NuNuWho Series 2 Episode 1: The One With The Things And Stuff
SPOILERS and stuff.
Well that was certainly a Steven Moffat story, wasn’t it?
Spacesuits, disembodied kid voices, the Doctor saying various things are cool, the Doctor saying something really annoying like “wobbly bobbly flippity floppity” or something, I don’t even remember what, alien monsters that are more a conceptual threat than a real thing, astronaut suits, hints as to River Song’s identity, a major character ‘dying’ in a way that will very obviously be reversed, characters knowing secrets about other characters’ futures, a bit ripped off from Alien Bodies (the bit where they have to destroy the Doctor’s body in order to stop it being prized by alien civilisations), Mary Sue River Song being able to do everything in the world… It really was like somebody’s got some kind of machine, the Moff-O-Matic, churning this stuff out by the yard.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you – one could make a similar list of ingredients for a Terrance Dicks, or Robert Holmes, or Christopher Bidmead, or Douglas Adams script. And of the writers on the Welsh series, Moffat is by far the most competent at actually telling a story. And Matt Smith is still turning in an astonishingly good performance. I have trouble seeing Smith’s character as the Doctor though – while some have described Colin Baker’s TV Doctor as ‘a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is like’, Smith’s character seems to be a deeply dull person’s idea of what an interesting person is like. He’s not so much an eccentric as “I’m mad, me”. The performance manages to sell it, though – Smith is as good an actor as ever played the role (I didn’t warm to his performance at first until I read an interview where he talked about how he was influenced by Peter Sellers, and it became obvious then that Smith is playing the Doctor as Sellers would, were he given those scripts).
On a comparative scale, this ranks somewhere in the middle of last year’s episodes, which means it would still be by far the best thing in any of the four series prior to that. But compared to the old series? Earthshock or something from that era. It’s about up to the standard of a Series 19 mid-season filler, right down to a surplus of companions (two companions is OK. Two companions plus River Song plus Guest FBI Blokey is too many) and the desire for SHOCKING EVENTS! (The Doctor Died!!!!!).
It’s not a bad piece of TV by any means – I laughed at points, the monsters were quite spooky, the bloke playing Nixon looked slightly more like him than Ian MacNeice did Churchill last year, and everything more or less made sense. But it was just sort of… there. Forty-five minutes of extruded TV product.
Moffat *is* capable of better. When he’s good, he can actually be very good. I hope he starts trying later in the series…
Doctor Who And Batman Week Day 1: NuNuWho
So I’m a couple of weeks behind in my blogging now, thanks to some rather bad health problems due to stress, and I’m aware I’ve got quite a bit of stuff to write about. So I hereby declare the next seven days to be Doctor Who And Batman week, with the plan being to do posts on NuNuWho, Batman 700, the seven ‘free’ Doctor Who CDs that the Daily Torygraph gave away, Return Of Bruce Wayne 4, Marco Polo and the issue of Batman & Robin that comes out tomorrow, in that order.
I think I’m actually going to be able to find a surprising amount in common between these things, to the point that I’m seeing this more as one very long piece than seven shorter ones. Let’s see if that works.
The most recent series of Doctor Who has been weirdly polarising. It’s appropriate, in fact, that it ran over the election and coalition formation, because much like the coalition it’s led to people finding themselves violently disagreeing with those they previously agreed with, and praising the opinions of those they despised. Andrew Rilstone, for example, who detested pretty much everything from the last two or three years of RTDWho, has been absolutely gushing in his praise. Lawrence Miles, on the other hand, who held similar, though much more strongly-expressed, opinions, has judged the new series as being probably the worst thing in human history (on the basis of half-watching one episode and a personal dislike of Steven Moffat, the head writer).
I actually find myself agreeing with both of them, for reasons that are, to me at least, rather interesting.
Because the interesting thing about this series is how all the criticisms that most people were making of the RTD era turn out to be bunkum – the plots here don’t make any more sense than they did during RTD’s time, there’s an overemphasis on Daleks, the companion is the most specialest person in the whole history of ever, ludicrously-high-stakes finale – in fact the whole thing could almost have been written as a parody of the worst excesses of Davies’ era. But none of *these* things mattered, because Moffat, unlike Davies, understands story structure – the plot to the weeping angel two-parter made no sense at all on any level *when looked at as a whole*, but every individual idea followed neatly and yet surprisingly from the idea before.
