Fish Custard (12)

"Hi. We're the makers of a TV show about a guy with a Time Machine."

"Ah. You want me to write an adaptation of H.G Wells' The Time Machine."

"No. We produce a children's television series about a man with a Time Machine."

"Oh. What does he do with it?"

"Travels in Time. Goes to the past and the future and meets historical characters and stuff."

"Crazee. Can't see it ever catching on. Why are you telling me about it?"

"We want to commission you to write a story."

"About Time Travel?"

"About people from the present day visiting an historical period. Because you're, like a mainstream writer, who writes period drama. Crossover appeal and all that."

"Any particular historical period you have in mind?"

"No – you choose. The sky's the limit. That's the whole idea. Mainstream writer, thinking outside the box."

"Can I bring historical characters into the present day?"

"Sure. It's, you know, as limitless as your imagination. We generally try to avoid our hero changing historical events too much, though. And he probably shouldn't create established history, either. Saying he caused the Fire of London would probably be a bad idea."

"Or the Fire of Rome?"

"Or the Fire, as you say, of Rome."

"It sounds like a fun, open ended format that will run and run. Here's my idea. Just extemporizing, but could your hero go back in Time and meet Van Goff."

"Van Gock?"

"Van Gow. I'd show all the scenes from the famous paintings – the cornfield, the church, the cafe...and how about this, I'd have the hero bring him some sunflowers, and suggest that he paints them. I'd get lots of irony out of all Van Gock's contemporaries thinking he's a terrible painter, but our hero knows that history will have the last laugh. I'd do a sensitive portrayal of Van Goff's depression, but steer right away from obvious cliched stuff about him chopping off his own ear. I'd probably take the line that he was bipolar. I'd allude to his suicide too. What time does this show go out?"

"Tea-time, but that's okay, we can drop in an 'If You Have Been Affected By' line at the end. Those chaps at the Samaritans get awfully bored if we don't encourage people to phone them, you know."

"But I haven't told you the clever bit yet! The clever bit is that we'll start the story up in an art gallery, doing a Van Goff exhibition. We can show all the paintings, so the young kids will get the references even if they don't know who Van Gock is. And we'll have an art critic doing a tour, talking about Van Gow's life. We'd need a really high class actor to do the cameo."

"I reckon we can get that guy with the tentacles from Pirates of the Caribbean. But we probably wouldn't credit him."

"Great. So he can do some funny dialogue with your hero. Maybe they can compete about who has the best..."

"....Bow tie..."

"Bow tie, great. But then, here's the clever bit. At the end, after the hero has visited Van Gow and got to know him a bit, and Van Gock has even developed a bit of a crush on your hero's beautiful young red-headed assistant, then...and this is the scene I want to write, this is the scene I've wanted to write all my life...your hero puts Van Goff in his Time Machine and takes him back to the present day and shows Van Gock the exhibition. So Van Gow knows that he'll be vindicated and dies happy. He even hears the famous actor lecturing about what a great painter he was, and what a great man he was. And, we'll do this subtly, but wouldn't it be cool if the art critic almost, almost, just out of the corner of his eye, sees his hero for one second, in the flesh! Oh, why I have I wasted my career working within the constraints of narrow social realism! This is the sort of moving, slightly surreal, magical realist material that only the conceit of a Machine that travels through Time can achieve! I hope your series lasts for 46 years and seven months!"

"It sounds excellent. Exactly the sort of thing we're looking for. How does the monster fit in?"

"I'm sorry. I don't quite follow you."

"The monster. We don't feel that a TV series based around a charismatic hero who can visit any historical time period (or, in fact, any place in the universe, but we've played that down, because the punters aren't very interested in stuff set on the planet zog) is exciting enough. So we have a rule that wherever or whenever he goes, and whoever or whatever he meets, there always has to be a monster."

"A monster?"

"That's right, a monster."

"You mean, like a giant chicken or something."

"Exactly. Van Goff, an art critic and a giant chicken."

