Christmas Who Reviews

[This went to a mailing list. You may as well get to see it too.]

So, what Doctor-Who-and-related stuff have I experienced since I was last [here]? Rather a lot, actually.

I’ve tried to keep these mini-reviews to a paragraph or so, as an exercise in self-restraint. I’ve also failed. Let’s see...

Combat

A couple of online commentators have been making this out to be the second coming, which puzzles me. It’s competent enough character drama, but not exactly complex or original SF, and it certainly hasn’t made me want to seek out Noel Clarke’s other screenwriting work. It was, however a perfectly decent episode of Torchwood, which shouldn’t be, but has been, so rare as to warrant comment. There really wasn’t much wrong with it except the usual: ie, that it was enormously derivative and did very little to tie in thematically with the rest of the season. Interesting how closely it followed up ideas from the very first episode, though –- it’s obvious that Clarke had been given the script to read.

Captain Jack Harkness

This was rather lovely, though not as good as Catherine Tregenna’s previous time-travel love-story. The entire story about Jack’s encounter with his alter ego was wonderful, Tosh’s attempts to contact the future were clever and well thought through, and the testosterone competition at the Hub was mostly very stupid, but that’s the nature of the material. The character stuff all seemed to line up well, although the sudden revelation that Torchwood have a TARDIS console wired into the Rift was unexpected. Like [many episodes of New Who], it works wonderfully well if you accept it on an emotional level, but squint at the plot so that your eyes go all blurry.

End of Days

After all that, of course, we return to the usual load of old Chibnalls we saw in Cyberwoman and Day One, although at least it’s better than Countrycide [1]. It’s entertaining enough in a brainless way, but there’s far too much plot, too little of which meshes together, and the resolution makes remarkably little sense. (Why does the Rift suck things back into itself suddenly, and why does this undo everything that had happened in the episode? Do all the Weevils vanish? What about Emma, a month or so into her new life in London? Why do all the Torchwood personnel remember what had happened? And why in the name of [copulation] does Rhys’s murder, which had nothing to do with the Rift, get undone? I really despise reset-switch plot resolutions.) It’s also needlessly messianic: not only does Jack sacrifice himself to save the world from the devil, rise again on the third day and forgive the disciple who betrayed him, but he then ascends into heaven, at least if the final helicopter shots are anything to go by.

I actually rather liked the Abaddon sequences -- B. and I are both both fans of huge monsters tearing cities apart [2], and the idea of people dying wherever his shadow falls was genuinely frightening. However, they were worthy of an episode in themselves, with proper buildup and resolution and all that sort of thing, rather than a rushed ten minutes tacked onto a story which had mostly been about other things. (The entire lack of setup was made worse by the fact that Bilis’ reasonably adequate explanation that Abaddon was “the son of the Great Beast, imprisoned before the beginning of time beneath the Rift” was swallowed up in noise and music [3].) The ending also reinforces the fact that Torchwood won’t be free to be its own creature all the while Doctor Who is on TV.

This really can’t be an atheist universe any more, though, can it? Is this just because Torchwood is predominantly horror, and unlike SF or fantasy horror is actually strongly reliant on a monotheist / dualist good-vs-evil underpinning?

The Runaway Bride

Not bad, actually, and reassuringly it barely suffers at all from being the first episode of New Who without Rose. I didn’t find Tennant so obnoxious in this, although Tate became tiresome quickly. The plot was rather chaotic and confused, as we’ve come to expect (what exactly is Lance doing in those scenes where he rushes off to find that axe?), and the business with the huon particles attracting one another when it happens to be convenient was almost as lazy as the plotting in End of Days. The resolution was also too pat in plot terms, although I really liked the Doctor’s ruthlessness without Rose around to anchor him. Generally very spectacular, though (the Empress is a brilliant effect, and it’s astonishing -- though rather pointless -- that it was achieved through prosthetics rather than CGI). A distinct improvement on The Christmas Invasion in most respects, although Harriet’s a better character (and Penelope Wilton a better actor) than any of the guest stars here.

Invasion of the Bane

Perhaps my expectations of children’s TV are lower than they should be, but I enjoyed this. The combination of scriptwriters [Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts] resulted in (on the one hand) convincing characters and an emotional plot that made sense, and (on the other) an alien-invasion plot which -- though cliched, unimaginative, stupid in parts and burdened with comedy-grotesques and overblown melodrama -- still hung together in a way in which few of RTD’s New Who episodes manage. (I still fear a Who episode where Roberts is unleashed solo, mind you.) A charming, charismatic lead (and [Lis] Sladen isn’t bad, either), a comedy ethnic sidekick who manages mostly to stay this side of annoying, an annoyingly obvious K9-substitute and a Brendan for a new generation. The sonic lipstick was a funny visual joke, but became less so with a) explanation and b) repetition.

