12: The Return

I: The Sun

have an aversion to combining sweet and savoury flavours and in particular an aversion to combining food from the sea with food from the land

before jesus came and put a stop to it the jews were not allowed to cook a lobster in its mothers milk which is proved by the reference to fish fingers and custard in doctor who roses are redd-ish violets are blu-eish

since babylonian times school children have been given milk puddings as a dessert which they have always hated what is the matter with mary jane shes perfectly well and she hasnt a pain what a shame mary jane had a pain at the party

shakespeare said that tinned fish represented sexuality fools are as like to husbands as pilchards are to herrings the husbands the bigger

if we trouble to learn the secret language of the school-yard we will easily discern that the semolina pilchard straddles the boundary between land and sea fish and cow first course and pudding male and female nice and nasty sensible and silly this is the same as the jungian archetype of the fool which i am almost sure is in the tarot deck somewhere

so when the semolina pilchard tries to ascend the phallic axis of the world we see that true wisdom can only be achieved through the path of stupidity the eiffle tower is in paris paris makes me think of the judgement of paris which is in greek mythology somewhere

also the penguins chant hindu mantras about the dancing child who taught arjun the bhagavad gita so the penguins represents the combination of south with east black with white chocolate with cream biscuit with little coloured bits of silver foil

expert textpert choking smoker don't you see the joker laughs at you

II: The Moon

Campbell begins Hero With a Thousand Faces with a spectacularly inane passage from Freud. When a child asks where the new baby came from, his parents will sometimes say "The stork brought her".  But this isn't, it seems, where babies really come from. "We are telling the truth in symbolic clothing" says Siggy "For we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it."

This, for Freud, is a bit like religion. God doesn't exist, any more than the Stork exists, but babies certainly exist and they certainly come from somewhere. God, like the Stork, "stands for" some truth. But the symbols in practice "distort" and "conceal" whatever truths they once represented. In any case, it's a bad idea to lie to children: better to dispense with the Stork metaphor altogether and tell the little darlings about erections and ejaculation and spermatozoa as soon as they are old enough to ask.

Campbell obviously likes the idea that the story of Mr Stork disguises the facts of reproduction. The purpose of Hero With a Thousand Faces is to "uncover some of the truth disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology" – to get past the Stork of mythology and reveal the messy truth that lies behind it. But he doesn't seem to think that stork-type stories are lies that it would have been better never to have told in the first place; lies which can be thrown away once we are ready for the truth. He rather thinks that we ought to reverently and respectfully study the Stork so that eventually the big secret will reveal itself to us.

But it won't. There is no possible way that any amount of study of the Stork could possibly tell us what really happens in the maternity ward even if we swallow the idea that the Bird represents Mummy's Belly and that dropping the baby down the chimney represents the newborn's passage through the vagina which I assume we don't. Everyone but Freud – including the very small child who originally asked where his sister came from – understands that "The stork brought you" isn't a symbol, or a lie, or a myth or even a euphemism, but a polite refusal to answer the question, a form of words which means "I'm not going to tell you yet", like when you asked Granny how old she was and she replied "As old as my tongue, and a little bit older than my teeth."

The Stork is, in fact, a social construct in which a group of people in a particular society at a particular time agree that the bird will represent childbirth. Watch the opening minutes of Dumbo; look at the behaviour of storks in real life; do an art history analysis of twee Christening cards; compare stork-stories in America with stork-stories in the African basin. You will never discover the Truth about how babies are made. Because it just isn't there.

Your Sunday School teacher probably told you that Jesus preached in parables to enable his audience to understand him. In fact, he specifically said that he preached in parables to prevent his audience from understanding him.

In Mr William Wordsworth's poem Anecdote for Fathers, the narrator repeatedly asks a child why he prefers his new house to his old one. The child, who doesn't know, eventually claims that he likes the new house because it has a weather-cock and the old one didn't. In Mr Jim Henson's television show Sesame Street a character named Big Bird tried to understand why the old storekeeper (who has, in fact, died) will never come back, and is told by one of the adult characters "It has to be this way because."

