Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

"Mardryn Undead, to begin with."

Stuart Ian Burns — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:20:32 +0000

Stuart Ian Burns sings the praises of Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

Happy Christmas! How are we all? Still suffering from mince pie indigestion and an overabundance of alcoholic cheer? Good, good. Let’s begin. Where was I? Right, that’s right, Christmas Doctor Who! Hooray! Now, for a good long while on my own blog, this blog, I had the tag line, “A vast archive in place of an imagination.”, which is used by the narrator in the Italian film Il Divo to describe its subject, former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a cold, callous, meticulous, unfeeling man without a shred of warmth. A bit like Donna Noble at the beginning of The Runaway Bride.

Previously I’ve employed it hopefully ironically to describe myself, but during the emotional crescendo of Doctor Who’s A Christmas Carol, as the older Kazran embraced the younger version of him, my fan gene was screaming “Blinovitch! Blin-oviiiiitch!” instead of the misty-eyed recognition that my favourite tv rendition of Charles Dickens’s original tale from ’77 with Michael Horden as Scrooge, always brings as the mental documentation I have of Doctor Who’s mythology asserted itself.

It’s that COPAC of the mind which throughout also led me to wonder exactly how the Doctor could be changing history to such a degree and not be creating cataclysms in the web of time all of the place making The Waters of Mars look like the dodgy banger in a Christmas cracker and how Kazran could have two sets of memories babbling about in his head when causality itself was being messed with, and why the Doctor hasn’t employed this methodology before, on, I don’t know, Davros?

Then as the night draws in I’m visited by three ghosts (Twitter, Gallifrey Base and the TARDIS Index File) and my imagination kicks back in. This is a whole new rebooted universe, time can be rewritten, who’s to say what’s up or down and if the Amy can play au pair to the younger version of herself in The Big Bang then hug away Kazran and let all those frozen people live again, keep Christmas well, and all the other stuff you’re going to do after the temporal duration of the episode.

Because come Boxing Day, come the second viewing, I’m delighted, beguiled and all the things writer Steven Moffat probably hoped I’d be the first time around. This is Moffat’s answer to Davies’s previous argument (from about the time of Voyage of the Damned) that the British public can’t handle anything too complex on Christmas Day, that something like Blink couldn’t work and what you really want is Who as blockbuster movie with faux Dickensian trappings like The Next Doctor, rather than emotional chamber piece about the timelord making someone less grumpy.

In actuality, the Doctor has used a similar methodology before, in Moffat’s only 90s Who fiction, Continuity Errors from the Decalog 3 Virgin Books anthology in which the Seventh Doctor also changed history to help deal with an obstinate librarian and Paul Cornell's Telegraph short story "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years". But the clever aspect of this story was in making the Doctor fully aware of his borrowing from literature. I don’t remember that happening much in the Hinchcliffe era. It’d be like the Fourth Doctor saying “Elementary my dear, Leela” in Talons.

It’s that self-awareness that stopped this from being the simple cover version it could have been and created an extra tension as to who the various ghosts would be. A lesser writer might have employed Rory somehow as the future ghost instead of what was the rather marvellous twist that originally led to me contracting Blinovitch syndrome and indeed more clearly insert some kind of Marley figure (though there’s probably an argument that the Doctor embodied him too). Where Dickens employs his ghosts as a device to allow Scrooge to visit various points in his own timeline, Moffat deploys the Doctor to create memories instead.

Just as years ago, the casting of Simon Callow as Dickens demonstrated this new version of Who meant business, the glinting eyes of Michael Gambon as Kazran shows how ambitious the show has become. Oddly enough, this is the first time he’s Scrooged. He played the Ghost of Christmas Present to Callow’s Scrooge in the animated Carol in 2001, the one were Kate Winslet sang, as well as Jenkins actually, but in fact he’s barely done any Dickens on screen so no wonder he took up this opportunity.

Gambon’s modesty in Confidential suggested that all he did was see in which direction Toby Haynes pointed and went there, but this was about as layered a performance we’ve seen from a Who guest star, utterly captivating especially in the scenes when he was called upon to remember fondly the memories captured photographically even though this was the first time the older Kazran was remembering fondly those memories, scene which themselves were reminiscent of his long term collaborator Stephen Poliakoff.

His performance might have been enough had the actors playing the younger Kazran’s not been up to the job, but luckily both Laurence Belcher (whose making quite a career from playing smaller versions of our greatest actors – he’s the teenaged Xavier in the X-Men prequel, understudying Patrick Stewart) and the new to the IMDb, Danny Horn, were more than capable of carrying the collective emotional weight of the single character, this was no Matthew Waterhouse turning into Andrew Sachs (cf, the Big Finish audios).

