Reaction: A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR

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 PANDORICA OPENS

Written by Steven Moffat, directed by Toby Haynes, 2010

I hate season finales. Tediously overblown, messy, self-indulgent things. But maybe I should put that into the past tense.

Russell T Davies is the only writer to have previously tackled the slot designed to bring a season’s worth of stories to a climax. Therefore, more than any other element of this second era of revived Doctor Who, it’s impossible to discuss this series’ finale without comparing it to those of the previous showrunner.

In my Lodger review, I pondered whether Moffat would take a different route from his predecessor’s overblown approach, or instead try to out-Davies Russell with more of the same. The appearance of multiple alien races would appear to point to the latter – an escalation of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday’s Daleks versus Cybermen more-is-more principle. In practice though, that Moffat undercuts this expectation is representative of the previously un-furrowed direction in which he takes The Pandorica Opens.

Despite the scale deriving from its culmination of various season-long strands, there’s a surprisingly restrained – and in that sense, decidedly un-Davies approach to this story. Which is not to say that it is restrained, but by comparison to the previous new series finales at least there’s time to breathe.

Inevitably, this episode will be described as something of a synthesis of Davies and Moffat’s approaches, with the often ultimately hollow spectacle of the former reinforced by the latter’s more assured way with a complex plot. And it works. For once, I was as excited about a finale as I evidently was always intended to be, a possibility which was always destroyed by the looseness and lazy crowd-pleasing of the previous stories in this slot - to say nothing of the excruciating celebrity cameos.

Most telling, perhaps, is the evident comparison between the mysterious Sphere in Army of Ghosts and the mysterious Pandorica: one is in a deeply dull research facility, and has some Daleks in it. The other is under Stonehenge! In a creepy gothic vault! It might be massively clichéd, but at least it has atmosphere. I know what I prefer. Oh, and, it doesn’t have some Daleks in it.

It’s nigh-on impossible to accurately judge a two-parter on the basis of one episode, and in fact, The Pandorica Opens feels rather more like the pulling together of various strands than a coherent story in its own right. However, it performs its function rather gloriously, and if making the narrative itself rather disjointed is the only end-of-season concession we’re going to get under Moffat, then - ehh, I can live with that.

The cracks, the TARDIS explosion, the Pandorica, Rory’s return (which, miraculously, doesn't actually renege on his death in Cold Blood with a direct reset-switch), Amy’s past – obviously, all these things aren’t fully resolved here, but for once it’s actually exciting seeing them coming together, rather than tiring, and makes the Bad Wolf and Saxon memes seem even more inadequate. Where those seasons literally led toward an answer to ‘What/Who is it?’, there are multiple elements at work here, making both trying to predict what will happen - and enjoying the revelations as they come - far more rewarding.

What’s most satisfying is the dexterity with which Moffat handles these various threats: the Pandorica itself being the ultimate case in point, the revelation of its function seeming immediately obvious, in the most gratifying way; it had to be linked to the Doctor, but…

Similarly, the various races’ relationship to one another, again undercutting the Doomsday-on-acid thing, is a similarly simple but effective bit of sleight of hand. It made me think of Jonathan Morris’ DWM strip Death to the Doctor!. It fact, the monster axis of evil has a very comic book feel, albeit located within a contrastingly complex situation. If the story had been merely what it appeared to be - Monster Smackdown, or even Monsters versus Romans – it would have been severely naff. It’s also a bonus that this isn't 'just' a Dalek story or a cyber-story, cos, really, we don’t need that, and it wouldn’t be anything special for a finale.

That all this is going on alongside Auton Romans (who saw that coming?), the return of Rory (with another major nod to Mickey), and Amy’s apparent death, is fantastic – none of these would have been so thrilling individually (whereas any one of these things might have been a major element of a Davies finale), but have a cumulative power that left me literally jaw-dropped – something I cant say happens very often. And in the best way – thrilled, slightly overwhelmed, and amused at the script’s audacity, and at my own complicity in not seeing any of this coming.