Weather cocks, storks, giant yellow budgies: clearly large birds always represent unanswerable questions.




continues
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I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)

*

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”

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*

If you write "The flashback in the extended Two Towers was ill-judged because it retrospectively changed Boromir's motivation, making him a less interesting and less admirable character, and contradicting what we've already been told about him", a certain proportion of the Interweb will hear "I morally deny this scene's right to exist because it contradicts the footnote to the unpublished appendix on the use of the dative in middle-Quenya."

Similarly, the magic rhetoric fairy will take the words "I don't think you should criticize things without reading them first" out of your mouth and turn them into "You cannot possibly appreciate Glamourpuss unless you have read and memorized the minute details of all 300 issues of Cerebus."

(I'm Andrew Rilstone, and I used to read to RPG.Net, but I've been clean for over a month.)

So, whatever I am about to say, certain segments of my fanbase will interpret it as meaning "I wish that spaceships still looked as if they'd been made out of old hair-driers and I'm still sore at Jon Pertwee for quitting."

But I think it would be really helpful if before going any further, we all sat quietly for a moment, and said in our hearts some of the things that we really like about Doctor Who.

The redesign of the TARDIS interior.

Destroying the Time Lords.

Powerful, scary Daleks.

Daleks with personalities and dialogue; slightly sympathetic Daleks.

The Time War

Billie Piper.

The Doctor as a darker figure.

The Doctor as a lonely figure.

The Doctor as capable of romance.

Showing the creature inside the Dalek.

Re-imagining the programme as taking place in a real world setting.

Recurrent scenes involving the companions' family.

The Ood.

Billie Piper.

The re-design of the Cybermen.

Use of CGI to do stuff that previously only happened in TV Century 21

Billie Piper.

Use of real world cameos to give impression that big stuff is happening.

The re-design of the Sontarans.

Making companions equal partners with the Doctor.

The idea of the Doctor as a tourist.

Sense of a Doctor Who world – Harriet Jones, UNIT, Torchwood, etc...

45 minute episodes

Dalek

The Satan Pit

The Empty Child

Human Nature

Blink

The Girl in the Fireplace

Father's Day

The title sequence

Does anyone else want to share?

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Fish Custard [Intermezzo]

River Pond Song is Amy's daughter: a River Comes from a Pond.

The Doctor, by meeting Amy, has prevented her marriage to Rory thus prevented River being born.

We know that the Doctor encounters River at a place called "the Pandorica", and that she survives whatever Bad Thing happens there. Presumably River contributes in some way to the Doctor's victory.

So by meeting Amy and preventing River coming into existence, the Doctor has created a paradox which has brought about a space time split fracture crack thingy.

I assume that River is Amy's daughter by Rory: but it is possible that she is Amy's daughter by the Doctor. This would account for River's Time Lordyness. A lot of her flirting could be "grown up daughter" flirting rather than "wife" flirting.

But even if this is right, Amy's wedding day is still the epicentre of the paradox. What breaks time and space is Amy marrying Rory, as opposed to Amy not marrying Rory: the very actions which the Doctor is taking to prevent the paradox are, in fact, creating it.

Could it even be that the Crack is consciously removing the obstacles to the Doctor marrying / sleeping with Amy to bring River into existence and heal the wound in the universe? For example, it might be said to have dragged the TARDIS back in time 14 years in the episode one; and deliberately erased Rory from existence in the one with the Silurians.

I am somewhat afraid that we are going to be told that large lumps of continuity have also disappeared into the Crack; or even that the whole universe will be be sucked into the Crack and that Steven will say that, as of next year, the series is taking place in a new, post-Crack Doctor Who Universe to which the history of the pre-Crack Universe no longer applies. I hope not. It seems to me that if Doctor Who fans have spent 50 years happily believing that six impossible and mutually contradictory things happened in the same "universe" before breakfast; there's no reason to think we need a Big Continuity Clear Our this late in the day. But note that Moffat wanted to refer to Season 5 as "Season 1".

There's no reason that The Crack shouldn't be left lying around for fans to use as a hand wave. "The Romana regeneration doesn't make a lot of sense in the light of what we know about other regenerations, does it?" "Oh well, let's just assume it disappeared into the Crack."

