A Much Delayed Doctor Who Post

Right, so it's about time I got around to writing this. Originally, this was going to be one of my long, epic posts, but I'll spare everyone and do something a little more truncated. And, oh, spoilers.

"The Beast Below." The Doctor and Amy travel to a future ark ship, containing the remaining population of England. The ship harbors a dark secret: they've enslaved a sentient space-faring creature for their locomotion, and all the adults aboard (Amy included) are complicit in knowing the secret, but choose to forget it. (Those who don't, it's implied, are fed to the creature.) The Doctor is understandably not pleased to choose between euthanizing the creature , and Amy saves the day by letting it go free, under the assumption that it is like the Doctor--it volunteered to help humans because it "can't stand to hear a child crying without doing something about it." So she frees it, and it decides to keep traveling with the humans.

This episode still caters to a lot of Moffat's favorite ideas, especially the "child in peril" theme. The difference between this week and last week is that this time, it's explicitly part of the plot. The other important element is that they answered the "why her?" question that comes up for each companion; it was largely Amy's perspective that saved the day here. And they're not sweeping her skewed perspective under the rug; the Doctor tells her that she couldn't know the creature wouldn't just kill them all, and she really didn't--she just assumed it would behave the way the doctor did (or the way she thought the doctor did), despite years of torture. Considering that it apparently eats people, I'd say it might be thinking with its stomach rather than its heart--this way, it's got a permanent self-perpetuating food source.
Other quick thoughts: I liked the idea that everything came down to refusing to accept a binary decision--the denizens of the ship had to vote every five years to either erase the creature from their memories or destroy the ship, and it took an outside view to realize that it's never just A or B. The Smilers continue the retro-technology feel--although frankly, the moment you create robots to act as law-enforcers, you pretty much deserve the resulting dystopia. Last: it's kind of depressing that when the human race takes to the stars, we go entirely along national lines--this is Starship UK, and we're told the Scots went their own way. It fits the vibe of the episode, but it's still depressing. (Of course, if you wanted to be REALLY cynical, you'd have the human the human race go to the stars in populations that were divided in terms of corporations.)

"Victory of the Daleks." The Doctor and Amy travel back to WWII, only a few months off--Winston Churchill has, by the time they got there, authorized an inventor to build war machines that look suspiciously like Daleks. And, as it turns out, that's because they are Daleks. And they built the inventor, not the other way around. The Dalek's plan here is kind of interesting--their own technology is locking them out, because after numerous permutations, it doesn't recognize them as pure Daleks anymore. So they need to get the Doctor stating, on record, that they are Daleks, because the computer will accept the Doctor, Dalek's No 1's villain, as an authority on what is a Dalek. Anyway, the Daleks escape while the Doctor and Amy are preoccupied with convincing the inventor that he's human, and not a Dalek bomb that's going to explode and kill everyone. Because apparently, Daleks make their androids in such a manner that this is sufficient to defuse them. Amy reminds the inventor about lusting after forbidden people, and he "turns" human.

One of the essays I read recently on Dr Who said that the Daleks and the Cybermen are both used in the same manner: by comparing ourselves to machines, we define what makes humans--our emotions, our feelings, etc. To me, this episode personified that use to a T. There's some clever twists--putting the racially pure Daleks into WWII, and, by extension, Nazism; using the android/bomb to suggest a middle state between Dalek and human; and the the fact that, before their technology jerry-rigs a brand new Dalek breed, the only Daleks left were impure themselves. But strip that stuff away, and what you have is "Who-by-numbers"--it's just a variation of the same damn story we get every time the Dalek or Cybermen show up these days. They're suffering the same problem comic book villains suffer--they're overused, to the point where all the stories about them are the same.

I should add that the acting in both episodes was very good--I'm really liking the leads. And while I wasn't particularly struck by Queen Elizabeth the 10th, the portrayal of Churchill and the man who played the Dalek "inventor" were both well performed. So the season has been good--but the real test is the next episode, with the return of the Stone Angels.



