Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 15
November 5, 2018
Space Balls
Doctor Who
The Tsuranga Conundrum
Series Eleven, Episode Five
Oh, what’s this? A fifth consecutive episode written or co-written* by Chris Chibnall? (*See Rosa, noticeably the best episode yet.) Well, I see no reason to worry. Off we go.
Surprise! It sucks. Some of which is down to odd choices in the production, and I’ll get to those. But most of it is our good friend, the writing. Of course it is. To expect Chibs to suddenly metamorphose into a brilliant writer now is the definition of insanity.
The Tsuranga Conundrum actually starts well, with the TARDIS already having landed and the crew in the middle of something. That’s my jam! Granted, what they’re in the middle of is wandering around a junk planet with metal detectors looking for… something… which they can’t be bothered to explain, even though they’ve apparently been at it for four hours. You’d hope it was important for all that. (Incidentally, it’s so helpful when a character announces how long they’ve been doing something. Like that old joke of how you find out the time in the middle of the night: bang a drum until someone yells “WHO’S BANGING A DRUM AT FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.”) Graham promptly finds a “sonic mine” which the Doctor is completely unable to stop, giving us yet another pathetic “Sorry” before they’re all obliterated.
Well look, at least it's not copyright infringing that alien.Just kidding! The Doctor lucks out and none of them are killed – not for want of standing around like a tit and staring at the bomb as it goes off – although the Doctor does gain a serious injury that will plague her for the rest of the episode. Kidding again, sort of! She has some sort of pain which means she’ll occasionally wince and grab her side. It serves absolutely no purpose in the story for her to do that, but do it she will, on and off for forty minutes. Grand. Anyway, our heroes find themselves on some sort of space hospital, and for some reason it takes the Doctor a while to figure out this is actually a spaceship. I’ve no idea why since a) she probably knows there’s nothing like this on the junk planet, and b) she’s been on a billion spaceships before, it’s obviously a spaceship. But this is Series 11 and the most basic information is going to be treated like a revelation. Certainly when it’s this Doctor figuring it out, one head-scratch or grunt at a time.
We quickly meet the two medics in charge and their patients, including a pregnant man. We learn about them in quick succession, all with the usual subtle Chibnall touch. “I understand your responsibilities, Ronan. I hear about them endlessly.” “Says the man who never wants any of his own.” / “I fix the things pilots like my sister tend to wreck. And she looks down on me for it, and she always will.” / “You can do this, Mabli. You’re good enough. You have to believe in yourself!” / “He was one of the only people who ever believed in me, including me!” Mercifully a plot arrives in the form of a mysterious alien, which gives the Doctor plenty of opportunities to strut her stuff. Kidding, obviously! She gets put in her place by the chief medic and then fails to save him, as he stupidly blunders into an escape pod which is blasted into space and then explodes for some reason. She then comes face to face with the alien, tries to sound tough and is completely ignored, observes that it can “digest pretty much whatever it wants” and is somehow surprised when it eats the sonic screwdriver she waves right in its face. Not exactly a showcase for Jodie’s Doctor, this one, but then have we had anything like that this series?
Still, we have our alien. What’s it like? Well, remember me grumbling about production choices? Here’s one. Perhaps not wishing to copy Ridley Scott, they go in the opposite direction with a cute CGI critter that looks like Stitch, and then they tell us it doesn’t eat living things. Aww! Except it’s responsible for one death already – not deliberately, though the Doctor has to do some more bumbling and guessing before she twigs this – and the episode hinges on the threat posed by it, so maybe they could threat it up a bit? But despite a lot of early comments about how fast and unstoppable it is, the Doctor seems happy to ask for seven minutes to think of a plan, and the other characters are then able to wander around having slow conversations like nothing’s wrong. You could cut the tension with bubbles. And incidentally, what conversations: since Ryan’s purpose in life is to moan about his dad, the sight of a pregnant man gives him all sorts of Feelings to work through. Yaz’s purpose in life is to do whatever’s left over in the script, so she gets to feed him lots of thankless questions which, if you’re feeling really charitable, could be construed as policeman-like? (This is her side of the conversation: “When was the last time you saw your dad?” “Why?” “D’you mind me asking, how did your mum die?” “God. Who found her?” “How old were you?” That... that isn’t how conversations work, you guys.)
Eventually even Chibnall decides the Pting is a bit too adorable to hang the whole episode on – even the name sounds fun! – so we’re reminded that the ship’s home base will blow them all up without hesitation if they believe there’s a dangerous creature on board. Teeny bit harsh? How likely even is that? (Earlier on, the chief medic says they could get blown up if the Doctor tampers with the controls. Did someone just buy a lot of explosives and really needs to get their money’s worth?) The Doctor’s seven minutes are up and – surprise! – she hasn’t done anything and asks the rest of them for ideas. This is the generously-named “conundrum”, by the way: they need to get rid of the alien, ideally without touching it, and hope the home base doesn’t blow them up first. The Doctor eventually figures out that one of the ship’s explosives could a) lure it towards an airlock and b) feed it long enough to get away, but the magic ingredient to her plan is, and always seems to be time. This Doctor never works stuff out, she just fruitlessly marches up and down until the solution plops out in front of her when the episode’s nearly done. This is surely not how you write a genius character.
This week, in a shocking development, Ryan is a dick to Graham.Just to raise the stakes, the pregnant bloke goes into labour – what did you think this was, Fargo? – but it’s a comedy subplot especially since it’s a bloke, so the stakes don’t actually get any higher, it’s just wacky extra colour. But it lets Ryan tediously lecture an alien on how to live his life because of his own dad baggage. A famous space pilot gives her life piloting the ship towards the home base, only for that to be awkwardly undercut when her (not-at-risk-of-dying) brother ably takes over. So, uh, what did she die for, then? All the while, the Doctor keeps putting the home base’s surprisingly polite “Are you sure we don’t need to blow you up?” question on snooze, like the goddamn genius that she is. Eventually the sonic screwdriver fixes itself, probably because it noticed it wasn’t getting anywhere with her.
And the thing just goes on and on and on. At one point the Doctor delivers a speech about the wonderfulness of anti-matter drives. Why not? We’ve got all day, apparently.
It probably should be exciting, with a… technology? No, energy-eating monster on the rampage, and a spaceship that will explode with the slightest provocation. But the characters aren’t scared, unless you count Mabli the medic whose crisis of confidence is well established before the alien even turns up. “Action” scenes include Yaz kicking the Pting uselessly down a corridor – because it’ll never find its way back from there! – and the only deaths are by accident or from natural causes. At a glance it’s trying to be Doctor Who meets Alien, but as there’s no attempt to create any atmosphere what with the cuddly-wuddly monster and all the friendly, brightly-lit corridors, and all the attempts at tension suffer from the incessant need to stretch everything out, they might have been better off leaning into Gremlins and making it funny instead. They try to with the Man Have Baby! stuff, much good it does the rest of it, but look at what passes for a “joke” here. When he finally has the baby and wants to name it “Avocado Pear” in honour of Ryan and Graham, because… future history is wrong, and like, full of avocadoes or something… he says that calling it “Ryan Graham” would make it a laughing stock. Why? Oh right, for no reason at all. Haha? What the hell is that?
I felt quite sorry for the director as the characters yacked on interminably and, in one curiously un-thrilling sequence, stared at a ticking bomb and just hoped for the monster to amble along. What can you do with this stuff? Yet again it feels like Chibnall’s making it up minute-to-minute, piling on threats to keep it interesting but straining to the point of aneurism just to get the simplest plot progression going. As for writing the Doctor, a character of mythical mystery with a dizzying intellect, that’s seeming like a taller order every week. On the plus side we’re now out of Chibnall territory for a few weeks, but who are we kidding? We’ll be back. And he’ll be there, ready to force his latest half-idea slowly and painfully through a mesh screen, where other show-runners used sometimes to fire them out of cannons.
The Tsuranga Conundrum
Series Eleven, Episode Five
Oh, what’s this? A fifth consecutive episode written or co-written* by Chris Chibnall? (*See Rosa, noticeably the best episode yet.) Well, I see no reason to worry. Off we go.
Surprise! It sucks. Some of which is down to odd choices in the production, and I’ll get to those. But most of it is our good friend, the writing. Of course it is. To expect Chibs to suddenly metamorphose into a brilliant writer now is the definition of insanity.
The Tsuranga Conundrum actually starts well, with the TARDIS already having landed and the crew in the middle of something. That’s my jam! Granted, what they’re in the middle of is wandering around a junk planet with metal detectors looking for… something… which they can’t be bothered to explain, even though they’ve apparently been at it for four hours. You’d hope it was important for all that. (Incidentally, it’s so helpful when a character announces how long they’ve been doing something. Like that old joke of how you find out the time in the middle of the night: bang a drum until someone yells “WHO’S BANGING A DRUM AT FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.”) Graham promptly finds a “sonic mine” which the Doctor is completely unable to stop, giving us yet another pathetic “Sorry” before they’re all obliterated.
Well look, at least it's not copyright infringing that alien.Just kidding! The Doctor lucks out and none of them are killed – not for want of standing around like a tit and staring at the bomb as it goes off – although the Doctor does gain a serious injury that will plague her for the rest of the episode. Kidding again, sort of! She has some sort of pain which means she’ll occasionally wince and grab her side. It serves absolutely no purpose in the story for her to do that, but do it she will, on and off for forty minutes. Grand. Anyway, our heroes find themselves on some sort of space hospital, and for some reason it takes the Doctor a while to figure out this is actually a spaceship. I’ve no idea why since a) she probably knows there’s nothing like this on the junk planet, and b) she’s been on a billion spaceships before, it’s obviously a spaceship. But this is Series 11 and the most basic information is going to be treated like a revelation. Certainly when it’s this Doctor figuring it out, one head-scratch or grunt at a time.We quickly meet the two medics in charge and their patients, including a pregnant man. We learn about them in quick succession, all with the usual subtle Chibnall touch. “I understand your responsibilities, Ronan. I hear about them endlessly.” “Says the man who never wants any of his own.” / “I fix the things pilots like my sister tend to wreck. And she looks down on me for it, and she always will.” / “You can do this, Mabli. You’re good enough. You have to believe in yourself!” / “He was one of the only people who ever believed in me, including me!” Mercifully a plot arrives in the form of a mysterious alien, which gives the Doctor plenty of opportunities to strut her stuff. Kidding, obviously! She gets put in her place by the chief medic and then fails to save him, as he stupidly blunders into an escape pod which is blasted into space and then explodes for some reason. She then comes face to face with the alien, tries to sound tough and is completely ignored, observes that it can “digest pretty much whatever it wants” and is somehow surprised when it eats the sonic screwdriver she waves right in its face. Not exactly a showcase for Jodie’s Doctor, this one, but then have we had anything like that this series?
Still, we have our alien. What’s it like? Well, remember me grumbling about production choices? Here’s one. Perhaps not wishing to copy Ridley Scott, they go in the opposite direction with a cute CGI critter that looks like Stitch, and then they tell us it doesn’t eat living things. Aww! Except it’s responsible for one death already – not deliberately, though the Doctor has to do some more bumbling and guessing before she twigs this – and the episode hinges on the threat posed by it, so maybe they could threat it up a bit? But despite a lot of early comments about how fast and unstoppable it is, the Doctor seems happy to ask for seven minutes to think of a plan, and the other characters are then able to wander around having slow conversations like nothing’s wrong. You could cut the tension with bubbles. And incidentally, what conversations: since Ryan’s purpose in life is to moan about his dad, the sight of a pregnant man gives him all sorts of Feelings to work through. Yaz’s purpose in life is to do whatever’s left over in the script, so she gets to feed him lots of thankless questions which, if you’re feeling really charitable, could be construed as policeman-like? (This is her side of the conversation: “When was the last time you saw your dad?” “Why?” “D’you mind me asking, how did your mum die?” “God. Who found her?” “How old were you?” That... that isn’t how conversations work, you guys.)
Eventually even Chibnall decides the Pting is a bit too adorable to hang the whole episode on – even the name sounds fun! – so we’re reminded that the ship’s home base will blow them all up without hesitation if they believe there’s a dangerous creature on board. Teeny bit harsh? How likely even is that? (Earlier on, the chief medic says they could get blown up if the Doctor tampers with the controls. Did someone just buy a lot of explosives and really needs to get their money’s worth?) The Doctor’s seven minutes are up and – surprise! – she hasn’t done anything and asks the rest of them for ideas. This is the generously-named “conundrum”, by the way: they need to get rid of the alien, ideally without touching it, and hope the home base doesn’t blow them up first. The Doctor eventually figures out that one of the ship’s explosives could a) lure it towards an airlock and b) feed it long enough to get away, but the magic ingredient to her plan is, and always seems to be time. This Doctor never works stuff out, she just fruitlessly marches up and down until the solution plops out in front of her when the episode’s nearly done. This is surely not how you write a genius character.
This week, in a shocking development, Ryan is a dick to Graham.Just to raise the stakes, the pregnant bloke goes into labour – what did you think this was, Fargo? – but it’s a comedy subplot especially since it’s a bloke, so the stakes don’t actually get any higher, it’s just wacky extra colour. But it lets Ryan tediously lecture an alien on how to live his life because of his own dad baggage. A famous space pilot gives her life piloting the ship towards the home base, only for that to be awkwardly undercut when her (not-at-risk-of-dying) brother ably takes over. So, uh, what did she die for, then? All the while, the Doctor keeps putting the home base’s surprisingly polite “Are you sure we don’t need to blow you up?” question on snooze, like the goddamn genius that she is. Eventually the sonic screwdriver fixes itself, probably because it noticed it wasn’t getting anywhere with her.And the thing just goes on and on and on. At one point the Doctor delivers a speech about the wonderfulness of anti-matter drives. Why not? We’ve got all day, apparently.
It probably should be exciting, with a… technology? No, energy-eating monster on the rampage, and a spaceship that will explode with the slightest provocation. But the characters aren’t scared, unless you count Mabli the medic whose crisis of confidence is well established before the alien even turns up. “Action” scenes include Yaz kicking the Pting uselessly down a corridor – because it’ll never find its way back from there! – and the only deaths are by accident or from natural causes. At a glance it’s trying to be Doctor Who meets Alien, but as there’s no attempt to create any atmosphere what with the cuddly-wuddly monster and all the friendly, brightly-lit corridors, and all the attempts at tension suffer from the incessant need to stretch everything out, they might have been better off leaning into Gremlins and making it funny instead. They try to with the Man Have Baby! stuff, much good it does the rest of it, but look at what passes for a “joke” here. When he finally has the baby and wants to name it “Avocado Pear” in honour of Ryan and Graham, because… future history is wrong, and like, full of avocadoes or something… he says that calling it “Ryan Graham” would make it a laughing stock. Why? Oh right, for no reason at all. Haha? What the hell is that?
I felt quite sorry for the director as the characters yacked on interminably and, in one curiously un-thrilling sequence, stared at a ticking bomb and just hoped for the monster to amble along. What can you do with this stuff? Yet again it feels like Chibnall’s making it up minute-to-minute, piling on threats to keep it interesting but straining to the point of aneurism just to get the simplest plot progression going. As for writing the Doctor, a character of mythical mystery with a dizzying intellect, that’s seeming like a taller order every week. On the plus side we’re now out of Chibnall territory for a few weeks, but who are we kidding? We’ll be back. And he’ll be there, ready to force his latest half-idea slowly and painfully through a mesh screen, where other show-runners used sometimes to fire them out of cannons.
October 30, 2018
Eight Legged Friends
Doctor Who
Arachnids In The UK
Series Eleven, Episode Four
Hmm. There’s something very familiar about all this.
The new series has been to space and to the past, so in Week Four it obligingly drops us back home for a breather. Series 1 and 4 did the same thing. (If it ain’t broke, etc.) But Arachnids In The UK goes a bit further down memory lane with anthropomorphic monsters threatening home and hearth, and an Evil Capitalist sneering at everybody. It’s practically a Russell T Davies tribute act.
Not that that’s a bad thing per se, as RTD knew how to tell a fun, modern monster story and Chibnall – at his best – can ape that reasonably well. But Arachnids reins in the wackiness you might expect, as well as most of the fun, while keeping in the little character moments.
"What's that? Oh my god!"
Popular writer in da houuuuse.The Doctor is potentially losing her new friends the moment she gets the destination right, and there’s a lovely, funny scene of her clearly hoping someone will invite her in for tea first. Even better is Graham going back to an empty house, seeing Grace in little visions but never for long enough. Bradley Walsh is the Series 11 MVP so far; he doesn’t disappoint whenever a script needs him to be quiet, humble and pained. It’s a joy to watch him alongside Ryan, patiently trying to solidify their relationship without forcing it. This must be why Ryan is here – because otherwise it’s Week Four of the Too Many Companions balancing act. There’s not much call for dyspraxia storytelling so far, and when exactly is Yaz going to do something resembling police-work? (There’s a running bit on the Doctor Who Facebook page where she investigates the weekly monsters and whatnot. The bloody Facebook page remembers to address it!)
In true RTD style we’ve got to meet the family – specifically Yaz’s. They’re well-acted and fun, but still not much to write home about, although Yaz does eventually decide they’re annoying enough to escape for a while via the TARDIS. Which is normal for Doctor Who, except for the Doctor’s oddly portentous warning that this life will change them all, they won’t be the same when they come back, and so on. Which is a bit weird considering they’ve already had travels in the TARDIS and aren’t noticeably dead or insane yet. Calm down, Doc. Anyway, Graham has the best reason to get away.