Even before the trailer (and isn't Steven being good at keeping the trailers mostly spoiler free) we could probably tell that "The Pandorica", which is going to open, would be a box of some kind. There was a box in Greek mythology with a similar name. It contained something very horrible, I seem to remember.

Some people would like it to contain something Time Lordy: the Skaro Abominations or the Could Have Been King or something else that was referenced in The End of Time. Rassilon himself, maybe, or the whole of Gallifrey. I would cast my bet against "The Other" or "Omega": these are characters who only fans know about, and significant recurring villains in the new show have to be in the consciousness of the mainstream public. I can't believe that Moffat would be so boring as to make it the Daleks or the Master.

The Box is not the Crack, but opening the Box obviously has to be closely related to whatever caused the Crack. Several villains have implied that the contents of the box is obvious and it's funny that the Doctor doesn't know. The specific phrase "The Doctor in the TARDIS" has come up twice.

So my money is on the Pandorica containing an evil future incarnation of the Doctor. Fans will be able to say "The Valeyard" to their hearts content, but he won't be called that on screen, or only in passing. Seasons 1 – 4 kept on telling us that the Doctor would turn evil one day; and we've had the Toby Jones anti-Doctor to lay the groundwork.

Who will be playing the evil version of the Doctor?

I can't believe that this wouldn't have leaked out, but I do have to point out that in the one in the flat the Doctor becomes Craig's lodger. A person who pays him money to use a section of his property.

That is to say, a tenant. I've been wrong before, of course.

continues....

4:11 "Turn Left"

The dreadful Torchwood keeps telling us that the 21^st Century is when everything changes. But the dreadful Torchwood makes it quite clear that, in fact, nothing changes. Ever. The earth gets invaded by cybermen, demons manifest in the center of Cardiff, and the average citizen just sits in the bar saying "Don't be silly, there's no such thing as aliens look you rugger boyo blonwyn isn't it?" Torchwood even have a magic plot device in the form of a drug called "Ret Con" (ho ho) which ensures that nothing changes. The main character is so immortal that even if you drop a thermonuclear plot device on his head, he'll still bounce back for the next episode. Totally unchanged.

The nice thing about "Turn Left" is that everything really does change. It's a quite convincing snapshot of what it would actually be like to live on an Earth which was invaded by aliens ever other Saturday. It's an everyday story of folk whose world has become a permanent warzone. I'd like to see the series take this direction in non-parallel earth stories. I'd like Donna's mum and Donna's Grandpa to be living in a world that had been scarily changed by all the alien stuff. If there is ever an "adult" version of Doctor Who, I'd like it to take this approach: a darkish, humans' eye view of last weeks rip-roaring space yarn.

It's all bollocks, but that hardly matters. If the Doctor died in "Runaway Bride" then he never went to depression-era New York, and if he never went to depression-era New York, he never defeated the Daleks; and if he never defeated the Daleks, Caan never went back in time; and if Caan never went back in time, Davros was never rescued and there was never a second Dalek empire. Ergo: no, the stars aren't going out.

And I don't think that, even if Buckingham Palace had been struck by a full size replica of the Titanic, England would have relapsed to the 1950s quite so quickly. I mean, why is the office clerk rubber stamping papers rather than using one of those newfangled laptop thingys? And isn't it cute that the refugee is the sort of fellow whose a-mother is a-lika the spaghetti, and not, say, a Pole? Most seriously, the Damn Fine Climax (where every piece of text the Doctor can see changes to "Bad Wolf") which had me punching the air and going "Whoo!" turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with this story or next story or any other story or anything else. It's one more example of R.T.D thinking up a scene and dropping it in whether it belong there or not.

Not knowing, at this point, that parts 12 and 13 are going to be the most gratuitously pointless guest star fest ever exhibited on a public stage, it was terrific fun and actually quite moving to hear, second hand and in passing, that Sarah Jane and Martha and Torchwood had given their lives to save the earth. And the angsty stuff, like Donna's Mum looking at the mushroom cloud and realising that everyone she knows is dead, is nicely done. And Catherine Tate continues to be not nearly as shit as we'd expected. Seeing her development from incredibly annoying Donna to not quite so annoying Donna telescoped down to a single episode was really quite impressive.

