Fish Custard (9)

So, in the one with Toby Jones, the Red Kryptonite – sorry, the Psychic Pollen – is pure plot machinery. And the two different worlds which Amy has to choose between – they are plot machinery as well. Toby Jones himself -- the Dream Lord, the Doctor's dark side – is probably best seen as a plot device. In fact, once you've taken all the plot machinery away, it's quite hard to track down the actual plot. At times, it feels an lot like The Edge of Beyond the Inside of the Sun or whatever we're supposed to call it nowadays – the third William Hartnell story, where the TARDIS goes mad and everyone starts having hallucinations and wearing dressing gowns and attacking each other with scissors. Not really a story: more a sort of crucible to force the first story arc to come to some sort of conclusion. The "solution", if you remember, was that everything had gone weird because a button on the TARDIS console had got stuck. The First Doctor spent about five minutes playing around with a torch to make sure that everybody knew exactly what he meant by "button" and "stuck". But it was fairly clear that the point of the story was to bring Barbara to the point where she'd tell the Doctor to stop being such an old git, and to bring the Doctor to the point where he can apologize and agree to be the main character in the series from now on.

So what exactly was the point of Amy's Choice?

When I saw the pre-cred – or at any rate, when I read the summary in Radio Times – I thought that something really interesting was being set up. We'd seen Amy as a child, and as a grown up – it would have been so cool if, without telling us, the story had skipped another 5 years and picked up the action after she'd stopped travelling with the Doctor. So when we flashed forward / backwards to the TARDIS, I was rather disappointed. "Oh", I said "It's just another dream sequence virtual reality alternate time line thang, like Turn Left and Silence in the Library and every damn episode of Sarah Jane."

Actually, that's not quite fair. I like Sarah Jane an awful lot. There's a character called the Trickster who periodically pops up and plays, well, tricks on the main characters. They often involve mucking about with Sarah's time lines, showing her what would have happened if she'd made a different choice. (Who was it who said that "what would have happened" was only ever a vivid rhetorical tool for describing what actually did happen?) In Season 2, the Trickster tricks her into going back in time and (stop me if you've heard this before) preventing her parents from being killed. At the time I said it was the single best thing to have been done with the franchise since the relaunch. The Trickster is really just so much psychic pollen, and Amy's Choice is a very, very good episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures.

So. The Dream Lord sets the TARDIS crew a Puzzle. Are you, he asks them, the crew of the TARDIS dreaming that you are in Leadworth, or three people from Leadworth dreaming that you are on the TARDIS. Chuang Tse asked a similar question, but he didn't expect anybody to answer it. The point of the problem is that it's insoluble: every time Amy says "This is real, definitely real" we feel that she hasn't understood it properly.

Some people claim that they have become aware that they are dreaming without waking up, because they have noticed something in their dream which is silly, illogical, or contradictory. Freud himself says that he once thought, or dreamt that he thought "How can I possibly have arrived late for my first year medical exams, when I am an eminent professor who has been practising medicine for many years?" [*] So all our heroes have to do to identify the dream is to look for elements which are silly, illogical or contradictory.

In an episode of Doctor Who? How could they tell?

Every episode contains things which are silly, unbelievable, or surreal. Shop window dummies, anyone? Gas masks? Statues? Robot replicas of Anne Robinson? In the surreal stakes, evil child eating zombie grannies with eyeballs on stalks that pop out of their mouths would hardly make it into the top ten. And the Doctor can't open his mouth without scientific gobbledegook popping out. The idea of a cold star (and one which freezes the inside of the TARDIS, which is presumably capable of a withstanding the absolute zero of space) is not obviously sillier than sonic paper or fluid links or evil time lords living in black holes or any of the stuff he's been asking us to believe in for decades. Stuff in Doctor Who is "believable" or "unbelievable" purely on the Doctor's say-so. He's the fixed point in an often absurdist narrative. Remove his authority and all bets are off.

Jeremy Bentham (the Doctor Who historian, not the philosopher) once remarked that there were very few successful parodies of Doctor Who. The series undercuts itself so shamelessly that there's no point in a comedian doing so. As early as 1964 Crackerjack had done a sketch featuring Peter Glaze as a dotty old man called Doctor What who lived in a post-box. The substitution of the word "What" for the word "Who" and a post-box for a phone box produced something that was no sillier, and arguably less silly, than the programme that was being sent up.

Doctor Who is already the kind of story where funny men turn up in your garden and demand fish custard; where naughty school children are fed to giant whales who live under London; where statues, and pictures of statues, and memories of pictures of statues, only move when you aren't looking at them. It is already dream like. It already works according to dream logic. In something like Star Trek, a dream sequence is a surreal break with established narrative conventions. In Doctor Who it's business as usual.

Unless – perchance – that is the point? Unless something very clever and story-arcy is going on, and Steven has spent a whole episode drawing our attention to the dream-like-ness of New New Who to soften us up for the moment when Little Amelia wakes up and realises that all her adventures with the Raggedy Doctor were only a dream. Or perhaps a little game that she's been playing with her home made action figures?

Is all that we see or seem....

[*] In my experience, it more often works the other way around: I have occasionally actually been awake and eating breakfast before saying "Since I am 44, I can probably stop worrying about whether or not I left my

homework on the bus."

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Fish Custard (8)

I was less convinced by the one with Toby Jones.

