - The One With the Silly Robots **
10.3 - The One With the Fish ****
10.4 - The Scooby Doo One *
10.5 - The Good One *****
10.6 - The One With the Pope *****
10.7 - The Bad One *
10.8 - The Even Worse One * 
10.9 - The One With the Ice Warriors  ***
10.10 - The One With the Romans ***
10.11 - The One With the Cybermen *****
10.12  - The One With the Cybermen, part 2 *****

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10:12 The Doctor Falls

Oh Steven Moffat.

Oh, Steven Moffat.

You were so nearly there. So nearly there.

I watched The Doctor Falls with my Doctor Who watching head on, I promise. Not with my “I have to make smart remarks about this on the blog” head on. But within ten minutes, the little voice inside my head was saying: "This. This is what New Who was meant to have been like. Always."

It was clear from the beginning that I was watching a piece of television that fundamentally took itself seriously. A bit of television in which the actors were were playing characters and no-one had got around to saying “but you can ham it up if you like because it’s only some shit about robots on a spaceship.” If you were one of those hypothetical people who didn’t know what Doctor Who was, you wouldn’t have definitely known your weren’t watching a new Scandinavian police drama, or Daphne Du Maurier adaptation. Not until the robots came on. It was just TV drama, like any other TV drama, telling a story, as well as it could. 

I spotted no smirk; no “don’t worry kids they are only silly robots” moment. 

The episode was fundamentally interested in Bill’s predicament at having been turned into a cyborg; and the Doctor’s need to do the right thing. If you had Never Watched Doctor Who Before then the horror of the human who has been turned into a robot was absolutely clear from context. And you could tell that the old, wise man had really loved the young woman who had been cyborgized, and was trying to let her down gently. 

But no-one has really never watched Doctor Who before; everyone in the world knows that the Doctor and the Cybermen are old enemies, almost as old as television itself. That's one of the bits of raw material that the story has to work with, just like, I don't know "rich people are moving into the lower class areas of London" is one of the bits of raw material that Eastenders has to work with. Jokes and in-references were there for those of who have watched the old episodes, but they were funny in themselves and not (I suppose) confusing or distracting to people who didn’t get them. When the Doctor shouts "Voga", you can tell that he is (like a soldier) shouting the name of a previous battle against the Cybermen. But I happen to know that it's a reference to Revenge of the Cybermen. That's as it should be. 

The resolution of 50 years of continuity angst about whether Cybermen come from Mondas, or Telos or a parallel earth and why the design keeps changing is genuinely clever. Wherever there are humans, they eventually evolve into Cybermen; parallel evolution. 

Of course, there is a problem with treating the Master as a serious character in a serious drama. Fairly obviously, he isn't. We first met him in the days of Adam West and John Steed. The Radio Times explicitly presented him as a comic book villain. Depth is one thing he can't ever have. He believes in a cruel God who made him in his own image: evil for the sake of being evil. John Simm plays it with camp self knowledge but never descends into camp absurdity. (The ludicrousness of Last of the Time Lords is entirely avoided.) I suppose, in a sense, he and Missy are the “comic relief”, the boo-hiss pantomime villain to be set against the existential horror of the Cybermen. But you can really feel the evil. The Evil Capitalist in the One With the Fish says that the Doctor’s speeches would inspire anyone with a shred of human decency. Here, the Doctor makes a genuinely inspirational speech and the Master casually says that he wasn’t listening. It’s the kind of moment where you actually want to punch him. 

I am not sure whether the handling of Bill’s transformation was very brave or very cowardly: I would like to have had more scenes embracing the absurdity of Bill’s lines coming from the Cybermouth. I suppose this was the whole reason that the Hartnell-era Cybermen were brought back: because we can believe that there is some of Bill left under the gauze mask better than we could believe there was some of Bill left under the silver CGI cyber-helmet. The conceit that we see BIll as herself, while everyone else sees her as a Cyberman is not entirely original. I kpet thinking of that episode of Frasier where the attractive young gym teacher he is dating turns into the abusive coach from his childhood. But it works. And it assumes that the audience is intelligent enough to discern what is going on.

