No Dempsey! Make Peace!
Tachyon TV presents a very special alternative DVD commentary podcast for The Stolen Earth. It's our biggest podcast yet.
Topics up for discussion include: Soho drinking clubs, incipient Forsythia, Sarah Jane's giant dating computer, Sky series link clashes, Torchwood's AV bill, and the definite Dempsey and Makepeace DVD boxset release.
Listen to it via the Behind the Sofa jukebox or download it from Tachyon TV.
But if you can't wait, here's a specially produced video teaser to whet your appetite...
In the wee hours of Sunday morning last weekend, in the aftermath of The Stolen Earth, after my initial "'the fuck was that?", I started to try to wrap my weary brain around what I thought of the episode.
Ever been to the circus? No, neither have I, but I have seen circuses portrayed in myriad films and television programmes, from La Strada to At the Circus to Series 25's The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and let me tell you one thing: based on the evidence, those places are simply infested with clowns...and the penultimate episode of Season 4 of the born-again Doctor Who was so over-filled it felt like two-dozen of those gurning misanthropes piling out of a tiny little car. Packed to the gills, it was. Stuffed like a haggis. A veritable Berliner of in-your-face fanwankery.
With this as my initial impression of the episode, that, like Wales, it was simply too overpopulated for it's own good, the clouds that lay over my sleep-deprived mind parted to allow a beam of inspiration to alight in my consciousness with a title for my review: "The Swollen Earth". It was perfect. Simple...yet elegant. A clever play on the title of the episode, as well as a biting criticism. I promptly went on "the internets", clicked on "New Post" and proudly started this review under said title and saved a draft version to finish later in the week.
Well, much to my annoyance, within a day a review was posted up by one Iain Hep-burn. Up near the top of the review, it contained this line: "Stolen Earth? Swollen Earth more like."
"Damn you, Iain Hep-burn!" I shouted, shaking my fist in the air. Defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory! Crestfallen, I have since had to settle for a review proclaimed by a title which is a mere shadow of my original idea. You'll just have to make do.
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
How does that old adage go? Too many companions spoil the broth? Something like that...and The Stolen Earth is a fine example. The episode is simply sodden with so much exposition and forced emoting that it doesn't leave a lot of room for any of the characters to do much of anything. There certainly isn't room for any individual development. It's all about spectacle; there's surface, but no depth.
Damn you, Iain Hep-burn!
Not that some of that isn't nice. The Mill outdoes itself with eye-candy from all the money they saved by not having
to do anything for the last couple of weeks. They have some great
spectacle of Dalek saucers attacking New
York, the nicely-rendered (if structurally questionable) Shadow
Proclamation outpost, Daleks attacking the Valiant and the Medusa
Cascade.
Part and parcel with the overblownedness (I just made that word up) of it all are the relentless and gratuitous attempts to tug at our heartstrings, which often comes across as cackhandedly blunt. A little finesse would probably improve matters significantly; throughout the episode we are repeatedly bludgeoned by dialogue that seemed to be applied by a trowel and a score that seemed to be applied by Murray Gold. Even Harper makes some strangely heavy-handed choices in camera zooms when Rose first appears in her flash of lightning.
Probably the height of this problem is the reunion between Rose and the Doctor. Rose appears in the distance with her big gun and bigger teeth. The music swells. They run toward each other. Even the Doctor's extermination happens in slow motion. I can't help but think the mawkishness of this scene is probably intentional so it could be subverted by the Dalek attack, but even that is undermined by its predictability.
Poor Martha still seems to be saddled with the most hackneyed parts of the script. Even Dame Judy Dench couldn't deliver contrived pap like "Maybe Indigo tapped into my mind, because I ended up in the one place I wanted to be!" and be convincing. (Her mom doesn't fare much better: "you came home. At the end of the world you came back to me") In fact all of UNIT and the "Project Indigo" storyline suffers from stilted dialogue and delivery and poor plotting. Where's Colonel Mace when we need him? I suppose I should be pleased that at least she gets to bandage someone's head for a change.
Well, at least Freema got a part for a change, and they apparently had to bump someone else to make room for it: it seems to be Sarah Jane's turn to get the "Guest star Freema Agyeman" treatment. All Liz Sladen gets to do is look terrified and/or sad for a few minutes, and then go drive her car into a couple of Daleks. I can only hope they find more for her to do in Journey's End...and less for Gwen and Sylvia.
Another contributing factor to the lack of room for character is that what seemed like a full third of the episode is devoted to a video conference call with lots of people introducing themselves to each other and spouting exposition and flirting like it's one of those "meet hot singles" toll lines you see advertised on late-night television. Oh, and Rose gets all jealous and feels left out. The climax of this extended scene erupts into techno music and very, very dramatic typing. I suppose it could be worse: before the split-screen thing everyone was just moping around being despondent.
What little room there is for character moments seems to have been reserved for Rose, Donna and Harriet Jones. Rose returns to form after her thoroughly perplexing turn in last week's episode. Donna's...well, Donna's Donna. That's a good thing. And I rather enjoyed Harriet Jones' hurried, stubborn performance (though her reveal was no surprise to anyone who paid attention to the credits). Wasn't Penelope Wilton magnificent?
Parallel Worlds:
If RTD was looking for a place to trim some of the extra bloat off of The Stolen Planet, let me suggest this: perhaps we could have done without the whole deal with the Shadow Proclamation. You see, deep down, when looked at closely, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be all a bit shit. After some four series worth of ominous-sounding buildup, all they turn out to be is the space police?? The intergalactic equivalent of CHiPs? So much for the mystery.
...even for cops, the Shadow Proclamation don't turn out to be all that much cop.
Now, my general distaste for jackbooted-thugs of all stripes tends to give me a low opinion of all armed agents of the state, but, even for cops, the Shadow Proclamation don't turn out to be all that much cop. They seem to consist of about half-a-dozen Judoon and a couple of haughty, palid zealots looking for a crusade. They're like the old "homespun" version of UNIT from the 70's or 80's, but with digital technology. Once the Doctor materializes in their hallway and places an order for Ma-Po Tofu, nothing much happens.
On top of the fact that the Shadow Proclamation itself isn't exactly exciting, I think the lengthy interludes where Donna and the Doctor mull over the missing planets and follow bees really throw a spanner in the pacing of the episode. Sure, I realize the narrative function of these delays: the earthbound Planeteers need to fret and whine about how the Doctor's cell-phone battery must have run dry and they're all going to die. Nonetheless, they seem to be twiddling their thumbs while high energy exciting-type stuff happens to everyone else.
The Masters of Earth
I have something to confess: I've always liked the Daleks. Sure, some of the earlier models were easily thwarted by stairs and mirrors and mud on their eyestalks and insulating materials on the floor and people pushing them from behind; and sometimes they have been known to e...nun...ci...ate... all... of... their... di...a...logue... like...this (I'm looking at you, Dr. Who and the Daleks!), but, overall, they've done a great job of filling their role as iconic Doctor Who monsters.
