Because not every post can be on the epic scale of a major political demonstration shutting down Canada’s largest city, I’ve decided to talk about Doctor Who. It’s been a long time since I’ve done so. Tom Baker once said that fan love is superior to human love. Because Tom's friends and family will tell him that he's gained weight, that it's silly to dye your hair white, and to stop being so strange. But Tom's fans will introduce themselves saying, "You're my hero, man!" Well, Matt Smith can definitely count me as a fan.
First, I want to make clear that I love what new producer Steven Moffatt has done with the show. I’m glad that Russell T Davies revived the show in the first place, and he often made some fine adventures, and wrote some good scripts. “Midnight” is still a brilliant suspence vehicle, and wonderful character piece for the Tenth Doctor. But I always found Russell’s aesthetic a little too pop for me, along with the Tenth Doctor generally.
If there’s any feeling that I get from Moffatt’s production and Matt Smith’s performance as the Eleventh Doctor, it’s nerdiness. The Eleventh Doctor himself is a fantastically strange man. You’re entertained watching him because of the fundamental, unpredictable weirdness of his personality. He’s a man who is always a bit odd everywhere he goes, but far from being alienating, this oddness is charming, ingratiating. He doesn’t fit in, but he fits around others. Russell’s Doctors were very much lost men looking for a home, an anxiety that shaped their personalities. I got the feeling at times that the Tenth Doctor wouldn’t have minded settling down in a stable, if unconventional, home. But Moffatt’s Doctor is at home wherever he goes, because he’s so comfortable with himself. The Eleventh Doctor is a true traveller.
A Moffatt story isn’t afraid to become complicated, never assumes that the audience won’t be able to follow a clear, if complex, story. His season finale, “The Big Bang,” involved a lot of time travel shenanigans that were played for laughs in the moment, but intricately constructed the plot. And ultimately, it became a very personal story about the relation between the Doctor and his main companion Amy.
A couple of the reviews I’ve read of Matt Smith’s first season as a whole, I’ve found miss the point of having a new production team and new Doctor, which is a new articulation of what Doctor Who is. I’ve read that this year’s finale missed the epic dimensions of previous season enders. Even though the universe itself was at risk of being wiped from existence, there were no grand battles or sci-fi vistas, but puzzle in an empty museum for the Doctor to solve. The drama was contained within the four cast members of that story, the Doctor, Amy Pond, Rory Williams, and River Song.
Yet the biggest complaints about Russell’s season finales were that his epic battles became cartoonish, solved with technobabble and deus ex machinas with little attachment to the drama of the characters. But the resolution of this season, the return of the Doctor from oblivion through an anchor in Amy’s time-cracking memories of him, was hinted at throughout the season. Growing up next to a crack in time had altered Amy’s memory, so that she could remember timelines that never existed.
The metaphysics of how the Doctor could return to reality through a memory, and rebuild one timeline with a sample of it in another, was actually seeded in Russell and the Tenth Doctor’s swan song, “The End of Time.” All that’s needed to bring Gallifrey and the whole universe of the Time War back from oblivion was a single Gallifreyan diamond. Likewise, all that’s needed to restore the original universe is a sample within the Pandorica box, and all that’s needed to restore the Doctor to the universe is a sample of his existence in Amy’s brain, her memories of the never-was.
I also don’t understand why consensus seems to be that Rory is dead weight. It’s been a long time since televised Doctor Who had more than two main cast members for an entire season: classic season 21 in 1984. The 2011 season crew of the Doctor, Amy, and Rory will be the first crew. Maybe we’re just not used to stories with enough activity for three people that don’t devolve into the clutters of Russell’s mass reunion episodes.
I think people still consider Rory a white Mickey, the boyfriend overshadowed by Rose’s relationship with the Doctor. But Amy and Rory do onscreen what Rose and Mickey never actually did: make out. Rory fits into the same ‘main companion’s boyfriend’ slot, but the relationships among the three leads (and they are three leads) are completely different in 2010 than in 2005-6.
Mickey started out scared and incompetent, not knowing what to do in an alien invasion in “Rose.” In “The Eleventh Hour,” Rory’s actions and suspicions about his supposedly walking coma patients give the Doctor the information he needs to track down the villain. And he’s just as fast as Amy at evacuating the hospital. By the time he was travelling regularly in the TARDIS, he was on a level with the Doctor setting traps for Silurian warriors. At the end of the season, he was defending Amy from Dalek and Cyberman attacks. Rory was on his feet the fastest of any second-billing companion who wasn’t already a Time Agent.