(That wasn’t the case with every episode – some were incredibly predictable – but it was the case more often than not).
The main thing Moffat did was to take the series away from soap-operatics and frame the same kind of stories instead as fairy tales (signalled by someone every five seconds saying “Oh, it’s just like a fairy-tale”. I never said Moffat was subtle), and within that fairy tale world, the rules could change, but never unfairly.
At least until the last episode, where the time-travel paradox was the kind of idea that Christopher Bidmead dismisses as first-draft writing. It was not only a cop-out, but it was one which was a) avoidable (one shot of the Doctor dropping the sonic screwdriver as he’s dragged towards the Pandorica and you’ve got your get-out), b) less dramatic than an obvious alternative (Rory has to try to figure out how to work it, nearly deranged with grief, because he knows the Doctor’s Amy’s only hope), and most importantly gives it the Superman: The Movie problem – we now know that any time the Doctor’s in an impossible situation, future-Doctor can just come and rescue him. It destroys tension in any future episode where we remember this.
And it was very enjoyable for what it was. A friend of mine said ‘Rilstone being positive about newestWho makes it sound worse than when he disliked it – it sounds like it’s finally become a puddle of “lovely, mad, beautiful, loveliness and special niceness”‘, but I think that’s misreading Rilstone’s reviews, and it’s *certainly* misreading the show, which has been far less sentimentalised than Davies’ excrescence. The new-new series is harder and more obviously cynical (I thought the RTD show was cynical as hell, but hidden under mountains of schmaltz, which have mostly been scraped away in the new show).
There is still a greasy residue smeared all over everything, of course – romantic love is still the highest ideal to which anyone can possibly aspire, and it’s perfectly acceptable to punch someone if they suggest that in a choice between saving your girlfriend from certain death, and saving the entire universe from being retroactively wiped from existence, the latter might be more important. But this is par for the course in modern TV, and something we just need to tolerate.
More worrying for me is the characterisation of the Doctor, where we see how this series is the half-way house between the RTD series and something interesting (in a glass-half-full or half-empty way, the RTD series was a glass full of urine, while the new series is the same glass, with the urine emptied out, given a good rinsing, and with a decent wine poured in – a definite improvement, but you’d still be cautious about drinking it, and there might be an aftertaste). The Doctor in the RTD series, at least once Tennant took the part, wasn’t a character at all, just a set of tics pulled together by Tennant in an increasingly-desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in the scripts. The scripts this year have a character in them who one assumes is what they were *trying* to do in the Tennant years – certainly some of the speech patterns (the more annoying ones) are the same – but is an actual character.
Unfortunately, rather than ‘eccentric’, this character is ‘whacky’ – where the Doctor should be three parts Sherlock Holmes to one part each Einstein and Groucho Marx, the Eleventh Doctor is Ralph Malph or Mork. This is better than no character at all, but significantly worse than the ‘real’ Doctor.
But my real problem with the new series has been its innate conservatism. This is something that was already there in the RTD years, but for all his faults (and by God did he have faults), Davies would at least try to make the show *different* – Love & Monsters is a fairly horrible piece of television, but it wasn’t something that Doctor Who had ever done before.
Moffat has taken what Davies did, streamlined it, made it even more formulaic, and added a basic level of competence that is far above what was there in Davies’ time. He’s making a solidly entertaining program. But he’s doing *nothing new*.
In the discussion I always point to, in the mid-1990s, Moffat said of Who “I’d rather see them do something limited than something crap.”
Which is as absolutely, utterly, totally wrong as one can get – even if he wasn’t, in the process, dismissing the work of Bob Holmes, a far better writer than Moffat has any hope of ever being.