Now, some of you older readers may remember an obscure space opera called Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired back in the late 80's and early 90's. Somewhere in the middle of its short run, the series introduced a wildly popular enemy called The Borg. They were sort of like Margaret Thatcher's worst nightmares about the Soviet Union, or the Legion of Doom with coordinated outfits. They were pretty much an unstoppable, malevolent force with designs on literally consuming the rest of the universe.
No more of this sifting and perverting one human cell in a billion crap. No more pig-slaves. No more religion.
Well, it didn't take long for The Next Generation and its sequels to water down The Borg until they were not only a stoppable force, but one that seemed to have trouble getting started. Unfortunately, the Daleks have often followed a similar path. For decades now Doctor Who has been tainting the Daleks' biology with human DNA, diluting their menace, and making them behave in a thoroughly un-Dalek-like manner.
Well, I'm pleased to note that the Daleks are finally back to being real Daleks. No more of this sifting and perverting one human cell in a billion crap. No more pig-slaves. No more religion. No more breeding with humans. I hope the reveal next episode of whatever the hell they're harvesting the humans for doesn't let me down terribly.
Okay, so they aren't perfect. They're probably a little too talky; they used to be all "Exterminate!" and "You will o-bey the da-leks!", but now they're all "maximum extermination!" and "annihilate UNIT!" and "Daleks do not accept apologies." And they still seem to panic a bit too much whenever the Doctor is mentioned. ("Emergency! Locate the TARDIS! Find the Doctor!")
And what's with the Daleks being so giddy about being masters of Earth? The Supreme Dalek intones, "We have waited long for this ultimate destiny," and they all bob up and down in space chanting "Daleks are the Masters of Earth." So what? As far as galactic backwaters go that's right up there with "Today: Germany...Tomorrow: Davos, Switzerland!"
Julian Bleach and the production team have done a stellar job of bringing Davros back to life (if that's what it is). Harper handles Davros's slow reveal well, and his exchange with the Doctor, complete with nipple-slip, was likely the best dialogue of the episode (except, perhaps, for the incongruous "bye!")
On my second pass through the episode I'm even slowly growing to appreciate Dalek Caan as he gurgles and sputters and laughs maniacally. The bizzareness of the performance is fascinating in much the same way that Billy Piper's was in Turn Left. The tentacled abomination, in a spotlight, squealing, "Death is coming...Ho ho...I can see it! Everlasting death for the most faithful companion. Hee hee." Certainly not something you're going to see anywhere else.
No Signal:
I know that when some of us go on to point out the scientific inaccuracies and implausibilities in Doctor Who, certain frustrated individuals like to throw around this argument that Doctor Who isn't actually science fiction at all, but it's actually fantasy and, therefore, we should treat it exactly like Harry Potter, and hold it to no standards of plausibility and scientific integrity.
Well, that's bollocks.
Unfortunately, so is much of the science in this episode. When Doctor Who, or any other science-fiction programme, starts pulling bad science out of its arse, that doesn't make it fantasy...that simply makes it bad science fiction.
Do you know what happens when millions of cell phones try to call the same number at the same time? Busy signals.
The worst culprit of "bad science fiction" in The Stolen Earth is the nonsense with the phones. Do you know what happens when millions of cell phones try to call the same number at the same time? Busy signals. And probably crashing a lot of computers. Even if they could all do their calling at the same time, and even if they still had satellites and whatknot to help 'em along, it still wouldn't result in cartoonish smoke-rings pulsing slowly up the giant phallus in Torchwood Plaza. It was even a dramatic catastrophe, with Billie Piper and a bunch of other people staring wishfully into space while hammering away at their cell phones.
A consideration of the science of the episode also brings up the question of why the hell the 27 planets were so close to each other, and, more importantly, why they don't seem to be experiencing any of the massive gravitational effects one would expect from the proximity. ("It was on Earth. This planet called earth...miles away.") I guess that if you take those sort of things into account you'd have to forgo the spectacle of a whole bunch of planets filling up your entire night sky.
Interagency cooperation:
Here are a bunch of random observations I couldn't put anywhere else...
t's a pretty thick coincidence that the three missing planets from the past happened to be on Donna and the Doctor's radar, but none of the other 23.
Why exactly was the cloister bell ringing? When he got to the earth everything seemed fine. Who or what set it off?
"Donna...I'm taking you to the Shadow Proclamation...hold tight!" Why? Is there turbulence?
One of the more unintentionally funny exchanges in the episode:
Martha: "I've been promoted. Medical director on Project Indigo."
Jack: "Did you get that thing working?"
Martha: "Indigo's top secret. No one's supposed to know about it."
Why does Jack just insist "We're dead". Jack, in particular, we know is going to not stay dead.
That comic chemistry at work: "You're saying bees are aliens?" "Don't be daft!...not all of them."
Daleks Attack Formation 7 seems to be a fancy way of saying three Daleks all facing the same way. Interestingly, that seems to be the same formation they use to exterminate Harriet Jones, Former Prime Minister.
I'm with Frank. I enjoyed the final "We know who you are" joke...
If Jack had shared his info about the teleportation device with UNIT, maybe they'd have had working teleporters and been able to, you know, combat the Daleks or something. A little inter-agency cooperation goes a long way. And, for that matter, if it was just a matter of figuring out 4 and 9, I'm sure Jack could have tried all 100 combinations in relatively short order.
The Pirate Plot:
Apparently a lot of the...what do you call them? min-g-mon-gs? ...have been up in arms at the possibly-gratuitous references to continuity and such that has been scattered up and down the last couple episodes, and will probably reach a boiling point with Journey's End. I for one wasn't particularly bothered, because the passing references generally seemed appropriate (such as mentions of Tosh and Owen).
Interestingly, however, the episode has a lot more connection to The Pirate Planet than the idle name-dropping of "Calufrax Minor". Just like the Captain's victim planets in the earlier serial, the Doctor notes that the 27 stolen planets are "in perfect balance." All those worlds fit together like pieces of an engine (a very big engine, it would seem). I don't recall what it was actually for in The Pirate Planet, but I wouldn't be surprised if RTD lifted it directly from Adams' earlier script.
Bait and Switch:
And finally, I want to discuss at some length my feelings about the cliffhanger...
To (Bang) Be (Bang!) Continued (Bang!)....
Here are the results for the twelfth blog poll, for The Stolen Earth:
The thirteenth, and final, Doctor Who season 4 poll, for Journey's End, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
There's not much left to say about The Stolen Earth
that my estimable
colleagues on this blog haven't already said, but something Neil
mentioned in his fabulous, nail-on-the-head review
got me
thinking about fanwank so I thought I'd make a few generalisations and see where it takes me. There were loads of references to the
"classic" series in The Stolen Earth and previous episodes, but there
were also many more references to stuff that has its origins in the new
series. The Shadow Proclamation goes right back to Rose, the Medusa
Cascade was mentioned at the end of series 3, and there are many other
examples since the series came back, not least of which all those
shennanigans about the Face of Boe. Fanwank has been defined in lots
of ways but this one is as good as any other: "A term used in Doctor
Who fiction to refer to any piece of work which
reuses old monsters or characters purely in an attempt to stir feelings
in the groins of sad anal fanboys." I think that
you could also refine it slightly by saying that it's also any piece of
work "which references old monsters or characters purely in an attempt
to stir feelings in the groins of sad anal fanboys". What's
interesting about the definition is that it's all about the target -
fanwank gets the sad fanboys going - and this is what seems to drive a
lot of the hostility towards those Doctor Who episodes which they
perceive to be loaded with stuff that supposedly leaves the general audience
bewildered.