And I’ll have no disrespect to the mopey nice guy who scored the hot bossy redhead.
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Monday, July 5, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Television that Keeps Me Watching TV
I’ve been very impressed by the new season of Doctor Who, especially Matt Smith, who embodies the role of the Doctor in a way that implies gravitas, joy, and strangeness, sometimes all at once. I find him much less self-consciously pop than David Tennant, which endears him to me, though perhaps not to all the casual fans of the show. Steven Moffatt’s ability to craft such an involved and complex story arc is quite a selling point as well. For all I admire what Russell T Davies was able to do resurrecting the show in the first place, his season arcs were usually a little too simple, amounting to little more than teasers for the finale. This year, the Doctor is discovering clue after clue about the nature of the mysterious cracks and silences in the universe that seem centred around new companion Amy Pond and the oddly insular town of Leadworth.
Treme has been remarkably engaging television for me too. I particularly like the show’s favourite asshole, Steve Zahn’s Davis. Davis is a pompous musician and radio DJ whose uncompromising exuberance and total inability to tell how people will react to his actions before he does them combine, little by little, to ruin his life. In the second episode, he got fired from his radio job after letting a local musician sacrifice a chicken live in studio. By the end of that episode, he got his second job as a desk jockey at a hotel on Bourbon street, but lost it after directing a group of twentysomethings in New Orleans with a church group cleanup crew to a bar outside the hotel’s designated comfort zone. It didn’t help Davis that they didn’t make it back to the hotel for two days.
As a Spaced fan, one of the happiest things we experienced was that the US remake of the beloved show was never picked up. However, I realized this week that there is an American Spaced, and it’s called Community. It’s not just because of the inter-generational unlikely friendships in an eccentric environment, though the nuanced and self-aware characterizations of the protagonists and Greendale College residents is key to its charm. Edgar Wright is a rare director, in that he knows how a camera movement can tell a joke. And the creators of Community understand this as well. One recent episode saw the campus collapse into a paintball war zone, and the climactic last battle of Jeff and Britta with their deranged Spanish teacher Señor Chang would have just looked kind of silly and lame if it had been filmed with an ordinary series of camera shots. But the slow motion of Chang’s entrace, the low angles at which the diminutive teacher was shot, and the kinetic flow of Britta’s attacks and Jeff’s escape heightened the surreality of the moment. It’s still a very revolutionary, and very difficult technique for a camera to be made so pivotal to the humour of a scene. But Spaced and Community have successfully achieved that.
Treme has been remarkably engaging television for me too. I particularly like the show’s favourite asshole, Steve Zahn’s Davis. Davis is a pompous musician and radio DJ whose uncompromising exuberance and total inability to tell how people will react to his actions before he does them combine, little by little, to ruin his life. In the second episode, he got fired from his radio job after letting a local musician sacrifice a chicken live in studio. By the end of that episode, he got his second job as a desk jockey at a hotel on Bourbon street, but lost it after directing a group of twentysomethings in New Orleans with a church group cleanup crew to a bar outside the hotel’s designated comfort zone. It didn’t help Davis that they didn’t make it back to the hotel for two days.
As a Spaced fan, one of the happiest things we experienced was that the US remake of the beloved show was never picked up. However, I realized this week that there is an American Spaced, and it’s called Community. It’s not just because of the inter-generational unlikely friendships in an eccentric environment, though the nuanced and self-aware characterizations of the protagonists and Greendale College residents is key to its charm. Edgar Wright is a rare director, in that he knows how a camera movement can tell a joke. And the creators of Community understand this as well. One recent episode saw the campus collapse into a paintball war zone, and the climactic last battle of Jeff and Britta with their deranged Spanish teacher Señor Chang would have just looked kind of silly and lame if it had been filmed with an ordinary series of camera shots. But the slow motion of Chang’s entrace, the low angles at which the diminutive teacher was shot, and the kinetic flow of Britta’s attacks and Jeff’s escape heightened the surreality of the moment. It’s still a very revolutionary, and very difficult technique for a camera to be made so pivotal to the humour of a scene. But Spaced and Community have successfully achieved that.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Written From a Cheap Hotel With a Spotty Wireless Connection in the Middle of Cuenca: Part Two, Doctor Who
When I was staying in Toronto overnight with my friend / former professor Dr Garrett, I caught on his quite efficient broadband internet David Tennant’s last episode of Doctor Who. I had seen part one of “The End of Time” the day after Xmas over the internet at my mother’s house, and have taken in events such that I can give a solid review of my thoughts.