Several of Moffat’s criticisms of the old show in that article actually ring true. Despite what some of the more vociferous fans may say, Doctor Who was never ‘the best programme on television’. It was often very good indeed (and equally often a pile of old tat), but during the 26 years Doctor Who was on, British TV also produced I, Claudius, Boys From The Blackstuff, Not Only… But Also, Life On Earth, The Ascent Of Man, The Beiderbecke Affair, Q, The Prisoner, Face To Face and many more. Objectively, as television, Doctor Who rarely if ever rose to those heights.
But while it was not the ‘best’ programme on TV, it was and remains my favourite. And one of the main reasons for that is that when it was at its best – when it felt most ‘like Doctor Who’ – it was a show that *tried different things*. Stories like, say, An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, The Mind Robber, The War Games, Vengeance On Varos, Logopolis or Delta And The Bannermen might not all have been great, but they were all *DIFFERENT*. A show can’t go from the high of Caves Of Androzani to the low of The Twin Dilemma *in a single week* without doing something interesting. That variability which kept Doctor Who from attaining the perfection of Fawlty Towers also made it worth watching even at its worst.
Moffat’s series has none of that. The best episodes (the first two, the first episode of the weeping angel two-parter and the two-part finale – in other words all bar one of Moffat’s episodes) have had me on the edge of my seat, desperate to see the next week’s episode, and wanting to watch them again. But when I’ve come to *actually* watch them again, there’s nothing there – it’s amazingly well-made, but it’s well-made *product*, with few real ideas. Expecting this show to be innovative, different or thought-provoking is a bit like expecting those things of your new iPad. That’s not what it’s *for* any more.
And that makes me sad, but if what you’re after from your TV is pretty people saying witty things in exciting situations, then you’re really not going to find a better example than the current series of Doctor Who. And that’s really not meant as a backhanded compliment – the new show does what it does extraordinarily well. Compared to the Davies series, this is a staggeringly huge improvement. But it isn’t the series I loved. That’s OK – the Pertwee UNIT series bore practically no relationship to The Romans or The Time Meddler, either. But it could be so much more than it is…
Doctor Who – The Time Of Angels
That was good.
That was actually good.
For the first time since about half way through the Eccleston series, an episode of the Welsh series has felt to me like a proper Doctor Who episode. For the first time since Dalek, I’m wanting to watch it again straight after seeing it.
I’m far from convinced yet about Moffat’s take on the show as a whole, and I still don’t think they’ve got the character down properly – that cliffhanger line is, as Lawrence Miles pointed out, more suited to Clint Eastwood than to the Doctor, but with surprisingly little modification that could have been a Troughton story, and it would have fitted in nicely in series 12 too, and would have held its own against the rest of that year.
And the thing is, it definitely *shouldn’t* have worked. It’s entirely built out of cliches and reused ideas, cobbled together in a way that shouldn’t possibly work.
I believed the Weeping Angels should be a one-off thing. Blink, the story they first appeared in, is deservedly thought of as one of the best episodes of the Welsh series (thanks, in large part, to the fact that it didn’t have Tennant’s travesty of a Doctor in it for more than a few seconds). It was a wonderfully constructed piece of TV, albeit horribly emotionally manipulative, cynical, and with a nasty nerd-mocking aspect to it, and the Angels were a fantastic monster for the story. But they were essentially a plot device.
And indeed, for much of this story, the Angels could be any monster at all, as a big chunk of it is just standard eighties action-movie formula stuff. But if any show has a right to do eighties formula action-movie it’s Doctor Who – this story is clearly a descendant of Alien, but Alien itself was ripped off almost entirely from The Ark In Space, and this feels nicely like a combination between that and Tomb Of The Cybermen. Not as *good* as those, but it’s got that feeling.
But Moffat has always understood that one of the things Doctor Who always did best was to use the fact it was on TV as a plot point – the Troughton era was full of things on monitors, while the Colin Baker period was almost Brechtian in the way it emphasised its own televisuality. Even in Hartnell’s day the TARDIS had a horizontal hold…
Moffat has often had people speaking out of TV screens – most obviously in Blink – but here he takes it one step further. Here we have monsters that *WILL COME OUT OF THE TV AND GET YOU IF YOU STOP WATCHING*. If you’re looking for a way to absolutely scare the shit out of little kids – one of Doctor Who’s hallowed functions since its inception – then that has to be a good one.