Too much fanwank
I was particularly struck by this hostility when I read a comment on another forum from someone who's a fairly high-profile fan but decidedly keen on distancing himself from the sadder fanboy types. He'd watched Turn Left and decided that "the Fanwank God had been out fanwanked by RTD", the episode had been a "Doctor Who fan's wet dream" and he could "imagine them bouncing up and down with excitement as each new companion death was casually announced via background news reports". This made me laugh at first, but then I started wondering who exactly these Doctor Who fans were supposed to be, especially as the bulk of Turn Left was about revisiting moments from the series since RTD came on the scene. There's a weird consensus in some circles that the only people who could possibly enjoy things like the detail of those background news reports are the old-style weak lemon drink type of fans who make transcripts of each programme while chuckling into their handwritten Big Finish synopses. This is, of course, nonsense, and the notion only exists because the people who perpetuate it are themselves bound up in another, less-celebrated part of the old-school fan mindset: fear of continuity. It's a given among some fans that the classic series withered away because it became increasingly inward looking and incomprehensible to the general viewer because of the obsession with continuity during the John Nathan-Turner era. The argument is OK as far as it goes, but tends to ignore other crucial problems such as wayward producing, disastrous casting and frequent recourse to the "Will this do?" school of script-writing. But the spectre remains at the feast. It takes only a small reference to the past in current Who to start the siren voices plangently crying "Too much fanwank - it'll lose the public - playing to the fans."
Surely something as niche a concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to a mainstream channel's popular audience?
The absurdity of this position really came to the fore when Doomsday
was transmitted. The battle of the Daleks and Cybermen was
characterised by some as pure fanwank, something that even fan fiction
writers would have thought twice about. But this fanwank episode was
watched by over 8 million ecstatic viewers, only the merest fraction of
whom could be described as fanboys. Surely something as niche a
concept as fanwank loses all meaning if it's applied to something that appeals to
a mainstream channel's popular audience? Forget the weak lemon drink
fans watching Turn Left - all 0.5% of them - and remember that a huge
swathe of the audience enjoying the references to Matha and Sarah's
deaths and the rewriting of earlier events are young males and females
(yes females) who have been happily watching the series since 2005.
They are not like the old fans in the 1980s who staunchly gathered
around a minority interest show and who relished the supposed cut and
thrust of continuity madness. They are in a world where the national
press features lengthy articles about Bad Wolf and Saxon. They are in
a world where series arcs and motifs don't alienate anyone. The
average "I'm better than fanwank" fan is the one who says, seemingly
every week, that episode x featured "too many references to something
that happened earlier in the series - the audience won't understand
it", and retains this view undaunted by all the other evidence
(ratings, AIs, word-of-mouth) which suggests that not only are the
audience not alienated, they are lapping it up and screaming for more.
for Doctor Who fans to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense
I sometimes wonder if these loons actually understand that television is a bit different nowadays from when Colin Baker was strutting his stuff. I have some sympathy for the view that Doctor Who gets a bit bogged down with its series arcs, but that isn't same as saying that the general public have problems with them. The programme is mild in comparison to US shows that are increasingly adopting the true serial form. Network television channels with large audiences are showing Lost, Heroes, Prison Breakout and so on, but I don't hear people having paroxysms whenever a character from Series 1 of Lost suddenly reappears in the series 3 finale. The world didn't end when Buffy showed up in Angel. I didn't feel moved to shout "the audience will be confused" when a minor first series plot point became significant in the final series of The Wire. Television is at its best when it can exploit a long and complex developing narrative, and this pattern is increasingly supported by the development of iPlayers, downloadable episodes and DVD season boxsets. So for Doctor Who fans to worry that some footling story arcs are the harbingers of doom is the highest form of 1980s paranoid nonsense.
The current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed fans.
The Stolen Earth has been slagged off in various places on the web as
being a confusing and frantic mish-mash of elements from the Davies
era, and on more than one occasion as having appeal only to fanwank
obsessed fans. I find this view depressing and wrong-headed. The
current Doctor Who viewers are the fanwank obsessed
fans. That's the point. They like fanwank. For fanwank and continuity, read "modern
television storytelling". In this case sometimes ropey modern television storytelling. OK - there were quite a few nods to classic
era Who, but they had no impact on the story and were just a nice bit
of window dressing for the main event which was to give the general
audience the culmination of a story that began with Rose. Imagine the
eight-year old boy or girl who started watching the series in 2005.
The Stolen Earth must have been like all their Christmases at once, and
who would begrudge them that just because a few of the weak lemon
drinkers liked it as well?
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
I don’t really like science fiction. That might sound like an odd thing for a lifelong Doctor Who obsessive – not to mention a writer for, duh, SFX magazine – to say, but it’s true. Sort of. What I mean is I’m actively turned off by so many of the staple trappings of sci-fi – spaceships, laser guns, big fuck-off battle scenes – I wonder if I oughtn’t find a better word for the bits I do like.
When I consider the kind of stuff that is – whether it’s the claustrophobic terror of Sapphire and Steel, the warped psychodrama of Twin Peaks or the whip-smart wit of Buffy – I’d say it roughly breaks down as “reality with a twist” - which is why you’ll find no bleating about a lack of alien planets from me. (Just to add a note of confusion, my DVD shelves are also home to highly prized box sets of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, though whether I like them because they adhere to certain sci-fi conventions or deliberately set out to subvert them (more dialogue than dogfights, basically) I honestly couldn’t tell you.)
So what of Doctor Who? I guess, more than any other show, it’s anything you want it to be. I know we all blether on about its “infinitely flexible format” all the time, but it really is its greatest strength, and the reason why my favourite episodes include unique spins on horror movies, historical epics, screwball comedies, romances, revenge tragedies and boys’ own adventure stories, but very little in the way of rocket ships, jet packs or chicken dinner pills.
Now, before you start accusing me of being an insufferable la-de-da smuggo who thinks you’re shallow for getting your kicks from space stations and fighting robots while I labour over illuminating studies of the human condition, I can assure you my tastes are not quite as recherché as I’d like people to think. For example, I’m a sucker for a good – or even a bad – rom-com, so while it’s true I’d watch literally anything rather than sit through the likes of Independence Day or Starship Troopers, that anything is a lot more likely to be Four Weddings And A Funeral or In Her Shoes than it is The Seventh Seal or A Matter of Life and Death.
But enough about me. Oh, actually, a tiny little bit more about me: I’ve never really “got” the Daleks, either. I mean, they’re just not scary, are they? Creeping shadows, creatures under the bed, dead kids in gas masks, men turning into plants – that’s the stuff of nightmares. But big tin cans with stupid voices who are always shouting the odds about how terrifyingly invincible they are, seconds before being bitch-slapped into submission - again? They never did it for me in my original behind the sofa days, never mind now.