I’m not sure what this story does that convinces them that the Doctor’s way of life is better. I’m not saying it isn’t – obviously it’s more fun than going to work on Monday. But Chibnall’s RTD-ish plot misses the feeling of making a difference that would normally send companions scurrying into the TARDIS afterwards. They just continue to hang around with the Doctor while things happen around them. This has been a consistent problem not just with three companions, but with marooning them in this version of the show, which barely has a pulse at the best of times. Episodes just drift along, with hardly anyone taking ownership of the plot.
A scientific research team have been trying to harness spider abilities for… science reasons, and they have inadvertently disposed of enhanced spider carcasses amid some toxic waste. Except that’s not really an issue – the dead ones anyway. One of the carcasses maybe wasn’t dead, and that one’s been breeding, and the toxic waste has… helped it grow, Green Death style, I guess? Except wasn’t it already capable of growing, because of Mad Science? Anyway, the “toxic waste” they keep going on about is actually landfill under a hotel, which is improperly stored and everything but still, the Doctor’s making a leap to say “That there’s toxic waste! Presto, giant spiders!” (God, this whole plot sounds like the author’s first, bumbling go at sci-fi.) There’s much standing around and yacking on about spiders going mad everywhere – with awkwardly funny lines like “Something’s wrong with the spider eco-system in South Yorkshire” not given the arch nudging they deserve – but it never feels like, well, anarchy in the UK.
Sooo... you've got scientists creating super-spiders...
and no one makes a joke about Spider-Man?There’s no feeling of people on the street being aware of all this, despite the bizarre “reports of unusual spider behaviour”, and with pre-titles sequences seemingly a thing of the past (boo) there’s no immediate chance for the spiders to make an impact. The episode is confined to Yaz’s block of flats and a hotel where some of the spiders are massing. And that can’t be all of them, surely? At the end, aren’t there still some out there? Didn’t Graham say the one he found had shed its skin? What about the one the Doctor trapped with some vinegar (hmm) and then said she’d come back to? Whoops.
The spiders aren’t exactly on the rampage, so there isn’t a ticking clock apart from the observation that they’ve webbed up the hotel all our characters are in. (Does that stop them getting out? There are several scenes of the Doctor ripping webs apart with her bare hands. And curiously, no scenes of people getting stuck to anything...) Our heroes are free to amble about and guess their way through the problem – again. It’s made clear that, although they’re morbidly oversized, the spiders are just confused and out of their element. They don’t actively murder anybody, though a few people suffocate in their webs. They’re quite sweet, really.
That’s not a dig at how they look. The CGI and even the sound design are fantastic, especially compared to some of Doctor Who’s earlier arachnids. But the episode’s sympathies are with the spiders by default. I wondered why the Doctor didn’t make a thing out of arachnophobia and how silly it is. (Seriously folks, why not get a glass and a bit of card? Or just leave ’em alone to deal with all the flies…) Which makes the ending all the more odd, as the Doctor seemingly goes along with a plan to lock them in a room and starve them to death. Conversely a villainous character suggests shooting them instead, and is practically booed for it. Aren’t we killing them in either case? Is there really no other option?
The Doctor suggests “herding” the biggest one “out”, and that’s about as far as her plan goes; it turns out the creature is dying so there’s no need for follow up questions. (Such as, where the hell is “out”, then? Off to meet the who-knows-how-many other ones left outside?) Then when the resident Bad Guy shoots it, he receives the standard You Didn’t Have To Do That line from the Doctor. But you were happy to kill all those other ones, and this one’s about to die, so why are you on your high horse about it?
It’s around here that the plot just stops. It hasn’t been resolved – we’ve no idea what the scale of the problem even was, and as above we know there are still some mega-spiders out there. But the episode’s had enough of worrying about them. What was it all for? If Arachnids was trying to say something about the environment, and how pollution is bad, it says nothing that isn’t immediately obvious. Except, well, chucking an already mutated spider on a big pile of rubbish probably isn’t going to trigger the end of the world, but I suppose this is Doctor Who. As a monster story, then, it’s dull. As a people story? Hmm.
"I love a conspiracy!" How is it even a secret that the hotel
is on a landfill site? Does no one remember it?
And why is he keeping a load of shit in his house?All the companions get a little character work, Graham with his grief, Yaz with her family, and Ryan with his deadbeat dad trying to get back in his life. All good stuff, though with that much going on the Doctor disappears a bit, again. Jodie Whittaker’s doing her damnedest, but there just isn’t much of a Thirteenth Doctor to play at this point – which she weirdly highlights by saying she’s still figuring herself out. Arachnids reminded me that the writers weren’t told the new Doctor is a woman. What would be unique about the character if she wasn’t, though? The goony enthusiasm and light quirks are all David and Matt. There’s the odd genuinely funny line – I loved the one about Ed Sheerhan – and a disappointing inability to come up with a really good plan, but I’d hesitate to describe her otherwise. (Anyway, look at me talking about other writers on the fourth episode in a row written or co-written by Chibnall. Sod off and let someone else have a go!)
What else have we got? Well, there’s a Trump caricature so witlessly written that he loathes Trump, but apparently hasn’t noticed he embodies him… and nobody else notices it or points it out either, so it probably isn’t even deliberate. We just get a string of pompous eccentricities like firing people for no reason, American stereotypes like announcing that guns can solve everything, and random notes that I don’t even know what they’re there, like scheduled bathroom breaks and a need to show Yaz’s mum around the hotel after firing her. (No thanks, my lift’s here. WTF.) It’s obvious Chris Noth is a coup as he’s in the episode so much; he’s game and everything, but the character’s got nothing to give.
First time watching this, the vague whiff of the RTD era made it seem quite fun. Second time around, it’s pretty obvious I was remembering what fun used to be like. Arachnids is a creaky recreation of something the author isn’t very adept at. I’d suggest he farm out some of the workload before we all nod off, but apparently Series 11 was written in a kind of American writers’ room. It’s just one with his name all by itself on most of the scripts, and all of them sound like it.
Arachnids In The UK
Series Eleven, Episode Four
Hmm. There’s something very familiar about all this.
The new series has been to space and to the past, so in Week Four it obligingly drops us back home for a breather. Series 1 and 4 did the same thing. (If it ain’t broke, etc.) But Arachnids In The UK goes a bit further down memory lane with anthropomorphic monsters threatening home and hearth, and an Evil Capitalist sneering at everybody. It’s practically a Russell T Davies tribute act.
Not that that’s a bad thing per se, as RTD knew how to tell a fun, modern monster story and Chibnall – at his best – can ape that reasonably well. But Arachnids reins in the wackiness you might expect, as well as most of the fun, while keeping in the little character moments.
"What's that? Oh my god!"Popular writer in da houuuuse.The Doctor is potentially losing her new friends the moment she gets the destination right, and there’s a lovely, funny scene of her clearly hoping someone will invite her in for tea first. Even better is Graham going back to an empty house, seeing Grace in little visions but never for long enough. Bradley Walsh is the Series 11 MVP so far; he doesn’t disappoint whenever a script needs him to be quiet, humble and pained. It’s a joy to watch him alongside Ryan, patiently trying to solidify their relationship without forcing it. This must be why Ryan is here – because otherwise it’s Week Four of the Too Many Companions balancing act. There’s not much call for dyspraxia storytelling so far, and when exactly is Yaz going to do something resembling police-work? (There’s a running bit on the Doctor Who Facebook page where she investigates the weekly monsters and whatnot. The bloody Facebook page remembers to address it!)
In true RTD style we’ve got to meet the family – specifically Yaz’s. They’re well-acted and fun, but still not much to write home about, although Yaz does eventually decide they’re annoying enough to escape for a while via the TARDIS. Which is normal for Doctor Who, except for the Doctor’s oddly portentous warning that this life will change them all, they won’t be the same when they come back, and so on. Which is a bit weird considering they’ve already had travels in the TARDIS and aren’t noticeably dead or insane yet. Calm down, Doc. Anyway, Graham has the best reason to get away.
I’m not sure what this story does that convinces them that the Doctor’s way of life is better. I’m not saying it isn’t – obviously it’s more fun than going to work on Monday. But Chibnall’s RTD-ish plot misses the feeling of making a difference that would normally send companions scurrying into the TARDIS afterwards. They just continue to hang around with the Doctor while things happen around them. This has been a consistent problem not just with three companions, but with marooning them in this version of the show, which barely has a pulse at the best of times. Episodes just drift along, with hardly anyone taking ownership of the plot.
A scientific research team have been trying to harness spider abilities for… science reasons, and they have inadvertently disposed of enhanced spider carcasses amid some toxic waste. Except that’s not really an issue – the dead ones anyway. One of the carcasses maybe wasn’t dead, and that one’s been breeding, and the toxic waste has… helped it grow, Green Death style, I guess? Except wasn’t it already capable of growing, because of Mad Science? Anyway, the “toxic waste” they keep going on about is actually landfill under a hotel, which is improperly stored and everything but still, the Doctor’s making a leap to say “That there’s toxic waste! Presto, giant spiders!” (God, this whole plot sounds like the author’s first, bumbling go at sci-fi.) There’s much standing around and yacking on about spiders going mad everywhere – with awkwardly funny lines like “Something’s wrong with the spider eco-system in South Yorkshire” not given the arch nudging they deserve – but it never feels like, well, anarchy in the UK.
Sooo... you've got scientists creating super-spiders...and no one makes a joke about Spider-Man?There’s no feeling of people on the street being aware of all this, despite the bizarre “reports of unusual spider behaviour”, and with pre-titles sequences seemingly a thing of the past (boo) there’s no immediate chance for the spiders to make an impact. The episode is confined to Yaz’s block of flats and a hotel where some of the spiders are massing. And that can’t be all of them, surely? At the end, aren’t there still some out there? Didn’t Graham say the one he found had shed its skin? What about the one the Doctor trapped with some vinegar (hmm) and then said she’d come back to? Whoops.
The spiders aren’t exactly on the rampage, so there isn’t a ticking clock apart from the observation that they’ve webbed up the hotel all our characters are in. (Does that stop them getting out? There are several scenes of the Doctor ripping webs apart with her bare hands. And curiously, no scenes of people getting stuck to anything...) Our heroes are free to amble about and guess their way through the problem – again. It’s made clear that, although they’re morbidly oversized, the spiders are just confused and out of their element. They don’t actively murder anybody, though a few people suffocate in their webs. They’re quite sweet, really.
That’s not a dig at how they look. The CGI and even the sound design are fantastic, especially compared to some of Doctor Who’s earlier arachnids. But the episode’s sympathies are with the spiders by default. I wondered why the Doctor didn’t make a thing out of arachnophobia and how silly it is. (Seriously folks, why not get a glass and a bit of card? Or just leave ’em alone to deal with all the flies…) Which makes the ending all the more odd, as the Doctor seemingly goes along with a plan to lock them in a room and starve them to death. Conversely a villainous character suggests shooting them instead, and is practically booed for it. Aren’t we killing them in either case? Is there really no other option?
The Doctor suggests “herding” the biggest one “out”, and that’s about as far as her plan goes; it turns out the creature is dying so there’s no need for follow up questions. (Such as, where the hell is “out”, then? Off to meet the who-knows-how-many other ones left outside?) Then when the resident Bad Guy shoots it, he receives the standard You Didn’t Have To Do That line from the Doctor. But you were happy to kill all those other ones, and this one’s about to die, so why are you on your high horse about it?
It’s around here that the plot just stops. It hasn’t been resolved – we’ve no idea what the scale of the problem even was, and as above we know there are still some mega-spiders out there. But the episode’s had enough of worrying about them. What was it all for? If Arachnids was trying to say something about the environment, and how pollution is bad, it says nothing that isn’t immediately obvious. Except, well, chucking an already mutated spider on a big pile of rubbish probably isn’t going to trigger the end of the world, but I suppose this is Doctor Who. As a monster story, then, it’s dull. As a people story? Hmm.
"I love a conspiracy!" How is it even a secret that the hotelis on a landfill site? Does no one remember it?
And why is he keeping a load of shit in his house?All the companions get a little character work, Graham with his grief, Yaz with her family, and Ryan with his deadbeat dad trying to get back in his life. All good stuff, though with that much going on the Doctor disappears a bit, again. Jodie Whittaker’s doing her damnedest, but there just isn’t much of a Thirteenth Doctor to play at this point – which she weirdly highlights by saying she’s still figuring herself out. Arachnids reminded me that the writers weren’t told the new Doctor is a woman. What would be unique about the character if she wasn’t, though? The goony enthusiasm and light quirks are all David and Matt. There’s the odd genuinely funny line – I loved the one about Ed Sheerhan – and a disappointing inability to come up with a really good plan, but I’d hesitate to describe her otherwise. (Anyway, look at me talking about other writers on the fourth episode in a row written or co-written by Chibnall. Sod off and let someone else have a go!)
What else have we got? Well, there’s a Trump caricature so witlessly written that he loathes Trump, but apparently hasn’t noticed he embodies him… and nobody else notices it or points it out either, so it probably isn’t even deliberate. We just get a string of pompous eccentricities like firing people for no reason, American stereotypes like announcing that guns can solve everything, and random notes that I don’t even know what they’re there, like scheduled bathroom breaks and a need to show Yaz’s mum around the hotel after firing her. (No thanks, my lift’s here. WTF.) It’s obvious Chris Noth is a coup as he’s in the episode so much; he’s game and everything, but the character’s got nothing to give.
First time watching this, the vague whiff of the RTD era made it seem quite fun. Second time around, it’s pretty obvious I was remembering what fun used to be like. Arachnids is a creaky recreation of something the author isn’t very adept at. I’d suggest he farm out some of the workload before we all nod off, but apparently Series 11 was written in a kind of American writers’ room. It’s just one with his name all by itself on most of the scripts, and all of them sound like it.
October 23, 2018
Doctor Who Discovers Racists
Doctor Who
Rosa
Series Eleven, Episode Three
Duck and cover, everyone. This could go wrong.
Mind you, it’s not like an episode about race is a bad idea – if anything, where the hell has it been all these years? When Martha raised some pretty sensible concerns about visiting Elizabethan England, the (extremely white) Doctor told her to strut around like she owned the place, since it works so well for him. (Facepalm.) We got a bit more tension later when she had to be a maid in the early 20th century, and even more recently when Bill bumped into a Regency racist, whom the Doctor obligingly clocked. It’s a sad thing to have to staple onto your whimsical sci-fi show, but staple you should: if you’re a non-white character travelling through time, you’re going to encounter some twats. It’s refreshing to meet that head on for once.
But like… really head on. With snarling 1950s racists slapping one of the companions, and Rosa Parks doing her bit for history, and a Martin Luther King cameo. Rosa ain’t half-arsing it on the race front. Little kids watching may be unpleasantly surprised, but they might learn a wee bit of history. Didn’t that used to be the point of Doctor Who?
This is an area I rather expected them to balls up. It’s easy to insert Doctor Who into history, but to justify it there always has to be some alien threat. It’s just as easy to insult the history you’re telling us about by saying that the whole thing only happened because of Alien X or Robot Y, or because the Doctor’s so flipping wonderful. To my surprise, it isn’t like that this week.
For one thing, she doesn't give up her seat on buses. Rude!Rosa only has the teeniest bit of sci-fi going on. A guy from the future is trying to nudge history off course: stop Rosa taking her fateful seat on the bus, set back progress by who knows how many years. The Doctor and co. promptly set about keeping history on the rails, and that’s it. They work as a team to get the right people in the right place. There’s no exploding spaceship or alien menace sending the whole thing up, just a very determined git who wants to make things happen differently. (The Time Meddler told a similar story 50+ years ago, but the villain in that one was far less clear cut than this one, and hence loads better. We’ll get to the crap one in a minute.)
Most deliciously of all, the Doctor is keeping history on track because that’s how it should be, it’s progress, it’s right. And not, tediously, because the universe will go floop and everything will explode into time glorbicles if she doesn’t. I don’t exactly love Series 11’s determination to keep things simple – the Doctor explains at least three damn times that a certain number of people need to be on the bus in order for the Rosa thing to happen, we get it folks – but in this instance, the heart is totally in the right place. They even point out that, for all the wonderfulness of Rosa, they’re not solving racism overnight. It’s just a step.
It’s definitely a good day for Jodie Whittaker. The Doctor doesn’t have any apologising to do this week, and she faces off against the quietly bastardly Krasko without a care. She even gets a few little idiosyncrasies in there, like the way she sneaks back and scans Krasko with the sonic, and her cheery snipe at Graham about killing the vibe. Probably best of all is the difficult decision to stay on the bus and contribute to the problem in order to make Rosa decide – for once, helping in an unconventional and even painful way. You don’t expect that kind of choice from a character whose considered response to most things is “I really like it!” or “Brilliant!” It’s easily my favourite turn from Whittaker so far, and the most Doctorly.
It helps that the script is pulling its weight a bit more this week. I can’t help it: you spotted the second author’s name at the start, right? It would be foolish to guess which bits Chris Chibnall was responsible for and which bits Malorie Blackman wrote, because you never know, but it sure is noteworthythat this week’s is better written than Chibnall solo. It’s still playing in the Chibnall Era sandbox, of course, with companions standing around and asking what’s going on, and plans needing to be spelled out ad infinitum. But they all get something to do this time, and there are enough character moments to go around. Ryan’s dorky enthusiasm about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King is well played when he says their names a little too reverently; Yaz brings up the rear again, but gets to bond with Rosa a little. Graham has some beautifully acted moments as he confronts the worst version of how people might have reacted to him and Grace. Bradley Walsh is understated throughout, playing a simple man who really doesn’t want to stay on the bus and make things worse. It’s everyone’s best episode so far.
I like the way none of the regulars dignify a cruel comment with an agreement – “I don’t know anyone who fits that description” – and the Doctor actually makes a few deductions for once about Krasko. Hooray, she’s possibly smarter than the audience! The Banksy joke was funny, and can you believe the one about Elvis’s mobile phone came back, and it served the plot? Saints preserve us.