And the idea that the Angels are in fact living *ideas* – thrown out quite casually – not only explains this new power, but fits with the quantum handwaviness in their previous appearance. Moffat has actually made these creatures make *MORE* sense.
And while each part of the story is absolutely cliched – we’ve got the James Bond bit, the time-travel message sending, the action movie and a load of Moffatisms on top (things in the TV, repeated phrases from dead/possessed people), but the way the tone of this episode could wheel around on a pinhead, the sudden realisation of just how bad the situation was for the Doctor and his companions… there wasn’t a single new idea in the entire thing – in fact there wasn’t an idea that wasn’t as worn down as those Angels’ faces – but it was rather like watching a master bluesman play a twelve-bar. It’s all in the execution.
As for River Song, the returning character, I’d not seen her previous appearance, having given up on the RTD show in disgust long before, but I’d heard she was essentially Bernice Summerfield (a companion from the books and audios). Luckily, she seemed far more interesting here. In fact, with her hallucinogenic lipstick and the way she treated the Doctor, she reminded me far more of Iris Wildthyme, just without the annoying joke-Northernness.
And this was clearly an episode done on a budget, too. Other than one or two shots, there was nothing here that couldn’t have been done in the 80s – including some slightly dodgy matte work. And the lack of money has clearly made the programme-makers concentrate on the script and the drama rather than the big moments.
This was by far the tightest script of the series so far – which is to say, the tightest script since the Welsh series started – and while it wasn’t perfect – I’d put it at somewhere in the top 35 or 40% of Doctor Who stories, no better – there were no actual *problems* with it either.
I’d still like to see this series have some ambition to it – it’s very clearly sitting in a very comfortable, formulaic place right now – at the same time, it’s doing the formula very well. If it doesn’t break out of that formula soon, it won’t really be Doctor Who – Doctor Who should never be about doing the safe thing – but for now, at least, it’s just good to see something *competent* and *enjoyable* going out under the Doctor Who name.
I am very scared of what’s coming up – we have episodes by Richard Curtis and Simon Nye to come, and one with that horrible annoying bloke from Lesbian Vampire Hunters – but at this point Moffat would actually have to make an effort to mess this up.
Doctor Who: The Beast Below (Second Verse Same As The First…)
So to a large extent I could repeat last week’s post about the show as my review of this week’s.
After two weeks, it now looks like MoffWho will be, more or less, a series of remakes of the Welsh Series as if they’d been written by a competent writer. Not, necessarily, a *good* writer, but a competent one, which is, to be frank, more than we had for most of the Welsh Series so far. In this case, what we had was What If… The Long Game Had Been Better Than It Was And Had Those Creepy Puppets In Coin-Operated Booths From Old Fairgrounds In It?
Along with that, of course, we *also* had the second trip for the Doctor with his new companion being to a future spaceship with people from Earth who’ve escaped its destruction and a woman who, thanks to rejuvenating treatments, had lived a long, long time. (And next week we’re getting the Celebrity Historical By Mark Gattis. It seems we’re following the template of Davies’ first series exactly).
And it’s all seeming a little… calculated. We’ve got Moffatisms (cute little girl scared of common childhood fear) coupled with Davies’ series structure, mixed in with some of the more annoying Welsh Series aspects (we did *NOT* need another monologue about how special the Doctor is, especially in a story where the companion solved the problem).
