Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

New nu-Who new USA trailer.

That's more like it. Loads of dialogue, moments of charm ("They're scared of me..."), more a sense of what the performances are going to be like and a confirmation that this is a very different programme from the one which ended on New Year's Day.

New nu-Who new trailer.

When I was a little boy I dreamt of ... Well, I don't think you want to know what I dreamt of ...

The trailer and clips are coming thick and fast. This offers far more visual information about the new series. As well as a surprise monster return and the tantalising glimpse of the back of someone running towards Stonehenge in a sheepskin coat the general feel is more daylight, less gel lighting, old school look for the Daleks and lots and lots of space. Incidentally, that little girl from the clip. Having read farther than I should have into this spoilery review from Scott at The Stage blog, I think I've fallen into a very large me shaped trap.

New nu-Who.

There are people in the world now who aren't in the production team who've seen the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who due to the press launch tonight. They're talking about it on twitter or tossing about huge spoilers in reviews. The overall opinion is very positive, generally saying it's different but still brilliant.

I feel much as I did at about this time five years ago, unbelievably excited and desperately nervous at the same time (insert my usual football analogy here). It's a clean slate, albeit with some of the original chalk markings still apparent here and there. Luckily, this time, in interviews, the star isn't curiously talking about his role in the past tense ...



... and look at that a whole few seconds of the new episode. Isn't he great? Abrupt and charming and not talking down to the small girl. Reminds me somewhat of the relationship Eccleston had with the kids in The Empty Child. My guess about who the small child is? That it's Amy and the five minute jump will turn out to be fifteen years like Renette in The Girl In The Fireplace. For the next ten days those precious few minutes will equal the Zapruder film for being poured over looking for clues ...

Doctor Who and the Vortex of the Travelling Pants

The second tangible bit of nu-nu-Who was presented to us tonight in the form of this specially shot trailer narrated at the end by what sounds like Simon Pegg and though parts of Gallifrey Base are screaming fail (space) whale!  I’m very optimistic.  It’s rather busier than the Eccleston/Piper “Wanna come with me?” promos from 2005 and like those an expressively epic way of telling us that a new series is imminent. 

And it must be fairly imminent if we're seeing this now.  The trailer says Easter.  The imdb has the 13th March (plus a bunch of potential plot spoilers so beware). 

Matt’s performance seems entirely different to anything we’ve heard before – the intonation is rather more, um,  naturalistic?  Is that the word?  (I'll get back to you.)  Karen has a beautifully boggle-eyed lack of cynicism (even if we’re a bit distracted in the vortex shots).  The dialogue is really a set of bullet points, but poetic bullet points nonetheless and it’s good that Steven’s got the obvious out the way early.

Clearly it will look rather amazing in 3D (should you want to risk going to a Cineworld to see Alice In Wonderland in front of which it will apparently be showing) with the baubles on an intercept course with our retinas as we try to work out what’s changed about the Dalek (a bit simpler?).  Even in a rough bitrate on a tiny monitor it’s a perfectly designed statement that this will be a show that’s once again the same but also very, very different.

Role on March/Easter/sometime in the Spring.

Galloping Gallifreys

 For all the weeks, then days of expectation …

The End of Time: Part Two

… was really just another Doctor Who story.  Thousands leading up to it, thousands hopefully to come.  In January alone, Big Finish have three stories in release, BBC Audio has an audio book read by David Tennant as well as a version of The Ice Warriors Target novel, the raft of dvd releases, and comic strips in Doctor Who Magazine, Adventures and Battles In Time (is that still going?).  By my calculation, that’s seven new stories or instalments of stories and there’ll be much the same next month, and March and the month after that.

Except The End of Time was different.  In our heart of hearts we know that all of those other releases are narrative polyfiller and reclaimed bricks, filling in gaps created in the past, whereas the television series adds whole new layers with Russell T Davies carrying the trowel and David Tennant pushing the wheelbarrow (I’ll let you decide where Julie and Phil and everyone else fit into this analogy).  It was important for them to top it off properly ready for Steven Moffat to bring in his own set of masonry and in that regard they did him and us proud.

To an extent the difficulty with the story, and this has haunted the rest of the specials, Journey’s End was the emotional summation of the past four years of the series.  At the close, after everyone had steered the TARDIS to safety and the Doctor had watched them drift off into the distance it felt like the last time.  It felt right.  If the Doctor had regenerated after leaving Donna with her family perhaps having hidden some hitherto unseen sacrifice from his friends it would have been just as perfect a fade out to the Tenth Doctor’s song as we found here.