*UPDATE: Almost forgot. Here's a picture of the new and improved for the up-teenth time Daleks, and a brand new reason I'll have to struggle to take them seriously:


This reminds me of something...




Later Days.

In with the New Old, Out with the Old New: A Spoileriffic Doctor Who review

"It's all true. I thought... well, I started to think that you were just, like, a madman with a box."

"Rose Tyler, Amy Pond, there's something that you'd better understand about me, and it's important, because one day, your life may depend on it--I am definitely a madman with a box." Doctor Who, Season 1, 5,or 31, depending on who you ask, Episode 1: "The Eleventh Hour."

One of the signs that I'm absolutely in the right field is that I can take something I love and spend hundreds of words explaining in great detail what is wrong with it. Let the tearing begin.

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi show starring a time-traveling (who travels in a spaceship with the exterior appearance of a police box) alien who calls himself the Doctor. The series has been going continuously in Britain for the past 47 years, with a brief 16 year break starting in 1969. The series rebooted in 2005,and has been roaring away ever since. The Doctor usually runs around space-time (with a suspicious amount of time spent in England--who knew the universe revolved around Big Ben?) with a group of humans, called Companions--or, as they tend to be since the reboot, not so platonic love interests. The Companions change regularly, as does the Doctor himself--through an alien regeneration process, he can become a new person with an entirely new physical appearance, which is handy during salary negotiations.

The current season kicked off with not only a new Doctor and a new Companion, but also a new show-runner. Stephen Moffatt is now in charge, and the new Doctor is... this guy:

Because after the last guy, everyone agreed what they really needed was someone younger.
Snark aside, Moffatt has written some of the best Dr Who to date (I can only judge since the reboot, but...). And for my money, the season 3 episode "Blink" is the best 44 minutes of not just science fiction, but drama, period, that you can find on television.

But let's get to the episode. Plot: Still fresh from the regeneration chamber, the Doctor stumbles into the house of 8 year old (or so) Amelia Pond, a little girl who's afraid of the crack in her wall. The Doctor confirms that she has a right to be afraid--it's not a crack in the wall, but a crack in reality itself, and something--Prisoner Zero--has come out of it. He darts back into the TARDIS (that's the name of time machine) and promises to be back to take her with him in five minutes. But the TARDIS has just regenerated too, so instead of 5 minutes, it's fifteen years, and little Amelia Pond has grown up into Amy Pond, the young woman who's spent her life waiting for the Doctor to come rescue her. Oh, and Prisoner Zero is still on the loose; not only that, but the wardens have finally gotten around to finding him, and are threatening to destroy the world if he's not placed into their custody in the next 20 minutes. Conflict!

...and from here on, I'm dropping the "Dr Who 101" tone, so if you haven't watched the last 50 episodes, go back and do that now. I'll wait.
Right. I think the tone of the episode can be summed up in a single scene. When the Doctor starts "pressing things" in the regenerated TARDIS, we see that the interior has changed somewhat: there's cranks, hotel bells, an oscilloscope--he even stops for a few seconds to input random letters into a typewriter. In other words, it's new, but it's old. And hence the episode. It's littered with Moffat-esque themes: there's the little girl in peril ("Forest of the Dead") who spends her life fantasizing about the Doctor ("The Girl in the Fireplace"). And there's a villain whose creepiness comes out of a disynchronicity with sound ("Silence in the Library"-- "ghosts" whose final living words are repeated over and over again vs. Prisoner Zero, who can duplicate images, but can't get the voice quite right) and with vision (stone angels in "Blick" that can't move when you're looking right at them vs. Prisoner Zero, who, in addition to the duplicating thing, is never seen in its real form except out of the corner of your eye--until it reveals itself to kill you.). Even the new theme song is a return to old, remixing the reboot theme with the more classic theme. (Actually, I'm pretty fond of the new one here.)

