Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Saturday Night’s Non-event

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

Three words.  Three simple words to undermine the credibility of the biggest cliffhanger since the show returned.

To.  Be.  Continued.

Good grief, who’s bright idea was that?  Talk about putting the c--- into continued.  What is this, an episode of Live and Kicking?  This was beyond family TV -  with whacky sound effects, it was like something from the worst cheapo kids game show.

And while this might sound like a ridiculous piece of nitpicky ranting that’s recycling an old Screenwipe joke, there’s a reason why I’m starting at the end of the episode.  Namely, that the ridiculously OTT graphic is perfect encapsulation of everything right and wrong about The Stolen Earth.

For The Stolen Earth was preposterous, overblown, loud and in your face.  This was Doctor Who as Michael Bay would make it.

Stolen Earth?  Swollen Earth more like.

Clearly the theme at the tone meeting was epic.  Everyone’s talked about a Crisis on Infinite Earths scale romp but that’d only really have been true if the final scene in Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures’ most recent series had been a cliffhanger leading into The Stolen Earth.

What this feels more like are those god-awful annoying crossover episodes that shows like CSI or ER would do with other programmes on the network.  The ones where the characters crossing over are written by people who don’t normally write for them, who perhaps don’t grasp the nuances or subtleties from the host show, and thus give us a broadbrush caricature that only superficially, if we’re lucky, resembles the characters we know.

This is an episode of Doctor Who with guest stars from established shows that Russell hasn’t written for

In fact, it feels very like that because it’s exactly what Russell T Davies has done here.  This isn’t the Doctor Who multiverse, this is an episode of Doctor Who with guest stars from established shows that Russell hasn’t written for - ever, in Sarah Jane’s case, and for more than two years in Torchwood’s.  So the Ianto, Gwen, Luke and Sarah Jane here aren’t the ones we know and love (or tolerate, in Gwen and Ianto’s case).

This determination to cram in every aspect of the last four years, no matter how desperate, stretches the episode close to breaking point.  Harriet Jones’ appearance makes so little sense dramatically as to be nonsensical, especially the idea that she’s now some superhacker able to unite Dumbledore’s Army... sorry, the companions.  It means having the Daleks attack New York while Martha’s there, as a nod to last year.  It means throwing in references to Klom and Slitheen, to Owen and Tosh's deaths, to Maria and her dad.  It means dragging Dalek Caan out for one last go-round, and throwing in dialogue tributes to just about every episode featuring the dustbins over the last 45 years.

And it means three separate reprises of the sodding ‘Yes, I know who you are’ gag about Harriet in the space of a couple of minutes.  One of which involves the Daleks.  I mean, seriously.  The Daleks - the all-conquering, most fearsome race in the universe, able to move Earth half way across the universe and subjugate its population in hours - are reduced to playing comic stooges.  Frank described it in his review as taking the joke to its logical conclusion but I see it as quite the opposite.  It’s unnecessary, and ineffective in inverse proportion to the way ‘No, don’t do that’ became chilling and tense in Midnight.

Part of this does indeed feel like Russell clearing the decks, getting rid of the last four years worth of loose ends so that the new production teams (plural, to include Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures) inherit a relatively clean slate for 2010.  But it also feels like Russell has got caught up in his own hyperbole.  Every year he sells the season climax as the new biggest threat ever.  Last year we had the Earth enslaved for a year, and a Doctor/Jack/Martha team-up.  This year it’s the whole universe at stake, with pretty much anyone who’s ever appeared on camera getting a look-in.

And eventually something has to give.  It’s not the performances - everyone’s pretty much uniformly great here, even Billie, who’s apparently recovered from her dental work last week, and Freema, who finally reminds us what she can do.  But everywhere else, there’s a sign of creakiness, almost desperation, creeping into the production.  The sets don’t look quite so polished or convincing as usual. 

More than once the CGI looks ropey - and indeed, in one obvious case is a reused shot from The Parting of the Ways.

But mainly it's because of the script, which leaves monstrous credibility gaps.  Why would Sarah abandon her son, if she knows the Daleks can trace the signals and could, potentially, work out where he is?  Why does Jack bugger off from the Hub, knowing the Daleks are on their way, with the only Dalek-killing gun in the complex?  For that matter, why doesn’t he teleport Ianto and Gwen with him - we KNOW the bracelet can teleport three people, because we saw it last year.  In Russell’s script, no less.

Occasionally, you feel Davies should have his creative licence revoked.  He's so desperate to work on the bigger picture here that the fine detailing, what made his work on Doctor Who by and large so notable  has been lost.

I don’t want to suggest that they’re being overambitious, but this is a production team that has worked bloody hard, consistently, for almost four years solid as we come into The Stolen Earth.  And maybe, after all this time, the strain has started to show.

The biggest giveaway that things are stretched just that little bit too thin this time round is the Shadow Proclamation.  For four years we’ve had the Shadow Proclamation name-checked in dramatic, universe-shattering terms.  It’s clearly something to be feared, invoked as it is against the Autons, the Sycorax et al.  But we’ve never known what it is - a treaty?  An organisation of some kind?  A planet?

When we finally get there, after four years of build-up, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be a branch of Pizza Express run staffed by Judoon and a couple of albino Scottish Widows.  And all the tension and the threat and menace that concept, that warning the name carried... gone.

After four years of build-up, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be a branch of Pizza Express run staffed by Judoon and a couple of albino Scottish Widows

 

So this is Doctor Who as BayVision.  It’s big and loud and flashy, and ultimately dumbed down and as hollow as a toilet roll tube.  And it’s sad, really, because there’s lots in there which works.  There’s lots of moments that are wonderful to watch.  The Daleks swooping down and attacking the Valiant is the new series’ version of the Trial of a Time Lord space station FX shot - a breathtaking, dizzyingly gorgeous visual that looks so far ahead of everything else in the show you can’t help but forget for a second that this is just Saturday night telly. 

