Rewatching Genesis of the Daleks (overrated, I felt, but not massively so) a horrible yet strangely persuasive thought struck me. But a quick play with Google revealed my fears to be thankfully unfounded.
Can you believe, given the legions of shippers out there, that you don't get one single hit if you search for "Davrotica"?
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
The Times They Are A-Changin'
If you want evidence of the different regard that Doctor Who is held in these days, you only need to look at Radio times covers through the decades.
For the first eleven seasons, Doctor Who gets one cover per year, to remind people that it's on again and they should watch it. And then... one cover, to celebrate the 20th anniversary special, and that's it till 1993. One cover in all the final 15 years of old Who's run! The show had become a fixture, completely taken for granted.
After the cancellation, of course, everyone kind of missed it now that it was gone, and there are 4 nostalgic covers over the 16 year period that the show is off air. Then the show comes back and in its first year gets 3 generic TARDIS or Dalek covers, presumably because actually showing Chris Eccleston's ugly mug might put people off.
And then David Tennant comes on board, the show is pronounced a smash success, a phenomenon, the nation's favourite programme. By my quick calculation there have been more Radio Times covers in the Tennant era than there have been in the entire rest of the history of the show put together.
The ratings and the AI figures these days are of course astonishingly good. One wonders if the enthusiasm with which the Great British Public has taken this once-so-neglected genre television programme to its heart will endure, or if the fickle winds of fashion will change direction once again. Obviously I'm hoping that the show's current awesome popularity remains constant into the Moffat era and beyond, but hmm, can Matt Smith possibly compete with his photogenic predecessor in the monopolizing the RT cover stakes? Time will tell.
For the first eleven seasons, Doctor Who gets one cover per year, to remind people that it's on again and they should watch it. And then... one cover, to celebrate the 20th anniversary special, and that's it till 1993. One cover in all the final 15 years of old Who's run! The show had become a fixture, completely taken for granted.
After the cancellation, of course, everyone kind of missed it now that it was gone, and there are 4 nostalgic covers over the 16 year period that the show is off air. Then the show comes back and in its first year gets 3 generic TARDIS or Dalek covers, presumably because actually showing Chris Eccleston's ugly mug might put people off.
And then David Tennant comes on board, the show is pronounced a smash success, a phenomenon, the nation's favourite programme. By my quick calculation there have been more Radio Times covers in the Tennant era than there have been in the entire rest of the history of the show put together.
The ratings and the AI figures these days are of course astonishingly good. One wonders if the enthusiasm with which the Great British Public has taken this once-so-neglected genre television programme to its heart will endure, or if the fickle winds of fashion will change direction once again. Obviously I'm hoping that the show's current awesome popularity remains constant into the Moffat era and beyond, but hmm, can Matt Smith possibly compete with his photogenic predecessor in the monopolizing the RT cover stakes? Time will tell.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
As An Era Nears Its End...
People are already murmuring about David Tennant being one of the most iconic, Doctorish Doctors ever. I suppose that's fair, the lad's done a great job. But let's bear in mind that he's the first actor since Tom Baker left in 1981 (a lifetime ago! Matt Smith wasn't even BORN then!) to have had a really substantial amount of time to win people over. Davison, Colin Baker, McCoy, McGann and Eccleston, fabulous Doctors all, but if you were an average member of the British viewing public you could easily have blinked and missed any one of them.
I loved what Russell T Davies did with the first season of his show. Not only was it a fabulously original re-envisioning of the Doctor as a post-traumatic war veteran, it attacked the cliches of the old show from all sides, brought Doctor Who into real three dimensional existence at last. Look at all the questions RTD's episodes ask and answer: wouldn't a companion and a Doctor start to develop romantic feelings for one another? Don't companions ever have families and boyfriends and things that they love and miss? How come when the Doctor whisks random youngsters off for adventures in time and space they're so invariably suitable for the job, don't any of them ever fail to come up to snuff? Does the Doctor's meddling ever create disastrous repercussions throughout the timelines? Do monsters have feelings too? (Love and Monsters, later on, feels like another item in this series: what happens to the little people whose lives the Doctor touches, once he's off on his next adventure?)
Obviously, from Series Two onwards, RTD dialed back the number of episodes he was writing each year, assigning himself the duties of introducing each new companion, creating a suitably festive romp for each Christmas special, and writing an even more ultimately apocalyptic and Earth-shattering season finale each year than the last one. So now we're on the verge of getting some kind of overarching perspective on Doctor Ten's reign, what do its questions and themes seem to be?
At this point, with Waters of Mars still fresh in everyone's minds, we're all wondering if Ten is doing some kind of reverse Six: starting off quite sweet, and then ending up a mad, ranting, angsting megalomaniac whose only remaining option is to regenerate. We'll see how that arc ends up in a month.
The other cohesive thread that seems to bind Ten's three-and-a-half seasons together is... his relationship with women. Yes indeed, Ten is the playboy Doctor. Not content to have gotten into sexy relationships with Madame de Pompadour, Joan Redfern, Queen Elizabeth the First and River Song (well, sort of), each of this Doctor's seasons has centered around his relationship with a different woman. Rose is the one he loves and trusts implicitly, who's always been there for him... and he loses her. Martha is the one who wants to be everything Rose was to him, but he's too wounded and wrapped up in himself to be able to see it, so she gives up on him... and he loses her. Donna's the one who he neither wants or is wanted by him, finally he's got a good functional relationship with a female... and he loses her. And now we have the pseudo-season of No Companion, Period: he can flirt with the likes of Lady Christina, but there's no way anyone's getting through the doors of the TARDIS now or ever again.
So basically the Tennant era, 2005-2010 has, boy-girl relationships as its keynote. And - I'm strangely reminded of the plot of recent indie video game hit Braid here - those relationships are deeply dysfunctional. Female companions, can't live with them, can't live and are forced to regenerate without them; I can't help but wonder which members of the scriptwriting team may have been deeply scarred by failed relationships in their past.
Nine was horribly traumatized by war, Ten by being unable to hold down relationships. I dunno, maybe the angst is a fundamental part of the show's new school appeal, but maybe it'd be nice if Matt Smith could be a basically carefree, optimistic, happy-go-lucky young/old Time Lord, at least for a while? It worked for (most of) the first 26 years, after all...
I loved what Russell T Davies did with the first season of his show. Not only was it a fabulously original re-envisioning of the Doctor as a post-traumatic war veteran, it attacked the cliches of the old show from all sides, brought Doctor Who into real three dimensional existence at last. Look at all the questions RTD's episodes ask and answer: wouldn't a companion and a Doctor start to develop romantic feelings for one another? Don't companions ever have families and boyfriends and things that they love and miss? How come when the Doctor whisks random youngsters off for adventures in time and space they're so invariably suitable for the job, don't any of them ever fail to come up to snuff? Does the Doctor's meddling ever create disastrous repercussions throughout the timelines? Do monsters have feelings too? (Love and Monsters, later on, feels like another item in this series: what happens to the little people whose lives the Doctor touches, once he's off on his next adventure?)
Obviously, from Series Two onwards, RTD dialed back the number of episodes he was writing each year, assigning himself the duties of introducing each new companion, creating a suitably festive romp for each Christmas special, and writing an even more ultimately apocalyptic and Earth-shattering season finale each year than the last one. So now we're on the verge of getting some kind of overarching perspective on Doctor Ten's reign, what do its questions and themes seem to be?
At this point, with Waters of Mars still fresh in everyone's minds, we're all wondering if Ten is doing some kind of reverse Six: starting off quite sweet, and then ending up a mad, ranting, angsting megalomaniac whose only remaining option is to regenerate. We'll see how that arc ends up in a month.
The other cohesive thread that seems to bind Ten's three-and-a-half seasons together is... his relationship with women. Yes indeed, Ten is the playboy Doctor. Not content to have gotten into sexy relationships with Madame de Pompadour, Joan Redfern, Queen Elizabeth the First and River Song (well, sort of), each of this Doctor's seasons has centered around his relationship with a different woman. Rose is the one he loves and trusts implicitly, who's always been there for him... and he loses her. Martha is the one who wants to be everything Rose was to him, but he's too wounded and wrapped up in himself to be able to see it, so she gives up on him... and he loses her. Donna's the one who he neither wants or is wanted by him, finally he's got a good functional relationship with a female... and he loses her. And now we have the pseudo-season of No Companion, Period: he can flirt with the likes of Lady Christina, but there's no way anyone's getting through the doors of the TARDIS now or ever again.
