Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

He Can Carry A Good Tune

Doctor Who: Proms 10 & 11 - Royal Albert Hall, 24th and 25th July

And here we are again, two years later and another Doctor Who Prom. Much has changed since that last extravaganza and the series itself has undergone something of a transformation under the auspices of Head Writer & Executive Steven Moffat. We have a new Doctor too, in the beguiling form of Matt Smith. But some things haven't changed and one of them is the music composed for the series by Murray Gold. Proms 10  and 11 at the Royal Albert Hall provide us with an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of Gold's most successful pieces composed for the Russell T Davies era of the show and to get to know a whole new set of themes for the first series overseen by Moffat.

What I like about these Proms is that we get a chance to hear concert versions of the music composed for the series unshackled from the extremely busy sound mix that smothers many of the episodes we see on television. You can listen to the latest themes without all manner of sound effects, including explosions and weapons fire, and dialogue obscuring some of the best music being composed for a British television series today. The music is also presented within the world of Doctor Who as live too, with all manner of monsters prowling round the Hall and plenty of interactivity including clips of the series and special appearances. Hopefully, the children attending these Proms will be inspired by Gold's music for the show but also will come away also having had a taster of some of the more accessible classical pieces within the programme.

This year's Proms get off to a gorgeous start with 'The Mad Man With A Box', an ethereal piece, almost mystical in quality, that, with its beautiful solo vocal from Yamit Mamo, manages to capture some of the magic of the man that we all know of as the Doctor. Onto the stage comes one of the hosts for our show, Karen Gillan, resplendent in a gold and black gown, who then introduces us to the pizazz of 'An Untimely Arrival' which covers the pre-titles to The Eleventh Doctor as the TARDIS crash lands in Amy's garden. Full of energy and vigour, Gold uses it as a bridging motif between the RTD era and the new adventures of a new Doctor. Familiar but also preparing the way into the new series without frightening the horses too much. It complements the John Adams piece, Short Ride In A Fast Machine quite wonderfully, itself full of syncopation and looping, repetitive rhythms and, for these Proms, it is certainly one of Adams more accessible and audience friendly pieces.

One of my highlights of these Proms is Gold's new theme for the Doctor, 'I Am The Doctor'. It's an epic signature tune for one of the most mercurial of the Doctor's incarnations and sets out to remind us that although the Doctor has changed, he is still very much the hero. The melody sticks in the mind and is instantly addictive and it's been used throughout the series but most significantly in The Pandorica Opens as he gives his speech to the amassed ships of his deadliest enemies above Stonehenge. A superb composition, a Gold standard if you like, and musically one of Series Five's greatest achievements. As this played, the Hall was invaded by all manner of alien foes - Saturnynians, Silurians, Cybermen and Judoon - and children everywhere, even those of us who are 48 years old and still refuse to grow up, were left grinning with delight.

Two classical pieces follow with the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales under the brilliant conductorship of Grant Llewellyn. If the Adams piece was a bit of a warm up, then Llewellyn gets the Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir to really give it some welly here. William Walton's Overture 'Portsmouth Point', a crafty nod to Murray Gold's home town, is a jaunty, perky work, full of gorgeous melody and rhythm. The mood undergoes a startling change with the second piece. An all time favourite, Holst's 'Mars', from The Planets gets a stunning rendition here and much kudos must go to the Choir and the percussion section of the Orchestra for really getting their teeth into this. Another highlight of the two Proms, it's stunningly performed and Llewellyn conducts like a man possessed. The boiling, doom laden aggression and pounding military crescendos sent tingles down my spine. Now, if they could have shown a few clips of Quatermass whilst this was playing then I'd have been an extremely happy telefantasy fan boy.

Back to Who with 'Battle In The Skies' from Victory Of The Daleks. Amusingly, Gold's homage to the scores of Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare) and Eric Coates (The Dam Busters) is heard as an ARP warden yells across the Hall, 'Put that light out!' as one of Bracewell's 'Ironside' Daleks rises from the floor of the Hall and asks everyone if they want a cup of tea...and a biscuit (thanks to Nick Briggs). The poor old Ironside is then bluntly interrupted by the white Dalek Supreme, arriving on stage in a blaze of light and dry ice. It sends the Ironside Dalek packing and then orders conductor Ben Foster to play the music of the Daleks or else! Foster teases the Dalek and on the matinee performance threatens it with his baton only to be told not to interfere with its sucker. The Supreme (aided and abetted by Barnaby Edwards) patrols the stage as Foster whips the Orchestra Of Wales into a stirring accompaniment to the episode's dogfight sequences. After a swift ice cream in the interval, it is back to the second half of the programme.

Grant Llewellyn returns and once again he wrings as much drama as he can from the Choir and the Orchestra with 'O Fortuna' from Carl Orff's Carmina burana. A medieval eruption of choral power, this iconic piece is stirring and epic, summoning up the very essence of raw nature, of life and death. And Old Spice. Yes, I'm old enough to remember those ads. Karen begins to introduce one of her favourite themes, Amy, but suddenly receives a very special message. In the spirit of Music Of The Spheres back in 2008, where David Tennant's Doctor attempted to stop a Graske from disrupting the Prom, Matt Smith pops up on the video screens around the Hall, greeting the audience from some very odd angles, even upside down at one point, in fine panto tradition. It's a lovely, witty piece, "Sir, careful with that wig. And you sir. And you. And actually most of the violin section. Oh, and ladies mind those skirts. And selected gentlemen."

He's got to fix an overloading fold-back quasar do-dah, thingumy that will turn into a "wibbly wobbly explody wody thing". And he tries to defuse it with an electric tooth brush! But here he goes one better than Tennant. He disappears off the screen and emerges, for real, in the centre of the Hall, looking for someone to help him defuse this bomb. Smith's comic timing and physicality is much to the fore and when he actually does pop up in the Royal Albert Hall for real, interacting with children from the audience, he's in his element and ad-libbing away like a good 'un. Children clearly adore him (he captivated Ellis and Ben in these performances) and he completely confirms that of all the things about Series Five, he is quite simply the series greatest asset right now. Judging by the way he handled all the gobbledegook of the script he's also fast becoming the Stanley Unwin of all of the Doctors! "ITV's been blown off the air!" he naughtily concludes after deactivating the bomb.

We return to the music from the series with 'Amy' and this time Arthur Darvill comes on stage to introduce the music. This is again one of Gold's major triumphs and definitely a high point in the Proms. Yamit Mamo returns for solo vocal duties and with nods to Danny Elfman, Gold offers a heartbreakingly lovely tune for the new companion in the series, deftly capturing the frailties and weaknesses of the woman as well as her sense of wonder and bravery. Quite stunning. It's back to more monsters with a suite of themes, 'Liz, Lizards, Vampires And Vincent', covering the music to accompany the battle between Liz 10 and the Smilers on Starship UK; the return of the Silurians (with Ben Foster surrounded by three of them as he tries to conduct); the marauding vampire Sisters Of The Water and the tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Of these, the standouts are certainly the motifs and themes for Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor.

The vampires get a memorably unearthly melody to accompany their sojourns into Venice and into the Hall itself as a group of the Sisters way lay a member of the audience during the matinee performance, dancing around him, much to his bemusement. The magnificent music that featured during Vincent's journey into the future and his visit to the gallery to hear how his work had affected millions of lives is presented here. Full of joy and sadness, it remains a very special, emotionally powerful theme.  The medley concludes with the nerve jangling incidentals, using a lilting piano riff, pounding chords and choir, that accompany the Weeping Angels and one of them pops in for a quick visit, scaring the bejesus out of most of the kids in the audience.

Karen and Arthur return to introduce Wagner's 'The Ride Of The Valkyries' and Grant Llewellyn gives the Orchestra Of Wales yet another energetic work out with the swirling strings and strident brass of this stirring classic. It again truly shows what a class act this Orchestra is. Karen then introduces, to several whoops from the audience, 'This Is Gallifrey', as featured in Series Three, and 'Vale decem' from The End Of Time. 'This Is Gallifrey' is here used to wonderful effect as, in the evening performance at least, the video screens show all the regenerations of each Doctor. All the Doctors get their fair share of applause and this slightly distracts from what is one of Gold's finest pieces for the series. Naturally, the greatest response is reserved for Tennant and Smith. On the matinee, either through a technical fault or by decision, the roll call of Doctors wasn't shown and 'This Is Gallifrey' was allowed to soar, full of loss and pride for an ancient society. 'Vale decem' is an amazing choral work with counter-tenor Mark Chambers beautiful voice at the centre of a moving, elegiac piece that sees the regeneration of the Tenth into the Eleventh. Both pieces are guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house. Superb.

Matt then arrives on stage to describe Gold's response to Moffat's two part series finale, a specially arranged work, 'The Pandorica Suite'. To be honest, it's not my favourite of Gold's recent work as it tends to resort to emotionally colouring the scenes it covers, particularly the comedy time travel bits, rather than develop big, memorable themes. There's little to remember or to hum here as it rather is incidental music and only until he gets to the conclusion of the suite with a thrilling reinterpretation, signposted with some great brass sections, of 'I Am The Doctor' does it come alive with crashing percussion and insistent woodwind.

Smith, Gillan and Darvill come back to introduce 'The Song Of Freedom', from Series Four. Personally, not one of my favourites but Mark Chambers voice is again extraordinary and Foster gets a tremendous performance from the London Phiharmonic Choir and the Orchestra for this anthemic theme. Murray Gold guests on keyboards during this and the arrangement of the 'Doctor Who Theme' and I'm still not particularly fond of his latest arrangement of the series theme, especially those very non-Ron Grainer opening orchestral tags and brass sections. That said, fortunately enough of Grainer's original composition and Delia Derbyshire's realisation remains and it's lovely to hear the old theme in such a setting driven by especially powerful bass and percussion. Both Proms rightly received a standing ovation and it is still pretty amazing to think that the little series we all love has been transformed into an unstoppable multi-media attraction. To paraphrase the Ninth Doctor, 'Fantastic!'

Making it a good one

Doctor Who: The Big Bang

Review by Paul Kirkley

The Big Bang is very possibly the greatest episode of Doctor Who ever made. Here are 50 – count ’em! – reasons why:

He’s back – and it’s about time. No, it really is this time. It’s incredible how little this ancient TV show about a time traveller has actually exploited the fantastic, fairytale possibilities of time. This episode does its best to make up for half a century of neglect in 55 minutes.

We got a total story reboot. All those Dr Who Monster Book baddies gathered together at the end of last week’s episode was undoubtedly an OMG moment, but having them all standing around chatting and shuffling would inevitably have diminished everyone involved. As an idea, it peaked before it even got started, so it was the right decision to just let it go.

Instead, we got a brand new mystery for the young adventuress Amelia Pond - like getting a whole new bonus story when we were least expecting it.

A world without stars. Or the Doctor. I don’t know which is the more unthinkable.

The museum scenes have a real filmic quality to them. Beautifully shot by Toby Haynes and scored by Murray Gold in a manner that wouldn’t have disgraced Steven Spielberg and John Williams.

A stone Dalek. Uh-huh-u-huh, that’s pretty cool

“Okay kid – this is where it gets complicated.” Yep, you got me. Wasn’t expecting that.

Rory needs a ridiculous miracle, and he gets one: the Doctor, in a fez, with a mop. Given that the last time we saw our man he’d just been locked away for eternity by an alliance of all his greatest enemies, this sudden comic, vaudeville reappearance – with props - totally subverts our expectations.

“Echoes. Fossils in time. Footprints of the never were.” You never got this stuff with Robert Sloman, did you?

“Your girlfriend isn’t more important than the universe.” “She is to me.” Ouch, I felt that. Still, you go gallivanting around the universe with a jaw that big, you’re gonna have to take the occasional slug.