Matt clearly enjoyed the challenge of slightly pitching his performance differently with each of them and like Death to the Doctor we can clearly see now that he’s worked out how he wants to play the character and how Moffat wants to write it. His petulant reaction to all the kissing and marrying Marilyn was just perfect, and more importantly very specific to him, though it does explain somewhat how Tenth might have nabbled Liz I. Nevertheless, David Tennant seems like a very long time ago. The End of Time was only a year ago. Amazing.

The strength of the episode even managed to soften my heart towards Katherine Jenkins, a figure I usually have a snobbish enmity towards because of what she represents in the classical crossover market as I watch her compilations massively outselling the likes of “proper” singers like Anna Netrebko, Renee Fleming and Angela Gheorghiu, Classic FM to Radio 3, Classic FM Magazine to BBC Music, Pip and Jane Baker to Robert Holmes, David Gooderson to Michael Wisher.

Moffat somewhat protected her by making Abigail Dickens’s Belle figure, an obscure object of desire, Mulveyian projection of male desire only now and then allowed her own emotional beat. But in places, Jenkins melted my heart, especially when she sang as in the goofy coddling of the shark (Spotify link) and in the Murray Gold rush job that played out the episode (and how demeaning for the rest if us under achievers that Gold can knocking something like that out in a couple of days).

Speaking of Confidential discoveries, how have we only just employed Michael Pickwoad, a man who looks like he should be revealing how he created an entire Cyber-battlefleet in the 60s from a contemporary lunch budget not taking over now and showing the previous comparative youngsters how these things should be done? Pickwoad is of course a legend; his first proper prod. des. job was Withnail & I and he’s been providing drawing rooms for corsets and bow-ties on tv for years including The Old Curiosity Shop a few years ago.

His design work in A Christmas Carol was stunning, nodding not just to a kind of Dickensian steam punk aesthetic but also the soulless interiors of Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, the same kind of soulless privilege born from a heartless past. He’s brave too; obviously Moffat’s detailed script would have suggested the classically futuristic interior of the spaceship, but Pickwoad pushed it further than we’ve yet seen in nu-Who, as close as we’ve been to the plastic polish of some 80s Davison stories (in which a bridge would often be left to suggest the contents of an entire ship).

All of which didn’t seem to leave much room for Amy and Rory. Typically Arthur Darvill finally receives an opening credit but is barely in the episode but it certainly explains their absence from the cover of the Radio Times. They received a few good moments, not least the unspoken explanation for why they were in those costumes (not the timey-wimey reason suggested by the trailers) but essentially they were in the classic companion of waiting for the Doctor to save them. There’s a longer discussion to be had about this with reference to The Christmas Invasion, but I’ve been writing for three hours and five years already and it's time to wrap this up.

A Christmas Carol hasn’t convinced everybody but Moffat’s achievement has been to soften the heart of us Scrooges who too easily look to the details when it’s the emotional sweep that is important. Davies was capable of that too, though arguably most of his specials overeggnogged the Christmas pudding too much not least in the ghostly resurrection of Astrid. Unlike Dickens even, who at the end of his tale makes it plain that Tiny Tim didn’t die, there’s no cure for Abigail, who’ll pass away in Kazran’s arms once their shark-ride is over. We’re left with the message that sometimes we can fight, but sometimes the courage is in our acceptance, and that’s well worth ignoring five or fifty years worth of mythology for.

I say high, you say low. You say why and I say I don't know, oh no.

Stuart Ian Burns — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:14:47 +0000

Stuart Ian Burns says Sarah Jane Adventures: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith

Back in the distant past, in mid-October when I was still exactly in my mid-thirties, it seemed as though the production team were taking the brave step of writing out Luke and K9 in an effort to move away from the too easy deus ex machina style story conclusions which have tin-dogged the series from the start. Luke may have stuck around as a dismodied head and shoulders on a flatscreen, making fleeting appearances to justify his continued presence in the introduction ("Boy GEEENIUUUS"), but the stories since have arguably been more thrilling because, with one obvious exception, the remaining attic allies have needed to rely somewhat on their wits, putting the clues together without too many easy answers (even to the point of taking Mr Smith out of the equation for this or that reason) and a fair bit of trial and error.

Which makes me wonder whether Clay and Gareth, in crafting the conclusion to Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith and this season are being entirely serious when offering a solution that requires the combined effort of Luke, K9, Mr Smith and newbie electronic soap tray Mr White and a return to the worst excesses of previous stories: the kind of easy research leaps Lisbeth Salander would be proud of, action sequences lasting what seems like mere seconds piled one on top of another in which characters shift geographical area in moments and not always through teleportation and a villain that requires the emotional fallout from a fake global terror to be destroy. Epic concepts like Clyde trapped in the orbital golfball which would have been explored over whole episodes in the old Doctor Who (and did in the case of The Space Pirates) are ushered in and out all too soon.

