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...."

continues.....

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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.

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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...

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Fish Custard (4)

Or take the one with the statues. It's a "sequel" to Blink and "brings back" the Weeing Angels which were one of the "scariest" monsters in New Who.

Actually, the minute you start describing things as "scary" you've side-slipped away from the actual TV series and into another virtual Who clone in idea space -- "that programme which children watch from behind the sofa". Kids can be scared by anything and everything – Big Bird and Laurel and Hardy and the India Paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- but a glance at, say, Robot would be enough to blow away the theory that Doctor Who was always and irreducibly a horror show. The editors of Doctor Who Adventures, Radio Times, and other children's publications continue to ask whether this story is, or is not, as scary as that story. But they all agree that the scariest story ever was Blink, and that Blink was, coincidentally, the work of the present incumbent, sir, Mr Moffat, sir.

Blink was a good story. (I think that it was a very good story, but dissent from those who think that it was a very, very good story.) But the Angel itself was a very small part of the success of Blink. Steven had, in fact, written an angel-free version of the story in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual. The story was – like The Gel In the Fireplace and the Eleventh Hour – and, come to think of it, like Silence in the Library and Curse of Fatal Death and everything else the Moff has ever written – about Time Travel. Not from the point of view of historically accurate portraits of Winston Churchill, or even from the point of view of marrying your Grandad and stepping on a butterfly, but from the point of view of events confusingly starting to happen in the wrong order. Which, come to think of it, is what Time Travel in the context of a story pretty much has to be: a way of disrupting the narrative, foreshadowing, putting effects before causes and carts before horses.

So Blink is about people who are young at one moment and old the next because they've been sent backwards in time; and the Doctor trying to get a message to himself about something which hasn't happened yet. The Statues concatenate all the wibbly wobbley timey wimey ideas that Moffat wants to muck around with into a bloody great lump of plot device. Making them statues which can only move when nobody's looking at them (manifestly a stupid idea) is as good a way as any to signify to us that they are only a plot device and we shouldn't waste too much time thinking about them. It would be a bit like giving your hero a huge and inexcusable lump of technology and signalling the fact that it's never going to be explained by making it look less like a space ship and more like, I don't know, a phone box. (People who have invented something called a Doctor Who Universe go on and on about something called a Chameleon Circuit and thereby miss the absurdity, and, arguably, the point.)

So: bringing back the Angels is pretty much a category mistake, as if there was anything that was bringable backable. Everything which was angelly about them – the fact that they don't move (by the end of the second episode, they have) and the fact that they send people back in time (these ones don't) the fact that you can defeat them by making them look at each other (you can't, for some reason) has been dumped. They have randomly acquired new powers. It turns out that whatever carries the image of an angel becomes an angel and it turns out that Angels can turn people's arms to stone and it turns out a bit later that they can't turn people's arms to stone after all but only make people think that they have turned their arms to stone and it turns out that they can talk to people through the bodies of people they've killed which is only a bit identical to the invisible telepathic alien piranhas in the library.

And – you know where I am about say next, don't you? – none of this matters in the least.

My god-daughter says that she had "always wanted" to see a story with the Angels in it. Well, three years is a long time in television and an awfully long time when you're ten. Having always wanted to see the Angels in 2010 is no odder than having always wanted to see Yeti and Cybermen in 1973. (I never did see any Yeti.) The Angels are things which happened in Doctor Who a long time ago, and things which everyone knows are really, really, scary, even people too young to have seen them the first time round.

The story was as everyone has boringly but correctly persisted in pointing out, a remake of Aliens, plucky marines being picked off one by one by indestructible monsters. The idea of space marines fighting statues that don't move is manifestly absurd. The imagery of stone angels massing in spaceship corridors is manifestly absurd. And that's fine. Daleks are manifestly absurd. Daleks never made the slightest sense outside of the corridors of Skaro. Angels are Moffat's Daleks. They are the scariest thing in the universe because Moffat says they are the scariest thing in the universe. We have a race memory stretching all the way back to 2007 that says that they are the scariest thing in the universe. Even though they can't go upstairs