Rory’s vigil. The lonely centurion, performing one last act of devotion to the box he had pledged to protect for nearly 2,000 years. Now that’s what I call an epic fairytale.

It’s reassuring to know the Doctor only changes history for the most important of reasons. Like getting a little girl a drink.

It’s all jaunty, timey-wimey caper one minute and then, bang: there’s a dying Doctor from the future. Breathless – and breathlessly inventive –stuff.

Things you can do in 12 minutes: Suck a mint, buy a sledge, have a fast bath. See Sidney? This show’s still educational.

“Today, just dying is a result.”

The lone Dalek powering up in the darkness echoes the latent menace of 2005’s reputation-rescuing Dalek (you know, before before it was pissed away again in various camp runarounds)

The Doctor against the London skyline and the exploding sun-TARDIS burning up the sky: it’s the sort of shot that makes you feel justified in using poncy terms like mise en scene. See, I just did.

And then a Dalek rises up above the roofline. A decade ago, that would have been an iconic moment in itself. Here it seemed positively throwaway. I guess we’ve just got spoiled.

“It's a fez. I wear a fez now.”

The Doctor getting frazzled by the Dalek is still a shock, even with all the warnings we’ve had. Maybe I should have been keeping count.

“I’m River Song. Check your records again.” Blimey – we’ve come along way from that Dalek being Rose's new BF in series one, haven’t we? This one was petrified in more ways than one. And then it died.

Rebooting the universe: not so much jargon as anti-jargon, bringing the biggest Event of all down to the level of everyday Windows frustrations.

And for all its crazily epic scale, the idea that all you need is a few atoms to grow a universe is a very elegant sci-fi concept; after all, yer basic periodic table of elements provides all the building blocks you need. (Okay, so recreating a specific universe - stars, planets, Mr Kipling’s French Fancies and all - is a bit more tricky. But hey, it's still better than that bloody Paradox Machine, right?)

The Doctor in The Pandorica: so weak, so broken, so utterly defeated. Have we ever seen him this vulnerable before?

“He wants to talk to you before he goes.” It’s the “before he goes” that gets you: a deathbed farewell.

“Amy Pond. All alone. The girl who didn’t make sense. How could I resist?” How could anyone?

And

"You'll have your family back - you won't need your imaginary friend any more." As if.

And

“Nothing is ever forgotten.” This is what Michael Praed’s Robin Hood said just before he died. As a kid, it broke my heart. And so did this.

That kiss. We’ve had our fair share of Doctor-companion lip-lockery in recent years, but that tiny, chaste, blink-and-you-miss-it kiss to the back of the hand was the most beautiful by a mile.

“Geronimo!”

Look at the pain etched on the Doctor’s face as he pilots The Pandorica into the heart of the explosion. In the flying final sacrifice stakes, it beats even Davison’s heroic effort at the end of Androzani part 3. I have never feared for my hero more. If this had been his final end in the final ever episode, I wouldn’t have felt cheated.

Flashbacks: to Aickman Road and then, oh yes… the Byzantium. Hah! That jacket! It’s a measure of the quality of this show that we would immediately assume some clever timey-wimey trickery over a mere continuity blunder. And then be proved right.

Amelia asleep on her suitcase in the garden. The girl who waited.

And then, because Moffat is really spoiling us now, another impossibly lovely goodbye. “When you wake up, you’ll have a mum and dad.” Now that’s a Doctor with a bedside manner.

“You’ll dream about that box. It will never leave you. Brand new and ancient at the same time. And the bluest blue ever.” This was lump in the throat stuff, even before we knew it was clever coded message.

The Doctor shedding tears not for the loss of himself, but for the loss of his friend. And then the way his expression turns to real fear as he turns to look at the crack. “I don’t belong here any more.” It’s difficult to know in which of these Doctor-Amy farewells Matt Smith is more extraordinary. But if Tom Baker ever starts guffing on about “Well of course Doctor Who isn’t really an acting part…”, can someone bung a DVD of this in his gob? Cos, don’t get me wrong, I love Tom Baker – we all love Tom Baker - but there’s a lot more to playing this crazy, raggedy man in a box than the ability to walk through a door interestingly.

Twinkling lights in the sky: Amelia’s reward for wishing upon a star. Then the sun comes up and…

It’s Amy, all grown up. How many little surprises can one episode throw at us?

And Amy has a family. With a little tiny dad! In The Doctor Dances, everybody lived. Here, even people who were already dead get to live.

Amy the bride: how traffic-stoppingly beautiful does Karen Gillan look?

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. But of course. With the benefit of hindsight, how else was this series ever going to end? If you didn’t cry or laugh out loud or punch the air at this point, you might want to ask yourself if you actually genuinely like Doctor Who. The most glorious, utterly transcendent moment in the show’s 47-year history? Today, at least, I’m saying, Hell yes.

“Raggedy man, I remember you and you are late for my wedding!” The tremble of glasses. The wind. A wheezing, groaning sound. And there it is: that iconic blue box. The bluest blue ever.

The Doc in his dapper new duds. “Hello everyone. I’m Amy’s imaginary friend. But I came anyway!”

The Doctor Dances. Really, really badly. (“That’s it, that’s good, keep it loose!”)

“2,000 years. The boy who waited. Good on you, mate.”

“Hang on, did you think I was asking you to marry me, or asking if you were married?” The wise and ancient hero who saved the universe. And still a little boy lost when it comes to women.

Who is River Song? We’re going to find out very soon. And she’s sorry, because that’s when everything changes. Ooh ’eck.

An Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express. In Space. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Russell T Davies is still writing the Christmas specials…

But not in ours. In ours, Steven Moffat is the man with the power to make and break realities, to reboot universes and give little lost girls the gift of stars. He is the custodian of the greatest story ever told, with the greatest hero who ever lived, and died, and lived again. And in Matt Smith, he has found his perfect muse, and given us the perfect Doctor Who.

“I’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay – we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know. It was the best.”

Get Me To The Church On Time

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang
Review by Frank Collins

I'm not sure that experience of working on Spielberg's version of Tin Tin has rubbed off on Moffat that well. The Pandorica Opens more or less amounts to a gene-splicing of the Devil's Tower sequences of Close Encounters and the catacomb exploring of the Indiana Jones films and looks very pretty but I'm not convinced on this evidence he can do 'epic' in Doctor Who. The narratives that hold these glossy visual spectacles together are really what Moffat is interested in. The rest is a bit tokenistic. The two part story that concludes with The Big Bang also reflects an ancient literary tradition that you could say Spielberg himself has deliberately woven into many of his major films. It falls into the tradition of menippea - a form of satire that signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. Both The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang act as reflections of each other, at once proposing an anti-epic visual presentation in counter-point to an epic narrative.

From the sky full of spaceships above Stonehenge to the alliance of monsters with their rather ridiculously contrived plan to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, Moffat turns the whole thing on its head and in The Big Bang simply has four people chasing around a museum whilst the universe shrinks outside the window and the Doctor cheats willfully with the time lines, bouncing around like a deranged cosmic Tommy Cooper. Bakhtin regarded menippea as 'the use of the fantastic internally motivated by the urge to create extraordinary situations for the testing of philosophical ideas'. Which sums up the finale for me and Moffat's own view of the entire Doctor Who series synthesised into a carnivalesque ambivalence for logic, an irreverent desire to break the rules and to cross boundaries. Sometimes it works spectacularly - not just in terms of visual spectacle but also in narrative complexity - and sometimes it's a way for him to cheat, avoid the implications of what he's done and refuse to answer questions left dangling by the preceding 11 episodes.

Thus we get no real answers to who was saying 'silence will fall', why the TARDIS was exploding and a reasoning for Amy's 'special' status. And presumably the missing ducks from the Leadworth duck pond ended up on the other side of the crack in time. Moffat knows his game and in the opening sequence with Vincent in 1890 he's clearly sending himself up rotten when the neighbour attending with the doctor looks at the painting of the exploding TARDIS and mutters, 'Look at this, even worse than his usual rubbish'.

Moffat's end game with this finale is to focus in on the triangular relationship between Amy Pond, the Doctor and Rory Williams. The messages carried through time via Van Gogh's painting, Churchill's telephone call, Liz Ten's meeting with River after she has broken out of the Stormcage facility are simply a means to an end whilst also cleverly rewarding the patient viewer with the pleasure of recognition in these pre-titles revisitations. They throw out a number of questions that in typical Moffat style aren't likely to be answered - why is Liz Ten still alive in 5154 and why is Bracewell still working for Churchill when it was more than suggested at the end of Victory Of The Daleks that he was off in search of his true love, Dorabella. These are, like many other sequences in the story, narrative conceits.

The Pandorica Opens is in effect one massive conceit. The significance of the Pandorica and the exploding TARDIS drive the story but in the end we never really discover the answer to the latter and the former is inevitably not what it seems with much of the episode heavily signposting the fact that it's a prison cell into which the Doctor is dumped by his enemies and not the home of an ultimate 'big bad'. The most effective twist in The Pandorica Opens is the resurrection of Rory, presumed erased from history at the end of Cold Blood. His reappearance is another layer to the series themes about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' and, significantly, he isn't the real Rory but a facsimile, a memory of Rory, created by the Nestenes. They presumably replaced the real Rory who did die at the end of Cold Blood. Or was he an Auton right from his introduction in The Eleventh Hour, then destroyed in Cold Blood, and then resurrected in The Pandorica Opens? It is narrative obfuscations such as these that Moffat deliberately ignores or refuses to clarify.

Rory is that most human of non-humans, embodying the crisis of subjectivity at the heart of this revelation. He struggles with his Nestene programming and conflicting human emotions, just as Amy evoked the same contradictions in the Dalek's android Bracewell back in 1941, to reaffirm his love for Amy, only to then destroy the object of his feelings. That this death takes place simultaneously with the Doctor's capture and imprisonment in the Pandorica, the destruction of the TARDIS and the death of the universe offers the spectacle a much needed emotional grounding. Rory's non-human status and his subsequent murder of Amy is the single most powerful scene in The Pandorica Opens and legitimises what is in effect a Doctor Who episode that resembles a Busby Berkeley tap routine performed by a sweating Steven Moffat sporting a fixed grin. It's hard to be 'epic'.

Moffat uses such conceits to again fuel the narrative expectation in The Big Bang where the audience is given a linear narrative - of the Doctor escaping from the Pandorica and the dead - now alive - Amy taking his place - that is broken into non-linear and often repetitive moments of recall, planting visual and verbal information about scenes that haven't happened but will happen or that have happened and we don't know why they have until the explanation appears further along the narrative. He's testing our ideas about time and the use of empirical and metaphysical paradoxes in the science fiction genre. For me, however amusing it is, and - in the way Matt Smith performs these sequences - it is, it really amounts to more grandstanding, including the revitalisation of the Dalek as a token monster to chase our heroes down corridors, that delays the story getting to the roof of the museum and the ultimate fate of the Doctor, the Pandorica and the TARDIS.

What's more interesting in the story are the binary oppositions between men and women. Amy truly is the fairy tale figure of the mysterious Little Red Riding Hood that the series has been constructed around. She is not only the absent woman in search of her self, her journey starting as a girl, the adorable Caitlin Blackwood returning as the younger Amy, and continuing through to impending womanhood and that wedding but the story is itself a science fiction satire about getting the bride to the church on time, about getting the adolescent Amy married off.

Typically, the finale also underlines of some of the problems I've been having with this series. Firstly, the series as a whole has evidently suffered from a cut in budget. This is unfortunate because television is such a visual medium these days and you need to spend money on it to engage audiences. Otherwise, you might as well do all this on the radio and, oddly, a great deal of The Big Bang might as well have gone out as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4. No matter how much of a clever clogs Moffat is, he can't just rely on characters running around a museum engaging in time travel screw-ball comedy to define the nature of the threat to the audience. The difference here to Series Three or Four, for example, is the inward and insular way Series Five has been structured around Amy and the Doctor, including the world in which these characters are seen to exist and the way they counter the threats to this world.

