Shall We Destroy?

Stuart Manning

2012-01-12T12:39:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of recent updates (I've been posting more on my film/TV blog, Wild Horses of Fire!) - however, The Wedding of River Song and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe reviews will be forthcoming in the probably-quite-immediate future. And after that I've got a bazillion other reviews lined up, of all manner of Who-ish marvellousness - so fear not!

Reaction: CLOSING TIME

2011-12-07T17:56:00.001Z

Written by Gareth Roberts, directed by Steve Hughes, 2011

Being a fan of The Lodger, I was very muchhoping this’d make a hat-trick of high-quality consecutive episodes, yet in theend it erred somewhat too much on the side of mundanity. Not quite as funny orlikeable as the previous Colchester-set offering, the general tone is undoubtedlycongenial, but let down by the marginalised and somewhat ineffectual Cybermen. Seriously:impassive robot men with the strength of ten who make people like themselves –this stuff should write itself, yet the Cybermen have nary a handful ofeffective stories under their shiny belts (for my money, Tomb and The Invasion,and, er…?), and, while it kind of worked in The Lodger, the love-conquers-allending is pretty weak; conversion is thething that should give the Cybermen a frisson of abjection, so to have the processovercome by fatherly affection is just… weak. Having said that, it’scharacteristically snappy and fun, and I think will no doubt repay multipleviewing, but seems a little bit nothingy at this point in the season.

I know nothing about the finale beyondhaving seen the RT cover [at the time of originally writing this], so I know Amyand Rory are on hiatus here rather than gone for good already – and let’s faceit, they were never going to be written out at the end of an inter-season story– however, I quite like the disruption of the norms of companions’ coming andgoing by having them not appear. Craig makes a surprisingly good surrogatecomp, though it makes me realise, given the Tenth Doctor’s multiple pairings(…slag), how much I’d like to see Eleven in the context of someone new.

As for the coda… Well, let’s leave thatuntil after The Wedding of River Song…though it was nice to see Alex Kingstonget to do some Actual Acting for once, as opposed to her usual vamping.

On the possibility of a David Yates feature film

2011-11-25T14:35:00.001Z

Christ, I’m sick of hearing about the sodding thing already.Mooted cinematic Doctor Who outingshave so consistently gone nowhere that this feels too abstract to really believe that infour years I might be here reviewing it.

But – regardless of the actual likelihood of this wholething coming to aught – my initial response, that refitting Doctor Who for a global audience will nodoubt be seen to require some major work, fills me with horror. But, actually,there’s a lot about the template Davies established (and which Moffat has done littleto change, fundamentally) that I don’t like in the present incarnation of theseries, so the idea of an entirely fresh approach could in fact yield somethingamazing, and perhaps unprecedented.

Could.

Maybe a ‘new take’ (in the sense that the UNIT era, orseason 18, or the Cartmel seasons – and numerous others – were relativedepartures at the time) is quite exciting – there just seems to be an arroganceimmediately apparent in Yates’ patronising ‘they did a good job, but we’regoing to do something better’ implication… which reet puts my back up. On anentirely first-impressions basis, I’m feeling maybe it’ll be a godsend if thisis entirely separate from the series, and even the existing canon/continuity(rendering it as apocryphal as the Dalek movies).

Obviously, speculation at this stage on whether a film mightbe a continuation of the series, or replace it (at least temporarily), or existentirely separately, is patently futile, so let’s put that to one side. More tothe point, a film, at least if done relatively straightforwardly – eccentric,mysterious time traveller fights aliens – could be great. But David Yates' hand on the tillerdoesn’t fill me with massive amounts of confidence. Okay, he’s done some worthyTV, and Harry Potter admittedly isn’tmy bag, but he doesn’t strike me as a director with the individualistic ororiginal sensibility that a project like this might really benefit from. (The Harry Potter movies’ self-importance andsense of undeserved weightiness is actually not a million miles away from theTVM. And if you've read my thoughts on that, well– ALARM BELLS, to put it mildly.) Of course, from an industry perspective, whatyou could politely term ‘a safe pair of hands’ (ie, not a Terry Gilliam) isalways going to be the preferred route – the path of least resistance - but creatively, that thinking is death.

In a period characterised by the bastardisation ofanything vaguely worthwhile (remaking TheWicker Man, The Ladykillers, Akira, Let the Right One In, Straw Dogs, blah blah blah…), I can’t beginto imagine how horrendous a big-screen ‘reimagining’ has the potential to be. Eitherthe excessive, pointless backstory-wank of the post-Survival movie pitches, or some ‘postmodern’ Bewitched-style metatextual abortion where ‘the Doctor’ is reallyPeter Cushing’s son. Pretending to be an alien. (Or something.)

I shudder to think the liberties that might be taken in theinterests of making the property accessible to a global audience to whom Doctor Who means nothing. If thetwenty-first century revival has shown us anything, it’s that respect for theexisting series is not only possible in light of an effective reboot, butdesirable in terms of depth of story and also fan/audience goodwill. There’sdefinitely an unfortunate potential for a movie to try to define itself as aseparate entity from the series (even if it does prove to be ostensibly linkedto the existing continuity) with gratuitous redesigns and rethinking ofestablished elements. (Which seems a bit pointless given the infinitepossibility for satisfying adventures within the ‘mad man with a box’template.) I just really hope things aren’t changed things for the sake ofchange, or that they're at least justified narratively if they are.

Also, in structural terms, with so much riding on a (bycomparison to TV) large budget and a short running time, I can imagine aone-off Doctor Who movie becoming hamstrung by trying to represent the entirefranchise with a standalone hour-and-a-half story, and ending up trying to beall things to all people and doing too much. This could be ugly. Given DoctorWho’s ability (in a series) to change from episode to episode, maybe the way toequal that in film would be a wide-ranging, multi-location story akin toMoffat’s finales. It would also be good to see the budget used for foreignlocation filming outside of the series’ means, but I imagine a biscuit-tinEngland is more likely, given its ‘Englishness’ will no doubt be used as aninternational selling point.

More generally, in terms of money, I’ve repeatedly saidthat, in recent years, my favourite stories have been the lower-budget onesthat have to get by on invention rather than money, so the prospect of a big budgettake makes my heart sink. Though, on the (admittedly, rather meagre) plus side, a cast of actors of the calibre ofMaggie Smith, Richard Harris, John Hurt, Fiona Shaw, et al, in Doctor Who, would be pretty nifty.

So, I dunno. I’m not actually as absolutely scandalised bythis announcement as I could be – although apathy could be doing its bit there.A big, fun, exciting, scary, mad adventure (which doesn’t mess up or,necessarily, even engage with existing continuity) – sounds like it should beeasy. Just as long as it’s not mired in continuity, backstory, infodumps. OrGallifrey.

(I’ve seen a lot of messageboard comments suggesting pre-100,000 BC adventures. To which I canonly say: please, god, no. Not only because of my massive affection for theearliest seasons, but because (DUH!) elucidating origins that have remainedopaque for 50 years would be even more of a disaster than, say, ahem, opening astand-alone movie with a regeneration. More prosaically, the First Doctordoesn’t even like humans at the time of that first story, and he’s certainlynot a moral crusader at that point, so how would earlier stories work? AHartnell lookalike collecting soil samples hardly screams moneyspinner.)

I will monitor development with… trepidation.

Oh, and, okay, while we’re at it: the inevitable casting mêlée.The one slightly interesting suggestion that I’ve heard so far (read as: whichwill never, ever happen) is Andy Serkis. I’d go with Toshiro Mifune, myself. But he’s dead. Or take a punt on Klaus Kinski. But he’sinsane and dead. Or Tilda Swinton.But that would be too ‘edgy’. Or Simon Russell Beale. But he’s rotund, 50, andno-one knows who he is. More realistically, Chiwetel Ejiofor could be good.Maybe Peter Capaldi, or Dominic West (a burlier Doctor?). Just no-one boringlyyoung, bland and good-looking – ta.

Play with Captain Jack!

2011-11-21T14:55:00.001Z

Just put a few Character Options action figures on Amazon Marketplace, y'all, in addition to DWMs, books, videos, etc. Check them out!

Dan McDaid

2011-11-03T20:22:00.000Z

I haven't been following the DWM comic of late, I'm ashamed to say, so I don't know what story this is from, but... I like it. That is all. It's the TARDIS going freaky - that's cool, is it not? And at least I'll be able to catch up now the trade collections are being restarted. (HUZZAH!) But, yeah - Dan McDaid's art is a funny one. I have a lot of time for the comic, and I'm always happy when they branch out and take a punt on artists less concerned with realism than the prevailing style of, say, Martin Geraghty - having said that though, I wasn't massively enamoured when Hotel Historia came along, which just seemed a bit too scratchy and messy... But, having become more familiar through his blog with his style I'd certainly be up for the chance to get round to reading this strip. And he created Majenta Pryce. RESPECT.*

Next Time: CLOSING TIME

*...Sorry!

Reaction: THE GOD COMPLEX

2011-11-02T15:19:00.001Z

Written by TobyWhithouse, directed by Nick Hurran, 2011

TWO IN A ROW! Well, bugger me.

I was quite a fan of Being Human… to start with… even if itdid quickly degrade into humourless self-importance - so I’ve always hoped TobyWhithouse’d have it in him to deliver. Much like The Girl Who Waited, arelatively tight, small-scale setting and premise is a massive benefit, as isthe fact that Whithouse isn’t working to some horribly hackneyed alien-invasiontemplate. I can’t help thinking in some ways that DW is at its best when takinga slightly mental concept and running with it, rather than just indulging inbog-standard robots-and-spaceship sci-fi-ery.

There’s quite a comic book feel to the story’s premise –nightmares in hotel rooms! – so it’s especially striking that this is thenbuilt up into something with a certain amount of genuine emotional kick. Thecoda may seem a little out of nowhere but works because it fits thematically,while of all the new series’ would-be companion figures, Rita is quite lovely,and feels real, and as such there is a weight to her death that, say, a morecontrived character like Lorna Bucket didn’t achieve.

Stylistically, the B&W CCTV footage and various othercamera affects are perhaps slightly overegged, but are unusual enough to givethe story a unique feel (and it’s certainly welcome to see the show developinga visual identity beyond soap-style point-and-shoot).

Also! ‘A distant cousin of the Nimon’! I love the strange senseof validation when obscure stories are referenced on primetime BBC1.

Get them while they're hot!

2011-10-21T21:31:00.000+01:00

Public service announcement:

Just put a couple of years' worth of Tennant-/Smith-era Doctor Who Magazine back-issues on Amazon Marketplace: check! Them! Out!

There's also assorted Doctor Who books, including a copy of Gareth Roberts' The Well-Mannered War - have a scroll through!

Next Time: THE GOD COMPLEX

Mel Vogt

2011-10-19T00:00:00.001+01:00

I have little time for fan-art. And genre mash-ups between shows are par for the course in that sort of arena. So-oo, I should hate this... But, I only just discovered Adventure Time (I was so excited, I even wrote about it on my not-we page) and I like it enough that I actually think this is pretty cute.

More of Vogt's work here.

Reaction: THE GIRL WHO WAITED

2011-10-18T13:05:00.001+01:00

Written by Tom MacRae, directed by Nick Hurran, 2011

Okay, so, despite the white void and white robots, this isn’t 'Return to the Land of Fiction'. But – that’s okay, because this is the good stuff. And, yeah – the miraculousness of that doesn’t escape me, coming as it does from the writer of The Age of Steel – aka, THE WORST NEW SERIES STORY EVER.

I’m wary of openings as hackneyed as ‘the Doctor promises a location which he doesn’t deliver,’ but this makes it all the more astounding that The Girl Who Waited has almost immediately become located alongside my favourite episodes of Moffat’s era, Amy’s Choice and The Doctor’s Wife. That is (the latter's fannish grandstanding aside), stories which rely on strong premises and sense of place over flimsy ‘return of the Daleks!’-style concepts; which hold to their internally consistent rules (the failing of Night Terrors); and which are low-key enough to be able to explore that situation.

It’s no coincidence - and I'm aware I always bang on about this - that the ‘cheap’, limited episodes are the ones which are often most satisfying, having as they do to rely on compelling storytelling rather than sloshing money around on special effects. Having said that, this episode does look good, but all the more for being as controlled as the plot itself is. Equally, there really isn’t a lot to the plot, but, akin to mysteriously-opening stories like The Space Museum or The Web Planet, the situation is opaque enough to remain interesting and not develop in an entirely predictable way.

Plus, a major point in its favour: a DIY-samurai Amy, taking a leaf out of River/Liz 10’s book – fabulous! (ACTION FIGURE!) The makeup is even nicely underdone, while her hatred of the Doctor and her embittered outlook on life is convincingly brutal. And the climactic fast/slow robot slice-and-dice is pretty sexy.

The idea of characters ‘waiting’ has recurred repeatedly with Amy and Rory, but rather than feeling repetitious, it’s become a trope that lends some continuity to the characters, and is genuinely expanded upon here rather than simply being referred back to as a smug little nod. The various moral dilemmas here also don’t seem false or rote either, and the emotion seems to develop naturally - as opposed to the inevitable re-establishement of the ideal (and highly predictable) status quo in Night Terrors.

Obviously emotionalism has become a tenet of the revivied series, yet often its development can seem as textbook as a lazy pre-titles death, so it’s something of a joy when that emotionalism creates something genuinely moving, given how absurd a series it is we’re talking about.

I don’t have a great deal to say about The Girl Who Waited because I liked it so much it seems counterproductive to pick over it too much. But, a sincere development of Rory and Amy’s relationship is always going to be welcome, as is a return to a more authentically ‘adult’ tone adult tone. On this evidence – unlikely though it feels to be typing this – Tom MacRae is more than welcome to return for future seasons.

(Also, the reference to ‘Disneyland, Clom’ made me laugh more than anything else so far this season.)

Dan Hipp

2011-10-11T18:05:00.001+01:00

I love illustrators who work in really bold,distinctive styles, and especially given his unashamed pop-cultural glee (Tintin vs Aliens, anyone?) Dan Hipp's work is consistently exhilarating and effortlesslycool. So, I love that he’s done a Eleventh Doctor illustration, butconsidering there’s so much that could be done with Doctor Who, I wish he’d done… more.

Loads and loads of other stuff here. (Warning: it's quite addictive.)

Next Time: THE GIRL WHO WAITED

Reaction: NIGHT TERRORS

2011-10-10T12:38:00.001+01:00

Written by Mark Gatiss, directed by Richard Clark, 2011

As this is the sort of second-tier episode we’ve seen somany times before, why isn’t it atleast proficient? (And given that no-one has a good thing to say about FearHer, why sanction something that comes across as little more than a rehash?) Inthe face of these seasons’ increasingly baroque approach to arcs, the idea ofstories based round relatively basic scenarios is an appealing one (not becauseMoffat’s approach is ‘too’ complex, simply because the show is increasinglyappearing rather too desperate to impress)… But despite how easy that sounds,Night Terrors doesn’t entirely deliver.

I’m sure Mark Gatiss is lovely fellow – but I don’t rate himas a writer. Not least since his brand of unreconstructed ‘trad Who’ grates somuch, as it’s almost entirely founded on a spurious good-old-daysbehind-the-sofa nostalgia, which seems to necessitate the regulars being splitup, and liberal amounts of textbook corridor-wandering. Let’s Kill Hitler mayhave been almost absurdly batshit crazy, but at least its melange of variedlocations and flashbacks is inestimably more ambitious than a script like this.It reeks of wannabe ‘classic storytelling’ – yet despite the familiarity of itscomponent parts, Gatiss manages to make his story both wildly ‘untidy’ (despiteits generally simplistic premise in practise it seems weirdly overcomplicated),yet also rather too slight. The SJA-style ‘he’s an alien’ justification for thewhole situation, and its saccharine happy ending are pretty bit weak, too (well,happy ending until the greasy landlord comes to collect, I imagine).

Overwhelmingly though, this is a bit of a too-transparentattempt to ‘do a scary one’ – though at least this belies and contrasts theopener’s rollicking broadness. The dolls are pretty freaky (though who’dgive a child a house with figures like that in the first place?!), though anold dark house and disembodied child laughter are ridiculously old hat.Visually, it’s a shame they didn’t make more of the(obvious-from-the-wooden-pan) dollshouse, plumping for location filming ratherthan a set which could’ve more realistically replicated the scaled-downsimplicity of a dollshouse, and made more of the oversized Planet of Giantsprops.

Ultimately its failings are in its lack of cohesion – eventhe various ways in which the incidental characters are taken suggests thestory could’ve done with some judicious tightening up: people being sucked intoa dollshouse: okay (though the lack of reference to the previous story’s miniaturisationmakes its reshuffling pretty obvious) – the lift and the bin bag bit probweren’t necessary.

Where it succeeds is in returning the show to a “could get abus here” location – it’s been a while, and given my initial feelings aboutseries one’s urban locales, it’s unexpectedly agreeable to be back somewhereakin to the Powell Estate, especially in the company of this most whimsical ofDoctors. Less positively, I wondered at the time of A Christmas Carol whetherthe new series’ engagement with child characters (something unknown in the oldseries) would start to get old. It is something of a no-brainer, but I admitI’m starting to become a bit apathetic to it, maybe cos theDoctor-as-oversized-kid is maybe a bit of an over literal representation of hisanti-establishment outsider status.

I’m sure Gatiss has got a good story in him; this just isn’tquite it. As I say, I think the notion of a ‘traditional’ Doctor Who story iskind of a nonsense – but though none of his TV stories have been entirelysuccessful to my mind, it feels like there must be a Doctor Who and theSilurians-style unreconstructed number somewhere in his mind; something that’dwork without being pulled between old-school straight-forward adventure and newseries emotionalism. Or maybe just a full blooded monster story with graveyardsand things. Yeah, there you go: someone pass that brief on: “graveyard andthings” – go!

Elin Jävel

2011-10-07T13:07:00.001+01:00

Apologies for the chopping-and-changing in the design department ('design'; I use the word loosely). I'll get it nailed... One of these days. (Sigh. I hate Blogger.)

But, in the meantime, THIS! This is great. Not only do I love that someone has made a doll of the Eleventh Doctor - and a non-realist one to boot; Character Options have got that covered - but I particularly love that it has the vibe of something that's been lurking at the back of an Eastern European toyshop. For forty years.

(More Deviations by Jävel here.)

Reaction: LET'S KILL HITLER

2011-10-06T00:52:00.002+01:00

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Richard Senior, 2011

Well – I seem to increasingly be saying this about StevenMoffat’s stories, but that was a queer fish. There’s lots of fun to be hadhere, and some lovely moments, but once again we get a rather self-involvedtangle of wrapping-up and foreshadowing played out among the four maincharacters, in a situation which might as well have taken place anywhere. Likemost people, I’m somewhat relieved quite how much the Hitler situation turnedout to be ratings-baiting misdirection, but equally, I’d quite like Moffat toactually deliver an honest-to-goodness plot that occupies definite location,and features more than a handful of very minor characters in addition to theregulars. (Certainly, none of his event episodes have delivered as well as hisfirst finale, which somehow managed to balance scale with a tangible sense ofplot development.)

It’s a concession I’m slightly loathe to make, not leastbecause it was a dynamic I’ve always been so disapproving of in the Davies era,but I suppose this story’s reliance on twists, set-pieces and the laying offuture groundwork is acceptable in a season premiere (well, kind of). It goeswithout saying that the series’ ability to support a story featuring “atime-travelling, shape-shifting robot operated by tiny angry people”, a Hitlercameo, and an evil early Melody and the regeneration into the River we know –and more – is a prime example of Doctor Who’s deliciousness. But, equally –and, I suppose we can again lay this at the door of the ‘event episode’ defence– the series seems to be sliding in a somewhat lighter direction than Moffat’savowed ‘dark fairytale’ mentality might initially have suggested. However, Isay that with no foreknowledge of the remainder of this half-season, so whoknows – it just concerns me somewhat that the Doctor is almost entirely a comicfigure by this point.

As for River, in a way I sort of preferred her as amysterious-but-glam archaeologist, though it’s undeniably good fun to see herpsychopathic programming in action. Mels takes the piss a bit though: she’slike a refugee from some alternative-universe Hollyoaks-demographic version ofthe series. Mainly though, the sudden advent of a character in this way bothreinforces the sense of Moffat’s on-the-hoof manipulation of at least thedetails of his own masterplan, whilst coming across as a contrivance too far.It’d be almost an unforgivable cheat, perhaps only justifiable because itinvolves River, and she can get away with anything.

Case in point: River giving up her regenerative ability tosave the Doctor is pretty neat, anddoesn’t feel like a pat reversal of his death-by-lipstick, but then, River’sTime Lord powers seem a bit too neat to me anyway. (Though the Doctor’sdescription of her as the ‘child of the TARDIS’ goes some way to suggesting asemi-conscious helping hand on the part of the old girl which sits slightlybetter with me that the idea that anyone shagging on board will produce a brandnew Time Lord.)

What else? There are lots of pleasing nods – Rose, Marthaand Donna’s images seemed a bit unnecessary, but the reappearance, evenbriefly, of young Amelia, and the glimpses of Amy and Rory’s pre-DoctorLeadworth lives are appreciated.

However, overall, there’s something quite shonky about thisstory – an uneven, slightly clunky tone, as well as the plot. It feelsslightly, at the moment, like the River/Silence saga might keep on unfolding,forever, in ever more tortuous ways, but I guess when this arc is resolved itmay be easier to accept Let’s Kill Hitler as the balls-to-the-wall romp thatMoffat no doubt intender. And, fair enough.

Also: like the Doctor’s new coat. It’s good. Also, I foundthe Tesser-whatsit’s antibodies hearteningly crap.

NB: I enjoy the tortuousness of Moffat’s arc; but, I have tosay, I kind of hope, next year – are we getting new companions?! – strippingthings back wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome and might be quite refreshing. Theunravelling of River’s identity, her killing of the Doctor, blah blah: as adedicated follower, though it can get a tad overwrought, it’s satisfying towatch it all unravel, but, really, what did a casual viewer think of this?! Ifeel like the aforementioned Big Bang, say, wrapped itself up quite neatly, butin ways self-contained enough to not be entirely baffling.., whereas, this…

'Shall We Destroy?' - reborn!

2011-10-01T02:46:00.000+01:00

Well, mercy me, I'll be goddamned; SWD? has been idle, necessarily, for quite some time - but now, as (I'm sorry to say) I don't have any international jaunts on the horizon (...or a job), I intend to update with something approaching regularity for the foreseeable.

First things first, obviously there's series 6b to get out of the way (but I can't be fagged with Miracle Day...). Then, as I've been suffering classic series withdrawal somewhat, I'm planning on allowing myself a strict regimen of Doctor-by-Doctor stories (as per my previous Ten Stories series) - as a way to avoid spiralling off into an endless spiral of VHS-consumption...

So what else is already on here? Well, there's a handful of articles, of sorts, on DWM's 'Mighty 200' countdown, on the Doctors themselves, on the Doctors' costumes, top novels... Then there's the aforementioned series of Ten Stories; story-by-story reviews of series one and Matt Smith's debut season; a whinge about (old-school) Torchwood masquerading as a review of From Out of the Rain; and standalone reviews of Evil of the Daleks, The Massacre, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, An Unearthly Child, Fang Rock, Paradise Towers, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, The Smugglers, Planet of the Spiders, Revelation of the Daleks, the Voyager and A Cold Day in Hell! comics collections - amongst others. Have a browse.

I've also accumulated a large array of visual apocrypha, with which I plan to continue gradually interspersing the reviews. This one's credited to 'Art Grafunkel' (which I presume is this guy), from a series of unbound Thirteenth Doctor designs, others of which I've posted before - here. A female Doctor with clown makeup,in an African blanket, fishnets, with a sonic staff/spear and aserpentine cybermat. This should be totally absurd, but somehow Ilike it; it has a confidence few of the other unbound Doctors from that‘challenge’ did, both in terms of its visual realisation and inits concept; most of the others where white men in period costumes,so I appreciate the fact that, by comparison, this is a slightlybizarre imaginative leap.

So, SWD? isn't dead. Yet. Enjoy.

(PS - oh, BTW: assorted Doctor Who oddments for sale HERE, on Amazon Marketplace.)

Next Time: LET'S KILL HITLER

2011-09-05T05:18:00.001+01:00

Missing the first half of series six was bad enough, but this is just ridiculous.

(Updates in a few weeks, y'all...)

Reaction: A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR

2011-06-29T01:09:00.003+01:00

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Peter Hoar, 2011

Last update for a while, as I’m going to South America for three months. If I don’t die, I will return to post more in October. Mm, the anticipation’s so palpable, I could bottle it...