I’ve only seen four regenerations ‘live’ in the chronology of the show. Of course, I wasn’t alive for most of them. I saw Colin Baker become Sylvester McCoy, but this was actually the first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw, at age five, so I had no attachment to Colin’s Doctor. I didn’t even really respect Colin’s Doctor until I returned to the show in the mid-2000s, exploring his character in novels and audios, which let me see his much-maligned television stories in a better light.
In 1996, I watched Sylvester turn into Paul McGann, but knew too little of the backstory in the Seventh Doctor novels for it to have appropriate impact, and the script was too mediocre for me to care. Like Colin, Paul’s Doctor was one who grew on me after rediscovery. The foreshadowing of Sylvester’s regeneration in the novels was actually quite similar to how David’s last year was developed, as Sylvester’s grand plans wound down to a surprising death in a random act of violence.
Then in 2005, I saw Christopher Eccleston become David Tennant. We had known this was coming because of a news leak from the production after broadcast of the first new series episode. So there was a touch of dissonance, as I knew Christopher would die, but no one on the show did. And Christopher’s regeneration was a kind of consummation of the character. Christopher’s Doctor was traumatized by his role in the Time War and the destruction of his people. This trauma defined his Doctor, hardened him and at times gave him a kind of death wish. Rose’s willingness to sacrifice herself to save him inspired his own sacrifice to save her. Christopher’s Doctor was at peace when he regenerated, able to accept his new body as a new beginning for his life.
David’s regeneration this New Year’s Day was of an utterly different sort, because the Doctor himself could see premonitions of his death long before it happened. Early in season four, Ood Sigma told him that his “song is ending soon.” And he heard the same thing from the psychic on the bus in “Planet of the Dead,” adding that “he will knock four times.” The story arc of the 2009 specials was David’s Doctor travelling alone confronting and running from the inevitability of this event. “The End of Time” saw him face this inevitability.
David’s Doctor stood out most in his enthusiasm for life, sometimes acting like a giddy child when he can defeat a destructive force or save a life that otherwise would have ended. These moments were insufferable at times, but they best embodied the simple joy at being alive that David’s Doctor was all about. I remember in the forum discussions of “Love and Monsters,” one of the most contentious elements of that story was how he saved Ursula’s life, by embedding her face and neural architecture in a paving slab. Many fans said it would have been better to die, but that was an essential moment of David’s character: any life is better than death. That’s why he saved River Song and her crew in the virtual world of The Library’s computer in “Forest of the Dead:” they were no longer bodily alive, but lived for thousands of years as mental patterns in the computer’s Matrix.
So when David is faced with his own death, he avoids it at all costs. When the Ood reveal the return of The Master on Earth, he is sure that confronting him will lead to his death, the four-times knocking being the drumbeat The Master heard in his head since he was a child. All his conversations with Wilf, his companion for this story, are the reflections of two old men facing the end of each other; Wilf with his old age and The Doctor with his premonition.
Part One is basically exposition of the situation, examples of the typical tropes of the series setting up the pieces by which the story’s real conflict will become clear and be resolved. The increasingly insane Master cruelly and literally devours others to keep his degrading resurrected body alive. A small-minded businessman plays with technology he doesn’t understand for selfish purposes, while two mysterious aliens, Vinvocci, lurk in the background. All the publicity leading up to the broadcast focussed on these elements so that we thought this was what the story was really about. Then the episode ends, revealing the Timothy Dalton led Time Lords about to return.
Part Two opens with a meeting of the Time Lord High Council on the eve of the Time War’s end, when The Doctor is about to use ‘The Moment,’ the weapon that will burn away the Dalek fleets and Gallifrey alike. But Dalton’s Rassilon angrily and violently refuses to die, a malevolent reflection of David’s Doctor’s refusal to give in to the inevitable. And he formulates the real scheme, seeding The Master, as a boy, with the sound that will drive him mad, and sending a Gallifreyan diamond to Earth just after The Doctor and Wilf flee to the Vinvocci ship in orbit to plan their counter-attack against The Master. All the time, the two old men contemplate with terror and sadness what they are prepared to do to save the Earth, whether they are willing to kill The Master to save humanity.
The Master discovers the diamond, and in his investigation of it, uses it as an anchor to lead Gallifrey back to reality, sitting ominously next to Earth. When the Doctor discovers the existence of the Gallifreyan diamond, he takes Wilf’s service revolver, which he had refused to use against The Master, to use against his own President. Here we finally discover the truth behind The Doctor’s destruction of Gallifrey: as Davros and the Daleks planned at the end of season four, the Time Lords were about to destroy all reality, to exist as consciousness alone. Rassilon would end the Time War by destroying the entire universe, and leaving the Time Lords as beings of pure energy. Rassilon’s refusal to die transformed him into someone willing to kill everything else.