Except Davies had some loose ends.  The shape of his sixty episodes dictated that from the moment the Ninth Doctor first spoke of the Time War with each passing burst of information in the meantime, the timelords and Gallifrey had to return in the closing episode of his tenure.  Leaving it to Moffat to sort out would have been like Anthony Reed handing off the end of the Key To Time season to Douglas Adams.  What? Oh right, bad analogy.  But the point is, having offered his spiritual conclusion, as in all of his individual stories, he needed to wind the plot up too.

And wind it up he did, like Trevor Bayliss on amphetamines.  The rigmarole, the Doctor escaping sorry, WORST. ESCAPE. EVER.) just so he can return again with a plan is a classic Doctor Who dramatic device and the Lucas-alike confrontation and chase with the missiles genuinely exciting.  The cactus aliens served their purpose as expected and Tennant got to have a final bit of humour before his long, final, drawn-out frown.  The Mill did their best to fulfil Davies’s epic demands in show the Master race with lots of CGI and virtual sets, some of which came off, some of which looked like cut-scenes from Wing Commander.

The shot of a broken Gallifrey, the landscape filled with crashed Dalek saucers certainly did have the requisite armo and filled in the gaps created by the shadows of the interiors.  I was joking last week when I suggested that Timothy Dalton was playing Rassilon, yet there he was, freed from the Divergent Universe, regenerated and Lord High President (presumably having taken the post in the absence of Romana, trapped outside of normal space as she was when last we chronologically heard of her) the population of the planet having not turned into zombies (ask Big Finish).  Sometimes the wall can get a bit crooked can’t it?

One final global threat to deal with.  I can’t help feel another writer would have had one of the humans, when faced with another planet in the sky, saying “Oh no not again” or some such, slamming the doors as they go back into his or her house.  That would have undercut another chance to see the Chiswick neighbourhood watch hugging each other with relief and since we’re in summation mode it would have been wrong for us not to have seen that one final time, concluding with a member of the family looking to the sky with gratitude, Sylvia this time.  And quite fitting that it all happened with shot from the Sonic Screwdriver blowing up a box of fantasy tricks.  Was forever thus.

I’ll admit to being slightly frustrated with the moment that the Doctor was reduced to being a whirling dervish, mutely spinning revolver cocked as he spun between a shouting Master and Rassilon.  It’s not been unknown for him to lose verbosity when faced with impossible odds but I kept recalling his opening moments with the Sycorax, and his closing chatter during the likes of The Age of Steel, The Family of Blood, hell even The Poison Sky.  That’s the Tenth Doctor I’d been expecting, defiant in his closing moments, shouting and gurning right through into the undiscovered country.

Then I realised that he needed that attitude for the Master to talk himself into sacrifice because he’s the man who would, a beat signposted earlier when the Doctor chillingly acknowledged Davros’s allegation about how he’d manipulate situations so that someone else would die a heroic death.  That’s the richness of Davies’s writing; behaviour which in isolation seems out of character or even a retcon when taken in conjunction with previous episodes is nothing of the sort.  When Wilf reminds the Doctor of his veneration of his people, the timelord shouts that it’s how he chose to remember them, it seems inconsistent, until you remember Gridlock.  He’s always lied to himself and others about these things.

Which is why, in the final analysis, the writer wasn’t going to make the Doctor’s death knell some fall out from a shooting frenzy with the Master and the timelords.  As cultural commentators and writers more talented than me have already noted, if Davies has done nothing he’s proved that sci-fi can and does work with a mass audience if you give it small consonants and make it about people. Despite the broadstrokes, the moments which impressed in The End of Time were between the old men, the Doctor and Wilf, the Doctor and the Master, as the realities of what they’ve seen and done came to the fore, all three actors nakedly bringing a reality to these larger than life characters. 

Davies said during Confidential that he always knew the Tenth Doctor wouldn’t lose his life at the hands of the big epic story, but a smaller choice.  A beautifully shot and directed scene (vintage Euros Lynn), with the Doctor almost metafictionally recognising the same thing, railing against the world.  It’s the same choice the Doctor always has to make in the end – will he sacrifice himself to save one person?  He could just go.  He’s a timelord.  He’s a god.  But as with Rose at the close of The Parting of the Ways, he can’t.  He has a conscience.  He’s made promises.  Unlike Margaret Slitheen who sometimes let them walk away, for the Doctor, everybody lives (if he can make it happen).  Even this one man.

That’s the point when The End of Time finishes.  Or at least when the Doctor heads off in the TARDIS with his regeneration expectation.  After that we’re into an epilogue, the deliberate epilogue.  Like I said, functionally it’s not doing much more than the close of Journey’s End, it’s an indulgence.  But why the hell not?  If The Lord of the Rings films can have a dozen endings after nine-twelve hours of screen time (depending on which version you’re watching), the Russell T Davies years probably deserve an extra twenty minutes, the Doctor holding back his regeneration, if only to explain why Mickey and Martha didn’t join Torchwood after all.