There is less show and more tell in many of the scripts with, I'd argue, only The Time Of Angels/Flesh and Stone really achieving the winning mix of the epic and the personal that uses the visual medium of television well.  There are undoubtedly instances where location filming abroad has paid off, as in the Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor, and the threats have been placed on a broader canvas (unlike the exploding TARDIS which is only ever seen on a canvas). On the whole I get a sense that the world building that's so necessary for a high concept series like Doctor Who is being presented to us in shorthand.

If you look at The Pandorica Opens the money has clearly been spent on the Stonehenge locations and the visual effects. By the time we get to The Big Bang the Stonehenge location is gone as is the visual misdirection of the massing alliance space fleet and what was indicated as threat has, ironically enough, become as fossilised as the remaining Daleks (no doubt another addition to the Character Options range). The Big Bang tells us about the threat to the universe but never actually reveals why it is there in the first place, why it is happening and who caused it. It's an unsatisfying finale because we never have a 'big bad' on which to pin the focus of the story. That conflict is absent and the Doctor spends most of The Big Bang fire-fighting whilst Moffat brings the story of Amy full circle.

Much of the series has therefore been set within a self-referential bubble, with the effects of conflict on those outside that bubble all happening off screen. We're told about the consequences from the Doctor, Amy and Rory but we never really see it actually affecting other people. As the TARDIS burns itself out we get the barest indication through dialogue that Richard Dawkins is slightly concerned about the shrinking of history and the lack of stars in the sky. These are powerful concepts that Moffat is creating but I keep feeling I'm being placed at a distance from them and I am only allowed to hear about them, never mind see them, through Amy or Rory. You have to have very strong, very identifiable supporting characters to be able to pull that switch from the broadest to the narrowest world view and to convince an audience that the apocalypse is mostly taking place off screen.

Although RTD's use of his characters families and the extended repertoire of supporting characters in Harriet Jones, Captain Jack et al might be seen as too much a reflection of soap opera, the audience accepted that world view because of its familiarity and because the conflict between the Doctor and the villain of the week was often staged on screen in familiar surroundings, often showing us the consequences. In the end we are left only with Amy and Rory as the audience identification figures and there isn't enough context to care about the threat to them and to us, as the audience. I've stopped caring, to be honest, because the series won't let me care.

Secondly, try as I do, but I don't much like Amy. I find her a rather unsympathetic character. It culminates with her finally waking up on her wedding day and getting married. How do we accept that Amy then casually waves goodbye to parents that she's desperately fought to bring back into existence, and who occupy a minimum of screen time, as she and Rory abruptly leave in the TARDIS. We don't even see them wave back! After all the reunions, I find it rather callous of her to reject that new world with her parents in it, and after restoring the Doctor through the power of suggestion, to spend her honeymoon with him in the TARDIS. Has this woman an obsession about younger, father figures?

I'm afraid there's a whiff of a straight male fantasy (the kissogram's a bit of dead giveaway) deliberately being projected onto the character possibly as as an extension to Moffat's own fantasies of a woman who doles out a form of sadomasochism to the men in her life. Moffat and Moffat's analog, Rory, bask in the power of a strong, controlling woman. Amy as the idealised woman, ironically, may both evoke in them the feelings of safety and protection associated with childhood and likewise from which Rory, and by extension Moffat, may derive satisfaction from earning the approval of that figure. Very much a case of bringing yourself to what you write I think.

Amy spends a lot of time belittling both the Doctor and Rory, trying to dominate and to an extent emasculate them (her attempt to seduce the Doctor is clearly an extension of that but he's strong enough to reject it) and it is very telling when, at the wedding reception, the Doctor congratulates Rory with, 'From now on I shall be leaving the kissing duties to the brand new Mr. Pond' after Amy has ordered the Doctor to 'kiss the bride'. Here, the Doctor firmly rejects her dominance but also confirms that Rory is no longer Rory Williams but Rory Pond. 'No, I'm not Mr. Pond. That's not how it works.' 'Yeah it is' confirms the Doctor with Rory's status underlined as victim of his own self-defeating personality disorder.

Rory is for me the best thing about The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. As I said, he's the Moffat analog and in being such is a far more humane character, even when he's an Auton, than the horribly idealised Amy Pond. This is the plastic man that hangs around for 2000 years protecting the Pandorica, marries the woman inside it and settles down to a life of hen-pecking in the TARDIS. He's a man who engages in excessive self sacrifice in order to get a response from the woman who allegedly loves him and then happily takes the humiliation from Amy when he is reluctant to find any pleasure in all the dangers that travelling in the TARDIS throws at him. He's a deeply flawed man whom most of us can relate to - 'the boy who waited' guarding the gift of hope in the Pandorica (definitely symbolically similar to Pandora's box itself) and who then emerges into manhood.

The finale is flawed, lacking a really decent conflict between the Doctor and whoever it is that caused the TARDIS to explode and told us 'silence will fall', but they are good, solid and entertaining episodes. The scripts are witty and full of life even if Moffat plunges into self-indulgence in The Big Bang. The death of Amy at Rory's hand, literally, is the pinnacle of The Pandorica Opens whilst the allegedly show stopping gathering of the alliance of monsters is just a sop to keep the kids happy (and bearing in mind my thoughts about the budgetary necessities of the anti-epic, how must they have been disappointed to find it all reduced to one pathetic Dalek screeching for mercy in The Big Bang?).

The Big Bang is more satisfying emotionally with it being the conclusion of the series long Amy arc. The stand out scene between the Doctor and Amy, the conversation with her as he prepares to hurtle into the heart of the burning TARDIS, is one of the best of the series. It adds the full stop to the whole series subtext about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' that has been drip fed into stories from the beginning and the notion that the Pandorica ultimately symbolises hope after both forgetting and remembering, much as in the ancient story of Pandora, even if it does stray rather too close to a big reset button.

Moffat's story arc, in which all of history is erased and then rebooted, in which the very act of remembering is a macrocosmic event (the key to saving the universe) -  and a microcosmic event (bringing back your long vanished parents) is surprise, surprise a main tenet in fairy tales. Amy's Red Riding Hood journey through time, symbolised very powerfully in the forest scenes in Flesh And Stone, is one about avoiding the threat of being devoured wherein the hungry wolf of the old fairy tale is now the crack in the bedroom wall. But like many readings of fairy tales, is this also a story about a girl's desperate avoidance of womanhood, her impending marriage to Rory, and to remain a child by jumping aboard the TARDIS to avoid the predations of the wolf (Rory and the crack in time)? Might this explain her defensiveness to Rory in some of the earlier stories?

The interesting thing about Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales is that they are concerned with the control of women, the control of desire. Amy as a Red Riding Hood princess whose final trajectory is marriage is a fascinating reading of a transgressive woman, acting on her own desires but who in the end must be rescued by two friendly male figures - Rory and the Doctor - the husband and the father. River, cycling through a number of identities and appearances - from earth mother to seductress - is positioned here as a trickster heroine and as literally, the figure of the old wive's tale, the woman as storyteller and an analog to Scheherazade, as one who spins her narrative ('spoilers') throughout the Doctor's timeline. Plus, of course, she's his wife and by extension she's symbolically Amy's wicked stepmother.

As ever, Matt Smith completely steals the show and is particularly impressive in The Big Bang, giving us a mesmerising range of performances within one episode, capturing ancient wisdom and youthful recklessness in one big eccentric package. He truly is the biggest success of what I think has been a fairly middling series this year and remains the sole reason for continuing to watch the show. I have no problem with Karen Gillan's abilities but I'm hoping that now we've got Amy married off the character will acquire some warmth and sensitivity. The themes in this year's series about the journey from childhood to womanhood didn't quite make it across in the performances until the very end of the series. Less flippancy and that awful shouty emphasis she puts on the ends of certain line readings would also help. But when she's good she's very good.

I'm very pleased that Rory appears to have permanently joined the crew. He is the 'everyman' figure that the series must hold on to and Arthur Darvill is completely charming in the role. Now all we need are better monsters (the new Daleks and Silurians were design disasters in my opinion), decent scares and better realised worlds as a context for the journeys the Doctor, Amy and Rory go on.

Until Christmas then...

The Doctor and Amy's Excellent Adventure

Stuart Ian Burns watches Doctor Who: The Big Bang

Raggedy Doctor, raggedy final episode.  I’ve been watching lots of productions of Hamlet lately and concurrently reading scraps of literary criticism, volumes of words devoted to whether he’s really mad, she was in on the murder of his Dad and oddly what religion they all are.  Some of this is quite the most bonkers theorising you’re likely to see in print as each and every Phd tries to find something new to say about a four hundred year old play that everyone (well everyone who cares about literature, a progressively dwindling number) has already had an opinion about.  Shakespeare was probably a genius because he knew his legacy wouldn’t just be built on the poetry of his plays but the collective head-scratching of his audience.

The days, weeks and hours leading up to The Big Bang have been like those four hundred years compressed into a much shorter time.  Online, the minutiae of dialogue, narrative and since this is television, directorial choices, ploughed over and over.  A feature of modern television obviously, but even in the Bad Wolf era, the Doigian attention to brainteasers wasn’t quite this intensive.  The Big Bang had a lot to live up to, not just as a piece of Saturday night television watched by the millions not watching football or having a barbecue or both but as the solution to a three month old logic problem.  I’m not about to end this paragraph comparing Steven Moffat to Shakespeare, but his methodology was certainly similar.

the Doigian attention to brainteasers wasn’t quite this intensive

The brilliance of The Big Bang, and yes, it is brilliant, is that it manages to not only provide answers to some of those questions (that’s some) but also spin them into a emotional entertainment which unlike you what you might expect from the title, refused to give in to the tendency in these finales for massive space opera and offered instead a much smaller story which was ultimately about a girl and her childhood memories, about dreams and fairy tales, in which Moffat risked losing those viewers who focus on the literal and attempt to punch through something more profound.  As the older Amy says when the Pandorica opens again, "OK kid, this is where it gets complicated."

Just before transmission, the rector of this parish tweeted that he was more nervous about this episode than the England match tomorrow and as it turned out Moffat split his story roughly down the middle, with Big Bang 2 as the narrative equivalent of oranges and an ear-bashing from Fabio Capello.  Anyone expecting a monster mash will have been surprised to find Saturday night drama again audaciously being carried by little Caitlin Blackwood in an extended recreation of The Eleventh Hour, sans the Doctor and with the small and telling gesture that the stars haven’t just gone out this time – they never existed.  A residue of race-memory is retained, not least by that well known cultist Richard Dawkins, who in the Russell T Davies version of this episode would have been back on screen pointing to a diagram of where in the void Alpha Centuri should be.

that well known cultist Richard Dawkins

Few other cliffhanger resolutions have been like this, continuing to keep the audience guessing even after the main titles, but as Moffat said in last month’s parish newsletter, he was writing a script which attempted to be a sequel to all the episodes this season (with the exception of episode seven – so far) so you can understand why he might want to take his time.  The reveal of this new universe (can a planet and not a proper sun be described as a universe?) was a masterclass in suggestion, with remnants such as the stone Daleks (like their cousins in Victory) from the old timeline anomalies in the new, the whole planet now a metaphor for the interior of Amy’s brain, with a history that doesn’t make sense and presumably since there’s no space exploration, any Star Trek or Star Wars (What’s a galaxy? Why build a spaceship if we’ve nowhere to go?).