Of course, Rassilon is defeated with the help of The Master, indignant at being reduced to a pawn. Gallifrey and the Time Lords return to die in the Time War, and The Master disappears. The Doctor thinks he has beaten the inevitability of his own end, until he hears four faint knocks: Wilf, trapped in a chamber that will soon flood with deadly radiation, and the only way to release him is to climb in the chamber’s twin to be fatally irradiated himself. Wilf urges The Doctor to let him die, because he’s already an old man, and David is enraged at the unfairness of it all. He has survived a battle with his life-long enemy and the most powerful Time Lord ever to live, but now faces death to save one old man. After all that he has achieved, his reward is his own demise. But he strides into the chamber, telling Wilf to be quick after unlocking the door.
He steps out of the chamber, thinking he has survived, but noticing that his cuts have healed: the regeneration is slow, but it’s begun. And so he goes for his reward, an epilogue that the general fandom sees as too sentimental, but that I see as a perfect summation of David’s Doctor. He, probably in great pain, holds off his regeneration, travelling to visit briefly his former companions who have meant the most to him, and gives them a second chance at life.
He saves Martha and Mickey from being shot by a Sontaran sniper. He gives Wilf a wedding gift for Donna and her new husband, both working minimum wage jobs: a £10-million lottery ticket for the next day. He passes Jack, in despair over his actions in Children of Earth, a note introducing him to Alonso Frame, the Stovian Titanic midshipman from “Voyage of the Damned,” offering the isolated Jack a new connection in the world, a new start for the immortal man. He visits the granddaughter of Joan Redfern, the nurse he fell in love with in “Human Nature,” seeking to know if Joan was ever happy again, pleased to know that she was. He saves Sarah Jane’s son Luke from being hit by a passing car, and finally visits Rose. It’s the first hours of 2005, a few months before she met Christopher’s Doctor, and David stands in the shadows of an alleyway, wishing Rose to have a great year.
She leaves, and David, doubled over in pain, staggers back to the TARDIS. David’s Doctor was shaped by a reaction to the despair of Christopher’s, his character informed most deeply by a love of life and a desire to improve the lives of those he cared about. This was why he didn’t go straight back to the TARDIS, why he held off regenerating to say goodbye and give one more life to his deepest friends. After all that, he is on the verge of tears as his regeneration begins, but they are not of happiness: “I don’t want to go!” he whimpers, and sets the TARDIS on fire with the pent-up energy of his transformation.
Matt Smith’s first actions as The Doctor are a radical break from David’s character, simply because he seems completely indifferent to the story we’ve just seen. He is the clearest indication that the story of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who is over, and that an entirely new path for the show as begun with Steven Moffat in charage, Matt Smith as The Doctor, and Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond. I think the closest analogue in the history of the show may be the weirdness of Tom Baker’s Doctor and the heightened creepiness of his early years under Phillip Hinchcliffe. Steven has a similar reputation for frightening stories, Matt can be seen in the trailer below to be utterly idiosyncratic in his eccentricity, and Amy seems to be quite a match for it. I can tell a lot from a pair of googly eyes.
To days to come, and all my love to long ago.
I’ve only seen four regenerations ‘live’ in the chronology of the show. Of course, I wasn’t alive for most of them. I saw Colin Baker become Sylvester McCoy, but this was actually the first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw, at age five, so I had no attachment to Colin’s Doctor. I didn’t even really respect Colin’s Doctor until I returned to the show in the mid-2000s, exploring his character in novels and audios, which let me see his much-maligned television stories in a better light.
In 1996, I watched Sylvester turn into Paul McGann, but knew too little of the backstory in the Seventh Doctor novels for it to have appropriate impact, and the script was too mediocre for me to care. Like Colin, Paul’s Doctor was one who grew on me after rediscovery. The foreshadowing of Sylvester’s regeneration in the novels was actually quite similar to how David’s last year was developed, as Sylvester’s grand plans wound down to a surprising death in a random act of violence.