Most of us probably thought that Missy had not reformed, but was pretending to be good to fool the Doctor. A few of us may have thought that she had genuinely stopped being evil, and that she was going to be the Doctor's friend or companion for a few seasons — at least until some future producer comes up with “What if Missy turned evil?” as an idea. The actual resolution — Missy kills her previous incarnation, to ensure that she comes into being, but he kills her, because she really has turned good — was not one I had predicted. Comic books have mostly stopped pretending that a this months story is the definitive, final, one-lives-one-dies confrontation between Batman and the Joker or Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus. Readers know that however thoroughly the villain is killed, a few months down the line, the status quo will have to be restored. If Harold Saxon didn’t stay dead after the funeral pyre ending of Last of the Time Lords, she is not going to stay dead after being zapped by her past self. But for the minute I’ll pretend that I believe she's dead and enjoy the elegant finality of the scene. 

The Doctor’s last stand, farewell to Nardole, dozens of exploding Cybermen. I liked absolutely everything about the first fifty three minutes and seven seconds of the episode. 

And then, as exclusively predicted in this channel, someone activates the My Little Pony magic lilac love ray and makes Bill becoming a Cyberman didn’t happen. 

If at the very last moment the Water Nymph had popped up and held Bill’s cyberhand, just for a second, dropping a teeny weeny little hint that Billy Potts body is a rusting in the grave but maybe her soul is going to go dripping on  I wouldn’t have minded. Not that much. But Moffat doesn't know when to stop. He can't leave things alone. Never have one good bye seen if six will do. We had to go through definitely revivified ethereal Bill and a definitely physically present Heather physically moving the Doc back to the TARDIS and floating off round the universe with silly music playing much too loudly in the background and although it only lasted for a few minutes I. Just. Wanted. It. To. Stop. 

The puddle monster absorbed Heather’s physical body; Bill’s physical shape has somehow been extracted from the dead Cyberman and turned into magic lilac pony water — despite that fact that most of her remains have been long-since destroyed. What is the magic puddle meant to have done? (Moffat is a little vague about minds and bodies and hardware and software: we found out in Death and Heaven that it if you upload someone's mind to a computer it becomes possible to retrieve their physical form.) 

I hope that this is the last we see of Bill and that we won’t have to  see her corpse endlessly violated in the way that  Wonderful Clara's was — killed and unkilled on a weekly basis. Clara was never really a character, so it didn’t matter so much, but Bill was enough of a person that I’d like her to be allowed to rest in peace and not be reincarnated as an onion to make us cry over and over again. 

I didn’t properly get the coda about the Doctor. I understood that he was prepared to die to save the Mondasian colonists because it was the right thing to do, but I don’t know where the not wanting to regenerate idea suddenly came from. David Bradley was good enough at doing Hartnell’s lines in the docudrama but I could honestly have missed that fact that the person who shambles on at the end was meant to be the First Doctor. 

Maybe there’s a fabulous idea for a two-Doctor Christmas special with a light touch and witty repartee between the First and Last Doctors, just like there was between the Two Masters. Or maybe Moffat is going to bow out with a terribly ill-judged attempt to overwrite Doctor Who mythology from the ground up. 

“How did you find me?”

“I left you my tears, remember.”

Oh, Steven, Steven, Steven. What were you thinking of?

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A person on the internet says that it is typical of Stephen Moffat’s gender-politics that, quote, “the boy master has to come back to show the girl master how to master properly.”

Corollary #1: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, we all not be able to do any more multi-Doctor stories, because it will imply that the Thirteenth Doctrix needs a man to help her out. 

Corollary #2: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, all subsequent Doctrices will have to be feminine, because a female-to-male regeneration will be a tacit admission that boys are better than girls.

Corollary #3: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, all discussion about Doctor Who will have to be suspended: anyone who thinks that the Doctrix is a bit Peter Davison and not at all Matt Smith will be assumed to be saying that boys are better than girls and episodes will only be criticize-able in terms of what they reveal about the incoming producers gender politics.

The Doctor can change his physical form: this is a natural part of his life cycle. Each form is very different, but all the forms have irreducible characteristics in common. This wasn’t always the case; but it has been an established part of Doctor Who, and of the person-in-the-street’s perception of Doctor Who since at least 1981. In the new version of the show, the present form perceives regenerating as actual death, but all his memories and experiences are preserved in the new form. 

It doesn’t follow that the Doctor can turn into absolutely everything. There are lots of things he couldn’t be. He couldn’t be cruel or cowardly. He couldn’t be stupid. He couldn’t be a man of action who punches first and asks questions later. He couldn’t really be young. Matt Smith was young, but Matt Smith’s Doctor was very, very old. He can be Northern or Scottish and I assume Welsh, but he can’t cease to be British. This is not a matter of canon. There is no logical reason why a Time Lord should adopt a particular planet and then only be able to regenerate into a form which comes from a particular part of that planet. We’re talking about how the TV series works. 