And I’m still not convinced, *AT ALL*, by Moffat’s characterisation. He writes the Doctor as if he’s been given a description of what the character’s like, but without having ever seen an episode. Which is still an improvement over the previous series, which last I saw had no consistent idea of what the Doctor’s character was meant to be (unless, ‘unpleasant, annoying and prone to Kenneth Williams impersonations’ counts as characterisation). And in much the same way, Smith’s performance seems off. It’s definitely the same *kind* of character as the Doctor, but it’s not the Doctor I know. I’ve heard him compared to Michael Palin and Jim Carrey, and both of those seem apt at different points (he makes me think of Emo Philips myself, the way he gangles and folds himself up), and while I can see *some* people casting either of those as the Doctor, I wouldn’t cast either (though Palin might be interesting, thinking about it…)
And the worst thing of all is the fact that the dialogue is so reliant on cliche. Almost all the ‘witty’ lines were ones I could see coming from three lines earlier (“OK, the Doctor’s doing something ‘wacky’. That means the companion will say *this* confused line, which will allow the Doctor to make *this* reply. Oh I was right. Again.”) and some of the other stuff was frankly painful. I don’t care if “Help us, Doctor, you’re our only hope!” was meant as a post-modern ironic pop-culture reference or whatever, it’s still a terrible line.
And yet…
The plot only had the normal number of plot holes, the Doctor was shown as an actually decent person trying to do good, the dialogue was only not-very-good, rather than terrible, again the turning point was someone actually using their brain, and most importantly, *the story was based around an actual moral dilemma, and both the Doctor and his companion acted properly*. That dilemma was somewhat cheapened by the everybody-lives ending, but even that ending was set up from the very beginning, as a proper actual consequence of things that happened in the show – and brought about by an independent action of the companion, rather than just being Davies ex machina.
It’s still far from what I’d hope for in a series of Doctor Who, and it’s still problematic (and WHAT THE FUCK was Moffat thinking with the menacing black man in a hood? That’s NOT the kind of imagery you should be playing around with) but it’s better than anything from the five previous years, by some considerable margin, and I’m always willing to forgive the occasional lapses of a sinner that repents. I’m definitely going to watch at least the next few episodes, and I’ll see how it goes from there. I don’t love this – I’m not even sure yet if I like it – but on balance I don’t *dislike* it, and that’s a start.
Right?
Doctor Who – The Eleventh Hour
A little under a week ago I sent in my entry for Big Finish’s short story competition – I’d written what I like to think is an excellent short story, where a brave, bright, but very little girl is scared by voices in her bedroom, which the only parental character mentioned in the story doesn’t believe exist, but the voices are made to go away through the intervention of the Doctor.
I thought it was possibly the best piece of fiction I’ve ever written, but ‘a bit Steven Moffat’, and it actually had a chance of winning.
All I could think, through the first ten minutes of The Eleventh Hour, the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, as written by Steven Moffat, was ‘bugger’.
There are two things I want to make clear in this review before I go any further – two things which, unfortunately, due to the nature of online Doctor Who fandom, I need to say even though they really, really shouldn’t need saying.
The first is that even though I overall quite enjoyed the programme, I thought there was a lot to criticise within it as well, and in reviewing it I’m going to talk about those things. If you worry about someone ‘ruining your squee’, then please go away.
The second, and opposite, fact is that I have disliked the vast majority of what I have seen of the revived show as produced and written primarily by Russel T. Davies, and don’t really consider it to bear any relation to the programme I *do* like – but that I consider this a statement of personal aesthetic judgement about the programme, rather than a moral judgement about the programme’s creators or fans. In particular, I do not think Mr Davies is Satan, or that he wrecked the programme by allowing evil homosexualists into it, or that he is ‘destroying my childhood’ or ‘hating the fans’ or ‘stealing my programme and giving it to the mundanes’ or any of that nonsense. I just think he happens to be a writer/producer who is sincerely trying to make the best programme he can, but whose idea of a good programme is wildly at variance with mine. I also don’t think being overweight, gay or Welsh are, in themselves, reasons to attack someone. So if you wish to comment about how good it is that the fat taffy queer with his gay agenda has gone and given the programme back to the real fans, please go away.
Right, after that, with a bit of luck we might have got rid of the lunatics, and everyone reading this will be someone who regards Doctor Who as a TV programme, one to be judged by more or less the same standards by which one judges any other TV programme. So with that in mind, does Steven Moffat’s version of Doctor Who measure up?