So basically the Tennant era, 2005-2010 has, boy-girl relationships as its keynote. And - I'm strangely reminded of the plot of recent indie video game hit Braid here - those relationships are deeply dysfunctional. Female companions, can't live with them, can't live and are forced to regenerate without them; I can't help but wonder which members of the scriptwriting team may have been deeply scarred by failed relationships in their past.
Nine was horribly traumatized by war, Ten by being unable to hold down relationships. I dunno, maybe the angst is a fundamental part of the show's new school appeal, but maybe it'd be nice if Matt Smith could be a basically carefree, optimistic, happy-go-lucky young/old Time Lord, at least for a while? It worked for (most of) the first 26 years, after all...
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Doctor In Need
I suspect the intention was to show something upbeat, so as not to harsh the jolly vibe of Children in Need... but wow, that only barely qualified, and then only if you weren't paying much attention.
The Tenth Doctor puts on a brave face, but from the look of things he's positively sick with fear. The forced jollity drains right out of his voice, becomes something tight and uncomfortable, when he brings the subject matter round to what's actually on his mind: his song is ending soon.
Worst of all, and kudos to sharper eyed people than me for spotting this, is what the Doctor says upon making his unfunny "I locked it like a car" joke. "Funny? No? Little bit?" Word for word the same as the Master, just before he gasses the British cabinet in The Sound of Drums. It's not a stretch to believe that the Doctor is starting to turn into his arch-nemesis, not any more. What is a "Time Lord Victorious" but a Master? Also, Ten's leering innuendo about devirginising Good Queen Bess doesn't seem a million miles away from John Simm lurching around the Valiant groping and French kissing Lucy Saxon; New Who doesn't (at least let's hope) equate heterosexuality with evil, but the flaunting of heterosexual promiscuity was certainly one of the completely-off-the-rails Master's key traits in Last of the Time Lords.
To be honest, after these painful few minutes I'm not sure I'll miss Tennant's Doctor as much as I might have hoped. He's turned into a bit of an irritating idiot, and for what reason? Ultimately, because he fell in love with Rose and then couldn't be with her; a plotline that became increasingly unconvincing as he first rejected the infinitely more attractive and resourceful Martha, and then it turned out that Rose was going to escape from her parallel universe and come visit him at least once a year anyway.
I'm not even convinced by all this "Phosphorus Carousel of the Great Magellan Gestalt" business: frankly, every time RTD attempts to describe the infinite wonders of the Doctor's universe, it invariably sounds to me like a discounted weekend away break at Eurodisney. The pink lei and the sunhat would seem to bear this out: not content with holding a candle for Rose, the Doctor's started to holiday in a chavvy style too, booze cruises and wet T-shirt contests on the Costa del Sol. Here's hoping we get back to a Doctor with the capacity to be a bit more dignified and majestic soon.
The Tenth Doctor puts on a brave face, but from the look of things he's positively sick with fear. The forced jollity drains right out of his voice, becomes something tight and uncomfortable, when he brings the subject matter round to what's actually on his mind: his song is ending soon.
Worst of all, and kudos to sharper eyed people than me for spotting this, is what the Doctor says upon making his unfunny "I locked it like a car" joke. "Funny? No? Little bit?" Word for word the same as the Master, just before he gasses the British cabinet in The Sound of Drums. It's not a stretch to believe that the Doctor is starting to turn into his arch-nemesis, not any more. What is a "Time Lord Victorious" but a Master? Also, Ten's leering innuendo about devirginising Good Queen Bess doesn't seem a million miles away from John Simm lurching around the Valiant groping and French kissing Lucy Saxon; New Who doesn't (at least let's hope) equate heterosexuality with evil, but the flaunting of heterosexual promiscuity was certainly one of the completely-off-the-rails Master's key traits in Last of the Time Lords.
To be honest, after these painful few minutes I'm not sure I'll miss Tennant's Doctor as much as I might have hoped. He's turned into a bit of an irritating idiot, and for what reason? Ultimately, because he fell in love with Rose and then couldn't be with her; a plotline that became increasingly unconvincing as he first rejected the infinitely more attractive and resourceful Martha, and then it turned out that Rose was going to escape from her parallel universe and come visit him at least once a year anyway.
I'm not even convinced by all this "Phosphorus Carousel of the Great Magellan Gestalt" business: frankly, every time RTD attempts to describe the infinite wonders of the Doctor's universe, it invariably sounds to me like a discounted weekend away break at Eurodisney. The pink lei and the sunhat would seem to bear this out: not content with holding a candle for Rose, the Doctor's started to holiday in a chavvy style too, booze cruises and wet T-shirt contests on the Costa del Sol. Here's hoping we get back to a Doctor with the capacity to be a bit more dignified and majestic soon.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Happy Birthday To Who
I suppose I can't let this day go by without wishing a very happy 46th birthday to the greatest show in the galaxy. Here's to 46 more!
I myself was born somewhere in between Planet of the Spiders Part 6 and Robot Part 1, which I suppose makes me almost 7 Doctors old. All being well, my daughter is going to be born somewhere between The End of Time Part 2 and Matt Smith's debut. I wonder if there'll still be Doctor Who when she's 45 going on 46? Will she, or her children, be eagerly anticipating the last few adventures of the Twentieth Doctor?
One thing's for sure, if there's any TV show that has the capacity to go on forever, Doctor Who might just be that show. Forty-six years and showing no signs at all of running out of steam. Bravo, Doctor.
I myself was born somewhere in between Planet of the Spiders Part 6 and Robot Part 1, which I suppose makes me almost 7 Doctors old. All being well, my daughter is going to be born somewhere between The End of Time Part 2 and Matt Smith's debut. I wonder if there'll still be Doctor Who when she's 45 going on 46? Will she, or her children, be eagerly anticipating the last few adventures of the Twentieth Doctor?
One thing's for sure, if there's any TV show that has the capacity to go on forever, Doctor Who might just be that show. Forty-six years and showing no signs at all of running out of steam. Bravo, Doctor.
Never Invite A Gift Horse Round For Dinner
The problem with Sarah Jane Adventures series 3 closer, The Gift, wasn't so much that it was terrible or anything... more that for a long time, most of the first episode, it looked as though it might be really good.
The Slitheen are a funny old monster. After vying with the Daleks for being the Ninth Doctor's signature foe in New Who Series One, it seems as though they might have been deemed a bit too kiddie-oriented for the mothership, and bequeathed to Sarah Jane instead. (Let's hope they never find their way onto Torchwood, as I just don't want to know what a notorious pansexual like Jack would find to do with a farting alien in a fatsuit.)
I didn't hate the Slitheen in Aliens of London/World War Three, despite the questions they raised about Russell T Davies' taste levels - the core concept is, after all, so crass that Hollywood has since spoofed it, in the "Fatties Fart 2" trailer in Tropic Thunder. And I actively warmed to them after Boom Town, when RTD brilliantly used Blon Fel-Fotch Slitheen to ask the question, are the monsters in Who people too?
So I was hoping for good things for most of episode one. In the first five minutes, a typically absurd Slitheen moneymaking plot is foiled... by the intervention of two new Raxacoricofallapatorians, the Blathereen, who have every appearance of being good guys. This seems canonically reasonable: we know that the Slitheen family are bad apples on their own planet, an exception rather than the rule. Leaf and Tree Blathereen come over for dinner, and despite displaying "humorously" disgusting table manners, are gracious enough to present Sarah Jane with a gift: an alien plant that will solve the problem of world hunger on Earth for once and all.
After the Blathereen depart, the regulars argue: Rani (increasingly the most impressive member of the gang) wants to trust them, Clyde is prejudiced against disgusting aliens and doesn't. Sarah Jane's head wants to trust the Blathereen, but her intuition tells her that there's something fishy going on. Mr Smith's scan detects nothing problematic about the Rackweed, so they keep it in the house - and then the following morning the plant releases a cloud of spore which make Luke very ill indeed...
And at this point this could still have been a great story. We are told that the Rackweed spores lead to coma and death for those that might stand in the way of their propagation. How interesting would it have been if they'd infected Luke for some reason related to him being a creation of the Bane? Sarah Jane would have had to choose between ending world hunger... or saving her own son. Of course there'd be no contest, and the "gift" of the title would not have been a no-effort get-out-of-jail-free card for the human race, but her child; it would have been a perfect contrast to the tragic climax of Torchwood: Children of Earth earlier this year.