Rose’s jealousy at Martha?   Spot on - it’s exactly as it should be, and it works so much better when we remember how pissed off Martha got about the constant Rose mentions.  The cliffhanger, kicking the stakes up to furious levels of danger as four main characters face death (of a sort) - wonderful.

And there’s Davros.  Julian Bleach’s performance is wonderful, evoking the clinical genius of Wisher and the deranged villainy of Molloy.  The design is consistent yet fresh, looking like an aged decrepit version of the Great Healer.  The menace Davros carries is perfectly judged - it’s not just the Doctor who sells it, it’s also Sarah Jane, which gives that connection back to the first time we met him.

But there’s little to hang it on.  The pacing’s all over the place.  Harper’s direction is good - he’s been here before, of course, so this sort of stuff he can do in his sleep, really - but there’s too much going on.  The production team are trying to pour a pint and a half in a pint glass, while jogging.  Stuff’s sloshing about everywhere, it’s seeping out the sides and being left in a messy trail behind so that, crucially, once the job’s finished there’s still a lot to be unaccounted for, and there’s far less left than we started with.

Now, I’ll be charitable and fair.  About time too, I hear the squeeing fangasmers reading say to themselves.  This is only the first part of a two-parter, or the second of a three-parter depending on how you count, and so much of it is set-up for next week.  There’s still many loose ends to be resolved, not least the matter of a certain regeneration.  It could turn out that the hour-long finale is a work of genius, and the most audacious piece of TV broadcast in decades.

Until then... don’t you think they look tired?

Don't Believe The Skype

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

Poor old Wilf. All he wants to do is join in the nearly 14 billion conversations that were made by 12 million users of Skype by the end of last year but Sylvia wouldn't let him even have a web cam as he innocently quips, 'she said they're naughty.' I suppose in a way they are but if it means Harriet Jones can pull together all the conversations that matter in the world then, bugger it, Wilf should have a bit of naughty even if it is to allow Rose an 'I just called to say I love you' moment

The Stolen Earth is another chapter in Russell T Davies' ongoing fascination with forms of mass communication.  Here, he's utterly beguiled by sensory communication using telephony, text messaging, video conferencing and social networking and how shared interpretations affect storytelling styles and propel the narrative. There is a sense here of a society's huge engagement with media products and its capacity to intervene in and contribute to the course and content of the communicative process. Our heroes are participants in a structured process of symbolic transmission where constraints such as time and space are reordered and eliminated. Hence, we have all the major characters talking on phones and via the internet with that hugely symbolic moment of mass messaging the Doctor's mobile just simply to get him away from the rather dull sub-plot with the Shadow Proclamation and bring him back into the action. At one point, I thought Davies might even be so cheeky as to ask the millions watching to 'vote' and choose their own, or any, plot. Because, let's face it, there wasn't really one much in evidence here.

It's the skilled art of taking information transfer and adding on a whole set of sensuous economics to provide a strung together series of character presences and big action moments and making them work just by themselves. There's a huge amount of crowd pleasing, and fan pleasing, moments in The Stolen Earth and they're used, in the absence of plot, to get us to the apex of revelation. That cliffhanger. Those of us 'in the know' were aware of what the cliffhanger would entail but even so it was an enormously grand, epic and funny ride to get to that closing scream of the theme and the rolling credits. Having said that, most of the audience will have read their papers or been on the internet and are perfectly aware that David Tennant will be in the Christmas Special and thus, the cliffhanger is a bit of bluff on the production team's side and the question we're all asking now is how does the Tenth Doctor get to remain as the Tenth Doctor despite that oncoming regeneration? It's a deliciously manufactured tension.

...a typical piece of Davies flippancy and knowingness that relieves the very palpable tension but also suggests that Davies himself has been at the furniture polish...

So as the episode strings together the Super Friends of the Doctor (the 'children of time') we also get to see Davies indulging in another of his favourite storytelling devices - the comic book. The power of comic books, scene-to-scene, to take great leaps in time or space is immediately evident in those typewritten captions 'Far Across The Universe' 'New York' 'Cardiff' that close off and reopen narrative in rapid succession. There are the illogical non-sequiturs of comic books that produce a weird alchemy in the viewers minds in even the most jarring of combinations.  So we get Richard Dawkins popping up with a bit of pseudo science juxtaposed with Paul O'Grady being watched by Ianto in the Torchwood Hub in a typical piece of Davies flippancy and knowingness that relieves the very palpable tension but also suggests that Davies himself has been at the furniture polish whilst writing this script. He emulates the comic book team ups and the grand narratives of stuff like DC's Crisis On Infinite Earths. The twelve part comic book series dating back to 1985 was not just an exercise in bringing together their stock range of superheroes in one gigantic meta-narrative but it was also an attempt to tidy up a 55 year long continuity. I do get the sense that this is also Davies clearing his desk and having a go at wrapping up narratives whilst also giddily chucking lots of references out to the audience. And he does it with the customary recycling of many of his more familiar narrative tropes that work in both subtle and crass ways. It's his Greatest Hits compilation CD and this phenomenon of observing the parts and perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure. And this sense of sprawling comic book sagas and Greatest Hits compilations are a closure of sorts on Davies' reign.

The Doctor's a bit busy having shouting matches with a woman in a hairnet - the Ena Sharples of the Shadow Proclamation - in order to find his way back into the centre of the narrative.

OK. French critical theory time. It's a bit of a tradition. Don't sigh. When Harriet Jones emerges from the ether via an untraceable sub-wave signal and starts to gather together the 'children of time' I think we get a sense of an alternate Shadow Proclamation being formed. It's a strange little emergency government - and yes, that 'Harriet Jones - Former Prime Minister' joke is taken to its logical conclusion here - and Michel Foucault noted that the science of government developed out of an earlier conception of economy as the art of managing family and household. Harriet gathers together the 'family' of the series, past and present, and grapples with ' how to introduce economy - the correct manner of managing individuals, goods, wealth within the family and of making the family fortunes prosper - how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state'. For Foucault, governmentality thus comes to depend upon the family and household more as an instrument of government than as a model for government. The trick here is that as the family comes together to form an ad-hoc government it's being done in the absence of the Doctor. The Doctor's a bit busy having shouting matches with a woman in a hairnet - the Ena Sharples of the Shadow Proclamation - in order to find his way back into the centre of the narrative. And he does that with a virtual, Skype powered community and ensemble mythology. The business of fathers and their relationship to their children is also an underlying theme too with Davros and the Doctor as symbolic opposites where the Daleks represent a physical, non-humanoid extension of their creator and the ensemble companions embody the extension of the humanistic ideals of the Doctor.