As with Amy’s note in The Lodger and every other script Steven Moffat has written, the explicability of how these Mobius (no not Morbius) events are generated and resolved was again not fully explained and likely to be the most headache inducing (particularly for poor Blinovitch).  The predestination paradoxes agogo used to explicate the break from the Pandorica and Amy’s resurrection are the stuff of the jail break in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and I can understand why someone might feel cheated by the inherent logic short circuit in the centre.  Cheap tricks are not exactly new in Doctor Who.  The fake Mona Lisas in City of Death for one thing, and Jonathan Morris’s novel Festival of Death is replete with them.  Quite whether kids and some adults would have been able to follow all of the shifting about of time I’m not sure, though they must have loved the Doctor in a fez randomly carrying a mop.  

Jonathan Morris’s novel Festival of Death

Like the deus ex pandorica conclusion to the crackpot crack plot, Moffat gets away with his folly (at least for me) by ultimately turning both into quiet meditations on sacrifice.  Amy’s boys both become myths in different ways to show their love for her and though we can argue whether the Doctor would have done the same no matter what sort of human she was, Pond, thanks to Karen Gillan’s consistently well judged performance (give or take a few line readings), is the kind of girl you would surrender yourself for.  Her twin reactions to the story of how her boyfriend may have perished safeguarding the Pandorica over two millenia and the Doctor’s final words before he hurls himself into the smouldering TARDIS just demolished me; she’s almost a younger, female Cribbins.  When Gillan cries, I do too.  We await her cover version of Gossip Calypso with great interest.

From Amy’s resurrection to the whole universe.  The Doctor’s steering of the Pandorica into the heart of the Tardis’s storm firstly brought to mind similar journey’s in Contact, Sunshine, The Abyss and more specifically 2001, a lone figure entering the unknown and like 2001, gaining the opportunity to become a viewer reviewing elements of his own lifetime, though Moffat sadly doesn’t take the opportunity to explain if timelords are loomed or born, there’s no star time-tot floating in the void.  He does however resolve two of the big theories, of the multiple Doctor’s in Flesh and Stone and the non-dream sequence in The Eleventh Hour, Amelia’s long evening wait.  Rare is it in Doctor Who that this kind of forward planning has been in evidence and so sensationally pulled off.  This whole finale is nearly a homage to the inexplicable Dalek amongst the Roman battalion in Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox's Big Finish audio Seasons of Fear (which threw forward to Time of the Daleks later that season).

Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox's Big Finish audio Seasons of Fear

Matt Smith’s performance in this section and especially when he explains his existence to a sleeping Amelia was extraordinary.  Once again we see the character’s years weighted on his shoulders and behind his eyes as he agrees with River’s suggestion that they’re all a fairy tale, distilling his existence to a poetic version of the key components, of the kind a small mind might be able to comprehend.  He recalls the beginning of his own adventure, however long that was before An Unearthly Child (the jury is still out), his own life folding back on itself; given the number of times Billy has appeared this series, I almost expected him to break into chat about his grand daughter, kidnapped teachers and a junkyard, but unlike some authors we could mention, Moffat’s tasteful enough to keep to the essentials.  Then before the Doctor finds himself watching another story with a hyperbolic title, he’s gone.

Finally we meet Amy’s family, the appearance of whom was rather spoiled by the BBC Three listing in the Radio Times.  Like other elements of Amy’s character, the loss of memory, the runaway bride, ginger, Augustus and Tabetha recalled Donna’s parents, same kind of demographic group, yet more immediately likeable somehow, especially when her Dad said he needs a few moments to perfect his speech (never mind the Dahl reference, Augustus is played by the brilliantly named Halcro Johnston which might be the best actor’s name ever).  It’s in these moments, Moffat’s groundwork on memory begins to pay off as like Gwyneth Paltrow at the close of Sliding Doors, this older Amy begins to remember the person she was in the other timeline.  There is some glossing over such topics as to the extent she and her husband remember both remember their other existences, Rory in particular with two thousand years as her plastic pal who’s sort of fun to be with (if you want, not sure).  

Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors

The Doctor’s re-emergence also neatly sidesteps the subject of how the Earth is a nice place to live without the troubles that befell it in Turn Left – Amy would have remembered him eventually and so he will have existed and so the Whoniverse is back to normal – moreso since it also corrected the bother created by the cracks.  Such questions and answers simply didn’t occur to me during my sharp intake of breath on seeing River at the window, her TARDIS diary and Amy’s explanation of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.  As with much of the rest of the episode, Moffat, aided by a beautiful sweeping push-in, is able to turn what should be inexplicable narrative sleight of hand into a beautiful character moment as Amy is able to confirm that she isn’t mad – even if the man in the top hat quite conclusively is.  Look at the dancing.

Threading through this all of this is River Song, pointedly oscillating, like the Doctor himself between elucidator and enigma.  We’re meant to believe that her moral compass is pointing more toward the Seventh Doctor than the present incarnation – though in one of the episode’s few logic missteps (few?), I don’t quite understand how having her do an Absolom Daak demonstrates that (unless it’s because the pepperpot wasn’t armed).  Still, there is something rather chilling about seeing this remnant scream for mercy and Alex Kingston enjoying its misunderstanding of the role River has in the Doctor’s life, her eyes sparkling.  At some point, her “spoilers” catchphrase will begin to tire, but you suspect that Moffat will, in a timely manner, judge when that will be, and some of the answers will begin to flow. 

Absolom Daak

Because in order to keep us interested, still guessing, still theorising, oh the mysteries some of which, like Hamlet's listlessness, may never be "solved".  We don’t know who was controlling the TARDIS, who’s voice is slithering “Silence will fall” or why, as the Doctor notes, his time machine exploded in the first place.  We don’t know what happened to the ducks in the duck pond.  A crack, perhaps, but given how often these potentially otherwise picayune anatidae have been mentioned, no explanation to their relevance was forthcoming.  What of the machine in The Lodger?  Perhaps most importantly, will Arthur Darvill be in the opening credits now that he appears to be a full companion?  He’s certainly earned it, having been in more episodes than Moffat’s written, and turned Rory into a character who feels as significant as Amy.  Unless he really does become nu-Who’s equivalent of South Park’s Kenny, always existing on the precipice between life and death, ready to take the bullet or neutron ray when an episode is requiring an emotional crescendo.

In my review of The Eleventh Hour, I said I was “enchanted, beguiled, cheering, laughing and clapping” and that’s been my state through most of this series (though to be fair when has it ever not been?).  The only slightly bogus journey was the Chibnall Silurian two-parter and even that held together well enough on the strength of its dialogue, its direction and performances.  There was no New Earth, no Planet of the Ood.  Even Victory of the Daleks entertained me, though I know it’s not been universally praised because of (amongst other things) the new Dalek design.  What Moffat has done is to somehow mix our collective childhood memory of Doctor Who (before it was tarnished through our adult cynicism via dvd) with the needs of modern television for an emotional luminance and hired a Doctor who is able to embody both.  If nothing else, I think we can all agree that in Matt Smith is a replacement for the other fella who may well yet eclipse him (assuming he hasn’t already).

The Memory Cheats

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

Review by Paul Kirkley

Expectation is a slippery biscuit. Because, clearly, this was brilliant. Amazing, in fact. And yet, on first viewing, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit short-changed, possibly because of all the tweeting and blogging that had been going on since the BAFTA screening about how it was the greatest thing since, well, the Big Bang. (Or, at least, that’s what Ian Levine said. But then he probably said the same about Take That’s first single. And we can only guess how much the bloke who wrote Attack of the Cybermen must have got off on a continuity porn-fest like this.)

Anyway, I’m not going to do my usual nitpicking about plot holes and lapses in logic because the plotting is so dense I suspect that, on this occasion, it might be a case of, it’s not you, it’s me – i.e. it made sense but I simply failed to understand it. One thread I will risk a tug on, though, cos it’s quite fundamental, is the whole idea of the trap built from Amy’s memories.

So how does that work, exactly? It’s a terrific concept but hard to get a handle on in any real, practical sense. River says the Doctor’s enemies have used Amy’s memories to construct a scenario he will believe, in order to get close to him. But, as Neil has already pointed out, surely the Doctor was delivered to Stonehenge by van Gogh’s painting and River’s graffiti? The only bits from Amy are the Romans – and they’re little more than window dressing who could have been replaced by any old army – Rory, who makes cock all sense anyway, and the Pandorica itself, which the Doctor appears to have known about since his own childhood and which, I’m pretty sure, he’d have come and taken a shufty at whatever it was called. Unless I’m missing the obvious, this actually turned out to be an even more nebulous concept than series one’s much-derided Bad Wolf arc – which at least made a kind of sense, if you sort of squinted and tried not to think too hard about it.

(Incidentally, I bet it was the Daleks’ idea to construct the whole “Amy’s memories” scenario. They seem to have been taking a lot of inspiration from The Anthony Ainley Book of Hopelessly Convoluted Traps lately. You can imagine the scene when they outlined the plan to all the other Big Bads, with much awkward coughing and shuffling of feet from the Cybermen, while the Sontarans insisted it would be a more effective martial strategy to just poke the Doctor on Facebook.)

My other big irritation was with the cliffhanger. Not because it wasn’t brilliant, but because it was teetering right on the verge of Best. Cliffhanger. Ever. until the Doctor ruined it by blabbing too much. The idea that our hero is a more dangerous force than the combined evil of all his enemies is a pretty powerful one, and would have left us with much to chew on over the next seven, agonising days. Instead, the Doctor kind of blew the whole gaff by revealing it wasn’t actually him that was the threat but the TARDIS, and that the Daleks et al had basically not bothered to check their facts about who could pilot it (sloppy, as there’s a whole list of people who have in the new TARDIS Handbook, available at all good galactic bookshops, etc).  I couldn’t help feeling this revelation undermined the moment somewhat: instead of the terrible, unknowable powers of The Oncoming Storm, it was basically reduced to the equivalent of a misunderstanding about who was at the wheel when a vehicle got flashed by a speed camera.

Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack

There were a couple of other little niggles – I thought the reveal of the vandalised cliff face was a bit chucked away by the director, and the silence falling at the end still feels less like a dramatic flourish and more like Murray Gold’s just mis-timed his cue. Also, though I don’t usually trust anyone who uses the term “fanwank” – it smacks of a lazy reflex response ming-mongs use to try to prove they’re too cool to care about old monsters and stuff – the Evil Alliance did push credibility to breaking point. Then again, if the Lib Dems can hook up with the Tories, I guess anything’s possible.

But enough griping. On the whole, The Pandorica Opens rocked like a stone Dalek (hmmm… interesting idea: someone should write that down).

Some things to note:

The pre-titles sequence was so Alias it hurt. But hurt in a good way.

River’s contact got his vortex manipulator from “a handsome time agent”. Anyone we know? Still, Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack.

Speaking of which, the Blue Man Group have really let themselves go in the 52nd century, haven’t they?

The Cyberhead: Sweet Jesus, have those metal muthas ever been more terrifying than when skittering across the floor on their own spidery innards? And that was before it opened up and popped a big grinning skull out.

Joke of the week: “You graffitied the oldest cliff-face in the universe.” “You wouldn’t answer your phone.”

It’s been mentioned elsewhere, but look at Matt Smith’s face when he first hears the Daleks. Look at the eyes: that flicker of doubt, of fear, of weariness. Then the mask comes on, and he’s instantly back to his quipping, larky self. (Interestingly, David Tennant pulled off exactly the same trick, in another exchange with River Song, in Forest of the Dead. Maybe Moffat puts this stuff in the stage directions.)

The last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

And the Comedy Award goes to… Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill, for their beautifully awkward reunion exchange – especially Smith’s “How’ve you been?” and the way Darvill, when prodded, slowly rocked back on his heels, like a Weeble.

Loved the Doctor’s “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” speech, especially the taunt about “your silly little spaceships with all your silly little guns”. That'll learn 'em.