Well. Doctor Who has repeatedly confounded expectations this season (at least in the event episodes), and so – again – I find it quite hard to know what to think of this episode. Less a story, as with The Impossible Astronaut, and more a culmination of various plot strands and scene-setting for continued narrative, its resultant lack of resolution renders it somewhat less than the triumphant story it’s been heralded as.

Don't get me wrong - in some ways it’s highly impressive, not least for having a structure pretty much unlike any previous DW story, with its various fleeting visits to disparate locations – in former years the sort of thing only budget-less media like the novels or comics could muster. I absolutely applaud this sort of outside-the-box thinking; DW is all about variety, but stories like The Curse of the Black Spot or The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People belie the possibilities that affords by delivering such staggeringly overfamiliar premises.

In A Good Man Goes to War, though not up with Moffat’s best – or maybe it didn’t feel quite worthy of him for the lack of voices over radios, memorably contrived monsters, or even narrative chicanery – it’s in its ability to prove that Doctor Who’s box of tricks need never be emptied in which it suceeds. Otherwise, there is something lacking to it. Like the season opener, it suffers for its dearth of answers – which, as I don’t really care that much about how a general audience might respond, doesn’t really matter a great deal, as they will presumably come; though we get a couple of biggies here (who the 'impossible astronaut' was and why she could regenerate; River’s identity – more on that later), the basics are somewhat neglected.

For example, the Eye Patch Lady – maybe we’ll get to know more about her, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if the details will be considered unimportant and we’ll have to simply accept that she’s the head of a Doctor-hating organisation… just because she is. This role inevitably brings back memories of Army of Ghost’s Torchwood 1, so perhaps it’s a mercy that that was fumbled so spectacularly (a woman with bad hair in a white room with some soldiers) that this can’t help but have slightly more impact. Still, it is a bit flimsy – a default baddie: a militia on a secret base. But then, coming up with a non world-domination premise is pretty good. The grandeur the episode aspires to, certainly in its first quarter is laudable, but perhaps doesn’t quite come off, and feels almost unbalanced in its size (would, say, the Third Doctor really have bothered to scour the universe and tear battlefleets apart to find Jo Grant? Even if she was carrying Mike Yates’ child).

That aside, Moffat nevertheless makes some of the tricks he’s already previously played seem impressively fresh, like the cameoing guest characters from previous stories; I was somewhat dubious about a surplus of returning monsters (…again), but that he makes this work in a different way than in The Pandorica Opens is quite a thrill. (I was all ready to rant about how no-one really gives two shits about the Silurians or the Sontarans (“Don’t slump; it’s bad for your spine”) being rolled out as a gambit for ratings, so I’m massively appreciative in this instance for an entirely unexpected take on raiding Millennium FX’s storeroom.)

But - while I’m a sucker for glimpses of new characters and situations from Doctor Who’s huge universe, and as charmed as the next ming-mong by the idea of a sword-wielding lesbian Silurian crimefighter in Victorian London, broadly-sketched characters based more in concept than characterisation are symptomatic of – for all the talk of how ‘dark’ the series is becoming – the cartoonish universe Doctor Who inhabits. That it’s hard, for example, to imagine, say, Jago and Litefoot coexisting with Madame Varna, even though they share the same peasouper milieu, goes some way to illustrating how much the series' tone has shifted across the years. As with the lack of answers, or insufficiently developed Actual Plots, the guest characters here do seem rather underwritten and ultimately only really fodder for Character Options (Arthur Darvil even describes it on Confidential as feeling like a dream team of action figures and cartoon characters).

Moving on - as for that revelation (spoilers! Of course): well, River Song’s identity is unsurprisingly a victim of its own expectations. I suppose I was expecting that Moffat’s tortuous imagination would confound us all, so her identity being relatively easy to guess (as one of only a few viable options), certainly given the clues in this episode, is a bit underwhelming. Also - and I don’t know how I feel about this - there’s the fact that her identity doesn’t really change anything…

In a way, I'd've almost preferred that she turned out to have been a baddie or have dubious allegiances, or at least play up here moral ambiguity. The question of her physiognomy does raise some questions, but it’s overshadowed for me by it all seeming slightly cobbled together: Amy and River’s names tie in, but that could be happenstance on Moffat’s part; also, she’s never previously given her parents anything but the most cursory attention, which doesn’t ring true and makes the whole thing feel like a last minute fix. I don’t buy the idea that Moffat is pulling things out of his arse as he goes, but there wasn’t the big, ‘Ah, OF COURSE! It all fits together!’ moment which I was hoping for. (Especially when there’s loose ends like, why did River investigate the child and the spacesuit as if she knew nothing about it?) Also, the effect of the circumstances of her conception seem a bit too easy to me, whereas (perhaps because it hasn’t been the subject of a few years’ speculation) at least the baby’s appropriation as a weapon in a campaign against the Doctor himself is rather neat and satisfying. Though, personally, I thought it’d make most sense for the child in the opener to be River and the Doctor’s.

Still, whatever I feel about River’s identity, it doesn’t invalidate the character, and there’s still interesting things for her to do (killing 'the best man she ever knew'; perhaps even marriage? Which would make Amy and Rory the Doctor’s in-laws…).

At least, though the hyperbole surrounding the Doctor reaches hitherto unseen heights here (something I've been becoming bored with), it’s refreshing to find this story fundamentally engaging with the idea that the Doctor’s self-aggrandisement and ‘impending godhood’ isn’t necessarily the best path along which to take the character. Perhaps disappointing is the total failure of the story to live up to its own bullshit: darkest day? Anger being new? We-ell, not really. That’s the trouble with hype; we’ve seen the Doctor go so much further into dark, vengeful territory in The Waters of Mars and The Family of Blood, while having him confronted with his own failings would be interesting if it hadn’t already been done in former story, and even Journey’s End.

In short… Well, I don’t really know what to think. As with my reaction to The Impossible Astronaut, there’s almost too much detail to take in… but also too little story to be ultimately satisfied. As with Moffat’s earlier contribution to this half of the season, it’s unarguably impressively audacious, and genuinely does new things with the series, certainly ramping the story-arc format to hitherto unseen heights. But, I feel we have to admit that judgement must be deferred until the autumn, when maybe some resolution will retroactively render this mid-season finale a landmark rather than a mildly frustrating curiosity.

More broadly, I’ve come to prefer the finale episodes of the Moffat administration over the dispiritingly soulless affairs they were under Davies, but, still, the thinking that increasing the amount of event episodes with a split season like this equates to a big win seems dubious territory to me; predicating the series around shock tactics and revelations is a dangerous, ever-escalating precedent to set – I’d much rather see storytelling held above attention-seeking twists, which, paradoxically, both court and alienate mainstream audiences (based on mainstream reaction). A Good Man is an exciting, confident episode, but outside of its place in this story arc, one wonders how much merit it’ll have in future; ironically for a hugely hyped EVENT EPISODE, I cant imagine it being held up as a massive classic in the way the more self-contained and satisfyingly standalone Doctor’s Wife could conceivably be.

But, yeah. ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ is a brilliant title, anyway, and given the strength of this half-season’s highs, I’m pretty excited. Only two stories were underwhelming, and generally speaking the remainder more than made up for any shortcomings, delivering some extremely successful and surprisingly challenging entries into Doctor Who’s canon.

But, until then, questions and speculations…

Why’d the church give the child to the Silents to look after? (...I hope there actually is going to be a satisfying answer to this and not just ‘because they did’.)
The deliberately playful intimations of incest or hardcore ‘hanky-panky in the TARDIS’ aside, surely the idea of River growing up as the love interest of someone who’s essentially her godfather is a bit freaky, is it not…?
Initially I didn’t like either “I speak baby” or the idea of Time Lords developing through exposure to the vortex – but, actually, both those ideas do make sense (especially given the seeming existence of a Time Lord rank and then a Gallifreyan hoi-polloi).
Interesting in retrospect seeing the things that have been foregrounded in previous stories – not so much stuff like the Flesh, but the signposting that, say, Amy and Rory do, yes, have a bedroom onboard the TARDIS, etc.
And, most nigglingly - why would the Doctor’s own cot be onboard the TARDIS, hmm? Was William Hartnell dragging it around with him when he decided to nick her (or her him). It doesn’t even make sense that he might have used it for Susan, as she apparently remembered Gallifrey - so who’s this someone else Alex Kingston has let slip it was used for...?

(More questions, here, on Bleeding Cool.)

PS I’m ashamed to say I missed the Silurian cunnilingus gag. What’s wrong with me?!

Reaction: THE REBEL FLESH/THE ALMOST PEOPLE

2011-06-21T02:17:00.002+01:00

Written by Matthew Graham, directed by Julian Simpson, 2011

You can find a version of my review of The Rebel Flesh here, on Kasterborous.

Tempting though it is to simply write “Shit sandwich” in lieu of a proper review, fanboy completism compels me to give it an at least slightly less desultory shot than that.

There’s nothing wrong with these two episodes – well, there is; they’re lazy and inconsistent and poorly developed, but Doctor Who’s been knocking out stories like this since… forever, so it feels a bit churlish to get the claws out. The thing that gets me is that, as showrunner, Steven Moffat can’t fail to be acutely aware of which stories in any given run are going to be the flabby also-rans that no-one’ll bother to rewatch on the DVD boxset. Maybe it’s necessary to throw the audience a bone and deliver some unreconstructed running-around-in-corridors, but… I don’t really by that that should be part of the programme’s structure, or that the series wouldn’t be improved if, as far as possible, it never let its ambition slip as low as this.

Okay, so, given a three out of four hit rate so far this season, and especially having the unenviable task of following up the impeccable Doctor's Wife, The Rebel Flesh suffers from not being an event episode. But then, I’m dubious about the mentality that says ‘event stories’ are fantastically important – I mean, using that phrase to describe the openers and finales where the narrative big-guns are cracked out. But then, title aside, The Doctor’s Wife isn’t easy to pigeonhole as an event episode in that way: no season-long plot strands come together, there’s no revelations about anyone’s character or origins… But it feels special just because it’s not only hugely imaginatiove, but well enough written to do justice to those ideas.

Even accepting the idea that dependable, nuts-and-bolts Doctor Who is desirable, what does this story have to work with? Karma-tempting overconfidence in scientific advances is hardly fresh territory, while having the Doctor wrestle with humanity's potential for inhumanity is becoming something of a shop-worn subgenre in itself – although, in fairness, at least the script attempts to engage with the resulting questions of what it is to be human. Throwing in the ever-present threat of acid is hardly the narrative flourish that might’ve redeemed matters.

In the interests of not being a totally unremitting bastard for a thousand words, Matthew Graham’s second contribution to the series may be unlikely to win many accolades, but despite a slow and somewhat infodump-heavy opening, it at least avoids the schematic seen-it-all-before pitfalls of stories like (most recently) The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. It’s not even the worst story of the season – curseoftheblackspot, cough cough. As the action gives way to a more low-key creepiness – in keeping with season six's increased gothicism – Graham steers the story away from the action end of the Doctor Who spectrum into more engaging territory. The ganger head on a snaking neck – sort of an early-evening take on Cronenberg's version of The Thing – is pretty freaky, but it does feel there's still a lot of untapped potential for clammy who's-who paranoia which isn't entirely satisfied in the first instalment.

Unfortunately, I think any goodwill this territory might’ve clawed back is fairly comprehensibly squandered by The Almost People, which fails utterly to do anything interesting with the story. Again, The Doctor’s Wife plays against it; by comparison, this more straight down the line narrative can't help but feeling naggingly unsatisfying. Similarly, in launching the series with a story that matches or outdoes the complexity and relatively serious dramatic register previously built up over several episodes in previous seasons, it's a slight disappointment to regress (as in The Curse of the Black Spot) to a lighter, less character-driven approach. It's notable also that the more, uh, jobbing writers often fail to capture the regulars so effortlessly. Especially when it comes to the Doctor, unlike when written by Moffat or Gaiman, there is a risk of his becoming a collection of traits and wisecracks rather than a living, breathing interpretation – despite Matt Smith's continued dedication to the character.

Okay, I feel a bit back spewing so much scorn. Perhaps it is too harsh to see The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People as anything other than a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin return to the age-old base under siege format (albeit under siege from within). There are elements which strike on first viewing at least as unconvincing or a little unfortunate: a solar storm? Uh-huh. And pumping acid? From... where, exactly?; the slightly sitcom-ish suddenly-messy TARDIS interior; the-woman-from-Teachers’ abruptly changeable character (surely in a story lazy with doppelgangers, well sketched out characterisation is something of a must?); the two-parter tendency to stretch out a story over double the usual length, rather than sustaining the single-parters’ pace for twice as long; Muse. At least we're given a setting rocking the inherently memorable collision of ancient and technological which has been working since, say, The Ice Warriors’ combination of country mansion and pop-art catsuits. And, at least they didn't miss the ganger-Doctor boat; we haven't had a Doctor-double since... well, okay, since Journey's End. But you can never have too many Doctors.

But then you get the dispiritingly raft of schematic plot points that you can’t help but see coming from a mile off. Male Guest Character #1’s despicably saccharine son; painfully contrived Noble Self-Sacrifices so as to prune the narrative loose ends, rather than resolving it through organic storytelling (and conveniently leaving no doubles) so as to prune the narrative loose ends, rather than resolving it through organic storytelling (and conveniently leaving no doubles – you can’t tell me there REALLY was no alternative to both ganger-Teachers-woman and ganger-Doctor sacrificing themselves?!). And don’t forget to throw in an arbitrary eleventh-hour monster! (Speaking of which - is anyone else feeling withdrawal for full-blooded slavering monsters this season? Even the Silents were genteel enough to wear suits.)

Add to that some Castrovalva-style impressions of past Doctors’ catchphrases (the naffest kind of ‘kiss to the past’) and another example of this series’ repeated insistence on solving everything with numerous guest characters trooping into the TARDIS (I mean, I know Moffat has a chubby for the Davison era, but didn’t everyone hate that back then?), and you get an exceedingly disillusioned viewer.

And then, as if that weren’t enough, even more laughably - riddle me ree, but doesn’t the Doctor’s out-of-hand liquefication of Amy’s ganger negate the WHOLE BASTARD PREMISE of the story, which just shows what pointless posturing all its ‘we’re equally valid too’ bollocks was. Squirm your way out of that one, Graham.

It’s even more galling that the lacklustre entirety of these two parts exist only to facilitate its final scene. I didn’t see the ganger-Amy revelation coming… well, before the coda, anyway… but the prior hour and a half of mediocrity numbed my ability to care somewhat. And, as natal body horror cliffhangers go, nothing can or ever will beat the fully-grown head of Udo Kier being born at the conclusion of the first series of Lars von Trier’s diabolically brilliant The Kingdom.

…But, having said all that, my seven-year-old niece appreciatively dubbed The Rebel Flesh “the scariest one ever,” so what do I know?

Reaction: DAY OF THE MOON, THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SPOT, and THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

2011-06-09T14:16:00.004+01:00

DAY OF THE MOON

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Toby Haynes, 2011

I feel I may have been overly harsh with The Impossible Astronaut. It’s just that, while I applaud increased complexity in the series, I feel it could/should be better handled than as simply a plate-spinning exercise – yet, Day of the Moon worked for me in almost all the ways the previous instalment didn’t. Whereas that was forty-five minutes of frustrating and seemingly directionless foreplay, this flows and starts to makes sense, rather than being too busy delivering a zinging high-concept opener to bother with such trivialities as even a suggestion of where the plot was going to go.

The three-months-later opening is a typical Moffat curveball, and gives a welcome sense of scope (as it’s rare for a story to take place over more than a few days), which is also matched by the story’s geographical shifts. If you’re going to bother setting a story in America, I suppose it’d be a mistake to overlook the country’s ridiculous scale.

The more outré elements of Moffat’s approach to storytelling deliver some surprising and arresting moments (the Silence-flanked child-astronaut; Nixon appearing from a sealed prison cell), and generally gel better than in the jumpy first part. His continued (and impossible to ignore) reliance on familiar tropes – recordings/transmissions; a sinister child; writing on walls; monsters based round childhood fears; even down to specific elements like River’s freefall into the TARDIS – would be getting absurd if they weren’t coupled with an actual plot this time round.

Speaking of which, though grateful for it showing its face, I’m not sure this plot holds up to scrutiny that well; in fact, a lot of it doesn’t make a great deal of sense (as pointed out on Tachyon TV) - but, crucially, Moffat has a knack for circumnavigating these criticisms with events that seem absolutely, intuitively right, so you forgot they're not necessarily logical. So, on the surface at least we have a coherent story – which almost made me forget til the end that a) the Doctor’s willing self-sacrifice, b) the Silence/the Silents’ part in last season’s TARDIS explosion, c) Amy’s pregnancy, d) Frances Barber in a futuristic eyepatch, e) the identity of the Child, and f) holy shit, that cliffhanger… are all utterly unaddressed – and on top of the promised reveal re River.

I really, really hope none of the answers to these questions fall by the wayside. Perhaps it’s more frustrating though that the entire explanation for this plot is left hanging – what are the Silents trying to achieve with their occupation? And what do they need the child for – why the life-support? (Tying into the space race simply because they needed the suit seems a tad tenuous.) Also, why does the child only bust out of the spacesuit after her encounter with Amy? And is she no longer important once the Silents have Mrs Pond? And is the Aickman Road pseudo-TARDIS the Silents’, or something they’ve nicked? Can it time-travel?

And as for the Silents themselves: they're relatively freaky, in a Munch-does-the-Grim-Reaper double-whammy of tick-box creepiness, although not really outdoing the Weeping Angels as Best Moffat Monsters. I mean, why has no-one pointed out that a monster you can’t look away from is basically THE SAME PREMISE as the Weeping Angels? Or at least, leads to the same ‘don’t take your eyes off them’ scenarios. But, at least the inversion of the expected invader status is original, as is their having been on earth indefinitely. (Although this does smack slightly of the disclosure of Torchwood 1’s hitherto-unsuspected century-long presence – though at least this is kind of self-retconning concept.) The idea that every time the Doctor has or will land on pre-late-sixties earth they’re there is quite odd, and gives a sense of weight to the episode – but without necessitating Davies-style suspension-of-disbelief-busting and conspicuous worldwide incursions. The brilliantly satisfying conclusion wherein the human race fights off its oppressors… without knowing about it, is quite delicious.

What else? A less jokey, more emotionally convincing take on Amy and particularly Rory’s relationship works well. While I commend the twenty-first century version of the series’ insistence on being all things at once – funny, moving, scary, etc – the gap between the Chris Cunningham-lite of hordes of Silents clustering on the ceiling and the ever-present fanfare of The Star-Spangled Banner heralding Nixon’s various arrivals (which I though was very funny) nevertheless gives rises to some massive tonal lurches. Unless I was just feeling particularly uncharitable for part one, Day of the Moon seems more convincingly creepy, with its forays into (southern) gothic territory, but this did make me wonder whether it would have been more compelling without the underlying jokiness, for once?

Moffat’s tortuous approach to the series makes it increasingly difficult to make informed judgements, at least about an ‘event’ story such as this. I’m torn between being impressed by his audaciousness and also wishing that he’d still write – at least occasionally – with the self-contained coherence of something like Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

Also, how many people (like me) assumed from the trailers that the imprisoned Doctor prisoner was a secondary/future version, Jubilee-style?

THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SPOT

Written by Stephen Thompson, directed by Jeremy Webb

Stories aping the titles of pop-cultural bilge like The Da Vinci Code or Pirates of the Caribbean are always going to approached (by me) with caution. I didn’t expect massive amounts of originality, and The Curse of the Black Spot spectacularly failed to subvert those expectations. An arbitrary pseudo-historical setting with an arbitrary ‘supernatural’ villain, couched in slightly naff sci-fi terms, cf Tooth and Claw, Vampires of Venice, et al. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The lazy historical shorthand of this story led me to spend most of the time watching it thinking how I’d inestimably prefer a see the show take the plunge and deliver a genuinely dramatic take on historical settings. Even – the very idea! – a pure historical. Having people say ‘blaggard’ doesn’t a convincing sense of time or place make.

Doctor Who has always been a beast of varying quality, of course – that’s all part of the appeal – perhaps most obviously illustrated by the yawning chasm of quality between The Caves of Androzani and the hot-on-its-heals Twin Dilemma. However, whereas that is at least impressive in its inexplicability, this unsteady volte-face from The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon is perhaps even more dispiriting, as it marks an example of Doctor Who at its most production-line banal. That this story could be entirely transplanted from the second half of this season to the second story in the running order speaks volumes about its inherent pointlessness and paucity of anything approaching originality or character development. A cutesy, precocious, kickable child (actor)? An eye-stabbingly inept father-son relationship, written with no feeling or insight whatsoever? A flippant guest-character-in-the-TARDIS scene? Really?

I might’ve moaned that Moffat took too long to let us in on the plot of his season opener, but at least there were still enough memorable things happening for it to never be less than watchable. This, on the other hand, is less a story, more a collection of contrived injuries, the repeated identical deaths of non-characters, and a criteria for ‘monstrous’ appearances almost more contrived than The Vampires of Venice’s. What a waste of the quite lovely Lily Cole, too, especially considering how good she is in Gilliam’s (overambitious but surprisingly effective) Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

I’ll concede that at least the final third stuff is a little unexpected, even if the solution to the situation does lift from Steven Moffat’s Girl in the Fireplace and The Doctor Dances – was Stephen Thompson (who?!) looking to pick up some brownie points with this blatant brownnosing? It does however suffer from the same damaging tonal shift as The Stones of Blood.

How can forty-five minutes of filler be so stretched? Talk about a first draft script; this doesn’t even warrant hating. Listen to The Smugglers instead.

THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

Written by Neil Gaiman, directed by Richard Clark

Well, this is certainly the one I've been looking forward to – if only for that ming-mong-baiting former JN-T decoy title seeing the light of day.

I can take or leave Gaiman – generally there’s rather too much just-because macguffin-based plotting in his writing; nevertheless, the prestigiousness of having him write for the show doesn’t escape me. Yet, my apathy aside, this quickly announces itself as without doubt the work of an original – especially in contrast to the generica of the preceding episode.

Gaiman brings a definite, richly detailed but off-kilter sensibility to the series, which rubs off even on the production design – the eroded formations of the crashed ‘spaceships’, the dresses and the hotchpotch costumes – and there’s a similar richness and depth to the concept at large: a sentient, TARDIS-eating asteroid outside of the universe, and the TARDIS herself being given human form. The latter of which could have been so awful, worthy of all those dreadful post-Survival movie concepts where David Hasselhoff and Eric Idle and god knows who else were mooted as Doctors. I had no idea what was coming so it’s a huge complement that the way it’s handled felt entirely natural, with Idris’ glitchy and non-chronological speech. A lesser writer would’ve just made a human TARDIS a sexy sidekick in a policewoman’s uniform, rather than a Helena Bonham-Carter-style “bitey mad lady,” so I can only be grateful that we dodged that bullet.

Perhaps the most notably thing about this story is how unapologetically fannish it is: from the title down to the throwaway inclusion of an Ood – which shows how misleading trailering can be; this is no recurring monster per se, rather the big-picture perspective of a fan to whom elements from throughout the series’ history are fair game to explore.

In terms of specifics, the Eye of Orion, the Matrix (kind of), and the High Council are namechecked, while ‘House’ and ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’ suggest the Gallifrey of Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow novel; there are hints of Morbius’ Karn (crashed spaceships and stitched-together bodies); then there’s The War Games hypercube things; even corridors! Only an unashamedly slavering fan would give us our only glimpse of new series TARDIS interior space (aside from The Christmas Invasion), or have the Doctor build a console out of the remains of a hundred different crashed TARDISes. Then there’s the archived spare console rooms (that’s so fannish – the idea that any of the previous console rooms could be revisited), Rory’s brief query about the Doctor’s room, and the concept of the TARDIS’ consciousness residing beyond human comprehension or language and across all of space and time, which is straight from the novels.

Even the idea that exploring the Time Lords in post-Time War Doctor Who is entirely viable shows pretty definitively what a ming-mong perspective Gaiman’s coming from: exploring the Doctor’s initial theft (and the neat inversion of it/her being the one doing the choosing); the shaving mirror on the souped-up console… That a story containing all these elements isn’t a massive gushing fanwank of Gary Russell proportions – that’s impressive. It feels like fan fiction with a budget – and, in case you’re not sure, I mean that entirely in a good way, in the sense of the best New or Eighth Doctor Adventures, which drew on a fannish perspective to continuity, but made something new and original out of the ideas they tackled. Also, these things aside, that The Doctor’s Wife is dramatically successful despite consisting of a junkyard, some corridors, and a disembodied voice as an enemy – well, I take my hat off to Gaiman.