So… why was I worried it would suck? Well, context helps. Doctor Who isn’t something you’d want a Very Special Episode from at the best of times. Also this subject is virtually impossible to do with subtlety, because, well, it’s not a subtle subject. Look at Quantum Leap: an adorable, but sometimes rather pious show about making things better, there were a couple of episodes about race that went from gently upsetting Driving Miss Daisyreference to full-on violent horror show you wouldn’t watch twice. (It also had a hilariously silly arc about “Evil Leapers” that go around ruining everything, which come to think of it is the plot this week… hmm. Moving on.) Rosa splits the difference by being gently fun but also having people behave abominably towards Ryan and Yaz, as well as the other two when it’s obvious they get along, or god forbid, are related. But there are also some worthy, obvious bits.
Ryan and Yaz’s conversation behind the bins is going to trigger eye-rolls just from the PSA tone, let alone the ridiculous notion that Ryan doesn’t think Yaz has ever taken any shit from people on the street. And then there’s the ending, where the Doctor cutely lectures her mates with a reminder that things turned out all right in the end, with a black President and everything! (Except hold on, who followed him?) Yeah, they’re over-egging it. And if anyone can explain to me how naming an asteroid after Rosa Parks helps race relations, thanks in advance. Since anyone can get a star named after them, it just struck me as random. (Is it a race-relations asteroid? Are those a thing?)
Sorry, I stopped listening. Too distracted by the
what were they thinking TARDIS design.The message is mixed a little further by the villain of the week. Krasko is interesting in that he only wants to distort history a little bit – he can’t physically hurt anyone, so he has to use other means. All good so far, and Josh Bowman smoothly underplays every scene. The wheels threaten to come off when you consider that the Doctor and co. are dumbly running around putting out his fires instead of doing something about him; Ryan has to use Krasko’s time-displacement gun to do away with the bugger (until next time, Gadget!), which the Doctor then doesn’t really pick up on. But then there’s the real problem – his reason for all this.
He’s doing it because… he’s a racist! A proper, 1950s-style, old-timey racist. And he’s from the 79th century, which farts in the face of the Doctor’s “Yay, progress!” speech. (Guess what, Ryan and Yaz: there are twats now, there were twats then, and what doth appear on the horizon? Why, tis future twats!) In any other episode, Krasko’s motivation would be laughably lazy. Here it’s incredibly on-the-nose for the story they’re telling, and it muddles the ending. They should have just left it up in the air.
But hey, think positive. I’m still grateful that they kept the McGuffins to a minimum, and let history be the important bit. It’s almost a pure historical – hip hip bleedin’ hooray! Vinette Robinson is excellent as Rosa, though Segun Akinola leans worryingly close to Murray Gold territory with her theme: it sounds like she’s going to safely get our boys back from the moon. If on-the-nose music choices aren’t your thing, the song at the end might be a problem. I didn’t hate it, since the Doctor Who theme would have been a marginally weirder choice after all that. But yeah, it’s a pretty obvious way to go with that ending.
There are bum notes, certainly, but the story is small enough to let its good moments stand out. Besides, I think there’s a certain bluntness that comes with telling this kind of story, however you do it. Doctor Who should still be allowed to try.
NB: If I’m honest, they had me at “the TARDIS doesn’t work properly”. Hartnell Era FTW.
Rosa
Series Eleven, Episode Three
Duck and cover, everyone. This could go wrong.
Mind you, it’s not like an episode about race is a bad idea – if anything, where the hell has it been all these years? When Martha raised some pretty sensible concerns about visiting Elizabethan England, the (extremely white) Doctor told her to strut around like she owned the place, since it works so well for him. (Facepalm.) We got a bit more tension later when she had to be a maid in the early 20th century, and even more recently when Bill bumped into a Regency racist, whom the Doctor obligingly clocked. It’s a sad thing to have to staple onto your whimsical sci-fi show, but staple you should: if you’re a non-white character travelling through time, you’re going to encounter some twats. It’s refreshing to meet that head on for once.
But like… really head on. With snarling 1950s racists slapping one of the companions, and Rosa Parks doing her bit for history, and a Martin Luther King cameo. Rosa ain’t half-arsing it on the race front. Little kids watching may be unpleasantly surprised, but they might learn a wee bit of history. Didn’t that used to be the point of Doctor Who?
This is an area I rather expected them to balls up. It’s easy to insert Doctor Who into history, but to justify it there always has to be some alien threat. It’s just as easy to insult the history you’re telling us about by saying that the whole thing only happened because of Alien X or Robot Y, or because the Doctor’s so flipping wonderful. To my surprise, it isn’t like that this week.
For one thing, she doesn't give up her seat on buses. Rude!Rosa only has the teeniest bit of sci-fi going on. A guy from the future is trying to nudge history off course: stop Rosa taking her fateful seat on the bus, set back progress by who knows how many years. The Doctor and co. promptly set about keeping history on the rails, and that’s it. They work as a team to get the right people in the right place. There’s no exploding spaceship or alien menace sending the whole thing up, just a very determined git who wants to make things happen differently. (The Time Meddler told a similar story 50+ years ago, but the villain in that one was far less clear cut than this one, and hence loads better. We’ll get to the crap one in a minute.)Most deliciously of all, the Doctor is keeping history on track because that’s how it should be, it’s progress, it’s right. And not, tediously, because the universe will go floop and everything will explode into time glorbicles if she doesn’t. I don’t exactly love Series 11’s determination to keep things simple – the Doctor explains at least three damn times that a certain number of people need to be on the bus in order for the Rosa thing to happen, we get it folks – but in this instance, the heart is totally in the right place. They even point out that, for all the wonderfulness of Rosa, they’re not solving racism overnight. It’s just a step.
It’s definitely a good day for Jodie Whittaker. The Doctor doesn’t have any apologising to do this week, and she faces off against the quietly bastardly Krasko without a care. She even gets a few little idiosyncrasies in there, like the way she sneaks back and scans Krasko with the sonic, and her cheery snipe at Graham about killing the vibe. Probably best of all is the difficult decision to stay on the bus and contribute to the problem in order to make Rosa decide – for once, helping in an unconventional and even painful way. You don’t expect that kind of choice from a character whose considered response to most things is “I really like it!” or “Brilliant!” It’s easily my favourite turn from Whittaker so far, and the most Doctorly.
It helps that the script is pulling its weight a bit more this week. I can’t help it: you spotted the second author’s name at the start, right? It would be foolish to guess which bits Chris Chibnall was responsible for and which bits Malorie Blackman wrote, because you never know, but it sure is noteworthythat this week’s is better written than Chibnall solo. It’s still playing in the Chibnall Era sandbox, of course, with companions standing around and asking what’s going on, and plans needing to be spelled out ad infinitum. But they all get something to do this time, and there are enough character moments to go around. Ryan’s dorky enthusiasm about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King is well played when he says their names a little too reverently; Yaz brings up the rear again, but gets to bond with Rosa a little. Graham has some beautifully acted moments as he confronts the worst version of how people might have reacted to him and Grace. Bradley Walsh is understated throughout, playing a simple man who really doesn’t want to stay on the bus and make things worse. It’s everyone’s best episode so far.
I like the way none of the regulars dignify a cruel comment with an agreement – “I don’t know anyone who fits that description” – and the Doctor actually makes a few deductions for once about Krasko. Hooray, she’s possibly smarter than the audience! The Banksy joke was funny, and can you believe the one about Elvis’s mobile phone came back, and it served the plot? Saints preserve us.
So… why was I worried it would suck? Well, context helps. Doctor Who isn’t something you’d want a Very Special Episode from at the best of times. Also this subject is virtually impossible to do with subtlety, because, well, it’s not a subtle subject. Look at Quantum Leap: an adorable, but sometimes rather pious show about making things better, there were a couple of episodes about race that went from gently upsetting Driving Miss Daisyreference to full-on violent horror show you wouldn’t watch twice. (It also had a hilariously silly arc about “Evil Leapers” that go around ruining everything, which come to think of it is the plot this week… hmm. Moving on.) Rosa splits the difference by being gently fun but also having people behave abominably towards Ryan and Yaz, as well as the other two when it’s obvious they get along, or god forbid, are related. But there are also some worthy, obvious bits.
Ryan and Yaz’s conversation behind the bins is going to trigger eye-rolls just from the PSA tone, let alone the ridiculous notion that Ryan doesn’t think Yaz has ever taken any shit from people on the street. And then there’s the ending, where the Doctor cutely lectures her mates with a reminder that things turned out all right in the end, with a black President and everything! (Except hold on, who followed him?) Yeah, they’re over-egging it. And if anyone can explain to me how naming an asteroid after Rosa Parks helps race relations, thanks in advance. Since anyone can get a star named after them, it just struck me as random. (Is it a race-relations asteroid? Are those a thing?)
Sorry, I stopped listening. Too distracted by thewhat were they thinking TARDIS design.The message is mixed a little further by the villain of the week. Krasko is interesting in that he only wants to distort history a little bit – he can’t physically hurt anyone, so he has to use other means. All good so far, and Josh Bowman smoothly underplays every scene. The wheels threaten to come off when you consider that the Doctor and co. are dumbly running around putting out his fires instead of doing something about him; Ryan has to use Krasko’s time-displacement gun to do away with the bugger (until next time, Gadget!), which the Doctor then doesn’t really pick up on. But then there’s the real problem – his reason for all this.
He’s doing it because… he’s a racist! A proper, 1950s-style, old-timey racist. And he’s from the 79th century, which farts in the face of the Doctor’s “Yay, progress!” speech. (Guess what, Ryan and Yaz: there are twats now, there were twats then, and what doth appear on the horizon? Why, tis future twats!) In any other episode, Krasko’s motivation would be laughably lazy. Here it’s incredibly on-the-nose for the story they’re telling, and it muddles the ending. They should have just left it up in the air.
But hey, think positive. I’m still grateful that they kept the McGuffins to a minimum, and let history be the important bit. It’s almost a pure historical – hip hip bleedin’ hooray! Vinette Robinson is excellent as Rosa, though Segun Akinola leans worryingly close to Murray Gold territory with her theme: it sounds like she’s going to safely get our boys back from the moon. If on-the-nose music choices aren’t your thing, the song at the end might be a problem. I didn’t hate it, since the Doctor Who theme would have been a marginally weirder choice after all that. But yeah, it’s a pretty obvious way to go with that ending.
There are bum notes, certainly, but the story is small enough to let its good moments stand out. Besides, I think there’s a certain bluntness that comes with telling this kind of story, however you do it. Doctor Who should still be allowed to try.
NB: If I’m honest, they had me at “the TARDIS doesn’t work properly”. Hartnell Era FTW.
October 16, 2018
Death Stroll 2000
Doctor Who
The Ghost Monument
Series Eleven, Episode Two
And, breathe. Now that all the stress of The Inaugural Episode is out of the way, and with it the burden of introducing everybody – which ended up being neither terrible norworth getting very excited about, yaaay I guess? – Doctor Who can get on with just telling stories. And The Ghost Monument certainly gets on with it, going right from last week’s incredible cliff-hanger to a brisk and exciting opening. In the time it normally takes to blow the steam off your tea there are two separate rescues in space and a crash landing. I’m a bit mystified that they put the titles before this, as it has the makings of a really good pre-title sequence. Oh well.
Pictured:
A very expensive art project getting flushed down the loo.
IN SPACE.The Doctor, Yaz, Graham and Ryan (come on guys, we can remember all the names) get separately rescued by the last contestants (and possibly, survivors) in an intergalactic race. One is a misanthrope out for himself, the other is determined to rescue her family with the winnings. Their task is to get across a desolate planet to the Ghost Monument, which you may or may not guess is actually a blue boxy sort of thing with a light on it. First one there wins. It’s going to be dangerous with a toxic atmosphere, deadly water and miscellaneous uh-ohs, but the Doctor and co. follow along anyway as it’s their only way out of here.
That’s a good start. I love stories that cut out all the “Where are we and what’s going on?” stuff, though… okay, The Ghost Monument still sort of does that, because Series 11 has a serious thing about characters announcing that they don’t understand what’s going on. (As well as the Doctor apologising. It’s only been two episodes, but seriously, stop it.) I’ll bet it’s their way to underline just how Normal And Relatable the companions are, but even the Doctor gets in on it sometimes. “Why would you need robot guards on a deserted planet?” Because the planet’s part of a deadly race and you’ve been told to expect difficulties, dipstick. Jodie Whittaker gets her teeth into this one a bit more, regardless of how well she’s written, and she has plenty of opportunities to politely or angrily shoot down the monotonously friendless Epzo. She even rips him for one of the crappier lines of dialogue – “Maybe I don’t play by the rules.” “Did you practice those lines in the mirror?” – which almost-but-not-quite excuses having it there in the first place. Hey, if even Chibnall can recognise the crap bits, maybe that’s a start?
So far, the show hasn’t found a lot of ways to make the Doctor seem clever, which is another worrying trend after the rousing choruses of “We Don’t Understand It, Guv.” A heroic rescue using an EMP blast is one such excuse, but she pretty much stumbles on a robot with a built-in EMP button, which sort of takes care of that. She fails to spot that a room full of cardboard human-shaped targets is… stay with me… a shooting range. She announces that their air supply has been cut off and they’re all in imminent danger, in a gigantic corridor that surely has buckets of air stored, before promptly urging them all into certain danger outside. (Why not wait and have a think?) More than once she points the sonic screwdriver at stuff and just hopes aloud for a solution to show up. The script ain’t helping: a surprise attack with a lit cigar and a cloud of acetylene gas would come as more of a surprise if Epzo hadn’t loudly announced that his cigar lights with the click of a finger – gosh, do you think that might come back?
I think Whittaker does have a better time this week than The Woman Who Fell To Earth, because there’s none of that wobbly First Episode-itis and she can just be the Doctor. But, random stupidities aside, they more than cock that up at times: when they arrive at the finish line hoping to the see the TARDIS, but don’t right away, the Doctor laments “All this way, for nothing.” Eh?! Her companions try to buck her up, but it’s no use: “We’ll be dead within one rotation.” She laughs this off when the TARDIS shows up, but come on, that’s bollocks. It’s so out of character for somebody otherwise gleefully stomping ahead, all “Let’s get a shift on” and “Get out of my head!” (in a heroic way, not the did-we-just-become-best-friends way).
But hey, whoopsie-pooh characterisation swerves are a hallmark of Chris Chibnall. He arguably manages a good one earlier in the episode, granting Graham a no-nonsense spine he didn’t seem to have last week. Bradley Walsh rises to it, so just go with it. I mean it’s not like we’re getting anywhere with Ryan.
Alas, Ryan. Three companions is a big ask, but you would hope their creator would have plenty to draw from. Is anyone here for this guy? All Ryan does is complain – understandable in a life-or-death situation he just fell into, but it’s all the time. When he isn’t quivering at the prospect of climbing a ladder, which looks as rubbish as it sounds, he’s inexplicably firing off crack shots with a space rifle while running. “I play a lot of Call Of Duty” is Chib’s excuse for that little get-out-of-dyspraxia-free card, but I’m not buying it. As for character work, we do have the ongoing thing about Ryan Not Calling Graham Granddad, but that just feels a bit binary. At some point, he’ll stop being such a twonk and he will call him Granddad. I don’t massively care either way, though Graham’s likeable enough that you want to thump the other little git.
Sorry, Doc: the best thing about robots
is that they can't shoot straight.And Yaz? Ahh, she’s nice in’t she? And that about wraps it up for Yaz. (Wait, isn’t she a police officer?)
Character-wise, it ain’t much, besides a strangely more grounded performance from Bradley Walsh and more action for Jodie Whittaker. A scene where some killer CGI bandages are suddenly psychic and drop portentous Hints With A Big H about something to do with the Doctor is as painful as it sounds. (It almost – almost – makes you miss certain departed showrunners, who at least had more practice with this kind of thing.) Both the contestants get some background stuff, Epzo about his terrifyingly misanthropic mum, and Angstrom about her family on the run from the Stenza. (The blue, face-full-of-teeth people we met last week. Seeing them again is not a thrilling prospect.) It’s all pretty straightforward for their character-types, but it’s well acted. And the game’s originator, played by a leisurely Art Malik, has glorious fun dismissing the needs of the Doctor and her friends; I loved his cheery refusal to teleport them off the planet, even if I didn’t buy his sudden caving to Epzo’s threats after he refuses to grant a joint victory. And yeah, the let’s-do-it-together ending is a hard sell, which just might be why they decide to do this off-screen.
Epzo and Angstrom make it damn clear how much they’ve done to get this far and how much winning means to them, so it’s bizarre that they’d chuck away half of it now. Sure, this planet sucks, but this can’t be their first reminder that other people get killed, or that maybe helping others is a good thing. They must be harder than this to even be here. On the other hand, the minute they arrive they seem quite enamoured with each other – one way, anyway – and they spend almost the entire “race” idly strolling along beside one another. Epzo even goes for little naps, apparently confident the rest of them won’t ditch him. It’s not verylife or death, is it? By the time they reach the end of what must be, surely, not the most exciting lap of this race, it’s almost a shrug to actually finish the thing.
But hey, that’s one of the problems with producing a script like this. You can talk up the planet’s pitfalls and terrors all you like but the budget is the budget. We get a great looking landscape, an eerie empty structure, some robots and the aforementioned (quite creepy when they shut up) CGI bandages. “Toxic water” is conveniently cheap – take regular water, sayit’s toxic, then nobody is stupid enough to get in it – the “toxic atmosphere” is mentioned but never seems to be an issue, apart from some apparently isolated acetylene fields. As for “killing machines and creatures inhabiting every corner,” ehh, no. Stay out of the robots’ way and don’t go to sleep next to some rags and you’re pretty safe. No one even gets thirsty or hungry en route. Several naps are had. Wake up! This is supposed to be exciting!