The scenes between Rory and Amy: how can something be so simultaneously ridiculous and heartbreaking? Only in Doctor Who... It certainly rescues the Autons from burping bin ignominy; the last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

Toby Haynes’ direction was impressively cinematic, and not just in the big money shots: River exploring Amy’s darkened house was just as beautiful. (Hard to think this is the same show where directors once had to fight to get a dimmer switch put into TC3.) And the decision to go slo-mo in the climactic moments was spot-on: we’ve had pomp and bombast before – Russell the T loved a bit of that – but has Doctor Who ever been more grandly, more thrillingly operatic than in those climactic shots of our defeated hero being dragged, Christ-like, to his final humiliation? Stunning.

In summary, then: Stephen fry can fuck off.

This is Fictile Trap

Stuart Ian Burns watches as Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens.

“Ah shit, it’s not fucking Davros is it?”

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a bit will know that out of all of us, I’m the one who tends to have the biggest emotional reaction to the franchise, at least during an episode.  My reviews have been littered with paragraphs in which I admit to shouting, screaming, laughing, clapping and yes, swearing at whatever bit of dramedy is being thrown at us in the name of entertainment.

Sometimes it’s criticism, sometimes it’s disbelief, sometimes it’s desperation or in the case of the version of me from forty minutes into the episode who shouted the Davros comment, all three -- and many more idioms, because by then, all four lobes of my brain had formally announced hostilities, with the frontal and temporal finally getting the upper hand over my parietal.  The occipital was just biding its time.  

So expertly had Steven Moffat developed his mystery as to what would be in the Pandorica, so cleverly had he withheld that pesky narrative information, but also so used are we to cop outs and a lack of imagination that despite that build up, as soon as the Airfix Daleks popped into Henge’s basement my occipital made its move, drew victory against the other lobes and the Davros comment catapulted through my lips leaving a dirty mark my LCD tv …

… just as the Cybermen made their entrance, demonstrating that more cunning adventures were afoot.  Not long afterwards, as we discovered a peace treaty had been signed between the monsters of the Moffat and Davies eras on screen, another was agreed in my head allowing the rest of my bemused form simply to sit open mouthed, gaping as the cliffhanger to end all, well cliffs and hangers and everything else in the Whoniverse developed in all its glory.

Who? When?  Why?  What? How much have you got?

The reason my brain cells were in such a spin was because as with the rest of the series, this was an episode about questions.  Who? When? Why? What? How much have you got?  Much of Doctor Who is about that.  It’s inherent in the title.  All stories are structure around these questions – the good ones anyway.  Much has been written about how the traditional companion role is to ask questions so that the Doctor can answer them.  But a slight of hand which has served the series across the decades is that the timelord asks just as many questions himself. 

The Pandorica Opens lays that mechanism bare.  When a transcript of the episode is published, most of the dialogue will have punctus interrogativus plastered across the end of it and often in the middle.  But unlike many of those classic stories, were because of the need to give Roger Delgado something to do, we were given answer to those questions as part of a parallel narrative, in The Pandorica Opens, we were as clueless as the leads.  We all became the Doctor, full of questions.  And without the help of an Immortality Gate. 

Moffat had two options with these close episodes.  He could have brought everything back down and told a small story that managed to answer all of questions, perhaps even in Amy's house, a natural sequel to The Eleventh Hour.  He may yet still.  But for episode twelve he needed to prove something to himself, that he could also do blockbusters, big speeches, big spaceships.  Yet unlike Davies's space operas which still had character at the heart but rather random storytelling, The Pandorica Opens also had dense, mostly logical plotting.

Which means that each time I want to talk about about some of the best direction the series has yet seen from Who-newcomer but tv drama veteran Toby Haynes and the amazing photography of his long term colleague Stephan Pehrsson (neither of who has had much genre experience other than Spooks: Code 9 which hardly counts) I find myself asking a litany of questions - there's more going on this one episode than whole series of the old show, and that includes The Key To Time season.  This paragraph was the last to be written so that I can warn you that yet again, the following will not be for fans of good copy editing.  For example, this segway makes little sense.

the following will not be for fans of copy editing

Over the next week, much of the talk, and we fans do like to talk, will be about that climax, which is a shame because the teaser was perhaps the most audacious in the show’s history, vying for superiority with the team-up opening of The Stolen Earth (which feels likes as old as The Keys of Marinus at this point).  Despite being one the most interesting of the series (Playback!), Doctor Who Confidential conclusively failed to explain whether all of these actors were brought back together or if, as I hope and expect, these little bits of scenes were included in the shooting schedule for the previous episodes.

The “Children of Time” turned out to in fact to be a bunch of people from near contemporary London and Cardiff because that’s were the timelord chose to land his TARDIS.  This group of friends emerged from across the vortex to help this Doctor who sees all of time and space as his home.  Unfolding like an adaptation of the next volume of Gary Russell’s The Doctor Who Encyclopaedia, we can now surmise that Vincent was driven to suicide by his vision the TARDIS’s destruction, Bracewell continued to work with Churchill and Liz Ten’s brain is still (just about) intact. 

True, the fictional logistics were effectively a more prosaic version of the way River communicated with the Doctor in Time of the Angels, as was the coincidence of this incarnation just happening to be in the right point to receive the message in the right order but as he would later remark “There are more things in heaven and earth, Rory. Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”  Or something like that.  

the next volume of Gary Russell’s The Doctor Who Encyclopaedia

You might even question how all of the monsters would be able to lure the Doctor to this exact spot – did one of them put the idea for the date and location in Vincent’s brain because without that data being splattered onto a canvas, River wouldn’t have known were to bring the Doctor to and well, it's at this point we hit the door marked The Big Bang and an entry intercom that when phoned has a determined Scottish brogue on the end whispering “I’ll explain later.”  But that can’t stop the questions.

Like, why was River Song already in the Stormcage Containment Facility?  In our previous encounter, the impression was that she’d been sent down for killing a good man, the implication being that it would be the Doctor and in this finale, and yet here she is already kissing the penitentiary.  If it was that simple to Cool Hand Luke it out of there, why didn’t she do it already?  Was she waiting for Churchill’s phone call?  Is she post Flesh and Stone but pretending to be the younger version of herself?

Alex Kingston’s delicious jaunt through time suggested perhaps that younger version but she was perfectly at ease with Amy and didn’t seem as bothered about how old the Doctor was and when they’d last met, less than usual at least.  But this was the River Song that had been teased before, the galactic traveller brimming with wit and imagination and unafraid to use a second hand time ring -- which she must still have on her in the TARDIS console room at the close of the episode …

Is the underhenge conclusive proof after all these years that The Meddling Monk was lying when he said that he aided its construction via some anti-gravity doodah?  Was the Pandorica in position while the Eighth Doctor and Sam visited during one of my favourite Short Tips, the atmospheric The People’s Temple?  Or for that matter when Theshold transported the whole thing, lock, stock and stone to the Moon in the comic strip Wormwood?  

Nothing is as it initially seems

None of these questions will have been in Moffat’s mind as he wrote this, which is probably for the best, because this spooky chamber was indeed more like something from an Indiana Jones film which shows his heightened aspirations for what the show is capable of.  But this is a typically Moffat episode.  Nothing is as it initially seems – and I don’t just mean that the stars didn’t really ride the horses (as we finally see one of a dozen shots which were originally rammed into our consciousness in the original exciting series trailer). 

But even in here, even with the Pandorica business, the episode took a detour into some exciting Amy on Cyberman action.  This crawling then walking homage to John Carpenter's The Thing offered one of the grossest shots of the series as its masked skipped open to reveal a skull, the reaction exquisitely played by Karen as she bashed it against the wall.  Gillan had a great episode all round, one moment exhibiting child-like wonder and another getting excited about the Romans.  Lacan would have had a field day with Amy.

It’s a mark of the Moffat’s understanding of Doctor Who and its audience that while us big kids are wrapping out brains around the big narrative brickbats, the kids can still be scared to.  What are we meant to believe was the origin of this remnant?  Was it left behind when the monsters dropped off the prison?  Did an Uvodni or Roboform (or some other head Neil Gorton had lying around the creature shop) take a dislike to him?  Left there by some future version of the Doctor so that it could stick Amy with the dart …

From scary straight into funny and the Doctor’s reaction to the sudden emergence of Rory.  Some are already suggesting that this is Arthur Darvill’s best performance but if we assume that because of his mechanical make-up the character is a more vital presence, more acute with his banter, more forthright, perhaps a touch braver, the comparison is simply in seeing a different version of the same character, revealing a subtlety at the heart of his previous appearances.  

proper Rory but other Rory, auton Rory

Funny the first time, these initial scenes develop even greater poignancy on repeated viewings now that we know it’s not proper Rory but other Rory, auton Rory.  Unless they're both autons.  Has Rory been an auton all the time, is that why his staff badge says it was issued 30th November 1990 decades before Amy’s date?  Has he been quietly on Earth all of those years biding his time?  Is that how he retains all of the memories of his death and resurrection?  Why that photo wasn’t wiped from history too?

The Doctor’s pronouncement to the monsters of the galaxy was a summation of Matt Smith’s characterisation over the past eleven and a bit episodes, like his “battle” with the Atraxi, a demonstration that sometimes his best defence is the forty-odd years worth of history.  Moffat likes this kind of posturing and after however many centuries of adventure, it’s only fair that he should be able to cash in his annuity once in a while.  Pity that up in said spaceships the collective menace of the galaxy are looking at their watches and tutting about poor workmanship as they realise the Pandorica hasn’t opened yet and that they should come back a bit later. 

Smith surprisingly still has his doubters (including Smith himself) but his mercurial magician act fits the mood perfectly, especially with River’s prophetic description about the Doctor being at the centre of many fairytales.  His desperation as he realises that all of his worst enemies, in forming an alliance, had set the scene for their own downfall was as moving as anything in previous years, even if Murray’s emotive music didn’t quite match the shot of the Sontaran’s noble if determined potato face (Are the Rutans in this alliance?  Who brokered that peace deal?).

The casting of Christopher Ryan as said Sontaran was a neat piece of continuity and another reminder that though Moffat has his own ideas about how Doctor Who is a fairy tale, ladedadeda, this is still the same series that produced The Sontaran Stratagem.  One of the quirks of the Who franchise (and sci-fi franchises in general) is that character designs signed off on by a previous administration will end up having service for quite some time.  The sudden emergence of so many aliens from the earlier era should be quite jarring – and quite purposeful due to the budget restrictions – it’s an easy shorthand for demonstrating the oddity of the alliance.  

(humina humina)

Of course, it would have been fun to have one of the throwaway aliens included, not least the Gareth Roberts created spin-off alien Chelonians or the Drahvins (humina humina) or the Zygons, but why would you spend the money if all they’re going to do is stand there and be upstaged by the Tonka Daleks anyway ala the Ogrons and Frank Butcher in Dimensions in Time?  That said, the appearance of the Weevils is worth querying not least because we’ve not seen them show much in the way of intelligence before.  Shouldn’t they be trying to gnaw the leg off a Hoix?

Now back to the ending and the reveal that it was never about what was emerging from the Pandorica but rather what would be placed in it which is a spectacular piece of writing from Moffat.  The initial appearance of the Daleks was of course a classic piece of misdirection from Moffat which was supposed to make us all fear the worst (however much we liked Julian Bleach's portrayal last time) and of the kind which I hope will mean that in the finale it'll be revealed that all the plot holes in this series were indeed put there on purpose making all the reviews which consist of nothing but questions and nods to inconsistencies look a bit foolish ...