There is also what seems like a very deliberate attempt to do a Stolen Earth early on, and cement this season’s status as a self-contained era in its own right with the appearance of various characters from earlier stories. It’s funny, I’d already found myself musing, earlier in the run, on the idea of situation where characters like Churchill and Liz Ten might return en masse – like the celebratory New Adventure Happy Endings - and it’s brilliant (and unexpected!) to actually see something akin to that. There have been a number of particularly brilliant pre-titles sequences this season, a damn-sight less perfunctory than in previous years, and the appearance of van Gogh, Churchill, and only bloody Liz Ten (meeting River!*) is massively impressive – in delivering a really obvious bit of audience-pleasing, without it seeming offensively unnecessary.

At various points during the writing of these reviews, I’ve wondered how unfairly biased I am toward series fnarg. I really don’t like Davies’ general approach, whereas I really like Moffat’s stories and mentality: I was probably always going to cut him some pretty substantial slack. But this run of recurring characters is the sort of thing I hated The Stolen Earth or The End of Time for, yet here… Perhaps it’s because it’s genuinely woven into the narrative. Not the overall story, perhaps, but part of the set-up, a chain of events, in a way that that Sarah or the Torchwood team’s arbitrary involvement, or the Tenth Doctor’s dying rounds, didn’t.

Quite apart from the characters, in this case I loved seeing such varied settings – Provence, the war rooms, the Stormcage (even if it was another one of those over-used Cardiff locations), the cartoony jungle planet, Liz Ten’s gallery (love that she provides the security herself…) - even the Star Wars-y bar where River does her dirty deal. All those situations add to an impression of the expansiveness of the Doctor’s universe, whereas a role-call of former companions only emphasised the insularity of the Tenth Doctor’s world.

Okay, so, this story wasn’t without its flaws. I think the Pandorica prop wobbled at one point, for example. Ooh, that’s not going to be pretty in HD! And then there’s all the little niggly points – who woke the Silurians up to be part of the alliance when they won’t even meet the Doctor for a couple of thousand years? (That we know of, admittedly – but I’ve got my Outraged Ming-Mong hat on. It has a bobble.) How comes the Cybus Cybermen have a fleet? How does Rory nobble a Cyberman (even a battered one) with a sword? Hmm? More importantly, do we care…? Well, no.

Flagrant disregard for continuity bugs me; what can I say – I’m a fan. But, for once, I really get the immediacy of the big, fast, shocking, involving finale. And I say finale like it’s separate from any other type of story, because I think it is. It’s a different format, where the story is drawing on things that have been established over several weeks, and has to bear the extra weight of those snowballing expectations. And, previously, the series has always flunked for me, and failed totally to deliver on those expectations. The series two and three finales are among the most hateful of new Who stories for me, the moments where phrases like ‘dumbed down’ and ‘lowest common denominator’ really come in handy.

But, I actually – can I say it? – kinda loved this. I’m writing immediately after watching, which I don’t usually do, so it’s probably not the most balanced of reactions - but that’s sort of part of the fun. It was invigorating and actually shocking, mainly because it didn’t entirely jettison the intelligence and little twists of Moffat’s mindset.

There is always that worry of how enjoyable something’ll be when you know all its secrets – how much will be left? – but let’s ignore that for once. What’s perhaps most exciting is not having a clue what to expect from episode thirteen. I imagine it’s unlikely to hang around the under-henge for too long, and hopefully it’ll end with Rory and Amy finally tying the knot. But whose is that voice? Next week I’ll probably sound as stupid as those people who thought Omega might be in the Pandorica, but – the Dream Lord…?

If this series had ended on a damp squib (…and I do realise there is still time for that), I might’ve found it hard to overlook my disappointed with fairly hefty swathes of the year’s stories. But it looks set to go out with a (big) bang, and in that case, I’m happy to overlook the saggy middle.


*Something The Guardian suggested back in week two, although it – and I - hoped for more of a bitch-off.

"Sarah Jane Smith – still involving children in your dangerous games!"