The David! Catherine! Freema! John! With Liz! And Billie! title parade was like the world’s most thrilling Powerpoint presentation
You won’t be at all surprised to learn from this solipsistic preamble that I didn’t really like The Stolen Earth. Or, at least, I couldn’t help feeling it was aimed at someone else – someone younger, less grumpy, more squee-inclined (for more on this, should you be able to bear it, see my previous ruminations on the difference between Optimus Prime and a loaf of bread). Which is ironic, as this was the episode in honour of which words like fanwank and fangasm have been chucked around like… well, like the product of both those things - and I’m a big enough fan to have once owned a copy of Gary Downie’s cookbook.
Which is not to say my fan buttons didn’t take a few big punches along the way. For starters, I was unfeasibly giddy over the David! Catherine! Freema! John! With Liz! And Billie! title parade, which was like the world’s most thrilling Powerpoint presentation. And the combination of Richard Dawkins and Doctor Who – two of the great loves of my life – was enough to make me think the universe is now being run specifically for my personal gratification (and yes, I do appreciate the irony in that). I particularly loved the way Dawkins, true to form, was shown to be right about everything; no doubt somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, Anne Coulter was insisting those planets in the sky were all a giant liberal atheist conspiracy.
There were also a few belly laughs, courtesy of the Doctor’s hilarious exchange with the Judoon captain (especially Tennat’s crowning “Ma-ho!”, which sounded like the sort of thing Mr T would say, were he fluent in Judoon), and Donna’s description of the subwave network as an “outer space Facebook” (though if anything’s going to date-stamp this episode, it’s that).
Rose’s petulant, jealous reaction to Martha on that same network was also a nice touch, neatly reversing the Rose-envy of series three and giving Freema her moment in the sun. In the end, though, poor old Martha couldn’t hope to compete with that emotional reunion, which took one of the conventions of those rom-coms I’m so guiltily fond of, milked it for all it was worth and then fried the hell out of it with a severe case of Dalek-powered coitus interruptus – an iconic moment destined for a long afterlife on a thousand TV clip shows.
And then there was Davros. It was fashionable for a time to criticise ol’ blue eye for having stolen all the Daleks’ thunder, but that’s a bit like accusing The Beatles of making Cliff Richard look a bit lame – a better alternative came along, that’s all. Davros is everything the Daleks aren’t – creepy, repulsive, insidious, and capable of holding his own in genuinely thrilling confrontations with the hero. And Julian Bleach has clearly nailed it from the get-go – the perfect synthesis of Wisher’s cunning and Molloy’s barely contained hysteria, he just might turn out to be the daddy of them all. (Is it just me, though, or is there something inherently funny about Davros being played by a bloke called Julian? Or is it actually slightly less ridiculous than his real name being Terry?).
Oh, and the cliffhanger was a bit of a doozy, too.
Sadly, these triumphs were in danger of being buried under an avalanche of lazy plotting, spurious continuity, vaulting over-ambition and a general, pervasive air of silliness. A few random examples:
What the hell was going on with the big talking kids’ TV computer?
Spin-offs-a-go-go. If last week saw a good episode tainted by its association with Voyage of the Damned, this week RTD went one better by smearing Torchwood all over it like some kind of cross-franchise dirty protest. And I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for The Sarah Jane Adventures but, bearing in mind it pulls in a million viewers, tops, wouldn’t 80% of the audience have been wondering what the hell was going on with the big talking kids’ TV computer?
Continuity overload. On top of the cast who actually appeared, there were namechecks for Tosh, Owen, Maria, Maria’s dad, Clyde, even Mr bloody Copper, not to mention references to the plot of The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the planet Calufrax (see how my point last week about casual viewers not being familiar with The Pirate Planet suddenly makes sense? Hey, if RTD can retcon random nonsense as significant plot arcs, so can I.)
John Barrowman turning it up to 11. And then turning it up some more. This isn’t I’d Do Anything, you know.
The Shadow Proclomation. Once darkly invoked as the most powerful force in the galaxy, it turns out the SP is nothing more than “posh outer space police”. Way to undercut your own mythologising, Rusty. And while the exterior looked great, why did the TARDIS appear to land in some Victorian public toilets?
Too many “special” Daleks: Davros, Dalek Caan, The Supreme Dalek – typical bloody management-heavy organisation. I bet they’re all on whopping bonus packages, too.
“Annihilate UNIT”. Not sure why, but this really made me laugh.
The Doctor and Donna. They didn’t actually do an awful lot, did they? And what was with the Doctor just giving up and chucking in the towel like that? That just wasn't like Ten at all. Hasn't Russell got character notes he can refer to, or something?
Martha: “I’m medical director on Project Indigo.”
Jack: “They got that working?”
Martha: “Indigo’s top secret – no-one’s supposed to know about it!”
“Take this – it’s the Osterhagen Maguffin!” And where did Dempsey think he was sending Martha, exactly? Or was he just atomising her for the sheer heck of it?
The TARDIS, a time machine, bursts into flame with the effort of… travelling through time. Bit of a design fault, perhaps?
Harriet Jones - from mumsy MP to war-mongering PM to expert hacker. I believe this is what’s known in the trade as a “character arc”. And yes, the whole planet may have been taken out of time and space using technology so advanced the entire fabric of the multiverse is threatened, but don’t worry, all we need is a signal booster and we can still phone out for takeaway. (Using the power of a rift in time and space that ‘s now about a billion light years away. Did anybody actually read this before it got made?)
There’s a fleet of Daleks on the way to wreak more devastation on Cardiff than Charlotte Church on a night out to wet the baby’s head
The “wobbly TARDIS” shot. I know I’ve just spent ages affecting a snooty disregard for special effects and CGI set-pieces, but even I noticed this one. (The flying saucers over the street money shot was genuinely cool, though, I’ll give you that.)
I’m alright Jack: “Gwen, Ianto - there’s a fleet of Daleks on the way to wreak more devastation on Cardiff than Charlotte Church on a night out to wet the baby’s head, but I’m off. And I’m taking the Dalek-killing gun with me. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”
The direction. I’ve said this before but, while Graeme Harper was once the nearest thing Doctor Who had to a genuine auteur, these days he just looks a bit flabby alongside Young Turks like Euros Lyn and James Strong. For example, check out the way he introduces the “Exterminate” broadcast – it’s supposed to be a pivotal moment: a chilling invocation of the power of a single word to fate a planet to its doom, but Harper chucks it in as casually as a Skype call from his mum, without any attempt to build up the tension, and then proceeds to over-compensate by having everyone get instantly hysterical. Or look at the way he has Cribbins gawping up at the sky for about five minutes without noticing it’s full of giant planets (and he’s supposed to be an astronomy buff! No wonder he always misses all the action).
Of course, The Stolen Earth can’t have been all that bad, otherwise why would I still be in such a state of feverish excitement for the next installment? (Incidentally, I think all the portents of doom surrounding Donna are a red herring, and Billie’s going to be the one to cark it. That’s not a spoiler, just a hunch). I guess I was just disappointed the episode wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be: I was all geared up to be indulged by one kind of fanwank, and I got a whole different type instead.