If this had been the previous era, my guess as to how the cliffhanger would be resolved would have included the cyber genes saving Amy, the space-time manipulator saving River and the Doctor escaping from the Pandorica because he’s the Doctor.  But Moffat is too intricate a writer for that; he likes to produce second parts that are structurally and tonally unlike their predecessor and there are too many open enquiries about duck ponds without ducks, why Amy’s life doesn’t make any sense - rattling about in that empty house, who is manipulating the TARDIS and the origin of that raspy, ancient, but artificial voice with its deathly prediction: “Silence will fall”

Ah shit, it’s not fucking Davros is it?

Oooh! Monkeys, monkeys!

Doctor Who: The Lodger
Review by Frank Collins

Christ, you can smell the testosterone from here. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it's that new Lynx fragrance 'Monkeys, Monkeys'. Or the smell of omelettes. Ah, I wondered when we were going to get to this point. Let's face it, when you've got Messrs Moffat, Nye and Curtis all lined up and writing for Doctor Who by the law of probability someone was bound to introduce the whole crisis of modern masculinity schtick into the series at some bloody point. All three writers have, during their careers, paraded a number of male characters across the screen with many of them desperately attempting to come to terms with the modern man's place in a rapidly changing culture.

Traditionally, scripts from all three writers have had an emphasis on the burdens of masculinity or the crisis of male identity which have been examined with humour and irony but from an essentialist point of view which presume that there was and still exists a relatively stable masculine 'essence' that defines men and distinguishes them from women. This essentialism was one that was then reconstructed as an extension of the media created New Lad or New Man. Here, we're in the post New Lad territory of the metrosexual 'caring' man struggling with his sense of self-esteem and a severe case of unrequited love. It is the centre of a script that frames the traditional tropes of male behaviour ('I'm a normal bloke. Tell me what normal blokes do.' 'They…watch telly, play football, they go down the pub.' but looks at them from a slightly different angle.

That's because the writer here is Gareth Roberts, adapting the story he presented in the comic strip of the same name where the Doctor and Mickey do the whole flat share thing. Whilst it's clear that Roberts is having immense fun exaggerating the Doctor's eccentricity within the domestic human context of a flat share, you could argue that this urgent desire to emphasise how eccentric the Doctor actually is out of his natural habitat somewhat contradicts his history with, and knowledge of, Earth, including his long period of exile where he was seen regularly hobnobbing with politicians and scientists, scoffing their cheese and draining dry their wine cellars. An amusing reference to Pertwee singing in the shower reminds us of that previous Doctor's vast experience with human lives that Roberts rather conveniently puts aside to raise the script's comedy stakes. Roberts is also perhaps too busy churning out the charming sit-com romantic triangle between the Doctor, Craig and Sophie, that highlights how the alien Doctor is actually the epitome of humanism even though we already knew that, to recognise that he delays for too long the Doctor's solving of the mystery, allowing several nasty deaths to occur whilst the Doctor is cooking omelettes and building scanner devices out of bric-a-brac.

This is one of the major problems with the script along with the fairly rushed ending. For all the 'fish out of water' humour, the Doctor's reasoning and behaviour is shown at its most illogical here and the script tantalises, rather infuriatingly, with the mystery of the TARDIS-like time-engine and its unknown owner or owners but goes no further. Despite these problems, the set up is interesting and the threat from the man upstairs is wonderfully evocative as he or it lures in his victims one by one. The disturbing thing is that he or it uses a number of disguises, all equally suspect, to lead them to the slaughter. There's a slightly unsavoury aspect to the first sequence where the ship's autopilot lures in the young Leonardo Dicaprio lookalike and as he innocently mounts the stairs his doom is clearly in the hands of an older, more mature man who awaits his arrival. Later, what looks like a prostitute dressed like Donna Summer and someone from Eastenders are given the routine from the emergency auto pilot thing and are reduced to damp patches on Craig's ceiling whilst the Doctor diddles about nattering to Amy, who seems to spend most of the episode hanging from a trapeze, or he indulges his male bonding with Craig by playing football.

'You're weird and you can cook. That's good enough for me.' admits Craig and in doing so he pretty much sums up how many heterosexual and homosexual partnerships get off the starting blocks these days. The suggestion here is then further compounded by Craig's explanation of the customary arrangement between the flat's male occupants. 'In case you want to bring someone round' says Craig. 'A girlfriend…' and then Craig looks the Doctor up and down and crucially appends 'or boyfriend' to frame the relationship between the two men as one of male homosocial bonding with the dynamic for the Doctor's inferred homosexuality framed within that. The episode surfs along with many references to these themes and ideas with Roberts using the differences between the Doctor and Craig to deconstruct some of the masculinities on display and the wider questions of change and continuity in contemporary identities.

When we first see Craig and Sophie and they discuss the flat share advert, Sophie offers Craig a 'mission in life. Find me a man!' which he inadvertently does in the form of the Doctor and, whilst initially too reluctant to share his feelings with her, he increasingly feels his chance has gone simply because the Doctor has opened her eyes to how she can widen her horizons and escape her suburban rut. It's interesting that, even though it is done as a humorous contradiction, Craig bursts out of the front door yelling 'I love you!' at the Doctor, a mock declaration of the love that dare not speak its name. At first rather taken aback by the Doctor's rather unmanly behaviour (the double air kisses and the Doctor's compliments on Craig's taste in decor also connote the episode's witty view of metrosexual, suburban mores) Craig's initial discomfort switches to a sense of defeat when the Doctor demonstrates that he is better at the things Craig does - the things that define him as a man.

The Doctor might be weird and wear a bow tie but in the end Craig feels inadequate as the Doctor presents his abilities as a footballer and as a temp where Craig works and even as a man who can seemingly relate to women better when he convinces Sophie of her potential. The whole issue of men and work is explored with Craig's job. In a culture of recession, downsizing and market driven policies, he represents the rising occupational insecurity and sense of precariousness in the male workforce, especially when he finds the Doctor sitting in the office. There is a sense that when Craig turns up for work after the Doctor's gentle, almost feminising, administrations to his sickness, that he is immediately emasculated by the Doctor's further interruption into his working life. He has seemingly usurped Craig, is clearly using his intellect and charm to influence company policy, tell awkward customers the way things will be from here on in and is generally being praised by Craig's boss. Perhaps doing all the things that Craig himself secretly desires.

The episode also explores further notions about men, fear and weakness. Craig puts a brave face on the world, disowning his fear of rejection and yet he's weak enough to capitulate to it when faced with his relationship with Sophie. He regresses from intimacy as much as she does and this is only resolved at the end of the episode when their survival relies completely on the expression of their desire for each other. The regression and repression that Craig is acting out is also the very thing that protects him from the time-engine's search for a pilot. His seeming contentment with the status quo is at first challenged by the 'man' upstairs when the noise of what he does to his victims disturbs the male flat share but he is again rejected ('Thank you, Craig. But I don't need your help') by the threat. The time engine and its pilot emphasise his entanglement in the roots of suburbia and his lack of ambition beyond 'beer, pizza and telly'. Is he man enough to become the pilot? The only way he can do that is to want to move on, to embrace change, to be the 'man' upstairs. This can only come about when Sophie herself begins her journey to self-fulfilment under the Doctor's influence and finally when she is threatened by the 'man' upstairs too.

The episode succeeds through the three lead performances of Matt Smith, James Corden and Daisy Haggard. When he and the Doctor literally knock heads and Craig instantly discovers the Doctor's real identity and history, Corden's playing of Craig's reactions is amusing and well judged. I had my doubts about Corden but he confirms here that he's very much at home in drama and that frankly he should leave sketch shows, horror film pastiche and football punditry behind him. Where the episode falls down is in its conclusion. The 'love conquers all' solution to the threat from the time engine teeters over into tweeness and the threat is resolved in such as way that we are left with no real explanation of where it came from in the first place, reducing it to simply a device for articulating all of the character's inner desires. However, there is that interesting coda - about relationships found and lost - as Craig and Sophie are finally brought to their senses by the Doctor in contrast to Amy's discovery of the engagement ring and a relationship that has been wiped from time and leaves her and the audience asking any number of questions.

Flat's entertainment

I absolutely loved this episode.

So here is a picture of a terrible tragedy:

 

And with that image now burned on our retinas, let's move on to happier times with

Doctor Who: The Lodger

Review by Paul Kirkley

Look, I’m not one for scurrilous gossip – much – but all I’m saying is, it must have been one hell of a pre-season writers’ party this year because, somehow, Richard Curtis ended up going home with Gareth Roberts’ celebrity historical, Toby Whithouse got off with Mark Gatiss’s Gothic comedy and Roberts, the dirty bugger, found himself sharing a cab with both Curtis’s romcom and Simon Nye’s flatshare caper. With the result that, while The Lodger may not be the greatest Doctor Who story ever made*, it’s difficult to remember a more thoroughly irresistible 45 minutes of shamelessly showboating entertainment.

Just as a Yeti sitting on a loo in Tooting Bec is scarier than one in the Himalayas, so a Time Lord in a flat in Colchester is more alien than one in the Panopticon on Gallifrey

The real masterstroke here is that, in exploiting the comic potential of the Doctor’s total bewilderment at lives less extraordinary than his own, Roberts has delivered a format-stretching bottle episode that feels new and fresh and different, but which is also fundamentally true to the spirit of Doctor Who. In fact, its alien-among-us premise is thematically not that much of a stretch from the show’s own ground zero, An Unearthly Child – except we never saw William Hartnell in a small bath towel or scoffing biscuits in a call centre. I can't help thinking all that grunty stuff with the cavemen would have been a lot more fun if we had.

So this was the perfect showcase for everything that's special about the Doctor - because, just as a Yeti sitting on a loo in Tooting Bec is scarier than one in the Himalayas, so a Time Lord in a flat in Colchester is more alien than one in the Panopticon on Gallifrey. But, more than that, it was the perfect showcase for this Doctor. Ironically, given its origin as a Tenth Doctor comic  strip, I’m not sure this story would have worked nearly as well with David Tennant; with all that blokeish charm, he’d have fitted in far too convincingly. But Smith’s angular, awkward young fogey is a more obvious outsider, ripe for mining fish-out-of-water comic potential in the spirit of Mork and Mindy, My Favourite Martian, Third Rock From The Sun and A.L.F – with whom, let’s face it,  Smith bares more than a passing resemblance (at the very least, they're using the same barber).

Matt Smith is just adorable here. There's no other word for it.

And boy does our man seize the opportunity with both hands: Matt Smith’s performance is a comic tour de force, from the bit of business with the toothbrush to his hilarious regurgitating wine act, from the Oncoming Storm warning to his bonkers take-over of the call centre ("Hello, Mr Jorgensen? Can you hold, I have to eat a biscuit”), he's just adorable here. There's no other word for it.
 
If it had just been a straight knockabout comedy in the spirit of the unfairly maligned The Unicorn and the Wasp, then, The Lodger would have more than earned its stripes. But the horror element was also surprisingly effective, from the plaintive, disembodied voices luring hapless passers-by through the intercom – for some reason, it reminded me of Rex Harrison taunting Doris Day in Midnight Lace – to the shadowy figures at the top of the stairs. Why are things at the top of the stairs intrinsically more scary than things at the bottom of the stairs? Is it because there’s no escape? Because it’s where we sleep, and are thus most vulnerable? Or because it suggests the malevolent presence has already taken deep root in the most private rooms of our homes? I don’t know, but I do know there’s nothing more sinister than a creepy child looming down at us from the darkness above. In this respect, The Lodger was probably as Sapphire and Steel as nu-Who has got and, as any fule no, Sapphire and Steel remains the gold standard for creepy British fantasy television. (Incidentally, was it just me or did the hologram at the end look suspiciously like Sven Goran Eriksson in an Arthur Fowler cardie?)