Then in 2005, I saw Christopher Eccleston become David Tennant. We had known this was coming because of a news leak from the production after broadcast of the first new series episode. So there was a touch of dissonance, as I knew Christopher would die, but no one on the show did. And Christopher’s regeneration was a kind of consummation of the character. Christopher’s Doctor was traumatized by his role in the Time War and the destruction of his people. This trauma defined his Doctor, hardened him and at times gave him a kind of death wish. Rose’s willingness to sacrifice herself to save him inspired his own sacrifice to save her. Christopher’s Doctor was at peace when he regenerated, able to accept his new body as a new beginning for his life.
David’s regeneration this New Year’s Day was of an utterly different sort, because the Doctor himself could see premonitions of his death long before it happened. Early in season four, Ood Sigma told him that his “song is ending soon.” And he heard the same thing from the psychic on the bus in “Planet of the Dead,” adding that “he will knock four times.” The story arc of the 2009 specials was David’s Doctor travelling alone confronting and running from the inevitability of this event. “The End of Time” saw him face this inevitability.
David’s Doctor stood out most in his enthusiasm for life, sometimes acting like a giddy child when he can defeat a destructive force or save a life that otherwise would have ended. These moments were insufferable at times, but they best embodied the simple joy at being alive that David’s Doctor was all about. I remember in the forum discussions of “Love and Monsters,” one of the most contentious elements of that story was how he saved Ursula’s life, by embedding her face and neural architecture in a paving slab. Many fans said it would have been better to die, but that was an essential moment of David’s character: any life is better than death. That’s why he saved River Song and her crew in the virtual world of The Library’s computer in “Forest of the Dead:” they were no longer bodily alive, but lived for thousands of years as mental patterns in the computer’s Matrix.
So when David is faced with his own death, he avoids it at all costs. When the Ood reveal the return of The Master on Earth, he is sure that confronting him will lead to his death, the four-times knocking being the drumbeat The Master heard in his head since he was a child. All his conversations with Wilf, his companion for this story, are the reflections of two old men facing the end of each other; Wilf with his old age and The Doctor with his premonition.
Part One is basically exposition of the situation, examples of the typical tropes of the series setting up the pieces by which the story’s real conflict will become clear and be resolved. The increasingly insane Master cruelly and literally devours others to keep his degrading resurrected body alive. A small-minded businessman plays with technology he doesn’t understand for selfish purposes, while two mysterious aliens, Vinvocci, lurk in the background. All the publicity leading up to the broadcast focussed on these elements so that we thought this was what the story was really about. Then the episode ends, revealing the Timothy Dalton led Time Lords about to return.
Part Two opens with a meeting of the Time Lord High Council on the eve of the Time War’s end, when The Doctor is about to use ‘The Moment,’ the weapon that will burn away the Dalek fleets and Gallifrey alike. But Dalton’s Rassilon angrily and violently refuses to die, a malevolent reflection of David’s Doctor’s refusal to give in to the inevitable. And he formulates the real scheme, seeding The Master, as a boy, with the sound that will drive him mad, and sending a Gallifreyan diamond to Earth just after The Doctor and Wilf flee to the Vinvocci ship in orbit to plan their counter-attack against The Master. All the time, the two old men contemplate with terror and sadness what they are prepared to do to save the Earth, whether they are willing to kill The Master to save humanity.
The Master discovers the diamond, and in his investigation of it, uses it as an anchor to lead Gallifrey back to reality, sitting ominously next to Earth. When the Doctor discovers the existence of the Gallifreyan diamond, he takes Wilf’s service revolver, which he had refused to use against The Master, to use against his own President. Here we finally discover the truth behind The Doctor’s destruction of Gallifrey: as Davros and the Daleks planned at the end of season four, the Time Lords were about to destroy all reality, to exist as consciousness alone. Rassilon would end the Time War by destroying the entire universe, and leaving the Time Lords as beings of pure energy. Rassilon’s refusal to die transformed him into someone willing to kill everything else.
Of course, Rassilon is defeated with the help of The Master, indignant at being reduced to a pawn. Gallifrey and the Time Lords return to die in the Time War, and The Master disappears. The Doctor thinks he has beaten the inevitability of his own end, until he hears four faint knocks: Wilf, trapped in a chamber that will soon flood with deadly radiation, and the only way to release him is to climb in the chamber’s twin to be fatally irradiated himself. Wilf urges The Doctor to let him die, because he’s already an old man, and David is enraged at the unfairness of it all. He has survived a battle with his life-long enemy and the most powerful Time Lord ever to live, but now faces death to save one old man. After all that he has achieved, his reward is his own demise. But he strides into the chamber, telling Wilf to be quick after unlocking the door.