Though I really like his American Gods novel and have a soft spot for the Neverwhere series, Gaiman’s not an author I’d expect to praise. I think it just shows though that authors coming out of leftfield (despite being a long-term fan) and bringing a new sensibility to the series can be so much more rewarding than those who evidently feel they know what format is expected (The Curse of the Black Spot) and are afraid – or it doesn’t even occur – to subvert established boundaries. By way of example, the grotesque, Beckett-like Auntie and Uncle are far more interesting than you’d ordinarily expect from such short-lived characters, while ‘House’ - something innocuous made sinister - is so much better a name than some made-up SF bollocks (‘Zolfar,’ or whatever); in these elements, Gaiman unarguably distinguishes himself from the second tier of Doctor Who writers, who’d never inject this much interest into such tiny elements of their scripts.

Likewise, it speaks volumes that the idea of the tattooed Corsair will undoubtedly inspire countless flights of fan-fiction fancy. I love how buccaneering the name is, and, from only the couple of details we're privy to, he/she sounds far more interesting than the numerous other renegade Time Lords the spin-off media in particular has always been littered with.

It’s seldom that I fall a bit in love with every element of a story, but in this case the location, the characters – Idris/the TARDIS especially – House, etc, all did it for me. (And I think while its engagement with fannish preoccupations helped, it certainly wasn’t the be-all of the story, and references to the High Council or whatever wouldn’t have meant diddley had it not brought anything new to the table.) This “plughole of the universe” is one of those situations that could sustain so many more stories (which is surprisingly not that common in Doctor Who), and this magical and strangely moving story makes me very, very keen for Mr Gaiman to become a regularly contributor to the Doctor Who world. (Perhaps a novel...?)

The status of the titular wife could seem a cop-out of Doctor’s Daughter proportions if the story at large weren’t up there with The Girl in the Fireplace or Human Nature; those occasional new series stories where everything is above reproach. In fact, this really does feel like a perfect example of a Doctor Who nailing absolutely every element: it’s mysterious and intriguing, creepy, exciting, funny, moving – yet without the lurches of Moffat’s opener.

Wild Horses of Fire mk. II

2011-06-05T13:35:00.003+01:00

Oh dear - another dirty, dirty bit of self-publicity, I'm afraid.

I posted a while back about my Blogspot movie review blog... but I've now jumped ship to Tumblr, home of kittens, porn, and wannabe-hipsters - so, CHECK IT OUT HERE! Hurrah!

PS Also, while I'm at it, still lots of Doctor Who goodies for sale on Amazon Marketplace HERE (second and third pages). Oooh!

PPS Day of the Moon, The Curse of the Black Spot, and The Doctor's Wife reviews coming soon, I promise! Watch this space, etc.

Reaction: THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT

2011-05-28T01:27:00.005+01:00

Directed by Toby Haynes, written by Steven Moffat, 2011

Talk about tardy to the party. However, I did write this immediately after the episode aired – only circumstances have prevented me posting it till now – so it’s written without any foreknowledge of the subsequent five episodes.

I’ve tried more successfully than normal to avoid all spoilers for this season. Ood… Cybermen… yeah, yeah. But we know this isn’t the real meat. There’s been a real emphasis in interviews and publicity on this season’s game-changing nature, its re-engagement with the mystery of the Doctor, the way it will push the series in whole new, internet-melting directions… All par for the course, you might think, with new series publicity. But the specificity of this hyperbole, the idea that this new run will indeed do some unprecedented things, seems tangible enough that I haven’t been able to stop wondering maybe they do have something definite up their sleeves. It’s all dreadfully, dreadfully exciting anyway.

There’s undoubtedly a danger that this level of massively-inflated hype might derail the series if it’s perceived to have been out of all proportion, but then, it does seem quite apparent that the post-Davies honeymoon period is over, and that’s exciting in itself. Whereas Moffat’s first series mainly adhered to the format laid down by his predecessor, here we appear to be dealing with something entirely different: a two-part opener? And a big, dark, ‘important’ two-parter to boot, the sort of thing previously saved for the last part of the season. Filmed in the US, for the first time. Oh, and a season split in two?

These might not seem like revolutionary changes to a casual audience, so it’s easy to be blasé – but they’re pretty audacious after five years of a quite definitive format. Add to that Moffat’s assertion that where last year was designed to assure those suffering Tennant-withdrawal that the show could continue as successfully, here he’s kicking into gear and willing to challenge the audience in unforeseen ways.

I don’t really watch other genre shows – well, sci-fi – which are the area in which season-long (or longer) story arcs have gained prevalence, so I can’t really comment on the oversaturation that some people seem to feel has hindered their efficacy. (Obviously dramas can have numerous long-running plot strands which may twist and turn and surprise the audience, but this strikes me as being more a reflection of life, whereas plots and schemes and misdirection in something like Doctor Who are a much more contrived form of narrative (not using ‘contrived’ in a necessarily negative way).) I’m quite excited by their potential, especially as it’s a potential I don’t think twenty-first century Doctor Who has yet realised (the ‘memes’ of Davies’ series do not a story arc make). It is in Moffat’s first series that the most fully-formed through-story has been realised, so I’m fascinated to see where he goes with an arc that not only binds a season together but continues directly from the previous one, and, in turns of River Song, from even further back.

While I agree that there may be some concern about story arcs hinging on a level of engagement with the series which might alienate a broader audience (not unlike the early-eighties continuity deluge), I can’t find myself worrying too much. I’m really not going to complain about a surfeit of intelligence or complexity in Doctor Who, and in fact find it massively exciting that Steven Moffat is allowed to go in a direction that demands so much from his audience.

But, on to specifics…

That was a difficult one. Obviously, as a ming-mong, it’s safe to assume that I’m on the series’ side; however, though the audaciousness of a dark, complex, American-set two-part opener isn’t lost on me I am still able to look beyond those elements, and, unfortunately, beyond those elements this episode didn’t satisfy me.

Maybe I’m just too impatient – having grown up with a complete 1963-89 run on tap where I never had to wait for anything to unspool at its own speed – but the twists and questions The Impossible Astronaut raised seemed contrived in a way Moffat’s generally managed to sidestep previously.

Naturally I appreciate that it’s hard to judge a two-parter on its opener alone, but, especially given this is a season opener, surely this is an episode that demands to feel coherent on its own terms, in the sense that The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, though dependent on each other, also felt satisfactory independently. Similarly, the humour, scares, and complexity don’t hang together as effortlessly as in, say, the similarly wide-ranging Big Bang (which I’ve recently re-evaluated as being the more effective episode of last year’s finale) – here, regrettably, those elements feel just a tad forced. I sort of wish Moffat’d just try to write a solid story with mystery and twists and clues naturally arising from the plot, rather than contriving an all-over-the-place narrative (such as it is) around those things. I have no doubt Moffat can make the next episode pay off, but does that excuse the first episode of the season feeling quite so exclusively expository?

Considering how many ace pre-titles sequences series five provided, The Impossible Astronaut’s opening is slightly baffling – not in terms of understanding it, but simply in appreciating quite why he did it the way he did. Surely something as simple as Amy and Rory’s relationship to the Doctor is unnecessarily complicated by having them suddenly separated from him for two months, rather than have him pick them up from their extended honeymoon (as I’d presumed was the case from the trailers). Also, why did the Doctor even need to attract Amy and Rory’s attention by gallivanting through history – especially when these scenes led to unpleasant echoes of the Tenth Doctor’s pre-End of Time shenanigans.

Perhaps I’m less well disposed to this story because of the aforementioned massive hyperbole that’s preceded it; I’d be very surprised if The Curse of the Black Spot and even The Doctor’s Wife don’t benefit from not having so many elements trumpeted months in advance. The slight sense of anticlimax ranges from the Silents not being any scarier than Doctor Who monsters have ever been, to the sense of underuse of the US locations. Hmm… America. Yes, it’s unusual to see the Doctor there, but I can’t help feel, ‘Ehh. Seen it’. The Silents/Silence are also too obvious an attempt to best the Weeping Angels, and that kind of inorganic approach (‘They’ve got to be THE SCARIEST MONSTERS EVER!!!’) never works. You can’t force these things, and they’re too similar anyway, with their comparable psychological gimmick.

Even in terms of its ‘darkness’, while, yes, unusual for an opener, this story has little more than a veneer of ‘adult’-leaning atmospherics - but no more so than the previous few late-season two-parters. Certainly, tonally, this is far less adult (ie, serious, uncompromising, harrowing) than, say, 100,000 BC or The Daleks (alright, I admit, not up-to-date points of reference…).

To be honest, I’m slightly at a loss as to how to respond to this episode – partly, it seems too much is shoved in, but conversely it felt like nothing actually happened, or, at least structurally, it’d all just been vommed out… Again, yes, it’s the first of a two-parter. But does that excuse how unsatisfying this episode was? The Doctor orchestrating his own death is the only brilliantly Moffat-worthy conceit here, and I’m not sure that warrants the entry fee.

There are also a couple of what, to my mind, seem rare Moffat missteps – which is all the more unfortunate when relating to things that didn’t need tweaking anyway. Namely, River and the Doctor’s lives explicitly going in different directions seems a mistake; I can buy random interactions, but pinning their encounters down to a structure doesn’t really make sense, and takes the fun out of that. (Isn’t very timey-wimey, is it?) Also, my worry with River, since Silence in the Library, has always been: when is there going to be time for the full scope of their relationship to realistically play out? Surely it must be more expansive than just fleeting meetings for occasional adventures? And does her apparent youth in their initial encounters (from her perspective) preclude us getting to see those meetings - or will Alex Kingston be recast?

And, the pregnancy revelation – well… so what? Okay, maybe this will simply be something which drives the Doctor to decide he should no longer be endangering Amy and Rory, but it would at least seem fresher if we hadn’t already seen Mrs Pond great with child (after a manner) in Amy’s Choice. Last year’s cracks through time look increasingly pedestrian in light of Moffat’s escalating tortuousness, but at least it’s a – superficially, at least – easy-to-grasp concept to string through the season. It’s probably pre-emptive, but I’m puzzled that no more definate new-season strands have emerged, despite the Doctor’s death seeming to be being discussed in these terms… Which might just prove a case of overegging the pudding. Could this not be tied up next week…?

Hmm. Definitely one that will stand or fall on its resolution. Can’t help feel I may have been a bit harsh – would I prefer the return of the Adipose?

...Well, no. Obviously.

Jikuu Daikettou!

2011-05-18T10:12:00.010+01:00

Gosh, I am so behind on season six – which, I suppose, is what happens when one flounces off to Japan. In honour of which, I've wanted an excuse to post this as a stopgap for ages – an illustration from the Japanese adaptation of David Whitaker's Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks!

I absolutely love alternative variations on familiar designs, and apocrypha in general, and it doesn't come much more apocryphal than this - so I absolutely love these images. Apart from anything else, it's pretty amazing how wildly these Daleks vary from the inimitable Raymond Cusick design... yet nevertheless still fit the default 'pepperpots with knobs on' description surprisingly well. (This is my fave, but it has a GD crease down the middle...)

But, yeah – head on over to the exhaustive On Target and have a butcher's – you can see the rest of The Daleks illustrations here, and there were also Japanese editions of The Auton Invasion (particularly like the freaky Nestene), The Cave-Monsters (with tyrannosaurus-style Silurians), The Doomsday Weapon, and Day of the Daleks.

But I digress. I actually wrote a full review of The Impossible Astronaut before I left, but didn't get a chance to polish or post it... and, in the meantime, my brother managed to wipe all my documents. What a massive bell-end. However, I should have a copy elsewhere... I hope... so I will get that online as soon as possible. I'm reviewing this Saturday's episode for Kasterborous, too, and it's not unlikely that that'll be posted first, so keep an eye out for that also.

2011-04-19T00:40:00.005+01:00

Nearly... Nearly...

Gosh, I am outrageously excited about the advent of series six. On the downside, despite reactivating SWD? with the intention of reviewing the new season story by story, I will in fact be leaving the country after The Impossible Astronaut screens (GODDAMMIT! What are the odds?), to go to Japan in fact, until the second two-parter starts. Unless the intervening episodes will still be on iPlayer I'm not sure if getting reviews up is tenable even after I return... But I'll see what I can do.

In the meantime, enjoy this, from the pen of Rob Davis (...or computer stylus, or whatever real graphic artists use).

Also: SQUEE!!!

"Diz-zy Da-leks!"

2011-04-13T00:58:00.005+01:00

Review: EVIL OF THE DALEKS

Audio soundtrack of incomplete story, written by David Whitaker, directed by Derek Martinus, 1967

Like The Massacre, it’s a massive cliché that this is a ‘best story’ contender. Similarly – and perhaps even more evidently – Evil of the Daleks very obviously lives up to that reputation. Before listening to it, this story already particularly appealed to me, helped I suppose by its popular status, but mainly because of the quite delicious combination of sixties-style machiavellian Daleks with a rich Victorian setting.

It’s not a particularly original observation to say that I love this story’s tone, but its – for this period – rare combination of creepiness, intrigue, and complexity is a massively satisfying cocktail. We might not be able to watch it, but I still rate Evil as one of the best ever stories the series has produced. Contrary to a general viewer’s expectations, it also flatters the audience’s intelligence a lot more than its modern equivalent – although, in fairness, it does have the luxury of a slow buildup, over seven episodes, with enough event and ideas packed into Whitaker’s scripts to ensure this (unusual) length doesn’t become detrimental.

In fact, let’s just say it: David Whitaker is a genius. Like Robert Holmes, he comes across as a writer capable of far ‘better’ than genre stuff of this nature, but who elevated the series with an intuitive grasp of its indefinable essence, a love for which is tangible here. Even his attention to detail is impossible to underestimate, and a major part of the reason why a story like this, junked though it is, remains so impressive. Elements like Waterfield’s struggles with twentieth century slang or the much-derided concept of time travelling with static electricity and mirrors (which I love for its blend of ‘science’ and magic, creating something far more evocative than pure, unintelligible technobabble), exhibit a resonance a more perfunctory jobbing writer would deem beyond the call of duty.

The combination of science and magic is quite an apparent component within this story, which is a rather less straightforward and nakedly pulpy concept than those exhibited in the preceding The Faceless Ones, The Macra Terror, The Moonbase, or The Underwater Menace. None of those stories feature an idea as brilliant – and effortless – as that of a Dalek suddenly barging out of Maxtible’s cabinet of mirrors; a particularly sparkling fusion of sci-fi and Narnia-reversal, also millions of mile from the guerrillas and space plagues and alien jungles of Terry Nation. Experiencing the sci-fi elements of the story from the perspective of the Victorian characters (eg, talk of “thought patterns on silver wire”) is also a smart way of avoiding tedious technobabble, and further adds a gratifying veneer of fairytale to the Daleks’ technology.

Fully in keeping with this tone is the mad scientist Maxtible, who does everything he does because of his blinkered desire for the alchemical secret of transmuting metals into gold (“The Daleks know many secrets”). Incidentally, the actor Marius Goring is actually quite a casting coup if you’re familiar with his roles in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death or The Red Shoes.

Jamie and Victoria – steadfast Jacobite and willowy Victorian soon-to-be orphan – also illustrate a more storybook or fantasy approach to the series than predecessors like the Swinging Sixties Ben and Polly or the ‘futuristic’ Steven and Vicki. As in the most recent season, I enjoy this take on the material, which seems a more effortless fit for Doctor Who than (going out on a limb here) the militarised UNIT era or the self-consciously urban Davies years. There is perhaps a danger of tweeness in the series drawing on (the modern conception of) fairy stories, but Whitaker counters this by peppering his scripts with little twists of sharpness, Jamie’s startlingly unexpected run-in with the Doctor being the prime example (more on that later).

The incongruity of Daleks in a Victorian house – or even of Victorian inventors on Skaro – feels quite glorious, and draws on parallels and opposition in a way that creates a lot more depth and significance than the other previously mentioned stories of this season muster, regardless of their quality. Even the Daleks themselves (“mechanical beasties”) are presented in a more fantastical way than before or since - eg, in their ‘possession’ of Terrall - while the whole concept of a distillable human or Dalek ‘factor’ is brilliantly rich and fantastical too. There’s no comparative frisson to Cybermen invading the moon, for example.

Even in encompassing all three of Doctor Who’s stomping grounds, in its past, present, and future locations, Evil of the Daleks sets itself apart as something broader and more significant than its season four bedfellows. (How many contemporaneous writers must’ve kicked themselves for not going through with such a deceptively simple idea?) And it doesn’t stop there! There’s even a return to Skaro, an unprecedented event during this period - and, relatively speaking, soon enough after The Daleks to feel authentic, in the way that Attack of the Cybermen’s belated return visit to Telos… doesn’t. This return trip might be the most fabulously aberrant and ‘knowing’ element of Doctor Who at this point (and compared to the majority of the subsequent run) – something that’s hard to fully appreciate in a period when the series refers back to earlier stories as a matter of course.

That Whitaker manages to top all this is no mean feat, but he does so, with the dazzling (dizzying?) conceit of the friendly Daleks which the Doctor creates with the introduction of ‘the human factor’. In lesser hands, childlike Daleks could be a disastrous concept of the proportions of The Chase’s ‘thick Dalek’. It’s almost as if Whitaker was attempting to show how easily Terry Nation’s treatment of his own creations could be bettered – that he succeeds must’ve been a bit of a slap in the face, because the friendly Daleks highlight the creatures’ deviousness, rather than diffusing it. (The slurred friendly Daleks’ voices are almost more unnerving than ever: “Frieeends, frieeends…”.) In fact, that all this was done forty-four years ago shows up even Big Finish (never a company to shy away from any possible way of wringing a new take out of old material) – but Daleks playing trains is more postmodern a variation than I think even they would attempt in their numerous Dalek revisitations.

There’s a lot that’s unexpectedly metatextual here, for such an early story – not least people walking around arms outstretched, essentially pretending to be Daleks – which goes a long way to demonstrating what a before-its-time story this is. It’s full of brave ideas and intelligent use of the series’ tropes, to an extent that’s arguably far more sophisticated than the vast majority of seasons that would follow. Given the Daleks’ previous ‘servants’ routine in Power, Whitaker obviously couldn’t help but use them more interestingly than almost anyone else. Even the idea of the Daleks making the Doctor help them is an original, lateral idea – again, making the ever-diminishing returns of Terry Nation’s space plagues and alien jungles even more pitiable. (You almost feel sorry for him, don’t you? Oh, wait: Planet of the Daleks is 150 minutes I’m never getting back, so, no, I don’t.)

Considering that (collect-’em-all colour schemes aside) the Daleks were essentially unchanged in their last on screen appearance, in 2010, it’s remarkable that anyone even felt it necessary to treat them so inventively only four years after their very first appearance. (And yet we still have to endure outings like Victory of the Daleks. Oh dear.)

Even the – seemingly obvious – idea of a Dalek Emperor, although already essayed in the TV21 Dalek Chronicles strip, is more of a departure than any seen in previous Dalek stories since their shock reappearance at the conclusion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode one. The Emperor’s voice may be changeable, but is quite brilliant, especially in episode seven, where its harsh booming fills me with fannish glee. Similarly, the Daleks are also at their sixties best, with a genuine deviousness which actually makes them a credibly unpleasant force to be reckoned with. Even in small moments like threatening Victoria with force-feeding they are especially malicious, and as well as being particularly scheming, they seem especially violent and aggressive.

The story’s above-par treatment of familiar elements extends to the Doctor himself; in the first two episodes, his increasing bafflement and eventual realisation of who is manipulating events is extremely persuasive, not least for the fear Troughton brings to the role. Though massively over-complicated, the set-up to the plot and the Doctor’s Holmesian deduction is very satisfying. The various red herrings of the plot also ensure it doesn’t become stretched thin. Also, its large cast of varied characters (Bob Hall, Kennedy, Arthur Terrall, Maxtible, Waterfield, Victoria, Molly, Kemel, etc) feels very ambitious and wide-ranging, or rather, by comparison makes a lot of contemporaneous stories seem quite lazy and lacking. Even that events are already underway prior to the Doctor and Jamie’s arrival on the scene marks it out as more ambitious and involved than the norm.

Similarly, Whitaker’s handling of Jamie’s relationship to the Doctor, their argument, and the Doctor’s manipulation of his friend into doing what he needs of him, is actually quite shocking. These characters usually have such rapport, and I tend to think of Jamie as quite a twee character; his anger and scorn toward the Doctor is very rare within the show (what, Ian, Barbara, Ace and Donna are the only ones to really row with him – maybe Steven?). “No, you’ll not get round me this time, Doctor! … You and me, we’re finished! You’re just too callous for me.” The most clownish and likeable of Doctors is notably sharper in this story; cooler, more collected and knowing than we’re used to, he feels very much like a precursor to the Seventh. Whitaker also has a handle on making the Doctor seem grand and mythic, which seems very before its time, even in small lines like his quiet comment of the Crimean War: “I watched the charge of the Light Brigade; magnificent folly.”

(Speaking of companions, Victoria interestingly doesn’t fall into the companion role in her first story, meaning the previously-unseen rockiness of the Doctor and Jamie’s friendship is allowed to play out against the backdrop of a rare all-male TARDIS crew.)

By comparison to the enigmatic, richly evocative beginning, the last episodes are almost disappointingly ‘sci-fi,’ but this is nevertheless an unprecedentedly complex and multi-layered story for the period. Having said that, the period/sci-fi contrast is most effectively mined by the music, specifically with a rather wonderful changeover from acoustic instruments to pulsing, sinister electronic music when Daleks are afoot. Though I imagine the Skaro sections were less visually interesting than the Maxtible mansion, I choose to imagine Raymond Cusick’s Skaro sets and the original Dalek city model from The Daleks, especially since Evil uses the same echoey sound effects from that story.

I don’t want to be too hagiographic, but there’s so much going for this story that it’s no wonder it’s been a favourite for so long – conceptually alone, it’s a keeper, with big, brilliant ideas like the Daleks’ manipulation of the Doctor, and his own corresponding deviousness; humanised Daleks; Dalekised humans; a Dalek civil war…

I’m a great believer in judging Doctor Who stories on relative terms, but, from an era when the format was being pared down, with the removal of straight historicals, and a move into the ‘base under seige’ format that the production team were perhaps inadvisably keen on, Evil of the Daleks comes across as something as an embarrassment of riches, a massively impressive story which remains unbeatable and relatively seldom challenged in terms of its wide-ranging, magical content.

Wild Horses of Fire

2011-04-05T11:10:00.000+01:00

Gosh, I just can't keep away can I? Partly I wanted to say, I will almost certainly be back to review the new series - partly because, being effectively half a season, I'm not going to feel hamstrung by doing it for thirteen weeks straight - but more importantly because I'm QUITE EXCITED about it all.

Also though, I wanted to give a shout-out to a new (and possibly even more irregular) blog, Wild Horses of Fire, where I'm going to be posting film reviews, and which you can view HERE.

Roll up, roll up!

2011-02-15T16:57:00.002Z

Bit shameless of me, this, but I'm having a clear out and have stuck a load of Doctor Who stuff onto Amazon Marketplace - you can check out what's for sale HERE. It's mainly VHSes, if there's anyone (else) still using them, a load of Virgin novels (including a rather smart copy of Gareth Robert's perennially-popular The Well-Mannered War), and other assorted oddments. Knock yourself out.

Also, given that I've just announced a temporary hiatus on this site, I wanted to take the opportunity to post this Phil Bevan image (which I cribbed from the 1995 annual) - having previously lamented how little of his work is online. Like most of his work, I think this is rather fab.

Anyway - one day, I shall return... Yes, one day...

2011-02-12T12:03:00.003Z

Kuh, real life, eh? Always getting in the bloody way.

Unfortunately real life is very much getting in the way at the moment, in various ways - as you might have been able to discern from the recent lack of updates. I can't really say when this lamentable state of affairs will be rectified, but I certainly intend to continue posting... at some point. Not least to have my say when Matt Smith's second season rolls round (you can check out my reviews of his first series here).

So... hiatus, then? A horribly loaded word to us ming-mongs, but there you are. Here, let me assuage you with a lovely (if somewhat irrelevant) Dave Gibbons panel.

Back soon. Bye-ee!

June Hudson

2011-01-12T19:27:00.003Z

Ooh, the first post of space-year 2011. Thrills!

A while back I wrote an article on the Doctors’ costumes (here), on the basis that it's something that never receives any more than passing comment.

As I said there (albeit in a rather more longwinded fashion), the way the Doctor(s) dress is an important signifier of his status as a hero somewhat removed from the norms of that archetype (in an action-adventure context). I'd love to be able to say this function has never been overstated... but it quite obviously has. Perhaps surprisingly though, it's the Fifth's outfit which I find most heinous.

The Fifth Doctor's costume never looks like real clothing, either in design or realisation (it's both flimsy and contrived), and is rather too concerned with being recognisable and 'iconic' in an overly forced way. Interesting then that this, June Hudson’s original design, is entirely without garish piping and the elongated jacket which suggests an irritatingly box-ticking approach to ‘Doctorishness’ in this incarnation.