It's great that Harriet's redemption is addressed and she doesn't capitulate on her original decision to shoot down the Sycorax ship whilst standing in the path of Dalek extermination.

The script keeps the Doctor pretty much out of the way, trying to solve the mystery of where the earth has gone and finally working out the real reason for the disappearing bees, until the closing act and for that massive cliffhanger bluff. Giving everyone screen time is problematic here but only because we're seeing part one of a two part narrative. So the roles that Sarah and Martha will play isn't yet clear and unfortunately they are are slightly short-changed here. I don't really know how effective it was to bring the worlds of Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures crashing into this but somehow the script copes with it all and manages to leapfrog between all out action, comedy and tragedy with all the characters. It's great that Harriet's redemption is addressed and she doesn't capitulate on her original decision to shoot down the Sycorax ship whilst standing in the path of Dalek extermination. As one moment in a succession of great moments, it makes up for the missing plot and The Stolen Earth is, in the end, closure on a huge, giddy, entertaining scale. A fairground ride with so many cool, de rigeur rides that in the end you do feel a little nauseous.

Julian Bleach superbly channeling Michael Wisher, Briggs camping up as the utterly loopy Caan, the massed ranks of Daleks, the Dalek Supreme, the Independence Day style visuals are the massive wheels moving this juggernaut but there is still room for the wonderful laugh out loud scenes with Wilf paintballing a Dalek, Sarah telling Mr. Smith to pack in the fanfares and tons and tons of continuity references - everything from the Medusa Cascade, mentions to Donna that there had been "something on her back", Mr. Copper, the airborne aircraft carrier Valiant, the Defabricator gun, and the crossovers with the other series with mentions of Sarah Jane's encounter with the Slitheen, the deaths of Torchwood personnel Toshiko Sato and Owen Harper. Excuse me whilst I have, what is commonly referred to as, a fangasm. Phew.

Get through all that with your nerves in shreds and you've still got the question of that regeneration, the weird drumming sound as Donna stares into space and the exact nature of Davros' plan to look forward to. Russell has emphatically cleared his desk and by sheer dint of his personality has had the balls to get away with this epic. It might not stand up to repeat viewings but as a 'watching it live' experience you couldn't help but get carried away by the sheer gobsmacking giddiness of it all.

It's a Steal

The Doctor Who News Page reports that unofficial overnight figures show The Stolen Earth got 7.4 million viewers (a 38.3% share) and won its timeslot against the tail end of the ITV1 afternoon film Racing Stripes and All New You've Been Framed (which got 2.1 million and 2.9 million respectively).

Tachyon TV Podcasts: Survival Part 1

Let's go to Little and Large's sex shop...

Tachyon TV presents their latest DVD commentary podcast. This week it's Survival Part 1.

Topics up for discussion include: randy elephants, Andrew Cartmel's stand-up career, Les Dennis, Stonky Stonky, and the Crystal Maze. With added swings and roundabouts.

Listen to it via the Behind the Sofa jukebox or download it from Tachyon TV.

Love Story

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live." -- Albert Einstein

Or twelve episodes.  That Einstein really was a genius wasn’t he?  The above quote opened out Roger Ebert’s review of The Happening and I hope you’ll forgive its Persaudian invocation here, because much like The Stolen Earth at about minute forty I have no idea where this review is going.  As I somewhat indicated last week, I usually have some idea what I’m going to write beforehand, a plan, a way of hammering out a thousand odd words on a Saturday night.  Realistically it’ll end up looking like the kind of shopping list Russell T Davies wrote for himself before scripting tonight's dose of digital madness and part of me’s thinking, you know, what’s the point?

That was one of the most viscerally exciting fifty minutes since the series came back.  It’s easy to use that kind of hyperbole, so easy I've used it before, yet I can’t imagine there were many fans, as David hunched over the Tardis console, who weren’t screaming.  I thought my Bad Wolf fangasm last week would lead to the evacuation of bodily fluids.  This week I actually gave myself a migraine.  No metaphoric brain explosion, an actual physical reaction.  I’m not a football fan, but I suspect the only comparable euphoria would be a last minute winning streak in a cup match which looked doomed to failure.

This week I actually gave myself a migraine.

Russell T Davies’s writing is actually endangering my health and I’d be consulting a lawyer if I didn’t love him and the show so much.  My reaction, if I really want to analyse it, wasn’t just because of the in-story events, the Doctor and Rose finally reunited only for the inevitable Dalek interference; for someone who follows the construction of these things so closely, the writing, there’s also the squeal of delight because of the audacity of the storytelling and also the fact that unlike the loss of Mr Eccleston, the temporary loss of Rose, the return of The Master and the return of Davros, we quite simply didn’t know about this, no nasty tabloid hack to destroy the fun.

When that gold halo engulfed that actor, just for a brief moments I was absolutely convinced that some other actor’s the new Doctor and the Dave’s appearance on set during the lensing of the Christmas special was all just a red herring.  Either that or Paul McGann’s agent is in a very happy mood (I can dream can’t I)?  Who else could possibly fill those trainers?  Who could be filling those trainers and be someone wouldn’t have leaked it?  The three punch ‘To Be Continued’ was the sassiest bit of lettering the show’s ever thrown at us and if Bachman-Turner Overdrive had supplied the closing title music it wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.