Oh there they are in their own gun-toting spin-off, married, the Mr & Mrs Smith-Jones of the Whoniverse chasing aliens in an industrial power plant straight out of the Pertwee years.  I can’t be alone in thinking at some stage this would have looked like a more palatable spin-off than Torchwood though I can’t help feeling sorry for Thomas Milligan who she’s clearly turfed over in favour of the more exciting life.  Was it like Brief Encounter but with Mickey’s uzi and bug hunts rather than shopping and trips to the movie and a Weevil instead of Dolly Messiter?  Noel Coward wouldn’t have stood for it.

A wink towards The Sarah-Jane Adventures.  Something else entirely towards Torchwood.  In his diary The Writer’s Tale, Davies notes his disappointment at not being able to afford to create the version of the Shadow Proclamation he had in his head with all of the returning aliens.  Well he has now, by giving the Whoniverse its own alien-rich dvd freeze frame friendly Mos Eisley (expect a list of cameos on the wikipedia by the end of the night).  It was unlikely that the Doctor’s convenient absence during Children of Earth and Jack’s reaction thereof were hardly going to be explained in the mother series and on reflection it’s ok that there wasn’t animosity, cushioned presumably by the introduction to Alonso. 

More surprises.  A cute nod to Human Nature, proving once and for all that the Tenth Doctor does do families and the final meeting with Rose bookending the Doctor’s story in a way we’ve not seen before and in a weird way would have been like Tegan turning up for Caves of Androzani.  But as with all of this, it suits the Russell T Davies era.  He apparently hummed and harred over how to bring Rose and her Mum back what with them being in the alternate universe but actually this was the perfect ending, which he suggested himself way back in the public transport and chips flashback that opened Doomsday. 

The final scene, the final line.  He’s alone again.  Well, alone with the TARDIS.  I finally cried when he touched the controls of the console for a final time.  Having established that regeneration is like death, "I don't want to go” is a final act of defiance, like his petulant rant in the face of Wilf earlier, and a continuation of his gusto during his first false regeneration.  No spare hand for the energy to be sucked into this time.  Prophesises are finally getting the better of him.  It also seems to answer what the kids are probably pleading at home “We don’t want you to go…”

My response on Twitter recently to the bizarre criticism of Tennant's ubiquitousness over Christmas was that if nothing else he's been a grand ambassador for the series (with the follow-on that since the franchise is big enough now to have his own embassy, we should be able to keep him on in that capacity).  But the show would have fallen apart if he hadn't also been a bloody good actor, naturally likeable in that way which makes people want to watch the programme each week.  Like all of his predecessors he redefined the part and in a way that none of them could because he was a fan.  A proper fan.  And probably still is.

Then, like generations of children before them, they’re greeted by a new face in those familiar clothes and Steven Moffat’s first lines for his new version of an old creation.  Typical of Moffat to gamely recall elements of the Davies years and his two Doctor’s comments on their appearance (the nose, still not ginger).  Matt Smith apparently channelling the Tenth Doctor in his opening scenes, though its nice to hear that he’ll be using the old fashioned RP.  Geronimo, indeed.  Hooray!  Some of the internet goons are already beginning the negative talk.  Give him a chance.

But even after all of this, Davies likes to leave his mysteries, something fior the kids to ponder or for Moffat to pick up on.  It’s not just the appearance of a new new new Doctor which reminds us that the series, the story continues.  Who was that mystery timelady?  Was she the Doctor’s mother?  Romana?  The Rani?  Susan?  Iris Wyldetyme?  Another one of his daughters?  How could she seemingly circumvent the timelock and appear to Wilf dressed in River Song white?  Mores to the point, who was the other 'weeping' timelord?  Brax?  Vancel?  Maxil?  Someone else whose name sounds like a spot cream?  Perhaps, like Jack’s missing two years, we’ll never know the implications.

During the recent Radio 2 interview, Who on Who?, David asked Davies what his taste in movies was.  Russell regretfully explained that he wasn’t a film buff and that his tastes were rather coarse that he wouldn’t go to see what he “still describes as art house films” or with subtitles.  He goes for spectacle.  An unkind critic would throw those words back at him and suggest that’s why his version of Doctor Who was often simplistic in its plotting and reliant on set pieces.  Except that the public attitude to films is much the same as his, they like spectacle too and if by giving them that, RTD has made Doctor Who a popular success again, what is there to complain about?

Its been fantastic.

Next Time: “Ok, what have you got for me this time?”

