Nightmare in Silver [7.12]

Obviously, to say that a story scores 100% on the Ril/Moff scale is not saying a great deal. It's only saying that what we have just watched was a competently assembled piece of drama in which I could suspend disbelief from beginning to end. "Okay, you have just told me a story: now we can talk about whether or not it was a story worth hearing."

That said I am awarding Nightmare in Silver, charitably, a perfect score of 100%. I say charitably because, if I were feeling uncharitable I would say that the two kids were such caricatures of knowing drama school brats that one could hardly take seriously a single scene they were in.

Neil Gaiman's last outing felt very much like a Neil Gaiman story into which Doctor Who had accidentally materialized. Nothing wrong with that: we have established that  Gaiman is the Second Greatest Living Writer. But I was more interested in finding out what  a Doctor Who story written by Neil Gaiman would be like and that is what this piece essentialily was. It had a lot of recognisable Gaiman themes -- fairgrounds, whimsy, victoriana, grotesques, silly costumes -- a sort of gypsy steampunk vibe. But it was recognisably a Doctor Who story in which the Cybermen get defrosted, try to take over the universe, and get defeated.

I am not sure why it is was set in a themepark, but I can't think of any particular reason why it shouldn't have been. I am pleased that the parallell worlds theory has been abandonned and we just kind of accept that there are Cybermen and they are baddies. I liked the fact that, given that this was the best theme park in the universe and the Doctor is (as has been established) somewhere between Father Christmas and WIlly Wonker, he would naturally have a golden ticket, and therefore forgot that "gold" is one of the things Cybermen are vulnerable to. I thought the idea of the Doctor playing chess against himself was clever and funny, although it went on for rather too long. Warwick Davis is always good value, and no, I didn't see that coming, although probably I should have done. 

So. To keep old Doctor Who fans happy -- to keep this old Doctor Who fan happy, at any rate -- you don't need to do a pastiche of Old Who. (I expect Neil Gaiman could have written a pastiche of Old Who if he had wanted to, and I expect that might have been fun.) There were a few odd references to the Old Days: Cybermen waking up from their tombs, and a million cyberboots stomping across the landscape -- but arguably those have stopped being references to old stories and are now just part of the vocabulary from which cyberstories are constructed. All you have to do to keep an old Doctor Who fan happy is to drop the soap opera and the post-modern bullshit and the foisted-on story arc and just tell us a bloody story.

100%, Neil. You have Made. Good. Art.

*

Which leaves us with the extended prologue for next week. Clara and the Doctor do a monologue to camera, in which they both say that they didn't know very much about the other before the season finale, but then they found out, and were quite surprised. (Rather well done.)

It doesn't tell us the answers, but it drops some pretty broad hints about the ball park in which the answers will be found. Clara is not mysterious merely because she keeps dying and coming back: she is mysterious because she is exactly the sort of companion that the Doctor wants and needs. Since Wonderful-Rose, every companion has been exactly the kind of companion the Doctor most needs; but granted that what the Doctor wants is a facility with wisecracks and that quality which, if possessed byba female, is always called "fiestyness" -- a sort of heroic joy -- I'm happy to accept that Rose was special and Donna was special and Amy was special and Clara is a special replacement for Amy that he acquired "on the rebound." So, fairly clearly, it is going to turn out that Clara, being The Perfect Companion, is actually part of a trap that someone has set for him. Not a person at all, but a Plot Device disguised as a person, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Sister. It is also pretty clear that Clara's Thing is related to the TARDIS because we keep being told that Clara and the TARDIS don't get on; and I think it will be something to do with the kids, because I can't see any reason for their being in the One With The Cybermen except as a set-up for the metaplot.

As to the Doctors thing, we ae being led down a fairly tranparent garden path. The title of tomorrow's story is The Name of the Doctor and Moffat has repeatedly said that the story will reveal the Doctors greatest secret. What he has pointedly not said is that the Doctor's greatest secret is his name. The expression "Doctor who?" has been very heavily lampshaded all through this "season": the One With The Daleks ended with Him jumping up and down in the TARDIS saying "Doctor who?" over and over again, and when Wonderful Clara asks his name, he says "I love hearing her say that." At the end of last season, the Doctor removed all references to himself from history. That idea has not really been followed up on on. I liked the Cyberplanner's remark that he was still visible in the universe by the shape of the gap.