Simpler, brighter, and, at this point, relatively unprecedented (in stepping away from the frock coat silhouette), I’d... not kill, but at least maim to have seen Hudson’s unsullied design realised on screen. An effectively youthful, Brideshead-inflected look - rather than the beige and pyjama-striped monstrosity Davison ended up saddled with. Just sayin’.

Anyway, check out June Hudson's website. There's also some alternate Sixth and Eighth designs which she did for some university course, here. None of them are that unprecedented, but it's interesting nonetheless.

"Marilyn! Get your coat"

2011-01-03T01:58:00.003Z

Reaction: A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Toby Haynes, 2010

So, yeah, yeah, it’s the ‘best’ Christmas special to date… But that isn’t saying very much.

Steven Moffat in crap story shock? Unfortunately, I think so. Of his output to date, people have seemed particularly unconvinced by The Beast Below, but I feel hard-pressed to write off a story dealing so confidently with (to use fan-parlance) such ‘oddball’ concepts. This, alternatively, doesn’t amount to much more than seasonal fluff, despite evidently trying to eschew Russell T Davies’ festive blockbuster template.

This year is the first time I haven’t been apprehensive about the Christmas special, because I thought we were in safe hands and assumed that, given Moffat’s take on the (for me, ordinarily equally painful) season finale, A Christmas Carol would be an atypically successful take on an element of the revived series that I've never enjoyed. Despite the line I opened with, The Christmas Invasion is to me still the only tolerable Christmas special, mainly because its seasonal setting is used as a trapping to the plot and is broadly irrelevant, whereas this story is entirely predicated around its own Christmasiness.

Given that the idea of a Christmas special being somehow necessary or appropriate to Doctor Who is fairly repellent to me, I’m probably not best disposed to enjoy this offering, even if it’s by a writer whose work I much prefer to his predecessor. I take issue with the idea of a Christmas special because it’s so staggeringly lazy, the thinking that jamming two things together that’re big with kids will somehow yield magical results.

Take this from Kasterborous’ ‘10 Reasons to Love Christmas Who!’ (all of which I pretty much disagree with): “The Christmas Season and Doctor Who are possibly the two greatest things to ever come together.” That sort of wildly spurious opinion typifies everything loathsome about the ‘special’ approach. There’s a case to be made for the merits of, say, chocolate and dildos, but that doesn’t mean a chocolate dildo is a good idea.

The only Christmas special I can recall ever actually being satisfied by was the League of Gentlemen’s effort, exactly because it played against its festiveness by being more grotesque than usual. So maybe I’m just too much of a miseryguts to appreciate the snow-drenched festivities Moffat and co delivered… but, yet, I was – and remain – willing to be proved wrong. It just hasn’t happened yet.

However, I would contend that A Christmas Carol’s problems run deeper than its festive spirit; for one thing, its standalone status gives the episode a disproportionate sense of significance which makes its failure all the more apparent. What we get is a weird and slightly damp mishmash of elements that somehow doesn’t spark in the way The Beast Below’s England-in-space did (for me). Sci-fi Victoriana… sharks… saccharine sob story… Star Trek parody. (The latter of which is particularly weak; I couldn’t care less about that particular franchise, but even I know taking off its shiny bridge set is breathtakingly old.) None of these things ever quite gel.

Then there’s the abrupt opening, which (excuse me) doesn’t quite fly; Amy and Rory’s marginalisation; the kind-of-crap flying fish; and the lack of antagonist (as Sardick ceases to fulfil this role pretty quickly, or consistently). All this fails to do justice to the neat Doctor-changes-a-life concept, previously explored in Steven Moffat’s Decalog 3 short story, and even the time-roaming Christmas Eve excursions with young Kazran and Abigail. These ideas should have been able to carry a whole episode, but overall the story feels both cluttered and yet still very slight, with only a couple of main sets, and, much as I hate to say it, lacking the grounding in realism of a period or contemporary setting - which might makes us care (the fifties Hollywood party seemed to have much more potential in only a very minor scene). In theory, I’m very much a believer in small-scale but clever, less-is-more scripts, which, on paper, this should be, but… sorry, no.

I certainly don’t think of Moffat as being infallible (even The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone wasn’t up to his very best), but this feels rather too much below par – jumbled and clever-clever (rather than complex and actually clever), with a slightly undeserved saccharine cloyingness (rather than actual emotion). The Doctor stepping from Sardick’s rooms in the present into the recording of his past, and the twist on the Ghost of Christmas Future routine, were both rather glorious moments – yet, what did the grandparents, assorted inebriated relatives, or the very young – ie, the majority of the audience – make of this?

In fairness, casting Michael Gambon, Britain’s favourite monstrous curmudgeon, an actor quite literally IN EVERYTHING, from The Singing Detective to The Life Aquatic, via The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, is quite the coup, and certainly counts for something, as he delivers much as you might expect. It doesn’t help however that Katherine Jenkins, though perfectly tolerable – and better than Kylie (albeit a back-handed compliment) – is saddled with such a non-role, as the insufferably sweet and doe-eyed terminal-case Love Interest.

It upsets me slightly to be so harsh, but almost nothing impressed me about this story. It looks quite good, but what were with all those wipes?! Dispiriting, as (the quite lovely) Toby Haynes brought so much brio to The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. Speaking of which, with that two-parter, Moffat made a format I hate – the finale – work, by both engaging with its customary more-is-more mentality, but also undercutting it. So what went wrong with this soggy cracker of an episode?

Specifically, I don’t like the deification of the Doctor – less in terms of his manipulation of someone’s life to such a (controversial?) extent, or numerous right-on-time appearances, but because of his untouchable, non-realistic portrayal as someone everyone defers to and who is never ignored or dismissed. His ‘importance’ and significance as a character has been inflated so much he is literally akin to fairytale figures like Father Christmas, or a troubleshooting Jesus.

Also, hate to say it, but… things just felt a bit too, um, ridiculous. Or, at least, this story’s ridiculousness felt quite flimsy. Like, the fish thing felt like a perfunctory stab at a trademark ‘big, mad, bonkers’ Doctor Who concept. The very idea of a ‘trademark’ style is fishy (ha, ha) enough as it is, but maybe in this case it’s that it isn’t a mad enough concept. A flying shark; that would have been cringeworthy in even something as wildly apocryphal as a John and Gillian TV Comic strip.

Ehh, I dunno. It wasn’t hateful, just a bit smug and forgettable. Worst Smith story? Victory of the Daleks is, obviously, rubbish and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is bad, but they were just straight-down-the-line pulp filler; this was a big event episode written by a showrunner whose work and storybook outlook on the show I like – but which never felt special. Multi-script burnout, perhaps? Even Smith, though reliable as ever, wasn't stretched by the material and felt too familiar – like the reappearance of a fez, which is going to get old extremely quickly. I can only hope this is an inter-season lull.

It’s not a direct comparison, but I couldn’t help thinking of Jeunet and Caro’s dark steampunk fairytale, City of Lost Children. It’s not directly comparable, despite sharing some of the same look in its city setting, and even its nautical-themed imagery, though without quite such a straightforwardly Victoriana-with-goggles bent. There are only a couple of nods to a Christmas setting in the film, but it cruises the mysterious, foggy side of Christmas rather more successfully than this outing does, with its uncertain collision of near-monochrome cinematography and soggy love story. There’s also rather more solidity in Jeunet/Caro’s worldbuilding - which takes me back to The Beast Below and its Starship UK. Though the concepts of anglo-Blade Runner and Dickensian dystopia are as broad as each other, Starship UK is more fictively satisfying – if not, obviously, actually feasible – because, by contrast, I can’t imagine 'Sardicktown' functioning outside of A Christmas Carol’s festive setting. It’s so obviously created for a festive story that it doesn’t ring true, in even a fairytale sense.

It’s a dispiriting return to the 2005-2010 years to feel this disparaging, but it’s not all doom and gloom. The child’s-eye-view on the series continues to work, with the Doctor once again paired with a pre-pubescent pseudo-companion in the young Kazran - but there is a danger that this’ll become another in a line of Moffat stock elements that could easily become tiresome (see also the manipulation of voices, which threatens to become stale after The Empty Child, Silence in the Library, and The Time of Angels). Another recurring trick is the leap from grandstanding Davies-like blockbuster-style opening, even down to a reprise of Voyage of the Damned’s (irritating) “Christmas is cancelled” line, before segueing into Moffat’s vision – in the same way his first script at the helm slipped deftly from TARDIS-dangling rollercoaster into the more atmospheric setting of Amy’s Leadbridge garden.

Amy being sidelined once again (so soon after The Lodger and whichever episode of The Silurian Fiasco during which she was imprisoned) may be cause for celebration for her detractors, but seems a slightly dangerous precedent; perhaps her characterisation has been criticised as lacking because she’s not being considered central enough by the show’s writers? It wouldn’t hurt to go back to the mentality of the assertion in 2005 that Rose/Billie Piper was just as much the star of the series as the Doctor/Christopher Eccleston. It’s ironic that as he gets his name in the credits for the first time, Rory is similarly marginalised. I suppose this can be explained by the festive special’s standalone status, but it’s slightly worrying in that I don’t think Amy and Rory’s relationship (to the Doctor, at least) would be that self-explanatory to any members of the audience who hadn’t been paying fan-like attention to the last series.

It’s a shame to feel so critical of a writer whose work I ordinarily enjoy, but I like to try to respond to things intuitively, at least initially, and this just didn’t grab me. In theory, the idea of a twisty, relatively small-scale character-driven timey-wimey excursion should be wildly preferable to Davies’ festive blockbusters, but in practise it feels clumsy and swamped, with none of its even most effective concepts given enough weight to balance out the weaker parts.

It’s a bit grim, but the ‘coming soon’ trailer was the best thing about this hour of viewing, and felt far more exciting than what I’d just sat through, suggesting a freshness I hope the production team can live up to (the impossible-to-fake iconography of Monument Valley looks particularly startling).

"And incidentally, a happy Christmas to all of you at home!"

2010-12-17T18:59:00.003Z

Firstly, I refuse to apologise for using the above go-to festive quote with such fearful inevitability. So there.

Secondly, and slightly more saliently, SWD? will continue to review, pick apart, and otherwise waffle on about stories from all eras of the series in the New Year. So, stand by for friendly Daleks, Russell T Davies’ take on the Seventh Doctor, unpronounceable Tibetans, and – of course! – Matt Smith in a Santa hat! (And the rest of his clothes as well. Probably.)

Also, stay tuned for a couple of slightly different new things, too… Oooh!

Oh, alright then - and, merry Christmas!

Next Time: A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Peter McKinstry

2010-12-03T20:59:00.002Z

As a long-term concept designer on the new series, there are understandably loads of interesting images on Peter McKinstry’s website. His graphics-based illustration has become quite familiar, so it's particularly interesting seeing such a recognisable style applied to a pre-existing design. I love the Tenth Planet-style Cybermen – sort of creepy, medical zombies – and McKinstry has really tapped into this with his grotesque, almost Hellraiser-like take on the design.

Much as I appreciate the ostensible art deco/Metropolis influence on the new series Cybermen that actually appeared in series two, in practice they’re a bit too clunky and robotic. Unused designs are always going to be fascinating, so it's unsurprising that I can't help wishing what had made it onto the screen could have been more like this. It's cool that McKinstry drew on influences from so far back, but I suppose it was always unlikely that the new series' Cybermen were ever going to depart so radically from more typical Invasion/Earthshock versions.

Whatever. I also like the ‘Blind Fury’ book cover or poster - or whatever it is - that’s included with his series five designs. I dunno what it’s all about, but I like it. "Sleep no more, sons of Gallifrey," indeed.

"There's never anything good at the end of a countdown – except New Years, and even that's rubbish”

2010-11-27T13:21:00.011Z

Review: THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES, SERIES FOUR
CBBC spin-off series, 2010

This time round, there was a danger that The Sarah Jane Adventures were going to feel like an obsolete pre-Moffat relic, with its Siltheen and Graskes. Even a notable lack of any crossover monsters from series five (I can imagine the Silurians turning up) sits a little oddly, and would perhaps have reinforced the show’s ancestry given how much the parent series has moved on.

Of course, the appearance of the Eleventh Doctor, this season’s selling point, goes some way to addressing this, but opener The Nightmare Man - a very self conscious attempt at a scary story – seems a patent attempt to move the series on and try new things, perhaps to limit reliance on Doctor Who itself. In fact, this is almost the most characteristic thing about this season; aside from a couple of by-numbers lapses, most of the stories have tried to showcase a more varied and mature take on the show.

Growing has obviously been a major topic, too, with The Nightmare Man particularly compounding a more teenage feel with its Skins-rated-U surprise party for Luke. It also shows a lot of confidence in opening the season with a first episode in which Sarah has very little direct involvement – although, in fact, she ended up seeming marginalised in a lot of the stories, especially Lost in Time and the final episode. Perhaps it’s a case of reality mirroring fiction and the actress’s age is actually catching up with her…? Despite this, as ever, it’s quite staggering to remember quite how marvellous Lis Sladen is; in all her little very human and idiosyncratic reactions, she seems far better than CBBC deserves and is of course the pièce de résistance of the show.

Ultimately, The Nightmare Man isn’t entirely satisfying, trying almost too hard to be teenage and scary, which seemed at odds with the series’ underlying positivity and niceness. Julian Bleach channelling Joel Grey’s Emcee from Cabaret or The League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou, but not being as scary as either, though probably quite creepy for the actual demographic (just not the ming-mong quotient), is slightly disappointing. On balance, this is probably the least successful of his Torchwood/Doctor Who/SJA triumvirate of villains.

However, it’s good to see a certain amount of dreamlike surrealism in one of the new series family, something twenty-first century Doctor Who itself has mainly eschewed, perhaps for fear of alienating its carefully built mainstream audience (with even the dreamscape(s) of Amy’s Choice being played straight). The world of the Nightmare Man does demonstrate the potential danger of ‘anything goes’ dream-logic, as it becomes a bit ‘Well why should we care?’, which, I suppose, is always the danger. Sarah’s relative lack of involvement isn’t entirely successful, either, as it falls to Tommy Knight to carry the story - but it’s okay, cos by the end Luke’s gone! (They’ll have to update that cringy catch-up sequence that plays at the beginning of every episode. Or is that just on iPlayer?! The bleeping they’d added to K9 was hacking me off too, so he’s not a great loss either.)

(As an aside, without Luke around, does it not look a bit weird to the inhabitants of Bannerman Road for Sarah to be jetting around with two schoolkids? Maybe the finale of the next season will see her lynched by a mob of concerned members of the community?)

The Vault of Secrets is one of the weaker offerings of the season, with the otherwise irrelevant Pyramids of Mars reference being probably the most interesting thing in it. (It’s also slightly saddening that in a split second of footage the visual of Mars’ surface is miraculous, by comparison to what the show could pull off back in 1975.) The links to the Dreamland animation, in the Men in Black, are less welcome, being the kind of astonishingly obvious pop-cultural ‘pastiches’ (and that’s being generous) which are destined to be repeated, ad infinitum, for decades to come. And all without being anywhere near as creepy as Hugo Weaving.

Death of the Doctor forms the meat of this review, perhaps unfairly – but there’s relatively little to say about SJA's regular stories, which are almost so routine as to be beyond reproach; they do exactly what they say on the tin, and there isn’t a great deal to analyse. In consequence, it is welcome to have a writer like Russell T Davies, who’s not exactly hampered by restraint, coming along and providing an event episode to shake up the format – in a way that previous stabs at season finales, such as the somewhat fumbled reintroduction of the Brigadier, didn’t. An injection of big thinking (in contrast to the standard ‘the gang foils an alien incursion in suburbia’) goes a long way: not only in having the Doctor appear, but doing so in a story dealing with his apparent death and its repercussions, along with the reappearance of another long-gone former companion.

A writer immodest enough to take the format and give it a good shake is a rare thing in SJA, so although self-conscious ‘big stories’ aren’t really my bag, this one is almost a relief. (Big, that is, in terms of its emotional ramifications – turning out the sun, for example, may seem big, but doesn’t mean anything compared to meeting up with a familiar character from thirty years ago.)

I imagine a lot of people’ll focus on the sheer amount of elements crammed into Death of the Doctor, whereas most stories have only one or two main building blocks – say, The Vault of Secrets’ returnees Androvax versus the Men in Black. Here, not only do we have UNIT (and their Gerry Anderson-like base in Mount Snowden), but the Doctor and his apparent death, new monsters (the Shansheeth), old monsters (the Graske/Groske), an alien planet, Jo Grant’s return, and a Luke-alike in Jo’s grandson. While this would seem to suggest that Russell is up to his old Stolen Earth/End of Time ‘more is… MORE!!!’ tricks, these elements actually gel and feel far more organic than that comparison would suggest. In fact, it really shouldn’t work, yet I enjoyed this story far more than my generally low opinion of Davies’ writing would suggest. In fact, I kind of loved this story, apart from anything else for its atypically measured pace, which, in the first episode, gives Sarah and Jo a surprising – but welcome – amount of time to both reminisce and become acquainted.

It’s a relief that such a continuity-heavy concept is fictively justified by a plot which revolves around memory. Similarly, Jo’s appearance feels entirely appropriate to the idea of the Doctor’s funeral, rather than something arbitrarily slotted in, thus dismissing the idea that maybe her’s and the Doctor’s appearances in this series would be better used in separate stories.

For a continuity fest, it’s impressive how fleet-footed it mainly manages to be – even without the Shansheeth drawing out Sarah and Jo’s memories for their own nefarious purposes, it is natural that the two ex-companions would share these things. Likewise, a rare nod to Liz Shaw seems natural in the circumstances – and, oddly, links into her presence on a moonbase in late New Adventure Eternity Weeps. Strangely enough, I doubt that makes her horrific, sulphuric acid-spewing death canon though.

I’m no fan of Jo, though I do have a certain grudging fondness for her; I coincidentally watched the (yes, dire) Time Monster for the first time before seeing this, and the contrast between her twentieth and twenty-first century appearances brings home how much emotionally-driven characterisation the new series has given to the companion role. On the basis of stories like The Time Monster it’s hard to credit Jo with any original thought at all, so though her wild post-Doctor life is laid on a bit thick here, it’s almost revelatory to hear her actually talking about the Doctor in retrospect, when we were never allowed any access to her thoughts about her life with him back in the seventies. (She does look a bit… desiccated, though.)

Perhaps because the character is effectively brought up to date, or brought in line with her modern counterparts, I felt a lot more pleased to see her than I expected. For all that I’m cynical about his generally overinflated reputation as a writer, Davies has certainly got a handle on Jo in presenting her – though exaggeratedly – as a batty, be-ringed free spirit. She’s well on her way to becoming one of Doctor Who’s fabulously mad old dears, á la Amelias Rumsford and Ducat. I like how Rani immediately thinks she’s “fantastic,” and Santiago is unembarrassed by her – I mean, she would be an awesome mad relative, who all the normal grown-ups’d shake their heads about. (Though quite why she brought her grandson to the funeral is anyone’s guess. Santiago is slightly hatefully right-on, though that might be mainly down to the excessively low-cut T-shirt, but at least the cons of his globetrotting life are brought up in the second part.)

That Jo’s aspirational post-Green Death lifestyle, which is sketched in rather than being left to the imagination, is implicitly due to the seize-the-day mentality that rubbed off from the Doctor, is one of those Russell tropes which irritate me slightly, but which overall didn’t stop me enjoying his return to the Doctor Who universe. (See also the sledgehammer emotiveness of concepts like ‘the Doctor died saving hundreds of children’; portentous dialogue (“You smell of time; he is coming”); pseudo-mystical alien-dialogue (“brothers of the wing”); a penchant for spuriously ‘exotic’ names (Santiago Jones); tortuous coincidences bent to shape the story (the sonic being in the TARDIS and Sarah’s lipstick having been ‘drained’); and the Doctor as the stuff of intergalactic legend; etc, etc.)

However, these things are tempered by the more sympathetic attitude to continuity that has become the norm since 2005, with it being more about events’ emotional consequences than an excuse to roll out old monsters. It still heartens me to hear characters react to the most outlandish elements of Doctor Who in broadly real ways; ie, Sarah Jane wondering what face the dead Doctor has – in a way no-one did in the old series.

That the explicit references to previous stories include less-obvious ones like Jo and Sarah’s Peladon jaunts or The Masque of Mandragora is quite lovely, because it’s less the events in question that are important than the characters' tactile memories of those experiences (ie, Sarah remembers the orange grove the TARDIS landed in in the latter story, rather than Heironymous and the Helix energy). Davies effectively couches continuity in terms of memory rather than relating it in dry, ‘factual’ terms. That he also gets in a reference to the unseen Third Doctor excursion mentioned in Timelash takes continuity references to a new level of tortuousness – again, though, it is justifiable as a simply tactile memory for Jo, and so doesn’t feel painfully fanwanky.

Incidentally, as a fan who’s used to numerous returns and reappearances in various media, it’s easy to be all too blasé about characters returning to the world of the show thirty-odd years down the line; but it is insane, and we should be so grateful that Doctor Who brings out the kind of good feeling that makes people want to return to characters decades later. This must be pretty unprecedented, mustn’t it?!

In a way, perhaps because such a Doctor-centric idea is at its centre, and because of its less furiously paced speed than is normal in SJA, this feels more ‘Doctor Who’ than the spin-off show, even if it isn’t necessarily ‘like’ an actual episode of Doctor Who. David Tennant’s appearance in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith did feel like an excursion for the Doctor into spin-off territory, even though in both appearances the Doctor doesn’t turn up until the end of the first part (which, given the ratings-winning kudos of bagging these leading actors, is nicely judged not to overshadow SJA’s regular cast). In some ways, it does feel odd throwing away such a fertile concept as the Doctor’s death/funeral (think Alien Bodies) in a ‘mere’ CBBC spin-off, but it comes off well, and gives a bit of scale and gravitas to a series often more disposable than this.

As for Sarah, with a fourth Doctor under her belt (as it were), Sarah has effectively become a latterday Brigadier-figure; that is, a friend rather than companion per se, who repeatedly encounters different Doctors. I’d love for her to still be popping up when she’s the age Nicholas Courtney is now. Speaking of which, I’m not sure how much longer that ‘the Brigadier’s stuck in Peru’ excuse will hold up – I mean, there are airports in South America.

It comes as something of a surprise for me to say it, but overall this story is outrageously lovely, and probably one of my favourite of Davies’ stories - which isn’t saying that much, but it's nice that his return doesn’t make me want him to piss off even more permanently. It’s in scenes like the Doctor’s talk with Jo where Davies shines, and which I actually found quite moving, especially because of how nicely the reason for her departure in The Green Death links with Amy and Rory’s recent marriage. That Jo tried to get in touch with the Doctor at UNIT is specifically strangely affecting, especially since, as he was based on earth at the time, there’s no reason she’d expect the definitive end to her association which we, as viewers, know to expect.

As for the past-companion namechecking, though shamelessly fannish, hearing mention of Ian and Barbara and Ben and Polly (and even Ace*) on BBC1 in 2010 made me giddy as a schoolgirl. The fact that all those mentioned are doing something inspirational is an example of Davies’ quite literal thinking, which grates on me slightly, but as it isn’t exactly an exhaustive summary I can live with it; personally, I prefer the broader idea that they aren’t all necessarily on top of the world, but obviously that wouldn’t be as appropriate to SJA’s optimistic outlook (on more general principles, it is undeniably limiting to demand that Doctor Who can never be sad). I don’t quite believe in, say, Tegan as a right-on campaigner for Aboriginal rights, but former companions wouldn’t seem human if it wasn’t implied that their travels with the Doctor had affected them, and injecting humanity into them is Davies’ forte.

While bizarre, the idea that a still-young Ian and Babs are mooching around Oxford is also inexpressibly lovely. It could be seen as presumptuous of Davies to furnish these characters with post-Doctor lives, but I guess that’s the price of having someone take a more hands-on approach to the series’ past. Also, it does tie the series together in a charming way to realise even sixties companions who seem like ancient history are still alive and kicking, if only in the Doctor Who universe.

On the other hand, that the Doctor’s rounds in the coda to The End of Time actually took in EACH AND EVERY companion is absurd, and another example of Davies’ utter lack of restraint. The idea of the Tenth Doctor tracking down, say, Dodo, Turlough, Steven, Mel or Grace is ludicrous, but makes me laugh at its audacity rather than heaving a weary sigh. That wilful ludicrousness is quite representative of Davies’ output, but I’m glad it has seen an expression, in this somewhat unassuming form, in a story I really enjoyed. (This even more extended ‘reward’ does smacks of fanboy completism – did the Doctor do it alphabetically or chronologically?!) I’d also throw my vote in with the idea that referencing back to past characters isn’t alienating for newer audiences (if done right), but rather provides a glimpse of history and backstory - which, frankly, Doctor Who has enough of to spare.