But no, the spores are going to end all life on earth as we know it. The Blathereen turn out to be close relatives of, and basically indistinguishable from, the Slitheen. With all potential moral dilemmas now avoided, the story can be resolved and the villains dispatched in a completely standard and unmemorable way. Ho hum.
There were a few other little things to be annoyed about: after Clyde suddenly turned out to be a brilliant artist for the purposes of last week's Mona Lisa episode, it was gratingly noticeable that he suddenly turned out to be an excellent cook for this one. Fine, Clyde's a renaissance man, I have no problem with that, except that it's blatantly obvious that he's REALLY just a place that lazy writers turn to for cheap plot hooks. Would it be too much to ask them to find something for underused unearthly genius Luke to do for a change, instead?
Even more disappointing, for me, was the final showdown with the Blathereen. Sarah Jane gives them one chance to reform their wicked ways; "no, we love being evil!" the pantomime villains cackle; and so Sarah blows them up. This is (a) quite boring, because it's exactly the same exchange as the Tenth Doctor traditionally enacts, q.v. the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and (b) troubling, because it undoes all the good work Boom Town did in showing us that mercy is never wasted, not even on an incorrigible Slitheen recidivist.
I hope the writers aren't buying into the idea that Ten is some kind of shining paragon in the how-to-deal-with-aliens stakes, because I'd personally class him as a dangerously unstable egotist, bordering on the psychopathic. And after Sarah Jane only "almost" having sympathy for the Mona Lisa trapped in painted solitary confinement for eternity - shades of Sister of Mine in her mirror, at the end of Family of Blood - I'm worried they're bringing her right down to his level.
It just feels like lazy writing to set up an interesting, problematic scenario, and then reduce it to something simple and one-dimensional, conveniently just in time for the denouement. Remember The Unquiet Dead, also from Eccleston's first season? Alien asylum seekers come to Victorian London... but in order to survive they need to borrow human corpses to walk around in. That's a bona fide moral dilemma - but wait, it turns out the aliens are completely evil and want to eat the entire human race, so it's fine to let them die after all, roll credits.
As such, I'd label The Gift one of the largest disappointments of what has been, overall, the best series of Sarah Jane Adventures yet, despite having the fabulous Alice Troughton in the director's chair. I'd rank the six stories, from best to worst, as follows:
1. The Mad Woman in the Attic
2. The Eternity Trap
3. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
4. Mona Lisa's Revenge
5. The Gift
6. Prisoner of the Judoon
Here's hoping that Series 4 has no problems getting greenlit - there's plenty of life in the old girl yet...
The Slitheen are a funny old monster. After vying with the Daleks for being the Ninth Doctor's signature foe in New Who Series One, it seems as though they might have been deemed a bit too kiddie-oriented for the mothership, and bequeathed to Sarah Jane instead. (Let's hope they never find their way onto Torchwood, as I just don't want to know what a notorious pansexual like Jack would find to do with a farting alien in a fatsuit.)
I didn't hate the Slitheen in Aliens of London/World War Three, despite the questions they raised about Russell T Davies' taste levels - the core concept is, after all, so crass that Hollywood has since spoofed it, in the "Fatties Fart 2" trailer in Tropic Thunder. And I actively warmed to them after Boom Town, when RTD brilliantly used Blon Fel-Fotch Slitheen to ask the question, are the monsters in Who people too?
So I was hoping for good things for most of episode one. In the first five minutes, a typically absurd Slitheen moneymaking plot is foiled... by the intervention of two new Raxacoricofallapatorians, the Blathereen, who have every appearance of being good guys. This seems canonically reasonable: we know that the Slitheen family are bad apples on their own planet, an exception rather than the rule. Leaf and Tree Blathereen come over for dinner, and despite displaying "humorously" disgusting table manners, are gracious enough to present Sarah Jane with a gift: an alien plant that will solve the problem of world hunger on Earth for once and all.
After the Blathereen depart, the regulars argue: Rani (increasingly the most impressive member of the gang) wants to trust them, Clyde is prejudiced against disgusting aliens and doesn't. Sarah Jane's head wants to trust the Blathereen, but her intuition tells her that there's something fishy going on. Mr Smith's scan detects nothing problematic about the Rackweed, so they keep it in the house - and then the following morning the plant releases a cloud of spore which make Luke very ill indeed...
And at this point this could still have been a great story. We are told that the Rackweed spores lead to coma and death for those that might stand in the way of their propagation. How interesting would it have been if they'd infected Luke for some reason related to him being a creation of the Bane? Sarah Jane would have had to choose between ending world hunger... or saving her own son. Of course there'd be no contest, and the "gift" of the title would not have been a no-effort get-out-of-jail-free card for the human race, but her child; it would have been a perfect contrast to the tragic climax of Torchwood: Children of Earth earlier this year.
But no, the spores are going to end all life on earth as we know it. The Blathereen turn out to be close relatives of, and basically indistinguishable from, the Slitheen. With all potential moral dilemmas now avoided, the story can be resolved and the villains dispatched in a completely standard and unmemorable way. Ho hum.
There were a few other little things to be annoyed about: after Clyde suddenly turned out to be a brilliant artist for the purposes of last week's Mona Lisa episode, it was gratingly noticeable that he suddenly turned out to be an excellent cook for this one. Fine, Clyde's a renaissance man, I have no problem with that, except that it's blatantly obvious that he's REALLY just a place that lazy writers turn to for cheap plot hooks. Would it be too much to ask them to find something for underused unearthly genius Luke to do for a change, instead?
Even more disappointing, for me, was the final showdown with the Blathereen. Sarah Jane gives them one chance to reform their wicked ways; "no, we love being evil!" the pantomime villains cackle; and so Sarah blows them up. This is (a) quite boring, because it's exactly the same exchange as the Tenth Doctor traditionally enacts, q.v. the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and (b) troubling, because it undoes all the good work Boom Town did in showing us that mercy is never wasted, not even on an incorrigible Slitheen recidivist.
I hope the writers aren't buying into the idea that Ten is some kind of shining paragon in the how-to-deal-with-aliens stakes, because I'd personally class him as a dangerously unstable egotist, bordering on the psychopathic. And after Sarah Jane only "almost" having sympathy for the Mona Lisa trapped in painted solitary confinement for eternity - shades of Sister of Mine in her mirror, at the end of Family of Blood - I'm worried they're bringing her right down to his level.
It just feels like lazy writing to set up an interesting, problematic scenario, and then reduce it to something simple and one-dimensional, conveniently just in time for the denouement. Remember The Unquiet Dead, also from Eccleston's first season? Alien asylum seekers come to Victorian London... but in order to survive they need to borrow human corpses to walk around in. That's a bona fide moral dilemma - but wait, it turns out the aliens are completely evil and want to eat the entire human race, so it's fine to let them die after all, roll credits.
As such, I'd label The Gift one of the largest disappointments of what has been, overall, the best series of Sarah Jane Adventures yet, despite having the fabulous Alice Troughton in the director's chair. I'd rank the six stories, from best to worst, as follows:
1. The Mad Woman in the Attic
2. The Eternity Trap
3. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
4. Mona Lisa's Revenge
5. The Gift
6. Prisoner of the Judoon
Here's hoping that Series 4 has no problems getting greenlit - there's plenty of life in the old girl yet...
Friday, November 20, 2009
Love and Monsters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXotzG-6Oo
I literally cannot get enough of this song, and the video isn't half bad either.
I do feel it's based on one of those charming misconceptions about Doctor Who that has, through the power of anecdote, become accepted by the general public as fact. A prime example of this is the notion of "wobbly sets" - as Toby Hadoke points out in his great Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf routine, he's watched every extant episode of Doctor Who at least two or three times and a set actually wobbles once or maybe twice.