As I say, perhaps my expectations should be higher, but it seems to me that this succeeded far better than Torchwood does at being a good example of the type of drama it sets out to be. As a Doctor Who fan who’s not in denial about being an adult, I would of course prefer a good adult Who spinoff to a good children’s Who spinoff. Still, I may actually watch some of the series, which is something I didn’t expect to say.

Deep and Dreamless Sleep

Saccharine and tiresome, but given the premise and context it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been otherwise, even with Cornell executing it. A decent characterisation of Tennant, which would be a point in its favour if I didn’t find Tennant so annoying. After reading it, I found my brain playing me an earworm which consisted of the words “Sentimental drivel” to the tune of “California Dreaming”.

Genesis of the Daleks

This DVD and Inferno were quite unprecedentedly well-chosen Christmas presents from my sister-in-law. It’s still bloody good, isn’t it? Not well-written in any real sense (The rocket! The clam! The repetition! The repetition!), but really good at projecting a claustrophobic atmosphere of misery and doom, and acted with an almost Shakespearean intensity and conviction. Tom Baker is so good here it’s astonishing -- so often I forget that it was only when he was given free rein in the part that he became a self-indulgent, grinning, boggling self-parody. Here he’s sombre and grim, and quite fantastic. Michael Wisher’s Davros is utterly compelling, and even Sladen was a better actor before she was burdened with matronly gravitas and a metal dog. Also Bettan the Thal is hot.

About Time 2

Much entertaining material as always, but the “bit of a slog” factor which has afflicted every volume increasingly [Edit: That's volumes 3, 4, 5 and 1, with 6 on the way] is made even worse by the fact that the stories under discussion are often so boring and repetitive. Lawrence and Tat desperately need a proper editor -- the entire series could be stripped down to the length of the Howe / Walker Television Companion and be a vastly better read. It’s easy to spot the bits that Tat would have corrected if he’d been allowed, although aside from the Xena / Sedna confusion I thought the essay attempting to locate Planet 14 was great.

I haven’t listened to Blood of the Daleks yet. Should I?


[1] Torchwood Season One episodes in order of impressiveness, from bloody good to bloody awful:

• Out of Time
• They Keep Killing Suzie
• Captain Jack Harkness
• Combat
• Everything Changes
• Ghost Machine
• Small Worlds
• Greeks Bearing Gifts
• Random Shoes
• Day One
• End of Days
• Cyberwoman
• Countrycide.

Somebody desperately needs to sack Chris Chibnall and put Cath Tregenna in charge.

[2] I got her Godzilla and King Kong for Christmas. What’s more, she asked for them.

[3] “Bilis” is the name of the King of the Otherworld in Celtic mythology, apparently. Also, rather less explicably, a dwarf who ruled the Antipodes.

How Cod Rot

I'm resurrecting Parrinium Mines, possibly for one time only, because I can't let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...

For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.

I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.

The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.

Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.

I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].

I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.

Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.

I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).

Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)

That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he apepars to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.

Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].


[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.

[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.

[3] And not Peculiar Times, where I'm crossposting this but where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought not to go.

Problem Tennant

The weekend just gone was spent largely in watching Doctor Who of various vintages while B. was away at a hen party. I've been disappointed by the latest season, and by David Tennant: there's been a lot of good stuff (and Saturday night's season finale was a splendid example, a handful of stupid moments aside) but it's failed, with one glorious exception, to scale the heights of the 2005 season.

I don't know whether I'll be updating Parrinium Mines any more. In theory I should at least set down my overall impressions of the season, but I feel strangely unmoved to do so. There's been much to admire, but it's so overshadowed by its immediate predecessor that much of what I said would turn out negative. In theory, I could keep it up for the sake of commenting on older Doctor Who, in book and TV form, but I'm not sure it's worth it. I'll let you know.

(On the plus side, though, my research for the still-to-be-announced short story I've been periodically banging on about at Peculiar Times has got me completely addicted to William Hartnell's era. The Romans is top-notch comedy entertainment, and not in a "so bad it's good" way. It's genuinely brilliant.)