Waiting For Gallifrey

Doctor Who: The End of Time: Part One

I was given a Slanket for Christmas, essentially a giant felt blanket with arm holes.  I’m wearing it now.  It’s keeping me warm.  Even as I tried it on for the first time, my Whovian mind was thinking “This must be what Timelord robes are like…”  Little did I know that nine hours later I’d be given a visual demonstration, with Timothy “clearly playing Rassilon” Dalton sporting the Harrods deluxe model with the special Indian weave.  I hope his has a back to it.  Mine doesn’t, not even a zip.  The idea seems to be that you can wear it either way around your body but depending on how you put it on, you’re very conscious of the gap, especially as the temperature drops.  You’re preoccupied.

Russell T Davies must have felt a similar preoccupation when writing The End of Time.  After five or six years in your dream writing job, master of your favourite franchise, how do you draw a line under your tenure, and as it’s turned out your actor’s time in the title role, knowing full well that the series will continue after you’re gone, with a different writer and different actor?  How do you fold the page in this giant televisual game of Consequences having left your mark on the story but beginning with enough of a next sentence that your successor doesn’t find themselves in a narrative cul-de-sac?  Give your main actor the chance to do something new with the role?  And do it at Christmas with all the tinsel that entails?

Perhaps the braver approach would have been for something quiet, a exploration on what it is to be a timelord, a surprising lurch to the subtle.  Something akin to clearly best scene in this episode, the exchange between Wilf and the Doctor in the café, in which we finally discover why the timelord is so afraid of regenerating.  It feels like dying, one man leaving and another taking his place, different face, different personality, same memories.  No wonder it’s rare that different incarnations get along.  Exquisitely played by both actors, it’s just as effective and affecting as the revelatory climaxes to The End of the World and Gridlock and one of the few moments when we see the aeons the Doctor's spent flying about time and space pushing heavily on his shoulders. 

But if the past five years have taught us anything, it’s that Davies isn’t about to spread a Bergmanesque meditation on mortality across a whole hour on Christmas evening.  So instead, having won every other award on the planet, he decides to put in an entry for the Turner Prize by having John Simm’s version of the Master replicated across every person on the planet eradicating class and society in the process (giving the actor the eerie opportunity of experiencing the scene in Being John Malkovich in which the thesp entered his own mind) and having the fans squee up their turkey lunches by returning Gallifrey to the franchise in the most sign posted plot twist since M. Night Shyamalan decided to spend his career trying to replicate the success of The Sixth Sense.

I clapped.  I cheered.  I laughed.  Yes, indeed I squeed.  Regular readers will know that I tend to get over enthusiastic about these Christmas specials and finales in a way that is curiously absent when I sit through the average Hollywood blockbuster, grumbling about the death of cinema.  It tends to be a glorification of the madness of what I’m seeing, of the version of Doctor Who in which the Queen or in this case Barack Obama can become a bystander (deal with that Mr Lance Parkin) as some surreal global catastrophe takes hold such as a giant space titanic smacking into the Earth or the planet is hurled through space to become part of an intergalactic game of bar billiards.

Except even in most of these stories, the general format of Doctor Who has gone unchanged.  The TARDIS lands somewhere, all hell breaks loose and the Doctor ties things up with a bow at the end before dematerialising.  With The Waters of Mars having restated the core storytelling principles in order to shatter them at the climax, The End of Time (part one) wilfully grinds up the resulting pieces, ignoring the format totally in favour of injecting something of the Homeric epic, mythology in the Greek sense of the word, of the audience witnessing events that have already passed, with broad stroke storytelling, third person narration, of man and superman, putting us in the position of witnessing events from the perspective of the timelords.  We haven't seen anything like this before.

And it works, at least for me, though I can imagine why you’d hate it.  It isolates the audience from becoming too involved as we’re essentially watching Gods squabbling over some dirt and a tree.  It’s Superman II meets Waiting For Godot, especially since in this case the Master’s resurrection has brought with it the power to fly, shoot laser beams from his hands and the kind of table manners which would make him a winner on Celebrity Come Dine With Me (perhaps he'll be defeated by Chicken In A Can).  But somehow it seems right that now the Doctor is isolated from humanity, that the reflection of his story should be too.

The scenes in the dockyard – and how lovely to see the product of a quarry for a change – were truly Shakespearean, with the Master essaying the senility of Lear reminiscing about the old times and the edges of kingdom to a Fool who’s far wiser than he is, Eros Lynn's camera pointing straight into the actors faces as they squabbled in the dirt.  Note the similarity with the Doctor’s similar speech about his home planet in The Sound of Drums, but there’s no CG flashback for blondie.  Instead, we and the Doctor discover that the constant banging is “real” not a manifestation of his madness, presumably Ron Grainer’s estate banging on the door of Upper Boat looking for their royalty cheque.