Every TV show falls back on some version of It's a Wonderful Life sooner or later. Dallas did it. Holby City did it, for goodness sake. And usually, they did it for some reason. In Star Trek , Captain Picard has always been very ashamed of a reckless decision he made as a young man: but he discovers that if he could go back and correct that mistake, he'd prevent himself from becoming a famous starship captain. In Red Dwarf we're led to believe that Rimmer is a loser because he was kicked out school when he was a kid; but the twist is that it was actually the heroic, alternate-world Rimmer who was expelled: our Rimmer had the good fortune, but still became a failure. Lois and Clerk combined with It's a Wonderful Life with Groundhog Day so we can watch the World WIthout A Superman becomign mroe and more depressing. In Star Trek the point is that we should accept who we are, the bad along with the good. In Red Dwarf the point is that we make our own choices and shouldn't blame out shortcomings on others. In Lois and Clerk the point is to tell a cute little seasonal parable about Hope. In Doctor Who the point is..er...well, I'll get back to you.

But no, really. Nice story.

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And Now I Promise To Shut Up About It At Least Until 2010

Control


Season One
Season Two
Season Three
Season Four
Summary



Appendix: Answers to Readers Questions

A: I agree with you that there exists at least one pre 2005 episode of Doctor Who with something wrong with it. I entirely concur that the plot twist in episode 2 of 'Invasion of the Muppets' was rather contrived, and that the Doctor's companion Jerri sometimes fluffed his lines. I agree that the original series frequently spent 100 minutes telling 75 minute stories, although I must confess that I find this preferable to spending 45 minutes telling 90 minute stories, or spending 90 minutes telling no damn story at all. This would be a scintillating riposte to my critique if I had ever argued that the New Series should be more like the Old Series or that NooWoo is not TrooHoo. I've said repeatedly that I like what RTD has done with the setting; like what he has done with the Doctor and especially like the presence of characters like Jackie, Mickey and Wilfy who would have been inconceivable in Old Who. What I don't like is RTD's pisspoor sense of narrative.

B: No, actually, I do not think that I am over-analysing. Being in possession of a brain, I find it difficult to switch it off. You might think that I would be better off directing it Pride and Prejudice or inventing a cure for Cameron, but you're reading this page, so yar-boo-sucks. If I notice that a male character is carrying a pink handbag, wearing a tutu, and obsessively performing his own special round and round dance, I cannot dissuade my brain from saying "I wonder if they are trying to tell kids that gender non-conformist behaviour is OK?" I do, of course, agree that you have to watch a TV show on it's own level, and can't expect Torchwood to be as sophisticated in its treatment of gender issues as Tellytubbies. That's why I am much more forgiving of "The Sontaran's Slightly Convoluted Stratagem" and "The Daleks Take Manhattan" than some mosquitos. If I'm offered "cliff hangery flying saucery earth invasion stories", then I'm inclined to accept them as such. But I don't quite see the argument that says that its okay to respond to a TV series, but only if you do so in a vague, half-arsed, disengaged way. Indeed, I'm not sure if this is even possible. Is the idea that I should hear the Doctor say "We are near the Sensephere" and by some peculiar Zen process lock down that portion of my mind which notices which 1964 story is being referenced? A bit like Holmes' trick of hearing the news that the earth goes round the sun and deleting it from his memory because it isn't relevant to forensics?

C: I take your point. A purely Marxist critic would indeed say that Doctor Who is precisely the kind of thing which the market would inevitably produce at this time, and that to apply aesthetic judgements to it is a category mistake. If Doctor Who is flawed, the solution isn't intelligent criticism, but the overthrow of capitalism. And a purely capitalist account, such as used by Russell T Davies, would hold that the claim "this is badly written" is entirely refuted by the statement "this got extremely high viewing figures" :"this makes money" is synonymous with "this is good". The point isn't whether or not I regard both points of view as being value-free to the point of being sociopathic, which I do. The point is that if we accepted the equation "To be popular is to be good", then criticism of any kind would be impossible, and none of us would ever say anything at all. It is true that 10.5 million people watched "Journey's End"; but it is equally ture that several million more would have watched two hot chicks having lesbian sex on the sofa. Channel 4 have for a number of years based their entire business model on this insight.