More prosaically, I don’t like Matt Smith’s new shirt/jacket; it looks like he’s cosplaying… as himself… badly. (But at least this variation in his costume was due to technical considerations, the usual Paul Smith shirt vibrating with the SJA cameras.) The Shansheeth are possibly the worst new series/spin-off monsters, both in realisation and design, and certainly the most tawdry of Davies’ animal-aliens; they look like refugees from a particularly cash-strapped production of Alice in Wonderland. But let’s just peg that as a cash issue and move swiftly on.

For my money, Death of the Doctor has a hell of a lot more interesting concept - and, let’s face it: is just better - than any of the 2009 specials; maybe Davies really did just need time to recharge. Similarly, perhaps stories without the pressure of building up to regeneration/end of an era, suit him better. Having said that, he does manage to make this return to the fold act as a coda to The End of Time (cos the twenty-minute one actually in that story obviously wasn‘t enough...), in its discussion of regeneration, and an epitaph for the Tenth Doctor. Some people might see this as further self-indulgence from Davies, but I kind of like the emphasis put on the Doctor's ‘death’ and renewal, because it’s natural the characters should discuss it. It's the opposite thinking of earlier versions of Doctor Who, where the production teams bizarrely never felt the need to put these thoughts into the mouths of earlier companions - an extreme example being TARDIS newcomer Tegan’s total non-reaction to the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration, in Logopolis/Castrovalva.

Overall, Death of the Doctor may be an exercise in linking the old series to its Davies and Moffat eras, but the story is a lot less clunky than that implies. The fact that the actual plot boils down to a scheme to get hold of the TARDIS, and the Shansheeth’s plan being somewhat more ambiguous than straight-down-the-line villainy, is welcome. A corrupt UNIT officer is quite a nice inversion of the generally faceless UNIT of the new series, too, and shows a tendency to tackle sacred cows which also sees expression in the story’s (albeit affectionate) mockery of Sarah’s “staggering” piousness and the show’s home-in-time-for-tea ethos.

The main thing this story made me wonder, with fearfully predictable geekiness, was which other old-school characters I’d like to see return? I guess Leela is the obvious one - being popular and memorable, but unusual - though it might be harder to flesh her out as a believable human being. Or, apparent Captain Jack-like immortality aside, Ian Chesterton - ironically, as William Russell’s age could give some real scale to the Doctor’s recurring association with human companions.

Well.

Following Russell's return was always going to be hard to equal, but in taking a completely opposed, sparer approach, The Empty Planet pretty much does. I’m going to skip over that though, as you can read a fuller review I wrote for this episode, on Kasterborous.

Lost in Time, perhaps most explicitly of this run, continues to push the series into new areas: I like its multi-location format, even if it doesn’t go into demented Chase-like territory, and it’s a relief that the Bannerman Road Gang aren’t explicitly ‘fighting aliens’ for once, persevering with a looser approach to the format. There’s a surprising, and welcome, degree of pathos to Jane Grey; in fact, all the strands are surprisingly satisfying considering their brevity, and how easily this could have turned into a bitty, disjointed mess (ahem, The Chase again). I particularly enjoyed the pip-pip derring-do of the budget Eagle Has Landed – especially the gun-wielding schoolmarm-cum-spy! – although this probably only serves to highlight the (relative) limitations of Daniel Anthony, giving him an action-based rather than emotionally probing mini-story. Though there are moments – for example, when the Nazi commandant calls him a ‘negro’ – where the script does veer into more emotional-driven territory.

There is a certain Moffat-ness to this episode (Matt Smith aside, one of few concessions to the spin-off’s relationship with its newly-rejuvenated parent series), in Jane’s shades of Madame de Pompadour, and the climactically timey-wimey (sorry!) delivery of the key. It’s also rather lovely that a kids’ program is prepared to give an emotional kick – even if it could be accused of being a little ‘schematic’ – of a type that Doctor Who itself seldom delivered prior to its revival.

And so to Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith: SJA doesn’t have a very good track-record with finales, and - regrettably - this one doesn’t fail in delivering an underwhelming story, continuing a characteristic and slightly annoying insistence on ‘high-concept’ finales (tag-teaming returning villains; a Sarah-equivalent figure). I think SJA falls down in this department because the big, showboating approach it tries to crib from the parent series just doesn’t suit its own style, which is at its most effective when tackling a more intimate tone and scale.

Having said that, Goodbye… does try for the kind of sensitivity which the series often succeeds at surprisingly well, but falls a bit flat with Sarah’s fears about ageing. Plus, the manipulation of her life feels like a retread of The Wedding of…, and isn’t quite compelling enough to justify the lack of any major threat for the majority of the first episode. Also, the non-appearance of the Trickster (who I’m starting to warm to, if only because his nemesis-status makes him feel ‘significant’) is countered by a ‘Ruby’s evil!’ reveal that’s a bit meh (a disembodied stomach?!), while also invalidating even more the rather weak cowl-wearing budget alien threat from earlier. Plus, Ruby’s true nature also nullifies her role as a Sarah-analogue, the heavy-handedness of which is a bit much; ‘Mr White’, the Alfa Romeo, the secret cellar.

I mean, Hickman and Roberts – shouldn’t that have been fun?! Instead it was desultory and charmless. (An evil exile? Jesus.)

Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith has none of the ambition of stories like Lost in Time to broaden the series’ tenets. Maybe that’s appropriate to a finale, but as I have serious issues with the way all Doctor Who-family series tend to end with some slightly desperate ‘big’ story, it feels disappointing in comparison to the best mid-season stories of this run. Lost in Time would have made a more memorable and ambitious finale, without ticking the ‘this is a finale!’ boxes, which are so very tedious.

Anyway, I’ve said waaay more than is strictly necessary in regard to a CBBC programme, especially since I’m only really interested in it as an adjunct to Doctor Who (though it still has its own charms) - so I will end on this note: has Luke been doing crystal meth at uni, or what? He looks like he’s dying!

*Ace’s fate as a philanthropist billionaire doesn’t necessarily negate the character’s Space Bitch and 'Time’s Vigilante' phases in the New Adventures, or her time-travelling motorbike and eventual life in seventeenth century France (…or whatever).

Matthew Jackson

2010-11-19T10:40:00.005Z

SFX recently posted the results to a 'zombify Doctor Who' competition - a bollocksy idea, but nevertheless I rather liked this image. Albeit less because of its zombification, and more because I'm a sucker for slightly stylised, off-kilter takes on familiar designs. There's a new series Cyberman in the same style, too.

The slightly souped-up costume also reinforces the impression that the series' own Martians could be easily and effectively updated for modern audiences, but without loosing their essence (cough, cough, à la shitty series five Silurians).

Next Time: THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES, SERIES FOUR

"You see shadows where there is no sun"

2010-11-13T10:00:00.002Z

Review: THE MASSACRE
Audio soundtrack of missing story, written by John Lucarotti and Donald Tosh, directed by Paddy Russell, 1966

When considering the sixties, people tend to focus on the stories most obviously comparable to the series at large (ie, the ‘spacey’ stories; anything with Daleks). While this is understandable, it does limit appreciation for this period, because it’s those stories that can’t help but be dated by comparison to subsequent eras. Therefore, the stories which take approaches unique to the period tend to get overlooked – tragically, as a story like The Massacre shows they can still work brilliantly on their own terms.

Given its attendant ‘best story ever!’ hype, I always wanted The Massacre to be amazing, and so was perhaps understandably slightly disappointed on my first listen – exactly because it’s one of the type of stories that don’t have any equivalents outside of the sixties (or even outside Hartnell’s era): straight, no-holds-barred historical drama. Also, I can’t quite get a handle on this story through its soundtrack alone – perhaps because the only roughly analogous stories feature the more familiar Ian and Babs, whereas season three is a more obscure period. As such it feels less like Doctor Who than it would with more highly-regarded companions. (The lack of photographs doesn’t help, either.)

However, having listened to it for a second time, I am more and more impressed. A high-minded, Doctor-lite, religious historical from the sixties – I can see why people go for a Dalek invasion over that; this should be turgid and worthy, whereas actually it’s the other way round. This is a tight, adult piece of drama. It’s so strange that this is from the same overall series as, say… Gridlock or, I dunno, Four to Doomsday – or even from the same season as basic genre pulp like Galaxy 4 or The Ark.

It’s so surprising that the BBC was permissive enough forty-four years ago to broadcast a story with religious content which might today be deemed potentially inflammatory – even an episode called ‘War of God’ would be too strong these days. It’d be like an Eleventh Doctor story dealing with fundamentalist Islam. I do love that ‘silly,’ ‘childish’ Doctor Who has dealt with such a subject, and with total conviction – and in the sixties, a period paradoxically humoured as being twee and harmless, but which contains the most adult, gruelling, and bleak stories of the series’ run.

I know next to nothing of this period (which I suppose can be seen as a vindication for the show’s early educational remit…), but the use of a detailed historical situation, rather than the historical window-dressing of something like The Pandorica Opens (much as I love it) is one of this story’s triumphs. The sheer amount of detail and apparent realism is massively impressive, and has the kind of built-in detail and richness that an entirely fictionalised context can never emulate. The performances also duly rise to the occasion. I adore The Myth Makers, the preceding historical, and obviously part of the joke there is its stiff received pronunciation, but there is nothing so mannered here; in fact, it’s extraordinary how wildly different The Massacre is tonally, and how compellingly naturalistic.

Even the relative incongruity (within Doctor Who) of the range of Parisian streets and French names we are presented with (Roger Colbert, Admiral de Coligny, Abbot of Amboise, Catherine de Medici) lends power and veracity to the plot. The large cast of characters with varied, complex motives outdoes anything sci-fi or contemporary-set stories could hope for, and is extremely compelling, for example in the loaded menace of the conversation between Tavannes and de Coligny. It’s also laudably ambiguous, with the distinction of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ being largely irrelevant – the story is resolutely un-melodramatic. (Even Nicholas – playing a part you’d expect to be sympathetic – is suspicious and untrusting of our sympathetic hero, Steven.)

The game-raising nature of the script extends to the regulars: Steven may not be a desperately interesting or well-developed character, but the understated nuances of Peter Purves’ performance are truly striking, and the part of the naïf is well suited to him. His increasing anguish is very successful, in that the more out of his depth, the more appealing he gets.

In episode one, the Doctor is also particularly charming in his interest in Preslin’s germ research – I like that the story gives him time to track someone down purely on the basis of an interest in their work. Even in such relatively simple scenes, Hartnell’s competence as an actor particularly struck me, in contrast to his perceived reputation, in that he really brings alive relatively undemanding dialogue. (Perhaps because we aren’t spoiled with interviews or behind the scenes footage, more than any other incumbent Hartnell simply is the Doctor, rather than an actor playing a part, so I forget he’s even acting at all.)

Hartnell’s dual performance is one of the elements of this production that seemed like a bit of a let down first time round, not seeming as radical as it is often claimed to be – that is, until you realise it actually is entirely “hmm”-free. Incidentally, it’s surprising how notably unimportant the device of the Doctor’s double is (the Abbot isn’t even the top dog like Salamander), only really functioning to further destabilise Steven’s situation.

The idea of isolating a single story out of two-hundred plus as the ‘best’ is patently absurd, but the more this story sinks in, the more appreciation I have for the fact that people actually vindicate the high-mindedness of this story. Even on this re-listen, The Massacre didn’t blow me away in the event – but then, crowd-pleasing isn’t its style (once again, stand up Dalek Invasion of Earth, and show where that approach got you…), and it’s all the better for that.

The fact that such an accomplished – and uncompromised – story exists within the series’ canon is staggering, and quite wonderful. Even generally comparable dramatic historicals like The Aztecs or The Crusade have more action-adventure content; this is like Doctor Who has temporarily collided with a historical drama, and is elevated by the depth and detail of its real-life machinations and players. A worthy historical-cum-period political thriller, with a double and an astronaut thrown in; I’m not quite sure how those elements gel, but they do.

It’s a laudable story which is entirely worthy of being so acclaimed – even if its relative complexity doesn’t translate so well to audio (despite its ‘talkiness’), as in more straight-forward stories of which The Smugglers is a good example.

It goes without saying then that it’s a tragedy this is a story we’ll never get to actually watch. I’ve heard that the soundtrack of the massacre itself was played over woodcuts on-screen, which particularly intrigues me – one of the rare but brilliantly innovative devices that were only ever attempted in the sixties. Considering similar moments of visual brio in films like Lady Snowblood, or the Hoichi the Earless section of Japanese portmanteau Kwaidan, I can only imagine this might have been as effective as The Chase’s La Jetée-style closing photomontage. Similarly, I have absolute admiration for the brave – and deceptively simplistic – stylistic device of using regional British accents to suggest different classes in sixteenth century France (a device reused recently in Vincent and the Doctor).

As an aside, I coincidently saw the 1994 film of Dumas’ La Reine Margot soon after listening to this soundtrack, which approaches the events surrounding the massacre in a rather different way – all boisterous sensuality and sumptuous violence. In fact, though decent enough for a mainstream French film, it’s almost too sumptuous – in a rugged, grimy-but-sexy kind of way. Considering how radically different these two interpretations are – especially since The Massacre is audio-only, so we’re effectively talking different media – as a kids’ programme/family show, Doctor Who’s take compares surprisingly well with the more obviously ‘adult,’ sexual, violent feature film.

It’s not very often that Doctor Who is directly comparable to anything else – which, naturally, is a large part of the appeal - but I think I actually prefer The Massacre’s taught, controlled political thriller to La Reine Margot’s slightly overplayed sexuality. The Massacre may be more formalised in its performances, but it works as a kind of shorthand for a historical setting.

I suppose it’s perverse to pump for the recording of an otherwise-wiped historical story from a sixties sci-fi show, over a feature film with a budget of millions, but then… I’m a Doctor Who fan. That says it all, really, doesn’t it?

Martin Geraghty

2010-11-06T23:54:00.006Z

Partly prompted by this here interview, I wanted to post an image by Martin Geraghty, because as arguably the primary DWM strip artist for fifteen years, though ever-impressive, his style is so ubiquitous as to be easily overlooked. Which is doing him something of a disservice, as the straight down the line directness of his work seems entirely appropriate to the way he’s become located as the default artist, whose work contextualises the more distinctively individual styles of less regular artists like Adrian Salmon, Rob Davis, or Roger Langridge.

So I do mean this positively; any of those artists’ approaches are too apparent to be used continually, whereas Geraghty’s consistent quality and likenesses, and relatively realist approach ground the strip in a reliably orthodox visual language. If this doesn’t sound terribly interesting, it’s worth considering how many memorably stories and concepts he has realised, many of which might have seemed ridiculous if they hadn’t been located within his oeuvre (…if that isn’t too grand a word for a TV tie-in comics artist).

Suffice to say, it was tough to choose an image to post from ones that include robot mummies on a Hollywood soundstage, female Sycorax in a replica Westminster Abbey on a Caribbean island, a toothbrush-wielding faux-Doctor, mutating beatniks, or a Lego castle in the sky...

"I cried out my eyes. They ran down my face like rain"

2010-11-01T18:45:00.001Z

Given the range’s relative lack of coherence by comparison to the New Adventures, I always have limited expectations for Eighth Doctor Adventures when reading one for the first time. Though I remember Lloyd Rose’s subsequent novel, Camera Obscura, as being good, it didn’t blow me away – so I was doubly unprepared for quite how excellent The City of the Dead proved to be.

There’s no standard feel to the EDAs – you’d be hard-pressed to characterise the ‘archetypal EDA’ in the way you could with the New Adventures. The BBC’s novels suffer from this lack of identity, but books like this one are welcome in showing that they could still produce titles that went very right, whilst also being quite tonally distinct from the NAs.

The two key elements of this book are Rose’s portrayal of its setting, New Orleans, and her instinctive take on the Eighth Doctor. The City of the Dead proves a refreshing reminder of how compelling and distinct Doctor number eight can be when written well (ie, when the much-derided idiot savant routine is avoided). The character has a ‘Romantic’ sensitivity which lends itself to the written page in a way unlike any other incarnation, and this sensitivity is matched by Rose’s handling of the emotional content of the entire novel. I suppose there’s space for the sort of calm moments which are conducive to this portrayal – in a way that is totally absent from the new series Doctors’ characters, which are tailored to fit forty-five minute bursts of mainstream entertainment. By contrast, the Eighth Doctor has been smelted and mainly realised in prose, which has created a casual, shrewd and calm figure.

The Doctor’s characterisation also gains something from the amnesia arc that this book is part of. It was a little after my time first time round, but it doesn’t matter because it is so effective to have no continuity cluttering things up (which was the whole point), and it’s exciting to see the Doctor exploring himself, still discovering the limits of his ability to heal, or not to age. Similarly, though more about the audience these novels were aimed at, it’s equally enjoyable for an author to take the advantage of showing him at, say, a goth party, or able to display knowledge about heroin, or being asked to model naked for a reclusive artist…

Another element of the Doctor which it’d ordinarily be inappropriate to explore, but which these novels’ demographic allows to be addressed, is his sexuality. What’s satisfying about this in relation to the Eighth Doctor specifically is that though there’s a certain childlike element to him, here at least, Rose has him faced with sex without being infantilised by becoming embarrassed by it, or just failing to understanding. In this book, he’s perfectly aware of sex, it just doesn’t mean anything to him.

In one scene he stops a hokey occultist having his wicked way with an acolyte as part of a ceremony, displaying an evident understanding of sex to some extent (eg, effectively saving the girl’s honour). At the same time his actions are motivated from a moral point of view which, though outside of the remit of the series at large, wouldn’t be unfaithful to the way any of the Doctors would act. Later though, it’s implied he has a sexual relationship with Mrs Flood (albeit in the dream world), something rather more unprecedented, and illustrative of the freedoms both this version of the character and the series in general enjoyed.

As for the well-evoked New Orleans setting, its occult underbelly, all museums of magic and cemetery-art traders, is extremely well-suited to a Doctor Who story which errs towards the mysterious and magical. Alongside a wide cast of believably characterised individuals, there are also various medical and historical occult details scattered throughout which make this environment feel convincingly ‘lived’.

As an American-set story with an occult-cum-crime investigation premise, there are (not unwelcome) shades of Alan Ball’s True Blood; a Deep South-set police procedural with supernatural elements. (To a lesser extent, Twin Peaks too, though I’m seeing that in everything at the moment - understated supernatural elements in a domestic American milieu.) I’m slightly ambivalent about the Doctor visiting America – mostly I like it because it’s so contrary to the usual ‘Britishness,’ and in this case it’s welcome slotting the Doctor into uniquely American surroundings where events perhaps couldn’t be easily replicated elsewhere.

It’s a relief that the supernatural/magical elements of the book are approached intelligently, in such a way that acknowledges this is slightly contentious territory within Doctor Who. (Although in all honesty as we aren’t in beardy old men and magic ring territory, the presence of ‘magical’ elements doesn’t make a damn-sight bit of difference to the story at large, aside from bringing a gratifyingly unique feel to proceedings.)

To some extent, the magic here is part of a universe where Gallifrey has been destroyed and effectively never existed, following the events of (shudder) The Ancestor Cell, with ‘magic’ now existing because the Time Lords weren’t around to suppress it. Though, intriguingly, the Doctor appears to be familiar with elementals like the naiad. I have to say, I quite like the use of magic here, as it’s a practise (defined as a manipulation of energy) rather than just leprechauns or unicorns popping up, so it seems to maintain internal logic with Doctor Who at large.

What’s particularly pleasing about the way Rose’s handling of the occult is that it’s located in the real world; ie, pitiable wannabes with no real power (who, amusingly, the Doctor finds hopelessly gauche). For example, would-be villain and sometime ghost-tour guide Dupre has a room with walls covered in preserved human limbs and organs - but rather than being played for creepiness, the Doctor finds it grotesque but mainly pathetic and tawdry.

Perhaps most distinct about Rose’s writing is a notable perceptivity that she shares with the primary female writer of Doctor Who prose, Kate Orman – appropriately, given that City of the Dead is dedicated to her – as well as (Faction Paradox novel authors) Mags L Halliday or Kelly Hale; which is perhaps too easy to put down to some vague notion of femininity, but very welcome nonetheless.

The comparison to New Adventures doyenne Kate Orman is particularly apposite because, as I say, though distinct tonally, there are numerous links to that formative series of adult-oriented Doctor Who books. Although, ironically I suppose, it is most similar to Orman’s Eighth Doctor novels (which have a calmer, more reserved feel than her NAs) – all likeable, well-drawn characters, in a fairly restrained story in a well-evoked American setting). So, City of the Dead doesn’t quite feel like an NA, but there is a valid comparison to be made with Orman, one of that series’ most definitive writers.

While it doesn’t feel like an NA per se (there’s a more ‘sensitive,’ quieter feel to it, despite cruising the same areas of violence and sexuality), it’s very obviously the work of someone to whom those novels where a formative influence, with nods like the cameo of a white-suited Seventh Doctor in a dream, and a mention of Shango, a Yoruban lightning god mentioned in (most likely) one of Ben Aaronovitch’s novels. Also, most specifically, there’s the moment where the Doctor crosses his own timeline to steal the cat which is horribly killed by vivisectionists in, I think, Warlock. However, none of these references are heavy-handed, and to someone who loves the former series so much, they form a gratifying link between the often very separate Virgin and BBC series. (These references are also specifically cheering as they relate to Orman, Cartmel and Aaronovitch, my favourite Doctor Who prose writers.)

There’s also an appropriately Orman-like approach to gleeful Doctor-punishment: he is beaten up and nearly stamped to death by the white-trash Flood (who is subsequently turned to pulp by the naiad elemental trapped into living with him as his wife); manacled and thrown in a swamp to the mercy of unseen ‘boggles’; has his leg shattered; and, most unpleasantly, has occult symbols carved into his chest with a razor. Also particularly unpleasant is the character fostered by a family who take him in only for the state support fee, whose own children are said to be rapists and to have set fire to a horse (it’s okay though; he smears then all over the inside of their house).

A major element of what I find so fascinating about Doctor Who – besides its general, inherent eccentricity - is locating such a vast range of varied approaches within one ‘canon’ (for wont of a better word), from the sixties, to the comics, the New Adventures, to the new series. Therefore, this kind of violence is a pleasing reminder that – much as I enjoyed the most recent season – Doctor Who is capable of a less tame tone than the prevailing jokiness of its most recent televisual iterations. After six years of family-friendly Doctor Who, the novels are a nice counterpoint to dip back into.

This book brings home how much the novels lend themselves to a richer textural palette, with more detail and depth than TV is capable of, and is overall a sensitive, intelligent, and compelling reminder of what the novels are capable of – as well as a validation of their continued relevance, in light of their very different approaches in contrast to the series itself.

This book is quite phenomenal, actually; the ending is muddled, but given what comes before, it hardly seems to matter. There are relatively few Doctor Who authors that really excite me, but with this book, Lloyd Rose has become one of them. Maybe it’s time to check out Camera Obscura again.

Niklas Jansson

2010-10-26T20:44:00.004+01:00

Though I have misgivings about redesigns of monsters - the Silurians in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood are an unsuccessful case in point - at the same time, it's often fascinating to see variations on familiar creations. I'm not sure how I came across Niklas Jansson's site, but there's something quite compelling about its range of consistently rethought monsters. Though the style doesn't appeal to me in itself, I quite like his take on the Cyberman, the bulked-up Sontaran, and even the Slyther (it amuses me that there's a Trod on there, too). It seemed appropriate to post the Quark, though, given the name of this blog.

Next Time: THE CITY OF THE DEAD

"That's the empty rhetoric of a defeated dictator – and I don't like your face either"

2010-10-24T12:05:00.002+01:00

Review: HORROR OF FANG ROCK

Written by Terrance Dicks, directed by Paddy Russell, 1977

Though a story with a solid reputation, Horror of Fang Rock isn’t generally considered a total classic – which feels a bit of an oversight, as it’s actually quite brilliant, a tight story that’s all the more effective for its small scale. This is the sort of story I miss in the new series – ones stripped of all excess and flippancy. I suppose Midnight is the closest modern equivalent, but even that doesn’t have quite the same doomy seriousness.

Terrance Dicks is a bit of a joke because of his simplistic novelisations and novels, so it’s startling how relentlessly grim and bleak Fang Rock is. The remorselessness of its plotting is textbook-tense, with the gradually increasing body-count and destruction of the telegraph. Something like Blink might have more obvious ‘scary moments,’ but for my money it’s hard to beat this inexorably ratcheted tension.

