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....

Fish Custard (6)

Moffat is doing rather more bleeding of stories into other stories than Davies did.

Davies seasons had running plot arcs, but they never amounted to much more than easter eggs for the more earnest bus enthusiasts to spot. It was quite fun to see the words "Bad Wolf" in the graffiti in Episode 1.4 and remember that the same words had been used by the clairvoyyant girl in Episode 1.3, but it didn't really have much bearing on either story. (The resolution -- that the word "Bad Wolf" appeared in every episode because when Rose became a demi-god she dropped the phrase Bad Wolf into every episode in order to give herself a clue that she should take the name Bad Wolf and drop that name into every episode when she became a demi-god was not very satisfactory. Couldn't she have just tied a knot in her hanky?)

This year's story arc is about Amy's crack. Er, the Crack in Amy's wall. In the first story of the season a Baddie said "The thingy will open! A bad thing will happen!" very much like baddies have been saying "He will knock three times on the window" and "You will soon die, metaphorically at least" pretty much since the show rebooted. I thought the Crack was going to turn out to be another case of the Bad Wolves. I thought it would appear in every story and that it's meaning would be revealed in the final two-parter, which would feature the end of the universe, the Daleks, and Amy temporarily becoming a demi-god.

But then, in the one with the statues, the back story came to the front. The Weeing Angels were feeding on a Crack in the space time continuum through which weird-crack-in-the-space- time-continuum energy was pouring. The question which had been set up the previous week (why doesn't Amy know about the Daleks, given they invaded earth only last Tuesday?) is more or less resolved. Things have been being sucked into The Crack, and things which are sucked into The Crack aren't merely destroyed, they never existed to begin with, so not one remembers them (except when they do.) That's why Amy Pond knows that the Pond in her village is a Duck Pond, even though it has never had any Ducks on it. (NOTE: Leadworth is an anagram of Dr Who Tale.) That's why everyone has forgotten about the giant Cyberman from the year before last's Christmas special. (I have certainly been trying to forget it.)

And The Crack was started by a Big Bang which the Doctor traces to the the day of Amy's wedding, which is also the day she joined him on the TARDIS and also (by a staggering coincidence) the day that the final part of Doctor Who Season 5 will be transmitted. And all this leads us straight into a huge odd soap operatic thang. Amy tries to kiss the Doctor, a scene which the Daily Mail thought was sordid, sexy and possibly a cure for cancer. This, in pretty short order, makes the Doctor decide that his preventing Amy's marriage is what has caused the The Crack and that it's his job to ensure that she and her fiance, the gorm free Rory (indistinguishably from Larry, Sally's boyfriend in Blink) should get back together, whereupon....

"Everybody" complained that Davies' plots were too rushed, but I rather like the speed with which Moffat is advancing the back story. Oh, it's clear enough what he's doing: Amy's sudden urge to kiss the Doctor, and the Extremely Unexpected Twist Ending to the one with the Silurians don't arise particularly naturally from the action which preceded them. They could have been dropped into any story and they would have made just as much sense. Amy kisses the Doctor because a bad scary thing has happened in which she nearly died: but bad scary and nearly fatal things happen to Doctor Who girls every week. It's an occupational hazard. I think that there may be a subtext about the way in which childhood dreams shade into wet dreams and imaginary friends turn into erotic fantasies. Poor Rory is, in every possible sense, in competition with the man of Amy's dreams.

I could have done without the "You, Amy Pond, are the most important being in the universe" speech. We've already had a "You, Donna Noble, are the most important being in the universe" speech and Rose actually being the most important being in the universe. Martha had to content herself with being the most important being on earth. What happened to companions who failed general science A level?

The Doctor says that for him, every day is a big day: he skips the little ones. In the same way, Moffat jumps over extraneous material and transitions. This works rather well: much better than Davies squishing long stories into small spaces. We go straight from the Angels to Amy

declaring her love for
revealing that she'd like to sleep with the Doctor; and straight from there to the Doctor popping up on Rory's stag night; thence to Rory already being a passenger on the TARDIS (and then to a point when he has been travelling on the TARDIS for some time).

And note, by the way, that there were no spoilers about Rory being a new member of the supporting cast – no press calls for for Arthur Darvil, no interviews with Peter Purves or Matthew Waterhouse about the weight of expectation about being a Doctor Who "boy", no articles about whether or not he is "something for the Mums". Okay, he doesn't get star billing, but he is very clearly a companion. Is this because Moffat is working hard to keep Doctor Who spoiler free (the man in the Grauniad keeps moaning that he doesn't get preview discs) or just because newspapers are irredeemably sexist?

continues...

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We has been mainstreamed

"I think it was Spider-Man's uncle, Ben Parker who said...well, it's disputed who originally said this:...'With great power comes great responsibility'".

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, on the BP oil spill

Any Questions, June 11.

Fish Custard (5)

The Lonely Space Whale was an obvious metaphor for the Doctor, and Amy's empathy for the Whale was an obvious metaphor for Amy's empathy for the Doctor and Amy understood the Whale better than the Doctor did to show that Amy understands the Doctor better than the Doctor understands himself.

The Weeing Angels aren't, in that sense, a metaphor for anything. They aren't anything at all. They are villains without motive or personality or clearly defined powers, almost an absence in a story which is about the relationship between three main characters: the Doctor, Amy and River Bloody Song.