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Fish Custard (3)

The One With the Daleks, for example. Yes, it was rushed. Yes, the revelation that Braceman was an android should have come at the end of an episode, when we'd had time to get to know him, not five minutes after we met him for the first time. Yes. there's a sort of glitch in that it took Braceman ten minutes – it's carefully specified in the script as ten minutes – to jury-rig the Spitfires into spaceships, when, even supposing him to be a Dalek supercomputer, it should have taken at least a fortnight. But even that's not the sort of glitch I can bring myself to get really cross about, because it means that the show is being driven by narrative logic, not engineering logic. Given that he's an android with Dalek blueprints it makes sense that he can rustle up something with which to defeat the Daleks. Given that he can, I don't think my enjoyment would have been greatly enhanced by a caption reading "three weeks later, he did."

After 47 years of careful thought, Terry Pratchett has spotted that Doctor Who isn't really science fiction. In other news: Bob the Builder is an inaccurate depiction of the modern building trade.

If what you want is something that you can think of as a little window into a more or less believable universe – one that carries on existing outside of the frame of your TV set – then by all means, go back to your FASA RPG and your New Adventures. You have your reward. But Steven Moffat laid out his stall pretty clearly on Day 1 ("in which Doctor Who comes to the forest and has breakfast"), and on Day 2, ("in which the whole character of the Doctor is defined as 'he can't bear to see children crying'".)

Do you remember that day in ninetyseventysomething when the Test Match was rained off and the BBC put the Peter Cushing Dalek movie on, unscheduled, on Saturday morning? Or the earnest boy in the school blazer perfectly describing how the Doctor had beaten the Daleks in the previous clip, and Michael Rodd saying "Only the Daleks could be so stupid!", patronisingly? Or even the ninetyeightysomething Panopticon which showed the Invasion of Earth movie on Saturday night, and Jeremy Bentham telling the nearly empty hall that they had just relived the days of Dalekmania?

It's all right, I'm shall spare you Yarvelling, Mark Seven, chocolate and mint ice lollies, yoghurt cartons, slot machines, board games.... My point is that the New New Daleks are brighter and shinier and bigger and have deeper voices than the Old New Daleks. They are, as my god-daughter helpfully pointed out, fiercer. The Doctor confronts them in a big, empty white room, and he beats them because they don't know what Jammy Dodgers are and he does. And very pointedly, when the action cuts back to the Cabinet War Rooms, we look at the Doctor confronting the Daleks in black and white, which was how we all first saw the Daleks, in order to make the point that the New New Daleks are much more like the Old Daleks, indeed the Old Old Daleks, than the Old New Daleks ever were. (Notice that the slats have gone and been replaced by those sort of metal collar things which disappeared after The Chase?)

It's like Russell wanted to the Daleks to be sensible, believable, dark, metallic, Klingons that went up stairs and had existential angst and weird religious fanaticism but who were a little bit pathetic even -- especially -- when they were trying to destroy the whole of Life, the Universe and Everything. Steven wants them to be great big exciting toys in a flying saucer with an interior that looks like how the interiors of flying saucers ought to look, and unceremoniously wipes out the Rusellite half-Daleks in a single scene.

The Daleks aren't serious believable alien life forms: they just aren't. They're 1950s outer space robot people with an impractical design: more like Smash Martians than Borg.

I didn't think that the Doctor was really going to destroy planet Earth, of course, but I did feel that he was being presented with a moral dilemma that was a little on the hard side and he did seem to have to think about it a little bit.

It really is beside the point to say that it wasn't a very believable portrayal of Winston Churchill. There are people out there who think that Doctor Who ought to be about time travel -- that a story set in the War ought to be a story set in the accurate historical War and that cave men should speak with the kind of received pronunciation BBC accents that modern anthropology tells us that cavemen really spoke with. Russell was wrong to say that Doctor Who historicals should be like Horrid History books. Horrid History books are mainly about executions and toilet paper. But Doctor Who historicals have always been set in the world of English school history text books. This may not have been Winston Churchill, but it was Winnie. Not true, necessarily, but certainly memorable.

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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.