He steps out of the chamber, thinking he has survived, but noticing that his cuts have healed: the regeneration is slow, but it’s begun. And so he goes for his reward, an epilogue that the general fandom sees as too sentimental, but that I see as a perfect summation of David’s Doctor. He, probably in great pain, holds off his regeneration, travelling to visit briefly his former companions who have meant the most to him, and gives them a second chance at life.
He saves Martha and Mickey from being shot by a Sontaran sniper. He gives Wilf a wedding gift for Donna and her new husband, both working minimum wage jobs: a £10-million lottery ticket for the next day. He passes Jack, in despair over his actions in Children of Earth, a note introducing him to Alonso Frame, the Stovian Titanic midshipman from “Voyage of the Damned,” offering the isolated Jack a new connection in the world, a new start for the immortal man. He visits the granddaughter of Joan Redfern, the nurse he fell in love with in “Human Nature,” seeking to know if Joan was ever happy again, pleased to know that she was. He saves Sarah Jane’s son Luke from being hit by a passing car, and finally visits Rose. It’s the first hours of 2005, a few months before she met Christopher’s Doctor, and David stands in the shadows of an alleyway, wishing Rose to have a great year.
She leaves, and David, doubled over in pain, staggers back to the TARDIS. David’s Doctor was shaped by a reaction to the despair of Christopher’s, his character informed most deeply by a love of life and a desire to improve the lives of those he cared about. This was why he didn’t go straight back to the TARDIS, why he held off regenerating to say goodbye and give one more life to his deepest friends. After all that, he is on the verge of tears as his regeneration begins, but they are not of happiness: “I don’t want to go!” he whimpers, and sets the TARDIS on fire with the pent-up energy of his transformation.
Matt Smith’s first actions as The Doctor are a radical break from David’s character, simply because he seems completely indifferent to the story we’ve just seen. He is the clearest indication that the story of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who is over, and that an entirely new path for the show as begun with Steven Moffat in charage, Matt Smith as The Doctor, and Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond. I think the closest analogue in the history of the show may be the weirdness of Tom Baker’s Doctor and the heightened creepiness of his early years under Phillip Hinchcliffe. Steven has a similar reputation for frightening stories, Matt can be seen in the trailer below to be utterly idiosyncratic in his eccentricity, and Amy seems to be quite a match for it. I can tell a lot from a pair of googly eyes.
To days to come, and all my love to long ago.
Friday, July 31, 2009
The Tragic Immortal Life of Captain Jack Harkness
The best new sci-fi I’ve seen in a while was the last Torchwood series, Children of Earth, and even though I ordered the dvd, I’m not sure how often I’ll watch it. The five-hour miniseries was brilliantly made, but terribly bleak. We weren’t quite in Requiem for a Dream territory, but it’s certainly far from a happy ending. Basically, everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and just when things are looking hopeful, it gets a whole lot worse.
I mean, the secret sci-fi superbase underneath Cardiff is blown to bits at the end of the first episode, as a means of setting the stage. By the time Jack, Gwen, and Ianto regroup at the beginning of episode four, the aliens known only as The 456 are set up like kings in the MI5 building, and the government is preparing to completely acquiesce to their demands for a cull of about 35 million children from Earth. The children will then be inserted alive into the aliens’ bodies, where they will live fully conscious inside the alien, causing chemical reactions that get the aliens high as kites.
The loudest fan reaction about the series is the death of Ianto Jones, a very popular character and Jack’s lover. There’s a letter writing campaign organizing to bring him back to life, but here’s why I’m against such a move. The quality of this series came from the development of its central character, Captain Jack Harkness.
When we first met Jack in the 2005 series of Doctor Who, he was a singular version of the caddish rogue. He was a decent person, but with a past that has remained utterly mysterious. Jack had been a Time Agent in the 51st century, but left the Agency when he woke up one morning and discovered that two years of his memory had been wiped, and in that time, he could have done anything in the employ of a somewhat shady space-time intelligence service. He told Rose, “Your friend over there doesn’t trust me. For all I know, he’s right not to.”
Jack’s friendship with the Doctor inspired him to become a better person, and not let himself be haunted and defined by his missing two years. Or at least, I’m understanding it that way as I think about the character. We discover throughout Jack’s time on our televisions that he has tortured people while working as a Time Agent, and during Children of Earth, we discover that he initially gave up twelve orphans to The 456 under government orders on their initial visit to Earth in 1965. Jack knows he is capable of terrible acts, and justifying those acts. His work travelling with The Doctor and running Torchwood is an attempt to prove to himself that he is a good person.
