Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Radio Squee

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 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 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 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"?

"Deze review is geboren uit wanhoop. Ik heb bijna mijn eigen oren afgesneden probeert te schrijven. Hier is dan zeven uur van mijn leven ..."

"Hello, and tonight’s Middle Row will concern itself with a single artistic achievement, this week’s Doctor Who, Vincent and the Doctor, which we’ll discuss with Behind The Sofa reviewer Stuart Ian Burns.  In it, the timelord as currently played by on television by Matt Smith meets the Dutch impressionist a year before he committed suicide as they battle against an invisible monster.  Here’s a clip …"

“You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”

“If you made an omelette, I'd expect to find a pile of broken crockery, a cooker in flames, and an unconscious chef.”

"That’s the wrong clip.”

“(interrupting) Yes, that’s City of Death.”

“Oh right.  So Stuart, what did you think of it?”

”Marvellous.  Absolutely.  Absolutely marvellous.  Certainly one of the best episodes of recent years.”

“Now, Richard Curtis isn’t known for being a writer of science fiction.  Did you have any reservations about him writing for Doctor Who?”

”When Curtis was announced as a writer, I was one of the few who probably had quite mixed feelings about it.  Having grown up with his work, quoting chunks of Blackadder with friends during chemistry lessons at school, crying through Four Weddings and a Funeral and in adoring Notting Hill, I’ve simultaneously hated Bean, sat stony faced through The Vicar of Dibley and wondered why he’s been so determined to turn Comic Relief into contradiction in terms. 

"He's written a time travel adventure before of course ..."

"Black Adder: Back and Forth -- yes -- but that was really just a mechanism to visit the same characters in other time periods.  My ambivalence reached its zenith when I chose to analyse Love Actually for a university dissertation and found a deeply misogynistic work in which all the middle class white men are permitted to romance and marry the help and the female characters must give up on romance either to care for a disabled relative or live in a loveless marriage for the good of the children.  His follow-up, The Boat That Rocked, was an editing disaster that continued his slightly dodgy approach to sexual politics with its resurrection of the Chaucerian bed trick.

Only in recent times has the Make Poverty History campaigning drama The Girl in the Café offered some of the old sparkle with its May to December romance and a social conscience and it’s that writer that I hoped would pitch up with our favourite timelord and his current plus one.  The pre-broadcast press releases about Curtis having an idea in his head for years about illuminating Vincent Van Gogh’s madness and deciding it would be best served as a Doctor Who story suggested that it could go either way.”

“And which way did it go for you?”

“Well, I think it’s important at which point we should take a short break to discuss what we want from a Doctor Who episode.  Personally, I don’t care, other than that it should be good.  Of course, whether some is “good” or “not good” is an open and lengthy discussion, which I suspect we don't have time for, but generally I have a very relaxed attitude to what the franchise is offering and indeed tend to be equally impressed when it’s breaking out of formula to propose something different like Love & Monsters or using that formula to make a specific point about it or its main character like The Waters of Mars.”

“Which is a given, I suppose, um …”

“I think the success of the episode, and an extraordinarily successful episode it is, clearly Curtis’s best work in five years, is that it manages to do both.  Richard Curtis fighting against Doctor Who’s formula and presenting us with the best of both worlds, a campaigning drama about mental health that requires a phone number over the credits versus celebrity pseudo-historical, the Doctor fighting the psychological demons inside someone else’s head, the head of Vincent Van Gogh chasing an alien that can be poked by an easel.”

"So it’s a bit of an atypical episode, then?”

“The scene beneath the stars is the perfect example.  However important the Krafayis is in forcing the Doctor to visit Provence and providing the expected action sequences, it’s one of those rare occasions, rarer still on the television wing of the franchise these days, which I sometimes wish would happen more often, in which the usual shocks take a back seat to offering an insight and perspective on history and its fellows,”

“How insightful is the episode in terms of Van Gogh’s work?”

“I'm not enough of an expert to really comment on the aspects of the episode that directly reference the work, though some of the recreations of the paintings were startling even if now and then -- for example his bedroom -- historical accuracy was apparently fluid at best, but then, if you assume that this is the Whoniverse's version of the man's life rather than our own, everything's hunky-dory.  If Dickens can erroneously take his speech tour to Cardiff, then this is fine too.  My first proper experience of Vincent Van Gogh’s genius was at library school…”

“You went to library school?”

“Yes, well it was a university degree in information studies, but I like to call it library school, just as I went to “film school” years later.  You do know we’re still on the air?”

“Oh yes, sorry.  Go on…”

“We’d been tasked, in that pre-Google period, with carrying out a literature search for sources of information about one of his paintings.  During the course of finding articles and books related to the Starry Night, of which we only had a small black and white illustration, I was amazed to discover, as we all did in the Doctor Who Confidential that accompanies the episode, that he produced from his cell of the sanatorium.  I couldn’t understand how such a troubled figure could paint something that beautiful, from memory.

Now, I’m surprised to find that Doctor Who, in a scene that might otherwise have only strained itself onto the pages of a spin-off novel in which the timelord his current plus one and Vincent himself look up to the sky and he describes what he sees do I finally get some sense of how it happened.  As the “real” sky digitally swirled to recreate Van Gogh’s vision we discover it’s because the artist was able to remember not the real image but how it effected his emotional well-being.”

"Woud Lord Reith be pleased with the way the paintings were portrayed?"

"I certainly think that any UK museums with Van Gogh paintings on display should brace themselves over the coming weeks.  But even taking into account the scenes outside the church in which the Doctor's manic name dropped reached Vasari levels this wasn't a documentary.  But we did at least get more of a sense of Vincent as a painter and his abilities, certainly than we did with Shakespeare."

"The theme of mental health has been covered across television in recent times, most recently a season on BBC Four which included another showing of the Stephen Fry documentary about his own condition.  Was this a worthy contribution?"

“I think it was.  The extrapolation of the painter’s mental state was sensitively tackled as Curtis and Moffat recognised there’s only so far you can go at tea time on Saturday.  The trick is to focus on the Doctor and Amy’s reaction to the painters mood swings, his drift between lucidity, extreme moments of inspiration and the depths of darkness and despair.  Broad strokes to be sure, but there has to have been some children watching last night who noticed the similarities between Vincent’s behaviour and that of a relative.