C.S Lewis or Aristotle or someone of that kind asks us to distinguish between the plot machinery and the plot itself. It doesn't matter too much if the mechanism by which your hero gets to Mars is plausible if the story was never about the journey, but what he saw when he arrived. We don't have to believe in Delphic oracles, sphinxes or improbable meetings at places where three roads meet: we're interested in how a man would react if he suddenly discovered that the woman he married was his own mother. Folk-singers (and for that matter Mr William Shakespeare) don't really expect us to believe that if a lady-shaped person slips on a pair of trousers, she'll instantly be assumed to be male by everyone she meets, including army recruitment officers and her own true love. We aren't interested in the practical problems faced by 17th century transvestites. "Imagine that a man who robbed at gun-point and the robber turned out to be his own girlfriend!" the singer is saying "Imagine the look on his face when he finds out!"

I forget whether or not Aristotle himself uses the word McGuffin.

If I were to write about The Prisoner, which I probably won't, I would say that in the original version, The Village was pretty obviously a piece of plot machinery, but in the new version The Village is pretty much the whole of what the plot is about. The original version is about the ways in which an exceptionally individualistic person stands up for himself in a society where there are is no such thing as an individual. It's about the relationship of individuals to society and what's so great about being an individual, anyway? It's about that tricks and traps that Number 2 sets to make Number 6 conform, and about Number 6's plans to escape. The remake is about The Village. It's about Number 2 (sorry, "2") who has a back story, a family, and considerably more personality than 6 does. It asks us what The Village is – a real place, the only real place, a dream, a virtual reality? The original only asked us what The Village meant. All sorts of questions which were unanswered and unanswerable in the original version – who did 6 work for? why did he resign? what was his real name? – are neatly tied up. [*]

There are, of course, Portmeirion literalists who try to answer those sorts of questions about the original programme. They are terribly disappointed to discover that English schoolchildren say "break" rather than "recess" so when Number 2 is in the persona of Number 6's old headmaster, he's much more likely to be saying "See me in the morning break!" than "See me in the morning, Drake." But even if you could conclusively prove that the protagonists of The Prisoner and Danger Man were the same person, it's hard to see how that would elucidate The Prisoner.

It occurs to me that a working definition of Science Fiction might be "literature without plot machinery; literature for people who are interested in the plot machinery; literature which tells you how the space-ship works stories where a girl can't pass herself off as a boy without a special sort of bra". Someone in the Grauniad pointed out that Nineteen Eighty-four was certainly not science fiction because it showed no interest in how the Screens worked. (I forget if this was someone who liked Science Fiction very much, but didn't like Orwell, or someone who liked Orwell very much, but didn't like Science Fiction.) Certainly some of the objections to New New Who have been science fictiony nit picks about the plot machinery: Why do the Doctor and the Daleks always meet each other consecutively? Why is the Doctor so confused by money and football and pubs when he's lived on earth for years and usually has no difficulty fitting in on weird alien planets?

We don't care.

It further occurs to me that on this definition I probably haven't read, or at any rate enjoyed, a work of science fiction since Blast Off at Woomera in Miss Walker's class, so you probably shouldn't pay attention to anything I say about the subject. But you probably don't anyway.

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[*] SPOILER WARNING: I do give them points for the ending in which 6 takes over from 2 and plans to create a new, happier Village. All the way through he's been saying "I am not a number": although he thinks he's "won", he's only done this by becoming a number, so he's really "lost". That's not a bad reading of the impenetrable final instalment of the original.

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Cardinal Ratzinger "Not An Anglican" Shock

Fish Custard (7)

The one with the Vampires is an altogether lighter romp than the previous five episodes, driven by some perfectly harmless gobbledegook. (Naturally, giant fish with cloaking devises don't have a reflection in the mirror, except when they do, because, er...)

Where the one with the Angels was a backdrop for some heavy stuff between the Doctor and Amy and some more clues about River Bloody Song, this was a backdrop to develop the relationship between Amy and Rory. Although he appears in episode 1, this is the first time we've really seen him as a character: in terms of what is going to happen over the next two weeks, it's pretty imperative that we like him. Which, I think, during this story, we pretty much do. He's a buffoon, but a nice buffoon, pointlessly trying to repel the not-vampire with a cross; jealous about the Doctor and Amy but not getting into a Mickey type strop about it. A running thread through Old New Who was that the Doctor is an inspirational figure, changing the lives of everyone he comes across. So it is very pointed and clever for Rory, the gormless normal guy to see through this or at any rate spot the downside of it. The Doctor, just by being the Doctor, inspires people to take risks which may harm them or get them killed.

But mostly, this story was a very agreeable piece of padding; showing us the Doctor and Amy having an adventure and quite enjoying it -- putting across to us the idea that they travel together and have fun travelling together, and that while dangerous stuff happens all the time every single minute isn't as incredibly heavy and angst ridden as last week's story was and next week's story is going to be.

There are Vampire myths in every civilisation in the universe, because the Time Lords had a big war with creatures called The Vampire Lords who drained whole planets of their energy, but who, so far as I know, didn't have heralds on shiny surfboards. However, at the very end of time, the Earth becomes so polluted that the human race evolve into Haemovores who drink blood, dislike sunlight, hang out around graveyards, take boats to Whitby and recoil from crosses. And hammer and sickles. Hammers and sickle. (*) But that's no reason that fish people who drain the water from humans shouldn't have vampirey attributes as well, because the Doctor Who universe is a self-consistent fictitious cosmology which makes perfect sense. When the First Doctor met an animatronic Dracula at a futuristic funfair, he assumed that it was, not a haemovore or a vampire lord or a fish-thing, but that he was in an alien dimension where human nightmares had somehow come to life, and got a jolly stiff cease and desist letter from Universal Pictures a result. I'm sorry. What was the question again?

[*] Radio 4 newsreaders still say things like: "The MOD has announced that three soldiers will face Courts Martial...."

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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.