Likewise, the idea that the Who girls were anything but strong, independent women. I think there's one companion from the Seventies that you can remotely level that accusation towards and that's Jo Grant, who admittedly did grace the show for a good long stretch, three years. For the other two-thirds of the 70s though we had Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, and two Romanas, all of whom spoke their minds and gave the Doctor as good as they got. And yet Mitch Benn can still cash in on the urban myth that Who girls were just there to look pretty, scream and get captured. (See also "Fiona" in Victoria Wood's late 80s Doctor Who skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tbe3W6hWyw)
Tell you what though, I bumped into someone in Seattle last year who, when the topic of Doctor Who came up somehow, launched into the following, seemingly in no way tongue-in-cheek, anecdote: he claimed that 70s Doctor Who, being prior to the age of political correctness, regularly saw Tom Baker's Doctor refer to his favorite sweets not as jelly babies but as n****r babies; allegedly this had been dubbed back for modern repeats and DVD releases. Of course this must be nonsense: there was such an un-PC licorice or chocolate sweet back in the early parts of the 20th century, but even if it was okay to bring them up on 70s TV, and it wasn't, you'd never mistake a jelly baby for one!
Now whether or not The Talons of Weng-Chiang is offensively racist, that's still up for discussion, but still... I think we can see the importance of judging Old Who based on its actual merits, not how the public seems to remember it. Because they remember it in very strange ways indeed!
I literally cannot get enough of this song, and the video isn't half bad either.
I do feel it's based on one of those charming misconceptions about Doctor Who that has, through the power of anecdote, become accepted by the general public as fact. A prime example of this is the notion of "wobbly sets" - as Toby Hadoke points out in his great Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf routine, he's watched every extant episode of Doctor Who at least two or three times and a set actually wobbles once or maybe twice.
Likewise, the idea that the Who girls were anything but strong, independent women. I think there's one companion from the Seventies that you can remotely level that accusation towards and that's Jo Grant, who admittedly did grace the show for a good long stretch, three years. For the other two-thirds of the 70s though we had Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, and two Romanas, all of whom spoke their minds and gave the Doctor as good as they got. And yet Mitch Benn can still cash in on the urban myth that Who girls were just there to look pretty, scream and get captured. (See also "Fiona" in Victoria Wood's late 80s Doctor Who skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tbe3W6hWyw)
Tell you what though, I bumped into someone in Seattle last year who, when the topic of Doctor Who came up somehow, launched into the following, seemingly in no way tongue-in-cheek, anecdote: he claimed that 70s Doctor Who, being prior to the age of political correctness, regularly saw Tom Baker's Doctor refer to his favorite sweets not as jelly babies but as n****r babies; allegedly this had been dubbed back for modern repeats and DVD releases. Of course this must be nonsense: there was such an un-PC licorice or chocolate sweet back in the early parts of the 20th century, but even if it was okay to bring them up on 70s TV, and it wasn't, you'd never mistake a jelly baby for one!
Now whether or not The Talons of Weng-Chiang is offensively racist, that's still up for discussion, but still... I think we can see the importance of judging Old Who based on its actual merits, not how the public seems to remember it. Because they remember it in very strange ways indeed!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Knock Knock Knock Knock
My current theory for what "he will knock four times" means?
I think the Tenth Doctor will tell that knock-knock joke twice over the course of the next two specials. You know, the one we all thought was so hilarious in the playground, aged about 8:
Knock knock!
Who's there?
Doctor.
Doctor Who?
Exactly.
I think the Tenth Doctor will tell that knock-knock joke twice over the course of the next two specials. You know, the one we all thought was so hilarious in the playground, aged about 8:
Knock knock!
Who's there?
Doctor.
Doctor Who?
Exactly.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Riddle Me This...
If, under extreme provocation, the Time Lords are willing to authorize the Doctor to go back in time and wipe out the Daleks at the moment of their genesis...
And if Adelaide Brooke is a fixed point in time, who must be inspired by a Dalek to go to Mars where she will die and inspire her granddaughter Susie Fontana Brooke to go the the stars, and whose timeline must not be interfered with under any circumstances...
Then how many million years of power does it take for a civilization to be really corrupt?
Presumably the Time Lords were so keen to smother the Daleks in their cradle because they had an inkling that that race might, one day, be strong enough to bring down Gallifrey itself in a devastating Time War. But really, the difference between the Doctor and his people? He interferes with the timelines because he can't bear to stand by and watch people die. They do it to protect their own skin.
And if Adelaide Brooke is a fixed point in time, who must be inspired by a Dalek to go to Mars where she will die and inspire her granddaughter Susie Fontana Brooke to go the the stars, and whose timeline must not be interfered with under any circumstances...
Then how many million years of power does it take for a civilization to be really corrupt?
Presumably the Time Lords were so keen to smother the Daleks in their cradle because they had an inkling that that race might, one day, be strong enough to bring down Gallifrey itself in a devastating Time War. But really, the difference between the Doctor and his people? He interferes with the timelines because he can't bear to stand by and watch people die. They do it to protect their own skin.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Dammit, Gadget
Has there ever been a dafter climax to a pre-title-sequence in all of New Who? The Doctor turns and his eyes widen in horror... as he's confronted by an exceptionally silly robot saying "gadget gadget" at him.
Given that, about a minute after the title sequence, we get the moment when Andy turns around to reveal he's turned into a hideous water zombie, I'd have thought they could have moved things around a bit for increased dramatic impact.
Given that, about a minute after the title sequence, we get the moment when Andy turns around to reveal he's turned into a hideous water zombie, I'd have thought they could have moved things around a bit for increased dramatic impact.
Wet Wet Wet
I'm writing this on a very soggy Monday morning in Victoria indeed... and I'm definitely not going outside until it's dry.
The Waters of Mars wasn't perfect, but I do think it was damn good, and definitely worth the six month wait. Some people had been agitating for an airdate of Hallowe'en, on the grounds that this was obviously "the scary one, but in the end November 15th was fine, because it wasn't really about the chills, was it? They were just window dressing to the main plot, the one about the Laws of Time.
No disrespect to the Flood, who were a superbly horrifying monster. Can I be among the first to suggest that they should make a return appearance, sometime in the next few years? However, I agree completely with my wife, who turned to me about halfway through and pronounced, "this isn't nearly as scary as Blink". Part of the problem was that we'd seen most of the big shudder moments already, in the trailers, leaving as far as I can remember only Maggie's transformation scene to unexpectedly chill our blood. The main issue though was that, with so much time and dialogue being devoted to the Doctor's inability to alter fixed history, there wasn't too much room left for terror and suspense.
Full marks to RTD for finally clearing up a question that has been hanging over the show since 1964, when the First Doctor insisted to Barbara "you can't rewrite history! Not one line!" For a long time it seemed as though history there just meant "the subject as studied in Earth schools in the late 20th century", and that deposing dictators and toppling empires was entirely kosher as long as it took place on alien worlds or in the future. At last though we have confirmation that some events are fixed, some aren't, and Hartnell just had a predisposition for taunting his bleeding-heart liberal companions by taking them to unpleasant moments in history that have to stand.
Things I liked about this episode: the production values and acting were top-notch, and Graeme Harper did his usual solid directing job, realizing the importance of turning the lights off for the scary bits. (Witness how comparatively lame Steffi's transformation is compared to the others, because no justification can be found for doing it in the half-light.) Mars looked better than Dubai, sorry, the Planet of the Dead, at presumably a fraction of the cost. "Bowie Base" was a good joke, and there were some classic soundbites, such as the impeccably delivered "the Doctor, Doctor, fun" and "are you the Doctor or the Janitor?"
Things I didn't like. Well, the crew. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the "crew" in any given episode set in the future will always be about the same number of people (half a dozen or so), with an appropriate diversity of genders and ethnicities. The problem being that, in an hour long episode with other things on its plate, there was only room to develop about 50% of them. Adelaide was fantastic of course, Ed defined himself economically by butting heads with his captain, Roman likes robots, Yuri has a gay brother and even Andy has his carrots. Unfortunately that left Steffi, Tarak and Mia with no discernible features apart from their nationalities. Particularly outrageous was where the Doctor made a song and dance about Mia being "only 27", moments after being introduced to Yuri (also 27), and Roman, the baby of the crew at 25. We can draw one of two conclusions from this: either the Doctor in this incarnation only really cares about attractive young girls (not entirely implausible at this stage), or that, in the absence of an actual character, they felt like they had to try and give Mia some remarkable feature, to wit being too young and pretty to die.
I was also miffed by the amount of time spent on shots of people running. Seriously, what was with all those corridors? Yes, they made Bowie look awesome in longshot, but you'd think it'd be blimmin' inconvenient over many years of running a base in actual practice. There was no room in the cargo for the dead weight of bikes, but miles of corridor material was deemed essential? I found myself wondering if the corridors were there as some kind of ironic statement, that "running down corridors is what futuristic Doctor Who is all about", in which case shame on you, Russell T Davies!