But the writer is still conscious of the timeslot and knows that his story has to have a human element even so, and some humour.  There’s June Whitfield pinching the Doctor’s bum.  There’s Lucy Saxon reaping some revenge on her abusive husband by rendering his resurrection incorrectly (even if, as far as we can tell it led to her own death).  There’s Donna milling about in the background being rude and funny.  There’s Wilfred finally experiencing travel in the TARDIS, gaping that the size of it.  There’s two cactus aliens which seems to have wandered in from The Sarah Jane Adventures who’re probably going to be the catalyst for the resurrection of humanity next week.

There was plenty for us fundamentalist continuity clerics.  Was the story that happened in the church in the 13th century some new adventure or a back reference?  The aforementioned appearance from Obama which puts President Norris from the Virgin New Adventure Warhead out of a job (Davies with a different masterplan to Andrew Cartmel’s in mind).  The mention of the fall of Torchwood was a nice touch even if it’s bound to have spoilt the Christmas of Ianto ‘shippers as they’re reminded of the death of their hero.  We know Barrowman’s in it next week, so perhaps Gwen managed to send a distress signal before her leather jacket was suddenly filled with the visage of Sam Tyler.  Mr Smith and K9 are going probably going fairly mental too.

As the opening half of a story it’s impossible to really say how good it will be until the conclusion (and they missed a trick not including separate title cards for “The End of Time by Russell T Davies” and “Episode One”).  The Space Museum looks like it’s going to be quite mysterious until the second episode when I’m convinced you can hear even the floor manager snoozing through events (at least until Mark Ayres restores him out).  Similarly it takes at least a couple of episodes (and the application of an eyepatch) for Inferno to warm up. 

It wasn't quite the continuation of The Waters of Mars some were expecting with Timelord Victorious bending history to his will as though he has the key to time in his back pocket.  But I'm not sure I would have wanted that.  His marriage with Good Queen Bess is quite enough thank you.  What we're heading for instead is a continuity heavy restating of the Davies approach to Doctor Who and the core elements of his mythology, something akin to Buffy's The Gift or Chosen than Battlestar Galactica's peekaboo.  I used to think that the Doctor would regenerate in order for Gallifrey to return from the void.  Now I’m wondering if we’re going to witness him destroying it yet again so that he can save time itself.  Oh, the irony.

Next Week:  “Stop, or the ginger-nut gets it!” or “How did you survive the Divergent Universe?”

Creamy.

My friends at TV Cream also have a new podcast out and it's a sci-fi special.

Join them as they board Tommy Boyd and Bonnie Langford’s Saturday Starship for a galactic quest to the planet Arg! Along the way, there’s an even more heightened mix than normal of appalling acting from your hosts, and cosmos-class features. Including...

The universal premiere of the Blake’s 7 theme plus lyrics, and an assessment of what actually makes a successful TV sci-fi theme song. Jon P’twee is defrosted to file a video game review, space buskers are given short shrift, and the space Monopoly board game is brought out for a thorough working over. There’s also the Davidson Dossier – new and exciting information about the Fifth Doctor; a look-back at Captain Zep: Space Detective; plus an exclusive peep ahead to this year’s Dr Who Christmas special… and a fleeting visit to Steven Moffat’s bedroom. Finally, there’s a guide to winning The Adventure Game, which culminates in a senses-shattering showdown on Arg!

The podcast can be downloaded here.  It's ace.

Lost In Time

In case anyone is visiting searching for up to the minute opinions of the Eighth Doctor and Lucie's latest audio adventures which were broadcast completely unheralded on BBC7 these past couple of nights (not even a mention on the official site), they were originally reviewed this time last year as part of their proper season.

Sisters of the Flame:  "Let’s be honest, this is really a sisterhood in the Alicia’s Attic sense of the word – we only hear from two of them, with Olsson joined by Nicola Weeks as Lucie’s initial abductor Haspira (who’s just one vowel away from sounding like a Paul Magrs creation).  I particularly appreciated the back reference to Tom and Paul's underscoring of the subtle differences between the two of them."

Vengeance of Morbius:  "It’s a bit of a mess, but endearingly so."

Ambiguously all the announcer gave us at the end of the second episode was a "wait and see" and a trail for the Christmas tv special so lord knows when and if the next series will be broadcast.  But rest assured etc.

Let's build a homeland together in the sand.