There’s really not a lot going on, which is already becoming a Chibnall era trope – relax, you won’t hurt your brain – and it’s never as thrilling as it seems to think. But it starts with a bang, looks brilliant, and the dialogue doesn’t clunk as resoundingly as I’ve come to expect. It’s also slightly shorter than last week’s, which helps with the pace. Backhanded compliments and little victories, I admit, but this here’s Chibnall Town, and you takes what you can get.
NB: That new TARDIS, though. It looks like they shrunk the cast down and stuck them in a bee hive with a rotting sweet in the middle.
The giant dead fingers are a lovely touch.
The Ghost Monument
Series Eleven, Episode Two
And, breathe. Now that all the stress of The Inaugural Episode is out of the way, and with it the burden of introducing everybody – which ended up being neither terrible norworth getting very excited about, yaaay I guess? – Doctor Who can get on with just telling stories. And The Ghost Monument certainly gets on with it, going right from last week’s incredible cliff-hanger to a brisk and exciting opening. In the time it normally takes to blow the steam off your tea there are two separate rescues in space and a crash landing. I’m a bit mystified that they put the titles before this, as it has the makings of a really good pre-title sequence. Oh well.
Pictured:A very expensive art project getting flushed down the loo.
IN SPACE.The Doctor, Yaz, Graham and Ryan (come on guys, we can remember all the names) get separately rescued by the last contestants (and possibly, survivors) in an intergalactic race. One is a misanthrope out for himself, the other is determined to rescue her family with the winnings. Their task is to get across a desolate planet to the Ghost Monument, which you may or may not guess is actually a blue boxy sort of thing with a light on it. First one there wins. It’s going to be dangerous with a toxic atmosphere, deadly water and miscellaneous uh-ohs, but the Doctor and co. follow along anyway as it’s their only way out of here.
That’s a good start. I love stories that cut out all the “Where are we and what’s going on?” stuff, though… okay, The Ghost Monument still sort of does that, because Series 11 has a serious thing about characters announcing that they don’t understand what’s going on. (As well as the Doctor apologising. It’s only been two episodes, but seriously, stop it.) I’ll bet it’s their way to underline just how Normal And Relatable the companions are, but even the Doctor gets in on it sometimes. “Why would you need robot guards on a deserted planet?” Because the planet’s part of a deadly race and you’ve been told to expect difficulties, dipstick. Jodie Whittaker gets her teeth into this one a bit more, regardless of how well she’s written, and she has plenty of opportunities to politely or angrily shoot down the monotonously friendless Epzo. She even rips him for one of the crappier lines of dialogue – “Maybe I don’t play by the rules.” “Did you practice those lines in the mirror?” – which almost-but-not-quite excuses having it there in the first place. Hey, if even Chibnall can recognise the crap bits, maybe that’s a start?
So far, the show hasn’t found a lot of ways to make the Doctor seem clever, which is another worrying trend after the rousing choruses of “We Don’t Understand It, Guv.” A heroic rescue using an EMP blast is one such excuse, but she pretty much stumbles on a robot with a built-in EMP button, which sort of takes care of that. She fails to spot that a room full of cardboard human-shaped targets is… stay with me… a shooting range. She announces that their air supply has been cut off and they’re all in imminent danger, in a gigantic corridor that surely has buckets of air stored, before promptly urging them all into certain danger outside. (Why not wait and have a think?) More than once she points the sonic screwdriver at stuff and just hopes aloud for a solution to show up. The script ain’t helping: a surprise attack with a lit cigar and a cloud of acetylene gas would come as more of a surprise if Epzo hadn’t loudly announced that his cigar lights with the click of a finger – gosh, do you think that might come back?
I think Whittaker does have a better time this week than The Woman Who Fell To Earth, because there’s none of that wobbly First Episode-itis and she can just be the Doctor. But, random stupidities aside, they more than cock that up at times: when they arrive at the finish line hoping to the see the TARDIS, but don’t right away, the Doctor laments “All this way, for nothing.” Eh?! Her companions try to buck her up, but it’s no use: “We’ll be dead within one rotation.” She laughs this off when the TARDIS shows up, but come on, that’s bollocks. It’s so out of character for somebody otherwise gleefully stomping ahead, all “Let’s get a shift on” and “Get out of my head!” (in a heroic way, not the did-we-just-become-best-friends way).
But hey, whoopsie-pooh characterisation swerves are a hallmark of Chris Chibnall. He arguably manages a good one earlier in the episode, granting Graham a no-nonsense spine he didn’t seem to have last week. Bradley Walsh rises to it, so just go with it. I mean it’s not like we’re getting anywhere with Ryan.
Alas, Ryan. Three companions is a big ask, but you would hope their creator would have plenty to draw from. Is anyone here for this guy? All Ryan does is complain – understandable in a life-or-death situation he just fell into, but it’s all the time. When he isn’t quivering at the prospect of climbing a ladder, which looks as rubbish as it sounds, he’s inexplicably firing off crack shots with a space rifle while running. “I play a lot of Call Of Duty” is Chib’s excuse for that little get-out-of-dyspraxia-free card, but I’m not buying it. As for character work, we do have the ongoing thing about Ryan Not Calling Graham Granddad, but that just feels a bit binary. At some point, he’ll stop being such a twonk and he will call him Granddad. I don’t massively care either way, though Graham’s likeable enough that you want to thump the other little git.
Sorry, Doc: the best thing about robotsis that they can't shoot straight.And Yaz? Ahh, she’s nice in’t she? And that about wraps it up for Yaz. (Wait, isn’t she a police officer?)
Character-wise, it ain’t much, besides a strangely more grounded performance from Bradley Walsh and more action for Jodie Whittaker. A scene where some killer CGI bandages are suddenly psychic and drop portentous Hints With A Big H about something to do with the Doctor is as painful as it sounds. (It almost – almost – makes you miss certain departed showrunners, who at least had more practice with this kind of thing.) Both the contestants get some background stuff, Epzo about his terrifyingly misanthropic mum, and Angstrom about her family on the run from the Stenza. (The blue, face-full-of-teeth people we met last week. Seeing them again is not a thrilling prospect.) It’s all pretty straightforward for their character-types, but it’s well acted. And the game’s originator, played by a leisurely Art Malik, has glorious fun dismissing the needs of the Doctor and her friends; I loved his cheery refusal to teleport them off the planet, even if I didn’t buy his sudden caving to Epzo’s threats after he refuses to grant a joint victory. And yeah, the let’s-do-it-together ending is a hard sell, which just might be why they decide to do this off-screen.
Epzo and Angstrom make it damn clear how much they’ve done to get this far and how much winning means to them, so it’s bizarre that they’d chuck away half of it now. Sure, this planet sucks, but this can’t be their first reminder that other people get killed, or that maybe helping others is a good thing. They must be harder than this to even be here. On the other hand, the minute they arrive they seem quite enamoured with each other – one way, anyway – and they spend almost the entire “race” idly strolling along beside one another. Epzo even goes for little naps, apparently confident the rest of them won’t ditch him. It’s not verylife or death, is it? By the time they reach the end of what must be, surely, not the most exciting lap of this race, it’s almost a shrug to actually finish the thing.
But hey, that’s one of the problems with producing a script like this. You can talk up the planet’s pitfalls and terrors all you like but the budget is the budget. We get a great looking landscape, an eerie empty structure, some robots and the aforementioned (quite creepy when they shut up) CGI bandages. “Toxic water” is conveniently cheap – take regular water, sayit’s toxic, then nobody is stupid enough to get in it – the “toxic atmosphere” is mentioned but never seems to be an issue, apart from some apparently isolated acetylene fields. As for “killing machines and creatures inhabiting every corner,” ehh, no. Stay out of the robots’ way and don’t go to sleep next to some rags and you’re pretty safe. No one even gets thirsty or hungry en route. Several naps are had. Wake up! This is supposed to be exciting!
There’s really not a lot going on, which is already becoming a Chibnall era trope – relax, you won’t hurt your brain – and it’s never as thrilling as it seems to think. But it starts with a bang, looks brilliant, and the dialogue doesn’t clunk as resoundingly as I’ve come to expect. It’s also slightly shorter than last week’s, which helps with the pace. Backhanded compliments and little victories, I admit, but this here’s Chibnall Town, and you takes what you can get.
NB: That new TARDIS, though. It looks like they shrunk the cast down and stuck them in a bee hive with a rotting sweet in the middle.
The giant dead fingers are a lovely touch.
October 10, 2018
Splat
Doctor Who
The Woman Who Fell To EarthSeries Eleven, Episode One
Okay, don’t panic. Doctor Who is back and there’s been a big change and people are going to flip. I’ve been a bit concerned about this for ages, because for all my moaning I do like Doctor Who, and this... Does. Not. Bode. Well.
Yep, it’s Chibnall time. The guy who wrote Cyberwoman is running the show. A writer with popular acclaim, thanks mostly to Broadchurch (haven’t seen it, I’ll take your word for it), he has a spottier track record on other shows such as UK Law & Order, Life On Mars, Torchwood (I’m still having flashbacks) and, oh yeah, that other one. With the TARDIS in it.
"There's no such thing as aliens."
To be fair, he was in hospital for some of the invasions.
But come on!His Who episodes were never exactly terrible. They just lacked spark. Loves a tired turn of phrase, does the Chibbenator, and he’s quite fond of ideas you’ve seen a thousand times before. Alien monster? Yeah, it should pick folk off one by one. (Whoa there, we can’t have one of them not observing aloud that “It’s picking us off, one by one!”) Got a robot? Get it singing the “Daisy” song from 2001. Got Silurians, whose entire history in Doctor Who up to that point was the same story told over and over again? Get a brew on, son, we’ll do the bloody thing again then.
When Steven Moffat got the top job in 2008 it made sense: he’d run shows before and he wrote stand-out Doctor Who. The best thing about Chib’s episodes was They’re Not As Bad As His TorchwoodEpisodes, although they did contain the same badly judged tone shifts. (Remember when the characters felt really sad about a dead triceratops, then cheered about making velociraptors extinct?) Just be thankful he wasn’t pitching his dialogue to the Bad Sex Awards.
Ah well, he’s head honcho now, get over it. So how’s it going? As you might expect the focus is shifting away from complicated plots, not to mention complicated dialogue, with a view to getting the fabled Casual Viewer back in the room. Moffat had many strengths, but his never-ending quest to dazzle us with his wit and intelligence also lead to a lot of introverted, no-stakes bollocks where nobody dies and nothing goes anywhere. The Woman Who Fell To Earth isn’t hard to follow. The jokes (such as they are) don’t require a comprehensive knowledge of Doctor Who. Characters in this have normal lives and, can it be?!, actual jobs, and some of them get properly killed with no fairytale take-backsies in sight. There’s sci-fi stuff obviously, but not too much – there’s no TARDIS, no mention of time travel that I noticed, and no Doctor Who theme yet. Even the music isn’t in-yer-face any more, since they’ve swapped out Murray Gold for newbie Segun Akinola. (Alas Murray: he made great music to listen to on its own, but on TV it was like an orchestra tap-dancing in close up during every scene.) It’s all very “I don’t bite!” The Doctor even tells Graham that it’s okay to be frightened of new things. There there, newbies.
“New things”, though? Okay, it’s original to leave the new Doctor out of sight for 10 minutes, without a recap or a title sequence to get you in the Who mood. The focus on people is a genuine relief – not to go on about it, but Moffat didn’t give a hoot about what people did for a living and they didn’t seem to really exist outside of the TARDIS. You can’t entirely say that for Yaz (a police officer sick of answering minor calls), Ryan (a mechanic in training with troublesome dyspraxia) and Graham (Ryan’s step-grandad, ex-bus driver and cancer survivor). And there’s Grace, Ryan’s adventurous open-minded nan, who is noticeably not on the promo material for Series 11... (Ahem.) These people aren’t flashy or desperately in need of adventure, and to be honest they’re not terribly interesting. But you get the impression they have lives which would carry on just fine if this episode didn’t happen to them. (Well obviously, as there’d be a lot less death.)
"But what if there's no one stupid enough to grant permission?"
"Duh, it's the planet of the SmartPhones."They don’t even sign up with the Doctor at the end – it’s a total accident. Which is a nice little throwback to how the show started, with none of that moony-eyed “Rescue me from working in a shop!” desperation that started with Rose. It makes the-Doctor-and-companion less of a ritual, more of an adventure. Great stuff. To top that off, the Doctor’s accidental group outing gives us the best cliff-hanger Doctor Who’s had in years. Hope it’s the first of many. (Of course they follow it with the weirdest Next Time trailer I’ve seen in years – literally just a list of actors. Oh wow, you got actors? Are there, like… stories too?)
The group approach is interesting, though it has a significant drawback. Who gets the spotlight? Fans will expect the old “companion saves the Doctor” bit where they earn their place in the TARDIS, and they sort of do that but… all of them at once. (Actually I’m not sure about Ryan. Yaz drove the crane, Graham threw a switch, Grace poked an alien…?) By the end of The Woman Who Fell To Earth, no one stands out much. They’re all nice enough and sort of helpful, but… ehh?
And okay, I’ve got to get my baggage out now: it’s largely the script’s fault. No one sounds very deep or interesting when their dialogue consists of asking what a weird thing is and concluding that “I’ve got no idea”, or even good old “Oh my god!” It’s a bit too easy to tell us that Yaz yearns for greater things by having her flat-out tell her colleague that she yearns for greater things. Dyspraxia seems like a visual enough disability to make it work on the telly, but all that means here is Ryan falling off his bike and getting nervous about going up a ladder. (Graham says Ryan blames things on his dyspraxia… like what though, besides the bike?) And Graham is older than most companions, so you’re automatically expecting someone a bit offbeat and fun like Wilf – it’s Bradley Walsh and everything – but he’s stuck with clunk-clunk signifiers like “Is he ever gonna call me granddad? Three years, we’ve been married!” and zingers like “Why is she running at another alien? Now you’re all running at it!” When it comes to real people being funny, or even closely approximating that, Chibnall’s no Russell T Davies. Most of the funny bits are crying out for someone with a better ear to come and shake them up. (Or just try them out loud first. “This city’s my own, and I’m not havin’ it being an alien battleground!” said a genuine human being?) Probably the cleverest thing here is the title, but I may only be saying that because I missed the first five minutes, so can’t honestly say how obvious Ryan’s setup was. (Yes, I caught up afterwards.)
The plot is just as likely to induce a shrug. Weird things are occurring in Sheffield – two whole weird things. A large blue pear-drop thing magically appears in front of Ryan, which is fascinating if you like looking at large blue pear drops that just sit there. And a large metallic squid-monster attacks some people on a train. Enter the Doctor, 10 minutes in, with a leisurely 50 minutes to guess her way to what’s going on, and variously poke things or throw herself at them or yell at them until they go away. When the Doctor’s great plan involves moving one crane nearer another one and then moving it away again, you know we’re not in Timey Wimey Land any more. Which I should be thrilled about – Doctor Who has been messily overcomplicated for years – but this plot just lumbers along. There are no great layers to unravel. The Eleventh Hour had a similarly pint-sized baddie to deal with and it also introduced a new Doctor, but that one was frontloaded with character development between an astonishing new actor and a charming kid. None of the time felt wasted. Not the case here. (What was the point of kebab guy getting killed?) The baddie, a gleefully murderous alien hunting a human trophy to prove his worthiness, tells the Doctor “You’re interfering in things you don’t understand!” (Urgh.) It’s actually pretty easy to sum up in a sentence, matey.
"Hunt who?" "Isn't it obvious?"
Yes. FFS, Ryan, you all literally looked at the guy's face just now.Admittedly I don’t understand why The Most Dangerous Game repeatedly takes these aliens to Sheffield, or why it doesn’t involve anything more taxing than grabbing a random bloke on a train, or why that somehow needed the assistance of a robotic squid-thing with a people scanner. It’s surprisingly-rural Sheffield, not Hong Kong. (Isn’t anybodymonitoring him? Of course he cheats!) Tim Shaw – not the alien’s name, but it’s like… kind of insulting to mispronounce it like that? Ha, good one! – is evidently a dick. But this doesn’t give him much to spar with the Doctor about when their inevitable showdown comes along. And “inevitable” is the key word, as plenty of New Who Doctor tropes come out to play: the Doctor tells Tim he’s not taking anyone else (before he kills a few more anyway), then tells him to get off this planet (he doesn’t listen) and then uses his own weapons against him. When he’s clearly already dying, his would-be victim kicks him off a crane – not to his doom, as he was about to teleport off anyway, no thanks to the Doctor. But the Doctor still wheels out the old “You had no right to do that!” before the scene awkwardly cuts away and we never see the guy again. If you’re going to go on about the Doctor’s moral compass, articulate it. When you rush it like this, she just looks like a git with double standards.
Which brings us to the Doctor, and the other thing people have been worrying about. For some reason. Got a problem with Jodie Whittaker? Fair enough, she’s the lead actor so if you don’t enjoy her work that’s not a good sign. (I’d only seen her in Attack The Block, where she is occasionally indistinguishable from the wallpaper.) But as for the gender change, how many times does it need saying? Doctor Who has frantically made up the rules of regeneration since 1966 and New Who has been setting this up (deliberately or otherwise) since 2011. Moan all you want, but they’ve done the work and it doesn’t contradict anything. I have zero sympathy for this. For god’s sake, you’ll get another man one at some point. And no, writing another strong female role isn’t good enough – why notmake it this one?