As I've said though, it turned out that the Flood and Bowie Base One were just a sideshow to the main issue, of what happens when the Tenth Doctor is confronted with a piece of timeline that he really can't change. We had a taster for this in The Fires of Pompeii: then, he refused to do anything, but Donna pleaded with him to make just a tiny difference, to save just a few. This time, again, he refuses to intercede, and again, Adelaide pleads with him for the lives of her crew. You'd think if he got away with it once, he could get away with it a second time... but apparently not.
I have to say, I loved the Doctor's constant struggle with his conscience at the beginning of the episode. He knows he should leave, knows that when things start taking a turn for the apocalyptic he might not be able to stop himself from rolling up his sleeves and wading in. The funny thing is, I think he's right to stay, and I think he's right to help, though it's a crying shame for Ed and Steffi and Ramon that it takes him so long to come to that conclusion. The Doctor doesn't look like a coward and he isn't a coward. How morally repugnant would it have been for him to keep walking away at the end, while he's listening to his helpless friends dying, one by one? That's the Time Lord way, but the entire series is founded on the principle that non-intervention is not the Doctor's way. I think the tragedy of the end of this episode is that what the Doctor does is completely, unarguably right. What use are laws, of time or otherwise, if all they do is cause innocents to suffer?
And although the timelines do change, Susie Fontana Brooke still goes to the stars. Is there an implication that this only still happens because Adelaide takes her own life? Perhaps. But I have to say, I was a bit shocked by the ingratitude of the survivors back on Earth. Yes, the Doctor should have taken them somewhere far away from the Solar System and 2059, instead of saying "in your face, Laws of Time". But it seems a bit unlikely that the universal reaction to a reprieve from certain death would be shock and outrage. Adelaide may be suffering from "a captain must go down with her ship" syndrome, but she begged the Doctor to help save her crew. She's known him for all of an hour and already she knows better than him about the immutability of the timelines... something which he explained to her in the first place? Granted, she could see the megalomania burning in his eyes in the last minutes on Bowie, she can tell he's going off the rails, but coming to the conclusion that she has to end her own life... well, I think that's RTD telling us, somewhat hamfistedly, that what the Doctor has done is Bad and Wrong, instead of it being any kind of logical thing for the character to do.
I liked that even a Dalek, with its presumable overriding urge to exterminate small defenseless humans, wasn't messing with the timeline of this one. I have to wonder - if the Doctor's screwing around with immutable Earth history somehow impacts on the Time War and brings Gallifrey back, and early indications are that this is a possibility - could the Daleks have been steering clear of Adelaide Brooke's timeline as a matter of priority? Though, as Davros's plan was to snuff out the entire universe, or something equally silly, I'm not sure that's entirely likely.
But yes, in the end, The Waters of Mars is good, because it addresses the issues that have been rankling with viewers for a while now. Isn't this increasingly messianic and Christ-like Doctor getting a bit too big for his boots? Isn't it a bit irritating that he can just point the sonic screwdriver at any problem nowadays and it fixes it? I would be pleased to believe that the increasing aura of omnipotence around the Doctor is not a matter of writers being too lazy to construct proper denouements, but a "Davies Masterplan" - an arc conceived from the start to illustrate the tragic theme of "pride comes before a fall".
"I went too far!" cries the Doctor, and yes he did. But he went too far for a lot of the right reasons, as well as a few of the wrong ones. "Just for once, everybody lives!" he crowed at the end of The Doctor Dances, and we cheered him on. But it's the fact that he's now trying to save too many people, too much of the time, that's going to be the end of him. And that is heartbreaking.
The Waters of Mars wasn't perfect, but I do think it was damn good, and definitely worth the six month wait. Some people had been agitating for an airdate of Hallowe'en, on the grounds that this was obviously "the scary one, but in the end November 15th was fine, because it wasn't really about the chills, was it? They were just window dressing to the main plot, the one about the Laws of Time.
No disrespect to the Flood, who were a superbly horrifying monster. Can I be among the first to suggest that they should make a return appearance, sometime in the next few years? However, I agree completely with my wife, who turned to me about halfway through and pronounced, "this isn't nearly as scary as Blink". Part of the problem was that we'd seen most of the big shudder moments already, in the trailers, leaving as far as I can remember only Maggie's transformation scene to unexpectedly chill our blood. The main issue though was that, with so much time and dialogue being devoted to the Doctor's inability to alter fixed history, there wasn't too much room left for terror and suspense.
Full marks to RTD for finally clearing up a question that has been hanging over the show since 1964, when the First Doctor insisted to Barbara "you can't rewrite history! Not one line!" For a long time it seemed as though history there just meant "the subject as studied in Earth schools in the late 20th century", and that deposing dictators and toppling empires was entirely kosher as long as it took place on alien worlds or in the future. At last though we have confirmation that some events are fixed, some aren't, and Hartnell just had a predisposition for taunting his bleeding-heart liberal companions by taking them to unpleasant moments in history that have to stand.
Things I liked about this episode: the production values and acting were top-notch, and Graeme Harper did his usual solid directing job, realizing the importance of turning the lights off for the scary bits. (Witness how comparatively lame Steffi's transformation is compared to the others, because no justification can be found for doing it in the half-light.) Mars looked better than Dubai, sorry, the Planet of the Dead, at presumably a fraction of the cost. "Bowie Base" was a good joke, and there were some classic soundbites, such as the impeccably delivered "the Doctor, Doctor, fun" and "are you the Doctor or the Janitor?"
Things I didn't like. Well, the crew. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the "crew" in any given episode set in the future will always be about the same number of people (half a dozen or so), with an appropriate diversity of genders and ethnicities. The problem being that, in an hour long episode with other things on its plate, there was only room to develop about 50% of them. Adelaide was fantastic of course, Ed defined himself economically by butting heads with his captain, Roman likes robots, Yuri has a gay brother and even Andy has his carrots. Unfortunately that left Steffi, Tarak and Mia with no discernible features apart from their nationalities. Particularly outrageous was where the Doctor made a song and dance about Mia being "only 27", moments after being introduced to Yuri (also 27), and Roman, the baby of the crew at 25. We can draw one of two conclusions from this: either the Doctor in this incarnation only really cares about attractive young girls (not entirely implausible at this stage), or that, in the absence of an actual character, they felt like they had to try and give Mia some remarkable feature, to wit being too young and pretty to die.
I was also miffed by the amount of time spent on shots of people running. Seriously, what was with all those corridors? Yes, they made Bowie look awesome in longshot, but you'd think it'd be blimmin' inconvenient over many years of running a base in actual practice. There was no room in the cargo for the dead weight of bikes, but miles of corridor material was deemed essential? I found myself wondering if the corridors were there as some kind of ironic statement, that "running down corridors is what futuristic Doctor Who is all about", in which case shame on you, Russell T Davies!
As I've said though, it turned out that the Flood and Bowie Base One were just a sideshow to the main issue, of what happens when the Tenth Doctor is confronted with a piece of timeline that he really can't change. We had a taster for this in The Fires of Pompeii: then, he refused to do anything, but Donna pleaded with him to make just a tiny difference, to save just a few. This time, again, he refuses to intercede, and again, Adelaide pleads with him for the lives of her crew. You'd think if he got away with it once, he could get away with it a second time... but apparently not.
I have to say, I loved the Doctor's constant struggle with his conscience at the beginning of the episode. He knows he should leave, knows that when things start taking a turn for the apocalyptic he might not be able to stop himself from rolling up his sleeves and wading in. The funny thing is, I think he's right to stay, and I think he's right to help, though it's a crying shame for Ed and Steffi and Ramon that it takes him so long to come to that conclusion. The Doctor doesn't look like a coward and he isn't a coward. How morally repugnant would it have been for him to keep walking away at the end, while he's listening to his helpless friends dying, one by one? That's the Time Lord way, but the entire series is founded on the principle that non-intervention is not the Doctor's way. I think the tragedy of the end of this episode is that what the Doctor does is completely, unarguably right. What use are laws, of time or otherwise, if all they do is cause innocents to suffer?