But notice that this story doesn’t offer any easy answers.  In the past few years we’ve been shown the inspirational, often messianic abilities of the Doctor to inspire people to be better – not least at the close of the previous episode.  Yet here was a man who the timelord knew couldn’t be saved even after dragging him through time to show him the effects his work would have on future generations, demonstrating the difference between some mood swings and a genuine psychological condition.  That’s very powerful.”

“Now, when people think of screen Van Gogh, they’ll immediately think of Kirk Douglas in Lust For Life, but there was also of course Tim Roth in Vincent and Theo – which the title of this episode refers to – John Simm in The Yellow House. How does Tony Curran measure up?”

"He’s riveting.  Authoritative in his gait yet also somewhat child-like, he invests the painter with a singular genius that's also hypercritical.  He’s exactly like many of the artists I’ve bumped into over the years, unable to quite comprehend what is about them which makes them do that.  But in some moments, especially when he was confronting the monster, he reminded me a lot of the tenth Doctor, who on reflection was quite a lot like Vincent, the lucidity, genius and darkness.  In that way you could view the eleventh Doctor’s actions in trying to offer emotional support to the painter as a way of salving his own demons.”

“What about the accent?  There’ll be some might question the wisdom of not offering a Scottish Van Gogh.”

“It’s a brave decision, especially considering the casual viewers who might wonder about all of the regional accents on display here – the waiter in the café being another example.  Of course, it’s a continuation of the accent confusion in the TARDIS’s translation circuits last seen in The Fires of Pompeii, in this case Scottish equals Dutch.  But it aided Curran in finding that slot between the crooked self portrait and human being without the ever present need to maintain the accurate inflections in his voice, useful on the speedy television schedule this was probably shot on.”

“Now, some have argued that in concerning itself so much with Van Gogh’s state of mind it stopped being proper Doctor Who …”

“(interrupts) … but as I said earlier, it depends what we mean by “proper Doctor Who”.  The set-up was very similar to The Time of the Angels from earlier this series and the spin-off novel The Stone Rose, the Doctor noticing something unusual about a museum object and jumps into the TARDIS to investigate, and, since Curtis hasn’t had the memo about its erratic behaviour, the Doctor’s able to steer the time machine to the exact moment (if not quite location) in space and time, unlike almost every episode in this series.

Plus, art and art galleries have been very present in Doctor Who over the years most notably the, ahem, aforementioned City of Death whose Louvre scenes with a fourth Doctor looking for information were very much like the Musee D’Orsey scenes in this.  It was certainly a more dignified homage than Mona Lisa’s Revenge, The Sarah Jane Adventures episode, mainly because Bill Nighy’s curator was allowed to be expert and illuminating without being a twit yet still share some bow-tie humour with Matt.  Nighy was once Russell T Davies’s choice to play the Doctor incidentally, and was announced as such by the Daily Mail, so it’s lovely to see him in the franchise finally.”

“Did you think the Krufayus was a worthy opponent?”

“The – Krafayis – was the kind of fantastical creature we’ve been seeing a lot this season, and this was the kind of giant chicken I remember from school books when I was a kid as the possible missing link between the dinosaurs and the battery egg poppers of the modern world.  It's also another lost soul, alone.   Arguably the episode could have worked without it, like a 60s historical, but I suspect even Moffat and Curtis weren’t brave enough to write an episode without a monster.  The bravery was to not let it overpower the episode – as arguably happened in The Shakespeare Code – and let the celebrity still be the primary focus.

The decision to make it blind is part of what John Moore from the Den of Geek website notes is the episode's obsession with "sight" and seeing beyond what's in front of you which was, of course, an obsession of the impressionists and other avant-guardians though interesting the term "impressionist" was proposed by a critic, Louis Leroy, but was using it in a critical sense: "    Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape." Which sounds like an average review of this episode on Gallifrey Base)

“... it let us see one of the Doctor’s gadgets.”

“Yes!  Those scenes of the Doctor in the TARDIS talking to himself as he searched for the hugeywhatsit tossing other items across the TARDIS floor, were one of the few occasions so far this series where we’ve seen what this Doctor is like when he’s alone and unlike Tennant but like Tom, he’s not self conscious about it, happy to jabber away at inanimate objects.  Matt relished these scenes with their gesticulating opportunities.  But the writing throughout tapped into the incongruity between his impotent inscrutability and the giddy professor sock puppet he uses to mask it.  

It is strange, however, seeing the Doctor, who's supposed to be possessed of a special insight into the universe, employing a hugeywhatsit to identify the thingydoodah  (and witness the reappearance of Hartnell's image in this episode, followed by Troughton - never mind the crack, what's that leading up to?).  But kids love gadgets.  Look at the tricorder like abilities of the sonic screwdriver.  Plus I’m sure they will have loved the scene in which he and Amy demonstrated a few more of the console’s controls.”

“A good episode for his companion Amy?”

“Yes, though again there’s still an unreal element to her, not least after the events at the close of the last episode, and it’s interesting that something wasn’t made of how her character might have changed in the absence of Rory and how she remembers her past now.  She’s certainly flirtier, I suppose.  One of the few oddities in the episode was in her relationship with Vince which seemed far further developed by the end than their screen time might have suggested.  Was something cut of their evening alone together while the Doctor was away monster chasing? 

But this was otherwise a spectacular episode of Karen Gillan, forever offering some business even in scenes were she wasn’t the primary focus, for once showing us some of the chemistry we've seen she has with Matt in real world interviews.  I loved the way she said "Of course" when asked if she'd be following the Doctor in to the church having been told not to.  I'd postulate that if you were to watch this series in production order you'd be able to more clearly see the two of them getting used to their roles and what works best, rather like Lalla Ward in her first season."

“What did you think of the look of the episode.  It was certainly cinematic.”

“Yes indeed.  Tragir doubling for Provance rather than Venice this time and again able to create the most convincing sense of place we've probably ever seen.  All the primary colours.  It’s quite startling after a couple of episodes very much grounded in television direction to be handed something which returned to the feature film photography of earlier episodes.  Jonny Campbell, who also shot the “vampire” episode clearly has a very cinematic eye and strove to make the visuals match the lushness of Van Gogh’s painting.  Witness the opening scenes of the cornfield, the luminous shot of Amy in amongst the sunflowers and the closing scenes shot on a turntable to demonstrate Vincent’s head spinning as he listens to Nighy’s tribute.”

"What did you make of the use of music at the climax?"