Grrr. No, it’s more important what the Doctor is like than what’s in his or her pants – which even now might be a yoyo and a pocket calculator. The news on the what is she like front is… promising, but not surprising? Jodie Whittaker gets it, obviously. There’s the bright, enthusiastic attitude, the ease with making new friends, the wacky outbursts (“Biology!”), the zero-tolerance approach when the baddie’s pushing their luck – it’s obvious Chibnall has no intention of making the Doctor an uphill climb as it was with Peter Capaldi. This is The Doctor 101, everyone’s new best friend. But at the same time there’s no call for the kind of thoughtful acting choices Capaldi brought to it. This Doctor’s an open book, and isn’t much more intelligent-sounding than her mates. She also has a nasty habit of giving herself slogans. (“When people ask for help, I never refuse!” “I’m the Doctor – sorting out fair play across the universe!” Ew.) It’s a first episode so who knows how it’ll develop, but she pitches most of it at the same level – like she’s talking to kids. Which I guess she is, to a large extent. (And hooray for female representation, especially for the childeroids.) Hey, it’s what the script called for.
"Any thoughts on costume?"
"Well, if we can agree on one thing, it's that we don't need a hat."In amongst all the obvious stuff – including a heroic death scene where the character a) immediately accepts they are going to die, b) delivers some caring last words off the top of their head and c) slips away quickly like Marion Cotillard – there’s some unambiguously good stuff. The Doctor is sometimes really funny, like her enthusiastic response to wiping Ryan’s phone (“All my stuff is on there!” “Not any more!”), and there’s a lovely scene where she describes regeneration as a moment when you think you’re going to die, and then you’re born. This is very apt stuff, like my favourite scene in The Power Of Three – and this time there’s no possibility that Steven Moffat edited it! I even like that flowery little line, “I’m not yet who I am,” which is the kind of glorious nonsense that only makes sense in this context. It’s just a pity the Doctor’s vagueness re who she is is so, well, vague: she doesn’t remember her name. Everything else, down to knowing she needs a sonic screwdriver for scrapes like this, is clearly present and correct from the minute she crashes through a train roof. Like that awkward “You had no right to do that!”, and the nothingy scene of the Doctor choosing a new costume (spoiler, she goes to a shop), it’s just sort of there.
And that’s the episode for me. It’s fine. Chibnall has written some stuff I absolutely hate, but this is the most palatable thing of his besides Power Of Three. (Yes, I know that’s just me.) It’s unchallenging, it’s easy, it’s nice. Apart from some people getting randomly killed, which is also sort of nice after New Who became so unwilling to kill anyone off. It’s like The Eleventh Hour if you set it in the Russell T Davies era. But, unsurprisingly? Without the zing. Enough to keep the show going? Sure. Enough to make young girls feel awesome? I bet, and hooray. Enough to make it really good going forward? Er. Who else is in the writers’ room?
The Woman Who Fell To EarthSeries Eleven, Episode One
Okay, don’t panic. Doctor Who is back and there’s been a big change and people are going to flip. I’ve been a bit concerned about this for ages, because for all my moaning I do like Doctor Who, and this... Does. Not. Bode. Well.
Yep, it’s Chibnall time. The guy who wrote Cyberwoman is running the show. A writer with popular acclaim, thanks mostly to Broadchurch (haven’t seen it, I’ll take your word for it), he has a spottier track record on other shows such as UK Law & Order, Life On Mars, Torchwood (I’m still having flashbacks) and, oh yeah, that other one. With the TARDIS in it.
"There's no such thing as aliens."To be fair, he was in hospital for some of the invasions.
But come on!His Who episodes were never exactly terrible. They just lacked spark. Loves a tired turn of phrase, does the Chibbenator, and he’s quite fond of ideas you’ve seen a thousand times before. Alien monster? Yeah, it should pick folk off one by one. (Whoa there, we can’t have one of them not observing aloud that “It’s picking us off, one by one!”) Got a robot? Get it singing the “Daisy” song from 2001. Got Silurians, whose entire history in Doctor Who up to that point was the same story told over and over again? Get a brew on, son, we’ll do the bloody thing again then.
When Steven Moffat got the top job in 2008 it made sense: he’d run shows before and he wrote stand-out Doctor Who. The best thing about Chib’s episodes was They’re Not As Bad As His TorchwoodEpisodes, although they did contain the same badly judged tone shifts. (Remember when the characters felt really sad about a dead triceratops, then cheered about making velociraptors extinct?) Just be thankful he wasn’t pitching his dialogue to the Bad Sex Awards.
Ah well, he’s head honcho now, get over it. So how’s it going? As you might expect the focus is shifting away from complicated plots, not to mention complicated dialogue, with a view to getting the fabled Casual Viewer back in the room. Moffat had many strengths, but his never-ending quest to dazzle us with his wit and intelligence also lead to a lot of introverted, no-stakes bollocks where nobody dies and nothing goes anywhere. The Woman Who Fell To Earth isn’t hard to follow. The jokes (such as they are) don’t require a comprehensive knowledge of Doctor Who. Characters in this have normal lives and, can it be?!, actual jobs, and some of them get properly killed with no fairytale take-backsies in sight. There’s sci-fi stuff obviously, but not too much – there’s no TARDIS, no mention of time travel that I noticed, and no Doctor Who theme yet. Even the music isn’t in-yer-face any more, since they’ve swapped out Murray Gold for newbie Segun Akinola. (Alas Murray: he made great music to listen to on its own, but on TV it was like an orchestra tap-dancing in close up during every scene.) It’s all very “I don’t bite!” The Doctor even tells Graham that it’s okay to be frightened of new things. There there, newbies.
“New things”, though? Okay, it’s original to leave the new Doctor out of sight for 10 minutes, without a recap or a title sequence to get you in the Who mood. The focus on people is a genuine relief – not to go on about it, but Moffat didn’t give a hoot about what people did for a living and they didn’t seem to really exist outside of the TARDIS. You can’t entirely say that for Yaz (a police officer sick of answering minor calls), Ryan (a mechanic in training with troublesome dyspraxia) and Graham (Ryan’s step-grandad, ex-bus driver and cancer survivor). And there’s Grace, Ryan’s adventurous open-minded nan, who is noticeably not on the promo material for Series 11... (Ahem.) These people aren’t flashy or desperately in need of adventure, and to be honest they’re not terribly interesting. But you get the impression they have lives which would carry on just fine if this episode didn’t happen to them. (Well obviously, as there’d be a lot less death.)
"But what if there's no one stupid enough to grant permission?""Duh, it's the planet of the SmartPhones."They don’t even sign up with the Doctor at the end – it’s a total accident. Which is a nice little throwback to how the show started, with none of that moony-eyed “Rescue me from working in a shop!” desperation that started with Rose. It makes the-Doctor-and-companion less of a ritual, more of an adventure. Great stuff. To top that off, the Doctor’s accidental group outing gives us the best cliff-hanger Doctor Who’s had in years. Hope it’s the first of many. (Of course they follow it with the weirdest Next Time trailer I’ve seen in years – literally just a list of actors. Oh wow, you got actors? Are there, like… stories too?)
The group approach is interesting, though it has a significant drawback. Who gets the spotlight? Fans will expect the old “companion saves the Doctor” bit where they earn their place in the TARDIS, and they sort of do that but… all of them at once. (Actually I’m not sure about Ryan. Yaz drove the crane, Graham threw a switch, Grace poked an alien…?) By the end of The Woman Who Fell To Earth, no one stands out much. They’re all nice enough and sort of helpful, but… ehh?
And okay, I’ve got to get my baggage out now: it’s largely the script’s fault. No one sounds very deep or interesting when their dialogue consists of asking what a weird thing is and concluding that “I’ve got no idea”, or even good old “Oh my god!” It’s a bit too easy to tell us that Yaz yearns for greater things by having her flat-out tell her colleague that she yearns for greater things. Dyspraxia seems like a visual enough disability to make it work on the telly, but all that means here is Ryan falling off his bike and getting nervous about going up a ladder. (Graham says Ryan blames things on his dyspraxia… like what though, besides the bike?) And Graham is older than most companions, so you’re automatically expecting someone a bit offbeat and fun like Wilf – it’s Bradley Walsh and everything – but he’s stuck with clunk-clunk signifiers like “Is he ever gonna call me granddad? Three years, we’ve been married!” and zingers like “Why is she running at another alien? Now you’re all running at it!” When it comes to real people being funny, or even closely approximating that, Chibnall’s no Russell T Davies. Most of the funny bits are crying out for someone with a better ear to come and shake them up. (Or just try them out loud first. “This city’s my own, and I’m not havin’ it being an alien battleground!” said a genuine human being?) Probably the cleverest thing here is the title, but I may only be saying that because I missed the first five minutes, so can’t honestly say how obvious Ryan’s setup was. (Yes, I caught up afterwards.)
The plot is just as likely to induce a shrug. Weird things are occurring in Sheffield – two whole weird things. A large blue pear-drop thing magically appears in front of Ryan, which is fascinating if you like looking at large blue pear drops that just sit there. And a large metallic squid-monster attacks some people on a train. Enter the Doctor, 10 minutes in, with a leisurely 50 minutes to guess her way to what’s going on, and variously poke things or throw herself at them or yell at them until they go away. When the Doctor’s great plan involves moving one crane nearer another one and then moving it away again, you know we’re not in Timey Wimey Land any more. Which I should be thrilled about – Doctor Who has been messily overcomplicated for years – but this plot just lumbers along. There are no great layers to unravel. The Eleventh Hour had a similarly pint-sized baddie to deal with and it also introduced a new Doctor, but that one was frontloaded with character development between an astonishing new actor and a charming kid. None of the time felt wasted. Not the case here. (What was the point of kebab guy getting killed?) The baddie, a gleefully murderous alien hunting a human trophy to prove his worthiness, tells the Doctor “You’re interfering in things you don’t understand!” (Urgh.) It’s actually pretty easy to sum up in a sentence, matey.
"Hunt who?" "Isn't it obvious?"Yes. FFS, Ryan, you all literally looked at the guy's face just now.Admittedly I don’t understand why The Most Dangerous Game repeatedly takes these aliens to Sheffield, or why it doesn’t involve anything more taxing than grabbing a random bloke on a train, or why that somehow needed the assistance of a robotic squid-thing with a people scanner. It’s surprisingly-rural Sheffield, not Hong Kong. (Isn’t anybodymonitoring him? Of course he cheats!) Tim Shaw – not the alien’s name, but it’s like… kind of insulting to mispronounce it like that? Ha, good one! – is evidently a dick. But this doesn’t give him much to spar with the Doctor about when their inevitable showdown comes along. And “inevitable” is the key word, as plenty of New Who Doctor tropes come out to play: the Doctor tells Tim he’s not taking anyone else (before he kills a few more anyway), then tells him to get off this planet (he doesn’t listen) and then uses his own weapons against him. When he’s clearly already dying, his would-be victim kicks him off a crane – not to his doom, as he was about to teleport off anyway, no thanks to the Doctor. But the Doctor still wheels out the old “You had no right to do that!” before the scene awkwardly cuts away and we never see the guy again. If you’re going to go on about the Doctor’s moral compass, articulate it. When you rush it like this, she just looks like a git with double standards.
Which brings us to the Doctor, and the other thing people have been worrying about. For some reason. Got a problem with Jodie Whittaker? Fair enough, she’s the lead actor so if you don’t enjoy her work that’s not a good sign. (I’d only seen her in Attack The Block, where she is occasionally indistinguishable from the wallpaper.) But as for the gender change, how many times does it need saying? Doctor Who has frantically made up the rules of regeneration since 1966 and New Who has been setting this up (deliberately or otherwise) since 2011. Moan all you want, but they’ve done the work and it doesn’t contradict anything. I have zero sympathy for this. For god’s sake, you’ll get another man one at some point. And no, writing another strong female role isn’t good enough – why notmake it this one?
Grrr. No, it’s more important what the Doctor is like than what’s in his or her pants – which even now might be a yoyo and a pocket calculator. The news on the what is she like front is… promising, but not surprising? Jodie Whittaker gets it, obviously. There’s the bright, enthusiastic attitude, the ease with making new friends, the wacky outbursts (“Biology!”), the zero-tolerance approach when the baddie’s pushing their luck – it’s obvious Chibnall has no intention of making the Doctor an uphill climb as it was with Peter Capaldi. This is The Doctor 101, everyone’s new best friend. But at the same time there’s no call for the kind of thoughtful acting choices Capaldi brought to it. This Doctor’s an open book, and isn’t much more intelligent-sounding than her mates. She also has a nasty habit of giving herself slogans. (“When people ask for help, I never refuse!” “I’m the Doctor – sorting out fair play across the universe!” Ew.) It’s a first episode so who knows how it’ll develop, but she pitches most of it at the same level – like she’s talking to kids. Which I guess she is, to a large extent. (And hooray for female representation, especially for the childeroids.) Hey, it’s what the script called for.
"Any thoughts on costume?""Well, if we can agree on one thing, it's that we don't need a hat."In amongst all the obvious stuff – including a heroic death scene where the character a) immediately accepts they are going to die, b) delivers some caring last words off the top of their head and c) slips away quickly like Marion Cotillard – there’s some unambiguously good stuff. The Doctor is sometimes really funny, like her enthusiastic response to wiping Ryan’s phone (“All my stuff is on there!” “Not any more!”), and there’s a lovely scene where she describes regeneration as a moment when you think you’re going to die, and then you’re born. This is very apt stuff, like my favourite scene in The Power Of Three – and this time there’s no possibility that Steven Moffat edited it! I even like that flowery little line, “I’m not yet who I am,” which is the kind of glorious nonsense that only makes sense in this context. It’s just a pity the Doctor’s vagueness re who she is is so, well, vague: she doesn’t remember her name. Everything else, down to knowing she needs a sonic screwdriver for scrapes like this, is clearly present and correct from the minute she crashes through a train roof. Like that awkward “You had no right to do that!”, and the nothingy scene of the Doctor choosing a new costume (spoiler, she goes to a shop), it’s just sort of there.
And that’s the episode for me. It’s fine. Chibnall has written some stuff I absolutely hate, but this is the most palatable thing of his besides Power Of Three. (Yes, I know that’s just me.) It’s unchallenging, it’s easy, it’s nice. Apart from some people getting randomly killed, which is also sort of nice after New Who became so unwilling to kill anyone off. It’s like The Eleventh Hour if you set it in the Russell T Davies era. But, unsurprisingly? Without the zing. Enough to keep the show going? Sure. Enough to make young girls feel awesome? I bet, and hooray. Enough to make it really good going forward? Er. Who else is in the writers’ room?
October 4, 2018
Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #75 – Happy Endings by Paul Cornell
Doctor Who: The New Adventures#50Happy EndingsBy Paul Cornell
Two books meet in a pub. Who Killed Kennedy says “I dunno, mate – I think I’ve overdone it with the continuity references. I’ve gone back over it and maybe you can have too many, y’know? Like, we get it, Doctor Whostuff, well done, have a badge for mathematical excellence – damn it! I’ve buggered it, haven’t I.” And Happy Endings says, “Hold my drink.”
Behold, the mother lode. Happy Endings is on a mission to celebrate the New Adventures, and no one gets left behind. Well, almost. The fact that, for example, Apocalypse and Lucifer Rising only warrant tiny mentions is fannish in itself, since you’ll need an industrial strength anorak to sort the wedding guests from the couldn’t-make-its. I’ve read every Virgin novel up to here, and when I reached the chapter written by all but one of the NA authors even I had to get my Google on.
It’s a 300 page panto walk-down. It is utter, utter fanwank. And... I sort of loved it anyway. But how can that be?
Well, I think there are some important distinctions between Happy Endingsand your more garden variety fanwank. With the “bad” (okay, that’s almost all examples of) kind, references for their own sake tend to come at the expense of something else, and they have little to do with the actually substantial bit. Point being, there usually is one. No Future, for example, goes full tilt at the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, chucking in lots of familiar heroes and villains. But it also has an interesting plot about social violence and it’s meant to wrap up a multi-book arc about interference in time and space – plus finally resolving the tension between two long running characters. Instead it goes “Ahh, isn’t this nice?”, and ends up as probably the least substantial book in the arc. It’s a jarring mix.
Whereas Happy Endings is a celebration from the outset. Literally, since it concerns Bernice and Jason’s wedding. It only exists to revel in how marvellous all this stuff is and all these characters are, and though it occasionally rouses enough interest to have a plot, that “plot” remains a subplot, low in the mix. Frankly, too many machinations would spoil the party; it’s hard enough just keeping a head count. You can do characterisation at the expense of plot – which isn’t exactly true of The Also People, but that remains the best example I can think of where plot gets measurably shorter shrift – but then Happy Endingsdoesn’t massively do characterisation either. With so many characters, it isn’t really possible to tell a unified story with people, or with plot. So everybody just gets a sort of sprinkling of progress. A.k.a. some happy endings, fired cheerily in all directions. An actual keeping-a-straight-face plot would just seem inappropriate.
Okay, so we do get something. Bernice and Jason are getting married in Cheldon Bonniface – of Revelation and Human Nature fame – and the Doctor is determined to make it a wonderful occasion. He’s inviting people he’s known since meeting Bernice, and one or two from before (just go with it), and soon a host of humans and aliens from the past and future are gathered. Something sinister is afoot, although everyone’s generally too busy to notice. (Which come to think of it, isthe something sinister.) The Doctor begins to worry that having all these aliens on a pre-first contact Earth will cause ripples in time, not to mention fights, and the tension wobbles both ways, from punch-ups to a (quite lengthy!) cricket match. Bernice spends most of it wondering if Jason really loves her, because he’s acting strangely. (Strangely, that is, for someone she’s known for hardly any time at all, as have we.) And… we’re already pushing it, to be honest. There are wedding jitters and there’s a slight mystery, and it all plods gaily along.