And although the timelines do change, Susie Fontana Brooke still goes to the stars. Is there an implication that this only still happens because Adelaide takes her own life? Perhaps. But I have to say, I was a bit shocked by the ingratitude of the survivors back on Earth. Yes, the Doctor should have taken them somewhere far away from the Solar System and 2059, instead of saying "in your face, Laws of Time". But it seems a bit unlikely that the universal reaction to a reprieve from certain death would be shock and outrage. Adelaide may be suffering from "a captain must go down with her ship" syndrome, but she begged the Doctor to help save her crew. She's known him for all of an hour and already she knows better than him about the immutability of the timelines... something which he explained to her in the first place? Granted, she could see the megalomania burning in his eyes in the last minutes on Bowie, she can tell he's going off the rails, but coming to the conclusion that she has to end her own life... well, I think that's RTD telling us, somewhat hamfistedly, that what the Doctor has done is Bad and Wrong, instead of it being any kind of logical thing for the character to do.
I liked that even a Dalek, with its presumable overriding urge to exterminate small defenseless humans, wasn't messing with the timeline of this one. I have to wonder - if the Doctor's screwing around with immutable Earth history somehow impacts on the Time War and brings Gallifrey back, and early indications are that this is a possibility - could the Daleks have been steering clear of Adelaide Brooke's timeline as a matter of priority? Though, as Davros's plan was to snuff out the entire universe, or something equally silly, I'm not sure that's entirely likely.
But yes, in the end, The Waters of Mars is good, because it addresses the issues that have been rankling with viewers for a while now. Isn't this increasingly messianic and Christ-like Doctor getting a bit too big for his boots? Isn't it a bit irritating that he can just point the sonic screwdriver at any problem nowadays and it fixes it? I would be pleased to believe that the increasing aura of omnipotence around the Doctor is not a matter of writers being too lazy to construct proper denouements, but a "Davies Masterplan" - an arc conceived from the start to illustrate the tragic theme of "pride comes before a fall".
"I went too far!" cries the Doctor, and yes he did. But he went too far for a lot of the right reasons, as well as a few of the wrong ones. "Just for once, everybody lives!" he crowed at the end of The Doctor Dances, and we cheered him on. But it's the fact that he's now trying to save too many people, too much of the time, that's going to be the end of him. And that is heartbreaking.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Web of Fear
While I wait with trembling anticipation to watch Waters of Mars...
It feels like Doctor Who has always provoked its most favorable reactions when it's been at its most scary. The phrase "behind the sofa" has become part of everyday language: I don't think anyone ever actually hides behind furniture to watch the show, but it's a pleasant urban myth that sometimes things get so scary that you might have to. The Troughton "base under siege" era has always been regarded as all-time classic Who, despite the episodes quite often not standing up to modern scrutiny, because it was pretty much all monsters lumbering about in the shadows all the time. Holmes and Hinchcliffe ratcheted up the horror levels after the "cosy" Pertwee era, much to Mary Whitehouse's disgust: result, classic status. Graham Williams and Douglas Adams made it lighter and funnier again: result, suspicion and disdain from the fans.
In the mid-80s Eric Saward managed to get it sadly wrong - he must have thought he was onto a surefire winner with Season 22, but violence and gore are not the same thing as the sophisticated, suspenseful thrills and chills which first made the show's name. Andrew Cartmel, replacing him, was a much more imaginative and innovative script editor, but sadly fell foul of the fans by not being scary enough, until it was too late.
New Who has treated scariness as something to be wheeled out for special occasions, normally in the context of a Steven Moffat script (though The Impossible Planet was no slouch in the creepiness department). But it's no coincidence that ostentatiously scary pieces like Blink and The Empty Child regularly top the fan favorite polls, and I think eventually RTD decided he wanted to get in on some of that action: Midnight in Season 4 was easily his most disturbing, and arguably one of his most successful scripts yet. Early indications are though that he might be trying to top it with The Waters of Mars.
It'll be interesting to see how scary post-2009 Who ends up being, whether Moffat just can't help increasing the fear factor of everything he touches, or whether he'll keep the formula of doing "a scary one" once or twice per season. Generally speaking, I don't think Doctor Who can go wrong by making it as scary as possible (while staying firmly within its PG limits) as much as possible, and I hope Moffat does edge it further towards the shadowy and Gothic.
A final anecdote: in 1988 I was combining watching the last episode of Remembrance of the Daleks with babysitting my young (six or seven year old) cousin. All was going well until a Dalek shell slid open to reveal the cadaverous figure of Davros. This was just too much for little Alice, who began to scream and scream, before rushing sobbing upstairs to her bedroom, pleading for me to come upstairs and protect her. Twenty years later, I don't believe there have been any lasting scars: I believe she's a fan of the new show, or at least considers David Tennant to be rather dishy. The point is, I wonder if this is the secret of Doctor Who's enduring success: whether it's black-and-white Daleks, or Yeti in the Underground, or giant maggots, or the horrible sight of Davros, everyone ideally needs something to scare the bejeezus out of them at an impressionable age, so they can say "Doctor Who? I was terrified of that show when I was small." Here's hoping for many more traumatized infants in the months and years to come. It's how the journey of a lifetime begins.
It feels like Doctor Who has always provoked its most favorable reactions when it's been at its most scary. The phrase "behind the sofa" has become part of everyday language: I don't think anyone ever actually hides behind furniture to watch the show, but it's a pleasant urban myth that sometimes things get so scary that you might have to. The Troughton "base under siege" era has always been regarded as all-time classic Who, despite the episodes quite often not standing up to modern scrutiny, because it was pretty much all monsters lumbering about in the shadows all the time. Holmes and Hinchcliffe ratcheted up the horror levels after the "cosy" Pertwee era, much to Mary Whitehouse's disgust: result, classic status. Graham Williams and Douglas Adams made it lighter and funnier again: result, suspicion and disdain from the fans.
In the mid-80s Eric Saward managed to get it sadly wrong - he must have thought he was onto a surefire winner with Season 22, but violence and gore are not the same thing as the sophisticated, suspenseful thrills and chills which first made the show's name. Andrew Cartmel, replacing him, was a much more imaginative and innovative script editor, but sadly fell foul of the fans by not being scary enough, until it was too late.
New Who has treated scariness as something to be wheeled out for special occasions, normally in the context of a Steven Moffat script (though The Impossible Planet was no slouch in the creepiness department). But it's no coincidence that ostentatiously scary pieces like Blink and The Empty Child regularly top the fan favorite polls, and I think eventually RTD decided he wanted to get in on some of that action: Midnight in Season 4 was easily his most disturbing, and arguably one of his most successful scripts yet. Early indications are though that he might be trying to top it with The Waters of Mars.
It'll be interesting to see how scary post-2009 Who ends up being, whether Moffat just can't help increasing the fear factor of everything he touches, or whether he'll keep the formula of doing "a scary one" once or twice per season. Generally speaking, I don't think Doctor Who can go wrong by making it as scary as possible (while staying firmly within its PG limits) as much as possible, and I hope Moffat does edge it further towards the shadowy and Gothic.
A final anecdote: in 1988 I was combining watching the last episode of Remembrance of the Daleks with babysitting my young (six or seven year old) cousin. All was going well until a Dalek shell slid open to reveal the cadaverous figure of Davros. This was just too much for little Alice, who began to scream and scream, before rushing sobbing upstairs to her bedroom, pleading for me to come upstairs and protect her. Twenty years later, I don't believe there have been any lasting scars: I believe she's a fan of the new show, or at least considers David Tennant to be rather dishy. The point is, I wonder if this is the secret of Doctor Who's enduring success: whether it's black-and-white Daleks, or Yeti in the Underground, or giant maggots, or the horrible sight of Davros, everyone ideally needs something to scare the bejeezus out of them at an impressionable age, so they can say "Doctor Who? I was terrified of that show when I was small." Here's hoping for many more traumatized infants in the months and years to come. It's how the journey of a lifetime begins.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
She's A Fake, Sure But She's A Real Fake
So, yeah, in the end I rather enjoyed Mona Lisa's Revenge, but it was easy to be distracted by the famous painting's other starring role in a Whoniverse adventure, 1979's wonderful City of Death. No wonder Leonardo da Vinci needed to borrow paint from his neighbor when he had not one but six Mona Lisas to complete. But surely Mr Harding the curator couldn't have missed the Fourth Doctor's warning "this is a fake", scrawled on the canvas of his beloved masterpiece in felt tip pen? Oh well, whatever.
Suranne Jones' performance as the Mona Lisa will doubtless always be mentioned in the same breath as the words "love it or hate it". Personally I might rather have seen the painting portrayed as a serene, implacable presence than a potty-mouthed Mancunian shazza, but I guess we were overdue for a comedy interlude. Jones didn't really bear much resemblance to the actual painting in my opinion, either, but that's what suspension of disbelief is for.