At the end of Children of Earth, Jack understands that he is not a good person, and he cannot leave his ability to justify his terrible acts. Jack, on his own, is simply not as good at fighting hostile invading aliens as The Doctor. When Jack is in charge of a situation, he frequently has to make moral compromises to defeat the hostile forces. He also makes tactical mistakes, some of which lead to the death of the people he’s trying to protect. Ianto dies because he and Jack confront The 456 at their headquarters on Earth, and he makes a big speech of ultimatums to the aliens and lines drawn in the sand.
And The 456 nonchalantly release a virus into the building that kills almost everyone inside, including Ianto, who dies in Jack’s arms pleading with his immortal lover not to forget him over the next few billion years of his life. The death of Ianto, and the hundred or so people in that building, is Jack’s fault because he was trying to be like the Doctor. But the Doctor never confronts an alien without knowing enough about them to protect himself and the people around him. Jack barged in knowing almost nothing about the abilities of The 456, and got a lot of people killed.
Jack is utterly shattered by what he had to do because his own arrogance and ignorance backed him into a corner where the only course of action to save the Earth was a terrible, cruel act that only a monster could have made. He ends the story facing up to his inadequacy as both a hero and as a moral man. He flees Earth because he has given up hope in himself. He cannot escape his cruelty, or his propensity for violence. And he leaves Earth because he cannot live in the place he discovered that fact for the next five billion years of his life.
Torchwood has been renewed for a fourth season. But I don’t think any of the old cast should return, except Gwen and her husband Rhys. Ianto is dead, and should stay dead, because if he’s brought back to life somehow, that will give Jack hope again. And Jack should never have hope again. It would cheapen the power of Children of Earth, Russell T Davies’ masterpiece, the grandest tragedy in all of Doctor Who.
I mean, the secret sci-fi superbase underneath Cardiff is blown to bits at the end of the first episode, as a means of setting the stage. By the time Jack, Gwen, and Ianto regroup at the beginning of episode four, the aliens known only as The 456 are set up like kings in the MI5 building, and the government is preparing to completely acquiesce to their demands for a cull of about 35 million children from Earth. The children will then be inserted alive into the aliens’ bodies, where they will live fully conscious inside the alien, causing chemical reactions that get the aliens high as kites.
The loudest fan reaction about the series is the death of Ianto Jones, a very popular character and Jack’s lover. There’s a letter writing campaign organizing to bring him back to life, but here’s why I’m against such a move. The quality of this series came from the development of its central character, Captain Jack Harkness.
When we first met Jack in the 2005 series of Doctor Who, he was a singular version of the caddish rogue. He was a decent person, but with a past that has remained utterly mysterious. Jack had been a Time Agent in the 51st century, but left the Agency when he woke up one morning and discovered that two years of his memory had been wiped, and in that time, he could have done anything in the employ of a somewhat shady space-time intelligence service. He told Rose, “Your friend over there doesn’t trust me. For all I know, he’s right not to.”
Jack’s friendship with the Doctor inspired him to become a better person, and not let himself be haunted and defined by his missing two years. Or at least, I’m understanding it that way as I think about the character. We discover throughout Jack’s time on our televisions that he has tortured people while working as a Time Agent, and during Children of Earth, we discover that he initially gave up twelve orphans to The 456 under government orders on their initial visit to Earth in 1965. Jack knows he is capable of terrible acts, and justifying those acts. His work travelling with The Doctor and running Torchwood is an attempt to prove to himself that he is a good person.
At the end of Children of Earth, Jack understands that he is not a good person, and he cannot leave his ability to justify his terrible acts. Jack, on his own, is simply not as good at fighting hostile invading aliens as The Doctor. When Jack is in charge of a situation, he frequently has to make moral compromises to defeat the hostile forces. He also makes tactical mistakes, some of which lead to the death of the people he’s trying to protect. Ianto dies because he and Jack confront The 456 at their headquarters on Earth, and he makes a big speech of ultimatums to the aliens and lines drawn in the sand.
And The 456 nonchalantly release a virus into the building that kills almost everyone inside, including Ianto, who dies in Jack’s arms pleading with his immortal lover not to forget him over the next few billion years of his life. The death of Ianto, and the hundred or so people in that building, is Jack’s fault because he was trying to be like the Doctor. But the Doctor never confronts an alien without knowing enough about them to protect himself and the people around him. Jack barged in knowing almost nothing about the abilities of The 456, and got a lot of people killed.