I think that the Doctor is irreducibly a boffin. I think that being a boffin is slightly different from being a geek or a nerd or a techie. It carries an implication of being old; being unfashionable; and being the guy who can cobble together a computer which very nearly works, as opposed to the guy who makes the great scientific breakthrough. (The TARDIS is very much a boffin’s spaceship. It is fantastically advanced, but it seems a bit jerry-rigged and isn’t quite reliable.) 

Doctor Who can definitely evolve: Tom Baker said in 1977 that the Doctor simply can’t become interested in romance because he simply doesn’t have those kinds of emotions. The first time he flirted, with that heart surgeon in the American one, and with that French lady in the second season, we all freaked out. But then we stopped freaking out and it became the new normal. We also freaked out about the Doctor being half Time-Lord on his father’s side, but we ignored that and it went away.

If the Doctor ceased to be a boffin, would that break the show? Or would it interesting shake things up and become the new normal? Would it really cosmically speaking matter is the guy in the TARDIS was cool and stylish and brave but needed someone else to explain the science to him — provided the brave unscientific time traveler fetched up on interesting locations and had exciting adventures there? 

The question is: is “boffin” a male stereotype? And if boffin is a male stereotype, does it follow that the Doctor has to be male. 

It took me a while to come around to to Missy because I thought her characterization was way over the top. I think that what works about her is her ironical, tricksterish, playful evil — owing something to John Simm, but very little to Roger Delgado. This may surprise you, but I thought that the opening scene where she plays with the term “Doctor Who” worked really well. Not (yawn!) because it means there is some canonical grounds for saying that the main character really is called Doctor Who and that Frankenstein really was the name of the monster, but because it showed Missy transgressing the boundaries of the script, understanding the rules of the show and deliberately breaking them, talking about “assistants” and “companions” and understanding that Bill and Nardole are “exposition and comic relief”. She knows she’s in a TV show. And that’s a very interesting way of playing the Doctor’s ultimate foe. 

The point of Missy is not “what would the Master be like if she was a woman”. The point of Missy is that she’s a very interesting piece of utterly over-the-top characterization. I don’t know if her particular style of camp had to be played by a female, but it is now very hard to imagine it being played by anyone apart from Michelle Gomez.

So, my tentative conclusion is that a female Doctor would be a really, really bad idea, but might still be really, really good for the programme, and even if it was really, really bad for the programme it might still be the right thing to do.

It is not true to say that the Time Lords no longer care about gender and gender stereotypes. Tom Baker would have looked very odd indeed in one of Romana’s frocks.

10.11 World Enough and Time

During the wilderness years, the faithful would sometimes sit round their great log fires and wonder what a 21st century version of Doctor Who might look like. 

“Maybe not 25 minute episodes” we said “Maybe short seasons of 100 minute movies, like Inspector Morse.” 

I think this episode proves that we were right. Pacing has been the ruin of many a good story; this story is superior to pretty much everything else in the season because it gets the pacing right. I don’t think Eastern European Guy (”very fast bottom”) would have worked if we had been trying to gallop to the climax in 45 minutes. I don’t think the idea of the different sections of the ship running at different speeds would have nearly so interesting if we hadn’t had to wait around to find out what was going on. And obviously the cliffhanger ending had to be a cliffhanger ending; it would have been a bit ho-hum as a premise. If I had one thing to say to incoming producer Chris Chibnall, it would be “More two part stories.” 

Even that’s a bit retro, of course. We are now in the era of 10 hours boxed sets and binge watching. 

OK, we’ve seen most of it before. Moffat really does only have a very limited number of ideas, which he shakes up and assembles in different orders. The Doctor and his companion caught in different time streams - check; a spaceship comprising different time-zones - check; characters watching other characters on TV screens - check; giant spaceship with retro city in the hold - check; nasty surgeons turning people into [SPOILERS} Cybermen - check; companion turned into Cyberman - check; Cyberman weeping beneath the mask - check. I think we are beyond saying “We have seen some of this before.” It’s more a case of saying “This is what Doctor Who is now comprised of”. Some TV shows go on for decades with only one or two ideas, in fairness. 