"You mock me and my muse, Sir. Please do not waste any more of my time. I bid you – adieu."

"What a pseud. I was hoping for something more like Blackadder."

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.

Not Right.

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong.

Wrong, wrong. Not right. Incorrect.

False, mistaken, and slightly bitter as well. (And containing spoilers.)

But mostly just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wrong.

What I Did Over The Weekend

Naturally, you all know the rules of "Eat Poop You Cat"?

"Picture Consequences" or "Chinese Whispers" for grown ups: player A writes down a phrase; player B illustrates it with a picture; player C tries to work out the phrase from player B's picture; player D illustrates player C's picture, and so on.

So a boringly successful round looks like this:

"Richard drank a lot of red wine"

"Richard got sick on wine".

However, when someone tried to introduce theology into the proceedings, things became more surreal:

"In the beginning, God created the world..."

"Biggles is on his way to destroy the world..."

And politics becomes positively profound:

"Clegg and Cameron formed a coalition that was doomed to failure..."

"The surgeons tried to separate the conjoined twins, but both died."

There was a point to this, but it has temporarily escaped your chroniclers mind.

Fish Custard (11)

One last thing, before moving on.

You remember the opening of Genesis of the Daleks? The Doctor tries to "beam up" from the Sontaran base to Space Station Nerva, but finds himself six zillion and four years in the past on the planet Skaro. A Time Lord explains to him that this week's story involves him preventing the Davros from creating the Daleks, and would he get on with it please? Doubtless Terry Nation could have come up with some special reason for the Doctor to decide to go and witness the creation of the Daleks off his own back, but it would have taken much more screen time and probably not been much more fun. Authors always have to nudge their heroes towards the plot: erecting a big neon sign saying "Step right up! This way to the plot!" is merely a particularly transparent way of doing it.

This, incidentally, was just about the only valid use of the Time Lords in the Doctor Who setting: as a convenient reverse deus ex machina to drop the Doctor into interesting situations (but never, ever to get him out of them. Well, hardly ever.)

Someone is already typing that no, in fact, this wasn't a plot device: this was (as explained in the totally canonical 2006 Doctor Who annual) the first skirmish of the last great Time War and therefore a pivotal moment in the history of the Doctor Who universe. I wish they wouldn't. [*]

Similarly, in Star Trek the Next Generation there was an all-powerful alien sprite called Q whose function was to pop up once a season and created a Dilemma for Jean-Luc Picard to agonize over. Although John De Lancie's characterisation was great fun, and although he sparked entertainingly off Patrick Steward, no-one ever really pretended that Q was anything other than a plot device: another stand in for the Author. Q shows Picard a future where he is sad and lonely; this has the result that he become less aloof and more willing to play cards with his colleagues. Q shows Picard and alternate world in which he is a merely competent officer, not a great hero, and this enables him to embrace (rather than feel ashamed of) his reckless youth. Doubtless those things could have been revealed through a more conventional narrative - but the device of the omnipotent god-like alien being, used about once per season, was a perfectly valid short cut.

(Captain Kirk also used to meet up with omnipotent alien beings, at the rate of about one in every three episodes. Some of them have been ret-conned as members of the Q continuum, I believe. But the points of these stories were invariably to show how Kirk reacts in the face of an all-powerful force and thereby make a point about religion and communism, or rather, to make the same point over and over again. The omnipotence and god-likeness of Apollo or the Squire of Gothos was the point of the story: the omnipotence and god-likeness of Q was only ever a means to an end.)

Now: I've said that there is not much point in inserting surrealistic dream sequences into Who, because the series itself is so surreal and dream like that it doesn't make much difference. I think that the same thing is true here. Clearly, The Dream Lord is a stand-in for the Author; and clearly his function is to create an environment which will reveal things about Amy's, or the Doctor's personality. And clearly this is, in the modern show, a pretty redundant plot device because every episode of Doctor Who is an environment which is intended to reveal things about Amy's or the Doctor's personality. The dreamscape created by the Dream Lord brings us to the moment when Amy chooses Rory over the Doctor; but then, the hardly more sensible costume drama in Venice existed mainly in order to bring us to the moment when Rory could tell the Doctor that he doesn't realise how dangerous he makes people to themselves (quite a prophetic remark, as it turns out).