Doctor Who: Dreamland

There’s something moderately disconcerting about watching a new Doctor Who episode for the first time on a Saturday morning.  Right day, right season (depending upon your opinion of these kinds of things) just at completely the wrong hour, totally missing the day long anticipation that comes with a tea time transmission.  I ended up with the 10am showing because I lacked the patience for trying to follow the timings of the episodic version on the red button service and my limited mobile internet package simply couldn’t have taken the strain of the chunky bandwidth sapping web edition.  But this is a cartoon, and it’s probably (on reflection) about right that it should be in this time slot – it served The Infinite Quest quite well the other year and changes our expectations as to content.  Dreamland would have been simply incongruous in the tea time slot though there was enough to entertain adults, not least the Die Hard references …

Televisual Who has been unsurprisingly reticent about setting itself in the big country and most often it has been with a format that aped an established Hollywood format like westerns (The Gunfighters), silents (The Feast of Steven), the TV movie (failed sci-fi tv pilots) and gangster films (Daleks In Manhattan).  Though the spin-offs have redressed the balance somewhat, it's perhaps because the show’s essential Englishness, that which makes it unique amongst genre franchises, is tied to heavily to it's parochialness.  Planetary colonies are established predominantly by the British, aliens tend to threaten London and the expectation that audience are less willing to empathise if the human plight is over there, despite something like Independence Day grossed nearly £10 million in the UK alone – though even that had a UK radio spin-off with the classic scene of Sir Patrick Moore duffing up one of the aliens, big Willie-style ("Either I'm concussed, or I'm watching Patrick Moore fistfighting with an extraterrestrial!").  Even global threats are envisioned through an anglophile prism.

So what would seem like the hugest narrative magnet, Area 51, has gone largely untapped with only a mention in Dalek and the early BBC Missing Adventure novel The Devil Goblins from Neptune actually spending time within its walls (the Doctor clearly having forgotten this earlier visit when he had Pertwee’s face, probably during one of the eighth Doctor’s many amnesiatic episodes, it’s all canon etc), presumably because UNIT and now Torchwood serve much the same function.  In attempt to redress the balance, Phil Ford’s script drops the Doctor into a pot pourri of 50s b-movie tropes from the all important greys to giant insect predators and marries them to the kind of US military types who lined their tanks up to give Klaatu a talking to In The Day The Earth Stood Still and then fragrances them further with a smattering of cold war paranoia (“The reds?  Manchester United?”) and contemporary horror references (Alien, Aliens, stopping just short of a McGann fan pleasing reference). 

After his less than stellar adventures with Sarah Jane but excellent collaboration with Mr Davies on The Water of Mars I was quite nervous to hear what Phil Ford would do with a solo adventure.  Well, he certainly didn't "nuke the fridge".  Presumably because of the requirements of the short episode format, the story rattles along, shifting from one end of the desert to another, taking in all of the locales you might expect from these studio quickies, from empty diners to abandoned towns that might have been part of the studio backlot to the rocky interior of “Dreamland” Ford is clearly understands his subject and he’s very comfortable writing for animation (I’ve heard good things about his Captain Scarlet revival), knowing that often simplicity is the key.  There’s a sense of wonder here which is sometimes absent from his Sarah Jane adventures.

Within that, Ford layers elements more associated with Doctor Who; a huge interplanetary battle underpinning a small terrestrial skirmish, the seeming mcguffin that turns out to be the solution, and the Doctor’s expectation that entire races never deserve annihilation, no matter how blood-thirsty, because they may have the capacity for change, including a useful contrast of the infamous “Have I that right?” scene.  Some might argue that the Tenth Doctor’s motto is “no second chances” but in this instance he appears to have seen the Viperox’s future and knows that peaceful intentions lay ahead.  Though on the surface Ford’s script seemed entirely superficial, as the story blasted onward, he manages to subtly and sometimes not so subtly smuggle in quite weighty thematic material.

Otherwise the format seems to restrict Ford’s characterisation though that doesn't hamper the actors too much, most of them rising to the challenge.  The greys, Rivesh and Seruba are the most sympathetic and depthful and played by with heartfelt ease by Lisa “Bernice” Bowerman.  David Warner brings a certain pantomime brilliance to Lord Azlok and Stuart Milligan is perfectly gruff as Stark but it seems a shame to have Clarke Peters from The Wire and only give him about three lines (well, at least it means I can finally unify an old joke from movie blog Ultra Culture and my own rip-off of it).  It’s also obviously a very good thing indeed to finally see Georgia Moffat’s name in the titles (albeit not playing the character we’d like her to be playing), but neither she or Tim Howar have much to do beyond the some old school question asking companionism as waitress Cassie and her friend Jimmy Stalkingwolf.  A few good jokes here, cliffhanger solving escapades there from the former, bit of social commentary from the latter. 