So. Predictions.

The Doctor's name used to be reasonably well known. When he turned up on planets and said "I'm Doctor Fooblenurdle" people said "Fooblenurdle -- not Fooblenurdle who has a Terrible Secret associated with something he did in before, during or after the Time War?" "Yes, that Fooblenurdle" replies the Doctor. When he removed himself from history, he also removed all knowledge of his name. As part of the season finale, we will learn what the terrible thing he did before, during or after the Time War was (which will, of course, have another even deeper and darker secret hidden inside it); but it will turn out that his name is literally unknowable. This is why he likes it when people ask him what he is called: it reminds him that he's covered his tracks successfully.

Clara is a construct, created by the TARDIS, based on the Doctor's memory of souffle girl, in order to prevent him going to the only place in the entire universe and world where his most deepest and darkest secret can be revealed. That's why she can't die: the TARDIS keeps rebooting her and reinserting her history at a different point.

Also: River Song is Amy Pond's daughter.

Dinosaurs on Spaceship

When we met Amy, she was a little girl writing a letter to Santa. Well, not so much writing, as praying: a sort of farewell to the RTD era which had embarrassingly re-branded the Doctor as a Jesus figure. 

Of course, the Doctor turns up in answer to her prayer: her imaginary friend, the Raggedy Man of her dream. This becomes one of the new new show's running themes. Last Christmas, the Doctor was a gift-bringer somewhere between Santa Claus and Willy Wonka; this year he was a sort of male-Mary Poppins, living on a cloud. It's an established part of the mythos that if children wish hard enough for the Doctor, he will sometimes hear them. 

The Doctor as Santa Claus. Hold onto that concept, as we turn to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship the episode when new new new Who finally figures out what it was supposed to be about, and then hopelessly buggers it up. 

When the Doctor arrives on the space ship, we see him running across the floor and then skidding to a halt. 

Later on in the same episode, we see the Triceratops do the same thing. Run; stop suddenly; skid to a halt. 

When the Doctor hitches a ride on the back of the dinosaur he cries out "I am riding a dinosaur!" 

Later, when Rory and Ron Weasaley's Dad are, as a result of a perfunctory plot device, left flying a space ship, Mr Weasley cries out "we're flying a spaceship!" and "this is better than golf!". 

Indeed, when the spiky dinosaur shows up in the pre-cred, the Doctor cries out the name of the episode, with evident delight. 

And when The Great White Hunter is making his dramatic last stand, he announces that he's never been happier. 

(Last week, when Amy found herself in incredible danger from the most evil creatures ever invented, she exclaimed "Is it bad that I've really missed this?") 

Summary: everyone is having fun, and everyone knows that they are having fun. 

Now: even when you were a little kid, you probably knew perfectly well that real war was no fun at all, without pompous grown-ups telling you. The difference between playing "war" and having a war is obvious to everyone, except Miss Walker and certain Guardian columnists. I am quite sure that there were lots of kids in January 1964 having a great time "playing" Daleks; but you could hardly imagine Ian or Barbara saying "whoopee! This is fun!" as something scary chased them down a corridor. It was fun for us because it was scary for them, and we knew that it was scary for them because they were treating it as if it was real, not as if it was a game. 

We are asked to pretend that you can make a triceratops go where you want it to go by throwing a golf ball: the big lizard smells the grass on the ball and chases it. This is there primarily so they can do the "What have you got in my pocket?" "My balls" joke, which isn't funny. The second time they try the stunt (though not the joke) the dinosaur catches up with the ball, picks it up, and drops it at their feet. 

Now, I don't know much about the behaviour of triceratops, but I am pretty sure that that's not what a rhino or an elephant would do. Or a crocodile. We've forgotten for a moment why the big green chap was chasing the ball, and made him into a puppy chasing a stick. Because it's fun. Because we're only playing. 