"Your tolerance for the late appearance of Athelete's Chance probably depends on whether you've been swept away by the previous forty-odd minutes.  It's certainly the most Russell T Davies-like climax we've seen this series, though it could more closely attributed to Curtis who has provided similar moments in his own films - Joni Mitchell in one of the few emotional true moments in Love Actually.  Popular music isn't as alien to Doctor Who as it use to be and has been employed to underscore emotional beats before.  The lyrics, which talk of taking the opportunities in front of you while you still are reflecting in Van Gogh's particularly fruitful final year and are entirely in-tune with Curran's teary performance which reflects the moment when the painter realises what he is capable of.  Plus, at least it wasn't John Denver's rendition of Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)."

“Finally, what was your favourite moment?”

“Predictably it has little to do with the main plot.  It’s when the Doctor takes Vincent back to the TARDIS only to find that its been flypostered.  He simply sighs and creates a hole big enough to open the door.  Then, when the machine lands in the future, we simply see the scorched remains of the posters left on the face of the blue box having not survived the time vortex.  It’s one of the few occasions when the mad details of the Doctor’s life are vividly demonstrated.”

"Stuart, thank you.  And Vincent and the Doctor will be on the iPlayer for a few more weeks, released on dvd and blu-ray twice, and repeated on BBC Three until the end of time…”

Malohkeh Myrka Mystery

Stuart Ian Burns spits Doctor Who: Cold Blood

Companion deaths on the television version of Doctor Who are comparatively rare.  Adric and Katarina is about the shape of it, and probably Sara Kingdom.  In the spin-off Whoniverse it’s a veritable bloodbath, from C’rizz through to Roz Forrester with a whole multi-novel plot arc dedicated to finishing off some television’s plus ones (or twos) in ambiguous circumstances, including Sarah Jane Smith.  They get dropped in a parallel universe, walk from the TARDIS or have their memory wiped and there’s collateral damage outside of the Doctor’s immediate circle but the death of a Tardis traveller in a family show on Saturday night BBC One?  That’s a very thick chalk line to cross. 

Unlike the viewers who immediately ran to twitter and made Rory’s name a trending topic for the next hour right into Eurovision and on the night that Dennis Hopper died, I wasn’t emotional drawn by the death, certainly not in the same way as the last time a main character died in the Whoniverse (#saveiantojones?  Um, no.)  Partly it was the shock that Moffat had done the one thing Russell T Davies said he could never do (cf, Donna Noble) but mostly its because the writing and direction seemed to want to us to ponder the implications of the death rather than feel it on a gut level.

#saveiantojones?  Um, no.

Most of the scene was played from the Doctor’s point of view.  From the moment Amy desperately asked him to do something to save her already gone fiancé’s life, we were given a sea of reaction shots of the timelord’s impotent face, and the ensuing action was about how he was going to get Amy into the Tardis and tellingly when he finally managed to bring himself to simply grab her by the torso and carry her through the threshold, instead of a close-up of her crying desperately at the door as the machine took off, we were right up on the Doctor blankly working the controls.

Only as the two worked to try to and keep Rory’s memory alive did the story become a joint one again but the implication throughout was still that the nurse’s death wasn’t simply a random fatality but an important part of the ongoing storyline and we were left to ruminate on the narrative consequences, for the rest of the series and beyond.  If Rory didn’t exist, what was Amy’s choice?  How did she escape Francesco, let alone get into the non-vampire school in the first place?  What about all of the people he helped save in his day job?

If Rory didn’t exist, what was Amy’s choice?

The implication is – evidenced by the irksome reappearance of future Amy, alone on the hill this time – that the web of time has knitted itself back into place to resolve any of these inconsistencies.  The crack, in wiping someone from existence, goes in with the Dettol equivalent of quantum physics to sterilise the wound and give it some stitches, but unlike the reapers in Father’s Day the process also removes them from the memory.  Except, presumably because he’s a timelord, the Doctor remembers.  As does BBC Books who have given Rory extra adventures in the next three releases in the range.

Rory’s death was slotted in at the close of what up until then had been a fairly stolidly traditional Doctor Who story which wasn’t especially bad and like last week offered moments of nostalgia but didn’t quite sing, giving the impression that Moffat and Chibnall’s motive was to put us into a false state of security (even if Arthur Darvill’s non-appearance in the previews of upcoming episode in Doctor Who Magazine gave the impression of something occurring) before smacking us around the head with Rory’s old lady battering stick: “You’re watching nu-Who, stupid.”  

“You’re watching nu-Who, stupid.” 

Unlike last week’s episode which could be viewed with all the comfort of a classic series dvd release bar the annoying unskippable caption, easter egg of a continuity announcement and randomly edited documentary about dinosaurs, this was about as entertaining as one of those generic Star Trek: Voyager episodes in which Janeway’s negotiations towards an alien race are going well until Seven of Nine goes borg and shoots one of them in the face (before attempting to assimilate the corpse).  With a sub-plot in which Harry Kim tries to teach the EMH about the joys of flower arranging.

I was better disposed to The Hungry Earth because it seemed like a genuine attempt to tackle classic Who in much the same way that Todd Hayne’s worshipped Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven or Steven Soderbergh riffed off Michael Curtiz and old Hollwood during The Good German.  Except both those films and other similar experiments then attempted to do something interesting, either by introducing greater thematic weight or simply content that would not have been permissible in the earlier form and that seemed to be way things were heading in the, as it turned out, rather disingenuous NEXT TIME trailer with all the talk of “fixed points” and the implication that Rory would be going Jack Bauer on prisoner Alaya.

all the narrative simplicity of the Gordian Knot

Unfortunately Cold Blood simply continued to be a rough remake of Doctor Who and the Silurians which is fine, except television has moved on and our expectations have changed and though there will be a large section of the meagre audience that won’t have seen Malcolm Hulke’s classic, there has to be more to it, especially in a season with all the narrative simplicity of the Gordian Knot.  The picture book nature of The Beast Below worked for me because despite its unsophisticated structure, it still pinioned on big emotional character beats for the regulars.  It’s funny how in this concluding episode, when the moral questions are passed to the incidental elements of humanity, it’s far less potent.