There's one remediation of the old that I'm kind of disappointed they dropped; when the Doctor first regenerated, his sense of taste had changed drastically, so there's a Very Funny Scene that shows him trying out various foods in Amelia's kitchen and tossing them away. (A little girl has just approached you with her fear of the supernatural. Do you a)comfort her, b) tell her there's nothing to worry about, c) go upstairs and immediately confront her fear, or d) Go into her kitchen, rifle through her fridge, and throw large amounts of food because they don't suit your taste? Oh, the things we sacrifice for a Very Funny Scene.) Anyway, I thought for a moment that they may be creating a link between this concern with food and the recently concluded two parter in which the Doctor's Nemesis, the Master, is regenerated, but since it went wrong, he was afflicted with an insatiable appetite to consume. Had the regeneration here failed in some manner? But no; just a Very Funny Scene.

let's talk about the biggest repeated element, one that doesn't originate with Moffatt so much as the rebooted series as well: the new Companion as a love interest for the Doctor. Each Companion has had to go through this. First, there was Rose, who is either the Doctor's True Love, or the Girl Who Did Absolutely Nothing to Deserve Being Made a Friggin' Saint, depending on your perspective. Then there was Martha, who served as the Doctor's rebound Companion. And then there was Donna, who had a platonic relationship, which had just a hint of "But is it REALLY platonic? Yes. But... really yes?" And now there's Amy.
Here's Amy:


She's got a Scottish accent too. Imagine me leering chauvinistically.
Actress Karen Gillian's leerability aside, the Companion/love interest angle is wearing a little thin. What I hope they emphasize in future episodes is how broken Amy is. Because I'm a sadist, one of my favorite themes of the series is the notion that the Doctor, because of his immense power, changes people, often without trying, often without meaning to. And what's a single chance encounter for him can have devastating effects on the other side of the affair. From what we've seen of Amy, she definitely may qualify. She has spent her life waiting for the Doctor to come back. Her bedroom, as we see, is practically a shrine, filled with little girl drawings and stick figures of herself with the Doctor. We know she's been to multiple psychiatrists over her imaginary friend. We know she's abandoned her own wedding to go gallivanting across the universe with him. There's something a little off there, and I'd really like to see something made of it. Through Donna, we've seen a Companion end in tragedy, but we haven't seen one broken yet.

Okay, that definitely sounds sadistic, and maybe a little misogynist. All I'm saying is that we've seen the story of the girl saved from a drab life by the mysterious space man; I'd like to see something different.

Let's see... what else? I liked both Matt Smith and Karen Gillian as actors; they both handle their parts well. We haven't really got a sense, personality-wise, that this doctor is any different from the previous one--I could pretty easily imagine this being a David Tennant episode. The amount of comic stammerinig and pratfalls is, as usual, close to being annoying, but that's been an element of the series for so long now that it's practically canonical. I liked the big Doctor speech to the alien prison-guards at the end. Essentially, it's "Earth's mine, stay away from my shit."

And as much as Moffatt's done the visual stuff before, it deserves to be acknowledged that he does it really, really well. Prisoner Zero's just the tip of the iceberg--surveillance is one of the big themes of the episode. The prison-guards are essentially giant eyeballs with crystal tentacles. And the difficulty is never really fighting Prisoner Zero--the problem is identifying which image it's taken and alerting the prison-guards that it's been found. There's a scene in the park where the Doctor quickly reviews his mental snapshot of the park, and the scale of the mental image is very impressive.

And even more interesting, it's almost entirely human surveillance equipment that saves the day. The prison-guards make their presence known by commandeering every communication device on earth--the Doctor makes it known that Prisoner Zero has been located by distributing a virus through a laptop that makes screens all over the world flash "zero." (Never mind why aliens recognize the human symbol for 0. It's a good image. Move on.) And the images of all the people Prisoner Zero can imitate are stored on a handy Iphone. It's hardly a coincidence that the TARDIS was made to look retro in an episode that emphasized the power of this moment of human communication technology.

So yes, I liked the episode. It gets most of the "Who are you?" and "You're a time traveller!" junk out of the way, and established the basic dynamics of the new leads. There's some ominous foreshadowing regarding the cracks in reality, and we've got a season arc too. Let's see where we go next.

Later Days.