Having said that, Fords presentation of the Doctor is perfect, capturing the expressive nature of his bluff and shade and the element of bluff which was a feature of Tenth in his first series before some of the gloom which developed in the wake of Doomsday, more like the version that turns up for the novels and the comic strips, tuned closer to the Adventures comic and IDW standalones than Magazine and IDW mini-series perhaps but certainly more complex than Battles In Time (I’ve probably thought about this too much haven’t I?).  As with his turn in Sarah Jane Adventures, Tennant relishes the chance to return to some of that unforced lightness and I like the jokes!    Most often the humour in the series develops from the Doctor’s anomalousness within a given situation and sarcastic word play; one liners are more a Clyde Langer thing (or Spider-man for that matter).  Yet here they are and utterly tittersome.  “Some have greatness and some have crates thrust upon them!” Hah!

Because Dreamland works so well as piece of storytelling, the animation seems slightly beside the point which (with apologies to bloggers Paul, Will and David, who detailed the technological efforts involved) is exactly as it should be.  But if can't go without comment that look of special project #2 (again with apologies) especially in relation to the human figures is by no means perfect.  Often very stiff, the Tenth Doctor’s face, so expressive and animated in real life, despite the brave attempt as stylisation often resembles Howdy-Doody or Johnny Cab from Total Recall with haemorrhoids, the rest often also very stiff when called upon to move about, with the glacial Cassie coming off worst.  But like The Infinite Quest before it, when the “camera” is focused on the landscape, on the aliens, on the vehicles, Dreamland  is often very beautiful, resembling the painterly poster art used to advertise those b-movies or a 2000 AD strip with the crated storage facility clearly influenced by Michael Pangrazio’s matt painting at the close of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Considering this has been a gap year in series terms, the production team have worked very hard to make sure Doctor Who still had a very strong presence.  From the Matt Smith announcement attracting high viewing figures to the stunning Torchwood: Children of Earth and the mostly enjoyable Sarah Jane Adventures there’s still been plenty to keep us entertained with some of the spin-off material, old and new school worthy enough to stand alongside the best of what the tv series has had to offer with special mentions for Trevor Baxendale’s novel Prisoner of the Daleks, Paul Magrs’s Hornet’s Nest and Reza from the second season of 24 seemingly telling the world Patterson Joseph was going to be the new Doctor even though he wasn’t.  In terms of the specials, Planet of the Dead disappointed some (not me, ello Michelle) as did amazingly Waters of Mars (generally idiots who don’t deserve their televisions), but this has been a very good year for the franchise which has been topped off nicely by Dreamland and special project #3, the Chrimbo ident, which makes me giddy.

Next time:  Izzy-wizzy, let’s get busy.

Out of Gas

There was a rather good episode of The Thick of It a couple of weeks ago (I know they’re all rather good, but this was especially good) set at the party conference which pinioned on a physical altercation between the descendent of Fires of Pompeii’s Caecilius and Glenn being leaked to bloggers via Twitter.  It felt very now.  As I think someone in the unpopular press said, it made the show even more contemporary because it sounded like something that has already happened, which is hasn’t as far as we know, at least not in the political sphere.  Twitter doesn’t seem to have made it into the Doctor Who universe yet, which means …

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

… lacks a moment in which Clyde and Rani huddle over some client software like Tweetdeck watching words like “weird”, “plant”, “flower”, “splotches” and “twilight” trend in the TwitScoop while the All Friend column is awash with detailed eyewitness reports (well as detailed as they can be in a hundred and forty characters).  This would have been the nu-Who equivalent of the railway station scenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians.  Instead, they were watching BBC News via the iPlayer which whilst a brilliant expression of a governmental programme to get decent broadband into schools also seemed somehow, rather dated.

But The Gift overall felt very old fashioned, but in a good way.  I complained last year that Enemy of the Bane, the climax of the second season was “brash, loud and disjointed, powered by a kind of atomised storytelling which has replaced such incidentals as logical plot structure and coherent character motivation”.  The Gift couldn’t be more different.  Perfectly paced, with a simply plot structure and mostly useful characterisation, it offered the chance to stop and think about the themes being offered up and to laugh at the hijinks of the kids, and concluded with a scene that was about as close to the conclusion to Children of Earth or The Waters of Mars as this adolescent franchise member is likely to have.

After the kind of chase through a warehouse which has all the hallmarks of a typical climax to a story in this series, Writer Rupert Laight (whose previous franchise credits have included some excellent short stories for the Doctor Who website, the novelisations of previous SJA stories and most interestingly one of the stories in Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith spin-off series) unexpectedly drops us into a homage to the Stanley Kramer’s film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (or when wet Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) with the Blathereen standing in for Sydney Poitier (or the Klingons).  The dialogue between the kids before hand is very on the nose; airing his suspicions, Luke says that it doesn’t matter what colour they are, they’re from the same planet as the Slitheen, as the camera pans across the kitchen to reveal Clyde and Rani.