For once, the secret of the top of the stairs actually turned out to have a satisfying pay-off. We’re always banging on about how this show successfully mixes the domestic with the fantastic – well here’s the physical manifestation of that: a huge, impossible time machine hidden inside a flat in Colchester. And what a time machine – a beautiful, cathedral-like chamber that I imagine the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS would have looked a bit like without the set-dressing from an All About Eve video. After so many disappointing reveals over the years – It’s a giant Ood brain! It’s a giant Metal Mickey Cyberman! It’s  really, really rubbish Human Dalek! – it was refreshing not to feel short-changed by the money shot.
 
The manner in which the romcom element was hardwired into the sci-fi resolution was also extremely elegant: love literally saving the world courtesy of some well-seeded gags (and there was me thinking that joke about the sofa was just a cheap shot about Corden's weight). Who needs biological metacrises or Whitepoint stars when the only words necessary are: “For God’s sake, kiss the girl!” Brilliant.
 
I also really like James Corden. There, I’ve said it. Maybe it’s because we’re such hopelessly late Gavin & Stacey adopters in our house (for some reason, I never got beyond the opening episode when it first went out, and have only recently caught up with what I’ve been missing). So, as far as Corden is concerned, I’m mentally still somewhere around early 2007, in the first flush of Smiffy love, before Horne and Corden and Lesbian Vampire Killers. Here, he proves he’s big enough to play the straight man and let Matt Smith get on with the crowed-pleasing stuff (though he still got the biggest laugh of the night in our house with “Sorry, are you going to live with monkeys now?”). As a gesture of solidarity, I should also admit I feel a bit ashamed this week to be related by marriage to that miserable, pompous old bastard Patrick Stewart.

So there you go. I loved it. Some people hated it, but I loved it. But that’s okay because, if we’ve learned anything from misfit flatshare comedies over the years, it’s that the world don't move to the beat of just one drum, what might be right for you, may not be right for some, because it takes, diff'rent strokes to move the world, yes it does, it takes diff'rent strokes to move the world.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t like cats.

Random observations:
 
I loved the Doctor’s vocal tribute to his only previous shower scene. Though perhaps he should have gone the whole hog and got a naval tattoo as well. Fantastic hair, too: maybe he’s from the same branch of Smiths as Robert?
 
Interesting choice of past Doctor clips during the psychic headbutt. For those not paying attention, the order went: 9, 10, 8, 4, 3, 2, 1. No doubt the conspiracy theories are already mushrooming all over the interweb. Here’s mine: Ten is just a figment of Nine’s imagination and Five, Six and Seven have been wiped out by the crack in time. Maybe this will be the terrible choice the Doctor faces in The Big Bang: restore the timeline and you get The Caves of Androzani back; leave it as it is and Pip and Jane Baker will never have existed. Tempting, isn’t it?

The Doctor dodging the spindles of his non-technological technology gizmo really reminded me of Alan Partridge’s legendary World Cup Soccermeter. As it’s topical, let’s take a moment to enjoy it again here.

Daisy Haggard = Lovely. I think I could even forgive her for her terrible dwarf-baiting in Psychoville.

But Karen Gillan needs to calm down sometimes. Not all the time, but there are occasions when she could take on Tom Baker and David Tennant in a boggling contest and win hands down.

Next time on Doctor Who: Am I the only one who thinks The Pandorica Opens looks a bit, you know, meh? Still, I’m sure the Mighty Moff won’t let me down. And at least those big stupid multi-coloured Daleks aren't in it, right?

*The Lodger may not the be the greatest but, as I'm feeling bullish, here are 10 much-admired stories it is better than: Tomb of the Cybermen, The Daemons, Carnival of Monsters, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin, Earthshock, The Christmas Invasion, Gridlock, Utopia and The Waters of Mars.

The God Subtle

Stuart Ian Burns takes in Doctor Who: The Lodger

God, I hate James Corden the comedian.  He’s one of the few comedians who along with Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr make me think “Oh god not him…” and turn the television channel over even if it’s a programme I quite like which has musical innuendo in the title.  He’s smug, overheated and he’ll hammer a joke until it has lost all its mirth and then continue perhaps for minutes in the hopes that it’ll reach some kind of a renaissance and we’ll start laughing (evidenced by the CGI football monologue in tonight’s Doctor Who Confidential).  I’m sure he’s one of the reasons I watch less television than ever and I’m not surprised that Patrick Stewart took umbrage at his very existence, and respect the veteran Shakespearean even more for doing so via a slightly hammered reputational suicide mission at the podium of an awards ceremony.

But paradoxically, I quite like James Corden the actor.  True, with the odd exception that shall remain nameless, he’s essentially spent much of his career playing the same character, but the character is a meaningful microcosm of post-millennial angst representing men of a certain age who left school with all kinds of hopes and dreams but saw them drift away in a morass of technological and recessional paralysis.  Not that I’m saying that I know anyone who’s remotely like that.  His turn in The Lodger is further evidence of this; as soon as Craig fumbles with the pizza leaflet in an attempt to hide his love for Sophie, and Corden pouts, we immediately love him which means that when the Doctor connects with his simple, ordered existence we’re entirely engaged and want to see how they bounce off one another.

a morass of technological and recessional paralysis

Storywise, Gareth Roberts’s The Lodger shares a general synopsis with Paul Cornell’s Human Nature: the Doctor must live amongst humans.  But as if to expostulate the Frank Carson theorum, whereas the former was a complex meditation on what piece of work man is, his nobility and reason, this was a delightful spin on the 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers albeit with Mork dropping through the front door rather than a Mediterranean stereotype.  On first inspection perhaps, something of a departure for Roberts, best known on the television version of Doctor Who for his celebrity historicals.  But his work on The Sarah Jane Adventures demonstrated that he has the facility for placing contemporary characters in unusual situations, the kind of thing which doesn’t requite a Pixley-like attention to historical detail.

I wasn’t a fan of the original comic strip at first because in order for it to work, the Tenth Doctor’s eccentricities had to be exaggerated to such a degree that they became out of character for the incarnation with the greatest of empathies for the human condition (“Chops and gravy” etc).  It wasn’t until I realised that in telling the story from Mickey’s point of view, Roberts was showing us our favourite spaceman from a human perspective, albeit a human who wasn’t completely averse to walking with aliens himself, that the action made sense.  It was always a great shame that the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who couldn’t have found space for tv version; Noel Clarke would clearly have enjoyed the change of pace for Mickey put front and centre for a change rather simply the tin dog.

Robert Slowman and Barry Letts's patent pending presumably

In renovating the story for the Eleventh Doctor, Roberts was able to take advantage of an incarnation for whom eccentricity is a way of life, the bow-tied man who isn’t convinced of Terran etiquette and balanced the point of view.  Outside of the giant time flow analogue (Robert Slowman and Barry Letts's patent pending presumably) and targeted word salad, Eleventh was finally shown to be as adept as Ninth and Tenth in indirectly inspiring humanity to rise above itself.  From the moment he saw Craig and Sophie and their key obsessions, he understood their simple yet infinitely complex emotional relationship and knew that the only way that the boy would do anything about the girl would be to give him something to fight against, the kind of mundane arch enemy Amy referred to half a century ago in Victory of the Daleks (is it just me or has this series seemed to go on far longer than any of the others even without the Eurovision break in the middle?).

As in the previous episode, this made much of its limited cast.  Checking through her internet movie database entry, it quickly becomes apparent that the reason I haven’t alighted on Daisy Haggard’s charms before is because I’ve somehow managed to miss her entire career, other than her turn as the voice of a lift in a Harry Potter film and a key character called Donna in Ashes To Ashes #jamecordensfault.  If her Sophie was anything to go by, I’ve probably missed much.  Like a benign Donna Noble she was also required to be instantly likeable and approachable and very real; her relationship with Craig and the Doctor brought to mind another Daisy in a very different flatshare related sitcom, and Haggard tapped into that, her and Corden embodying that kind of nervous comfort that develops between friends when one of both of them is besotted.  Not that again I’m saying that I know … you get the idea.

#jamecordensfault

On Amy’s Choice, I suggested that director Catherine Morshead had deliberately worked against the dream-like quality of the script and given that episode a more mundane style but sadly because of this week’s material, she wasn’t given much of a chance to demonstrate anything else.  Too wild and wacky visual elements would not have worked in these locations though it’s worth noting how fluidly, unwittingly or not, she mimics the “realistic” feel of a more typical BBC drama in the scene about Craig or Sophie then contrasts that with a more hand-held, fractured framing for the Doctor and Amy as though we are watching two different series stitched together.  The treatment of the hologram up stairs was effectively creepy especially in the shot when Craig visited only to find the old man on the edge of his vision, his silhouetted figure tantalisingly close. 

Elsewhere, time is out of joint.  Earlier today, I tweeted the wacky suggestion, based on a future synopsis, that it would be revealed that the man at the top of the stairs was some future version of the Doctor having trouble with his blue box.  Not in my wildest dreams did imagine I would be half right.  This DIY SOS time machine was a stunning piece of design, exactly as I’d imagine the Master’s TARDIS would have been in days or yore if a budget had dropped through the vortex into Barry Newbery (or whoever’s) lap in a brown paper back (assuming it could be sneaked onto the BBC’s accounts).  He’d certainly have gone for the plasma balls as a design feature, though the lighting designers might have baulked at the determined monotone and filled the thing with spotlights (with Mat Irvine storing up twenty-years worth of resentment ready to complain about it on a dvd commentary).  What was this egg shaped version of Scaroth’s ship and will we see it again? 

with Mat Irvine storing up twenty-years worth of resentment ready to complain about it on a dvd commentary

Perhaps because of the tone of the rest of the episode, one element that went unexplored was the deaths of those seventeen innocents whilst the Doctor could not make up his mind about visiting the room at the top of the stairs.  In the preceding era, they would have been standing around outside the newly bungalowed house vacantly wondering what had happened to them then cheering in the Doctor’s direction for no realistic reason other than to give Murray Gold a chance to insert “climactic burst of emotion cue #3” onto the soundtrack.  In The Lodger, they stayed dead, from child to pensioner, from the bedraggled to the bored.  It’s another instance of this series experimenting against the franchise’s usual philosophical attitude, embodied in its companions, that we should strive to leave and seek something different and exciting, which usually leads to hijinks and adventure but now just seems to get you killed.

Speaking of which I can’t tell if Amy was thinking at the close of this episode “Rory.  Who’s Rory?” or “Oh for fuck’s sake, Doctor, make up your mind.”  Shot in the same block as Amy’s Choice, whereas that episode knocked the Doctor out for some of its duration and brought in a substitute, The Lodger traps Amy in the TARDIS which meant we got to see her best LeVar Burton talking to a disembodied voice acting.  A lot.  Luckily she was very good at the LeVar Burton talking to a disembodied voice acting and acting in general, making Amy utterly compelling even when she’s simply shouting and draping herself nervously backwards across the TARDIS console.  Still, her general absence in the episode led to the rather wonderful Karen in Greenwich sequences in BBC Three’s premiere science documentary strand, culminating in her obvious delight in seeing Saturn in real time.  Part of me wished she’d done it in character, but across the weeks, despite what I just said about the acting, the gap between where Amy starts and Karen finishes has perceptionally diminished exponentially.

we got to see her best LeVar Burton talking to a disembodied voice acting

Whatever, even with the football sequences (the badinage about which I’ll leave to someone more qualified and I don’t mean the collective on Football Focus), The Lodger was another superb episode that left me feeling warm and fuzzy in a season with perhaps the highest unconditional goal rate yet.  It even managed to make the crack in the wall look like a proper structural defect of the kind you tend to find in buildings of a certain age, providing an ensuing montage as if to prove the point.  And what of the trailer for next week?  If the voiceover sounded like someone playing an amateur version of the lottery gameshow Who Dares Wins at a convention (with Matthew Waterhouse rather than Nick Knowles waiting for some smart arse to hit the thirty-three answers he's been saddled with) the rest offered what will be the most atypical finale yet, with a range of period settings, no global contemporary threat that requires Trinity Wells or celebrity cameos (as far as we can tell) and a general impression of a narrative working up to a conclusion rather than a last minute interjection of plot.  All I could think was, what will the prolls make of this?