The characters, too, are all compelling in their ways, forming a broad microcosm of society at the time – and it’s hard to miss that only the working class ones are sympathetic (Reuben, Vince, Harker). The upper class sniping though, is particularly entertaining; Palmerdale shoots Skinsale down at one point with, “Oh not one of your army stories, Jimmy – they’re even more boring than your House of Commons anecdotes,” while when Skinsale offers that Leela is “not a bad looker,” Adelaide deliciously counters, “Perfectly grotesque in my view. Were you long in India, colonel?”

I imagine Adelaide annoys a lot of people – which, obviously, to an extent is intentional, but her constant bitching is actually very funny (“Up in that room? Alone? Have you quite taken leave of your senses?!”). She is also totally vile in her unshakeable and undeserved devotion to Palmerdale; that the Doctor chooses to respond by either completely ignoring or just plain bullying her is very satisfying.

It’s taken for granted that Tom is a great Doctor, but I often find his ubiquity off-putting – not to mention his later lack of restraint. However, it’s good to be reminded how tight a performance he was capable of delivering: he’s commanding, charismatic, and steely, but leavened by an (at this point) subtle humour.

He forms an interesting counterpoint to David Tennant – perhaps the only Doctor with a comparable pop-cultural status; unlike the often emotional and apologetic Tenth Doctor, the Fourth offers little or no sympathy to the characters here. If a story ended so bleakly today (the opposite of The Doctor Dances’ “Everybody lives!”), it’d be so maudlin – all heavy-handed emoting about what a tragedy the loss of life is. Which, obviously, is true – but then, this is ‘just’ a light-entertainment TV series. Much as I do appreciate the injection of emotional awareness into the twenty-first century series, in terms of the veneer of realism it adds (if it were possible to travel the universe in a time-travelling police box, you probably would keep banging on about how amazing it all is), in some ways it can make the old series seem deficient at certain points for missing out on an acknowledgement of its characters reactions to the events they encounter. Yet, in some ways, the double-whammy lack of sympathy from Leela and the Fourth Doctor is quite refreshing.

It’s funny, actually, but as a Doctor/companion combo, the Fourth and Leela are surprisingly cold – these aren’t bleeding-heart do-gooders. We know they’re the ‘goodies’ and that they’re doing the right thing, but especially in light of the fact that not one other character survives this story – not even the sympathetic ones – and neither of them display any remorse at the end, it’s actually quite difficult to see them as out-and-out heroes. Again, given this is a story from the height of the series’ popularity, I find this hard to reconcile with its then mainstream recognition. But, I do find this slightly morally conflicted approach more interesting than the straightforward moral crusading often on display elsewhere throughout the series.

The Doctor is particularly rude in this story (“His manners are quite insufferable!”), and spends most of the time making almost callous hooded-eyed pronouncements, or considering everyone with unconcealed boredom, with only momentary bursts of energy. He looks right at home here, in such a gloomy situation, brooding and solemn, and the fact that he takes the situation so seriously does give it a very dangerous edge. Considering seventies TV (or rather, anything not contemporary) is often seen as quaint and primitive, it’s surprising – but welcome – how difficult a character this most popular of Doctors is. Practically the only time he seems happy is when he bursts in to announce, “This lighthouse is under attack and by morning we might all be dead. Anyone interested?”

Leela is a classic companion, but I often think she’s surprisingly overlooked – however, it can’t be overstated how ace she is. All the more because, though very much not a screamer, she isn’t a straightforward example of Buffy/Xena (et al) kickass-hottie wish-fulfilment – which, it shouldn’t have to be said, would be awful: instead, she’s naïve, but clever; violent, but compassionate. She’s fantastic. Apart from anything else, she’s notably particularly proactive for a companion (for example, taking it upon herself to batter down Reuben’s door), and the moment she pulls a knife on the uppity Palmerdale is possibly the best thing any companion has ever done: “Silence! You will do as the Doctor instructs or I WILL CUT OUT YOUR HEART!”

Hahahahahaaaa.

As for the production itself, fittingly, it is as tight visually as the plot itself is; there’s a remarkably expressionistic bent to the set design (reminiscent of televised versions of theatrical productions, like the Patrick McGoohan-starring adaptation of Ibsen’s Brand) – the sets, backdrops and constant smoke are undoubtedly stagy (no bad thing), but it’s so dark and foreboding it looks great. Even the modelwork’s pretty good – yes, the ship is an Airfix model, but if that’s good enough for Werner Herzog (in Fitzcarraldo), it’s good enough for seventies Doctor Who. The model-shots of the lighthouse against a brooding skyscape are almost painterly, and the brief shot of the beam striking the mothership from the lamp room at the story’s conclusion is quite brilliant.

With the addition of its spare, dramatic music, this is one of those (all too rare) stories where all the elements come together, down to – as in Human Nature/The Family of Blood – simple effects like the use of a sickly green light to signify the Rutan’s presence. The whole thing is like a play, with its limited cast and sets, and details like the red light representing the boiler fire, but I like it – it’s conducive to the kind of taughtness the modern series has all too often eschewed in favour of big, ratings-grabbing and ultimately tawdry set pieces.

I’m always worried about being overly positive in these reviews – obviously I love probably the vast majority of Doctor Who, but what’s the point of writing a ‘review’ without being critical? Having said that, it’s tedious to give something a mauling unless it’s irredeemably dreadful (which can be quite entertaining), so I generally steer clear of writing anything about mediocre stories. I suppose the worst element of this story – apart from general production values like its film quality, which are obviously unavoidable and due to age – is the acting.

For all that this is a quite brilliant example of the base under siege template, the acting isn’t of a uniformly high standard. In fact, there’s no offensive performances – Vince is a little amateurish, and even Louise Jameson, much as I love her performance, isn’t a fantastic actor here – but I think, while perhaps perfectly acceptable to a fan audience (we’ve seen a lot worse), trying to view the story from an outside perspective, it’d all seem quite stilted – which would probably be seen as more indefensible than the production values and special effects; they are a product of their time (and budget), so okay, whereas the seventies doesn’t seem long enough ago to justify less-than-perfect performances. (Having said that, things haven’t changed that much – there are often similar weakness in the new series, which people tend to overlook – maybe it’s a genre thing.)

With the special effects, the Rutan is often derided, and, yes, in a way it’s disappointing after such a tense opening to have the alien menace revealed, but given that the production team was given the task of realising a semi-aquatic alien lifeform that feeds on electricity, I’m just pleased by the atypical choice of eschewing a man in a suit. A floaty bioluminescent jellyfish, as in the otherwise execrable straight-to-video Shakedown spin-off, might be preferable, but the gooey balloon doesn’t bother me that much, as it at least comes across as truly alien, and totally at odds with the period setting. Even its first person plural dialogue and crackle of irritation adds to a level of alienness unusual for Doctor Who. Having said that, the Rutan is about a billion times scarier in the form of Colin Douglas’ Reuben – his down-to-earth gruffness shouldn’t be creepy, but somehow it is, monumentally so.

I love the concept of the Rutan – a powerful, truly alien creation. It's a real shame they’ve never been revisited, in favour of more crowd-pleasing monsters – especially since, given their inherent changeability, there’s lots of potential for reinvention. Also, the stealthy infiltrator is a much less bombastic template for a threat than usual, and all the more effective for it. Perhaps that's representative of Fang Rock's reputation; it lacks the broadness that might have secured it a better reputation within fandom. Whatever; the streamlined plot benefits this story immensely, and it is something to be admired.

Pia Guerra

2010-10-20T08:34:00.005+01:00

A while ago I posted a (frankly, inadequate) drawing I’d submitted to a site calling for designs for a hypothetical Thirteenth Doctor. You can see all the submissions here. The main reason that I actually bothered to contribute though, was this picture.

I dislike Pia Guerra’s IDW artwork, which, in the (albeit, bits and pieces of) images I’ve seen is in a pseudo-manga, cartoony fanart style. This, however, I think is a fantastic image (and one which bears more than a passing comparison to a similar pen and ink style of the Phil Bevan image I posted at the beginning of the month).

It’s not even so much the Doctor and companion (Sally Sparrow, I believe) – this Doctor's look and costume is almost supernaturally restrained compared to some of the submissions on the site – but I love the general attention to detail, and the rather gorgeous TARDIS design (which isn't too outré, and has clear links to the Davies-era design, making it easier to imagine being used for real). I particularly like what appear to be its glazed-tile walls and generally subterranean, Tube-station stylings. (Incidentally, the size above doesn’t really do it justice; click for full-size.) Really lovely.

I might post some more from that thread in future, cos some of them are genuinely surprising or exciting, so keep your eyes peeled.

Next Time: HORROR OF FANG ROCK

Review: THE SCALES OF INJUSTICE

2010-10-15T23:45:00.004+01:00

A little while back, I did a post on the perverse, experimental and rather wonderful Man in the Velvet Mask. But don’t get too excited: by contrast, this book represents a polar-opposite approach of traditionalist, continuity-ridden, pedestrian writing. But hey, what was I expecting – this is a Gary Russell, after all!

This isn’t a bad, bad novel (I could point to many that are much worse); it’s readable, even enjoyable – it is just wholly lacking invention or inspiration. Which wouldn’t bother me so much, except, given the detestation the former novel still receives, this is apparently what people want from Doctor Who novels. I mean, really?! Are people’s expectations so low?

This feels like less a novel and more an excuse to explain various inane FAQs from the series that have been niggling our Gary: namely, C19’s role in UNIT’s affairs (from Time-Flight and Who Killed Kennedy); the Brigadier’s family life with his first wife Fiona (all set for Battlefield and Downtime); the circumstances of Mike Yates’ promotion to captain (!); the initial encounter between the Doctor and the Triad from Warriors of the Deep; and (more laudably) Liz’s final story.

It’s like, once these boxes were ticked, he then draped an uninspired plot around them. It doesn’t help that despite its ‘traditional’ feel, the whole thing is rather mean-spirited; there’s lots of drearily wannabe-graphic shootings and decapitations, which are presumably meant to be cool, in a nihilistic way, but which don’t actually mean anything and are therefore utterly pointless.

The author’s note, which amounts to a bitchy rant against the rec.arts.drwho users who had the temerity to criticise the pseudo-science of his earlier Missing Adventure, (snigger) Invasion of the Cat-People, doesn’t help, starting things off on a slightly uncomfortable note. (It’s both annoying when authors wilfully ignore even the most basic scientific principles, and also when readers pick fictional science apart, but, I can’t help thinking: they were probably just having a laugh – get over it, Gary.)

The idea of alien invasions’ leftovers being used by the government for its own devices, while not desperately original (and this was years before Torchwood!), has potential. Unfortunately, this is undermined by Russell’s lack of restraint: there’s barely a relevant TV story which isn’t unambiguously catalogued. A little subtlety would’ve gone a long way here; maybe the author doesn’t trust us to work out anything too taxing – the monstrous dog infected with green slime, for example, really didn’t need to be called ‘Stahlman’s Hound’.

There is such a cavalcade of eager, fan-pleasing ideas (look – the base of an Imperial Dalek!), that they become very irritating, very quickly. Similarly, the book is crawling with unnecessary references to everyone from Sir Charles Sudbury to Group Captain Gilmore, Ann Travers, Ruth Ingram, George Hibbert… Gahhh! Give me strength! Struggling under this torrent of fanwank, the already barely-present Doctor seems rather anodyne; he rubs his neck a lot and a few ‘old chap’s are thrown in, but there’s nothing to make this ring true as Pertwee’s Doctor.

None of this would matter if Russell’s prose wasn’t deeply underwhelming (there are lots of phrases of the ‘He felt very hot’ variety), and, tonally, it’s irritatingly pompous and moralistically preachy. There is even an annoying tendency to reuse already all too ubiquitous quotes (sleep is for tortoise – come on!). Even the title’s crap! A book featuring Silurians with the word ‘scales’ in its title. Oh dear. (And speaking of the Silurians: a few names with apostrophes in them doesn’t cut it as world building. Although, to give him his dues, at least he didn’t ditch their third eyes and give them whip-like tongues and minidresses instead.)

Writing this, I feel a lot less well-disposed to the book than I did when reading it. It’s not hateful, or unbelievably bad. In a way though, it’s worse than that for being so depressingly unoriginal. You can really see all the joins – Russell obviously thinks he’s allowing us to relate to Mike Yates or whatever, or making the story into a sizzling rollercoaster ride. He isn’t. If this were a one-off author, I’d let him off. But this is a man who has had his fingers in all the Doctor Who pies – DWM, Big Finish, and even the new series. The day this man becomes showrunner, we’re doomed.

Read Who Killed Kennedy instead.

Paul Grist

2010-10-12T23:54:00.005+01:00

I have no time for IDW’s Doctor Who comics: they seem painfully amateurish. Nevertheless, Paul Grist has contributed several covers, of which this is one - and that is very definitely a Good Thing.

It still feels unusual to see familiar characters realised in especially distinctive styles, but Grist’s ‘quirkily’ spindly style is an uncharacteristic but satisfying variation – one which, having only been used for a whole strip in DWM’s Ghosts of the Northern Line, I would relish to see being used again in the Eleventh Doctor’s era. How likely that is I don’t know, but having done a bit of research (ie, I went on Wikipedia), I’m quite curious to check out his British superhero (Jack Staff) and "hard-boiled police series," Kane.

Next Time: THE SCALES OF INJUSTICE

"Is there no end to you weirdoes?!"

2010-10-10T10:53:00.004+01:00

Review: THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY

Written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, 1988-89

I’m torn about this story, because much as I love seasons twenty-five and -six and the Seventh Doctor and Ace, here everything seems somewhat disjointed and amateurish. It’s hard not to compare anything Doctor Who to the current series, especially because being from the most recent part of the original run, the comparison isn’t as churlish as contrasting 1963’s season one with 2005’s series one.

The new series has a generally very conventional approach to character development and plot progression; it ticks all those Robert McKee-style narrative structure plot points, has love interests and routinely good-looking eye-candy casting, character progression, emotional ‘beats,’ etc, etc. Much as I might frown on the potential arbitrary cynicism of that approach to story, by comparison Greatest Show feels a little guileless. There are far too many characters who don’t fit into any clearly delineated role, and consequentially feel a bit pointless, and too many poorly-defined intentions muddying matters.

Greatest Show is probably the weakest story of season twenty-five; it just doesn’t gel. I have a soft spot for The Happiness Patrol, which while sharing a similarly outré sensibility, is rather more consistent, and has an easily discernable resonance and can be read as a comment on totalitarianism, or Thatcher (or whatever). You’d be hard pressed, I think, to discern even that broad a theme in this story. Compared to the new series, and even most of the rest of the surrounding (and subsequent) season, Greatest Show needs tightening up, with a bit more script editing to smooth out its lack of logical plot progression.

Despite all that, what does win me over is its wealth of great, memorable (albeit isolated) images and concepts: the hearse, with clowns dressed as undertakers, is inspired and memorably macabre (though shame about stupid details like the unnecessary sci-fi window noise). The big top with the ringed planet behind it is beautifully – and unflashily – achieved; the special effects really were looking up, weren’t they? The violence in the ring taking place off-screen is very effective, as is the disembodied applause, while the clown workshop is grotesque and disturbing – and more than a little reminiscent of JF Sebastian’s workshop/apartment in Blade Runner. The impassive fifties Family and stone Gods are great as well. The stone Dark Circus is impressively solid, especially during its collapse (no polystyrene bounce!), and the climax actually feels appropriately climactic in a way Doctor Who often doesn’t manage.

Even with BBC-basic locations, while some of the quarry stuff looks, well… exactly like a quarry, on the other hand the dunes are amazing, and even the pale blue lake looks exotic and alien. Much like in Survival, the bright sunlight helps to convince that this is some arid alien desert. Likewise, the softly lit, billowing corridors may be corridors, but they’re of a better class than usual. (The tinselly pathway that the Gods open to the Dark Circus is a bit old-school though.)

Poorly-defined and slightly self-indulgent they may be, but the story is equally packed with memorable characters: biker Nord (“Oi, Whiteface! WHITEFAAACE!”); Morgana’s hokey gypsy shtick; and Mags – an eighties goth werewolf… in space! What’s not to love?! She really goes for it during her transformation, too, while the Doctor’s tumble down the stairs in the big top is also quite impressive.

Of course, the characters’ caricature-like presentation has no baring on reality, but is instead predicated around the sort of visual shorthand used by the modern production team: in the same way that Professor Yana wears a Victorian costume in Utopia for no other reason than he’s an elderly professor, so what else would he wear?, or Brannigan wears driving goggles because he’s a driver, here Captain Cook, the famous intergalactic explorer, wears (what else?) a safari suit and pith helmet, while Whizzkid, like all nerds, is bespectacled and wears a tanktop and bowtie (…I know I do).

I’m ambivalent about this approach – doubtless it works, but it is quite a reductive concept, although I appreciate how much less alienating to a general audience this must be than trying to make up futuristic or ‘spacey’ costumes for ringmasters or explorers, which would connote nothing. It’s the same thinking behind animal-aliens like the Judoon or Sisters of Plenitude; you’re far less likely to scare off your audience or make them snigger into their coffee by introducing an alien clearly based on a familiar animal, rather than something like, say, Alpha Centauri.

Unfortunately, despite this link between the eras, this story falls down by comparison to the new series because nothing is made of the big, daft ‘circus… IN SPACE!!!’ concept. A modern story would have a field day with that, but here it’s just accepted so, disappointingly, it doesn’t feel like a big deal. Even the way it’s introduced is lost in the choppily mixed-up opening scenes; imagine some sort of Trial of a Time Lord-like swooping modelshot of the big top as the opening scene, rather than a mix of the Ringmaster rapping; Bellboy and Flowerchild being pursued; and the Doctor juggling in the TARDIS. It’d be a really striking opening and everyone would get the concept straight away.

In fact, the disjointed, choppy scene progressions do a massive disservice to the story; individual scenes that should have been longer are instead distractingly intercut. The eighties trend of having several scenes cut up into infuriatingly short little snippets, and then intercut with about five other things, is not only infuriatingly ADHD but makes everything seem entirely inconsequential. Bad editing (and music) belie its budgetary constraints too, though at least there is enough invention to shine through. (Part one’s bizarre cliffhanger – “Well, are we going in or aren’t we?” – is one of the worst culprits.) Aside from these technical constraints, at least – echoing my comments about Paradise Towers – there are no stories like this in any other period; the show is trying something new rather than mimicking a former approach.

What makes the slightly unfocused cast of characters more annoying is than, when they do work, they’re brilliant. Intriguingly, for example, the Captain, with his quintessential Britishness, young female companion, and ever-present tea, is like an amoral version of the Doctor, while the Chief Clown is brilliantly creepy, all the more so because he’s not evil, or a robot, but a ‘real’ person. In fact, he must be one of the most evocative villains at this stage of the programme. His fey/sinister breathlessness, coupled with his strangely terrifying exaggerated hand gestures and deranged laugh, makes me empathise with Ace’s phobia.

The comparison to season twenty-four stands; the concept of “a friendly hippy circus … turned into a trap for killing people,” is great, and does smack of a more effective version of the kind of madcap/oddball/quirky stories from that run. Fortunately, its ‘zaniness’ is tempered by its more ominous atmosphere. You certainly couldn’t imagine any other Doctor in it, which I think is great – the series is doing brave new things! The whimsy, in fact, could have been pushed even further. It’s interesting that the surreal approach of this story, with its exaggerated archetypes, is more akin to The Celestial Toymaker or Mind Robber than more conventional sci-fi stories, yet the setting is technically ‘just’ some alien planet.

Ultimately, larger than life tone and bold imagery isn’t enough to stop the story falling apart, its grasp on narrative logic becoming increasingly tenuous. “Don’t try our patience!” What’s the eye and the medallion all about? And though the gladiator’s sword makes for a good moment… I have no idea why it’s important. Everything’s very muddled – in the words of Marge Simpson talking to John Waters, although I didn’t understand, “I loved hearing it!”, but I’m not sure that’s good enough.

Last comparison to the new series (promise): can you imagine a story where a convenient deus ex machina plot device that saves the day wasn’t even foreshadowed?! The new series is in no way without its flaws in this department, but though we’ve had our share of reset switches and all those fan-reviled bits of laziness, at least Russell T Davies’ resets are in some way prepared for. Having said that, I don’t know if that’s necessarily better – maybe that’s more cynical than the ‘guilelessness’ of a less structurally box-ticking outing like this. Hmm, I feel I may have stumbled into classic series/new series smackdown territory. And that's a fight I don't want anything to do with.

Phil Bevan

2010-10-05T20:30:00.005+01:00

It’s upsettingly difficult to find any of Phil Bevan’s work kicking around on the internet - he’s unfortunately passed away, and as such there’s no portfolio of his illustrations online. It’s a crying shame because, alongside people like Adrian Salmon, he used some of the most unique and original visual language among artists working within Doctor Who.

This image is from one of the previews or preludes or whatever they were called which DWM used to run for the New Adventures – in this case, Daniel O’Mahony’s much-as-I-love-his-other-books-not-really-very-good Falls the Shadow. Using black and white pen and ink is unusually restrained for this sort of TV tie-in artwork, but it’s gorgeous, and shows off the slightly off-kilter attention to detail which made his art really distinctive (his idiosyncratic way of drawing hair in definite strands is particularly memorable).

I think he also did the illustrations for Gareth Roberts’ least-bad season seventeen Missing Adventure, The English Way of Death, but the picture I remembered recently was for a DWM article on what could have happened if the series had continued after season twenty-six. Bevan’s illustrations, rather wonderfully, depicted a be-ringed and dandified Richard Griffiths as a potential precursor to (Withnail co-star) Paul McGann’s official Eighth Doctor. If I get a chance to dig the issue out, I’ll post a scan, because it was a particularly glorious ‘Unbound’ concept.

Next Time: THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY

Review: THE SOUND OF DRUMS/LAST OF THE TIME LORDS

2010-10-02T11:01:00.006+01:00

Written by Russell T Davies, directed by Colin Teague, 2007

When I reviewed The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and said season finales generally disagreed with me, this story is a large part of the reason why.

I don’t want to be a massive bitch, but everything about The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords is either baffling, or just plain irritating. In common with all but the best of Russell T Davies’ output, this story is perversely overcomplicated, with a disjointed plot structure, while the reliance on armies of CG’d flying robots - particularly in contrast with the smaller scale of The Big Bang - feels a desperate attempt to disprove the concept that less can be more.

Series three, perhaps even more so than those preceding it, is abysmally uneven in tone, and this finale is the epitome of its inconsistency. John Simm’s Master, as I feared from his appearance in Utopia (which, incidentally, I thought was bad - before seeing this two-parter; all is now forgiven), is entirely devoid of menace – or, indeed, of pathos, when the script calls for it. Couldn’t we have been treated to an extended outing for the Jacobi version?

In fact, the handling of the Master’s return is tonally rather inexplicable: the lame conceit of a weapon directly paralleling the much-overused sonic screwdriver (which is further weakened by an unnecessary and baffling link to The Lazarus Experiment); the somewhat unpleasant implications of the sexual excesses Lucy Saxon has to endure; the thumpingly mundane conversation with the Doctor in The Sound of Drums, which verges hilariously on homoerotic Time Lord phone sex; and, more generally, the plot treading water to delay their final confrontation.

What makes this Master worse is that I can see what they were going for; a kind of gleeful demented, self-aware version of the archetypal villain. I’m watching the second series of Twin Peaks at the moment, the antagonist of which (in one form… Spoilers!) is portrayed in a similar way, but with a much more effective balance between an unnervingly sinister side and an almost comedic spiteful glee. That would be fine. But this Master comes across as a heavy-handed attempt at reinvention, with an approach that doesn’t seem to come naturally to John Simm. He’s not funny, he’s not scary, he doesn’t ever seem deranged; rather, ‘wacky’ at best. We don’t need a wacky Master.

Add to all this an apparently bullet-proof Corsa; an underuse of Captain Jack which negates his reappearance in the series, chained up in the inexplicably purple-lit bowels of the Valiant; plus the unfathomable inclusion of a god-awful chart song (which immediately dates the episode) – yet another example of this era misguidedly shoehorning pop cultural artefacts into the series.

Arguably one of the most effective moments among all this is entirely divorced from the main action of the story: the flashback to Gallifrey, which, while not doing anything unexpected design-wise, is a well-realised addition. It does seem slightly presumptuous of Davies to provide a perhaps unnecessary backstory for a pre-existing character, but – as I cringe at the prospect of some ill-judged revelation – at least the temptation to reveal the Master and Doctor as brothers was resisted. I have to say though that this moment only appeased me by targeting the anorak within (Deadly Assassin AND War Games-style costumes...!).