Then, uniquely, a good ten minutes of the episode are spent at the dinner (in an empty Rani’s house, the parents conveniently at a conference apparently) with the kids enduring the table manners of their guests, their potentially racist remarks cleverly making us sympathetic towards the Blathereen, so that we understand when Sarah Jane takes them into her trust.  The message until this point is that you can’t take people at face value; as I think Rani says at one point, there are bad people on the planet Earth as well.  But it’s genuinely amusing, aided by some supreme voice work from Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes of all people, demonstrating the benefits of getting proper actors in for such roles.  Alice Troughton really enjoys stepping up to the challenge of filming the always difficult table scenes, my favourite shot between Sarah Jane and Rani at the sink as the mayhem of the meal plays out behind them.

The rest of the story is like that.  There aren’t that many big action sequences, no speedy runs through corridors or shouting and not a lot of intercutting in the editing actually, with the story quietly playing out in refreshingly long scenes allowing the actors room to act which also benefits the characters, with a return to the neat bits of screwball comedy which were the hallmark of the first season, in this case between Clyde and Rani.  If it didn’t quite work in the attic scenes were Sarah Jane seemed strangely listless initially at the prospect of her perfect (yet soon to be narratively sidelined again) son Luke somehow being ill which is an impossibility and should have tipped her off that something horrendous was in progress, the later scenes in which she enjoyed the reverse of her own domestic dinner party in the Blathereen ship were hilarious messy, bringing to mind the likes of Tiswas or Fungus The Bogeyman.  That right there is how to entertain kids.

A fair use of CGI too.  Though the production team couldn’t stretch to a Slitheen reveal this time, the unveiling of the vivid red petals of the flowers was very effective and the shots of the spores flying through air, though cartoony, had the same disturbing power as the virus droplets in those scenes in Outbreak as we watched them hover over our heroes and their classmates.  Of course, in a perfect world there would have been dozens of these scenes with populace fleeing as the spores degraded even further the air quality of London, but as is always the case in SJA, even if the moon is falling to earth, it’ll be viewed through the eyes of our heroes, the catastrophe being left to our imagination through reported speech.  Perhaps, just as we’ll never know what happened to these kids during Children of Earth, there’s a version of this story were Prime Minister Denise Riley is staring UNIT out across the cabinet table and asking them if they have any good gaseous pesticides.

If there’s a problem with the thematic heart of the story, it’s that having passed on to kids the anti-racism message, the needs of the narrative to have a villain leads to the reveal that the Blathereen were villains all along, a turnaround which is fairly dark stuff for something in the CBBC slot.  People who aren’t like you are ok – oh no wait, no they’re not, they’re bastards after all and they want to take your land.  Laight does briefly leave the possibility hanging that perhaps the Blathereen are set up, but it’s not long before they’re shown chomping their way messily through another meal.  Anyone who’s read the spin-off novel from which they’re sourced, Stephen Cole’s The Monsters Inside, will know that they really are as bad as the Slitheen anyway, I suppose.

Viewed through the prism of recent franchise editions, the conclusion of this story is also fairly challenging.  Having spent the best part of three years saying that sentient beings deserve a second chance, and third, and fourth, and … with the whole conversation about the execution of Margaret in Boomtown having already seen much of her family destroyed by a missile, with whole stories which talk about the orphaning of aliens, Sarah Jane uses Mr Smith to destroy the Blathereen couple, splattering their remains across the inside of the attic in a moment that inappropriately reminded me of the Marvin scene in Pulp Fiction, and like Tarantino’s best scene (!) it’s played for laughs and is very, very funny.

The final moments of the episode demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the series.  The scenes in which our heroes are huddled together amid the orange goo, the actors clearly trying not to laugh, like the earlier were Clyde is trying to hide the tin dog under the table much to Rani chagrin are adorable and demonstrates as I’ve already mentioned over and over and over again that when the characters aren’t simply spouting masses of exposition at each other we like spending time with them.  That's what ultimately made this episode so entertaining.  Plus Clyde's one liners.  And the continued rivalry between Mr Smith and K9.

About the only thing really wrong with the story was the coda.  The perfect end to the story and the season would have been a pan away from the group in that attic wiping Blathereen remains from their eyes, having saved the world and enjoying the consequences.  That final montage which is supposed to bookend the series and may be trying to be as depthful as an Angela’s philosophy montage from My So-Called Life but ends up being as anodyne as similar monstrosities in Heroes or Defying Gravity (“Some people say that life is a dream.  It could be a dream.  It depends if we dream and when we dream and what we dream about etc”). 

Good god, I hope they never do that again.