Paul McGann’s agent is in a very happy mood

If this is a regeneration, a proper regeneration, then bye-bye David it’s been great.  Except the establishing shot of the fighting hand in the teaser suggests that it’s going to interfere with the cycle, or there’s some hitherto unknown aspect of the process still to be revealed.  The eagle eared would also have heard Mr. Tennant note what was happening on the set when Mr Bleach was around and how would he know that unless he was there working with him?  Plus, the lack of another leading man at the read-through, implies some other skullduggery at work.  Is this the first time Confidential’s editing decision has supplied spoilers?

Julian Bleach has clearly worked his was through the Davros dvd boxset because at no point did you think that this was a different man and indeed he was even creepier than his predecessors, affecting a hunch and a rasp.  As with the Sontarans, the Neill Gorton's make up admirably accentuated rather than reinvented what had gone before.  The creator’s appearance here obviously knocks the spin-off canon for six, but since that’s not even consistent in and of itself (for reasons too boring to go into here), what does it matter?  Along with crazy Dalek Caan and haughty Dalek Supremo this is a scary a force as they’ve been since the showboating of the close of the first series – an impression aided by the look of terror in the eyes of both Jack and Sarah.

The entire cast, all several hundred of them were on top form

The Mill excelled themselves in creating the planet infested Medusa Cascade redolent of the shots of infinite worlds which appear in DC Comic’s Crisis series.  The entire cast, all several hundred of them including Dempsey, were on top form, with the main guests enjoying the many great moments Davies gifted them carefully still keeping the worlds of each of spin-off separate.  Even in this family friendly fantasy, Torchwood were still sex obsessed with Ianto largely stealing those scene, whilst Luke upstaged Sarah-Jane again even as she confirmed  finally that the fanfare actually comes from inside Mr. Smith’s innards.  It was clever too to suggest that Martha was enjoying a lead role in some hithertoo unseen US based UNIT series at least until the Daleks arrived to exterminate it. 

Now, since all this is going in exactly the direction I hoped it wouldn't, meandering in exactly the direction I expected it would, I’m instead going to pause and make a confession, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for quite some time.  Shut up, it’s not that.  If it was that, I’d have told you that already.  Leave it.  The confession is by way of a story, one which begins in mid-April.  I’m attending a lecture at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool, which I know isn't a promising start, but stay with me.  The lecture is being given by one Professor Richard Dawkins.  It was part of a series of talks organised by the University of Liverpool on the subject of arts and sciences and began with Jonathan Miller and will end with Robert Winston and Willy Russell.

Shut up, it’s not that.

Dawkins offered what seemed like a well rehearsed discussion of the issues surrounding his book The God Delusion.  He originally gave the talk in February (which you can see here) and it was so oversubscribed it had to be moved to the city’s premiere classical music venue,  from the random lecture theatre which had been scene for Miller's tale.  It also had to be repeated and I was there for his second visit.  The first was actually picketed by creationists with placards!  This time, the protesters had got wise and applied for tickets and so after we’d enjoyed the talk it become all too apparent, all too quickly, that the closing Q&A was going to consist of the Professor being harassed by people who both didn’t agree with his approach to religion and plainly hadn’t listened to the talk, with pre-determined questions written on cards. 

A couple of priests had already walked out in fact and the general feeling in the hall was that we were going to be in for a long half hour.  Being a good follower of the faith, and realising this might be the only time I’d ever have a chance to talk to the other man who married Lalla Ward, I knew that I had to ask a question.  But which one?  I there had been something in his speech which I’d want a follow-up on (related to a quote he'd used from Douglas Adams) but I also realised there were going to be enough of those and as you’ve probably guessed by now I never do anything normal, or at least that’s what my parents always tell me.  I like to think of it as never being what people expect me to be like, which is also true, and probably much the same thing.

this might be the only time I’d ever have a chance to talk to the other man who married Lalla Ward

When I stood up, I still didn’t know what my question would be.  As I shuffled along the aisle stepping on people’s toes I had an inkling, but by the time I was queuing up behind the microphone, which had been set up by the stage, it was fixed in my mind.  The short haired man standing in front of me, wearing a dark-blue ski jacket, was holding a card on which I could see words scrawled in both pencil and pen in even worse handwriting than my own.  I stood with my arms crossed and knees shaking and I suspect knowing that he’d want some more time, he moved out of the way and let me go first.

I stepped up the microphone.  The Professor was looking over his glasses towards me.  He greeted me.
“Hello Professor Dawkins.” I said brightly. “Very pleased to meet you.”
He looked at me expectantly, or with the fear in his eyes, I was too nervous to tell.
“I understand that you filmed a scene for the latest series of Doctor Who…” 
I paused and became slightly tongue tied as I realised that the sold out crowd of the Philharmonic Hall, some nine hundred people, were all looking at the back of my sweaty neck as I asked the great Professor Dawkins, a man whose CV took ten minutes to read out at the beginning of the evening, a question about Doctor Who.
“… and erm … I was wondering how you enjoyed the experience!?!”
There was random and sporadic laughter from the audience.  Dawkins grinned.  I relaxed a little but continued sweating.
“Well” he said cheerfully, “Perhaps I should explain that my wife Lalla played the Doctor’s assistant in the 1970s and though I didn’t watch her at the time I’ve been catching up through the dvds.  I’ve always had a great affection for the series anyway so I was very pleased when they asked me.  It was only a small part, I was being interviewed by a Jeremy Paxman-type of character and I can still completely remember my lines of dialogue …”
Then he paused.  And dried.  The audience laughed again.
“Well it was something like ‘We're living in a whole new universe were different laws apply…’ ”
There was an audible gasp from some parts of the audience.  Had I somehow inadvertently got Richard Dawkins to give out a massive spoiler about what happens at the end of the series this early into the run?  I turned around and there were definitely a couple of shocked faces.  I hadn’t meant to.  Bugger.  I nearly stamped my foot. 

I hadn’t meant to.  Bugger.