Partly that was to do with execution.  Neither of the sub-plots, the negotiations for humanity or the protection (or not) of Alaya were presented from Amy or Rory’s point of view.  There was no conflict here.  Amy was slightly reticent, but we caught little of the responsibility which had been placed on her shoulders and the point of agreement with the Silurians was treated with all the excitement of a corporate brainstorming session in a firm of accountants -- though admittedly it was interesting see that in this televised debate, Meera Syal’s Nasreen was the one to present the case against immigration with Stephen Moore’s amenable Eldane offering a list of benefits.

we caught little of the responsibility which had been placed on her shoulders

Additionally, because Rory wasn’t sitting on top of their prisoner for the duration, he just became one of the humans rather than a regular.  He should have been in there, trying but failing to defend their captive from Ambrose, who by this point had simply become an example of the human waste that inhabited the shuttle bus in Midnight.  I know I’m drifting into writing about what wasn’t there instead of what was, which is a dirty habit, but Chibnall’s approach to scripting in Cold Blood took a retrograde step backwards to the first series of Torchwood when it was usually impossible to consistently see the interior of a character unless they were having something inserted into them. 

My hunch is that like The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood overran and whilst the structure and expositional point of most scenes survived, the local colour is still sitting on a server connected to the Avid editing suite, despite the longer timeslot it was gifted.  Syal’s participation seemed truncated and until the very end and the burst of emotion, Amy was largely reduced to a default wisecrack setting.  Moore’s voiceover, however welcome to those of us who remember his audiobook version of Hitchhikers, and however epic its motives in suggesting “big history happening right now!” sounded like something imported to paper over some narrative cracks.  No not those kinds of cracks.

"big history happening right now!”

And yet, and yet, despite these reservation, it wasn’t horrible, it’s was still watchable.  Mostly that was down to Matt Smith who is a god, basically, someone managing to collect all of our childhood memories of what the Doctor was like with those pesky expectation built up over the past five years.  He oscillates between wimpy, genial and commanding, Pertwee’s indispensable moments of charm, stretched out across an entire performance.  When he said to Ambrose that she wasn’t the best humanity had to offer, I felt like he was disappointed with me too. 

Anyone who suggests that he’s still no David Tennant should be made to sit down at loud-hailer shaped gun thing-point in front of the closing moments of this episode in which a mixture of guilt and bewilderment wash over him but unable to really show it in front of a companion who’s entirely unaware of the source and probably wouldn’t believe him anyway.  There was some good support too from Robert Pugh as the stoic Tony and Nia Roberts who at least sought to turn her character into something approaching a real, if flawed human being.  Richard Hope was similarly effective as Malohkeh, initially giving the impression of being a reptilian Mengele but turned out to be a good sort really.  Despite the torture.

Why bother making the connection at all etc. etc.

If only these performances weren’t being slightly undermined throughout with niggles like the reappearance of a hardly redressed Platform One from The End of the World (Cardiff’s The Chapel of Peace) and the CG explosion of the drill which was less convincing than a similar interpolated detonation on The Time Warrior dvd which was probably produced on a fraction of the budget.  I was also finally drawn to admit that the rather generic make-up for this genus of Silurians simply lacked the imagination of the originals -- and omitting the third eye was vandalism basically.  Why bother making the connection at all etc. etc.

Will Rory stay dead?  Well, if Adric can be resurrected for an audio, it could be that when the Pandorica opens,  the Doctor sacrifices the TARDIS to save him and put time back together.  Which would be about right because I’m developing the opinion that the cracks are actually lesions created by the time machine, the Doctor’s travels having finally begun to create holes in space-time and that the cracks appear when he does something to change the natural order of events.  When he said in The Beast Below that they shouldn’t become involved, he was right in every respect and that despite his decades long protestations to the contrary, he knows less about what he’s doing than Rose in Father’s Day.

Next Week:  We hopefully get the Richard Curtis who wrote The Girl in the Café, rather than the hack who turned out Love Actually.

What Alaya’s Beneath

Stuart Ian Burns feeds himself to Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth

Blackpool won the Championship League play-off this afternoon.  I don’t know anything about football and indeed could care less about it most of the time, but I can totally understand the thrill which the fans of the winning club must have experienced at the final whistle because I suspect (though obviously can’t confirm so bear with me here) it’s much the same as I feel at the end of a particularly good film and for the purposes of this blog, an entertaining slab of Doctor Who (which a cup final success similar to a season ender though we won’t be able to test that out until the Pandorica opens).  At the very least it must have made up for the closure of a certain exhibition recently.

Which is my way of saying that contrary to the Twitter reaction (you know who you are) tonight’s closing title squeeze was greeted with applause from me which considering my historic enmity with writer Chris Chibnall and director Ashley Way (who was also on early Torchwood and so will be forever guilty by association) was rather a surprise.  I’ll admit to being charmed from top to bottom and though I’ll also admit to a couple of retrospective reservations (which we’ll come to) this was more or less everything I’d want and expect from an episode of Doctor Who.  We're even still in the countryside. 

contrary to the Twitter reaction

Before you ram issue 413 of Doctor Who Magazine down my throat (or some other orifice) and shout “What does that make The Caves of Androzani?” I will add that so far this isn’t the best story ever and no matter how good episode nine is it still won’t be.  City of Death wuz robbed.  But what it does deliver is a good old fashioned love letter to the Pertwee era and a reminder that even in this new(ish) version of the franchise with Steven Moffat’s fairy tale noodlings burrowing through it, that he’s still interested sometimes in offering a good old fashioned alien invasion story with a moral pulse, a tribute to the Silurian’s original creator Malcolm Hulke (albeit with a shorter miniskirt than Katie might have risked).

There is just something very comforting about an episode that throws out all of the post-modern tricks we’ve become accustomed to and goes about the business of showing us as traditional a Who story as possible that unlike The Waters of Mars which reported the standard Proppian/Dickian/Daviesian elements as a way of foregrounding the impending doom of the Doctor’s alien morality, just wants to leave us entertained.  For all the lush photography and rustic charm with a few obvious exceptions, parts of this episode look like we should be viewing them through the same gausy quality of episodes which now only exist in off-air NTSC copies down to the BBC Micro inspired graphic of the lizard's flatulence propulsion.

Just once the Eleventh Doctor is allowed to gradually follow the mystery, from the initial clue of the blue grass, through to breaking into an industrial building then gaining the trust of some scientist who’s experiment has rattled the cage of something other, with his companions becoming separated so that they can discover some bits of plot (nice moment for Rory in the grave) before falling into some peril (literally in Amy’s case) and taking refuge in a church up some other devil's end.  Arguably we have seen set ups in other episodes built on the Doctor’s own curiosity (notably The Beast Below), none of them as been quite this bald in execution.  About the only deviation is the Pertweevian cliché of the Doctor's perennial capture being turned on its head with his antagonist finding herself in the cell instead.

the Pertweevian cliché

Dr Nasreen Chaudhry and her new boyfriend Tony seem designed to merge the main early 70s bystander character types, like Ruth from The Time Monster finding something in common with Bert from The Green Death.  Of course, if this was a proper homage there would be a stereotypical Tory presence on hand tutting as the drilling was stopped for whatever reason (though given that this story is set in 2020 and depending on your optimism at the present climate it might as well be a Lib Dem – Chris Hulme’s in charge of the environment now after all).  Their role is arguably substituted with the fantastically named Ambrose whose collection of domestic weaponry is meant to suggest she’ll be the one to go Stahlman in the next episode, though it's clearly a front and Rory will be the on wielding the axe.