Very little of the actual plot made much sense to me. I have no idea why proximity would re-empower the aliens in the paint; it's then enough of a stretch to imagine that one of the powers of this race is to be able to make things in paintings real, but as far as turning real people into two-dimensional paint is concerned, I'm not even going to bother trying to make sense of that. I do amire the chutzpah of going to such absurd lengths solely to be able to reuse the Sontaran blaster, and avoid having to spring for a new weapon prop for the Mona Lisa. The puzzle box, so let me get this straight, Di Cattivo went stark staring mad from painting The Abomination but then had the time, knowhow and presence of mind to build an elaborate containment device for the alien, and a convenient key to release it? No, you've lost me there.
I liked the return to the International Gallery (though truly, it is a very silly place) and enjoyed Mr Harding and Miss Trupp. The dowdy spinster female assistant in love with her oblivious boss is a familiar double act, and it was nice to see Phyllis reject Lionel for being an idiot at the eleventh hour, in place of the telegraphed tidy conclusion. Though didn't we already have this scene out between the Doctor and Martha, at the end of New Who Season 3?
As I say, I could have done without so much of the "Harders" and "Clydie", but there was a lot more to this painting than met the eye. The scene where the Mona Lisa longed hopelessly to explore the outside world was touching, and the idea of a sentient being being trapped in silence and immobility on a wall for hundreds of years is a horrifying one. I was very surprised that Sarah Jane could only "almost" feel sorry for consigning Lisa to such a fate; I tend to expect a bit more compassion out of her, she's not the bloody Doctor after all.
All in all, a picture paints a thousand words and there were a lot more ideas in these two episodes than the somewhat silly business of Lisa running around wisecracking might suggest. I definitely preferred it to the straightforward "here's some aliens" fare of Prisoner of the Judoon, and if it does end up being rated as a relative disappointment, it's only because this has been by far the strongest and most interesting season of Sarah Jane Adventures yet.
Suranne Jones' performance as the Mona Lisa will doubtless always be mentioned in the same breath as the words "love it or hate it". Personally I might rather have seen the painting portrayed as a serene, implacable presence than a potty-mouthed Mancunian shazza, but I guess we were overdue for a comedy interlude. Jones didn't really bear much resemblance to the actual painting in my opinion, either, but that's what suspension of disbelief is for.
Very little of the actual plot made much sense to me. I have no idea why proximity would re-empower the aliens in the paint; it's then enough of a stretch to imagine that one of the powers of this race is to be able to make things in paintings real, but as far as turning real people into two-dimensional paint is concerned, I'm not even going to bother trying to make sense of that. I do amire the chutzpah of going to such absurd lengths solely to be able to reuse the Sontaran blaster, and avoid having to spring for a new weapon prop for the Mona Lisa. The puzzle box, so let me get this straight, Di Cattivo went stark staring mad from painting The Abomination but then had the time, knowhow and presence of mind to build an elaborate containment device for the alien, and a convenient key to release it? No, you've lost me there.
I liked the return to the International Gallery (though truly, it is a very silly place) and enjoyed Mr Harding and Miss Trupp. The dowdy spinster female assistant in love with her oblivious boss is a familiar double act, and it was nice to see Phyllis reject Lionel for being an idiot at the eleventh hour, in place of the telegraphed tidy conclusion. Though didn't we already have this scene out between the Doctor and Martha, at the end of New Who Season 3?
As I say, I could have done without so much of the "Harders" and "Clydie", but there was a lot more to this painting than met the eye. The scene where the Mona Lisa longed hopelessly to explore the outside world was touching, and the idea of a sentient being being trapped in silence and immobility on a wall for hundreds of years is a horrifying one. I was very surprised that Sarah Jane could only "almost" feel sorry for consigning Lisa to such a fate; I tend to expect a bit more compassion out of her, she's not the bloody Doctor after all.
All in all, a picture paints a thousand words and there were a lot more ideas in these two episodes than the somewhat silly business of Lisa running around wisecracking might suggest. I definitely preferred it to the straightforward "here's some aliens" fare of Prisoner of the Judoon, and if it does end up being rated as a relative disappointment, it's only because this has been by far the strongest and most interesting season of Sarah Jane Adventures yet.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Extraordinary Boys
After three really dramatic and intense Sarah Jane Adventures in a row, the first part of Mona Lisa's Revenge returned us firmly into "amusing romp" territory; and nothing wrong with that. I'll review the story as a whole after I've watched the second part, but here's something that struck me about Part One:
Since the reboot in 2005, the Doctor Who franchise has spent a lot of time in praise of the ordinary. Rose was a shopgirl from a council estate, Donna was a temp; of course in the middle we had Martha, an educated and capable doctor-in-training... who might as well have been chopped liver as far as our chops-and-gravy-eulogizing Time Lord hero was concerned. Torchwood centers around the anything-but-ordinary Captain Jack, but the real audience identification figure is Gwen, constantly torn between secret agent life and her blissful, boring relationship with tubby and hapless Rhys. When we met Ianto's sister and her family in Children of Earth the jig was up: tubby, hapless, tabloid-reading "ordinary folk" without a GCSE between them are the salt of Russell T Davies' earth, the new most important people in the Whoniverse.
Sarah Jane isn't as bizarre a protagonist as the Doctor or Jack, but they do play up the idea that she's a pretty odd old lady: she's traveled in time and space, she has a robot dog and an alien supercomputer in the attic... meanwhile her son Luke is an incredible genius grown in a vat by the Bane, and new girl Rani is a precocious wannabe investigative journalist whose dad is the school headmaster, neither of them exactly commonplace. With the departure of Maria Jackson, Clyde Langer was left as the series Everyman (or Everykid): a lot less concerned with academic success than being "cool", which is pretty much kidspeak for safe and ordinary.
So, I know it's only in the episode to provide a spurious justification for the gang to be roaming around an art gallery, but it was weird to see Clyde outed as one of Britain's most promising young artistic talents. (Not quite sure what it could have been about his busty-space-babes-brandishing-guns piece that won such admiration from the serious art community, but we'll let that slide.) What this seems to imply, at least to me, is that while the "grown-up" shows are intent on hammering home to us the idea that Mr and Mrs Joe Slob eating their fish and chips in front of the telly in Cardiff are the most wonderful and enviable creatures in the universe... Sarah Jane Adventures has left behind the last pretense that its young team are anything other than three incredible child prodigies.
None of this should come as any surprise in a world where children's fiction is still in thrall to Harry Potter, with its sharp dividing line between magical folk and the crude, boring Muggles. I have to say I feel that Russell T Davies ladled on the opposite view a bit thick over the past 5 years - to the point where it almost felt like his shows had contempt for anyone who tried to be educated or exceptional, or just stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, my favorite character from Buffy ended up being Xander, just because in a show where every other character was turning out to be an immensely powerful witch or werewolf or demon or angel, he remained an ordinary schmoe to the bitter end.
I guess my ideal is for there to be a balance: no contempt for ordinary working-class folk, but equally, no suspicion of those who have education and talents, and use them to live extraordinary, heroic lives. Clyde, Rani, Luke and Sarah Jane all fall into the latter category, I think, and it's nice. Because three shows dedicated to continually showing the nobility of life on the sink estate would probably be too many.
Since the reboot in 2005, the Doctor Who franchise has spent a lot of time in praise of the ordinary. Rose was a shopgirl from a council estate, Donna was a temp; of course in the middle we had Martha, an educated and capable doctor-in-training... who might as well have been chopped liver as far as our chops-and-gravy-eulogizing Time Lord hero was concerned. Torchwood centers around the anything-but-ordinary Captain Jack, but the real audience identification figure is Gwen, constantly torn between secret agent life and her blissful, boring relationship with tubby and hapless Rhys. When we met Ianto's sister and her family in Children of Earth the jig was up: tubby, hapless, tabloid-reading "ordinary folk" without a GCSE between them are the salt of Russell T Davies' earth, the new most important people in the Whoniverse.
Sarah Jane isn't as bizarre a protagonist as the Doctor or Jack, but they do play up the idea that she's a pretty odd old lady: she's traveled in time and space, she has a robot dog and an alien supercomputer in the attic... meanwhile her son Luke is an incredible genius grown in a vat by the Bane, and new girl Rani is a precocious wannabe investigative journalist whose dad is the school headmaster, neither of them exactly commonplace. With the departure of Maria Jackson, Clyde Langer was left as the series Everyman (or Everykid): a lot less concerned with academic success than being "cool", which is pretty much kidspeak for safe and ordinary.