I love Doctor Who way more than is healthy but, considering this was the (almost) culmination of four years’ emotional investment, why was my most moving, enduring TV image of the day was Elbow’s anthemic triumph at Glastonbury? “Throw those curtains wide,” sang Guy Garvey exultantly. “One day like this a year would see me right.” This wasn’t that day but, in the same way a mistreated dog will always return to its tormentor, I’m still putting my faith in Russell delivering the goods this Saturday. Because love is blind, and hope springs eternal. Just go easy on the spacey spacey, stuff, okay?
Scattered around the world and disconnected from each other, Earth's greatest heroes independently investigate a dark and terrible occurrence. Ultimately, their common history and common cause draw them together to combat a threat from the past that has become dangerously present.
Yawn.
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
Am I talking about The Stolen Earth, or am I talking about the first issue of the new Titans comic book series, written by Judd Winick and featuring the popular characters from George Perez and Marv Wolman’s New Teen Titans comic? The first issue of the new series features such former Teen Titans as Nightwing, Donna Troy, Beast Boy, and Cyborg independently attacked and they have to come together to discuss what’s going on and what to do about it.
Or perhaps I’m referring to one of the many other times that a variation on the same trope has been used: everywhere from The Five Doctors to the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring to the meeting between Kaito Nakamura and Angela Petrelli in the first episode of season two of Heroes. It boils down to the idea that the old guard have all seen the signs and now have to get together to discuss what's happening. It’s not an inherently boring device, but it is rather hackneyed, and so it’s not really adequate to drive an episode. Which is exactly what’s happening here.
Cohesion? Check. Coherence? Errr... quick! distract the audience! Penelope Wilton! Adjoa Andoh! Richard effing Dawkins!
It’s a little different here, because many of these characters haven’t met each other. For the first time, Matha Jones, Ianto Jones and Harriet Jones can talk to one another. And nifty as that idea sounds, am I really supposed to care? Turn Left drew from the program's recent past to give it the momentum it needed, to a certain degree of success. The Stolen Earth broadens its focus by drawing from the spin-offs that aired during that time, and it does so in a cheap, lazy, and boring fashion. I'm all for building a cohesive, coherent universe. Cohesion? Check. Coherence? Errr... quick! distract the audience! Penelope Wilton! Adjoa Andoh! Richard effing Dawkins! Because that's the tactic that's used here, and if the Appreciation Index is any indication, it works marvelously. Which, of course, it doesn't (perhaps there's a reason that no such thing exists in America). As much as I love The Sarah Jane Adventures, and as much as I've come to like Ianto and Gwen, why even bother enlisting them for this show when we know that they won't undergo any significant level of development, and they don't even really interact with each other (aside form Jack and Sarah Jane, who are both Doctor Who characters in any case)? Why bring these characters in at all if they're only going to be used as crew on the good ship Exposition, captained by a nonsensical version of Harriet Jones, who gets none of her well-deserved face time with the Doctor?
Why did they pay all of these actors to show up and deliver a couple lines of exposition when we're gearing toward a finale that should be powered by the triple threat of David Tenant, Billie Piper, and Catherine Tate? After a Donna-Lite and a Doctor-Lite episode, why on Poosh can't the two of them get more than a couple moments of screen time together? If Rose is so important, why can't we see her do more than point her gun at looters and complain about not being involved enough? Again, why bother to bring back Billie Piper if you're not going to put her to any amount of use? I was especially disappointed by her absence because Piper gave a much better performance in this episode. She actually seemed like Rose and not like a lame version of the Doctor.
It turns out The Shadow ProclamationTM is simply a bunch of Judoon and albinos who are rooming with an army of Jango Fett clones.
I'm getting carried away with my criticism, I know. This wasn't a bad episode of television. It was pretty good. I liked a lot of the little past references to things like Calufrax and The Dalek Invasion of Earth. And the screen time between the Doctor and Davros was great, for what little it was. But it should have been so much better. I usually love episode twelve. I loved Bad Wolf. I loved Army of Ghosts. I loved The Sound of Drums. All of those worked because they had developed out of plot points that had been seeded throughout their respective series. Well, The Stolen Earth does that too. It just does so in a shitty way. The bees? What the hell? Come on! I was half expecting someone the Douglas Adams reference I made in the title of this review to show up in the episode. The fact that Donna didn't instantly pick up on the bee thing when the Doctor asked her about odd phenomena is really flipping stupid. She remembered Pyrovilia, but not the bees? Hardly likely, What would have made sense would have been if the Doctor had asked her about phenomena on Earth and she stared at him, like he was some sot of idiot. "What?" the Doctor asks in that David Tennant-y sort of way. "The bees, Einstein!" she shouts. But no. And then there's the revelation of the Shadow ProclamationTM, which it turns out is simply a bunch of Judoon and albinos who are rooming with an army of Jango Fett clones. There's no culmination of any real kind, just the lame wrap-up of these meaningless threads.
Threads that, ultimately, have nothing to do with Davros or the Daleks in particular, which is why they fail so miserably. There was absolutely no buildup to Davros whatsoever. He merely shows up. Series Three built to the final revelation of the Master with a focus on Mr. Saxon and a variety of hints toward the fact that another Time Lord existed and how he might have hidden. Not so, here! Davros and the Daleks are tacked onto the end. And the star villains of the episode, the masterfully-portrayed Davros and the delightfully creepy Dalek Caan, are, like Tennant, Tate, and Piper, not given their well-deserved screen time. Davros's return is completely underwhelming despite the near-perfect design and portrayal of the character.
And let's make sure Sarah Jane steers clear of that hand or any other severed hands. Eldrad Must Live, remember?
In case it hasn't been clear, I'm going to boil my opinion of this episode down to a couple of sentences. We were promised "big." And in Doctor Who, that should mean "bigger on thie inside," but this isn't big, it's bloated. It's just a lot of flashy outside stuff and no substance. And how could I possibly end this review without talking about the biggest thing in the episode: the regeneration? It's fake. It's faker than fake. If you read the news, you know it's fake, and it you watched the episode you know it's fake because they would give David Tenant a far better send-off than this. There's almost no question in my mind that David Tenant will stay on as the Doctor at least through the Christmas special, and the fact that the Doctor's hand will be involved is almost undeniably involved. Russell simply won't let us forget it's around. And let's make sure Sarah Jane steers clear of that hand or any other severed hands. Eldrad Must Live, remember? Anyhow, the only question that remains about David Tennant's "regeneration" is the nature of the fake. We're not getting a regeneration, but we had better be getting something worth watching.
I honestly think I would have enjoyed this episode far more if there had been anything surprising at all in it. But I knew about all of the guest appearances. And I had heard the set report of Captain Jack carrying the Doctor into the TARDIS after a Dalek extermination. I can hardly imagine the thrill I would have gotten watching this episode if all of the cameos had been complete surprises to me. But you can't keep a secret in television anymore. From here on out, however, I'm resolving to steer clear of spoilers as much as I possibly can. Since I live in a country whose media isn't as obsessed with this show as I am, maybe it won't be so hard.