Despite what some fans my suggest, we haven’t seen enough of the new Silurian/Eocenes yet to really judge.  One of the b-list monsters along with the Sontarans, their reputation has grown large enough for us to forget that they’ve only appeared in two television stories and only one good story at that.  For fans I’d argue, it’s Hulke’s Target novelisation which has sealed their reputation and perhaps their infrequent contradictory appearances in spin-off media, including The Coup, that amazing preview that came free with DWM for the audio UNIT spin-off  in which a new knighted Brigadier attempts to help them be mankind’s first contact with alien life, only to have humanity dismiss them as men in rubber suits!

a new knighted Brigadier

Understandably the redesign, neatly another new branch of the species so as not to tread on what’s gone before employs the Star Trek/Frontier in Space appliance of allowing us to see the actor’s faces.  Taking into account the compensating mask which will no doubt come into play more in the next episode as way of cutting down on make-up requirements (and to give Forbidden Planet a bumber Christmas), that does mean that they may lack the enigmatic features of the likes of Ichtar and the wonderfully impractical flashing light but allows them a much wider range of emotions as seen in the interrogation scene we’ll discuss later.  They’re also more agile.  The scenes in the graveyard are gripping stuff, their Raston Robot like silhouette a perfectly alien shape against the stone and greenery.  Plus, doubters at least the reinvention of the Myrka hinted at in Confidential didn't come to pass.

It’s not all that straightforward though, with Moffat’s hand can be seen elsewhere.  As well as the idea of an every day piece of landscape become a portal of doom (and having had my own adventures I can tell you being pulled into the earth is no fun so exactly like being born), the spectre of older Amy and Rory on the hill are an incursion from the main story arc and ripe to reconfigure the story from an alternative viewpoint, perhaps shot in similar style to a similar scene between Harry Potter and Hermione Granger in the film version of The Prison of Azkaban (somewhat oddly since Rory is probably fulfilling the Ron Weasley role in the rest of the series) were the two watched their recent past spinning out unable to interfere.

This is The Waters of Mars, really…

All of the talk of fixed points in history in the trailer for Cold Blood suggests were heading back into time in flux “This is The Waters of Mars, really…” territory next week, which brings me to that retrospective reservation.  The deleted scene, the one revealed in Doctor Who Confidential which if you didn’t see it shows the Doctor and Amy’s walk to the mine.  Something has clearly gone awry if the first cut of an episode is fifteen minutes too long (did no one notice at the scripting stage?) and one casualty was what looked it should have been one of the best scenes of the season (and certainly would have made up for the paucity of Amy in the rest of the episode – was the she biggest causality of the cutting massacre?).

In the clips we saw, the Doctor and Amy are simply talking and laughing and joking about and talking about the main arc and Rory in the TARDIS in a way that they haven’t really since the first episode of this series.  The performances are relaxed and fresh and lensed in a beautiful mix of steady-cam mid-shot from the front and heading off into the distance from the back.  In this kind of show, these are the kinds of character scenes which people remember far longer than a bit of running (cf, the domestic chat between the Doctor and Rose in The Impossible Planet) and though I understand why such a long sequence had to be chopped for timing at that point in the episode, it’s a pity that it couldn’t have been tucked in somewhere else by way of a flashback.

the Tenth axis

Nevertheless with the strength of the writing elsewhere, there were enough other good character moments for the Doctor to go some way in making up for this aboration.  If Chibnall’s interpretation sailed very close to the Tenth axis with a few of His catchphrases creeping in (“I love a mine.”/“You are beautiful!”), he did give Matt Smith another opportunity to demonstrate his facility for working with children (“No, they’re afraid of me.”), his fallibility in letting the child spin off on his own and the very calm unwrapping of a villain’s armoury of bullshit we’ve already seen in The Vampire of Venice, his cross-legged, calm, unflappable intelligence more than a match Alaya’s thorn in the paw pretence, quietly elucidation her options but knowing full well, based on previous experience that she has war in her heart and that if he’s not careful it can’t end well.

Unlike this episode.  Since the more typical traditional body horror of Amy’s upcoming prospective dissection may have proved too much in these sensitive times (that infamous clip of Whitehouse commenting on The Deadly Assassin having gone airborne), the chosen, more nu-Who cliffhanger with its reveal of the lizard city, like a golden version of the Gungan city (if I can risk jinxing things with a comparison like that unless the next episode reveals a giant Silurian/Eocene leader with I’M BRIAN BLESSED!’S voice) is just the kind of epic imagery beloved of the comic strips (and the novels – can anyone confirm, since I haven’t read it, if this is what Hulke had in mind in The Cave Monsters?) and with its lava pools a reminder that they’re very much not from the amphibious end of the species.  If the designs in the next episode can extrapolate this vista properly, we’re in for a treat.

Next Week: Into the pit.  No, not that one.

Waking Wife

Stuart Ian Burns dreams about Doctor Who: Amy's Choice

I stopped eating cheese recently.  It was a health decision, but I quickly regretted it because I also stopped dreaming.  Well, ok, I'm probably still dreaming but my vivid memories of the land of the subconscious have disappeared.  I'm bereft.  My recurring nightmare of searching a fictional metropolis for the perfect film is gone and I’ll never discover if it is, as I suspect, directed by Cédric Klapisch and starring Jean Seberg.  Slowly, I’ve begun to ration some cream cheese back in but I know the more vivid images won’t return until I’m piling cheddar between two pieces of toast and microwaving for half a minute.