What is John Riddell doing in the story? He's a contrast with Queen Nefatiti, I suppose: there is a certain amount of mileage to be got out of Classically Chauvinistic Male and Powerful Historical Female. And Moffat wants to give us the impression that the Doctor has a life apart from the little slice that Amy sees -- other companions that we've never heard of. A lady from ancient Egypt and a man from the Olden Days are too cool, off-the-wall semi-companions for him to have. But I rather fear that the main reason he is there is that someone start brainstorming "dinosaurs" and immediately came up with "wassisname, Muldoon, from the good Jurassic Park film."

Which is not a bad reason, actually, providing what you doing is playing at dinosaurs. 

So a playful version of Who, a cartoon Who, a bunch of adults where are quite clearly kids having a great time, being delighted by each new danger. And it really is playful and fun: like a child excitedly making up stories about his favourite characters, not like a geek joylessly putting the Jurassic Park Action Figure next to the Queen of Egypt Action Figure. The whole of the Third Doctor's era was a game, after all: the relationship between Roger and Jon makes no sense if you believe for one moment that the Master really was a psychotic mass murdering villain next to whom Hitler was basically just a bit naughty. Sword fight in a castle? Leaving the pretty lady in a death trap? They are playing at goodies and baddies, and loving every minute of it. 

And that's the problem. If you are playing at Doctor Who, you have to do it playfully. You can't drop a serious villain who had done something seriously villainous into the middle of it. You can't make him pathetic and evil at the same time. You can't make cold blooded genocide the subject of a game. 

Was there really no better way to manoeuvre the Doctor into a spiffing yarn with cartoon dinosaurs than wiping out the Silurians? We are meant to like the Silurians. The idea that they've hung around in caves for a zillion years, been nuked by the Brigadier, only to get casually wiped out by a travelling junk-dealer seems unfair. And don't say "life isn't fair": we don't want to learn harsh life lessons during a game of dinosaurs, thank you very much. The Doctor treats the whole thing oddly lightly; when he's setting up the McGuffin in which Rory and Brian fly the spaceship home, he makes a weak joke about monkeys and then laments that he didn't have a Silurian as an audience. That makes him seem callous. Under the circumstances, that's like sliding straight from the liberation of Auschwitz to the one about the the comedy Nazi and Jewish mother-in-law. 

Some people had a problem with the Doc killing the baddie at the end. That didn't worry me so much. Haven't the people who said it was out of character spotted that acting out of character is part of the Doctor's character? The question of whether the Doctor does or does not show mercy to his enemies, and the question of whether that does or doesn't make him a bad guy himself has been the main thing the show is about since Boom Town at least. Next weeks episode is called "A Town Called Mercy", for fred's sake. In the same way that Amy and Rory are endlessly trapped in the moment of falling out of love / falling in love and Amy is trapped in the moment staying with the Doctor / leaving the Doctor, the Doctor, this Doctor is trapped in the moment of becoming the dark Doctor / stepping back from brink. But it sits badly in a story in which people run around and banter with the comedy Dads while admittedly having a great time. 

Which is a shame, because it seems to me that "Doctor Who is a silly, crazy romp in which you get away with things you could never get away with in any other kind of drama" is a refreshing, fun model of what the series could be. If we can't have Moorcockian insanity like Let's Kill Hitler and The Marriage of River Song every week (and I think it would get tiring if we did) then at least let's have this kind of mad silliness. 

So. Fun romp. People playing at Doctor Who. Clash of registers between the silly and the serious. What does that have to do with dinosaurs skidding to a halt, or, indeed, Santa Claus?

Well, obviously, people are shown running like that because that's how people run in cartoons, and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is "coded" as a cartoon, in the same way that Asylum of the Daleks was "coded" as being frightening. Once the Doctor has gathered the pulp fiction characters and various Amy's and Rory's into the TARDIS, he remarks, and I do not quote: "I have a gang now. Gangs are cool." 

A gang? 

Well, we know that since 2003, Doctor Who has been modelling itself on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, without ever managing to be quite as good. Buffy was always about a group of friends, and the changing cast of gay witches, mortal demons, reformed vampires and teen werewolves which made up the supporting cast was occasionally referred to as "the Scooby gang." And of course, the non-existent companion Emma famous told the non-existent Twelfth Incarnation of the Doctor "You can't die.....You're like Father Christmas! The Wizard of Oz! Scooby Doo!" 

"Like Father Christmas and Scooby Doo."