Part of my (perhaps improbable) enjoyment comes from lavishing so much attention – relatively speaking – on Bernice. She earned it. She was brilliant immediately, then got side-lined by a team of nervous authors with conflicting briefs (ahem), only to share the spotlight pretty much for the rest of her run. Her enduring popularity makes perfect sense, as she jumps off the page with almost any author. She’s that rare thing: a character invented by fans who isn’t an avatar, someone who adds meaningfully and refreshingly to who the Doctor is, and what the series can be. I’m obviously livid that this is it for Bernice’s ongoing travels, save for a few return visits and her own (equally deserved) line of solo books. But for a series that always wanted to try new things, there’s something admirable about not having too much of a good thing.
As for the relationship with Jason, sadly a lot of years have passed since Happy Endings came out, and I do know that the title won’t be accurate for long. But that’s another story – and another very pressing question of why they made such a fuss about it only to undo it later, a-bloody-hem– so what of Bernice and Jason in this? The latter appears at times to be a philandering jerk, which is only a slight exaggeration of the guy we met in Death And Diplomacy. The plot does a good job of having its cake and eating it, and it’s heartening how happy all this ultimately makes Bernice, but I can’t honestly say I know who Jason is, or whether he’s a good match for Bernice. (It’s difficult to separate opinion from foreknowledge on that front.) Ultimately it’s a romantic comedy starring Bernice, and you pretty much just have to go along with it. Hey ho.
There’s something lovely, albeit small going on with the Doctor in amongst all this. He said he was done playing games in Death And Diplomacy, and he – as well as the books – has been moving in a more positive direction lately. Trying to orchestrate a successful mix of people, aliens and oblivious locals without any shots fired is an unusual twist on a Doctor Who setup, a conscious attempt to do things differently. And he’s right to want to change, up to a point; an inevitable sneaky exit (so he can travel alone, plus Wolsey) is foiled by Bernice, sensibly pointing out that that’s a load of codswallop and he needs his friends in his life after all. The Doctor, adorably denying tears, goes along with it. I don’t know if I’ve loved this Doctor more than here, moving worlds to make Bernice happy.
As for everyone else… well, Ace gives her mum a hug, which is that endless well dry at last. Chris lives to bonk again, which is his main reason to exist apart from being loveably over-enthusiastic in general. (I’m honestly baffled at him now having two kids he doesn’t know about.) Roz is utterly charmed by Sherlock Holmes, which is easily the happiest I’ve seen her, but she doesn’t have room to do much else. Holmes and Watson repeatedly threaten to steal the spotlight, which is impressive in itself; Cornell reverts to the diary format of All-Consuming Firefor their bits, which naturally are where the book’s meagre plot spreads its wings. What’s the point in including Sherlock Holmes, if he doesn’t have even a little mystery to solve? (Mind you, it’s totally worth bringing them back just for the line: “I have become ‘with it,’ Watson!” But having Bernice’s increasingly cold feet point her towards Watson is an oddly charming detour.)
And the rest sees you into tick-off-that-hanging-plot-thread territory. We open with Romana (hooray! Be in more books!) resolving the stalemate of The Highest Science, not to mention becoming President of Gallifrey (oh, so that’s when that happened); Muldwych, the odd possible-future-Doctor from Birthright, escapes his confinement; Ace’s one-time love, Robin Yeadon, moves on at last, though he keeps it in the family; the Brigadier is getting on in years, and his story has a noble end, as well as a very sweet new beginning; and the Doctor gets his original TARDIS back. One of the oddest decisions in the New Adventures, the TARDIS-swap has remained a thumping great non sequitur, as hardly any writers made light of the fact that we’ve been seeing a different one. (Probably because it doesn’t make any damn difference.) I’m glad it’s been tidied back to normal. Odd that we didn’t tick off the feral Doctor and Ace from Witch Mark, since we’re in the market for random loose ends, but I gather they turn up at some point.
The infamous Everybody’s Welcome At The Wedding chapter is like a confetti cannon of mini-closures, with awkward goodbyes made less awkward on the second attempt, off-screen happy endings confirmed, and at least one random thing happening that doesn’t appear to mean anything. (Neil Penswick? You don’t say.) It reads surprisingly well, including a self-deprecating jab at John Peel’s not-exactly-loveable Gilgamesh. It’s just a shame Jim Mortimore wouldn’t participate. I mean, fair enough, it is a hell of a gimmicky idea. But come on, dude! It’s a wrap party! They even got Andrew Hunt back, and he was a vet by then!
That chapter is a good example of why the book, however improbably, works. It’s a celebration of good work done by a host of different people, and everyone gets their due. Although Paul Cornell naturally leans into his own books, particularly the tail-end of the Timewyrm saga (and adorably Saul, the spirit in the local church, whom I’ve missed), it never feels as smug as fan writing so often does. It’s written with absolute love for every incidental character and every effort made to get these books into print. And well done, that lot. It’s also, as you might expect, frequently bloody hilarious. It opens with a poem by Vanessa Bishop, which is all good but absolutely shattered me with: “And noticeably absent certain malicious pepperpots, who never go to weddings and have avoided fifty plots.” Captain Duranne from Shakedown, which co-starred Sophie Aldred, at one point stares quizzically at Ace and asks if they’ve met. The Doctor gets several mock-dramatic moments, including “There will be no rehearsal here!”, and a reprise of his “If we fight like animals…” bit is amusingly curtailed. The villain of the piece eventually shows up with a hilarious line that I mustn’t spoil, and at least one of the cameos is a deliberately crass false alarm that made me hoot. Oh, and one of the chapters is titled “Blake’s Heaven”. (Sue me, I like a good pun.) It’s worth mentioning Cornell’s prose remains thoughtful and witty throughout all this; bereft of continuity, I loved the bit about the vicar feeling the eyes of the Bishop on her as she’s working: “The Bishop was sitting in the front row, which made Annie feel as if she was in the middle of some sort of ‘vicary’ test, like a driving test. When the Bishop tapped on the pew, she’d have to perform an emergency sermon.”
It works, though it isn’t perfect. Obviously. Such a critical mass of fandom is inevitably going to be hit and miss. The urge to include everything, including the furniture if we can get it in the van, leads to a bit of simply not knowing who the hell he’s on about. At first I thought Hamlet Macbeth (damn it, it’s HAMLET, not HAMISH, every bloody time) was the paranormal cop from Witch Mark, and I’d completely forgotten what he did to the Doctor; Bernice’s dalliance with Vivant Denon slipped my mind entirely; and while I recalled the books they were from, a fair chunk of the Group Chapter People scarcely made an impression the first time. But given the purpose and the spirit of Happy Endings, by that point you’re fully aware of what you’re in for, and it’s oddly satisfying watching Cornell grab another New Adventure alumnus and cram them in the bag. There’s a great deal to celebrate and be proud of, and although it’ll be sheer Sanskrit to anyone not well versed in these books, I suspect the sweet atmosphere would still carry it some of the way. Everyone, after all, is welcome at the wedding.
8/10
October 3, 2018
Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #74 – Who Killed Kennedy by James Stevens and David Bishop
NB: Since its original release, Who Killed Kennedy has been somewhat rewritten by David Bishop as he wasn’t happy with the ending. It’s kindly available for free here, along with generous author’s notes. I got the original book before I knew all that, however, so I might as well read that first. I’ll give the new version a look at some point.
Who Killed KennedyBy James Stevens and David Bishop
I suspect most Doctor Who fans have a love-hate thing with continuity. It’s nice to be reminded of something from long ago, and done well it can put the present into context. (There’s a lot to be said for emotional continuity in particular, since life revolves around that.) But you can have too much of a nice thing, and this one quickly becomes just a meaningless pat on the back. Hey look, it’s that thing from Doctor Who! Both you and I recognise it! Aren’t we experts! Well, sure, but you’re here to make something new, not win a quiz. That’s the feeling I often get from reference-fests, the absolute bottom rung of fiction based on a famous property.
Who Killed Kennedy is full of continuity. It’s practically made of it. We’re talking an absolutely obsessed, all-aboard-the-continuity-train trek through Doctor Who history: the more of it you recognise, the better. But this is no lazy remembrance. 20 years before Love And Monsters, David Bishop (and uh, James Stevens – wink) gave us a view from the trenches of aliens running amok on Earth. As with that underrated episode, it’s a bloody good idea.
Doctor Who being the plot-driven monster-of-the-week show it is (or we can hope, was?), not a lot of effort was made to show real life and how it was affected by monsters and aliens. The decision to maroon the Doctor on Earth necessitated all the threats hitting us at home, which made for some compelling scary stuff; Jon Pertwee famously thought that was how you made good Doctor Who, and many agreed. The problem is that a bizarre number of invasions and disasters had to happen in quick succession. Well, you’d notice, wouldn’t you? You can’t write everything off as a gas leak or a mass hallucination. London had already endured mass panic in The War Machines, The Web Of Fear and The Invasion before we even got here, but there was a degree of safety in zooming off to other times and places afterwards, and betting the audience wasn’t keeping score. The Pertwee era changed that.
Who Killed Kennedy puts a journalist in that time – dated sensibly around when those episodes were transmitted, because who needs the UNIT Dating headache. He gradually joins the dots between these monstrous threats, the shadowy UNIT organisation and a series of agents called the Doctor. The book makes the quite valid point that while all this is (to us) clearly a struggle between good and evil, it would look like a terrifying mess to anyone else. The political climate gets steadily and understandably worse, as the government is obviously failing to repel these seemingly random attacks and various efforts at world peace have gone awry. (Because nothing says “high stakes” like “Generically-Named World Peace Conference.”) UNIT are doing their bit, but in secret, and with no qualms about rebuffing any investigations into the truth. Again this is for obvious reasons, but how would that look? Probably less like Doctor Whoand more like The X-Files. James Stevens is understandably dubious about what’s really going on.
For all my complaints about continuity for the sake of it, there’s a thrill to recognising one disaster after another, and even more so when Bishop cleverly sneaks his character into the stories themselves: Stevens is the bloke on the phone in Spearhead From Space, and even has a bit part in The Mind Of Evil! We get to revisit those events, not just by lingering on the consequences – such as the political fallout from the plague in Doctor Who And The Silurians – but by meeting the participants. Stevens interviews some characters from Inferno, meets Liz Shaw after her time with the Doctor, and most pointedly gets to know Dodo, still suffering from her breakdown in The War Machines. Who Killed Kennedy lingers on consequences in a way you just don’t expect in Doctor Who, which is a pretty unassailable excuse for reminding us about all these old episodes.
The picture it builds is the sort of thing you’d get on a conspiracy nut’s wall: random pictures and scraps of information, sprawled over a huge map and connected by string. But it makes admirable sense. You realise The War Machines and The Faceless Ones happened on the same day – so two Doctors were running about at the same time. The Seventh Doctor’s ruckus in Remembrance Of The Daleks is what led to UNIT happening in the first place. The leftover technology from The Invasion is what led to Britain making such waves in space in The Ambassadors Of Death. The peace conference in The Day Of The Daleks was even more necessary after the disasters in The Mind Of Evil, and so on. It’s compelling stuff, forcing a coincidental string of plots happening by necessity into a coherent shape. It’s difficult not to feel for Stevens as he stays firmly on the side of UNIT-mandated ignorance.
Of course as impressive as it is, there are limits to what this story can achieve. At best, Stevens will inevitably learn that UNIT meant well after all, and will probably end up keeping their secrets for them. That happens – along with him encountering the Doctor, albeit mostly via the phone. But more antagonism is needed, so we have C19: an even shadowier bunch who give UNIT a worse name, and make Stevens’ life a hell. It’s difficult to be sure where one ends and the other begins, what with UNIT’s need for secrecy, and David Bishop plays on that uncertainty for much of the book. (I must admit it’s a bit disappointing that we need to invent an even more sinister back-drop for UNIT who can then take the fall, when the impetus of the book is surely how UNIT and the Doctor looked to a real person at that time. But as above, I can see why it was done.)
Stevens tells the whole thing in first person, “unashamedly” as per the preface. It’s a satisfyingly immediate style you don’t see a lot of in Doctor Who fiction (and licensed fiction in general, I’ll bet), and it helps make the world feel more coherent and believable. All the same, Stevens is not an especially likeable or compelling guy. He gets married for a green card / to spite his girlfriend’s well-to-do father, cheerfully cheats on her, and then generally prefers his job to everything else. His personal motto is “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, which gives some indication as to the level of wit in the prose. Unashamedly nasty C19 thugs say things like “We’re going to have to take care of you – permanently”. A supportive character lamely finishes their thought with: “Good luck, Mr Stevens. You’re going to need it!” Escaping from the very same corrupt institution he’s been trying to track down, The Glasshouse, Stevens returns with a host of TV cameras and is somehow surprised that the place is now completely empty – having apparently never seen a spy movie before. And shortly before the love of his life is murdered, she poignantly tells him she has some important news, but she’ll tell him later; can it be any surprise at all that she’s a) pregnant and b) dead before she can tell him? It’s a pulpy, noiry read with Stevens standing in for any number of down-on-their-luck, don’t-give-a-damn PIs with a crummy office, who ultimately you like (if at all) in spite of themselves. There are few recurring characters and there isn’t much room for character development, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the book is a bit blunt in its approach to people.
As to the plot, because there must ultimately be one besides a long trip down Continuity Lane, of course it has something to do with the assassination of Kennedy. The book opens with a highly evocative “What If?” about Kennedy having survived his day in Dallas, and the subsequent rise in world tensions leading to Armageddon. Who Killed Kennedy eventually boils away to whether or not Stevens believes Kennedy should die to preserve history. But I don’t think enough work goes into this portion of the story, and Bishop seemed to agree, as it’s the main reason for re-jigging it later. Like the later Red Dwarf episode, Tikka To Ride, this story hinges on Kennedy’s death being a necessary part of human history, but the book spends so long (entertainingly) piecing together Doctor Who history that this is more or less presented as fact and left at that. Stevens, of course, knows this stuff inside and out, and even writes a book on it during these events, but we are mostly left out of the loop. It just seems conspicuous next to the rest of the story. Case in point, before he goes on his fateful voyage Stevens is so run down that he is ready to take his own life. Immediately after coming back, he goes right back to holding the revolver to his head.
Even worse is the Master’s plan to reverse all this, which is circuitous and vague even for him. The Doctor speculates that it’s intended to disrupt his own personal history – since we all know Doctor Who began the day after Kennedy was shot. But would that really affect Ian and Barbara’s decision to drop by Totters Lane, and the Doctor’s flight from Earth? (Is it a meta reference to the assassination’s effect on TV scheduling at the time?) What, otherwise, would the Master have to gain from this, unless he’s able to view another version of history and decided he likes that one better? Isn’t the whole thing more like the Monk’s MO than his? The enterprise ultimately plays out like an attempt to make James Stevens conflicted and miserable. The Master, cheerfully monologuing from afar, hasn’t seemed this petty since he tried to disrupt the Magna Carta for teh lolz. (This also doesn’t really tie up with the Master’s next TV episode, where the Doctor drops in on his supposed prison. Yes, the Master has secretly been coming and going at his leisure, but the Doctor clearly doesn’t know that yet. And his casual insistence over a phone-call that Stevens pop back in time and stop the Master – because for some reason he can’t? – is also weirdly incongruous. “Cheers, James. Also, can you get milk? Sorry I can’t do it, only I’ve got a thing.”)
It still just about holds together, especially with the evocative revelation at the very end. (Note that the title is a statement, not a question.) But despite ongoing hints about C19, the alternate-future preface andKennedy’s death affecting James’ entire life (occurring on his 18thbirthday), it still comes out of left-field. Ditto, if I’m honest, the Dodo thing. Who Killed Kennedy is so infamous for what happens to Dodo, as is The Man In The Velvet Mask, I knew about it decades before reading it and knowing nothing else about the book. Oh, you thought Dodo getting a non-lethal space-STD was bad? Well, we’re going for broke this time. She gets murdered, incidentally while pregnant. And that’s just the bit everybody remembers. Following The War Machines, Dodo had an even bigger breakdown and wound up with massive memory loss – she doesn’t remember the Doctor and her travels seem like dreams. She didn’t have anywhere to live and wound up in a cruel mental “hospital” run by the Master. She was almost raped by an orderly, inadvertently killed him, then wound up destitute. Her only ray of hope was a chance meeting with James Stevens, whom she feels she can help with information, but it’s unclear how much of that is the Master’s doolally plan. Either way she gets the most ignominious death of a Doctor Who companion, with the possible exception of Bret Vyon, but even that gave future writers something to work with.
Hey, I get it. Nobody liked Dodo. The character as originally written gave us nothing to invest in, and demonstrably little for Jackie Lane to work with. But it’s just plain poor taste to go after a character like that, especially in subsequent books. Making life worse for someone you know the audience will side against is a much too easy goal, and it’s the sort of fannish impulse Who Killed Kennedyotherwise (arguably) rises above. There’s also an uncomfortably sexist air about gleefully doing all this to a young woman. Yes, it raises the stakes, but the book seems more lurid for going down that route.
So I don’t love all the choices it makes. There are plenty of moments that work really well, like the gradual descent of a random UNIT officer into mental distress and insanity; another little real world consequence you wouldn’t consider when watching, say, Terror Of The Autons. I’d say the subversive stuff that works about Who Killed Kennedy largely outweighs the nastily obvious talking point, and the somewhat tacked-on plot. It’s a strange and interesting companion piece to Doctor Who’s time on Earth, and the sort of experiment licensed fiction could do with more of.