[Crossposted to Peculiar Times.]

Pickled in Time

Still no time for current series reviews, I'm afraid. In the meantime, though, I just sent this to a Doctor Who mailing list:

Jesus on acid, I've just watched Dimensions in Time for the first time.

It seems my Dad recorded it in 1993, when I could't be arsed to watch, and what with recently transferring all his videos to DVD he sent me a copy.

Christ, it's abominable. I'd heard rumours, you know, read reviews, but I never imagined... not in my wildest dreams... that it could possibly... be quite... that... bad.

It makes Divided Loyalties look like The Infinity Doctors. It makes The Five Doctors look like The Tempest. It makes the 2005 Children in Need special look like a bit of the Bible that got lost sometime in the second century that makes the whole of the rest of it comforting, convincing and making perfect sense.

There's a moment in the middle where it almost looks as if there's a danger Peter Davison is going to put in a halfway decent performance, but instead he puts his fingers to his forehead and wobbles them manically around whilst shouting.

If this was John Nathan-Turner's idea of what people expected Doctor Who to be like, then suddenly a lot of things come into sharp focus. What's more, I suspect that if I was familiar with Eastenders it might actually be worse.

It's certainly helped to put in perspective some of my reservations about the use of past companions and continuity in School Reunion.

It's Like Living in a Bouncy Castle

Apologies to those of you who may be checking Parrinium Mines hopefully for signs of my opinions on New Earth, and indeed The Christmas Invasion. The extreme hecticness of real life is intervening and meaning that my various rants are having to be stored up for later in the year. I hope to have The Christmas Invasion through to Doomsday in time for this year's Christmas special, though, at least.

Meanwhile, don't click here, then drift off while concentrating on something else in another window, forgetting entirely that you've done it until the sound effects kick in. It may provide a cheap thrill, but it's not good for you in the long run.

Ecclesthon

I spent last Monday watching every single episode of the recent season of Doctor Who, from Rose through to The Parting of the Ways. I was taking notes for the purposes of my Greenbelt talk, meaning that although the season is just under ten hours of TV, it ended up taking me from 10am to 10pm to complete.

I also ended up with the BBC1 station ident music going round and round in my head -- the rave version, mostly, although sometimes the Bollywood one for variety. (For something else Who-related which you might like to have going through your head, try clicking here.)

Among the insights I derived from the whole experience (some of which have previously been posted to Doctor Who lists over the past week) are as follows:

1. It's fascinating to watch the development of the Doctor / Rose relationship, as she goes from finding him exciting but dangerous and being very wary of him, to trusting him so absolutely that he can deceive her (in order to save her) with hardly any effort at all.

The Doctor's own development is subtle and complex, but there's just as clear a progression from "killer" to "coward" during the course of the series, as Rose reawakens the emotions he's been holding back. (It's particularly clever the way this final choice the Dalek Emperor offers him picks up on the accusations made earlier by the solitary Dalek in Dalek and Margaret the Slitheen in Boom Town -- accusations which are the opposite of the behaviour he displays in those episodes.) The man who was prepared to torture the Dalek to death while it was chained becomes the man who's willing to give even Margaret a second chance.

2. This was the first time I'd rewatched either episode of Aliens of London / World War Three -- I'd intended to rewatch the two parts as a single story, but been so utterly unenamoured of the second half that it just didn't seem worth it. In the event, Aliens / Three was just as boring to watch again as I'd anticipated, in a way which even Boom Town wasn't. Definitely the least appealing story of the season.

3. "Never underestimate the importance of plumbing": a very prevalent theme -- far more so than it ever was in the old series -- is the unnaturalness of body-altering technologies.

Virtually all the enemies this season were unholy flesh/tech hybrids of one kind or another: the Autons ("living plastic" capable of mimicking human beings), Cassandra (a human altered through technology and reliant upon it), the Slitheen (aliens masquerading as humans through a particularly icky combination of flesh and technology), the Jagrafess (plumbed into a space station, and presiding over an empire where people have computers in their heads), the Empty Child (flesh warped into machinery through the mediation of body-altering technology) and, obviously, the Daleks. The only monsters who don't fit the pattern are the Gelth (who could be seen as a rather limp steampunk transform of the same idea, given their affinity with gas lights) and the Reapers (who really don't fit at all).

There are also strong hints, in the continuity of The Long Game and the final two-parter, of a continuum between the relatively harmless chip-in-head technology and the excesses of the cyborg monsters, which at their most extreme involve taking humans and mutating them into utterly inhuman mechanical supersoldiers.