As ever I was simultaneously elated and appalled, especially since the first episode is actually a quite sensitive (well sensitive for this panto) portrayal of Alzheimer’s or at least the stresses of watching a trusted friend or family member getting old. Who of us hasn’t forgotten something or witnessed someone else forgetting something really rather major like the current residency of their son and wondered – are we or they alright? Lis wonderfully demonstrated first the denial to friends, denial to oneself before acceptance and the decision on whether to fight or relent and let nature take its course.

Of course, in the real world none of this is brought about by a milfian temptress in a red sports car with matching couture. Like Samantha Bond and Suranne Jones before her, Julie Graham senses rightly or wrongly (it oscilates) that this isn’t the place for subtlety though she manages in the first episode to just about convince us that Ruby could be a potential replacement for Sarah Jane, cleverly approximating some of Lis’s business (the walk, the stance, the flick of the hair). By the cliffhanger, the needs of the show kick in of course and it's as though Kate O’Mara is in the room (not least because Ruby’s plan, to steal people’s life essences wasn’t a million miles away from the real Rani’s in her first adventure, if you squint).

Ultimately ranking about a seven on the Zaroff scale you still have to applaud the determination with which Graham sells the Katesh’s gastroschisis state and the boggle eyed notion of a stomach which exists outside an alien’s body, the writers sadly failing to have Clyde suggest it as useful alternative to a gastric band. What I would have liked to have seen would have been a proper battle of wills between Ruby and Sarah Jane the latter having already lost her wits before the former reached ascendancy. Would I be wrong in suggesting that the title character has been even less present this series, mostly falling into her old form of having to be rescued? In nearly ever story this year she seems to have been zapped or put through some sort of mental torture.

Which brings us back to doe in which I also expected the Doctor to arrive for good measure. Whilst its true that both Rani and Clyde also have a hand in the solution, there’s always something slightly unedifying about a character who’s previously had little input on a story charging and saving the day. Perhaps Luke’s still ill-advised scarf is meant to hide the chord which is being used to dangle him in like the original gods that would be brought in at the close of a Euripidian Greek tragedy. Aristotle hated this approach to drama and said so in Poetics where he proposed (radically for 335 BCE) that the resolution of the plot must always spring from the internal actions of the play, a model which has worked for much of the rest of the series.

Or as Hitchcock says, if you show a gun in the opening reel it has to have gone off by the end. What just about makes it saleable (other than the fact that Luke did at least put in an appearance in the first episode) is Tommy Knight’s burst of adolescent vitriol, his character bawling out Rani like a refugee from a John Osbourne play, as though what we’re actually seeing is the result of some whole other unseen narrative which is happening at Oxford, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as the main villain (a tricky bugger once you’ve reached the middle section). When he later clumsily tells Rani that he loves her, it begins to seem almost exactly like my university experience.

But predictably amid all the shouting and running, the best scene is the quiet moment between Rani and her mum, in which Gita describes quite logically the jealousy of seeing her daughter palling about over the road with this second mother figure and the secret they clearly have between them, Mina Anwar perhaps suggesting, just as she did with the alternative version of the character in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith that the feckles, flowery, “HELLO SARAH!” version of her character is an act or defence mechanism and that, eep, Gita might have hidden depths which is quite a contrast to Graham’s gurning from across the road. It’s this contrast which has, on the whole, made this series such a joy.

Next Time: I don't know. Time's caught up with us.

The future is brighter and now is the hour.

Stuart Ian Burns — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:15:55 +0000

Stuart Ian Burns gets Sarah Jane Adventures: Lost In Time.

One of the story ideas for the new series of Doctor Who which I’ve coveted over years but is unlikely to happen is for a good old fashioned pure historical, one in which the only sci-fi element would be the Doctor and his plus one. I know these were largely curtailed in the 60s due to poor ratings, but the contemporary twist would be that the TARDIS team and the audience after decades of conditioning would assume that a monster or some other fantasy element is the cause of whatever mischief is, but in the end historical truth would assert itself. In other words, a reverse of The Time Meddler.

While we wait for Moffat or his successor to come to his or her senses, Lost In Time is an entertaining stop gap, with enough historical exposition to keep Lord Reith’s ghost from haunting Mark Thompson for a couple of nights at least (or at least until Strictly’s on and the poor John’s grave rolling begins again). It’s also one of the more blatant homage’s to the classic series, The Key To Time season retold in just over fifty minutes. Oh how Russell and Rupert Laight must have chuckled as they made sure one of the objects was an actual key. It’s just a pity Lalla Ward wasn’t available or willing, probably.