7/10
Who Killed KennedyBy James Stevens and David BishopI suspect most Doctor Who fans have a love-hate thing with continuity. It’s nice to be reminded of something from long ago, and done well it can put the present into context. (There’s a lot to be said for emotional continuity in particular, since life revolves around that.) But you can have too much of a nice thing, and this one quickly becomes just a meaningless pat on the back. Hey look, it’s that thing from Doctor Who! Both you and I recognise it! Aren’t we experts! Well, sure, but you’re here to make something new, not win a quiz. That’s the feeling I often get from reference-fests, the absolute bottom rung of fiction based on a famous property.
Who Killed Kennedy is full of continuity. It’s practically made of it. We’re talking an absolutely obsessed, all-aboard-the-continuity-train trek through Doctor Who history: the more of it you recognise, the better. But this is no lazy remembrance. 20 years before Love And Monsters, David Bishop (and uh, James Stevens – wink) gave us a view from the trenches of aliens running amok on Earth. As with that underrated episode, it’s a bloody good idea.
Doctor Who being the plot-driven monster-of-the-week show it is (or we can hope, was?), not a lot of effort was made to show real life and how it was affected by monsters and aliens. The decision to maroon the Doctor on Earth necessitated all the threats hitting us at home, which made for some compelling scary stuff; Jon Pertwee famously thought that was how you made good Doctor Who, and many agreed. The problem is that a bizarre number of invasions and disasters had to happen in quick succession. Well, you’d notice, wouldn’t you? You can’t write everything off as a gas leak or a mass hallucination. London had already endured mass panic in The War Machines, The Web Of Fear and The Invasion before we even got here, but there was a degree of safety in zooming off to other times and places afterwards, and betting the audience wasn’t keeping score. The Pertwee era changed that.
Who Killed Kennedy puts a journalist in that time – dated sensibly around when those episodes were transmitted, because who needs the UNIT Dating headache. He gradually joins the dots between these monstrous threats, the shadowy UNIT organisation and a series of agents called the Doctor. The book makes the quite valid point that while all this is (to us) clearly a struggle between good and evil, it would look like a terrifying mess to anyone else. The political climate gets steadily and understandably worse, as the government is obviously failing to repel these seemingly random attacks and various efforts at world peace have gone awry. (Because nothing says “high stakes” like “Generically-Named World Peace Conference.”) UNIT are doing their bit, but in secret, and with no qualms about rebuffing any investigations into the truth. Again this is for obvious reasons, but how would that look? Probably less like Doctor Whoand more like The X-Files. James Stevens is understandably dubious about what’s really going on.
For all my complaints about continuity for the sake of it, there’s a thrill to recognising one disaster after another, and even more so when Bishop cleverly sneaks his character into the stories themselves: Stevens is the bloke on the phone in Spearhead From Space, and even has a bit part in The Mind Of Evil! We get to revisit those events, not just by lingering on the consequences – such as the political fallout from the plague in Doctor Who And The Silurians – but by meeting the participants. Stevens interviews some characters from Inferno, meets Liz Shaw after her time with the Doctor, and most pointedly gets to know Dodo, still suffering from her breakdown in The War Machines. Who Killed Kennedy lingers on consequences in a way you just don’t expect in Doctor Who, which is a pretty unassailable excuse for reminding us about all these old episodes.
The picture it builds is the sort of thing you’d get on a conspiracy nut’s wall: random pictures and scraps of information, sprawled over a huge map and connected by string. But it makes admirable sense. You realise The War Machines and The Faceless Ones happened on the same day – so two Doctors were running about at the same time. The Seventh Doctor’s ruckus in Remembrance Of The Daleks is what led to UNIT happening in the first place. The leftover technology from The Invasion is what led to Britain making such waves in space in The Ambassadors Of Death. The peace conference in The Day Of The Daleks was even more necessary after the disasters in The Mind Of Evil, and so on. It’s compelling stuff, forcing a coincidental string of plots happening by necessity into a coherent shape. It’s difficult not to feel for Stevens as he stays firmly on the side of UNIT-mandated ignorance.
Of course as impressive as it is, there are limits to what this story can achieve. At best, Stevens will inevitably learn that UNIT meant well after all, and will probably end up keeping their secrets for them. That happens – along with him encountering the Doctor, albeit mostly via the phone. But more antagonism is needed, so we have C19: an even shadowier bunch who give UNIT a worse name, and make Stevens’ life a hell. It’s difficult to be sure where one ends and the other begins, what with UNIT’s need for secrecy, and David Bishop plays on that uncertainty for much of the book. (I must admit it’s a bit disappointing that we need to invent an even more sinister back-drop for UNIT who can then take the fall, when the impetus of the book is surely how UNIT and the Doctor looked to a real person at that time. But as above, I can see why it was done.)
Stevens tells the whole thing in first person, “unashamedly” as per the preface. It’s a satisfyingly immediate style you don’t see a lot of in Doctor Who fiction (and licensed fiction in general, I’ll bet), and it helps make the world feel more coherent and believable. All the same, Stevens is not an especially likeable or compelling guy. He gets married for a green card / to spite his girlfriend’s well-to-do father, cheerfully cheats on her, and then generally prefers his job to everything else. His personal motto is “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, which gives some indication as to the level of wit in the prose. Unashamedly nasty C19 thugs say things like “We’re going to have to take care of you – permanently”. A supportive character lamely finishes their thought with: “Good luck, Mr Stevens. You’re going to need it!” Escaping from the very same corrupt institution he’s been trying to track down, The Glasshouse, Stevens returns with a host of TV cameras and is somehow surprised that the place is now completely empty – having apparently never seen a spy movie before. And shortly before the love of his life is murdered, she poignantly tells him she has some important news, but she’ll tell him later; can it be any surprise at all that she’s a) pregnant and b) dead before she can tell him? It’s a pulpy, noiry read with Stevens standing in for any number of down-on-their-luck, don’t-give-a-damn PIs with a crummy office, who ultimately you like (if at all) in spite of themselves. There are few recurring characters and there isn’t much room for character development, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the book is a bit blunt in its approach to people.
As to the plot, because there must ultimately be one besides a long trip down Continuity Lane, of course it has something to do with the assassination of Kennedy. The book opens with a highly evocative “What If?” about Kennedy having survived his day in Dallas, and the subsequent rise in world tensions leading to Armageddon. Who Killed Kennedy eventually boils away to whether or not Stevens believes Kennedy should die to preserve history. But I don’t think enough work goes into this portion of the story, and Bishop seemed to agree, as it’s the main reason for re-jigging it later. Like the later Red Dwarf episode, Tikka To Ride, this story hinges on Kennedy’s death being a necessary part of human history, but the book spends so long (entertainingly) piecing together Doctor Who history that this is more or less presented as fact and left at that. Stevens, of course, knows this stuff inside and out, and even writes a book on it during these events, but we are mostly left out of the loop. It just seems conspicuous next to the rest of the story. Case in point, before he goes on his fateful voyage Stevens is so run down that he is ready to take his own life. Immediately after coming back, he goes right back to holding the revolver to his head.
Even worse is the Master’s plan to reverse all this, which is circuitous and vague even for him. The Doctor speculates that it’s intended to disrupt his own personal history – since we all know Doctor Who began the day after Kennedy was shot. But would that really affect Ian and Barbara’s decision to drop by Totters Lane, and the Doctor’s flight from Earth? (Is it a meta reference to the assassination’s effect on TV scheduling at the time?) What, otherwise, would the Master have to gain from this, unless he’s able to view another version of history and decided he likes that one better? Isn’t the whole thing more like the Monk’s MO than his? The enterprise ultimately plays out like an attempt to make James Stevens conflicted and miserable. The Master, cheerfully monologuing from afar, hasn’t seemed this petty since he tried to disrupt the Magna Carta for teh lolz. (This also doesn’t really tie up with the Master’s next TV episode, where the Doctor drops in on his supposed prison. Yes, the Master has secretly been coming and going at his leisure, but the Doctor clearly doesn’t know that yet. And his casual insistence over a phone-call that Stevens pop back in time and stop the Master – because for some reason he can’t? – is also weirdly incongruous. “Cheers, James. Also, can you get milk? Sorry I can’t do it, only I’ve got a thing.”)
It still just about holds together, especially with the evocative revelation at the very end. (Note that the title is a statement, not a question.) But despite ongoing hints about C19, the alternate-future preface andKennedy’s death affecting James’ entire life (occurring on his 18thbirthday), it still comes out of left-field. Ditto, if I’m honest, the Dodo thing. Who Killed Kennedy is so infamous for what happens to Dodo, as is The Man In The Velvet Mask, I knew about it decades before reading it and knowing nothing else about the book. Oh, you thought Dodo getting a non-lethal space-STD was bad? Well, we’re going for broke this time. She gets murdered, incidentally while pregnant. And that’s just the bit everybody remembers. Following The War Machines, Dodo had an even bigger breakdown and wound up with massive memory loss – she doesn’t remember the Doctor and her travels seem like dreams. She didn’t have anywhere to live and wound up in a cruel mental “hospital” run by the Master. She was almost raped by an orderly, inadvertently killed him, then wound up destitute. Her only ray of hope was a chance meeting with James Stevens, whom she feels she can help with information, but it’s unclear how much of that is the Master’s doolally plan. Either way she gets the most ignominious death of a Doctor Who companion, with the possible exception of Bret Vyon, but even that gave future writers something to work with.
Hey, I get it. Nobody liked Dodo. The character as originally written gave us nothing to invest in, and demonstrably little for Jackie Lane to work with. But it’s just plain poor taste to go after a character like that, especially in subsequent books. Making life worse for someone you know the audience will side against is a much too easy goal, and it’s the sort of fannish impulse Who Killed Kennedyotherwise (arguably) rises above. There’s also an uncomfortably sexist air about gleefully doing all this to a young woman. Yes, it raises the stakes, but the book seems more lurid for going down that route.
So I don’t love all the choices it makes. There are plenty of moments that work really well, like the gradual descent of a random UNIT officer into mental distress and insanity; another little real world consequence you wouldn’t consider when watching, say, Terror Of The Autons. I’d say the subversive stuff that works about Who Killed Kennedy largely outweighs the nastily obvious talking point, and the somewhat tacked-on plot. It’s a strange and interesting companion piece to Doctor Who’s time on Earth, and the sort of experiment licensed fiction could do with more of.
7/10
October 2, 2018
Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #73 – The Eye Of The Giant by Christopher Bulis
Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures#21The Eye Of The GiantBy Christopher Bulis
I’ll say this for Christopher Bulis: he’s not afraid to try different things. From the horse’s mouth, in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, he liked to write for different Doctors in case Virgin’s editors got “bored” with him. Naturally he became a recurring nuisance for the Missing Adventures, and he’s been largely successful, not just at tackling different eras of the show but at making an interesting go of each book.
I loved the pace and the escalation of Shadowmind, and the moral oddness of its “monsters”. I really enjoyed the colour and the cattiness of State Of Change. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an exception, for me at least, in that it tried to make something new by just putting different clichés next to each other, but it was at least a different kind of First Doctor story. The Eye Of The Giant is the first Bulis book to really focus on the era details, producing something that feels not only like it could have come from Season Seven, but is a necessary piece of the series that somehow went missing. (A missing... something or other.) It is also, for me at least, Bulis back on form.
But maybe not right away. After a largely forgettable prologue that handles a space battle about as generically as possible, we plunge into a 1930s adventure that feels so like King Kongthat Bulis must reference it and make the whole expedition a response to it. A group of filmmakers (surprisingly enough!) arrive on a mysterious island full of giant monsters. What are the odds? The somewhat shaky start continues as he introduces far too many characters in too short a time – including a movie producer, his saintly daughter, his fading actress / second wife, plus sundry crewmen and film personnel. Things get more interesting as the story ping-pongs back to Pertwee-era UNIT, where the Doctor finds a lump of extremely radioactive rock that, in conjunction with his old Time Space Visualiser, forms a gateway into the past. If you think the Doctor using a dangerous method to travel in space and time (since his TARDIS isn’t working) sounds a lot like Inferno, then you and Liz would get along fine: “Doctor, you nearly got stranded in that parallel universe the console took you to, remember?” Well gee, I think he might! The ultra-subtle writing includes, need you ask, a description of the Doctor’s “shock of white hair”.
Sure enough, the Doctor and Liz end up in the ’30s. And it’s worth pointing out what a pleasure it is to have these two characters together. Liz was gone too soon – fortunately Caroline John seemed not to bear a grudge – and her brand of scientific rapport with the Doctor isn’t something we get a lot of. (Of course, that’s why she went away.) There are many moments in this where the two of them discuss a problem on almost equal terms. When it comes to the action and derring-do that make up much of the Doctor’s life, Liz is playful, and almost scornful of it in a way no other companion would be: “Isn’t escaping the sort of Boy’s Own thing you do in circumstances like this?” Season Seven didn’t keep the Doctor and his new friend together all that much, having him in a coma, negotiating with Silurians underground, going into space or getting lost in a parallel universe. An argument could be, and probably was made that two such similar intellects cancel each other out. So it’s a rare treat to have the two of them mucking in, investigating and surviving dangers in their slightly more thoughtful Doctor-and-Liz way.
Their involvement isn’t quite as much barging into the middle of things as usual, and they become more like supporting characters in an Arthur Conan Doyle adventure novel. (Which is also to say that the ’30s characters, although entertainingly written, are staunchly archetypal.) I loved The Lost World, so the mysterious trek around Salutua, encountering various giant creatures and odd aliens, added up to a fun read for me. The Doctor and Liz inevitably fall out of favour with their new friends, but oddly not when they announce they’re from the future. (A weird move from the Doctor, but then he’s quite big on being honest.) There are ulterior motives for the film crew’s mission, which have the slight feeling of being improvised in places, and soon the Doctor and Liz are locked up. But their captors feel terrible and, uh, let them out again?
The Eye Of The Giant has an interesting take on villainy: for the most part, there isn’t any. The giant animals and insects are just going about their business; when a few of them are inevitably killed for sport or out of panic, I couldn’t help rooting for the creatures. What appears to be the “villain”, who has his own reasons for wanting a closer look at the island, has basically positive reasons for unlocking an alien power. (It’s also bitterness for his own past mistakes, so yeah, he’ll probably turn out to be a megalomaniac eventually.) When somebody else puts it to use, it’s purely for selfish reasons due to their litany of hang-ups and neuroses, but the world they could create with these powers – more or less as a side effect of their ego and what the alien wanted in the first place – would be mostly peaceful, even quite advanced. Said character is petty and especially bitter towards the film producer’s daughter for being too nice, and not noticeably hating her back. In one eyebrow-raising moment, she thinks “just once like to see her break down and admit what she felt about being crippled.” But she’s not a stereotypically evil person, just a broken and bitter one. Which is much more interesting.
And then we have the aliens. A long ago feud over a theft has left the titular giant waiting underground; weird, jelly-like aliens are trying to kill him. His stolen cargo is what caused the gigantic creatures on the island… and none of that is a plan to destroy the Earth, which is a refreshing change. Brokk, the giant, is an opportunist: he’ll destroy those who get in his way, but he’d sooner just get out of here. The Semquess have every right to want their stuff back. Humanity is just in the middle. It feels weirdly incidental, which is a different sort of scale for Doctor Who.
And yet, Bulis still manages to rope the whole world into trouble, simply by sending the Doctor and Liz back to take part in the story. Ghostly hallucinations keep appearing in the present, of buildings and people that shouldn’t exist. It’s pretty obvious that time travel is the cause of this, but this is a very creative use of that plot device, making sport of it in a way that Doctor Who didn’t often dare. What should be a barmy contrivance – I mean, the Time Space Visualiser?! – ends up being vital. And it gives Bulis plenty of excuses to keep his story going: just when you think it’s a simple case of trying to survive the island and solve the mystery, it turns out the island is due to explode any minute, and the Brigadier must warn the Doctor somehow! Then when they sort it all out and get back home, time has changed, and they must avoid being erased from existence! And then when they must go back and put things back how they should be, even that doesn’t seem to work, and then…
It’s probably worth mentioning the book is nearly 320 pages long. And you can see how. But in a funny way, the plot’s sprawling nature – not limited to pretty much forgetting about the giant insects halfway through – only makes it feel more like Season Seven. The Silurians, The Ambassadors Of Death and especially Inferno had ideas that tallied with what they were about, but still seemed suspiciously added-in-later. (Looking at you, Primords. And well, that whole parallel universe thing, really.) By the time The Eye Of The Giant got to its third climax, I could spot boredom on the horizon, but Bulis keeps things rollicking sufficiently that I didn’t mind.
My favourite thing about it is, bizarrely enough, the continuity: this feels not so much like an awkward repeat of Inferno, featuring another disappearing Doctor and parallel Earth, but an answer to it. (Ambassadors sort of does that for Silurians, now that you mention it.) The Brigadier isn’t having any of that again, so it’s (improbably!) him operating the gateway just to make sure they’re all right, with the help of Osgood, best known for another Doctor Who story where his entire mission is to prevent a thing from blowing up. The Brigadier happily sends Yates through to get the Doctor and Liz back, and when they refuse because they have work to do, he’s ready to wait and send more help. He has faith in the Doctor, and at the end, even insists he gets the TARDIS working so he has a less dangerous method of getting about! With the stealthy introduction of Sergeant Yates – not, to my surprise, promoted to Captain at any point, unless I missed it? – the whole thing feels like a transition from the grim military tone of Season Seven to the UNIT Family of Season Eight. There’s a jolly feeling of “Here we go again”, and everyone knowing how to work with one another, and cope with all this danger and weirdness.