Essentially, I just wish someone had had the guts to strip this story back – a straight conspiracy thriller could have been made suitably taught and involving for a season closer, but, alas… Similarly, the idea of a global disaster actually occurring should have been admirable in televised Doctor Who – instead, in cramming an entire apocalypse into one episode, the concept feels wasted.

In fact – as a measure of quite how disheartened I am by this story – I found myself looking back on the TV Movie with affection. At least then, in the Time Lords’ last on-screen confrontation, there was a fairly even tone. I mean, here, what did we get? Oh, the Doctor’s been turned into Dobby the house-elf. Mmm. And then, we're meant to accept the saccharine "I do believe in fairies!" conclusion as being ‘uplifting’. Hang on, no; if my love for the character of the Doctor weren’t so deep-seated, he’d have lost all his credibility the moment he was turned into a computer-generated gnome.

I know it’s a slightly dangerous game to start talking about taking things seriously in Doctor Who, but come on – the gnome-Doctor is such a ludicrous idea (or, at least, so dubiously handled) that it destroys any remaining shreds of integrity the story might have otherwise retained. Oh, and then, we’re meant to care when the Master dies? Seriously? Okay, I like the emotional element the new series brought to Doctor Who, but when arbitrarily bolted on to any given situation it does loose something of its power.

And this is disregarding the fact that Martha’s plan was bobbins – the Doctor patently not having enough time to impart anything useful, and her global preaching apparently not having been especially effective, considering that everyone we meet has only heard of her, not the Doctor.

Not to mention the enormous cop-out of the ‘time turning back’ ending, which is as dishearteningly weak (and not to say, predictable) as it is hackneyed. Let's just not even go there.

I find it quite hard to pin down specifically, but much of my aversion to this story stems from something slightly off in its tone. I suppose this is most obviously apparent in the way the regulars are degraded – but it’s the apparent domestic abuse of Lucy Saxon that gets me. No real attention is drawn to her black eyes, but this still feels like a huge miscalculation. While I’m absolutely fine with the sexual content, drug use and violence in the New Adventures – an adult-oriented series – it feels wildly distasteful for a self-declared family series to include this. It can’t even be argued that it's in some way raising awareness about a real life issue, because it’s being used as shorthand to show how ‘bad’ the Master is, as if pulpy megalomania and domestic abuse are comparable. Instead, it demeans something hideous.

Even discounting this tonal misstep, this is a story where almost everything feels as if it has gone slightly awry – all the more galling by comparison to Human Nature, where the opposite is true, only a handful of episodes earlier.

PS: Captain Jack as the Face of Boe. Okay, so, by The End of the World, et al, Jack’d be quite old, to put it mildly. But why would he mutate into an (obviously alien) GIANT HEAD. With weird multiple ball things hanging off it. (Well, okay, maybe it is Jack…)

Gerry Haylock

2010-09-29T08:29:00.002+01:00

Mid-week illustration!

Though I have no firsthand experience of them, I kind of love the style and approach of apocryphal early Doctor Who tie-ins like TV Action and all that. Maybe because you just wouldn't get painted artwork of this type now, it seems particularly bold and vibrant.

Also, before stories in all media became carefully moderated to ensure they fit with on-screen continuity, comics and so on like this seemed to occupy their own, slightly alternate continuum - which I also like, in a slightly perverse way. When would the Third Doctor ever do something as ordinary as mix with bowler-hatted businessmen, outside Horse Guards Parade, in the series proper?!

Next Time: THE SOUND OF DRUMS/LAST OF THE TIME LORDS

“Make way for the Doctor, ye swabs!”

2010-09-26T08:42:00.021+01:00

Review: THE SMUGGLERS

Audio soundtrack of missing story, written by Brian Hayles, directed by Julia Smith, 1966

I love listening to an episode of sixties Doctor Who before I go to bed – it seems right, curling up in the dark with a blanket and the ‘throbbing menace’ of the original theme coming through the headphones. Hartnell’s era particularly has the right atmosphere to be a bedtime thing.

The Smugglers is immediately unpretentious and direct, in a way that means it doesn’t seem dated, and translates well to audio (recalling the comparable Highlanders). There are no baffling decisions here; it does what it needs to straightforwardly and effectively: Ben and Polly are introduced as time-travelling companions proper (with a healthy amount of scepticism); the Doctor is re-established as an authoritative but charmingly heroic character; and the TARDIS is dealt with with a minimum of fuss (the newbies’ reaction to it is obviously less effectively than Ian and Barbara’s, but in a way more appropriate to the direct adventure we get here, rather than the almost punishingly dramatic An Unearthly Child).

It’s noticeable that Hartnell’s performance is particularly strong here; very confident and assured – which makes the endless harping on his Billy-fluffs a particularly horrible disservice to a consummate actor). The directness of this story – bam, Ben and Polly in the TARDIS; bam, seventeenth century Cornwall; bam, pirates – also does favours for the Doctor, showing how great Hartnell was in the role: fiery, authoritative, amused, gracious, pompous, perceptive. His chuckles and constant amusement also make him very likeable (although he never becomes twee).

This story also made me appreciate the truth that this far back the Doctor just isn’t the action hero we’ve become used to; I like the idea that over his lives, he’s developed into a more explicitly heroic figure (although I suppose also more conventional, so whether that’s a good thing depends on your outlook).

I love Ben and Polly’s respective reactions to their predicament – her thinking it’s all a great adventure, balanced by his grumpy pragmatism. Their adaptation to the Doctor’s lifestyle may be less realistic than Ian and Babs’ (their sixties Londoner precursors), but then this is a different sort of period and story. The “pretty young vagabonds”’ investigations are great, with their looking for clues – but I particularly love Ben (ie, the sorcery scene, posing as the Doctor’s apprentices; and, “What are you screaming for?” “Oh, nothing, mate, we’re just happy”). Ben and Polly actually feel like there’s a clear concept behind them, perhaps unusually for early companions (a cooler, more dynamic, modern duo) – in a way Steven, Vicki, or Dodo, don’t.

As Patrick Mulkern points out on the Radio Times episode guide , there is nary a note of incidental music here, but I didn’t even notice; simple atmospherics like the creaking timber and seagulls’ calls during scenes on the Black Albatross, crows in the graveyard, and the echo in the crypt, work brilliantly instead. It feels like a conscious decision (as in, say, The Birds), rather than a budgetary constraint.

The story may be lousy with clichés (which put me off the telesnaps – though that’s hardly the fullest way to experience a story), but in practise, the story comes alive nonetheless, because rather than in spite of the familiar setting and devices it employs. Cherub in particular (great name for a pirate!) is appropriately vile and larger-than-life for the lurid genre exercises the historicals had become by this period, with his “touch like an angel’s wing … with that knife”: “I’ll have the words spilling out of him, like blubber from a whale!”

It may in part be to do with its effectiveness on audio (the first episode warrants barely any additional narration, and introduces only Joseph Longfoot and Cherub in addition to the regulars), but The Smugglers is so much better than stories like The Tenth Planet that, though not necessarily ‘acclaimed,’ still have inestimably greater status. Though understandable (The Tenth Planet is sci-fi, not a ‘boring’ historical, and features the Cybermen’s debut and the first regeneration), it’s such a shame that a direct, effective story like this (though equally understandably) barely has any reputation at all.

There aren’t any big, crowd-pleasing concepts (flying buses or historical celebrities), but this story could be made today with only the most superficial of changes, down to the script itself – it’s just a shame it wouldn’t be, exactly because of its lack of ‘big concepts’.

Even though a relatively undemanding story (with a lot of its colour already filled in, due to the archetypes it’s dealing in), it strikes me as going some way to explain my love for the period of Doctor Who it comes from. I really love the sixties and so, whilst listening to this story, I couldn’t help but try and work out why.

There is a brilliance peculiar to the best of the sixties - this is the closest I can come to defining it:

Sixties DW is well-written, but economically so – there’s no obsession with development and arcs. The new series’ focus on ‘real people’ can seem overplayed, while the eighties is mainly lacking in realistic characterisation; the sixties is well-balanced between this – likeable, easy to grasp, well-written characters, but without an excessive desperation to load dialogue with button-pushing ‘significant,’ emotional moments.

There is a misconception of the sixties as being twee or quaint (which is arguably truer of Troughton’s years?), but, though I guess it has its moments in this respect, so do all eras, and it’s probably more to do with the production values than the tonal content. In fact, Hartnell’s era is often quite full-on (another thing I admire it for) – for example, Judith’s apparent rape in The Time Meddler, Vasor forcing himself on Babs in The Keys of Marinus, and her considering stabbing a child to death to save her from soldiers in The Crusade. The Doctor’s less developed ‘moral obligation’ helps to give this impression, too: misanthropic endings where the Doctor leaves carnage to play out unaided (The Massacre, The Myth Makers) would be unthinkable today, at least not without a lot of overwrought blubbing and emoting, or a lesson being learnt (cf The Fires of Pompeii).

In fact, there’s a sense of all-round conviction and commitment, especially in the era’s most high-minded stories, which trumps all the other periods for drama (in grown-up stories like The Crusade, etc). It’s not over-eager or flagrantly crowd-pleasing (at least from a modern PoV, which can only be an asset), and doesn’t talk down to its audience (eg, An Unearthly Child – which is unthinkable as a kids’ show, or even family viewing today; it’s so bleak and harrowing!).

The unknowableness of the lost stories gives the era a fascinating sense of mystery. Similarly, this era isn’t – and never will be – overexposed through interviews or behind the scenes footage or justifications, which stops me feeling jaded about it. The experimental variety of the stories (ie, the run of The Myth Makers' tragedy-as-farce followed by the pulpy Saturday-serial sci-fi of The Daleks’ Master Plan, and The Massacre’s deadly serious, Doctor-lite religious drama) adds to this unknowability.

More than anything, I think it’s the dated look of this period of the show that puts people off, but to my mind stylised visuals liberate it from the constraints of effective special effects or even realism (think false perspectives and painted backdrops, which don’t impair the stories – and which I love the theatricality of). This also makes it seem intriguingly unique and timeless because it doesn’t use the same visual language of anything on TV today. It actually looks quite beautiful, and is more intrinsically stylish and (despite being low budget and small scale) cinematic than arguably any other period (no-one could mistake the fuzzy colour showing up the seventies’ insubstantial sets, or the eighties’ flat overlighting, for a feature film, whereas the sixties is broadly comparable to then-contemporary features).

The first two Doctors, while admittedly favourites of mine, I would also contend are among the best (and yes, that’s a different thing) – much as I love every Doctor, many of the later ones seem quite contrived as expectations of ‘Doctorishness’ are all too established. There are less limits to the earliest ones; they’re so wildly different, and both brilliantly likeable (Hartnell’s giggling is so infectious). Equally though, I love Hartnell’s inaccessibility – the opposite of today’s focus-group culture; he is difficult, yes, but it makes him more intriguing.

Even the variety of companions makes the era seem broader than, say, the Sixth and Seventh Doctor’s two-companions-each: the First by contrast has ten companions (including Sara Kingdom; and why wouldn’t you?!). That alone gives so much variety; it feels like there are numerous eras within the era.

Even though Steven (much as I like him) is essentially Ian mk II, and Vicki (ditto) and Dodo are essentially retreads of Susan, the variety of companions (and partly because of the obscurity of some of them) adds to the era’s alluring mystery. (The First Doctor/Steven/Dodo combo, say, is practically unknown to me – something which can’t be said of really any combination since the sixties. That obscurity is so appealing; Peri, for example, has a ubiquity that can’t measure up to the mystique certain early companions have just because they aren’t fully knowable (and even if they aren’t perfect).)

I recently came across an unfortunately typical comment, apparently calculated as being as annoying as possible, saying: ‘I never have and never will be interesting in the first two Doctors and the dull and inferior B&W era of the show’. I really shouldn’t rise to that, but it does rile me.

If that is actually your considered opinion then fine, but someone who doesn’t have the critical faculties to back up such a ridiculously generalising and closed-minded comment like that is clearly a moron. I suppose I get the last laugh though, as the sixties has all the things I want from Doctor Who: visual strength, directness, intelligence, conviction, imagination, and variety.

Ha, ha.

2010-09-14T19:32:00.003+01:00

Just a stop-gap post, cos Blogger's being a total pain in the arse since they introduced new formatting controls, which I can't be bothered to deal with right now.

So, yeah. A pretty picture! Hurrah.

Next Time: "Oodles of trouble" in THE SMUGGLERS

"Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"

2010-09-05T13:30:00.020+01:00

Review: DAY OF THE DALEKS
Written by Louis Marks, directed by Paul Bernard, 1972

I love Doctor Who’s capacity for undermining my expectations. Though (if I’m honest) it is a huge part of my life, there are still areas of the show I expect to enjoy in only an ‘ironic’ sense; the majority of Pertwee’s era – which seems to me one of the flimsiest periods of the show – being one of them.

I’m not hugely into this era, but I was in the mood tonight. The grainy VHS copy I watched it on actually added to the strange pre-natal nostalgia of it – that I did so late at night, under a blanket, while eating birthday cake during a relaxed weekend at my parents’, probably helped.

However, only a little way in, after the clumsy introductory scene involving the Doctor and Jo’s doubles (which is a rehash of the similar scene from The Ambassadors of Death anyway), I found myself surprised by how decent this story is. As I say, I love Doctor Who – so I should know this! But I still find myself expecting something only enjoyable with suitably lowered expectations, and then being surprised by finding it pretty decent, once the scene is set.

True, I stand by my comments about this period’s flimsiness – but it’s a question of looking at things in context. Yes, the colour is garish and diffuse. Yes, people swim in and out of focus, and, yes, the editing is ponderous by today’s standards, but all these are unavoidable elements of its age.

However (and perhaps I can be too swayed by these things), there are several handsome visual touches, especially on location around the railway bridge, which are conversely pleasing (using the ambient noise of a train passing as the Ogrons depart for the first time effectively as part of the soundtrack is an inspired touch, while also suggesting a world beyond the story). There’s lots of lovely shots though the sunlit grass on the wasteland too – though maybe a few too many lovingly-uplit moustaches! The Controller’s set is also comparable with, say, The Long Game, aside from some smears and scuffs.

Being more of a season seven fancier, Pertwee’s costume here (red velvet and purple silk) really couldn’t be more garish. I’m not sure if we’re really still in that Pertwee-backlash thing, but though this is a story that’s often held up by critics of his ‘Establishment arrogance’ (etc, etc) – actually, I prefer this Doctor’s louche confrontationality to his (slightly forced) urbane jocularity earlier on in the story. (However, the line, “A most good-humoured wine. A touch sardonic, perhaps, but not cynical,” is genius. The classiness of defeating someone in hand-to-hand combat whilst holding a glass of wine is fantastic too.)

I love his short-tempered weariness under interrogation, and the, “Do you run all your factories like that?” scene is great. Yes, it seems unfair, as we’ve been allowed to see the Controller in a less negative light from Jo’s PoV, and, yes, the Doctor comes across as bullying (“You, sir, are a traitor”), but… Given that the classic series didn’t investigate the Doctor’s emotional side in the way we’re used to now, I think it’s ambiguous moments like this – the difficult bits – which make him most interesting in the past series.

As part of this, the Doctor can seem excessively patronising to Jo – but then, she is a moron. I actually have something of a soft-spot for her… but I also can’t stand her either. She’s the archetypal ‘Doctor Who girl,’ in the sense of an even more braindead Bond girl – wide-eyed, fashionable in an all-too-easily dated way, ‘kooky,’ with a heart of gold, and a tendency to repeat everything with added incomprehension. Though she’s likeable in spite of her dippiness, she still gets on my tits, frankly. “That’s right, Jo; I mean a ray gun.”

Day of the Daleks does seem like it was made for morons (children?), so perhaps Jo – as the audience identification figure – is just pitched at the audience Barry Letts was aiming at. (Behold: comedy disappearance sound effects! Overly-accessible explanations of really not too taxing concepts! And all the ghost stuff and incomprehension of basic things like people disappearing should be bread and butter to UNIT!)

As for the Daleks – because of their ubiquity, it’s hard to judge them objectively. In fact, I don’t really feel much about them either way. They certainly look shit here, with their horrible gloss paintjobs; they’re much neater and more precise in their sixties appearances, and, to be honest, they only look really good again in Remembrance (in the classic series; I was reserving judgement on the bulkier, more fiddly new series ‘bling’ models… until the bubblebath/dodgem/Mighty Morphin iDaleks came along).

It’s quite typical for people to bemoan the fact that, despite being ‘popular’ recurring creations, the Cybermen are rarely – if ever – used to their full potential. I can’t help wondering if the same is true of the Daleks. I don’t want to seem hopelessly biased toward the sixties, but that was the Daleks’ decade, during which they were genuinely nasty and scheming in a way that’s never quite been matched since – as well as balancing their pulpiness so they didn’t become too cartoonish (as they have in some of their most recent appearances).

Certainly, this story is an insubstantial dribble of nothing compared to Evil of the Daleks, their preceding story. Here, they are static, weedily-voiced and flimsy, and disappointingly unemotional; they aren’t unhinged or machiavellian as in Master Plan, Power, or Evil)

In fact, all their sixties stories are cracking (and yes, I’m including The Chase in that - albeit in a different way). The Dalek Invasion of Earth seems the ropiest and most disjointed to me these days. in that – albeit in a different way).

Beyond the sixties, though there are good Dalek stories, it often doesn’t follow that they’re particularly well used within them (ie, in Genesis and Revelation they are almost irrelevant in themselves). Dalek is great, in its unique approach, but then the series one and two ‘finales’ put them back to square one. they are almost irrelevant in themselves).

However, even in drearier stories like Destiny and Resurrection, their innate appeal always pulls through – they are another of DW’s inadvertently ever-lasting nuggets of genius (along with the endless freedom of structure afforded by the TARDIS/time travel structure, and the concept of regeneration). They are one of those marriages of various elements – concept, design, realisation, vocals – that are somehow unbeatable. Even when there are only three of them staging an ‘attack,’ wobbling through a field with some Planet of the Apes rejects in tow.

Designing the Thirteenth Doctor

2010-09-04T23:46:00.004+01:00

This is my submission for a 'design the Thirteenth Doctor' thread on the site freakangels.com. I haven't drawn anything in years, but the range of the submissions made me want to make a contribution (I particularly like the more outre ones).

Tilda Swinton as the Doctor is something I’d kill to see, so to start with that's what I tried to draw, in Orlando mode - but I couldn’t quite make it work. So instead I went for Toshiro Mifune (think of his gruff persona in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and High and Low especially) in a Brighton Rock-style suit and patent DMs. Sort of thirties-punk.

You can see the other submissions here.

"Better, richer, wiser"

2010-08-30T00:10:00.003+01:00

Review: HUMAN NATURE/THE FAMILY OF BLOOD
Written by Paul Cornell, directed by Charles Palmer, 2007

NB: Posts should be rather more regular from now on than they have been lately...

Human Nature/The Family of Blood is the story I’ve been waiting for since 2005, being as close to perfection as televised Doctor Who is likely to get any time soon. Even the arguable classics of the new series – Dalek, The Girl in the Fireplace – haven’t come anywhere close to this. (Even The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances doesn’t have the same level of structural and emotional complexity.)

It seems such a shame that one of the few examples of real brilliance from ‘the Davies years’ is taken wholesale from the New Adventures. Aside from this story the new series simply hasn’t aimed at creating anything comparable to the maturity, originality and emotion of the best of those novels. Everything’s straightforward and easy to grasp on one viewing; it’s all dumbed-down and very ‘Saturday night viewing’ – which, okay, is fine, but arguably I don’t think that’s what the best of the original run was.

So, on the one hand I feel vindicated that the best story of the new run derives from those books – but, it’s depressing that no brand new story has been as fully-formed or multilayered as this adaptation (perhaps with the exception of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead).

Unfortunately, the season just gone didn’t offer any real competition, as, despite being an unashamed Moffat man, I can’t deny that the one area where his run has so far has fallen down – by comparison to his predecessor’s – is in its failure to provide a story that lives up to this precedent. Indeed, where the slot of the second two-parter has previously all but guaranteed an increase in scope and complexity, with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood series fnarg delivered one of it’s most hackneyed and clumsily characterised outings. So, for now – to me – Human Nature remains unrivalled in new Who. (But – there’s always 2011, eh?)

Its structure alone is unusually ambitious, with a narrative straying beyond the given setting, to Tim’s glimpses of the future; the war; the memorial service; the flashbacks of past stories (which are effectively and economically used, for once); John Smith and Joan’s possible life; down to the voiceover handling of the ending. Even the three-month time span is a welcome exception to the adventures more usually taking place over only a day or so. Sadly, I doubt any of these techniques would have been employed had the script not derived from a broader medium than television – no other story of the new series has been quite this audacious or wide-ranging. In this way, the story felt like a ‘novel on film,’ rather than a simply televisual creation.

It really seems as if the stakes were raised for this production, as if, because of its origins as a novel, people realised there was more behind it than the majority of stories. I’ve never been an admirer of Paul Cornell – it’s always seemed to me that though he has the ideas, they’re let down by pedestrian prose. Here, freed from those constraints, it is wonderful to see the plot refined, and imbued with a loving attention to detail.

The continuity references, for example, are rather joyous, but not overplayed – the music accompanying the sinister schoolgirl from Remembrance of the Daleks momentarily echoed for the Family’s Daughter of Mine; the reference to the village’s dust being ‘fused into glass,’ alluding to the sequence from the novel in which the school itself is turned to glass; and, most charmingly of all, the sketches of the previous Doctors in the journal of impossible things. It’s wonderful that such a tiny thing, which’d be overlooked by the vast majority of the audience, is so heartening; it’s particularly great to see McGann’s portrayal vindicated by the new series, even if only so briefly.

It was also gratifying to see a story achieved so effectively with minimal use of CGI (which everyone seems to forget is going to date as badly as any crap blue-screen in about, ooh, two years). The use of green lighting for the Family’s communication demonstrates how effective simple, in-camera effects can be, while the rendering of the bombardment of the village is impressive for being so low-key.

On its initial broadcast though, the Doctor’s elaborate punishments for the Family came close to ruining things for me. Given that this sequence was narrated by Son of Mine, I immediately assumed that it was intended to appear unreliable: the Doctor doesn’t do this sort of thing! Which, given Cornell’s obvious understanding of Doctor Who and what it stands for, seems even more bizarre. What happened to ‘never cruel, never unkind’? Now, I’ve actually quite warmed to the Family’s ‘mythic’ fates; it feels pleasingly huge and magical, compared to the majority of the series at large, and, in a perverse way, it’s quite exciting to see an atypically vengeful edge to the Doctor.

This story really shows the difference it makes when a story is written by someone with an abiding love and understanding of not only the series, but Doctor Who in a broader sense. As opposed to the jobbing writer approach of, say – ooh, I don’t know – Chris Chibnall’s stories.

A strong script, complemented by great character moments, the backdrop of the oncoming war, and some surprisingly non-‘mainstream’ directorial touches (the slow-motion shooting of the scarecrows scored by children’s singing, etc) add up to the strongest story yet of the resurrected series (again, only contested by Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead). Among the elements that particular impress me is the emotion of Smith’s breakdown (“What exactly do you do for him?”) and the entirely appropriate excision of Smith’s sacrifice and his change back into the Doctor. Also, I always want Doctor Who to be beautiful, but it’s ordinarily too busy being flashy – for once though, with Charles Palmer’s shallow depth of field and visual darkness, it really is.

This story is sad and complex and serious and wonderful. (A shame then that Journey’s End is a bit of a betrayal of Human Nature’s affecting human Doctor – as is Utopia’s demeaning reuse of the chameleon arch fob watch.) It’s just regrettable that, despite demonstrating the highs the new series can evidently reach, stories this strong have definitely been in the minority.

Redesign!

2010-08-29T13:22:00.008+01:00

And a pretty but entirely random picture.

This will no doubt be a work in progress for a while (eg, I can't get rid of the bastard shadows on the images...), but I now actually have permanent access to the internet, so expect updates soon. Hurrah!

"Such things happen only in the theatre!"

2010-08-14T12:40:00.006+01:00

Review: SILVER NEMESIS
Written by Kevin Clarke, directed by Chris Clough, 1988

NB: Well, this review has been a long time coming - my recent move of house seems to have taken forever... Posts should be a bit more regular from now on.

It’s been ages since I’ve seen Silver Nemesis, and I’m left unexpectedly torn by it. a) It’s crap – contrived and confused – but, b), I also found it fairly entertaining. That isn’t the best you could ask of a Doctor Who story, but it’s not the worst either.