But this is an episode filled to the brim with homages of one form or another not least in the figure of the Shopkeeper, who appears from Mr. Benn, casting the team out to the various points in time, albeit without a new choice of fancy daywear. Cyril Nri tries his best with a part that mostly replicates the cast of Trial of a Timelord in standing around commenting on the stories and offering some much needed cliffhanger acting when required. Who is this mysterious figure, one of the Trickster’s lot or something else? Perhaps there's another Shopkeeper out there holding the balance of power, their constant Sinden/Davies-like rivalry a cosmic version of Never The Twain (but fighting over the health of planets and moons rather than a cheap bit of Carltonware or a mahogany table).

Each of the three yarns also looks towards other fictions. Rani’s story, though based on fact has the beating heart of a Philippa Gregory novel, putting a recognisable human face on a historical queen. Demonstrating that a quite complex drama can still be told on the BBC in a couple of rooms, a cast of few and some entertaining corsetry, this neatly describes the events leading up to the scene in Paul Delaroche’s painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey which hangs at the National Gallery, actress Amber Beattie sympathetically portraying the doomed young monarch rather misused for religious point scoring.

Given that for some younger viewers the second world war is as distant a memory as the Nine Day’s Queen, perhaps we should be cautious in welcoming Clyde's story, Theories abound on whether the Nazi’s did indeed land on England’s mainland shore as depicted here and in its anticedents Went the Day Well?, The Eagle Has Landed, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, um, The Curse of Fenric. But the exposition is clear enough to explain that Thor's so-called Hammer is changing history so instead let’s just give a cheer for what is a really ripping boy’s own adventure of the kind which seem all too rare now and no I didn’t see that coming. I did indeed yelp.

Sarah Jane’s segment is almost pure Sapphire and Steel, with just a pinch of Moffat magic and a public information film from the 70s. Arguably the weakest of the three, it does still have a peachy performance from Gwyneth Keyworth as a Charley Pollard alike and the random casting of Lucie Jones from last year’s X-Factor as the kind of figure Princess Superstar warned us about. The problem is perhaps that this the story with the least direct jeopardy for the main character (apart from returning hime obviously), though at least kids might get the message that its dangerous to play with matches.

The editing challenge of running these three distinct stories next to each other is carried off well, even better perhaps in cutting between distinct timeframes than The Hours or Julie & Julia and without their direct plot connections. On reflection, both of those films would have clearly benefited from a fez wearer offering a running commentary to his parrot ("She's running out time! There's no way she'll manage to cook all of those recipes in a year! Why do they all look like Meryl Streep?" "Sqwark!"). The trick is in giving Clyde the majority of the action beats, balancing the pacing and having using the old hyperlink cinema trick of matching the shapes of shots in different locations.

What also ties the episode together is the willingness to, for want of a better phrase, “go there”. In both of their stories, Rani and Clyde are the victims of discrimination. If Rani’s is the same kind of euphemistic public school insult endured by Martha Jones during Human Nature, the Nazi’s description of Clyde is absolutely shocking, especially for this timeslot. The strong way that both of them deal with it is how role models are made, both Anjli and Daniel motivated to give some of their best acting of the season (last week’s near two-hander accepted). Too late sadly for forthcoming dvd documentary Race Against Time, but a welcome detail nonetheless.

Another excellent story then in what’s turning into what might be the best series yet, despite the Fordist Rentaghost influences. Continuity buffs will also be pleased to see, thanks to that newspaper clipping, we finally have a date for when these episodes are happening, contemporaneous with broadcast and so definitively after The Big Bang and so confirming the reset of the extra year which was a legacy of Aliens of London all those years go, although as I’ve just discovered it's all a bit of a mess anyway since The End of Time is apparently supposed to have “happened” in 2009 before Planet of the Dead and The Eleventh Hour in 2008 when Saxon was in power (breath). Yes, I know, the silence, the cracks, the time war, the Faction Paradox ...

Next Week: Speaking of which, the Earth wasn't as defended as we thought judging by the weaponry.

Isolation is not good for me. Isolation I don't want to sit on the lemon-tree.

Stuart Ian Burns — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:46:59 +0000

Stuart Ian Burns gets lost in The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Empty Planet.

Since the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, one of the “motifs” repeated across the stories (other than parents are good) has been the lack of people on the streets or stories occurring in locales that don’t require too many non-speaking extras shuffling about, improvising silent conversation or walking a dog, with entertaining expository reasons from the cast such as “Well, it is a Sunday” or “The fairground closed?” Now finally, we have a story which turns this budgetary weakness into a strength in a way which will no doubt become the model as the license fee is squeezed.

The Empty Planet offers the same bracing images of peopleless streets familiar from the likes of 28 Days Later or the various versions of I Am Legend in which the mass of humanity is just gone and those of us who ironically like people but hate gatherings can fantasise about going to the cinema without being disturbed by the rest of the audience (once we’ve worked out how the projector works), break into the National Archive and see what’s really been covered up under the seventy-year rule and having the run of the expensive food isle in Waitrose. Or is that just me?