Father Christmas.

And Scooby Doo.

We knew that Curse of Fatal Death was Moffat's personal love letter to the show and letter of application to the BBC. But we probably never realized how literally he was going to end up taking it.

Asylum of the Daleks 7.1 (cont)

Terrence Dicks used to say that the point of a Dalek was that it was pure evil with no redeeming features, but that you wished you could be a Dalek and exterminate bully or teacher or policeman or whoever was being rotten to you that week. Yeah. But that's just as true of the Cyberpeople and the Icepeople and every other damn creature ever to appear on Doctor Who and there wasn't Icewarriormania in the 1960s and there was arguably Dalekmania, which was a bit like Beatlemania. I don't remember that, but I do remember Womblemania. Then we decided we'd had enough manias. 

The point of the Daleks is that the actual physical nuts and bolts look and feel of the design is incredibly cool. I don't know why "thing which glides", "thing which has no legs", "thing with hidden wheels" is such a great idea, particularly. But when the Daleks are being well operated, gliding around in formation in Planet of the Daleks or the bits that are left of Masterplan, it never fails to make me smile. 

R.I.P, Ray Cusick. The nicest, most modest, most deserving Gold Blue Peter Badge Winner I ever saw from some distance on a panel at the National Film Theatre. 

If I told you that there was an axe murderer in the next room and you believed me, you would be scared. If I told you that there was a ghost in the next room and you believed me, you would also be scared. You would be scared of the axe murderer because he might kill you; but you would be afraid of the ghost just because he was a ghost. 

I suppose that most of who hid behind the sofa during Doctor Who were experiencing the second kind of fear. We were afraid of the idea of monsters -- strange weird funny looking things. We weren't following closely enough to know that what was actually frightening about them was that they are a metaphor for anti-Semitism or that they were going to put a neutron bomb in earth's magnetic crust. 

Sofas generally have their backs to the wall. It is more or less impossible to hide behind them.

But there is probably not much point in talking about why, or if, the Daleks are scary. Fifty years of pop cultural history says that these rather old fashioned outer space robot people are the most evil creatures ever invented. 

Nothing wrong with a baddie who is pretty much just a symbol for evil. That's what we have baddies for. 

Evil. Cool. Metaphorical. 

When we first met them, rather before my time, they were intolerant, inflexible, bigoted people in general, and the Nazis in particular, although they were also pathetic, little school bullies hitting back at the Thals because the Thals hit them first. By the time I arrived, they were a nasty fascist technological empire, which was a metaphor nasty, fascist, technological empires. This week it turns out that they are all about the-evil-that-we-carry-within-us, or part of a discourse about what-it-means-to-be-human and, in particular what-it-means-to-be-the-doctor and what-it-means-to-be-a-human-asking-what-it-means-to-be-the doctor. Which is what Doctor Who is now about, and the only thing it can be about it. And I think that it very nearly almost works. 

Daleks hate; humans love; when humans are turned into Daleks, all the love is taken out of them; which is why we have a lady who likes soufflé who who has been turned into a Dalek, except she still loves, so she hasn't. 

And the Daleks admire the Doctor, because of the purity of his hate for them. Which, of course, was a big, big, clever, clever twist in 2003, when the only-Dalek-in-the-universe turns round and says to the just-turned-out-to-be-the-only-Time-Lord-in-the-Universe "You. Would. Make. A. Good. Dalek." But now it's just one of the things which is taken for granted and has to be re said in every episode. 

I preferred the model in those Big Finish Dalek Empire plays, which argued that the Daleks understand love very well: love is not that much different from hate. It's friendship they find completely impossible to understand.

If you were following the plot, then part of what made the Daleks frightening was the idea that the creature inside the machine was so terrifying and disgusting that you could hardly bare to look at it. The dying Dalek's claw coming out from under the cloak in episode 2 of Dead Planet caused more nightmares than a hundred extras going into negative and falling down. 