“Thank you.” I said and stepped away from the microphone and sheepishly made my way back to my seat, absorbing as best I could some of the dirty looks I was getting along the way, having turned the crowd against me.  "It wasn't me, it was Dawkins!" I wanted to shout but thought better of it.  The man who’d been standing behind me was up next and he’d already begun to ask Dawkins for an opinion on how monkeys could evolve into humans and how shared ancestory can work if there are stil chimps and humans on the planet (Dawkins’s reaction: “ARE YOU BEING SERIOUS?”). 

As I sat down, a girl nearby said “Good question…” and winked.  Was she thinking what I was thinking?  That the loss of the Adapose planet had to be related?  Probably not, since as I'm sure you guessed last week, I really don't understand women.  Dawkins would only have spoiled one aspect of the episode if he'd remembered everything he'd said and so my story doesn't really have a proper ending, which is just how things are in the unfolding text of real life.  Ironically, he was also upstaged by Paul O'Grady and his braying audience offering exactly the kind of reaction one would expect from them in the event of a global catastrophe. 

(Dawkins) was also upstaged by Paul O'Grady and his braying audience offering exactly the kind of reaction one would expect from them in the event of a global catastrophe

In an episode where what should be major elements, such as the death of Harriet Jones, became incidental, there’s little point in me going over the minutiae any more, other than to say that Billie really got her mojo back and Graham Harper's the Spielberg of the franchise.  I’ve already seen criticism of the Call The Doctor solution (and yes, I’ve tried calling the number too with no luck), the fact that actually not very much happens in the episode other than the Dalek invasion which means it drags horribly in the middle, the timelord and Donna spend most of the episode in the TARDIS and that at the conclusion, all the Rose reunion amounted to was some cheesy showboating. 

Everyone’s entitled to an opinion but on this occasion they’re wrong.  The Stolen Earth was Doctor Who at its most epic and the opening salvo of Russell T Davies’s valedictory lap, and frankly beyond criticism, at least in fan terms.  If this week’s anything to go by, next week is going to be one of the most bonkers hours of television this year, repaying fans for their four to forty-five years of support and hopefully giving Catherine Tate, slightly sidelined here, her final  moment of Doctor Who acting glory.  For all we know, it’ll be revealed that Donna was adopted, has always carried a fobwatch around with her that Grandad Cribbins gave her one Christmas which he found on the doorstep with her as a baby and those non-diagetic heartbeats are the first sign of the cockerney regaining her timelord senses before regenerating into River Song.

Next Week:  God only knows.  Or failing that, Russell T Davies.  At this point it’s difficult to tell the difference. 

Squee Here

Here's a temporary post for you all to squee about in until the first review of The Stolen Earth is posted. Please hose the walls down after you've finished. Thanks.

Cloister-fuck

Ah.  The cloister bell.  The dull clang of that harbinger of doom inevitably warms my black and shriveled little heart.  It may only get a few seconds of screen-time, but as soon as I heard it, I knew bloody well that I wanted to incorporate the word "cloister" into the title of my review.

Well, I'll have you know that coming up with a clever title based on the word "cloister" isn't easy.  Especially if you're not exactly sure what a cloister is.  One might assume it refers to that which "cloists", but that leaves me in much the same dark. Or perhaps it's a comparative...the opposite of "less cloist".  I imagine that somewhere in England there's a city called "Cloister." Of course, they, no doubt, spell it "Cloicester", or some such.

Regardless of meaning, there's just something about the shape of the word that doesn't lend itself to entertaining wordplay.  My options were fairly limited in both agent-noun form ("Cloisters Rockefeller") and conjugated verb form ("Jesus Cloist!")  Needless to say, given the end-result,  the deciding factor was "which one is most crass?"  I suppose that was predictable, on some level.

That's one of the best things about this "blog": Everyone has their own highly-individual style.  No two of us are alike.  We're like foul-mouthed, sarcastic snowflakes.  Frank's reviews are all "Look at me!  I can read!" with their French intellectuals and a clever allusion to "Finnegan's Wake" under ever punctuation mark.  Stuart is generally giddy about anything the producers throw at him, and posts within seconds of the episode airing.  Damon's are compact diatribes about bus toilets and the future regenerations of his curries.  My reviews are long, rambling, nit-picky things where I bitch about where everything went wrong, even if I liked the episode, and try not to sound as intellectual as Frank.  And they're always late.

The point here is something about how we all fall over ourselves to make sure that whatever we write in our reviews, we make sure we're not just saying what's been said before, and if we do, we try to do it in a new and original way.  Unfortunately, the current production team on Doctor Who, especially Russell T. Davies, could stand to learn a little from this approach, because there's a lot of times when I feel a bit too much deja vu during certain episodes.  Either that or it's food poisoning.

It's too bad this was the Doctor-lite episode, or I might have just dropped the whole "cloister" thing and gone with "Gurn Left."

Doctor Who: Turn Left

Copyleft:

I'm not sure if this found its way over to the side of the pond that you lot are on, but over here during the 80's we had a disturbingly popular sitcom called Family Ties, based on a premise something along the lines of "conservative teenager has lefty hippie parents."  Now that the programme has been off the air for twenty years or so, my recollections of the programme are somewhat hazy, but one thing that has managed to burn itself into my unwilling mind is that Family Ties was infamous for its overuse of one of the more unfortunate narrative devices to ever hit the world of television: the clip show.

I imagine some of you are familiar with the concept of the clip show.  The producers, rather than coming up with an entire episode of new material, would recycle most of the material from previously-aired episodes, and wrap it all in what is generally an appallingly weak frame-story.

How clever!

Well, I think Turn Left is officially Doctor Who's first clip show.

Admittedly, the frame-story is probably significantly better than the average version, where the family sits around their living room and reminisces about various events that happened over the course of previous episodes.  Nonetheless, much of the exercise comes across as an attempt to reuse footage and special effects from myriad (mostly RTD's less-well-scripted) episodes from the last couple of seasons.  Even when they didn't actually use recycled clips they feel the need to play the name-dropping game with Sarah Jane and the Torchwoodians and that lot, and then they make extensive re-use of their favourite gimmick, the far-too-ineffective exposition-by-television-news-channel.  To bring it all back around, at the end we get flashbacks to clips pulled from this same episode...but, get this...they're backwards!  How clever!