True, with just a roof shot of the London skyline to sell the absence, much of the action takes place on the same few empty streets, but as with the best of this franchise, the non-diagetic implication of what’s happening beyond the main characters field of vision can be just as chilling as endless shots of a deserted Trafalgar Square. These are the best scenes in the story, Rani dashing about suburbia to a soundtrack of nothing other than the low hum of the electricity supply showing off her inquisitive nature as she checks her neighbour's houses for signs of life. And what a messy bunch they are.

Except in such narratives, once the main character has twigged that they might be alone, often the scariest notion then is that they aren’t. Luckily for Rani, especially since all she had to defend herself with was in the dull end of tv remote control, that meant Clyde and luckily for us since writer Gareth Roberts replaces the silence with some really good character moments as the kids come to terms with their isolation and also their responsibility to discover what’s been going on despie being the zeppos of the group.

Like Sarah Jane, like the Doctor, like Xander, they’re so caught up on this life that they run towards the danger rather than away from it unless they're told not to and even then. For once, Daniel Anthony and Anjli Mohindra were allowed some meaty scenes (that's two stories on the run) in which their characters considered their place in the world (of the kind usually reserved for Tommy Knight) and what they might mean to each other and they were mostly up to the challenge providing some useful chemistry, Anjli offering her now trademark dreamy doe-eyes.

To an extent it’s a shame that as a kids rather than teen show a plot rather than just puberty has to assert itself; a real format buster would have had the two of them trailing about the streets of London (or Cardiff) coming to terms with the loss of everything, especially their parents, the true horror being that Clyde’s joke about him and Rani being the new Adam and Eve might come to pass with the loss of innocence that follows. Humanity would then have popped back in for some unexplained reason after an hour, along with the disappointing return of their hierarchical place within the family unit or some such.

Not that this necessary plot isn’t entertaining with plenty of moments for us to match our wits with the main characters as we um and aha along with them. Kids who’ve just finished watching the release of the third series were no doubt shouting about Clyde and Rani’s grounding by the Judoon and I was especially pleased with myself when I realised what kind of air, the robots were really thinking of, with its shades of Raymond F. Jones's pulp novel The King of Eolim and Lance Parkin’s Father Time, even if the number of choices isn’t exactly huge.

Following which we were gifted that gorgeous shot of an alien world reminiscent of the Boeshane Peninsula and Gallifrey. If only the budget could stretch to us seeing one of these places for longer than a few seconds. How do these robots fit within that society? Is this a Naboo affair were a small child is the one thought best for high office with Ketchup and Mustard or whatever they’re called as nursemade and coup-repellers? Perhaps if Big Finish’s licenses is relaxed a bit – as is rumoured (I read on the internet) – we’ll be gifted with a ten cd series by way of explanation.

Either way, The Empty Planet is brill entertainment, certainly the best story this series that doesn't feature the Doctor, making the most of the need to give Lis Sladen a holiday. It's also surprisingly interesting in mythology terms; the reactions of Haresh and Prince Gavin almost confirm now that Journey's End and The End of Time have effectively been rebooted out of everyone's memories. Again I ask (because I'm fishing for suggestions) are we to assume that its simply RTD taking advantage of the cracks or feeding into the ongoing main Doctor Who storyline in relation to the silence (whatever that is?).

Next week: That guy who played thingy in whatitsname.

All these places had their moments. With lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life I've loved them all.

Stuart Ian Burns — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:53:23 +0100

Stuart Ian Burns witnessed The Sarah Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor

The Green Death was broadcast before I was born, Jo Grant leaving the Doctor before I was even conceived. Yet seeing Katy Manning clumsily burst through the doors on the fake funeral presided over by the Buzzie, Dizzie, Ziggy and Flaps from The Jungle Book, I'm still filled to the brim with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, giggling at the sight of this older version of the girl who broke Mike Yates’s heart now breaking a vase, words spilling out of her like the Doctor himself with post-regenerative verbal diarriah, a young endogenous mix of her own husband and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles at her side.

If nothing else, Death of the Doctor is a successful demonstration of the power of merchandising, the ability of the videos then dvds, novels and audios to keep a character alive, pickled in amber at the age she was when she originally appeared in the programme and making her important and much loved even to those of us whose first identifiable memory of the programme is Leela and K9 tracking through a corridor in some story or other (The Sun Makers?) so that when she does re-emerge “baked” our hearts leap on greeting an old friend.

Still waiting for my own Doctor Who girl so that we can make some, I don’t know what Jo’s significance is for any children watching; it’s a few year since School Reunion and even though that story will probably still be present to them for much the same reason Timelash is unfortunately to us, it’s not a bad idea that a new set of youngsters discovering the franchise for the first time should be introduced to the concept that the Doctor had a different face and companions and history before the new married couple, that same story should be roughly retold from a slightly different perspective, with some different chaps with wings.