Season 1 of New Who gave us a single Dalek that could threaten a big military installation and wipe out a whole city of it escaped, and finished on a pretty convincing Dalekageddon; Season 2 reduced them to silly robots trading camp insults with Cybermen; by the end of Season 3 they were back to their accustomed roles as canon fodder who can't shoot straight and can be picked off by any amateur with a zap gun. I suppose this is part of the process: figures of horror in Dead Planet, mocked in Dalek Invasion of Earth, comic relief in the Chase; evil fascists in Genesis, hopeless slaves of logic who can't go upstairs in Destiny. 

But it is really really odd that Asylum of the Daleks, the nineteenth  story whose stated aim is to make the Daleks scary again, has so little confidence in the creatures that it treats them mostly as figures of fun and offers us completely different things to be scared of. 

The "fear" element comes from a space ship full of undead humans; a sort of combination of the spacesuit zombies from Silence in the Library and the Are You My Mummy zombie from the Empty Child. It's not actually scary, of course but it uses images which are "coded" a frightening. The "fear" element comes from the use of images which are "coded" as frightening. 

Children are told from an early age that ghosts are scary, which means, I think, that they play a game in which when one of their friends puts a sheets over their head they have permission to scream. (I have literally no idea what a sheet-ghost is meant to represent, by the way: a corpse in a burial shroud?) TV shows like Scooby Doo and Rentaghost are based on the idea that ghosts are frightening, but treats them as funny. If they actually thought about what a ghost represented, they might find it sad or upsetting, but they wouldn't necessarily be scared. A lot of people felt that the movie version of Caspar the Friendly Ghost-- in which Caspar is the ghost of a specific boy who has died -- took all the fun out of Caspar. My sister was inexplicably annoyed when I referred to the cartoon that my nephew and niece were enjoying as "Caspar the Dead Baby". 

The one bit which is actually "scary" in the sense of possibly catching us an making us think "that's a nasty idea" is the conceptual, mind control twist: the idea that Amy might be turning into a Dalek without realizing it, the idea that you could be losing your memory and not knowing. This is scary. But that has nothing particularly to do with Daleks. The idea of the Daleks sucking out people's emotions so they become Daleks is not really the Daleks usual schtick. It's much more a Cyberman thing. 

So maybe I'm actually misreading this. Maybe I am assuming that because there is so much talk about Amy and Rory, that the episode is about Amy and Rory. But perhaps it isn't. Perhaps Steven Moffat is one of us, and is really interested in the Daleks because they are scary-cool, and perhaps the object of the exercise is to show us as many Daleks and as many types of Daleks as he possibly can. Perhaps he is putting in the human back story to misdirect grown ups in the expectation that is target audience (eight years olds and geeks) will identify it as mushy stuff and ignore it. 

Fans always ask "Will there be any old monsters". John Nathan-Turner, in the olden days, took this to mean that fans liked the idea of old monsters and started to put lots of old monsters into Doctor Who. If the new race of snarling fibreglass fascist stormtroopers had the label "cybermen" on them, then this was fantastically exciting. Never mind that they had nothing to do with any previous version of the monster. They were Cybermen. The show was Honouring Its Past.

So: can we tune in, sit back, geek out, and love Asylum of the Daleks because there are mad Daleks, emperor Daleks, a whole parliament of Daleks, references to previous Dalek stories and a really, really silly joke about eggs. A thousand Daleks are a thousand time more exciting than one Dalek, yes? No?

Asylum of the Daleks (7.1)

But your anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam
And I wouldn't trade your life for one day of home

I've been watching Merlin. It's often funny and sometimes exciting. 

There was an episode in Season 4 where Morgana Le Baddie stole a magic cup from the druids. The magic cup made her soldiers immortal, as long as it had some of their blood in it. So Merlin had to go and upset the magic cup. There were lots of scenes of knights fighting immortal soldiers, which were quite fun, but everything depended on Merlin. (The fate of a great kingdom rests in the hands of a young boy, apparently.) 

Art is contrivance; this kind of thing is certainly contrived. It's how computer games are written: you want the hero to be rushing through the castle avoiding immortal knights, so you come up with a silly plot device to give him an excuse to do that, as opposed to working out what the baddie might plausibly try to do and then work out what Merlin might plausibly try to do to stop her. 

But throughout the episode, I was thinking: Merlin is trying to spill the blood from Morgana le Baddie's magic cup. I wonder how Merlin is going to get past all those immortal knights and spill the magic cup. 