Possibly the easiest way to look at this is to look at the things I didn’t like about Davies’ era, and see how Moffat’s version of the show compares to that. So the main things I didn’t like about Davies’ show were:
1) The morality of the show. It didn’t have any, and at times it seemed breathtakingly *immoral*, both in big ways (lionising Madame du Pompadour, one of the most disgusting individuals ever to have lived) and small (the bullying ‘let’s laugh at the nerdy nerdy nerds’ attitude of a good number of episodes). Both these, actually, are things that were more noticeable in Moffat scripts than others – but are still ultimately Davies’ responsibility as the person who set the tone for the show as a whole. My platonic ideal of Doctor Who would always side with the underdog, be that a slave being tortured to death in order to provide sugar for pampered French aristocrats, or a socially-awkward young man being mocked for enjoying science fiction DVDs.
2) The characterisation of the Doctor. The Doctor shouldn’t be a geek-chic indie kid generic hero who occasionally does something ‘wacky’, and nor should he be a lonely god who is the specialest person in the whole of special, but should be an intelligent, thoughtful, but fundamentally strange character.
3) The plotting. Things happening for a reason is nice, internal logic is also good. Davies ex machina less so.
4) Lack of imagination – everyone throughout history, whatever planet, in the year 200 billion or the fifteenth century, is exactly like people in early 21st century Britain. Big Brother and Britney Spears will be known until the end of the universe.
Looking at The Eleventh Hour in those terms, point one doesn’t apply – there is nothing horribly immoral in the story. It would be interesting if the Prisoner hadn’t been so obviously A Baddie – if there’d been a choice to be made between giving a possibly-innocent fugitive over or seeing Earth destroyed – but there was nothing actively immoral in there.
Point two I’m less sure on. Matt Smith is clearly a competent actor, but he didn’t seem especially Doctorish to me, and as Lawrence Miles pointed out, some of the lines would be easier to imagine coming from the mouth of Clint Eastwood than from Tom Baker. That said, he did save the world by actually thinking, and by noticing things, and that’s better than saving the world using handwavium. I’ll give him time.
Point three – there was a plot. It made sense, and the only problems with it are of the ‘but that’s not actually how computer viruses *work*’ type rather than the ‘but none of that makes any sense at all, even a little bit, why did he even *do* that?’ type. The one question I have is why the coma patients were all saying “Doctor” – there was no good reason at all for this.
Point four – well, this one was set in present-day Britain, so hard to say on this.
So overall, it’s too soon to say if the programme will be better than Davies’ effort, but there’s enough evidence that it will to be cautiously optimistic.
There are quite a few downsides, though. In particular, the show seems ruthlessly designed for the ‘geek demographic’, from the steampunk TARDIS interior to the guest appearance by Patrick Moore to the bow tie. It seemed so blatantly targeted to a demographic that I don’t consider myself part of that I felt put off.
Also, the story was very much Moffat-by-numbers. As I said, before, I wrote something that I thought very ‘Moffatty’ this week, and it turned out to be very close to the first ten minutes of this story (in fact I think it was rather better – those of my friends I asked to critique it can feel free to disagree in the comments). But structurally, this was very, *very* close to The Girl In The Fireplace, and the characters of Amy and Rory are more or less identical to the characters of Sally and Lawrence from Blink.
Not only that, but a *LOT* of the script was predictable. Little kid asks “How do I know you’ll come back?” to which the reply is “trust me, I’m the Doctor’. I was actually muttering many of the lines to myself before they were said. To a large extent the script was comprised entirely of cliches. Certainly, if you’d asked me to write the story I thought Moffat would write to introduce a new Doctor, I would have written something close enough to this that you could believe they were different drafts of the same script.
So it was still far closer to being cult-TV-by-numbers than to being proper good TV. The ‘classic’ series (or ‘real Doctor Who’ as I think of it) was in some way trying to do the same kind of thing as (at different times) I, Claudius or The Beiderbecke Affair or Boys From The Blackstuff or The Clangers or The Telegoons. It was often not up to the standards of those programmes, but it was trying to compete with those things. This series is trying to compete with Primeval and Robin Hood and Ashes To Ashes – it’s trying to do one very defined kind of thing. As far as that goes, it does it very well, and is probably the best show of its type. But I’d far rather an ambitious failure than a middling success, and my first impression of MoffWho is that it’s the latter.
13 comments