Bar sinister:

It can probably be argued that most narratives are only as good as their villain, and Turn Left, at least in the outermost frame story, comes up short here.  Chipo Chung's portrayal of the fortune teller is woefully marred by at least a couple of deficiencies. 

First, she's so clearly, telegraphically evil that I'm surprised that the makeup department didn't outfit her with a goatee she could stroke malevolently while she salivates at the prospect of Donna turning her car to the right.  The end result was sort of the bastard stepchild of Anthony Ainley and Sarah Parish voiced by Frank Oz.  Donna should almost certainly have been more suspicious about her insidious "chan reading is free for red hair tho."  Then again, she's a bit thick in this episode; look at the whole labour camp thing.

I'm not sure which I find more disturbing...Chung's mildly offensive caricature of Chinese people, or her mildly offensive caricature of Evil people.

Secondly, her  portrayal comes across as some sort of cartoon version of a Chinese person, complete with an atrocious accent.  Mind you, this broad ethnic plastering is sort of par-for-the-course in the episode, with Joseph Long's stereotyped Italian ("Mama!  Is people!  Nice-a people!") and Loraine Velez's evil-eye-giving Spanish Maid similarly difficult to endure.

I'm not sure which I find more disturbing...Chung's mildly offensive caricature of Chinese people, or her mildly offensive caricature of Evil people.

Not all the blame for the fortune-teller fiasco can be laid on Chung, however; Davies' script didn't give her a whole lot to work with.  Lines like "Turn right and never meet that man...turn right and change the world!" almost demand to be followed by an evil cackle, though instead we just got the opening credits, and while I fully expected the fortune teller's last line to be something along the lines of "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!", what we got instead ("You were so strong!  What are you?  What will you be??  What will you be??") makes me wonder if Davies' owns stock in foreshadowing.

Dung Beetle:

No, I'm not talking about Paul this time.

It's too bad that the Mill blew its entire budget on computer-generated banners and lanterns, and one small mushroom cloud, because it sure would have been nice if the beetle weren't such utter rubbish.  I mean, really...why a beetle in the first place?  My theory is that they opted for the beetle because they happened to have a big rubber one lying around in the prop department.  We get lots of unconvincing scenes of beetle-puppet gnawing at Donna's hair.  (Now, I can see the appeal of gnawing on Donna's hair...I'd consider doing it myself...but somehow it would have been more effective if it just sat there attached to her instead of groping her ponytail.)

The beetle scenes weren't helped any by Catherine's least-convincing performances of the episode.  Maybe she's just not cut out for abject fear; she's far better at trying to be brave even when she's afraid...or maybe the rest of this season has made the terror out-of-character for her.  I was unimpressed by Donna's franticly chasing her own tail while trying to see the beetle on her back, complete with thundery little sound effects that I can only imagine are supposed to indicate how quickly she's snapping her head around trying to see it.  The rest of the special sound also hindered my beetle-appreciation; the clichéd chittering, scuttle-y beetle-sound that played on the soundtrack whenever the beetle was even hinted at got old before it even started.

Port Forwarding:

The entire episode, of course, was carried, if you will, on Donna's back, like a big, rubbish beetle.  While we get a little more of the old shouty Donna near the beginning of her new life, and as mentioned the screamy "get this thing off my back!" Donna certainly wasn't the high point of Tate's Donna Noble career, most of what works about Turn Left works because of her.  The ever-increasing hints that she's going to have a spectacular exit-stage-left at the end of the season are getting to me, because, as you're well aware, I think she's the best thing since sliced bread.

I can see the appeal of gnawing on Donna's hair...I'd consider doing it myself...

Nonetheless, ominous omens are afoot, mostly focusing on her specialness.  From the "most important woman in the universe" to realities bending around her, we're being set up for some spectacular reveal about Donna...let's hope it's good; they've already brought back "Bad Wolf" for the denouement, and you know what rubbish that is.

Between the flashbacks and the foreshadowing I think I'm getting motion sickness.

Tate's work stands in marked contrast to Billie Piper's strangely affected performance.  While Tate's missteps result from her being too into the character, Piper's alien characterization of Rose is strangely fascinating, if not spectacularly convincing.  From her bizarrely poor attempts to play nonchalant when she runs into Donna to her inability to tear her eyes away from the thing on her back to her ominous declarations set to spooky music, she spends most of the episode looking like she's off her meds.

Left Behind:

No...I'm not referencing the ridiculous Christian Dispensationalist movies staring Kirk Cameron...this is just the part of the review where I run on about random nitpicky things I can't think to put anywhere else.

Donna tells the fortune-teller "It was on Earth.  This planet called earth...miles away."  I'd say other planets are definitely something you want to keep "miles away" from your own.  If they're any closer than that you're in trouble.  And why assume a person from a planet colonized by Chinese people has no awareness of this "Earth."?

I learned from the credits that Donna's friend who kept staring at her back was named Alice Coltrane, no doubt in honour of the late, great jazz musician.   Too bad they didn't find a way to use some of Coltrane's music in the episode; it would have been better than the pop music Murray Gold scattered throughout much of the ending.

Between the flashbacks and the foreshadowing I think I'm getting motion sickness.

It finished, of course, with that lengthy fan-serving trailer.  I like to think of it as a clip show for next week's episode.

Rose tells Donna that the day she chose to "turn left" was a day she "...wouldn't remeber, it was the most ordinary day in the world."  This seems odd, since the entire premise of the episode hinges on the fact that she remembered it.

Where can I get a ridiculously large "Leeds" stamp?  This entertained me, for some reason...

When parallel Donna first sees the TARDIS she says "What's a police box?"...what...hasn't she ever seen Doctor Who?