I don’t know if a Black Hole would really behave like it does in the episode. I thought that the point of them was that nothing, not even really really really big spaceships — and this was Doctor Who outdoing Red Dwarf outdoing Star Wars outdoing 2001 big — could escape their gravity well? But it doesn’t matter — a Black Hole is allowed to do whatever the writer says it does, provided it carries on doing it consistently. (”For the present purposes, your honour, a Black Hole is that astronomical phenomenon that can trap, but not consume, a really, really, really big spaceship and which causes time to pass at a faster speed on the lower levels than on the bridge.) I will only start to complain if it turns out that the Black Hole’s gravity can be reversed by the power of love, or is caused my midichlorians, or something. 

I do not think that the Cybermen, in this context, were either fanwankery or pornographic. A person who has seen clunky new Who CGI Cyberman will be able to look at this one and immediately say “Ah — an old fashioned, primitive, retro Cyberman.” That the old fashioned, primitive, retro Cyberman happens to be what the Cybermen looked like in 1966 is a little nod of the hat to the fans, and why not. I don’t know how you reconcile the Cybermen who evolved on Mondas and flew the planet around the universe sucking other planets energy with the Cybermen who were created by the Master on a colony ship on its way to Mondas. I don’t particularly care. I expect there will be a sort of an answer next week. If it is a sufficiently good answer then no-one will ever have watch Attack of the Cybermen again. 

It is a pity that the story was spoiled by, well, spoilers. The episode released the information about what was going on on the colony ship and Razor’s true identity rather subtly: we didn’t definitely know that the patients were being turned into Cybermen until the surgeon shows Bill the headpiece, about 35 minutes into the story. This should have been a really good surprise. Unfortunately, the BBC had been circulating publicity pictures of Peter Capaldi facing off against Hartnell era Cybermen since last year. And John Simm had appeared in two different trailers. The appearance of Missy’s previous incarnation is obviously intended to fall like a bolt from the blue and obviously doesn’t. 

The question about how much to reveal in the trailer or the blurb or the Radio Times listing is not unique to Doctor Who. Some people think that it would not have mattered if a certain 90s suspense movie had gone out under the title of “The One In Which Bruce Willis Turns Out To Have Been Dead All Along”; other people objected to “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford” because it gave away the ending. Somewhere in between is a sensible middle ground. I am happy not to trust the mysterious count in a movie called “Guest of the Vampire”; but I’d just as soon not know exactly who committed the “Murder at the Vicarage” until the detective works it out. 

It’s a particular problem for Doctor Who, because Doctor Who is so insistently non linear. We see Missy pretending to be the Doctor, and then we see the Doctor explaining to Bill and Nardole his plan to allow Missy to pretend to be him for a while. We see Bill getting killed, and then we see Bill making the Doctor promise not to get her killed. And the very first thing we see in the episode is the Doctor regenerating which we assume must be flashing forward to the end of the story. So Moffat wants us to watch World Enough and Time in the knowledge that it ends with a Regeneration just as much as Thomas Hardy wants use to read “The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge” with a pretty good idea about who won’t make it to the end of the final chapter. But then we get a post-cred trailer that (we assume) zooms forward to the end of the story, and again shows us the Doctor (apparently) regenerating. But the pre-cred is “part of the story” and the post-cred isn’t. And we’ve already once this season been “shown the Doctor regenerating”, only to have both the characters and the cast saying “Ha ha! We fooled you!” 

This can’t possibly be a proper review, because we only have the first half of the story to talk about. I liked nearly everything about it: the ship, the atmosphere, the pseudo-science, the relationship between Bill and Razor and Missy and everyone, the scenes of the dying city. The whole thing. And if these really are the Cybermen and that really is the Master and Bill really has been Cyberized and the Doctor really is going to regenerate — or if none of these things are true and the explanation is more exciting and brilliant and surprising than the set up — then I’ll call this the best story ever. The best Peter Capaldi story ever, at any rate. 

But if the Doctor turns Bill back into a human with magic love rays from his sonic screwdriver, and if these aren’t the real Cybermen at all but just trick Harold Saxon is playing, or if, perchance, none of this has happened and we’re all still in a simulation being run by the meddling Monks — then I reserve the right to call “foul” and give up watching Doctor Who. 

Until Christmas, at any rate.

*

Prediction: 

Moffat is going to pull another War Doctor stunt. The Doctor is indeed regenerating, but the person he is regenerating into isn’t the person who’ll be in the role in 2018, because that is for the incoming producer to decide. We’ll get a very short lived interim Doctor and the Christmas one will have both her and Capaldi in it. 

But there really will be a magical power of friendship reset button which will make Bill didn’t become a Cyberman at all. Because Moffat loves tears, but he really doesn’t like killing off characters, specially not pretty lady ones.