You’re definitely in jolly romp territory with this one. It’s slight. But The Eye Of The Giant manages a few interesting character moments anyway, like Nancy’s inherent lack of empathy, and the Doctor’s surprisingly matter-of-fact view that if some people aren’t meant to survive these events, it may be up to him to ensure that’s how it goes. (Fortunately he doesn’t have to test his theory.) The for-the-most-part lack of obvious villainy is a delight, and even though it sometimes feels like it’s hitting the Reset button, I enjoyed the story’s nearly bottomless reserve of jeopardy. Bulis gets the most out of his Pertwee one-shot, and you’re likely to have a good time.
7/10
October 1, 2018
Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #72 – Death And Diplomacy by Dave Stone
Doctor Who: The New Adventures#49Death And DiplomacyBy Dave Stone
Death And Diplomacy. At last.
This is sort of a big deal for me: possibly my first ever Doctor Who novel. It looks well loved, but sadly it isn’t; I just have vague memories of looking at it and wondering who those people were on the cover. (I sure as hell knew who they weren’t.) I remember almost nothing about the prose or how far I got, other than simply not recognising it as Doctor Who and thus losing interest. It seemed “adult” in some unsavoury ways. (Which of course it’s supposed to be, but young Doctor Who fans are still going to pick it up, aren’t they?) As to the book’s rough state, I can only assume it has gone off.
I wasn’t the only fragile young fanboy who felt squicked out by the New Adventures, although I doubt many others picked the 49th in the series to start off, and a Dave Stone at that. Any road, it was a bewildering first impression that put me off them almost for good. I was young and I was wrong. I like a lot of relatively weird books now that I wouldn’t have countenanced back then, including Dave Stone’s marmite debut. (And, y’know, lots of stuff that isn’t Doctor Who.) Finally, Death And Diplomacy has a fighting chance. So what the hell is it?
In young me’s defence, it’s weird. The book opens with a wordy author’s note about the nature of trilogies, then a series of quotes including something in untranslated Italian, a paradox loop and a Woody Allen sex joke. After a complicated introduction to a galactic stand-off involving three alien races and some gigantic god monsters, we catch up with Bernice – naked in a blob of alien cow dung on an unknown world. (Actually, I remember that bit...) Then Chris and Roz show up, also nude but on a different planet. The Doctor is alone in the TARDIS – clothes in tact, thank the maker – utterly puzzled and with an invitation to a galactic peace conference. It’s all suitably irreverent.
The characters are as much in the dark as we are, which is quite handy for any befuddled readers. But before long, Death And Diplomacy settles down into something quite easy to follow. (This may be why it tries so hard to make a weird first impression, what with it following the infamous Sky Pirates!) The gist is as follows: the Doctor is at the peace conference thanks to a mysterious invite. (If you’re about say “Hang on, didn’t we just do that in The Empire Of Glass?”, Dave Stone has it covered. Got to wonder if he was a bit miffed when Andy Lane submitted his book, though.) Bernice is alone on a nearby world until she bumps into the only human for parsecs, Jason Kane. Together they make their way to the conference, rightly assuming that’s where the Doctor will be and learning much about each other en route. Roz and Chris are in virtually the same situation – without all the funny business – but they end up joining the local military, and they’re soon on the very planet the three races are fighting over. And that, plotly speaking, is it for the most part. After all these years, I anticipated a bit more outrage. A headache, at least.
As is often the case with New Adventures, there’s a certain variety that comes with having to chop between different settings. Dave Stone balances it better than some: by all means jump between places and people, but at least keep the chapters focusing on one thing at a time! It’s jauntily paced, and there’s a lot of fun in putting the Doctor in the role of a mediator (which now that you mention it, he didn’t actually do in The Empire Of Glass), particularly when one of the leaders tries to spy on him using tiny insect cameras and finds the Time Lord staring through one right at him, before arriving at his door with a handful of broken cameras and an invitation to talk. The three leaders are somewhat archetypal – a schemer, a no-nonsense warrior woman, a muscular soldier – but they have an interesting journey as they come to recognise the worth of their subordinates, themselves and each other. There’s a recurring joke where members of each race turn out to be spies for one of the others, or double agents, and no one can remember who started where. That all helps the general theme of breaking down divisions and recognising a real problem that could unite them – like those pesky giant “gods”. The Doctor makes numerous references to no longer being the Machiavellian game-player, and he recognises someone doing just that. I’m not sure I believe he’ll change his ways, although change is obviously afoot in the New Adventures; nonetheless, I like that he simply gets on with his mission, making no bones about wanting the best possible solution, banging the leaders’ heads together if necessary.
Of course this isn’t the main event: Bernice meets Jason Kane, who in the years since Death And Diplomacy has become an important and frequent footnote in Bernice’s story. (Not to mention, in Big Finish, a substitute for the Doctor in a few book adaptations.) No amount of spoiler-avoidance can save me knowing he won’t be here forever, so I was a bit dubious about the character. And… that hasn’t entirely gone away.
Jason is snarky, funny, easily irritated and as prolific an alien debaucher as Captain Kirk. (Just kidding: Captain Kirk’s reputation was significantly blown out of proportion.) In the time honoured rom-com tradition, he and Bernice mostly get on each other’s nerves, until a significant moment when they share their family tragedies. Rom-coms are a pretty good template for the speed of romance in this. One book doesn’t seem like a long time to me, but love stories generally have to get on with it as fast possible; as I previously rationalised about Love And War, Ace fell for Jan mostly because she lives her life at TARDIS speeds, and any stability or contact must be grabbed as quickly as possible. Bernice’s relationship with the Doctor had a more mature starting point than Ace’s, she’s always seen him a little more clearly. She hasn’t needed him around in order to grow as a person, or not as much as Ace did, so it’s only natural she’d think about other things she could do with her life, and other people she could spend it with. She’s enough of a veteran to begrudge almost the whole thing anyway, right up to the wedding proposal. Which, okay, that is bloody quick, isn’t it?
They have a degree of chemistry, quite literally as Stone gets into probably the most detailed sex scenes in the New Adventures (so far), and some of my uncertainty is just the damn impossible to shift knowledge of what’s to come. Plus, the crucial moment when Bernice and Jason acknowledge their feelings is the work of a third party – a comedy villain, sick of observing the two of them clumsily building bridges and so espousing the obvious to shut them up. I’m not a fan of characterisation being parroted back at the characters, and even though this is pretty funny, it’s standing in for such a crucial moment that it felt a little like cheating.
Stone is a good author for Bernice – referred to throughout as Benny, even when using her middle name, which just looks wrong – being always on the lookout for a funny bit of dialogue. Bernice taketh no nonsense, or prisoners here: “A twinge of conscience had her wondering uneasily if the driver would freeze to death despite his fur, but that hadn’t stopped her from cutting down the leather jacket and trews to roughly her size, with the serrated knife that the driver had held to her throat.” And obviously the banter with Jason is combative and fun: “‘Renaissance man, me. You may kiss my ring.’ He held out a sardonic hand. ‘And you can kiss mine, sunshine,’ said Benny. ‘I see the spirit of the music halls is not yet dead,’ said Jason.” There’s a charming sense of panic about Bernice in this, as she realises she really-probably-definitely-maybe is actually going to commit to somebody. I’m excited to read about the big day in Happy Endings – like I have a choice – and for where Bernice will go after this. Which I know will not include all the remaining Doctor Who New Adventures. (Boo! A pox on thee!)
As for Roz and Chris, at one point it’s noted that they have been “simply discarded at random and forgotten about”, and… yup. It’s not their novel – not many of them are. Stone still does his best to make it count, facing Roz with the slavery of the Czhanos race and using it to highlight her own feelings of racial superiority. Chris, as usual, is more of an adorable extra. “‘I’m not sure I like this, Roz,’ he said as she arrived. ‘I keep thinking the trees are going to grow friendly cartoon faces.’ ‘I’d have thought you’d be in your element,’ said Roz. ‘Maybe if we hang on long enough we can find some happy lovely fluffy bunnies for you to be friends with.’” There’s an amusing revelation when a species of cuddly little aliens turn out to be megalomaniacs, and their cartoonish world is actually a façade, but I seem to be waiting in vain for a similar kind of reversal to occur with Chris.
Chris is as Chris does, I suppose, and Dave Stone is similarly guilt-free about making this book fun wherever possible. He indulges in lots of silly asides (although not quite with the determination of Sky Pirates!, which had a fully-formed silliness that set it apart from most New Adventures), happily tossing in references to Alien, Blazing Saddles and… er, Pinky And The Brain. (Just kidding, I love Pinky And The Brain.) The ridiculous villains are a good excuse for all that, though they come into it pretty late, and they’re perhaps a little too silly for some of the ideas he throws into the mix – like their brutal method for controlling people, and the fact that they’ve orchestrated unimaginable conflict for somewhat petty reasons. The book isn’t too concerned with anything, what with its measured pace, and the odd preoccupation the text has with looking ahead; it’s always saying that people reflected on such-and-such actions “later on”, thus tacitly reminding us that they will survive to do so. Given Dave Stone’s very deliberate writing style – owing lots to Pratchett, Adams and no doubt some less obvious sources – the book isn’t as polished as it could be, with a number of typos and missing words piling up towards the end. (When New Adventures have that problem, it’s usually at the back end of the book.) It’s still very funny, with only the occasional comedic swing and a miss, like a reference to “porking away like a paraplegic butcher”. (Hey, you knew you were getting marmite.) For good measure, the very last line is a hilarious dig at Love And War that’s almost worth the whole courtship.
For all its wacky touches, Death And Diplomacy is more slight than its predecessor, in what is certainly a very loose trilogy if it is one at all. Misunderstandings form an important part of the story, if you want to try to find some Jane Austen-ness besides the title. Otherwise it operates in the loose clothes of a standard Doctor Who adventure, with a peace conference getting hijacked and a race (or three) needing Doctorly liberation. With its overtones of change – for the way the Doctor goes about his business, and obviously Bernice’s future – it’s novel to look at a familiar kind of story and draw the focus in new ways. These books should evolve, especially approaching the 50 mark. Death And Diplomacy does that, though it never strays too far from just being a bit of a laugh.
7/10
September 30, 2018
Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #71 – The English Way Of Death by Gareth Roberts
Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures#20The English Way Of DeathBy Gareth Roberts
Gareth Roberts returns, and he is unlikely to leave until you agree that Season 17 was actually pretty good. And that you’re sorry for what you said about The Creature From The Pit.
The English Way Of Death is his second Missing Adventure with the Fourth Doctor and Romana, the era when Douglas Adams was on staff and a trip to Paris scored the show’s highest ratings yet. It was all good fun, apart from some unfortunate production values and maybe a little too much Adamsian snark – not to mention not getting the finale they wanted, and having to make The Horns Of Nimon instead. As with his last MA, The English Way Of Deathreminds you how indomitable this Doctor / companion combo was, as well as highlighting Roberts’ knack for the era and comic writing in general. No wonder Big Finish adapted these books.
I heard both plays before reading the books, and I thought this was the lesser of the two. It had a less action-packed plot and a general Wodehousian sameness in its characters. There is also a little too much crossover between the stories, as both feature a disembodied villain-of-the-week with a silly sci-fi name. (This time it’s Zodaal-the-zombie-creating-gas-of-doom, rather than Xais-the-super-power-granting-death-mask.) But perhaps I’d look down on The Romance Of Crime for that if I’d heard them the other way around.
Anyway, whereas The Romance Of Crime begs to be performed, The English Way Of Death is maybe better off in print. It’s absolutely entrenched in P.G. Wodehouse (and so, by proxy, Douglas Adams), being set in 1930s England and featuring a host of high society caricatures. They seem to benefit from having their pompous and silly opinions wittering on in prose, as opposed to just being a bunch of pompous and silly (and so pretty two dimensional) characters in a play.
The prose is an absolute shindig from start to finish. Roberts lives for characters that find each other irritating, which can simply make you hate them all; Tragedy Day and Zamper could have detonated their casts for all I cared, and The Romance Of Crime forgot to include anybody sympathetic. But the irritation in English Way Of Death is primarily… well, English. And it’s delightful. We open on a misanthropic biscuit magnate (!) being forced to share a train journey with an eccentric buffoon, and this is full of witty snipes about the buffoon resembling a squirrel, and how the self-important Stackhouse wishes he’d taken the car to Nutchurch only it had “chosen the same moment as him to break down”. Buckets of personality are poured into the (obviously doomed) Stackhouse, who can’t help following the bizarre Percival Closed across a beach, leading him to a spooky beach-hut. The TARDIS-ey incongruity of said hut is left snazzily unsaid, and it leads to an arresting shock, as a weird green haze takes over Stackhouse’s body. Closed, for reasons of plot, puts a lot of effort into seeming like a quaint Englishman, allowing Roberts to go nuts. (We can obviously thank Ford Prefect for the name.)
Later we have a socially inept novelist/widow trying to ensnare a tedious Colonel – both of whom want to win the other over while neither is remotely impressed by the match. Felicia Chater is a wonderfully pathetic creature, certain she can steer the conversation back to herself by leaving open her Tibetan exercise book, and wearily observing that “it was … so much more convenient to be married. It means there is always somebody in the house for one to complain to.” (I also loved the line “After a year spent in mourning – an unutterable bore but form was form…”) The Colonel’s character pivots on his being an old bore, but a moment where he falls instantly for Romana made me hoot: “The Colonel knew he could never forget her. His heart had melted into a sticky, pumping ball of goo. As he watched her slender, boyish, betrousered figure heading off along the pavement the securities of his character, 58 years in the making, crumbled.”
Up against all the whimsical flippancy is the now possessed Stackhouse, who along with his zombified underlings shows a crassly hilarious disregard for passing as human. I mean he is not trying at all. They shamble, they rot, they clamour for brains; when a dangerous new contact asks if he’d like a drink, he says “I have no need of liquid sustenance.” The contrast between high society and B-movie is amusing – getting in there well before Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which I can’t countenance touching with a bargepole until I’ve actually read Austen – but it wears thin before very long. (As does, I presume, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.)
Neatly joining the two very different worlds we have the Season 17 crew, whom we know Gareth Roberts can write with aplomb. Their easy, sniping relationship is there in spades. Romana on the Doctor’s overdue library books: “Oh yes, I’m sure there’ll be a great clamour for Febrile Diseases and Swine Judging For Beginners.” And on their length of stay in the one place the Black Guardian is most likely to look for them: “‘After all, we’re only going to be staying a few hours, aren’t we, Doctor?’ The Doctor waved his hand effusively. ‘Oh, minutes.’” When looking for one another, both assume the other might have fallen down a hole, and after Romana makes a fatal error of judgement regarding Zodaal’s trustworthiness, the Doctor makes frequent light of her momentary uselessness. There’s probably an argument to be made that theycre too combative here, but this might depend on which exact bit of the era you want captured: Tom and Lalla in love or Tom and Lalla wanting to push each other off a cliff.
Both are written sublimely by themselves. The Doctor has that inimitable Tom Baker ability to make zero concessions for mere mortals, casually namedropping famous historical chums and scientific jargon and suddenly asking random strangers questions of deadly importance. (Also spouting delightful rubbish: “‘Mrs Felicia Chater. Widowed, in brackets.’ The Doctor sprang from his chair. ‘How interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in brackets.’”) Romana strides around having virtually no need of the Doctor – except for those moments where a vital judgement call is needed and, I suppose, the Doctor just has more experience. She rebuffs any romantic interest from the Colonel and has a low tolerance for just the sort of people she’s likely to meet in this book: “Deciding that anybody that couldn’t manage to open their front door was unlikely to pose an intergalactic threat, Romana shrugged and advanced.” But even K9 seems to have his sass on this week, for instance throwing back the Doctor’s embarrassed accusation of going for unauthorised walkies with “Charge of wandering refuted.” (Asking quite a lot of unnecessary questions later, he gets a deserved “Oh, shut up, K9” from the Doctor.)
There’s a lot of comedic potential and Roberts gets the most out of it, but you still need a plot to go with it. He provides one, arguable similarity to The Romance Of Crime notwithstanding, but there isn’t much to it. Stackhouse/Zodaal wants to destroy the world and thus enable his escape. The Doctor and Romana, whilst investigating some time-travel malfeasance surrounding Percival Closed, need to put a stop to that. Zodaal murders people and works on his doom-bringing machines in the meantime, while a wild card associate, Julia Orlostro, weighs up her own schemes. There are some excellent dramatic highs (neatly fashioned in the old end-of-episode style), but there comes a point where Closed observes that he is facing “Another address, another frantic race through the streets with the Doctor at the wheel, another confrontation with the forces of evil.” And, yeah; as is often the case with fourth wall pokery, just shrugging and saying “Hey, what can ya do?” doesn’t fix any of the problems. Plot-wise The English Way Of Death runs in place from around the halfway point, and when you spend enough time with him, it’s apparent that Stackhouse/Zodaal isn’t going to win any Mr Interesting competitions. (Also his Blow Up The World Machine takes its damn time.) The kneejerk amusement of a bunch of ravenous zombies groaning through Jeeves & Wooster does eventually give way to wondering why a bunch of husks sharing the same mind are arguing with each other, and why brains are of any particular use to them. In the end, it’s all a bit candyfloss.
It’s even more of a pastiche than The Romance Of Crime, going hell for leather with one particular setting and style. The result is an often divine read, which at times made me think – yes! This is how you do a Missing Adventure! It’s just right for the era, and it’s a story well suited to a book! But The English Way Of Death isn’t exactly shy about its lack of depth, and while depth isn’t a huge prerequisite for a comedy, it helps to sustain a novel. Provided you like Wodehouse riffs, Roberts should just about keep the comedic bubble from bursting. It’s just less of a fun rush by the time you’re finished.
7/10
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