Two Left Feet:

It's getting to be a bit of a tradition for us to generate somewhat schizophrenic reviews.  We, apparently, want to have our cake and eat it, too (what else does one do with cake?)  We either heap our love and affection on the episode and then mercilessly eviscerate it, or vice versa. There always seems to be a significant portion of the episode we love dearly (Hi, Catherine Tate!) and a whole lot of bollocks that rubs us the wrong way (Hi, plot, dialogue, rubbish science and Freema Agyeman!)

I blame the writers.

No...I don't mean those of us writing the reviews; we're doing the best with what we have to work with.  I mean the writers of Doctor Who.  And maybe the producers.  And script editors.  Here's the problem...even a hollow, manipulative, heavy-handed slab of fanwankery like Turn Left is simply sodden with brilliantly conceived character moments and It almost makes me think that if RTD were saddled with, say, a good producer and script editor, he'd have the makings of a good writer.

There were tons of little things in the episode deserving of praise.  The dropping of Donna in Sutton Court was, I'm pretty certain, a clever reference to the Doctor's failed attempt to return Sarah Jane to South Croydon.  I also appreciated the observations about the U.K. teetering on the brink of fascism.

Predictably the Donna/Wilf moments were some of the strongest.  Of particular note is the exchange "You're not gonna make the world any better by shouting at it!"/"I can try!" and their thoroughly defeated reaction to seeing the Adipose on television is a wonderful contrast to their enthusiasm about aliens in the "proper" universe.

C'mon.  Do us a favour.

There was effective comedy: Donna's thinking the Titanic crash was a sequel; "Don't tell me...the hospital's back!"; Rose's recognition of the meaninglessness of "it seems to be in a state of flux."

Rose's ambiguous lack-of-response to "Were you and him...?" said more than any answer she could have given.  There were, shockingly, a couple of moments where Jacqueline King's Sylvia almost seemed human. Effective tear-jerking all around.  Even the special sound people have something to redeem themselves: the nuclear shockwave was a brilliant touch.

Why can't you people be more consistent?  C'mon.  Do us a favour.  Throw us a bone, here.  Those nice people over at Torchwood generally have no qualms about serving us a steaming plate of crap umpteen times a year.

Decisions... Decisions... Decisions...

What is it about the career path of Doctor Who assistants after they leave that draws them, like a particularly randy moth to a largely perverted flame, to roles and appearances that are so removed from their previous personas? Carole Ann Ford's first gig after leaving the show was to star as a prostitute in an episode of Private Eye. Katy Manning suffered from an horrific wardrobe malfunction with a Dalek. Billie Piper's exit strategy featured the salacious sexploits of a call girl - a vehicle for Piper's singular talent that reached the parts of teenage boys that had Torchwood looking on with envious eyes.

Catherine Tate's agent is, even now, on the look out for casting calls for the television movie event Unrequited Lust - The Nora Batty Story.

Doctor Who: Turn Left

The peoples of the world are confused. First the island of Japan burned and the sushi was ruined. Then it was raw fish all round. First someone purporting to be a door-to-door Target novelisation reading service for the blind travelled the world. Then she didn't. First Billie Piper could annunciate properly. Then she couldn't. First the bees started to disappear, then came the turn of natures other greatest pollinators, the orthodontists...

Repatriated back to the estate of Dick Emery.

Once upon a time there were two shows I needed to watch with subtitles on: Rab C Nesbitt and The Wire. There is now a third, Doctor Who. What the hell was going on with Rose's teeth? She appeared to be constantly engaged in a titanic tussle with her gnashers as they made a bid for freedom. What has she had done to them? Has she had them straightened? Stretched? Whittled? Inflated? Coated? De-coated? Grouted? Gouged? Electroplated? Drained? Buffed? Waxed? Painted? Annexed?

Or was she living in mortal fear of having them repatriated back to the estate of Dick Emery?

Time sucking beetles are one thing, but the most far fetched part of the entire tale was the fact that Rose managed to enunciate those two words clearly enough for Donna to not only remember them but then repeat them to the Doctor. The script could have taken it's own left turn at that point:

"But she told me... to warn you. She said... two words"
"What two words? What were they? What did she say?"
"Bath Rolf"

Even the Imperial Leather's not going to get us out of this one.

The welcome return of Bath Rolf. Personal hygiene challenged Australian around entertainers, galloping across the cosmos, threatening the very fabric of reality with their deadly body odour. Even the Imperial Leather's not going to get us out of this one...

There is very little else to say about Turn Left that hasn't already been said, aside from the vast wafts of Crime Traveller I was getting from the jerry-rigged time machine cum changing room that the TARDIS had been turned into. Even Donna's clunky timepiece reminded me of the one Holly Turner and Jeff Slade had to strap on before leaving the confines of their time machine.

And following on from her time in Secret Diary Of A..., Piper's probably more accustomed to the world of strap ons now. Let's just hope Tate learns from the lessons of history and doesn't make the same choices that so many before her have...

Good Wolf, Bad Wolf

Doctor Who: Turn Left

Did you catch the trailer for next week's episode? Boy howdy, it was a long one, clocking in at nearly fifty minutes.

Because seriously, that's all this was. A big, honking, beautifully acted, poignant, moving trailer for the two-part finale that we'll be getting. And that list of glowing compliments doesn't let this episode off the hook for being what it is: A gigantic trailer. I mean, it's true that Utopia had it's trailer-ish elements as well, but this is something else. That episode was at least built upon its own original story, while this train wreck of an episode just lazily feeds off of the plot points of the past two years while blatantly (and openly) recycling material from earlier this series.

And Billie, you wait your turn. I'll get to you later.

There were things I liked about this episode, and I shall list them now. The biggest thing is Catherine Tate, and in the spirit of this episode I shall express my opinions about her performances by copying and pasting sentences from reviews I've already posted. "But dammit, Tate, what’s wrong with you? Can’t you throw me a bone once in a while? Give me something to complain about? Why can’t you be anything less than lovely?" "Even most former TateHaters have to admit that Donna's return benefits both her character and the show." "Donna, meanwhile, has my unambiguous approval as I mentioned earlier." "It turns out I like Donna better! If you'd told me I'd feel that way a couple of months ago (hell, a couple of weeks ago), I'd have had a difficult time believing it." "I continued to appreciate Donna's presence to the point that it's getting tiresome to write about it. She's excellent! I can't complain about anything."