Everyone talks about the Buffyfication of Doctor Who, and by everyone I mean "me", obviously. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show of great underlying integrity. You could accept evil alien Buddweiser that literally turned frat-boys into cavemen, or a school swim team that were mutating into Deep Ones because you always and absolutely believed in and cared about every one of the characters. Every bit of teen angst was followed through to its achy breaky conclusion. Davies "got" that the monsters in Buffy were mainly metaphors, lights to shine a torch at the hopeless doomed love affairs between Buffy and Angel and Buffy and Spike and decided that this was how modern Who would have to be.

I still don't know if this was the right decision. I don't know whether everything really does have to be all touchy-feely. When people say that the the Boys' Mountaineering and Boxing Society isn't attracting many girls and should therefore do less mountaineering and boxing, I'm inclined to say "But what about the boys who liked mountaineering and boxing but aren't nearly as keen on knitting and watching Glee?" Good thing to drop the "boy" bit though. Apparently girls can join the Boy Scouts but boys can't join the Girl Guides. Or maybe "don't". There's nothing wrong with girls wanting to learn how to kill and cook wild squirrels and boys wanting to bake cookies. But I'm not at all sure that there isn't room in the world for an all male space where boys can talk to other boys about their periods, so to speak. There really are a lot of socially awkward males in the world and Doctor Who really did used to be place for them to retreat and talk about Thals and Neutron Flows, and I am not sure if making it about dating, weddings, mothers and showing your emotions was an improvement, given that there are one or two programmes on TV which deal with that stuff already.

But given that we are committed to making Doctor Who a soap opera, at least lets make it a good soap opera. Once we had passed Bad Wolf Bay -- which I increasingly think was the moment when Russell had done what he set out to do and said what he had to say -- both we and him stopped caring, and that's the one thing that can never, ever happen in a soap.

Steven has made me care.

He's made me care about the relationship between the Doctor and Amy, and as long as I'm doing that it really doesn't matter whether this is a different kind of relationship to the one which a different Doctor, a long time ago, might have had with Jo Grant or Adric.

Me and Jon have recently seen a lot of movies we've quite liked, like Avatar and Iron Man; and a couple that we liked an awful lot, like Kick Ass; but we keep finding that we don't have very much to say to each other about them. But we've been talking about the Phantom Menace, which neither of us liked nearly so much, for years and years. (We agreed to differ about the abomination.)

Why, says Jon, is it so hard to talk about good movies?

I think the answer is that in a real sense you don't actually see good movies. As long as the movie is good, you aren't watching it: you are inside it, sharing the characters' experiences, seeing their world through their eyes. If you are in that state of mind, you can put up with almost anything, even the plot of Avatar. In the same way, you never actually see a good special effect: what you see is a spaceship or a sword fighting skeleton or a big blue willy. Only if the special effect has fundamentally failed do you have a chance to think "I wonder how they did that?" When a movie goes wrong something wrenches you out of it and you are looking from the outside: commenting that such and such an actor is doing this thing well, and that thing badly, noticing structure and shot. Sweet is the something which nature brings / our meddling intellect mis-shapes the beauteous form of things / and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of knowledge, as the fellow said.

Criticizing Kick Ass would be a non sequitur. The only correct reaction is "Like, wow. Wow." Or as Jon said: "I never need to see another movie ever again."

The relationship between the Doctor and Amy is a relationship between two characters, between two people, not between two actors saying lines at each other. That's all that matters. Matt Smith gives us a panicky Doctor; an improvising Doctor; a Doctor who knows his own reputation and isn't quite sure if he can live up to it; a Doctor who knows that he is going to do something incredibly clever but hasn't thought of it yet; a Doctor who won't know what his plan is until he's finished talking; a Doctor who is concerned about being the Doctor.

"I'll do a thing. I don't know what thing yet. It's a thing in progress. Respect the thing."

Possibly maybe arguably perhaps a Doctor who is aware of his own Doctorness points to a show which is still not quite at ease with itself; a show which still thinks of itself as a revival of an old programme; a bit too post-modernist for its own good. "Doctor Who, based upon the BBC TV series 'Doctor Who'." But I honestly don't care. I haven't enjoyed the company of a TARDIS occupant this much since...I don't know, Logopolis, probably. From time to time David Tennant used to deliver lines which you wanted to take home and put on a tee-shirt because they defined everything you loved about this daft old silly TV programme. Matt Smith seems to do this every time he opens his mouth.

"There's something here which doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a stick."

When a character is this mad, this endearing, this compelling it honestly doesn't matter if he's too like, or too unlike, the ten actors who previously played a character with the same name. (Have you noticed that Moffat keeps face-checking the First Doctor, as if to remind us that this Young Man is the same person as the Old Man who he is almost completely unlike?) I think I might be in love with the Eleventh Doctor if I had never seen another episode of Doctor Who in my whole life.

The scene where he leaves Amy with the clerical soldiers, warning her to keep her eyes closed and telling her to trust him ("But you never tell me the truth" "If I told you the truth you wouldn't need to trust me") seems to matter more than any Doctor / Companion scene has mattered since.... Well, since Bad Wolf Bay. But that wasn't about the Doctor and his companion, it was about the Lonely God and Dark Phoenix, over-the-top, overwrought, out of the range of normal human emotion, I'm burning up a star just to say good bye to you. This was the young old traveller and his human friend; the old young traveller about whom the question has never really gone away: can you trust him?

Doctor who?

continues...

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of The Viewers Tale or Fish Custard which collects all my writings about Doctor Who to date.

Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.