Review: THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES, SERIES 2
CBBC spin-off series, 2008

It feels slightly unfair judging SJA on adult terms – but, at the same time, it clearly does cater for a wide audience, despite the limitations of its format, so why not. Though not a rabid follower of all things new series, I am surprisingly fond of this spin-off – certainly more so than Torchwood, which was almost incomprehensibly awful in every way, at least up until Children of Earth. (I was apparently mistaken in thinking an ‘adult’ Doctor Who spin-off would address similar stories with a greater degree of complexity, realism and maturity – akin to season twenty-six – rather than being Doctor Who’s deformed cousin.)

Favourably comparing SJA to Torchwood is something of a backhanded complement, but let’s say that despite being as twee as fuck, it is considerably more mature and likeable a series, and leave it there.

Lis Sladen is of course wonderful – although the extremity of her Doctor-/Captain Jack-like knowledge seems a little odd or inappropriate at times; yes, she travelled with the Doctor, but even given her subsequent involvement with aliens on earth, what did she do, take notes?! It would be more interesting were she slightly less assured in this respect – but then I suppose that would simply lead to her having to consult Mr Smith even more, and the less we see of that mobile disco, the better. I’m not entirely sold on Luke, either. Fortunately though, he’s the only one of Sarah’s adolescent posse who really feels like ‘a child actor’.

Clyde, on the other hand, is great (even though he should be massively annoying); in fact, having palmed Martha Jones off on Torchwood, could things go the other way, by having him become a companion? The male companion has only featured in the new series as aberrations like Adam, the unwilling Mickey and Doctor-equivalent Jack, but I reckon Clyde Langer could work (partly because he’s straight enough to forestall the redtops’ inevitable raised eyebrows about two men in the TARDIS).

Maria’s replacement, Rani (no relation), is perfectly likeable too; in fact, she seems more natural than Maria – but is slightly less interesting. Maria went against the grain in terms of leads – as established by the new series’ Rose/Martha/Donna – by seeming a bit art school, where the template established by the Davies companions is anything but.

The budget of this series is noticeably reduced: the first series gave us original monsters the Gorgon, Kudlak, and the Trickster (who everyone seems unfeasibly impressed by; a black-robed extradimensional evil being seems pretty bog-standard to me), whereas there are conspicuously no new creations in this entire series (Clyde’s dad with blue veins and obligatory freaky contacts doesn’t count). More generally, the effects (especially the CGI) don’t match up to the series’ ambition – which wouldn’t matter except they are so obviously trying to match Doctor Who’s, and falling short; a smaller focus might be beneficial in future. (Even the Black Archive looked all too obviously like an MFI warehouse, with the security to match.)

In fact, this series is generally weaker than the first. The Last Sontaran suffers from feeling unpleasantly nineties (all the computer hacking stuff – also, the radio telescope is even less realistic than The Android Invasion’s!), and away from the team’s usual stomping grounds, the story feels very thin, while Kaagh’s literal stomping got tiresome pretty quickly. (Incidentally, his name would be okay if it was pronounced as it’s written – ‘Kaah’ – but ‘Karg’ sounds unfortunately B-movie.)

Also – though this is more the fault of The Sontaran Stratagem – this story runs with the Sontarans’ reworking as noble warriors, with their hyperbolic suffixes and absurd war chant, which seems somewhat incompatible with their establishment in The Time Warrior as the ultimate parody of military buffoonery (spelt out during Lynx’s very first appearance by the brilliantly funny moment with the little flag). They’re meant to be unpleasant little thugs – nobility and honour shouldn’t come into it.

Also, the lack of any follow-up to the events of The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End is irritating; a) given the propensity of the three series to reference one another, this feels like a big oversight, and b), why go out of the way to constantly show alien incursions that are apparently too big for the public to avoid… and then instantly forget about them the next time the same thing happens.