See? I can reuse my material too! Now where's my OBE?

To say that this is Tate's best performance is no small compliment, I think. But credit is also due to Bernard Cribbins and Jacquline King as Donna's family. The former had me at hello, and the latter has finally won me over.

And that's about it.

I don't quite buy Rose's current characterization as the cool, calm Harbinger of Crisis on Infinite Whoniverses. Yeah, I went there.

You know, it's funny. Just a couple weeks ago I was talking to someone and I mentioned something to the effect of, "one of the very few things that would permanently end my Doctor Who fandom is if Billie Piper were to be cast as the Doctor." And, sadly, the day has come when that statement has been put to the test. Because that's exactly what has happened in this episode: Billie Piper has almost literally become the Doctor. She talks like him. She plays his name game. She bosses UNIT around. She travels in time and finds a companion. And she acts generally nothing like Rose Tyler. Anything likable about Rose (or, for that matter, anything unlikable about Rose) has been stripped away with this ridiculously neutered performance Billie Piper gives. I mentioned to a friend that I thought this was by far the worst performance Piper has ever given in Doctor Who, which he countered by bringing up the Deus-Ex-Rose-Tyler ending of The Parting of the Ways three years ago. Yeah, okay. That was probably Piper's worst moment, but looking at her performance in the episode as a whole, some of her better moments were present as well. I'm referring to the scenes during which she despairs of ever seeing the Doctor again, after he has sent her home. BIllie Piper was at the top of her game in that episode and thinking about it just makes me even more displeased with her performance here. I don't quite buy Rose's current characterization as the cool, calm Harbinger of Crisis on Infinite Whoniverses. Yeah, I went there.

And don't even get me started on all the flipping name-dropping. It's been done to death in the spin-offs with oblique (or occasionally direct) references to the Doctor himself. But when they do the reverse here it just seems cheap, like Russell is trying to draw momentum from outside sources to propel the episode when it would make more sense just to concentrate on the story of the episode. Oh wait, what story? I feel dirty comparing this episode to Midnight, but the mentions of spin-off characters gets exactly the same complaint as my complaint about the Rose cameo last week: it's meant to be tantalizing but it's just distracting. Couldn't we have left that all for the trailer, where it's meant to belong? Oh, wait, I forgot: This whole episode is nothing more than a flipping trailer, combined with a lame rehash of the story of Doctor Who for the last two seasons. Except for the most important part, ie, the return of the Master (yes, yes, I know, it makes sense).

SHIT. SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT.

At this point in the review writing, I had some friends over and re-watched the episode and entirely changed my mind about it. I flipping love this episode! Shit! What am I going to do with the nearly-complete review that I've already written?

And I'm not even interested in discussing the beetle aside from working in a reference to Donna eventually casting it of as though it were Pete Best. 

My points still stand with regard to Billie Piper's performance and the need to name-drop for the sake of giving the series some forward momentum (obviously intended to psych the viewer for the guest roles next week). And I'm not even interested in discussing the beetle aside from working in a reference to Donna casting it of as though it were Pete Best. But what I said was wrong for a few reasons.

First of all, how ridiculous was I to brush off Tate's performance as I did? I didn't even really say anything meaningful about what must be the best performance by a companion since the revival of the series. Hell, maybe the best ever. Donna is my favorite companion out of the ones who will be appearing over the next two weeks (yes, that includes Sarah Jane, who is probably number two). The fact that she is leaving the program at the end of this series makes me somewhat glad that the program is taking a year off because I admit I'm afraid it will be a poorer show without her. She significantly raised the bar for the show and this was the top of her game. The only pity is that Donna will not carry with her the experiences she had in the parallel universe. Unlike Martha's experiences in the negated timeline and Donna's married life on the Library's computer, or even John Smith's romance with Matron Redfern, all of which are remembered as actual experiences, this serves no such purpose. No character has been developed in any meaningful way, not even Donna, who barely remembers it all.

Which is why, I suppose, this felt so empty to me at first: It was all a dream and we were aware of this from the beginning. This episode served two functions: it built the Rose hype to its climax and it delivered some exposition about the final two-parter. Neither of which were really necessary, which makes me wonder whether this episode was written simply to give Catherine Tate something to do while David Tennant was busy filming Midnight. I'm not going to talk about whether Rose's new characterization works or whether her return is worthwhile at all; that's something I'm going to save for my review of the finale, because only then will I be able to form an opinion that's any better than the knee-jerk one expressed above.

Damn. And for once I thought I was going to get to write a negative review.

So ultimately, none of that other stuff matters at all because this episode is driven entirely by the engine that is Donna Noble: the raw emotional power of Tate's performance, the character's unique role in the story of the relationship between the Doctor and Rose, The best performance by her family to date, and it must be said that she is helped by some challenging and entertaining material by Davies in his best script since last week. Seriously, though, now that I've given this episode a bit more of a chance, I do have to admit that, in its own, weird way, it serves as a fitting "companion" to last week's episode. The relationship between the Doctor and his companion has never been examined quite this closely. Midnight was not just a companionless story, but rather a story about companionlessness, and what it means to the Doctor without a companion. Turn Left, then, is the opposite: a story about what a companion is without the Doctor. And then, of course, there's the two-part finale, which features a small army of companions.

Damn. And for once I thought I was going to get to write a negative review. But there's hope yet! And if the next two are good, I might end up having to wait for Torchwood.

Vote: Turn Left

Here are the results for the tenth blog poll, for Turn Left:

• 89%: Superb - Sliding Doors
• 11%: Not Good - Sliding Bores

The twelfth, and penultimate, Doctor Who poll, for The Stolen Earth, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.