My guess is that at least initially a lot of this material will head on over their heads except for the useful information that Amy and Rory are on a honeymoon whilst this adventure is going on, the youngsters giggling instead at the Muppet vultures and hiss at another dodgy authority figure whilst the adults are enjoying a meditation on memory, of old and new adventures, of finding a stimulating place in the world even after you’ve done what could have been the most exciting thing in your life. In this script, Russell T Davies proves that it’s possible to write for both age groups without resorting to dated Terminator references.

And both adults and kids can agree that Matt Smith’s version of the Doctor has now clicked, the actor inhabiting the skin of the character with supreme confidence, the weight of a millennia travel gathered across his shoulders. What we have here is (along with the climax to his first series) evidence that he’s clearly consolidated his approach, so much so that in places (aided it has to be said by a writer who’s clearly enjoying the opportunity to write for a Doctor he didn’t initiate) he almost manages to unseat the title character from her own series. When Matt suggested in a recent DWM interview: “You’ve got to bed into this part. I’m going to get better. I’m going to push the part to its limit”, he wasn't lying.

So well does he capture the mix of dottiness and sober reflection and fiery danger at the heart of the timelord, that it's almost impossible to tell how accurate Davies’s dialogue is in relation to the Eleventh Doctor; rather like Paul McGann reading Tom’s previously abandoned words for the audio Shada, Smith's able to make the words his own. Davies could just as well be giving him the full Tennant and I’m not sure would noticed. Not that it stops the ticks of relevant previous Doctors from seeping through, a Tenth like growl when faced with a decision in an air duct, a quite Pertweesque “yes” in agreement at the relief of a still living Smith and Jones in a lead lined coffin.

With so much else happening, it’s also a pleasure to see the kids being given to emotional weightlifting too; whilst some might find it difficult to care for the plight of a teenager travelling the world as part of a family tree that seems to have an abundance of disposable income, albeit aiding worthy causes, there must be children watching who for various reasons have also been farmed off to older relatives losing contact with their parents. With Davies offering a rare occasion when Haresh isn't simple straight man and genuine father figure to Rani, the writer's big theme in this secondary storyline that parents are good, something most of us can agree with.

Death of the Doctor is, then, one of the few occasions, blue little man group accepted, when Sarah Jane Adventures genuinely aspires to be more than programme just for children. Sam Watt’s music brings an epic quality to a story, which like some of the best classic Who, is ultimately told in about three rooms, a corridor, some ducting and a quarry. Ashley Way’s direction favours the close-up, all the better to capture the obvious chemistry between Lis and Katy born from years spent on the convention circuit together, the former graciously seceding the focus for a couple of weeks to a fellow actress reliving her youth.

In the final scene, Davies offers his equivalent of God's Final Message to His Creation, retconning the thematic undercurrent begun in the first season of nu-Who of the Doctor’s positive effect on the people he touches, essentially clearing up the grey skies, brushing off the clouds and cheering up a range of classic companions, taking off the gloomy mask of tragedy fitted on them by spin-off authors in the wilderness years, at least the ones still alive on Earth in whatever year this season of SJA is set in (sorry Dodo) which for some of us was rather more potent than the Doctor’s apparent publicity baiting new regenerative cycle.

On first inspection this seems like the writer disregarding even criticising the very merchandising that gave his returning character the life and relevance which made this story psychologically intelligible to most of us of a certain other age. But in fact, he’s been rather more sensitive. Glance through the relevant wikia pages and we discover that with the exception of Ace, whose timeline is a mess anyway, he’s simply adding to their on-going stories and in the case of Ben and Polly inadvertently offering a third act happy ending to love story told across decades via short fiction in the style of When Harry Met Sally. In other words, returning me to the merchandise that led me to this story in the first place.

Next Week: Challenge of the Gobots.

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

Making all his nightmare plans for everybody.

Stuart Ian Burns — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:59:25 +0100

Stuart Ian Burns meets The Nightmare Man.

Bye then Luke.

As you discovered, heading off to university is a scary business, especially since you’re barely old enough to know that checked hipster scarves are problematical at best. It’s all about change, though I’m the last person to give you any advice other than if a heavenly looking French girl invites you into her room on the second night, you go no matter what K9 says, you go. Honestly. You do not say, “Well I’m feeling very tired” or “That’s not something we do…” or whatever else might emanate from your lips bypassing your alien brain. Otherwise you’ll spend the next three years imagining what would have happened. Not that such a thing ever happened to me. Obviously.