D: Yarvelling
E: Yes, I am aware that there currently exists at least one very good cop show, and I admit that I don't watch cop shows. If I had claimed that "The Unicorn and the Wasp" was the single best piece of drama ever to appear on television, then "Have you seen Blue Remembered Hills" might be a reasonable riposte. But I haven't been comparing Doctor Who either favourably or unfavourably with other TV shows. I've merely been saying I think it would be improved better if it had an actual plot. (My specific point of comparison has been Buffy the Vampire Slayer which RTD has explicitly acknowledged as his model.) Is your claim that if I had watched The Wire I would understand that TV has moved into a post-narrative model?

F: Hamish Wilson

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4:3 "Planet of the Ood"

There is a vicious and unfounded rumour going around that I don't like new Doctor Who. In order to counter this libel, I shall concentrate on what I liked about "Planet of the Ood".

1: It was recognizably a Doctor Who story. The final scene, in which the underdogs who the Doctor has liberated gather round the TARDIS and promise never to forget him veered towards pastiche. (The title of the story felt so retro that I was afraid the story was going to be a parody.)

2: Come to that, it was recognizably a story. It had a beginning, a middle and and end, more or less in that order. It introduced a conflict (slave owners vs oppressed slave caste); set an objective (free the slaves); placed some obstacles in the Doctor's way and more or less resolved everything by the end of the episode. On the way, there was physical conflict (the Doctor chased around the warehouse by the mechanical grabber) and emotional conflict (the tour-guide almost seeing that what she culpable for the slaves' oppression.) There was an element of Mystery: how do the Ood's communication balls work? what's in the warehouse? what doe "The circle must be broken" mean? -- with a pretty satisfactory solution.

3: It had some emotional resonance. The scene in which the slave driver beats the Ood slave was a little corny, but the scene in which the Doctor and Not-Not-Rose find the Ood dying in the snow was really quite affecting.

4: The Ood felt like olden-days Doctor Who monsters; but they showed signs of having been thought up as fun aliens for the Doctor to meet; not simply as a collection of plot device to join some scenes together. The Big Reveal about the contents of the mysterious warehouse made some sort of sense on its own terms, and went some way to explaining the behaviour of the Ood in "The Satan Pit".

5: Finally, finally, finally a story set on an alien planet -- see, Russell, we are not too stupid to deal with the planet Zod, and the Non Wobbly Special Effects department did a good job at creating a convincing backdrop. The giant ice-bridge was particularly cool. (Do you see what I did there?)

6: The story was only slightly rushed. I felt "That could have done with being a full hour" rather than "That could have done with being a two parter."

(The morality of the story was pretty trite. It is clear in the first three minutes that the humans are all bastards and the Ood are gentle and harmless, so it's just as much about Good vs Evil as if the Daleks had been trying to wipe out the human race. Again. For the story to have actually been about something, you'd have needed to have added a wrinkle, say

a: Despite their obvious cruelty, Donna feels she should side with the humans because they are her people

b: There is a predator on the Oodsphere and, if not for the humans, the Ood would have long ago become extinct

c: Freeing the Ood will deprive the humans of their workforce, bringing about the collapse of the Great and Bootiful Human Empire and ensuring that the Daleks rule the galaxy for years to come.

As it was, the ethical issue served only to illustrate -- I would not use such a strong word as develop -- the relationship between the Doctor and Prima. The Doctor makes the valid observation that the 21st century humans use wage-slaves to make their clothes, but this scene is "about" the Doctor's self-righteousness and Donna's reaction to it. The Strange Interlude in which the Doctor uses the Vulcan Mind Meld to enable Donna to hear the Ood's telepathic singing is "about" Donna discovering what it's like to be the Doctor. He, apparently, can hear the Songs of of Captivity (wasn't that by Bob Marley?) all the time. The more Donna learns about the Doctor, the more she sees that what she thought was callousness is actually The Burden of the Time Lords. (But the most wonderful thing about Time Lords is I'm the only one). This doesn't, so far as I can see, change anything about their relationship. )

But I'm really happy for my criticisms to be parenthetical. This episode represents a much needed step from appallingeness towards good, solid, entertaining mediocrity.

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