So, I know it's only in the episode to provide a spurious justification for the gang to be roaming around an art gallery, but it was weird to see Clyde outed as one of Britain's most promising young artistic talents. (Not quite sure what it could have been about his busty-space-babes-brandishing-guns piece that won such admiration from the serious art community, but we'll let that slide.) What this seems to imply, at least to me, is that while the "grown-up" shows are intent on hammering home to us the idea that Mr and Mrs Joe Slob eating their fish and chips in front of the telly in Cardiff are the most wonderful and enviable creatures in the universe... Sarah Jane Adventures has left behind the last pretense that its young team are anything other than three incredible child prodigies.
None of this should come as any surprise in a world where children's fiction is still in thrall to Harry Potter, with its sharp dividing line between magical folk and the crude, boring Muggles. I have to say I feel that Russell T Davies ladled on the opposite view a bit thick over the past 5 years - to the point where it almost felt like his shows had contempt for anyone who tried to be educated or exceptional, or just stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, my favorite character from Buffy ended up being Xander, just because in a show where every other character was turning out to be an immensely powerful witch or werewolf or demon or angel, he remained an ordinary schmoe to the bitter end.
I guess my ideal is for there to be a balance: no contempt for ordinary working-class folk, but equally, no suspicion of those who have education and talents, and use them to live extraordinary, heroic lives. Clyde, Rani, Luke and Sarah Jane all fall into the latter category, I think, and it's nice. Because three shows dedicated to continually showing the nobility of life on the sink estate would probably be too many.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
And A Gentle Manifesto To Boot
What's the point of this blog? Well, there isn't really one yet, seeing as no one knows about it, and I assume no one is reading it. Nonetheless:-
Like many other rational people, I subscribe to the view that Doctor Who is, hands down, the best TV show in the history of the universe. I've been a moderately obsessive fan since sometime in the mid-80s, and a quarter of a century on, the passion shows no sign of abating.
So far, so run of the mill. But here's where I think I differ from other fans. I really do love the whole show. There are plenty of "elder statesman" Whovians out there, making pronouncements on their podcasts, who seem to love bits of it. Some of them profess to love Old Who but are scathing about the snogging 'n' soap opera elements of the 2005 revamp. Even within the Old Who camp, you'll find plenty who don't have a single nice thing to say about the latter half of the 80s, who write off all the joy and innovation of the McCoy era with a sneery quip about Bertie Bassett. These people invariably love the "Hinchcliffe era", Seasons 12-14, and everything else falls short to a greater or lesser degree. Some of them, mentioning no Lawrence Mileses in particular, seem to watch the new show avidly for the sole, religious purpose of ripping each new episode to shreds for how far it misses the mark of "real" Who.
And recently I've started to see a backlash against the relentless negativity of these crusty old gits, an equal and opposite reaction from newer fans who are quite invested in the "true love" of Rose and the Doctor, and want to see them live happily ever after. I've heard it said that the fixation of the 70s with spaceships and aliens at the expense of human interest is a real snoozefest, that The Caves of Androzani is nothing more than a tedious, testosterone-drenched video nasty, that Robert Holmes (Old Who's most beloved scribe and script editor) couldn't write worth a damn.
And none of these points of view are in the right. My intention is not to be a hagiographer: obviously in a show with a 46-year history there will have been high and low points. But put your ear to the ground of "fandom" and most of what you'll hear is bitching. My Who is better than your Who. The latest Who is nowhere near the quality of what I arbitrarily designate as "real" Who.
All of this is of course ridiculous. Who is a program that has survived for half a century on the strength of being all sorts of different things, and something new for every successive generation. To claim that it was at its objective best during the few years when you happened to fall in love with it is missing the point: it's at its best when it doesn't rest on its laurels, doesn't stick to tried and tested formulas, keeps moving restlessly and experimentally forward. The Doctor doesn't regenerate just because the actor decides to leave. The show stays alive because the Doctor regenerates. It's never the same program for more than about 3 years in a row. It's not hard to reel off a list of TV shows that were great for about 3 seasons but whose returns kept on steadily diminishing until the point of cancellation. For Doctor Who, that's not often a problem, as 46 years, 31 seasons and 11 leading men have proved.
Who Positive is my little love letter to Doctor Who, all of Doctor Who. I love almost all of it and I can say with my hand on my heart that there isn't a moment of it that I hate. I'm going to try and write something in here every day, be it a review or a thought or a memory. And who knows, maybe someday other people will stumble across it, by the magic of the internet, and enjoy it too.
Like many other rational people, I subscribe to the view that Doctor Who is, hands down, the best TV show in the history of the universe. I've been a moderately obsessive fan since sometime in the mid-80s, and a quarter of a century on, the passion shows no sign of abating.
So far, so run of the mill. But here's where I think I differ from other fans. I really do love the whole show. There are plenty of "elder statesman" Whovians out there, making pronouncements on their podcasts, who seem to love bits of it. Some of them profess to love Old Who but are scathing about the snogging 'n' soap opera elements of the 2005 revamp. Even within the Old Who camp, you'll find plenty who don't have a single nice thing to say about the latter half of the 80s, who write off all the joy and innovation of the McCoy era with a sneery quip about Bertie Bassett. These people invariably love the "Hinchcliffe era", Seasons 12-14, and everything else falls short to a greater or lesser degree. Some of them, mentioning no Lawrence Mileses in particular, seem to watch the new show avidly for the sole, religious purpose of ripping each new episode to shreds for how far it misses the mark of "real" Who.
And recently I've started to see a backlash against the relentless negativity of these crusty old gits, an equal and opposite reaction from newer fans who are quite invested in the "true love" of Rose and the Doctor, and want to see them live happily ever after. I've heard it said that the fixation of the 70s with spaceships and aliens at the expense of human interest is a real snoozefest, that The Caves of Androzani is nothing more than a tedious, testosterone-drenched video nasty, that Robert Holmes (Old Who's most beloved scribe and script editor) couldn't write worth a damn.
And none of these points of view are in the right. My intention is not to be a hagiographer: obviously in a show with a 46-year history there will have been high and low points. But put your ear to the ground of "fandom" and most of what you'll hear is bitching. My Who is better than your Who. The latest Who is nowhere near the quality of what I arbitrarily designate as "real" Who.
All of this is of course ridiculous. Who is a program that has survived for half a century on the strength of being all sorts of different things, and something new for every successive generation. To claim that it was at its objective best during the few years when you happened to fall in love with it is missing the point: it's at its best when it doesn't rest on its laurels, doesn't stick to tried and tested formulas, keeps moving restlessly and experimentally forward. The Doctor doesn't regenerate just because the actor decides to leave. The show stays alive because the Doctor regenerates. It's never the same program for more than about 3 years in a row. It's not hard to reel off a list of TV shows that were great for about 3 seasons but whose returns kept on steadily diminishing until the point of cancellation. For Doctor Who, that's not often a problem, as 46 years, 31 seasons and 11 leading men have proved.
Who Positive is my little love letter to Doctor Who, all of Doctor Who. I love almost all of it and I can say with my hand on my heart that there isn't a moment of it that I hate. I'm going to try and write something in here every day, be it a review or a thought or a memory. And who knows, maybe someday other people will stumble across it, by the magic of the internet, and enjoy it too.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Change, My Dear
If my calculations are correct, only once in the entire run of Old Who did they kick off a new season with both a new Doctor and a new production team: Season 7, surely the most massive sea change in the history of the program.
It seems unlikely that Moffat will tamper THAT much with RTD's award-winning formula, but still, it's hard to overestimate what a momentous year 2009-10 is for the show. I'm waiting with bated breath.
It seems unlikely that Moffat will tamper THAT much with RTD's award-winning formula, but still, it's hard to overestimate what a momentous year 2009-10 is for the show. I'm waiting with bated breath.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Binro Was Alright
"For years I was jeered at and derided - I began to doubt even myself. Then you came along and you told me... I was right!
"Just to know that for certain, Unstoffe... is worth a life."
RIP Timothy Bateson, 1926-2009
"Just to know that for certain, Unstoffe... is worth a life."
RIP Timothy Bateson, 1926-2009
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