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
knisjf vijv idsv jkbvnkgvjkfghoewfuoe ffikf kfvk vjoefjoelf efpef oe fogogjp[dkpfjlefg f ofef gpe pegeg goeg gfeog gerg fvemfglew jfggegejw;f[f dvlgegg fkjifj o fjo vihighioj opjopwfg jiogopgopi0r0r05r0 857595308fjfjldqwiofkpfg-r405 t45;J.
That's me typing really, really fast. Needless to say, if you ever find yourself being subjugated by alien invaders don't expect any help from me. I'd be effing useless. "The Doctor choose his companions well," says Harriet Jones as she hammers out some complex computer code whilst multitasking on MyOuterSpace. "80wpm. All of them".
I honestly don't know what to make of The Stolen Earth. My heart says "Squee" but my brain screams "No!". It's either a work of a genius or Russell T Davies is on crack. I can't decide.
The part of me that shamelessly embraces gratuitous fanwank certainly enjoyed it: Callufrax; Piper's "But you can't!" (which sent a shiver down my spine); "Somebody tried to move it once before"; Daleks being all Dalek-y and barking orders on a bridge; Tennant channeling John Simm with an utterly bonkers 'Bye!'; the milkman from Survival, Sarah Jane remembering Davros - yes, Davros, fer christsake! - all of these moments put a deliciously slaphappy smile on my face.
The part of me that's still six years old was in raptures too: kamikaze Daleks bringing down the Valiant! UFOs zapping New York City! The return of a nightmare figure who made me wet my bed in 1975! Doctor Who has never been so self-assured or as exciting as this before. Sure, it's the same old nonsense amplified to the nth degree, but it's our nonsense. Tell me that you didn't feel even the slightest twinge of pride when the Daleks swept across Manhattan blasting everything in sight on prime-time BBC1. Who cares if it made no sense! Did The Dalek Invasion of Earth make any sense? Or Day of the Daleks? Does any Dalek story stand up to scrutiny? And yet we're all still here, aren't we? And besides, I'd rather have an utterly bonkers, crowd pleasing, balls-to-the-wall end-of-season celebratory romp than an introspective, rushed and bewildering head-f**K any day of the week. Yes, I'm looking at you, Battleshit Galactica.
jkbvnkgvjkfghoewfuoe ffikf kfvk vjoefjoelf efpef oe fogogjp[dkpfjlefg f ofef gpe pegeg goeg gfeog gerg fvemfglew jfggegejw;f[f dvlgegg
How can Russell top this? This isn't his last 'Horray!' by a long chalk - there's still four "specials" before his era truly comes to an end. So what on earth is he going to do for an encore? It's a terrifying prospect. How about the Doctor and Borusa riding in on the back of a Myrka to defeat Morbius, the Master and the Rani as they attempt to destroy ancient Gallifrey with the help of some Quarks? Guest starring Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy (who has a Metebelis spider on his back) and featuring Simon Cowell as Himself. It's madness! Utter madness!
Good luck to him, I say. The audience is positively lapping it up and a stunning AI score of 91 won't see Russell changing tack as he hits the final stretch. We might as well go with the flow. This series has delivered some wonderful, thought provoking episodes - Midnight, Silence in the Library, The Fires of Pompeii - but we've always known that the finale would be an apocalyptic, loud, proud and utterly mental Russ-fest. Moaning about it now seems a little absurd. We may as well save our outrage for next week's obligatory reset button instead (aka the Haagen-Dazs Key).
And what the hell is going on with Donna Noble? The heartbeat scene is either a cheeky red-herring or my greatest fears are about to be realised. However, my faith in Russell's ability to foreshadow took a knock this week when it emerged that the missing bees were simply a weak homage to Douglas Adams, and the missing planets mentioned in the series were, completely coincidentally of course, the only planets not to be registered by the Shadow-of-their-former-selves-now-that-the-mystery-has-all-gone Proclamation. Handy, that.
The sentient software sent to hunt down anyone who could help in the Doctor's absence was exceedingly handy, too. Mr. Copper's money certainly went a very long way in a very short time, especially in the current economic climate. However, I was disappointed that we didn't see even more ex-companions offering up their humble services at this time of crisis. Perhaps Tegan Jovanka was in the bath and the Brigadier was out playing golf when Harriet made the call?
even the Doctor looked like he was having trouble keeping up with the current state of the franchise...
Yes, this episode has its fair share of problems - and, funnily enough, most of them revolve around Torchwood. I don't know what's worse: Jack pissing his pants at the merest hint of the Daleks (it's the children of whine!), Jack screaming that Martha is definitely 100% dead (oh guess what, she isn't), Jack leaving Gwen and Ianto to face certain death (well, as certain as you can get in this show), even though we know that his teleporter can save all three of them, or perhaps it's the fact that they don't defend themselves with that arsenal of alien weaponry they have at their disposal. The idiots! But come on, what did you expect?
There are some great moment of unintentional comedy to relish as well. Just watch Sylvia speed-dialing the Doctor as she casts her eyes heavenwards with a look of pure anguish on her face - it's comedy gold. The bloody phone number wasn't even real! Not that I dialed it, you understand. That would be silly.
More fun can be gleaned from watching Doctor Who attempt to emulate Cloverfield. A brave but wholly baffling effect. Let's get this right - Camden Town is going completely apeshit mental but Paul O'Grady is casually sitting in a TV studio recording a daily chat show in front of what sounds like a very chipper audience. What gives? Was Richard Madely bravely holding the fort while Judy ran around like a headless chicken? Was Kay Burley crying yet? And where the hell is Patrick Moore when you need him?
Perhaps Tegan Jovanka was in the bath?
And then there's the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. When I first saw this scene I have to admit that I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I never saw it coming (I was certain Rose was a gonner when the Dalek fired) and I honestly believed that I was about to witness the impossible; I was literally giddy with excitement. But within moments of jumping off the couch I knew I'd been conned. It's not even open to debate as far as I'm concerned - there's no possible way that we've seen the end of Tennant. Even if we didn't know that he was in the specials, there's one inescapable fact that makes it all blindingly obvious: Davies didn't attempt to wring any emotions out of that scene. Think about it. If this really was the end of the road for Tennant we would have had a speech to end all speeches. Tears would have flowed, violins would have soared and Angels would have fainted in awe.
This "regeneration" is simply the biggest fake-out in a season that's full of them. You can all stop writing your Tennant retrospectives right now. He isn't going anywhere.
But you have to admit, for sheer spectacle, word of mouth buzz and audacious grandstanding it sure takes some beating. Just remember that the resolution to The Caves of Androzani part 1 is contrived bollocks too, and I can't remember anyone being up in arms about that.
"I like Saturdays". You can say that again.
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
Three words. Three simple words to undermine the credibility of the biggest cliffhanger since the show returned.
To. Be. Continued.
Good grief, who’s bright idea was that? Talk about putting the c--- into continued. What is this, an episode of Live and Kicking? This was beyond family TV - with whacky sound effects, it was like something from the worst cheapo kids game show.
And while this might sound like a ridiculous piece of nitpicky ranting that’s recycling an old Screenwipe joke, there’s a reason why I’m starting at the end of the episode. Namely, that the ridiculously OTT graphic is perfect encapsulation of everything right and wrong about The Stolen Earth.