Everything is immediately a bit shonky: the convenient countdown displayed in a massive font on the computer screen, and a pensioner shooting parrots with a bow and arrow (what?!). But, the (brief) South American-based scene is pleasingly unusual for Doctor Who – though I can’t decide whether the cut from there to the seventeenth century is intriguing or alienatingly unexpected? Followed by another seachange shift to Courtney Pine playing outside a pub. What? (Also, how is this bloody November?) The eighties contemporary setting feels very cheap and uninteresting - personally, I’d’ve preferred to see more of the seventeenth century - but these opening moments are unfortunately indicative of how choppy the story remains throughout (the random returns to Peinforte’s house = very bad plot structuring!).

Basing a story around multiple parties could be interesting – but unfortunately the Nazis are totally bland. (Although, what’s with de Flores’ numerous costume changes in part one? What a fashion-conscious fascist! He acts like a proper tourist too, talking about the estate of “the infamous Lady Peinforte” – though not in reference to the seventeenth century women he’d seen earlier, because he scorns the connection!)

The Cybermen don’t fair much better (though they look quite good; it’s just a shame they’re so turgidly shot). They receive only the most cursory backstory, too. Surely at this point, while not wanting to overdo the fan-oriented back-references, not giving them any explanation would have been a deadly move? There may not be distracting continuity references like in Attack, but there’s barely any acknowledgement that any new viewers/non-fans could be watching, either. It wouldn’t take much – surely Ace’d be curious about them?

I hate the Cyberleader’s hammy, melodramatic pauses and delivery… Seriously, why is ‘emotionless’ so difficult!? The Cybermen’s use of a gold detector (and subsequently wet reaction) undermines the erstwhile silver giants even further. Their bumbling anorak-wearing stooges are very, very unthreatening, too.

There’s lots of slightly baffling slips in the production: the initial modelwork shot of the Nemesis comet is strangely excellent – but that just emphasises how crap it looks after that. Then there’s the Doctor and Ace’s simultaneous fall into the river, which seems inexplicable because it’s been choreographed into meaninglessness; one of those stunts that’s lost any sense of what it was meant to convey.

The whole story feels very slapdash, especially compared to the assured production of Remembrance of the Daleks, or the stylistically unprecedented (but consistent!) Happiness Patrol. It also suffers from the typical eighties tendency to intercut various scenes by chopping them into tiny little segments, when they’d be more effective if given some breathing-space – which is especially regrettable here, as we’re already juggling multiple characters and locations.

Tonally, it feels very ‘kiddie’ too (more like season twenty-four), with stupid ideas like being able to step away from a guided tour and bump into the (unaccompanied!) Queen. Or even the idea that the Doctor thinks she’d be the very woman to help him out – since when has he needed royalty on his side? (Well, okay, except Liz Ten. And Liz Two waving her hankie in Voyage of the Damned. And the Tenth Doctor shagging Liz One. Obviously this is a new series thing.) I like the idea of the Doctor raiding the Queen’s basement – I’m less keen on an unconvincing impersonator turning up. Also, why does the Doctor inexplicably tell the security guard at the palace that he arrived “by travelling through time and space” when they got to the royal apartments from the tourist routes?

There are lots of bizarre reactions and unfortunate dialogue like this – though bad editing plays its part (the Doctor saying, “Where did that come from?” of an arrow that shot a Cyberman several seconds before; Peinforte randomly noticing the Doctor after a long battle). One of my favourite dialogue clunkers is the line explaining Ace’s new ghetto blaster (itself a slightly meaningless piece of hardware which is presented as strangely meaningful): “Yes, I know I built it for you, to replace the one destroyed by the Daleks.”

Essentially, Silver Nemesis squanders the intelligence of the Remembrance reboot. It’s all a bit vague and pointless – there’s a time-travelling sorceress, a Courtney Pine cameo, a duck, Windsor, tourists, the Queen… None of it adds up. At best, it’s very, very unfocused, and desperately needs some decisive editing and tightening up.

Unexpectedly though, Peinforte and Richard are the best thing in it; they’re assured and fun, and on just the right side of ham. Though she isn’t a well-remembered adversary, Peinforte is really funny in her gung-ho-ness (eg, abruptly smashing the café window, rather than using the door). (Incidentally, the idea of having the setting change around them during their time travel is one of the story's few arresting ideas - although it still begs the question, why does no-one react? Does this happen a lot in Windsor? Ditto the tourists at the castle when the TARDIS arrives.)

Fiona Walker’s performance is effective because of her self-awareness of its hamminess (“I shall lead! And you, follow!”; calmly taking over the hitchhiking duties; and leaning over and conspiratorially telling Mrs Remington, “All things shall soon be mine”). Her final enraged scream is very funny, too, especially because you get the impression the actress is having a ball doing it.

It does make me wonder when the Doctor last encountered Peinforte though? (It’s jarring that he talks about her as if we should know about her – which could work. But doesn’t.) The trouble with a new take on the Doctor – his increased manipulation of events – is that it then gets retrospectively applied to his past, which doesn’t really fit. I mean, when did he set all this up? If it was just a couple of weeks back in his seventh life that isn’t very ‘mythic,’ but that sort of behaviour isn’t really true of any of the earlier Doctors (not that we’ve seen, anyway).

Similarly, it’s quite funny that, because of the story’s poor reputation, the validium - which would otherwise be a big deal within Doctor Who ‘mythology’ - has never been referenced in books, etc, to the extent of, say, the Hand of Omega. Also, the suggestion that the Nemesis caused various twentieth century atrocities seems a bit tasteless (while comparing Kennedy’s assassination with World War I stretches things a tad, surely?). (On the plus side, at least visually, the glowing paint used for the statue and the bow is surprisingly effective.)

That the statue told Peinforte ‘who the Doctor is’ is quite fascinating, and I like that nothing is actually given away… But, at the same time, it begs the question whether the production team actually had any concrete revelations in mind at this point? I suppose all the talk of the Doctor’s secrets is rubbish, really, because it’s so contrived, especially as it compares so badly to Remembrance’s gradual mystery (which actually hints at something particular, as well as expanding on part of the character’s past which we’ve actually seen a glimpse of, in An Unearthly Child).

The shadow of Remembrance hangs all too heavily over this story, which is a shame because, especially in its conclusion, this feels like a homemade, knocked-off version of the season opener (there’s a “miscalculation” line, and another “give me some of that Nitro 9 you’re not carrying!” line; the shots of the Nemesis travelling toward earth; even the music’s pretty much the same, though it seems even more intrusive here). Yet all the good things about Ben Aaronovitch’s story - its cohesive, mythologised approach - are entirely absent here.

Instead we get a production that feels cobbled together from disparate elements, with no flow or internal logic. The excessive time travel and flitting between locations and times would be okay if the whole story was predicated around that (as in The Chase), or if something clever came of the multiple time zones (as in Mawdryn Undead), but… no. Neither happens here.

Which is all the more annoying because there’s a sense of missed opportunity here, because an expansive, varied story like this could be unusual and interesting (and even do the anniversary slot justice) – unfortunately, it’s all too rushed; the concepts/scripts aren’t quite good or developed enough, and it all comes across as disjointed. In a way, it’s ambitious (at least in terms of concepts) – but not ambitious enough, because some of these concepts could really do with pushing further. Instead, it just gets absurd when all the various parties roll up at the end, and then stand around, waiting for a chance to speak.

My main problem with Silver Nemesis though is that none of it ever feels like it matters, or has any sense of gravitas, because there are no normal, everyday points of reference: instead we have Nazis, Cybermen, seventeenth century time-travellers, the Queen, a rich American tourist, skinheads… It’s like Kevin Clarke dared himself to not include any ‘everyman’ figures. Real people are almost entirely absent from this story.

I’m torn about making the (inevitable) comparison to the modern series - which, whatever else you might say about it, has no problem presenting realistic, everyday characters - mainly because it’s just a bit too easy, isn’t it. In the scheme of things, certainly when considering how long the series has run, 1988 doesn’t seem that long ago - but Doctor Who, like television itself, was a different beast at that time. It feels churlish to complain that it’s not like it is now.

It may be unpolished, but I will concede that this story isn’t lacking in imagination, and at least that makes me better disposed to it than if it were unfocused and lacking interesting ideas.

Next Time: HUMAN NATURE/THE FAMILY OF BLOOD

2010-07-20T08:47:00.004+01:00

Well, I can only apologise for the delay in posting my Silver Nemesis review… I’m sure people have been clamouring for that (that's irony, right there), but I’ve just moved house, so suck it up. In the mean time, enjoy this photo of my mantelpiece.

Character Options’ action figures are the only merchandise I have any time for (not counting fiction, in whatever media) – there’s something rather glorious about them. The attention to detail combined with the kitschness of owning little models of Doctor Who characters stirs something in me...

Review: WHO KILLED KENNEDY

2010-07-03T10:15:00.007+01:00

Missing Adventure novel written by David Bishop, 1996

A relatively obscure Doctor-lite Missing Adventure novel from fourteen years ago might seem a strange choice to review straight after the dizzy heights of a brand new series. But then, that’s why I like the novels, as they offer a more tangential approach to Doctor Who than the series ever can. In that way, they’re a satisfying counterpoint to the on-screen adventures - which almost by definition have to be far more broadly accessible.

Frustratingly, then, I haven’t read any Doctor Who novels in ages – not deliberately, just because of lack of time. Which, upsettingly, is why I left Doctor Who behind back in the nineties, because I felt I was missing out on so many other amazing books and films. So, since getting back into it, I’ve tried to alternate with ‘real’ novels (if you will), so I don’t burn myself out on it, or feel like I’m denying myself more varied things too.

There’s so much I want to enjoy though, Doctor Who-wise: at the moment alone I still have a big proportion of a 30-plus Oxfam novel haul to get through; I really want to reread the collected DWM strips to date; old DWMs I’ve eBayed from after I stopped buying them; and re-listen to several sixties audio soundtracks (I tend to listen to them at night, with the inherent danger of falling asleep and not giving them the attention they deserve).

It’s the novels that seem most important to me though. The Virgin series especially – at their best – represents Doctor Who at its most ‘right,’ for me. It upsets me, actually, how they are becoming more and more forgotten – even that they’ll never be reprinted and will gradually fall apart (which seems unfair considering they kept the series going, and their continued influence on the revived TV series; I really wish more could find their way online, for posterity).

In a way, I think that’s why I write these reviews, to sort of commemorate the books I feel are worthwhile, cos they mean so much to me!

Therefore, it’s really nice coming back to a book I read in the past but don’t have a huge memory of.

Who Killed Kennedy, while an aberration in published Doctor Who fiction, is a fascinating one, following journalist James Stevens on an investigation that takes in the events and cover-ups of various UNIT-era stories. With even on-screen, irrefutably ‘canon’ stories like Love and Monsters viewing the Doctor’s adventures from an oblique angle, it’s easy to overlook how radical and unprecedented Who Killed Kennedy’s outsider perspective was, and it’s actually much more successful that you might be given to expect. (I like the idea of viewing this as a Third Doctor era ‘Doctor-lite’ story. In fact, the replaying of events from recent adventures from an everyman, outsider context is present, particularly, in both Love and Monsters and Turn Left.)

There’s something about contextualising the outlandish events of Doctor Who within the default ‘real world’ setting it always returns to which I find really interesting. Having the events of The War Machines (C-day), Spearhead from Space (Black Thursday) – et al – mentioned alongside Asian flu, the fall of the Wilson government, or the death of Charles De Gaulle, is therefore rather wonderful, especially as these sorts of things never really impinge on the Doctor’s world.

Not only that, but seen from the point of view of reporter James Stevens, and grounded in the context of a life involving drink, sex, affairs, and divorce – creates a persuasive dichotomy. (And isn’t as jarring as it could easily be, perhaps because a realistic approach is brought even to characters like usually anonymous UNIT rookies like Private Cleary, whose letters bring to life a usually overlooked position. I always feel – especially given my appreciation for the NAs’ adult approach – that though sex and swearing and other ‘unsavoury’ activities don’t feature in televised Doctor Who, it’s not that they don’t exist in that world, just that we’re not permitted to see them; a viewpoint which David Bishop realises nicely here.)

Obviously the NAs put sex and drugs into Doctor Who, but they were dealing with the on-going adventures of the then-current Doctor; having such realism applied to a past era is unusual, and surprisingly doesn’t feel ‘wrong’. Whereas – in the first of possibly many comparisons with Gary Russell’s The Scales of Injustice – shoving some violence into a typical Third Doctor story just doesn’t work, and shows how facile that approach is. (Incidentally, I’ll be posting a review/defamation of Scales at some point.)

Subtle nods to Doctor Who tropes like Metropolitan magazine and a pre-digital BBC3 also show a relative subtlety unknown to the Gary Russells of this world, which help blur the boundaries between reality and the earth of Doctor Who. Even interviews with characters like Greg Sutton or Ralph Cornish don’t feel overdone – I guess because, in the context of a journalistic investigation, it makes sense they’d be tracked down, whereas Scales arbitrarily namedrops any and all characters imaginable.

(I also particularly liked the justification of the British Mars missions from The Ambassadors of Death within an otherwise recognisable seventies England – linking Ralph Cornish to the leftovers of Tobias Vaughn’s International Electromatics, and thus advanced Cyber-technology. Ooh, neat.)

Stevens’ integration and presence in existing stories is also very elegant and constrained (Spearhead, Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Mind of Evil). This is perhaps because, as Bishop himself was a journalist, it feels as if the concept for an investigation of these UNIT stories’ events was inspired by the pre-existing presence of journalists in those stories, rather than shoehorning these links in later.

The cover-ups Stevens faces, and the conspiracy thriller elements of the book also seem quite believable (or at least believably unpleasant), whereas, watching the stories in question, it’s all too easy to scoff and deride the fact that their events are apparently forgotten next week.

It’s also pleasing to have conspiracy thriller tropes applied to the usually morally black and white Doctor Who world, especially when the Doctor himself and the UNIT family are present in the background (and especially since they are made ambiguous themselves by distance).

Again, this is a less broad approach than in Scales, but to similar ideas, with Bishop taking a more believable and genuinely unpleasant approach (rather than just throwing in the odd arbitrary decapitation). These conspiracy sections might be trashy to an extent – beatings and firebombings – but it is to the author’s credit that, in keeping with this realistic perspective, they are also terrestrial, and don’t veer toward slavering dogs infected with Inferno-ooze, Cyberised villains, or partially-Auton henchmen.

Given that this deals with the first prolonged period of alien activity apparently in the public eye (the UNIT era), tellingly, this book wouldn’t work with regard to the second (the Davies era), because Russell T Davies repeatedly went out of his way to point out the whole world couldn’t possibly avoid this invasion… Only for it to be mentioned once more down the line and then forgotten, with our suspension of disbelief in tatters. At least it does seem conceivable that the events of The Web of Fear could be put down to some kind of tear gas attack.

(I guess this approach to existing Doctor Who stories – presenting them as events within a continuous timeline – could go on for ever; I’d love to see more stories presented in such a way as to believably fit within a near-real world, but it’s probably a blessing that Bishop exercised as much restraint as he did.)

I also particularly liked the idea of the Master’s ‘Victor Magister’ persona being portrayed as a terrorist by the media after the events of The Dæmons, used as a scapegoat for what, from the public PoV we are seeing through Stevens’ eyes, appears to be a spate of terrorist attacks. Having said that, I sort of wish the Master weren’t any more directly involved with the story than this, as it does seem slightly predictable within a UNIT era novel.

However, this is balanced by possibly the bravest element of this book; its use of Dodo. Seeing even such an unloved companion homeless and hopeless following her ignominious departure from the Doctor, is quite horrifying. There is also added pathos given her treatment as a real person in The Man in the Velvet Mask, while, like in that book, it’s kind of sweet that she’s allowed a starring role (especially outside of her era, and over Liz, say). It’s also nice having an earlier companion linked to the mainly UNIT-oriented situation here, making Doctor Who’s twentieth century seem like a coherent whole. It does seem a shame however that, given this novel’s proximity to The Man in the Velvet Mask in the schedules, that more wasn’t done to link them.)

It’s to David Bishop’s credit that a melange of elements including the Master, Dodo Chaplet, Liz Shaw, et al, feels cohesive, and not overly unrestrained.

Some of the journalistic wranglings and access to important and/or convenient contacts seems a bit too easy, but we’ll let that one slide in the name of dramatic licence. The sections toward the end where Stevens is locked up, and comes face to face with the Master (nefariously posing as the Director of the Glasshouse), followed by his all-action escape, and live-television humiliation - while necessary in terms of genre conventions, does seem at odds with the realism previously built up, but I can also forgive this as central to the gradually-building degradation and defamation the character is put through, resulting in not only the murder of ‘the woman he loves’ and their unborn child, but his arrest for said crime.

Stevens really does get put through the ringer in a way that wouldn’t really be achievable with a companion. Although, look at Dodo – at least not during their time with the Doctor, then. Similarly though – as in The Man in the Velvet Glass – Dodo’s fate was probably only sanctioned because of how unloved a character she is. (Can you imagine anything comparable happening to, say, Martha, these days?)

The Master’s dastardly (and, let’s face it, somewhat overcomplicated) plan – which I suppose is true to the character – also jars, though the major letdown is just how unrelated (and unnecessary) the Kennedy assassination seems. It feels very much shoehorned in, especially given the coincidence that Stevens happens to have always been interested in this, which remains nothing more than a coincidence, and doesn’t have any particular significance aside from providing him with the requisite detailed knowledge back in 1963.

Overall, Who Killed Kennedy is an unexpectedly brave formula experiment. Though well done, there isn’t quite enough invention for it to be brilliant, even though it takes an interesting perspective. That it avoids becoming a list recounting the events of various familiar stories is probably the books greatest feat (though there is perhaps – if necessarily – a little too much of this). Most of all though, and not for the first time, this novel makes me wish a similarly experimental series of books were still being published…

Next Time: SILVER NEMESIS

Reaction: THE BIG BANG

2010-06-27T11:19:00.009+01:00

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Toby Haynes, 2010

Less a story than a puzzle box, though exhilarating The Big Bang can't help but be ultimately anticlimactic, given that nothing is resolved. I don't know what I was thinking, really, imagining that, say, the Dream Lord, or some similar vengeful supervillain would be responsible for the TARDIS' destruction. Obviously I reckoned without Steven Moffat's wormy brain.

I feel I should be annoyed by the ultimate lack of resolution to these events (and I’m sure lots of people will be), but actually, the delicious tortuousness of this story is perfectly adequate recompense. "Silence will fall," indeed?! I should have known nothing so mundane would be on the cards. The potential for multi-season arcs is quite intriguing, though one wonders what a general audience must have made of this story (if anything), let alone another self-involved conundrum down the line.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Less out-and-out dazzling than the preceding episode - the essentially four-handed structure makes it feel surprisingly small, and though, frankly, I prefer a bit of intimacy, it somewhat undercuts the epic threat - this final episode was nevertheless filled with numerous great moments, not least those when a chunk of the plot fell into place. There was still a touch too much exposition of the 'this is going to happen because I say this is going to happen' variety (for example, flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS is in no way self-evident as a solution, rather something we have to take on trust). But, it still widdles over Davies' efforts, given that I don't immediately wish it could be purged from my mind.

I was expecting some sort of progression from the previous episode, akin to the initially baffling dream world with which Moffat's Forest of the Dead begins, so the "1,894 years later…" caption didn’t come as a massive surprise (incidentally, how satisfying must they be to write?!). The revisit of The Eleventh Hour's opening moments - the series coming full circle - was unexpected, but felt absolutely right, especially as it was actually great to see young Amelia again. Given the Doctor’s childlikeness, it seems odd this affinity hasn’t been exploited with child-companions before now (suddenly I have images of TV Comic's John and Gillian appearing on screen in the sixties...).

Similarly, I can't be the only person to have also welcomed the revisits to other previous stories, though it would have been nice if they’d been more integral. Considering how baffling this story could be though (if you didn’t pay attention), that might have been asking for trouble. Having said that, I wasn’t fully convinced that this would actually happen, on the basis of the scene where the Doctor briefly appeared to have regained his jacket in Flesh and Stone, which seemed almost too subtle to be anything besides a continuity error. However, it did appear to me that there actually was a continuity error this time round, as he seemed to have bare arms even when wearing the jacket?!

More than any of his previous series fnarg stories, this finale demonstrated the most outré elements of Moffat's imagination, as well as it arguably being here that he fully justifies his position as showrunner and head writer. Rory as a two thousand year old Auton - who'd ever have seen that coming?! That sort of unrestrained approach to storytelling is something always attributed to Davies, and which never quite worked for me - whereas here I think it does, the difference being that the story doesn’t coast on one or two elements. On the contrary, The Big Bang encompasses Roman Britain, 1996, calcified Daleks, Amy and Rory's long-awaited nuptials, a fez ("Fezzes are cool"), the TARDIS as a sun, and obviously "nonsensical time-travelling farce,” as Moffat puts it (nicely undercut by the future Doctor appearing and tumbling down the stairs).

Speaking of Daleks, it's entirely appropriate that it is one of them which forms the only sentient threat in this half of the story. I certainly can’t say I’m particularly upset that the alien alliance of The Pandorica Opens is pretty much irrelevant, simply serving as a means to put the plot into motion, so we're spared Doomsday-style interminable monster-smackdowns.

Probably unsurprisinglyly, I feel this is an episode which will repay rewatching in a big way, and already very much makes me want to return to the beginning of the season with the benefit of hindsight. I can't believe the Eleventh Doctor's first run is all over, but, gloriously, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang has fully justified the poorer stories of the series (which, in fairness, are relatively few) – though, in light of the season's strong opening and closing, these become little more than forgivable lapses.

My only substantial reservation is probably an unfair one. That is that The Eleventh Hour formed such a perfect pilot that I feel quite cheated that Leadworth and the inhabitants we met in that episode didn't become at least semi-regular. Given the format established prior to this year, it does make Moffat's version of the series lacking in not having a central core in that way (if not in many other ways).

It’s either less… or more… than the sum of its parts – not sure which – but I loved it. A finale that I didn’t simply tolerate at best! Some of it is too easy (the Doctor and River’s escapes), but at least things don’t get overly laboured, and instead we just get on with the story. Pleasingly, both Rory and Amy are brought back without recourse to much-derided deus ex machina reset switches; the situations of their deaths were resolved rather than rescinded. Moffat’s definitely a keeper.

It doesn’t feel like a coherent, fully fleshed-out story in the way The Empty Child or Silence in the Library do – it’s too episodic for that, and maybe a bit too clever-clever for its own good. But, in dramatic terms it’s massively satisfying - even if there’s probably a billion plotholes, should one chose to enumerate them. I don’t, though. Dramatically, it works; the Silence apart, it ties up a season’s worth of adventures and enigmas, and the effortlessness with which Moffat essays the audaciousness of the plot is glorious.

Other observations…

• So was Amy not remembering Daleks (and, presumably, Cybermen) a symptom of the events here? Or something else? It didn’t seem explicitly addressed. (Oh, and the whole thing with the duck-less duck pond - I presume that was an oblique reference to the emptiness of chez Pond?)

• It’s funny how quickly we as the audience – and the Doctor – have come to take River for granted, despite (rather like Captain Jack) not knowing the first thing about her history or background. She also seems to have returned to the somewhat milder, (marginally) less arch figure of Silence in the Library, rather than the brassier portrayal of The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.

Having her make a Dalek beg for mercy is an interesting development – though heavy-handed; yes, we get that she’s not necessarily that ‘nice’ – even if it does smack of yet more fan-teasing. Given that we have Moffat’s assurance that the next series will reveal more about her, I can live with that; I particularly can’t wait to see their first encounter (from her PoV).

• Matt Smith's evening wear is better than David Tennant's Paul Smith tux. Exciting that his costume is apparently being souped-up for future outings, but I’d be happy to see him retain his Edwardian spiv look, for a while at least.

In terms of this series at large, overall, Moffat hasn’t reinvented anything as such – rather added a fairytale/childlike veneer to the format he’s appropriated from Davies. Fortunately the format itself, since the show came back, is a strong one, and given that I prefer the slightly more magical approach Moffat has brought to the series, these are Good Things.

Perhaps my main overall criticism would be that Amy hasn't been given much chance to respond to what she experiences; there's been a slightly disappointing old series-style assumption that her thoughts should be implicit with the audience, whereas Davies brought the wonderment of the situation to the surface. This needn't be a constant, but it would be nice to see some acknowledgment that she has at least some self-awareness. Similarly, I don't really want to see a return to the domestic milieu of the companions' families (somehow I can’t imagine Augustus and her mum becoming major presences?), but at least glimpses of it throughout the next run might make her seem more rounded.

To be frank though, I’ve enjoyed the underlying tenets of this approach to Doctor Who so much more than the Davies era that any criticism is pretty much superfluous. The highest praise I can possibly give is that I am looking forward to Christmas and series six with excitement rather than apprehension.

Next Time: WHO KILLED KENNEDY