Seeking alternatives, I’ve been considering a trip into the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Waking Life, but have mostly made do with the couple of odd episodes in the (now) final season of Heroes in which the guilt of Hiro and Sylar trapped them into their own subconscious trials and prisons (budget permitting).  The problem is of course, like 80s horror Dreamscape, these are dramatic reconstructions of other people’s impressions of the dreamscape and require those things which our own subconscious aren’t very good at providing – a character arc, dramatic tension and a satisfying conclusion (ish, in the case of Heroes).  

ish, in the case of Heroes

And so it is with Amy’s Choice a fairly eccentric episode of modern Who which against what you might expect from Simon Nye (who you would think would be more comfortable with future episode The Lodger for reasons that will become apparent) harks back to the old days, a homage to the likes of The Mind Robber, The Celestial Toymaker and Inside the Spaceship/Beyond the Sun/The Brink of Disaster/The Edge of Destruction/or whatever you like to call it and also attempts to capture the kind of off-beat weirdness witnessed in children’s television programmes were shot on video and Kate Winslet was still young enough to appear in them and also an approach to plotting familiar to anyone who actually understands what Charlie Kauffman is going on about.

The initial hook of having the Doctor meeting a current companion and her own plus one five years after their travels is rather brilliantly extrapolated.  Given what we know about Amy’s connection to Ledworth, and Rory’s potential aspirations, their small idyll is entirely believable as is the Doctor’s reaction to her pregnancy with him bounding out the TARDIS as though minutes have just passed and then realising that he’s in the dullest part of the universe (quite something for him).  Played for laughs and with genuine chemistry between the three leads, it refreshingly lacks all of the recriminations of Sarah Jane in School Reunion (and a dozen Big Finish reunions) about being left behind, reminding me of the Eighth Doctor’s re-emergence to Bernice in The Dying Days.

a dozen Big Finish reunions

This opening section is crying out to unfold across twenty odd minutes with a cliffhanger ending in which the trio reappear on the floor of the TARDIS with the Dream Lord standing over them, in other words, with the classic four episode structure.  But as is the way with new Who, we’re all too quickly whisked back to the console room and the possibility that their new life is a dream, their version of human John Smith’s perhaps.  The confusing is nicely played here, taking full advantage of us having seen the Doctor skipping two years at the close of The Eleventh Hour to make the “future” reality entirely possible within the structure of the series (even if it does suggest that in future episodes that Amy will be chasing aliens between nappy changes).

Enter Toby Jones’s Dream Lord.  Look at that, Toby Jones in Doctor Who! His oddly round yet still angular face looks like William Hague pushing himself through a rubber band and a brilliant bit of casting because we could imagine in a different universe were the Doctor could still be played by an older man, Jones would be just the man to do it.  One of the best elements of the episode was in keeping the true nature of the Dream Lord hidden so that fans could spend much of the story assuming that he was somehow The Master, The Master or my guess, The Celestial Toymaker (it couldn’t be The Valeyard, of course, that would be silly, even though functionally they were doing much the same thing, expressing the Doctor’s id, and look at how I’m burying that in some brackets).  

William Hague pushing himself through a rubber band

Then like the old Demi Moore film Passions of the Mind (oh yes), they’re left to investigate which of these “realities” is correct, a problem hampered by the need to also decide which of the menaces on offer, alien possessed pensioners or the TARDIS drifting into a cold star.  The Dream Lord must be a fan of the Doctor Who Adventures because both of these stories look like the kind of thing which might be knocked out by Steve Lyons or @theolismith across eight pages and a cornucopia of exclamation marks.  That’s not a criticism; both offer impressive imagery, of old people acting like yobs and breaking up the place and the frosted time machine drifting ever closer to its icy doom, like the splash pages that might appear opposite “Ten things you didn’t know about the Crespallions (“7: No one can remember which episode they appeared in”).

At this point, seasoned viewers of British sci-fi might expect director Catherine Moorshead to break out the wide angle lenses and gels and go to town with the off-kilter close-ups and unusual lighting.  This version of Ledworth is the kind of weirdly deserted township in which nothing is at it seems and the normal becomes unreal.  Doctor Who has had a few of these itself, in other words, The Android Invasion on telly, Eddie Robson’s Memory Lane on audio and Stockbridge in the comics.  Similarly fans could be hoping the TARDIS scenes tonally mimic The Edge of Destruction in which despite the hulking great cameras, through some clever lighting, the console room became an alien place rather than a comforting symbol of safety.  

She goes conventional.

There’s none of that here.  Instead, Moorshead does something really quite interesting with the photography.  She goes conventional.  Though now and then in the village scenes we visit upon the odd shot which apes zombie films, notably one in which four of the pensioners slowly approach our heroes from across a field, despite the blue and green rinse brigade, Moorshead spends most of her time evoking Dangerfield, especially in the camper-van chase which also looks the fake credits for Monkfish from The Fast Show.  That approach is repeated in the TARDIS scenes which aren’t much different to anything we’ve seen before; it’s just that there are more of them.

Along with a music track which with the exception of some brief snatches of a re-mumble of Jon Brion’s main theme for Eternal Sunshine is Murray Gold almost parodying himself, the effort is to make our heroes confusion about the dream worlds as understandable as possible by portraying those dream worlds as conservatively as possible in televisual terms, something this audience might be less likely to accept if they looked like they were directed by Bunuel or Spike Jonze.  That’s very risky since it leaves the episode open to criticism for being “unadventurous” or “flat” or not making the most of the script (as I’ve already seen in a couple of early reviews).  But if there’s anything I’ve learnt about this series, it’s that there are more “features” than “bugs” and everything is very carefully thought through (and should be at this late stage -- Amy's Choice was the last episode of the season to be shot and edited). 

Theres noffink letht for me 'ear

Like the title of the episode.  For all the fantastical elements of both scenarios, it’s Amy’s desires which are being investigated, who and who’s world does she really want, Rory or the Doctor?  It’s much the same choice offered to Rose but unlike her “Theres noffink letht for me 'ear” treatment of Mickey in The Parting of the Ways which has always seemed cruel and unusual to me, especially with Billie’s playing of the line, Karen’s understated tragedy as she watches Rory fade to dust and realising her love for him and the Doctor’s impotence is very powerful, more-so because it lacks the histrionics we might well have expected.  Still, it is fairly predictable that the series might want to go the other way and allow her to have both, Rory embracing the adventure (Moffat seems keen to return the timelord to his original rampant asexuality).