Next Week:  We discover how literally Steven is interpreting Greek myth.  Will someone, to paraphrase that great organ of learning, the wikipedia,  "overcome by curiosity, open the Pandorica, release the evils contained into the world, then unable to close it again save but one thing: hope"?

Ways Of Seeing

Doctor Who: Vincent And The Doctor
Review by Frank Collins

When Richard Curtis was announced as one of the writers for the new series I couldn't help but have some reservations. At worst, Curtis is indulgently over-sentimental as a writer and I did wonder what exactly the writer of The Vicar Of Dibley, Mr. Bean, Love Actually and The Boat That Rocked was going to do with a commission from his mate Moffat. Again, we were back to the same worries that circulated about Simon Nye writing for the series. Nye produced a great script that was bogged down by a lacklustre production and here Curtis bucks his disappointing trend of late with a rather good script. It does get lumbered with his trademark manipulation of the audience's emotions but on the face of it Vincent And The Doctor is certainly one of the better episodes in what has been, for me at least, a series that, bar a few episodes, consistently stumbles to match expectations.

At the heart of the episode is a rather moving performance from Tony Curran as Vincent Van Gogh and considering that this was a performance for an episode of Doctor Who and not a lavish and gritty bio-pic, he was able to convey a certain amount of Vincent's torment without it becoming too disturbing for a family audience. There is no doubt that a great deal of visual license has also been taken here and the Vincent we see is definitely a kinder representation of the desperately ill man that spent his final days in Auvers. It was certainly left to Curran to portray the man's unhinged state more through performance rather than through the typical visual and physical attributes that the likes of Lust For Life and Vincent And Theo provided. Perhaps the Vincent seen here lacked the edge of those Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth performances but Curran should be rightly praised for what he managed to achieve.

Much praise must also be given to Jonny Campbell, the director, as he nails the tone absolutely right and gives the episode a visual splendour that cleverly captures the intensity of Van Gogh's work, reproducing many of the signature works - The Wheat Field With Crows, The Church At Auvers - with a great deal of wit and care. Well, not quite. There are some liberties taken with the settings. The location of the story is suggested as Auvers-sur-Oise but two of the reproductions that the episode so meticulously puts onto the screen were in a completely different location. The bedroom where the Doctor goes to wake Vincent is a faithful recreation of The Bedroom In Arles painting, the cafe that the Doctor and Amy arrive at is a faithfully realised version of The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, At Night. The episode claims that these were in Auvers-sur-Oise when in fact they were in Arles. It's not as if they were next door to each other - Arles is in the South Of France and Auvers is in the suburbs of Paris. Beautiful production design, wonderfully lit and photographed but clearly a dollop of artistic license has been used with the locations of the inspiration for his major paintings.

As much of the license I suspect that was used in the various pronunciations of Van Gogh's name that litter the episode and, like the use of the paintings locations, it raises the question of historical accuracy in a series that Den Of Geek believes has returned to its Reithian 'educational' remit. Historical detail has never been one of the series strong points and I'm sure Billy Hartnell would have been fluffing all over the place ('Van Go..Goff…Guff, Chesterfield') if they'd attempted a similar story back in the 1960s. Besides, Curran's natural Scottish accent is sub-textually dismissed with a sweet joke about Amy and him sharing their origins in Holland and therefore it's clear that the production team are somewhat aware they're playing fairly fast and loose with the setting of the story. In the end, it doesn't matter because this is Doctor Who and not Vincent And Theo.

The tone is firmly Curtis' romantic comedy/tragedy stock in trade and the inevitability of Vincent's career path runs like a jet black seam through the cultural tourist bedrock of the story as the Doctor takes Amy into Vincent's world on a mission to truss an intergalactic chicken that's popped up in the window of The Church At Auvers painting. The mention of Van Gogh providing his daubs 'with no hope of praise or reward', as Bill Nighy's Dr. Black intones in the pre-titles, pretty much underlines the mission statement here. Never mind the fact that art is now an international commodity that is endlessly reproduced to such a degree that iconic paintings are divorced from the context which existed at the time of their making (the discussion about the preciousness of the paintings between Vincent, Amy and the Doctor touches on this), Vincent And The Doctor instead attempts to depict the context of their creation within the series own current obsessions with seeing, perception, memory and forgetting and bravely tries to democratise the reception and appreciation of art by describing the artist's vision itself.

This is underlined by the driver of the story - looking at something intensely enough you see something that is beyond the normal range of perception and suggests other dimensions and worlds, both in the artist's mind and, as the Doctor and Amy discover, physically existing within the real world. How we perceive things is also neatly summed up by the Doctor's gadget which can not only reveal the existence of the Krafayis but also reproduce the various faces of the Doctor when he pulls tongues at it in his Eleventh incarnation (a little Einstein reference there, I think), Amy's referal to the book of Van Gogh postcards as the official text, and the in-joke about Impressionists ('this is the problem with the Impressionists - not accurate enough. Would never happen with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters') that gently mocks the public reception of high art.

Vincent And The Doctor also pays some lip service to Vincent's bi-polar condition (the scenes where the Doctor and Vincent discuss the fact he can 'hear colours' and that 'nature is shouting' at him and later his breakdown as the Doctor goes to wake him) and briefly explores the connections between manic-depression and creative activity, the question Edgar Allan Poe himself pondered 'whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.' I admire Curtis' desire to highlight mental illness in the episode but wouldn't that point have been made more profoundly if Vincent's demons, sublimated and projected into the Jabberwocky-like Krafayis in the episode, were just simply the external realisation of the man's manic-depression rather than the obligatory 'monster of the week'?

The episode suggests that if the Doctor had not intervened then the Krafayis would simply have continued to blindly stumble around the Auvers-sur-Oise countryside polishing off the odd peasant until Vincent shot himself. It would have been far better if Curtis had simply stated that the Krafayis was just one of many phantoms that the Doctor and Amy help Vincent deal with, if only temporarily. That the creature is invisible, can only been seen through Vincent's 'mad' vision and the Doctor's equally bizarre gadget, almost elevates the idea to this level. As does the metaphor of the Krafayis as an abandoned, blind orphan ('I'm afraid, I'm afraid' says the dying creature) that offers an analog of Vincent's anger ('like the villagers who scream at me'), frustration and fear at his inevitable demise, the Doctor's loneliness and Amy's dislocated sense of herself since Rory was wiped from the time stream. This would also have fitted more aptly with Van Gogh's use of colour for its symbolic and expressive values as seen in his paintings and with the episode's concentration on how we see the world and how some are gifted to perceive it in a particularly powerful but self-destructive way.

Still, the fact that the Doctor and Van Gogh come to reproduce the 'George And The Dragon' figure that's briefly seen above the door of the church is both satisfying in its physical realisation, where Van Gogh symbolically uses the power of art, in the form of the easel, to fell the Krafayis beast, and in its nod to the 'slay the dragon' techniques used in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy where clients are required to identify their particular 'dragons' and use particular triggers to deal with recurring trauma. There's also a hint here of the mythical hero's journey that takes us back to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he delineates the stages and common elements found on the hero’s journey as a form of transformative psychotherapy.

As it is, the episode's 'cultural tourism' is rather blunt, even if it is beautifully realised, and the cachet of the 'celebrity historical' relies a little too heavily on the naturalising of recognisable cultural figures within a 21st century milieu, complete with the ever reliable excuse of 'alien monster' to drive what could have been a truly extraordinary drama about the areas of genius and madness that both Van Gogh and the Doctor oscillate between. Here, it really is a case of if not being necessary to depict the symbolic monster projected from Van Gogh's troubled mind as an actual, physical monster from another world to maintain the series credentials as fantasy or SF. Despite this concern about how physically realised Van Gogh's inner vision should be, we do get that rather lovely scene where Vincent, the Doctor and Amy lie down in the grass (emulating that 3D trailer that initially promoted the series) and they all try to see what Vincent sees.

The night sky is transformed into the swirls of his iconic The Starry Night painting and the episode makes a supreme effort to let us see the world from Vincent's point of view. It's a captivating moment that at least tries to make you understand what his artistic vision was attempting to achieve and is far more effective than the litany of Shakespeare quotes or the use of titles in the Christie pastiche that have stood in for what was supposed to be the genius of the written word in previous episodes and where the private pain of both figures was barely articulated. The Starry Night is one of his most popular works and here the sky transformed into swirling lines and glowing orbs suggest a possible representation of his mental state and embody an inner, subjective expression of Van Gogh’s response to nature. For the Doctor and Amy it is as if they are seeing the energies that bind the stars and planets together for the first time, without the use of technology as a frame of reference.

Vincent once said “Looking at the stars always makes me dream. We take death to reach a star,” and that's worth bearing in mind as the Doctor takes him to the stars and through time to allow him the grace to understand that whilst he suffered and died to reach that star, that apex of his creativity, the star continues to shine brightly long after his tragic death. What follows is a very powerful scene with Tony Curran completely stealing the episode as Vincent, overcome with the sheer joy and utter shock at the 'Van Gogh love' in the room as the camera spins around him in the gallery at Musee D'Orsay. A lovely, life affirming moment and where even Bill Nighy, as the gallery expert Dr. Black, manages to remain understated. Which is more than you can say for the irritating pop song smothered all over the start of the scene to tell you 'this is the bit where you must cry'. It didn't need it because Curran and Nighy can make you cry at the drop of a hat in that scene through the sheer quality of performance.

However, Curtis just can't bloody help himself. It's a good ending as it is despite the music, gives Vincent an emotional moment of triumph that any neglected artist would desire but doesn't tamper with or damage the fixed point in time that is his sad demise. It's the way of the world and Van Gogh's reputation must always remain post-humus and it's rather dim of Amy to think she can change that. So, it also works as a practical lesson for her. Good, leave it at that and with the Doctor's sweet 'pile of good things and bad things' speech. As they stare at the windows of The Church Of Auvers painting and declare 'No Krafayis' I really would have preferred 'cue end titles' at that moment. Instead, Curtis has to have that final zoom into the classic Sunflowers canvas with the 'For Amy' dedication. It's clearly not enough for him to show the removal of the Krafayis from a painting or suggest Vincent's inspiration earlier in the episode is Amy not so subtly sat in the middle of loads of sunflowers. As a scene that was good enough without being too trite but to then suggest that an artist who clearly sees nature through the prism of the unconscious and through the intensity of his bi-polar condition would then daub 'For Amy' onto a canvas of sunflowers, flowers he describes as a metaphor for the brevity of life and the inevitability of death, just smacks of poor judgement to me.

We get it, Richard. For a brief moment, the Doctor and Amy revealed Vincent's humanity and we saw the troubled man's psyche as the catalyst for his art and now because you feel you haven't manipulated the audience enough you slap on the corniest, most contrived coda in the book. To that end, why wasn't Dr. Black suddenly very suspicious at the changes in the painting and asking for it to be verified as a fake? It's an illogical device to use especially when the painting that has the dedication was completed a year before the episode allegedly takes place. So Vincent, feeling a bit chipper, went back and dedicated a completed canvas to a mouthy Scottish bint from Holland who came on strong to him in a cafe? Right. A pity then, because this is certainly one of the better episodes this year and despite the final manipulative twist from Curtis, the scene of Vincent in the Musee D'Orsay must stand out as one of the more moving sequences in the revival of the series even though in itself it seems at once both a generous and a cruel thing for the Doctor and Amy to show him his future, the Doctor knowing that tragedy will not be averted and Amy believing it can, before he walks into that wheat field and shoots himself.