(This is why I think it's dramatically important that the Doctor's dumping of Adam and his modifications in 2012 is seen to have some repercussions in the long run. It's why the Cybermen seem like a particularly fruitful enemy to bring back next season. It's also the main point where The Long Game differs from classic cyberpunk, as it sees the body / technology interface in, albeit mildly, negative terms, rather than being indifferent to it as a given of the world's background.)

The urban settings mean that technological hybridisation is rarely contrasted explicitly with the natural world -- the closest we come is with Jabe and her Forest, who respect the Earth and don't get on with "metal-minds" -- but perhaps the alternative is to be found in the series' concentration on families. This is probably clearest in The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, where the mother / child reconciliation results directly in the reversal of the monstrous hybridisation.

4. The season's structural symmetry goes even further than I realised.

The script draws clear parallels between Cassandra, the villain in The End of the World, and the God-Emperor of the Daleks in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. Both are extensively modified flesh / tech hybrids; both are (or have been) the last of their kind; both dismiss other species as impure but have fatally compromised their own purity. There are even design parallels, in the suspended jar which holds the visible brain of each.

Among the elements shared by the non-bookending two-parters, Aliens / Three and Empty / Dances, are alien spaceships being used in confidence tricks, and actual borrowings from "Bad Wolf" folklore (the Doctor chasing the pig, Nancy's comment about how large his facial features are), as opposed to simple repetition of the words.

The Doctor's observation in The Parting of the Ways that what Rose experiences as a goddess is what he sees "all the time", clearly harks back to his speech in Rose about feeling the motion of the Earth.

The first and last episodes lack pre-credit sequences (although The Parting of the Ways has a "previously on Doctor Who" segment which Rose, thank heavens, didn't), and, oddly, the third and antepenultimate episodes -- The Unquiet Dead and Boom Town -- are the only two whose pre-credit sequences don't feature the Doctor. Whether that's significant or not, I haven't a clue.

5. There's something odd going on with the sun. In Dalek, the Dalek finds peace when it's eventually able to bask in the sunlight. In Bad Wolf, solar flares can block the Daleks from monitoring the Game Station. In Father's Day, Pete was planning to harness solar power, an ambition which his new life will allow him to achieve. The expansion of the sun destroys the Earth in The End of the World, and it's the sun's intense light which forms the most immediate danger throughout that story.

The sun is an ambivalent symbol, benevolent and yet so powerful as to be highly dangerous. If the series wasn't created by an atheist, I'd say it symbolised God -- particularly since the deity within the TARDIS is also represented by intense light. Eventually, of course, the Doctor himself is reborn in a blaze of light.

6. Rebirth and / or resurrection are overriding themes of the season, to an extent which indeed seems almost obsessive at times -- but then, the programme's very existence in 2005 is an embodiment of the same motif. Early episodes show the theme mostly in parodic or negative form, with the victims of the Gelth and the Slitheen being brought back to grotesque false life, and the Dalek's resurgence of life being a truly terrifying event. Even here, though, Dickens undergoes a spiritual rebirth, and the Doctor hints that under Harriet Jones's premiership Britain will experience the same.

Meanwhile, the Doctor himself is finding new life through his association with Rose. Father's Day plays extensively with ideas of death and resurrection, and Empty / Dances follows up a series of parody-resurrections with a genuine, and supposedly universal, restoration at the story's end. "Margaret"'s rebirth is the spiritual kernel of Boom Town, and by the final diptych the theme is getting out of hand, with Rose, Jack, the entire Dalek species and eventually the Doctor returning variously from the dead.


And that's it for now, I think. One thing's for certain: this is a series which really rewards repeated viewing. A number of times during its first broadcast I argued that it would only be possible fully to judge the episodes themselves (and especially those written by Russell Davies) in retrospect, once the shape of the whole season had become apparent. The more I consider the labyrinthine and complex structure of the Eccleston era, the clearer it becomes that if anything this was understating the case.

One Day, I Shall Come Back...

I haven't forgotten this blog -- it's just that, without the impetus of a new episode to review each week, I'm not finding the time to post here. Things are going to be a trifle hectic for the next fortnight or more (for reasons mentioned in the parent blog), but I'll certainly need to be watching a fair bit of Doctor Who in the next couple of months, in order to write at least one talk on it. I imagine I'll have more to say then.