All of which said, by the climax I was left a bit nonplussed.  Sitting down to write this review I was all ready to suggest that despite all the hilarious jokes, and wonderful performances, Amy’s Choice isn’t bold enough, certainly not as bold as Buffy’s Normal Again in which by the conclusion we’re not entirely sure that the previous six season’s worth of episodes aren’t an extrapolation of a twenty-something girl’s feverish imagination and that the conventionality of some of the direction with its steadicams-a-gogo, had dragged the episode down too far in the other direction.  But then I remembered the armies of kid-petrifying pensioners, the spooky shots of the Doctor and Rory frozen to the floor, the funny way the Dream Lord, a demonic rendering of the Doctor's own psychoanalytical concerns for goodness sake and is worth emphasising outside of brackets, zapped about Q-like and the whisk generator and realised that I may need to have look at this one again.  In other words, I've talked myself into liking an episode whilst writing a review of it.  Well played Nye and Moffat.

Next Week: "I sometimes wonder why I like the people of this miserable planet so much."

Fangs

Stuart Ian Burns takes a bite out of Doctor Who: The Vampires of Venice

In these uncertain times for the nation, when frowning men in suits are walking from cars into buildings and back again and no one has a fecking clue about the future of the country, weekly events like Doctor Who come into their own.  We should just be thankful perhaps that the hand over of power at the top of our favourite franchise ran so smoothly by comparison.  If it had been like the current constitutional negotiations, we might have seen Moffat attempting to form a coalition with a different Nick (Briggs), the latter demanding the resurrection of the Voord as a red line deal breaker (though presumably without a couple of thousand people turning up at Upper Boat demanding an adaptation of The Fishmen of Kandalinga -- from the 1966 annual). 

The Vampires of Venice is particularly welcome because it is so comfortingly familiar, drawing together old and new series traditions to produce a supremely entertaining forty-eight and a half minutes.  If ever there could be an episode designed to convince fans that the show is just the same as it always was, it would be this Hammer infused gothic horror adventure with creepy candle lit corridors in foreign climes, mythic creatures revealed to be aliens with a leader given to portentous speeches prophesising doom for her people.  The title even evokes Vampire In Venice, the spaghetti horror from the 1980s with Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu.

Bob?  Bob?  Are you there?

You can almost imagine Philip Hinchcliffe watching the episode over a sherry at the retirement home for old Doctor Who producers and with a slight chuckle in his voice pointing to the plasma screen and muttering “That’s it!  That’s it! If only I’d had the budget … Bob?  Bob?  Are you there?”  “Calm down Mr Hinchcliffe.  It’s only a television programme.”  “But look Bob, they’re finally doing that version of Lust for a Vampire we were talking about, and at six o’clock in the evening!  And it looks like a feature film!” “It’s not Bob, Mr. Hinchcliffe, it’s Olla.  Have you taken your diabetic pills today?”

Except of course, mythic creatures that aren’t all they seem employing fairy tale fantasy elements to mask technology infuses the Moffat era too; interestingly a combination of the preview in the parish newsletter and Doctor Who Confidential suggests that writer Toby Whithouse had a pretty free hand in crafting his story, but with its lush Croatia in for Venice architecture, giant fangs and lashings of the uncanny it fits perfectly with the past five episodes evening including a variation on the now familiar crack.  It’s the oh so quiet.  Sshh.  Ssssssh.  So peaceful until …

William Shakespeare as a spy

As an aside, Venice isn’t, surprisingly, a regular stop for the Doctor and this is his first television visit.  Spin-off media offers two visits; Big Finish’s The Stones of Venice in which the Eighth Doctor and Charley stop the city from sinking despite the best efforts of Michael Sheard and the bonkers Virgin Missing Adventure The Empire of Glass (available as an e-book) in which author Andy Lane has the First Doctor and Steven Taylor mixed up with Galileo and William Shakespeare as a spy, which presumably explains the photo on the Doctor’s library card (squee).  Aside over (since I'm now having to ditch all my choice State of Decay comparisons).

In developing the piece Whithouse appears to have looked to his own earlier episode School Reunion for inspiration.  Like Krillitanes, these perception filter employing fish from space are a disenfranchised people attempting to absorb the local culture by inhabit a school, the Doctor sharing portentous conversations with an intractable, sinuous leader whose pack is unexpectedly destroyed through a suicidal explosion that the timelord finds himself leaping to escape from.  No former companion to distract us this time, of course, though at least we can now induct Russell’s adaptation of Casanova into the Whoniverse as an unofficial spin-off.

Whithouse also has to deal with the companion's boyfriend again.  The production team and Arthur Darvill try their best not to make him Mickey 2.0 – his knowledge of the TARDIS for example, and eventual camaraderie with the Doctor, but some of the scenes here couldn’t help but sound like light rewrites of Boomtown, in which the companion’s partner has to jealously deal with his partner’s dazzling new best friend and her time spanning adventures.  The difference will presumably be that his and Amy’s future happiness is a key element of the ongoing arc story though it’s worth asking what Pond was doing at home on the night before her wedding when Williams was at his stag party.  Does she have any other friends?

Derick Sherwin is quietly pleased

Back at the retirement home, Derick Sherwin is quietly pleased that some of his era seems to have seeped through too.  Apart from a recognizable companion structure – a science geek and a Scot (albeit with a reversed gender make-up), Matt is at his most Troughton in this episode, hopping about the internal structure of the TARDIS, his hands forever moving in unusual ways, his voice cheerfully disappearing into anecdotes and making inarticulate noises during a solution which was the stuff of a season five four parter, battling extraordinary elements (foam or in this case rain) before saving the world with the simple flick of a switch.

Sherwin might also appreciate the imaginatively old school approach to reproducing Venice as revealed in Confidential and how despite the budget they still had to resort to a cardboard cut out and a paddling pool across a cobbled courtyard to create the impression of a gondola drifting up a canal.  In his book, What is cinema?, film critic Andre Bazin talks about how the best film makers understand that it’s the illusion of reality created in the frame that counts and the suspension of disbelief was total here (unlike the dome the Doctor had to shimmy his way up at the end though my digibox is particularly unforgiving to any kind of CGI element).

sorry Dennis and John

But the 60s episodes were never this funny (sorry Dennis and John).  From the Doctor’s cake burst in the teaser (leading into the titles with the kind of comic beat not seen since the other first series) to the sight of the gondolea wearing Rory’s stag t-shirt, this is an episode unafraid to be a romp.  There’s a Gallifrey Base thread developing which lists all of the best lines (and a flame war about the innuendo – yes, really) and though nothing quite touches City of Death, you have to love the confidence of the series to be able to chuck in "Blimey, fish from space have never been so....buxom" or “Yours is Bigger than Mine?” “Let's not go there!”