For The Stolen Earth was preposterous, overblown, loud and in your face. This was Doctor Who as Michael Bay would make it.
Stolen Earth? Swollen Earth more like.
Clearly the theme at the tone meeting was epic. Everyone’s talked about a Crisis on Infinite Earths scale romp but that’d only really have been true if the final scene in Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures’ most recent series had been a cliffhanger leading into The Stolen Earth.
What this feels more like are those god-awful annoying crossover episodes that shows like CSI or ER would do with other programmes on the network. The ones where the characters crossing over are written by people who don’t normally write for them, who perhaps don’t grasp the nuances or subtleties from the host show, and thus give us a broadbrush caricature that only superficially, if we’re lucky, resembles the characters we know.
This is an episode of Doctor Who with guest stars from established shows that Russell hasn’t written for
In fact, it feels very like that because it’s exactly what Russell T Davies has done here. This isn’t the Doctor Who multiverse, this is an episode of Doctor Who with guest stars from established shows that Russell hasn’t written for - ever, in Sarah Jane’s case, and for more than two years in Torchwood’s. So the Ianto, Gwen, Luke and Sarah Jane here aren’t the ones we know and love (or tolerate, in Gwen and Ianto’s case).
This determination to cram in every aspect of the last four years, no matter how desperate, stretches the episode close to breaking point. Harriet Jones’ appearance makes so little sense dramatically as to be nonsensical, especially the idea that she’s now some superhacker able to unite Dumbledore’s Army... sorry, the companions. It means having the Daleks attack New York while Martha’s there, as a nod to last year. It means throwing in references to Klom and Slitheen, to Owen and Tosh's deaths, to Maria and her dad. It means dragging Dalek Caan out for one last go-round, and throwing in dialogue tributes to just about every episode featuring the dustbins over the last 45 years.
And it means three separate reprises of the sodding ‘Yes, I know who you are’ gag about Harriet in the space of a couple of minutes. One of which involves the Daleks. I mean, seriously. The Daleks - the all-conquering, most fearsome race in the universe, able to move Earth half way across the universe and subjugate its population in hours - are reduced to playing comic stooges. Frank described it in his review as taking the joke to its logical conclusion but I see it as quite the opposite. It’s unnecessary, and ineffective in inverse proportion to the way ‘No, don’t do that’ became chilling and tense in Midnight.
Part of this does indeed feel like Russell clearing the decks, getting rid of the last four years worth of loose ends so that the new production teams (plural, to include Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures) inherit a relatively clean slate for 2010. But it also feels like Russell has got caught up in his own hyperbole. Every year he sells the season climax as the new biggest threat ever. Last year we had the Earth enslaved for a year, and a Doctor/Jack/Martha team-up. This year it’s the whole universe at stake, with pretty much anyone who’s ever appeared on camera getting a look-in.
And eventually something has to give. It’s not the performances - everyone’s pretty much uniformly great here, even Billie, who’s apparently recovered from her dental work last week, and Freema, who finally reminds us what she can do. But everywhere else, there’s a sign of creakiness, almost desperation, creeping into the production. The sets don’t look quite so polished or convincing as usual.
More than once the CGI looks ropey - and indeed, in one obvious case is a reused shot from The Parting of the Ways.
But mainly it's because of the script, which leaves monstrous credibility gaps. Why would Sarah abandon her son, if she knows the Daleks can trace the signals and could, potentially, work out where he is? Why does Jack bugger off from the Hub, knowing the Daleks are on their way, with the only Dalek-killing gun in the complex? For that matter, why doesn’t he teleport Ianto and Gwen with him - we KNOW the bracelet can teleport three people, because we saw it last year. In Russell’s script, no less.
Occasionally, you feel Davies should have his creative licence revoked. He's so desperate to work on the bigger picture here that the fine detailing, what made his work on Doctor Who by and large so notable has been lost.
I don’t want to suggest that they’re being overambitious, but this is a production team that has worked bloody hard, consistently, for almost four years solid as we come into The Stolen Earth. And maybe, after all this time, the strain has started to show.
The biggest giveaway that things are stretched just that little bit too thin this time round is the Shadow Proclamation. For four years we’ve had the Shadow Proclamation name-checked in dramatic, universe-shattering terms. It’s clearly something to be feared, invoked as it is against the Autons, the Sycorax et al. But we’ve never known what it is - a treaty? An organisation of some kind? A planet?
When we finally get there, after four years of build-up, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be a branch of Pizza Express run staffed by Judoon and a couple of albino Scottish Widows. And all the tension and the threat and menace that concept, that warning the name carried... gone.
After four years of build-up, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be a branch of Pizza Express run staffed by Judoon and a couple of albino Scottish Widows
So this is Doctor Who as BayVision. It’s big and loud and flashy, and ultimately dumbed down and as hollow as a toilet roll tube. And it’s sad, really, because there’s lots in there which works. There’s lots of moments that are wonderful to watch. The Daleks swooping down and attacking the Valiant is the new series’ version of the Trial of a Time Lord space station FX shot - a breathtaking, dizzyingly gorgeous visual that looks so far ahead of everything else in the show you can’t help but forget for a second that this is just Saturday night telly.
Rose’s jealousy at Martha? Spot on - it’s exactly as it should be, and it works so much better when we remember how pissed off Martha got about the constant Rose mentions. The cliffhanger, kicking the stakes up to furious levels of danger as four main characters face death (of a sort) - wonderful.
And there’s Davros. Julian Bleach’s performance is wonderful, evoking the clinical genius of Wisher and the deranged villainy of Molloy. The design is consistent yet fresh, looking like an aged decrepit version of the Great Healer. The menace Davros carries is perfectly judged - it’s not just the Doctor who sells it, it’s also Sarah Jane, which gives that connection back to the first time we met him.
But there’s little to hang it on. The pacing’s all over the place. Harper’s direction is good - he’s been here before, of course, so this sort of stuff he can do in his sleep, really - but there’s too much going on. The production team are trying to pour a pint and a half in a pint glass, while jogging. Stuff’s sloshing about everywhere, it’s seeping out the sides and being left in a messy trail behind so that, crucially, once the job’s finished there’s still a lot to be unaccounted for, and there’s far less left than we started with.
Now, I’ll be charitable and fair. About time too, I hear the squeeing fangasmers reading say to themselves. This is only the first part of a two-parter, or the second of a three-parter depending on how you count, and so much of it is set-up for next week. There’s still many loose ends to be resolved, not least the matter of a certain regeneration. It could turn out that the hour-long finale is a work of genius, and the most audacious piece of TV broadcast in decades.
Until then... don’t you think they look tired?
Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth
Poor old Wilf. All he wants to do is join in the nearly 14 billion conversations that were made by 12 million users of Skype by the end of last year but Sylvia wouldn't let him even have a web cam as he innocently quips, 'she said they're naughty.' I suppose in a way they are but if it means Harriet Jones can pull together all the conversations that matter in the world then, bugger it, Wilf should have a bit of naughty even if it is to allow Rose an 'I just called to say I love you' moment
The Stolen Earth is another chapter in Russell T Davies' ongoing fascination with forms of mass communication. Here, he's utterly beguiled by sensory communication using telephony, text messaging, video conferencing and social networking and how shared interpretations affect storytelling styles and propel the narrative. There is a sense here of a society's huge engagement with media products and its capacity to intervene in and contribute to the course and content of the communicative process. Our heroes are participants in a structured process of symbolic transmission where constraints such as time and space are reordered and eliminated. Hence, we have all the major characters talking on phones and via the internet with that hugely symbolic moment of mass messaging the Doctor's mobile just simply to get him away from the rather dull sub-plot with the Shadow Proclamation and bring him back into the action. At one point, I thought Davies might even be so cheeky as to ask the millions watching to 'vote' and choose their own, or any, plot. Because, let's face it, there wasn't really one much in evidence here.
It's the skilled art of taking information transfer and adding on a whole set of sensuous economics to provide a strung together series of character presences and big action moments and making them work just by themselves. There's a huge amount of crowd pleasing, and fan pleasing, moments in The Stolen Earth and they're used, in the absence of plot, to get us to the apex of revelation. That cliffhanger. Those of us 'in the know' were aware of what the cliffhanger would entail but even so it was an enormously grand, epic and funny ride to get to that closing scream of the theme and the rolling credits. Having said that, most of the audience will have read their papers or been on the internet and are perfectly aware that David Tennant will be in the Christmas Special and thus, the cliffhanger is a bit of bluff on the production team's side and the question we're all asking now is how does the Tenth Doctor get to remain as the Tenth Doctor despite that oncoming regeneration? It's a deliciously manufactured tension.
...a typical piece of Davies flippancy and knowingness that relieves the very palpable tension but also suggests that Davies himself has been at the furniture polish...
So as the episode strings together the Super Friends of the Doctor (the 'children of time') we also get to see Davies indulging in another of his favourite storytelling devices - the comic book. The power of comic books, scene-to-scene, to take great leaps in time or space is immediately evident in those typewritten captions 'Far Across The Universe' 'New York' 'Cardiff' that close off and reopen narrative in rapid succession. There are the illogical non-sequiturs of comic books that produce a weird alchemy in the viewers minds in even the most jarring of combinations. So we get Richard Dawkins popping up with a bit of pseudo science juxtaposed with Paul O'Grady being watched by Ianto in the Torchwood Hub in a typical piece of Davies flippancy and knowingness that relieves the very palpable tension but also suggests that Davies himself has been at the furniture polish whilst writing this script. He emulates the comic book team ups and the grand narratives of stuff like DC's Crisis On Infinite Earths. The twelve part comic book series dating back to 1985 was not just an exercise in bringing together their stock range of superheroes in one gigantic meta-narrative but it was also an attempt to tidy up a 55 year long continuity. I do get the sense that this is also Davies clearing his desk and having a go at wrapping up narratives whilst also giddily chucking lots of references out to the audience. And he does it with the customary recycling of many of his more familiar narrative tropes that work in both subtle and crass ways. It's his Greatest Hits compilation CD and this phenomenon of observing the parts and perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure. And this sense of sprawling comic book sagas and Greatest Hits compilations are a closure of sorts on Davies' reign.
The Doctor's a bit busy having shouting matches with a woman in a hairnet - the Ena Sharples of the Shadow Proclamation - in order to find his way back into the centre of the narrative.
OK. French critical theory time. It's a bit of a tradition. Don't sigh. When Harriet Jones emerges from the ether via an untraceable sub-wave signal and starts to gather together the 'children of time' I think we get a sense of an alternate Shadow Proclamation being formed. It's a strange little emergency government - and yes, that 'Harriet Jones - Former Prime Minister' joke is taken to its logical conclusion here - and Michel Foucault noted that the science of government developed out of an earlier conception of economy as the art of managing family and household. Harriet gathers together the 'family' of the series, past and present, and grapples with ' how to introduce economy - the correct manner of managing individuals, goods, wealth within the family and of making the family fortunes prosper - how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state'. For Foucault, governmentality thus comes to depend upon the family and household more as an instrument of government than as a model for government. The trick here is that as the family comes together to form an ad-hoc government it's being done in the absence of the Doctor. The Doctor's a bit busy having shouting matches with a woman in a hairnet - the Ena Sharples of the Shadow Proclamation - in order to find his way back into the centre of the narrative. And he does that with a virtual, Skype powered community and ensemble mythology. The business of fathers and their relationship to their children is also an underlying theme too with Davros and the Doctor as symbolic opposites where the Daleks represent a physical, non-humanoid extension of their creator and the ensemble companions embody the extension of the humanistic ideals of the Doctor.
It's great that Harriet's redemption is addressed and she doesn't capitulate on her original decision to shoot down the Sycorax ship whilst standing in the path of Dalek extermination.
The script keeps the Doctor pretty much out of the way, trying to solve the mystery of where the earth has gone and finally working out the real reason for the disappearing bees, until the closing act and for that massive cliffhanger bluff. Giving everyone screen time is problematic here but only because we're seeing part one of a two part narrative. So the roles that Sarah and Martha will play isn't yet clear and unfortunately they are are slightly short-changed here. I don't really know how effective it was to bring the worlds of Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures crashing into this but somehow the script copes with it all and manages to leapfrog between all out action, comedy and tragedy with all the characters. It's great that Harriet's redemption is addressed and she doesn't capitulate on her original decision to shoot down the Sycorax ship whilst standing in the path of Dalek extermination. As one moment in a succession of great moments, it makes up for the missing plot and The Stolen Earth is, in the end, closure on a huge, giddy, entertaining scale. A fairground ride with so many cool, de rigeur rides that in the end you do feel a little nauseous.
Julian Bleach superbly channeling Michael Wisher, Briggs camping up as the utterly loopy Caan, the massed ranks of Daleks, the Dalek Supreme, the Independence Day style visuals are the massive wheels moving this juggernaut but there is still room for the wonderful laugh out loud scenes with Wilf paintballing a Dalek, Sarah telling Mr. Smith to pack in the fanfares and tons and tons of continuity references - everything from the Medusa Cascade, mentions to Donna that there had been "something on her back", Mr. Copper, the airborne aircraft carrier Valiant, the Defabricator gun, and the crossovers with the other series with mentions of Sarah Jane's encounter with the Slitheen, the deaths of Torchwood personnel Toshiko Sato and Owen Harper. Excuse me whilst I have, what is commonly referred to as, a fangasm. Phew.
Get through all that with your nerves in shreds and you've still got the question of that regeneration, the weird drumming sound as Donna stares into space and the exact nature of Davros' plan to look forward to. Russell has emphatically cleared his desk and by sheer dint of his personality has had the balls to get away with this epic. It might not stand up to repeat viewings but as a 'watching it live' experience you couldn't help but get carried away by the sheer gobsmacking giddiness of it all.
"Donate Now!''
Rula Lenska UNICEF Appeal
Looking for older reviews? Behind the Sofa Volume 1 is the place to go for Doctor Who series one, two and three. Along with reviews for Torchwood series one and The Sarah Jane Adventures series one.
And if that weren't enough then indulge yourself in six whole series of classic Doctor Who reviews and a selection of other Doctor Who oddities from the last 4 decades.
Recent Comments