Mr. Moffat introduces Rory (Ep 1) reveals that Amy fancies the Doctor (Ep 5) and kills of Rory (Ep 9). So in episode 6 he needs to accelerate things to the point where Amy definitely knows she love Rory and wants to have his babies and definitely thinks of the Doctor as more of a friend. Ergo, on comes The Author to put up big neon signs which say "The audience knows which way you are going to swing, so could you hurry up and swing that way, please."

Mr Whedon did a similar thing in a more off-the-wall way in the classic musical episode of Buffy. He introduced the very silly idea of a magic curse demon plot machine thingy (I have honestly forgotten) that forced all the characters to sing, which was very silly and very funny, but it had the very serious consequence that, in the best tradition of musicals, all the characters sang their innermost thoughts. Various major plot developments – the departure of Giles, the fact that Xander and Anya's marriage can never work -- are revealed in the space of 45 minutes.

Except...and this is what makes the story either tremendously clever or a bit of a cop out, and I'm guessing we aren't going to find out which until the season finale....except that the God-like Alien, the Surrogate Author is not Q, not a Time Lord, not the Trickster but the dark side of the Doctor himself. And I actually literally don't know what to make of this. I love the way his identity is revealed casually by the Doctor in the final moments, as if it was obvious, which it should have been; and I like the actual sneering persona and the way the Doctor and the Dream Lord interact. But it turns out that the point of the story isn't "Amy realises that she loves Rory" but "The Doctor forces Amy to realise that she loves Rory". And I don't quite know what to make of this. The Doctor has been playing matchmaker: he has brought Rory onto the TARDIS because he thinks it is historically inevitable for his wedding to Amy to go ahead as planned. But when Amy is sort of may be kind off hesitating between her boyfriend and her hero it's the Doctor's evil side which brings them together. (Not, say, an externalisation of his unconscious desires. We could have run with that: at a conscious level, the Doctor wants to stay with Amy, but deep down he knows this is impossible, so the Red Kryptonite empowers his repressed mind to send her back to Rory.)

So what does the Dark Side of the Doctor want? Is the marriage of Amy and Rory so obviously a very bad idea – both for the two characters, and for the future stability of the universe – that it requires the intervention of the Evil-Author-Doctor to bring it about? Or was Amy's romantic development an unintended consequence of a plan to trap the Doctor in a dream-world forever? (Is the idea that if the Doctor had believed the TARDIS dream world was real, he would have stayed there and the Dream-Lord would have taken control in waking Doctor?)

There was a really terrible and badly thought out Colin Baker story in which an evil Time Lord lawyer is said to be a future incarnation of the Doctor himself. The idea there was that if the Valeyard could get the Doctor killed, he will somehow inherit his remaining seven incarnations. Perhaps more intriguingly, we are told that Barry Letts original plan was for the final Jon Pertwee story to have revealed that the Doctor and the Master were the same man.

[*] It's a little more complicated than this, actually. Doubtless, Shakespeare could have used any number of plot machines to tell Hamlet that his wicked uncle murdered his father – maybe the Prince meets a witness who was in the orchard, or overhears Claudius saying his prayers. But, while the plot might come out much the same, the atmosphere of the play would be a lot different: Hamlet isn't just "the story of a man who is told that his father was murdered" but "the story of a man who is told by a ghost that his father was murdered". Similiarly "The Doctor goes back in time to discreate the Daleks" is a different story from "The Time Lords order the Doctor to go back in time and discreated the Daleks". The dramatic "do I have that right?" scene wouldn't work nearly so well if the Doc was there voluntarily.

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.