Let’s see – obsessive-compulsive list coming up: in the new series alone, the public have been faced with large-scale alien activity in Aliens of London/World War Three, The Christmas Invasion, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, The Runaway Bride, Voyage of the Damned (kind of), Partners in Crime, The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky, and the aforementioned series four finale. Oh, and guess who wrote EVERY SINGLE ONE of those stories (save one – and Helen Raynor doesn’t appear to have a personality so she doesn’t count). Tsk.

Normality is reset each time – which is understandable, but begs the question, why bother in the first place? Journey’s End combined three series, but with no repercussions, save a reference to "those Dalek things," and the Brigadier’s comment that "now the cat’s out of the bag about aliens…" – so what’s the point?

The Day of the Clown was pretty good, but suffered from over-explanation, which diffused its creepiness (that every single threat Sarah faces absolutely has to be alien, rather than something more nebulous, is gratingly literal), while this and the subsequent Secrets of the Stars both end with possessed people wandering around, as in The Christmas Invasion – an example of slightly lazy feeding off the parent series. In fact, these stories feel too similar for one to follow the other in the run – the main difference being that Bradley Walsh makes a perfectly serviceable villain, whereas (the equally washed-up) Russ Abbot is a bit shit.

The Mark of the Berserker didn’t do that much for me either – do we really need a Sarah-lite story in a run of six stories? In another example of the spin-off’s stringent following of the new series’ formula, this story in particular was hampered by the sledgehammer emotional content – although, arguably, it was a little more ambiguous and thus interesting that usual, in the interplay between Clyde and his hitherto unseen absentee father. (On a side note, isn’t Three Non Blondes’ Jocelyn Jee Esien fab? I sort of fell in love with her here; I’d rather she had a bigger role in the series than Rani’s dippy mum.)

The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, much like the previous season’s Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (incidentally – any kids’ show referring to that particular Bette Davis psychological melodrama is automatically a winner in my book), is the strongest story here because it tears up the rule book in terms of format, while its emotional content derives from the situation, rather than being bolted on.

As for Enemy of the Bane – I hate the mentality of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into finale stories, in the mistaken belief that it’ll mean more, so, much like its predecessors, this ended up feeling flimsy, lacking the preceding story’s more effortless epic quality.

The Brigadier’s triumphant return was a huge disappointment, simply because it wasn’t allowed to be triumphant. The man barely even talks to any of the regulars, let alone interacts with them to a significant degree! I fully realise that this is probably due to Nicolas Courtney’s advanced age, but it could have been no barrier to his involvement had the character been written with this in mind (rather than slashing his involvement because he wouldn’t be running around or dodging bullets); he’s barely even present! There’s certainly no character development, and his involvement here seems ultimately a rather thankless missed opportunity.

It would still be wonderful to see him return in a bona fide – and, preferably, character-driven – Doctor Who story, one that was actually concerned with the character beyond his being used as an end-of-season reveal.

On the plus side, his walking-stick gun was, it has to be said, kind of inspired. Given that, in his civvies, the character is deprived of the military background which defines him (to an extent, he is ‘just an old man’ here), it was canny to give him a memorable visual addition (akin to recognisable accoutrements like Sarah’s watch, sonic lipstick, and Nissan Figaro); a gimmick appropriate to a kids’ series, but which also goes some way to diffusing his potential quaintness.

I’m well aware my opinions here are more or less irrelevant – I have no doubt this series is wonderful for its primary target audience – but, still, it is worth watching for more than fanboy completism alone, though I do feel some of the limitations of the new series’ format which it replicates are exposed.

However – the fact that this series is as good as it is is quite a shocker. I need only direct your attention to the trailer for the Bob Baker K9 series to show how bad a children’s DW spin-off could be, appearing as it does to encapsulate everything tawdry and lazy about kids’ TV. ‘Darius, Starkey, and Jorjie’? When even the names don’t have any bearing on reality, you know you’re in trouble. And, rationalising the disparity between a London setting and Australian locations by saying it’s set ten years into a globally-warmed future – for the love of god, just SET IT IN AUSTRALIA. At least then the whole thing’d be comfortably out of the way.