I get Merlin.

I know what Merlin's for. Saturday tea-time fantasy for kids and big kids. The characters are well drawn enough for me to care. I've even come to terms with the way they say "And I'm like, so, "fie on thee", innit?" At first I pretended it was a way of showing that the young people spoke a mix of Latin and French, or possibly French and Vernacular. Now I think it's just the way speak on Merlin. 

But Doctor Who? I love it to bits, but I increasingly just don't get it. 

The Doctor and Amy are climbing down the rope ladder. 

I catch myself thinking: "Why are they here?" 

I realise I have no idea. I wonder if it matters. I think probably not. 

I think they have beamed down to a planet full of mad Daleks to do something real important. 

And there sure are lots of Daleks. 

And there are little in-jokes for Doctor Who fans. (That's me! They still believe in me!) The doors in the corridors are triangular -- Dalek shaped -- not human shaped. And the surveillance cameras are shaped like Dalek eye-stalks. And the mad Daleks look like all the different Dalek designs there have been right back to the 1960s, which is kind of cool, but also kind of an admission that the recent vacuum cleaner / tellytubby design was a mistake, which is a shame, because I rather liked it. 

I do not know why there is a Dalek parliament when up to now they have always been an Empire. I just watched the footage of the two old special effects guys talking about making the big battle from Evil of the Daleks in 196something (a DVD extra on Revelation of the Daleks.) They refer to the Emperor Daleks as the Dalek Queen. That's about right, isn't? Mad insects? The Red Tellytubby Dalek was said to be the Drone. I suppose if RTD could make them religious fantastics, SM can make them democrats. Evil democrats. Evil fascist democrats. 

What are we doing here? Trying to shut down a force field, I think, because a space ship crashed through and made a big hole in it, so all the mad Daleks could get out and the sane Daleks would like to blow up the whole planet, but they can't because of the force field, which can only be shut down from the inside and Daleks are too scared to shut it down themselves so they kidnap their worst enemy and force him to do it and also his best friends because they know he needs friends and there is a lady who is going to be the next companion who keeps going on about soufflé. 

So, anyway, the Doctor and Amy are on the end of a rope, and it isn't about why they are there or if it makes sense, because Doctor Who is not about scaring kids with scary monsters (the Daleks are not scary) or exciting excitable geeks with cool hardware (the hardware is undeniably cool). All that is just a mechanism to get to the big Soap Opera moment.

Watching Doctor Who because the Daleks are scary-cool? That's crazy talk. 

Thing is, I think I get soap opera. I may not listen to much Archers or any Eastenders, but I think I get what it's for and things I like like Spider-Man and X-Men and Buffy are basically soaps. 

You have a character. And they have very strong, very fixed personalities; and each character has a very strong, very fixed relationship to each other character. And something happens which disrupts the status quo, and everyone worries about it and talks about it a lot and then they come up with a solution which either creates a new status quo or returns us to the original status quo; so there is perpetual change but perpetual staying the same. Bruce is the studious, well-behaved one, but this week, he doesn't hand in his homework and skips school. And it turns out that this is because he has a crush on Sheila who's not so clever and hangs out with the wrong crowd. So there is conflict between Bruce, the tough teacher who wants to kick Bruce out of school, and Bruce, the young teacher who wants to give him another chance. So maybe in the end Sheila, Bruce's sister, goes and talks to Sheila and persuades her that she's no good for Bruce and should break up with him. So the status quo is no re-established except that Bruce is now studious but sad, which makes him vulnerable to Bruce, who wants him to experiment with marijuana. (On Radio 4, that would be six months of story; in Australia, it would all be sorted out before the first advert break.) But it always cycles back to where it started. The characters don't change: if they did it wouldn't be a soap opera it would be a novel. 

Back in Season Five the Doctor whisked Amy away to have wonderful adventures on the night before she was supposed to be marrying Rory. Her whole fictional being is defined by this moment: will she stay with the Doctor forever, or go back and marry Rory. (There was an episode helpfully entitled Amy's Choice to clarify the point.) We know what she will eventually chose -- the rules of the show say she can't stay with the Doc forever; but we know that if she actually makes up her mind, she'd be out of the series. So she has to be permanently frozen in the moment of not making the choice. 