To break out of the metafilter, largely because I can’t work out how to sustain it for the next however many paragraphs (I'll try to be brief), it’s quite brave of The Sarah Jane Adventures to introduce the concept of university to its young audience. True, many of them will have older siblings who’ve already driven the yellow beetle down the driveway and it’s treated like an extension of school (we’re not even told what he’ll be studying in “Oxford” though if it’s maths he should have gone to Manchester) but nevertheless it’s a reminder that our heroes aren’t getting any younger and that they’re now of teen drama age. What happens with Clyde and Rani finish their A-Levels?

if it’s maths he should have gone to Manchester

Writing out Luke was one of the The Nightmare Man’s three main functions. I don’t know the ins and outs of Tommy Knight’s departure, though the in-camera appearance for Maria's photo might hint that like Yasmin Paige it’s for educational reasons. But the loss of the character and K9 does have something of the destruction of the sonic in The Visitation about it; even taking into account that this is a kids show, the convenience of having a Doctor-lite super-genius on hand to “solve” the central mystery in each story as earlier identified by JNT does mean that too often the dramatic tension ebbs away.

The second function was of course to scare us witless. As our avatar in the dreamscape, Tommy very effectively communicated his fear, not just of nightmares, but of having nightmares for the first time, lacking the emotional props that most of us have to deal with them. The sight of him, lost in the void, his head shifting backwards and forwards was a horrible image, piercing our child-like anxieties about being totally alone, and if we’re young enough, without our parent’s care, home sick. Sorry, bare with me, I’m having another fresher’s flashback. Oh, that phone call.

That probably would have done the job even without Julian Bleech’s stunning turn as the villain; if Toby Jones’s similarly hewn Dream Lord was all about psychological terror, TNM’s power was in his elastic body, the Milliband-like boggling panda eyes and the voice, which like his previous emergences as Davros and in the even earlier The Ghostmaker, had the capacity to nip into your soul and poke about a bit. Even if budgetry concerns seemed to halt his passage into the other residences on Bannerman Road, Bleach demonstrated (just as the late Heath Ledger and countless other Jokers did before him), the scariest villains can be easily achieved with some face paint and utter unselfconsciousness.

Heath Ledger and countless other Jokers did before him

The final function was to reconfirm what makes the show work. Despite the various mentions of the timelord here to foreshadow his appearance in the next couple of weeks, with the main show now in other hands, and Torchwood in production stateside, SJA could be viewed as something of an orphan, a continuation of the Russell T Davies years. But really what we find are the same elements: the willingness to experiment with storytelling structure, the sense of fun not least the rather wonderful exchange between Mr Smith and K9, the budding screwball chemistry between Clyde and Rani and Liz Sladen still bursting with energy even after all these years (the older dream-like version of her also demonstrating the actress's often untapped comic range).

Now we await the return of Jo and the appearance of the Doctor and the first full script by RTD in ten months (Can you believe The End of Time was only in January? Doesn’t it feel like ten years ago?) and it’s mark of this story’s quality that didn’t simply feel like treading water. What we had here was an above average script from Joseph Lidster with some genuinely funny moments, clever direction from Joss Agnew and if the climax seemed to drag a bit, the methodology for final demolition of The Nightmare Man not quite clear, its philosophy, that friends who stick together can do anything, are brilliant, is generally a good thing. Until the second week when you realise that not everyone in the student hall is your friend.

Sorry, there it is again.

Radio Squee

Stuart Ian Burns — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:25:02 +0100

Stuart Ian Burns listens to the Doctor Who Prom 2010

Listening to a Doctor Who Prom on the radio should be a miserable experience for most fans simply because we’re not there and we can't see what we're missing. When the audience are reacting to whatever’s happening in the Royal Albert Hall, it’s not until the end of a piece that (in this case) presenter Petroc Trelawny explains that the eleven rhythmic applauses are for the video appearances of each of the different incarnations of the Doctor, so we should be disappointed that we couldn’t quite rightly cheer for Paul McGann at the correct moment (or whichever Doctor is wrongly your favourite).

Yet, Karen’s funny introductions in which she seemed be surprised by the sound of her own voice, Arthur's astonishment at the scale of the auditorium, the weight of the orchestral and choral sound and the infectious atmosphere in the hall were just enough to transport at least my thoughts to my imagined favourite spot just in front of the stage (which I hear in reality isn’t acoustically the best place to stand but it's my imagination so for me it is). Someone else from this parish was actually in the hall tonight (and will be again tomorrow lunch time) and may write about the experience so I don't really want to steal his thunder. But I did at least want to say, as Karen might, wasn't that, well, amazing?

der-der-der-dum-da-dum vocals

This was also a fascinating first chance to hear the imaginarium of Murray Gold (orchestrated by Ben Foster) largely without the dialogue on top. First impressions in the prologue and The Mad Man with a Box were that in keeping with Moffat’s scripts, Gold had embraced the infantile qualities of the premise of the series by shifting from the ethereal qualities of “Flavia” to the kinds of der-der-der-dum-da-dum vocals that a child (and some adults) might use to interpret the music, essentially giving them something to sing along to. As the concert progressed, Gold was keen to demonstrate that although this is a new series with new themes, the range and ability he established in the previous era was still in effect.