If there’s a problem, it’s that for a show about vampires (sort of), the episode isn't that scary.  Helen McCrory has a certain camp serpentine Joan “He’s good for families” Collins steeliness but her character Rosanna Calvierri’s real alter-ego just looks like a well designed alien.  If her Oedipal relationship with her son is creepy, her daughters are simple eye-candy and less sinister than a bar invading hen night.  And the execution by aquatic predator worked better when Spielberg was directing it.  Perhaps like The Brain of Morbius, appropriating the imagery of Hammer and the like is one thing, delivering it to a family audience, and now getting it past BBC standards, is something else.

dressed only in a pink bikini

Only as Amy was led into the green light and Calvierri’s transformation process did I get a tinge, but even that scene ran up against the syncopated shooting and editing style which I’ve noticed in all of these episodes, were the action is sometimes obscured by the camera shooting from an unexpected position, or the cutting in and out of shots early with apparently important lines given off screen or as was the case at the close of this episode with the moment of silence not given room to breath.  It reminds me enough of Gilliam’s work in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to suggest that it’s a deliberate choice, and it doesn’t ruin the episode, but just sometimes it can be distracting.  

Then again, at least it's not like many "classic" series episodes where you could guess which direction the actor would be walking by the camera Ron Jones or whoever decided to cut to and the reason for shooting abroad was entirely dependent on the cheapest air fairs.  But in the old series you wouldn't have expected John Nathan-Turner to going swimming in the seas around Lanzarote dressed only in a pink bikini so that Nicola Bryant knew what to expect when she was forced to do it, like the swan attracting executive producer of the current show.  Perhaps for all its formal similarities, The Vampires of Venice differs from tradition in just the right places.

Next week:  How Do You Want Amy?

Eyes Wired Shut

Stuart Ian Burns feasts on Doctor Who: Flesh and Stone

Unlike you might expect, as far as I remember, Doctor Who has never really scared me.  I know this is a shocking admission to make in this august company, and especially considering the title of the blog, but never did I hide behind the sofa.  I’ve been agitated certainly and not just by Graham Crowden’s performance in The Horns of Nimon.  But generally I’m too busy enjoying the visual feast (depending on the era), my mind racing to take in all of the narrative twists and turns and in recent years trying to work out how I’m going to fill out six or so paragraphs afterwards to really jump with terror.  I even blinked quite happily during Blink.  Until Flesh and Stone which more than continued the quality of the first part if not surpassed it.

During the scene in which the Doctor was staging the minimalist Knightmare homage with Amy in the Nightmare of Eden-like forest of the draft, so involved was I that as she tripped on the inevitable tree root I found myself clutching my chest.  Staggeringly I did it again on second viewing even knowing that she’d soon be swept away by the teleporter; I giggled afterwards on both occasions, firstly because I couldn’t believe and secondly because I couldn’t believe I’d done it that second time.  Five proper seasons in and nu-Who finally manages to create a physical reaction in me that wasn’t laughing (Partners in Crime), crying (Journey's End), swearing (Torchwood Season One) or puking (Huw Edwards).

the minimalist Knightmare homage

Part of it must have been to do with my studded Amy Pond obsession; thanks to Karen's performance (a raw mix of the understated and unhinged) she’s firmly become the British ne plus ultra of the manic pixie dream girls (previous contenders include Diane from Trainspotting and Cassie from Skins), psychologically fractured in a way that entirely explains her episode closing nymphomania and also the Doctor’s, um, reticence but utterly adorable to the point that if you dress her like little red riding hood and put her in danger I’m at least going to jump.  As Midnight demonstrated, Doctor Who worries best when it is about the simplest of gestures, when a main character is hemmed in, outside their comfort zone and terrified.  Amy was rendered speechless here, her jibes lost and without the timelord to physically hold her hand only verbally offering some persuasion.

Another element has to be the first of Moffat’s proper (almost) on-screen deaths, in Father Octavian.  Yes it is.  Go and check.  No one human has properly, hopelessly, bought it since everybody lived in The Empty Child.  Moffat’s joked about it on commentaries.  Typically it wasn’t as simple as a neck snap; instead Iain Glenn was called upon to offer both plot information and nobility and as with the rest of the story managed both with an understated dignity.  As was rightly drawn out in Confidential, Matt’s performance was extraordinary here as his face suggested hope just as his eyes reflected despair.  If Octavian could die, well, what could happen to Amy?  All of these elements have to be what led up to me finally feeling Doctor Who in a way I haven’t before.

the British ne plus ultra of the manic pixie dream girls

But it also probably helped that this new version of Doctor Who is so bloody unpredictable.  That after a first episode which neatly set up an unusual base under siege type story, this second part, as is Moffat’s want, dumped the Aliens allusions and was suddenly invaded by the crack and an onslaught of continuity references stretching as far back as The Next Doctor.  As some of us might have seen (or rather read) in Paul Magrs’s novel The Scarlett Empress with its Proppian references, the timelord is well aware that his adventures can have a certain pattern or structure to them but in Flesh and Stone even he seemed surprised and disorientated to find himself coping with parallel storytelling, on the one hand (with its forefinger swirling about) wrapping up the present adventure and on the other throwing forward to what we have to assume will be the series finale.

Where is this leading?  We’re still no wiser about River Song; she’s apparently not who he thinks she is, but has killed someone who we’re to assume is the Doctor but like their proposed future marriage that may be misdirection.  In trying to explain the apparent continuity error of the Doctor suddenly having his jacket back whilst questioning Amy about her memory, Wikia suggests this is some future version jumping back into his own time-stream on a detective hunt which sounds like a very Moffaty thing to do (with the possibility that some of the other inconsistencies groused about here there and everywhere aren’t errors but features).  We know that Steven sent an episode of the series to Russell for a once over – is it because the timelord travels even further back?

Amid this random speculation, we do at least finally have some proper chronology for Amy thanks to date of her wedding -- 26/06/2010.  Which means that The Eleventh Hour (two years earlier) happened in the roughly the same month as Last of the Timelords and assuming she’s twenty-one years old, little Amelia’s appearance in 1996 the year of The Chase’s gothic horror Festival of Ghana, the Eighth Doctor’s first comic strip adventure in Stockbridge, “End Game” and the contemporary scenes of Lawrence Miles’s megalithic novel Interference,  The relevance of all this is probably non-existent in present context but with Moffat, at this point, anything is possible (especially with a copy of Miles's work sitting on his bookself).  At this rate, I’m half expecting the Doctor to sit Amy down and say:  “I had this friend once, Charley Pollard.  She was a bit of an chronological anomaly too …”

Next week:  Being Timelord