And, as we are going to carry on seeing, the choice between "staying with the Doctor" and "leaving the Doctor" is now what Doctor Who is about and almost the only thing Doctor Who is about. 

In The One With the Cybermats, last season, we discovered that since the Doctor left them on earth, some time had passed. Amy had become a successful model. Rory was still a nurse, but was still happy being a nurse. 

If this were a soap-opera we would have seen how Amy's glamorous lifestyle puts pressure on her relationship with Rory, and we would see this come to a crisis, and there would be a resolution. (Option 1: Rory quits nursing and becomes a model. Option 2: Amy quits modelling and becomes a nurse Option 3: They have a chat and discover that they are both in fact pretty happy with the way things are.) In fact, we skip over the whole soap opera and rejoin the story when Amy and Rory have already split up. The whole edifice of insane Daleks is only there to engineer the big scene when Amy and Rory realise they want to get back together so they can carry on failing to decide whether to stay with the Doctor or have a settled life at home. 

Because that's all they can do: that's all that ever happens to them. Their entire raison d'etre is to be perpetually separating and perpetually realising how much they love each other. They are like Itchy and Scratchy, never dead, but perpetually frozen in an infinite number of variations on the moment of killing each other. 

The Doctor talks about his life being made up of a succession of high points and interesting days -- living outside of time he can skip the boring ones. And this is increasingly SMs philosophy of narrative: straight from point A to point C without any need to pass through point B. We don't see Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall; we don't even see Humpty Dumpty having a great fall. We just see him in an endless state of having just fallen and being put back together again. 

But point B is where everything happens. Point B is what we normally mean by story. 

When Amy notices that the Doctor notices that she and Rory have fallen out, she also notices him straightening his bow tie. Straightening your bow tie is the sort of mannerism any actor might give a bow tie wearing character, like Captain Picard pulling his tunic down in ever scene of Star Trek. First the audience starts to notice it; then the characters start to notice it; then the writers start to notice it; and if you are not careful the whole character becomes Bow Tie Straightening Guy. When Amy tells the Doctor that she and Rory have actually divorced, and the Doctor is sad, she says that it isn't something he can sort out as easily as straightening his bow tie. 

But when it turns out that there are only two oxygen masks between the three of them, Rory says that he loves Amy more than Amy loves him, which causes Amy, who divorced him not an hour and a half ago, to say that in fact she loves him more than he loves her which is WHY she divorced him. She loves him so much that she thinks he'll be happier without her, because (pulled out of thin air) he wants kids and she can't have kids due to (pulled out of thin air) what eye-patch lady did to her last season. So they are both trying to give the other one the only oxygen mask, and it turns out that in fact there are two oxygen masks because the Doctor doesn't need an oxygen mask due his special Time Lords Lungs so the whole silly mess with the divorce is solved. And as Rory goes off and sells his watch to buy Amy some hair and Amy goes off and sells her hair to buy Rory a watch, we get a close up of the Doctor straightening his bow tie; from which we infer: he deliberately gave them the impression that there was only on oxygen mask, in order to force them to admit that they are still in love. He planned the whole thing. He did sort it out. All of which, you have to infer from the tie straightening motion. Which, on a first viewing, I didn't. 

They aren't oxygen masks but special time lordy bracelet thingies to counter act special turn-humans-into-daleks-pixie dust. Oxygen masks will do. 

Is there a good literary critical word for overloading things with symbolism in this way? Over-coding, perhaps, or entanglement? Is this the sort of thing which young people who are used to moving pictures find very intuitive, and us oldies struggle with? Or perhaps it is there to be spotted by people who are nearly as old as Doctor Who, and completely missed by the young people who may be visually literate but only ever half-watch anything, having a blackberry in their eye and an an Ipad in their ear? I'm not saying it isn't terribly, terribly clever. 

Or is it, like, "There never was a tie-straightening scene, Andrew, oh ghohhhd if you want Doctor Who to be like Crime and Punishment go and read Crime and Punishment and stop finding things in a kids cartoon show that are Just. Not. There." 

I do not want Doctor Who to be like Crime and Punishment. I want Doctor Who to be like Merlin. What I would like best of all would be for it to be like Doctor Who.