This Is The Doctor, what we heard of it under being drowned out by the dialogue (for a chance – it's usually the other way round) in contrast to the Tenth Doctor's angsty theme, is broad and rhythmic with an added, strident level of heroism that suggests the character has moved on from the underlying tragedy of the first two incarnations of the new era. Battle in the Skies (Daleks vs Spitfires) may have lacked the raw vocal distinctiveness of the The Dark and Endless Dalek night, but the meddly Liz, Lizards, Vampires and Vincent better demonstrated the range of sounds that the composer has to produce across the series, the final section perfectly capturing the melancholic state of the painter.

Perhaps inevitably my favourite tune of the night was Amy, which keys in nicely to the slightly madcap elements of the character’s personality but also includes some evident discord because her life doesn’t make sense. Murray’s companion compositions have been a mix of tragic (Rose), plaintive (Martha and Rose) and screwball (Donna) and in Amy he finds something rather more magical, perhaps because it has to cover the span of a longer life, and so has to fit both the child like wonder of Amelia and the bright young yet cynical thing she’s become.

Another gift at the close of the concert was the latest version of the Doctor Who theme, and for the first time in general public (after a couple of tantalising hints at the stuttery end of the credits sequences in the Doctor Who PC games) the middle eighth which is the moment when this rendition suddenly makes sense as the choir crashes in. I still live in hope that Moffat will have a change of heart and make good on his praise for the Delia Derbyshire arrangement and use the thing in the next series, but after hearing Murray's latest version tonight I’m oddly less hostile towards it. The graphics still look horrendous though.

I still live in hope that Moffat will have a change of heart and make good on his praise for the Delia Derbyshire arrangement and use the thing in the next series

Amid Murray Gold’s gold, the classical, some would say archival music was well chosen: the incessant, metrical sound of John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine brought to mind the ticking of a clock; Walton’s busy Portsmouth Point Overture suggested the bustle of a space port; Wagner’s repeating Die Walküre (which I made some good jokes about last time); Orff’s O Fortuna, the certain inspiration for much of Murray’s choral work and Holst’s Mars from The Planets the certain inspiration for much of the music in the Star Trek films, almost unlistenable now without imagining Picard growling “The line must be drawn here!” just as the Enterprise shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.

During the interval in 2008, the BBC controversially commissioned science fiction writer Justina Robson to provide an audio essay on the programme which quickly descended into a bonkers evisceration of the sexual politics of the show. This time, much more in keeping with the mood of the concert, Matthew Sweet offered a pleasant and intelligent short history of the score music in the classic series from An Unearthly Child through to the unearthly noise of Keff McCulloch which 2Entertain would do well to snap up and put out as an extra on one of their future releases.

All of the composers interviewed were on good form and although some of the stories were well worn (Dudley Simpson biking over the pages days before transmission), it was interesting to hear how their experiences and the demands placed upon them by successive producers were very similar across the forty years, assuming that if the video wasn't of the standard they'd hoped, the music would be able to somehow pull it together. That it did, is a testament to their creativity and like Sweet, I too sometimes whistle City of Death out in the world, and even did it in Paris. But that's a story for another time.

the unearthly noise of Keff McCulloch

Back in the Albert, any disappointment about the audience’s genuine sympathy for the exterminated Daleks before the interval (has it come to this?) quickly dissipated in the face of Matt Smith’s lively and mostly live turn as the Doctor. In an interview at the back of this month’s Doctor Who Magazine, the actor suggests, going into the next series, that he has a better handle on how to play the character and that was certainly on display here as he navigated a mix of improv and script with a volunteer from the audience. Smith is able to fully inhabit the Doctor now and it seems to be because he’s realised that the best way to make him convincing is to simply be himself (unless he was simply being himself tonight and so therefore he was the Doctor – there’s a brain teaser).

Music of the Spheres succeeded because of its evocation the beauty of classical music through a rather gorgeous speech; whatever this was called simply brought the magic of the show right into the auditorium. We weren’t given an indication on the radio as to the age of this small boy, but surely the experience of interacting with a fictional character will have interesting repercussions for his future psychological development. Let’s hope for the sake of his parents he doesn’t spend the next decade or so obsessing about this mysterious imaginary friend from his past who he helped save half of London, but then, unlike Amy, but like the rest of us, he can keep in touch with his friend’s adventures. And how they sound.

Next: Dvořák's Slavonic Dance in E minor Op.72 No.2

The Doctor and Amy's Excellent Adventure

Stuart Ian Burns — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:51:21 +0100

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).

This is Fictile Trap

Stuart Ian Burns — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:03:40 +0100

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?

The God Subtle

Stuart Ian Burns — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:53:34 +0100

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"?