Jack is utterly shattered by what he had to do because his own arrogance and ignorance backed him into a corner where the only course of action to save the Earth was a terrible, cruel act that only a monster could have made. He ends the story facing up to his inadequacy as both a hero and as a moral man. He flees Earth because he has given up hope in himself. He cannot escape his cruelty, or his propensity for violence. And he leaves Earth because he cannot live in the place he discovered that fact for the next five billion years of his life.
Torchwood has been renewed for a fourth season. But I don’t think any of the old cast should return, except Gwen and her husband Rhys. Ianto is dead, and should stay dead, because if he’s brought back to life somehow, that will give Jack hope again. And Jack should never have hope again. It would cheapen the power of Children of Earth, Russell T Davies’ masterpiece, the grandest tragedy in all of Doctor Who.
Monday, May 11, 2009
An Alien in London, Overweight as an American
A few days ago, I decided I'd watch the revived Doctor Who over again on dvd, one episode a day, or thereabouts. I've been watching a few of my classic series dvds like this while I ate dinner for the past couple of weeks, and it's a damn good improvement over most of what else is on tv at 5.00 in the afternoon. I think it actually has been well over a year at least since I watched any of the Christopher Eccleston year, so it makes for a good visit to an old friend.
Saturday afternoon, I watched "Aliens of London," the fourth episode of Eccleston's season, and the first part of one of its least-liked stories. The premise of the main plot, as we're introduced to it, is that a group of aliens called the Slitheen have disguised themselves as humans in the British government and security services, and faked an alien invasion. The Slitheen disguise was that they killed people and turned the humans' skins into pressurized suits that they squeezed their large bodies inside, and removed by opening zippers concealed on the forehead and wriggling out.
The main problem people had when the episode first aired in 2005 was that the aliens were more laughable than menacing. They always had to release excess pressure within their suits, and did so by farting, which often led to a barrage of immature jokes that the aliens made themselves. And that immaturity was present in their personalities, vanishing only when they were out of their skin-suits actively snapping necks, which was not often enough to make them genuinely frightening as Doctor Who can make an enemy. Overall, they were quite underwhelming, completely incapable of generating any gravitas, usually coming off as childish alien jerks.
It was only after several years of watching the new show regularly that I realized that this was the idea. Chief producer Russell T Davies has worked out quite a few ideas through the stories of Doctor Who while he was in charge, and the Slitheen was the first iteration of what was actually a quite intellectually interesting villainous motivation: money. The Slitheen were actually an extended family of cash-strapped alien criminals. Their plan was to blow up a planet with a bombardment of nuclear weapons and sell the radioactive pieces on the black market as fuel. But they didn't have the money to buy a planet's worth of nuclear weapons and blow up a lifeless Earth-sized rock. So, after a little research, they discovered Earth, a planet with many antagonistic governments with enormous nuclear arsenals. All they could afford were a couple of transport ships, pressurized skin-suits, and some surgical equipment for a quickie operation on their fake alien, a pig. And with this cheap equipment, they enacted a plan to fake an alien invasion, gain the launch codes for one of the country's arsenals, and attack the other nuclear powers under the pretext of defending from an invading vessel in orbit. The retaliatory strikes would destroy the planet.
The Slitheen were a band of rather ingenious petty criminals, the Fat Tony of Doctor Who. Russell was interested in exploring how petty crime and greed on a galactic scale can cause civilization-ending destruction. It's an interesting idea that such a cataclysm could be inspired by petty greed, but ultimately it makes for a let-down in the drama. As we watch a story unfold, we see a world-destroying catastrophe being precipitated, and we expect a similar sense of majesty in the motivations of the villains. This is why I was so dissatisfied when I first saw the Slitheen acting like immature school bullies. These people are planning to destroy an entire inhabited planet! Could we at least make them aware of the scale of their actions?
It may be fascinating to consider the extreme selfishness that a character could have destroyed a civilization for some quick cash. I think Russell might have been trying to work through a banality of evil concept in a Doctor Who story, which is intellectually interesting, and morally terrifying. The problem is that while the concept is morally frightening, it's a dramatic letdown. Immense plans are being carried out by pathetic, petty morons. I respect Russell's ambition in trying to make this dynamic work, but the mismatch is just too great for anything but an intellectual consideration. As drama, it just doesn't work.
Saturday afternoon, I watched "Aliens of London," the fourth episode of Eccleston's season, and the first part of one of its least-liked stories. The premise of the main plot, as we're introduced to it, is that a group of aliens called the Slitheen have disguised themselves as humans in the British government and security services, and faked an alien invasion. The Slitheen disguise was that they killed people and turned the humans' skins into pressurized suits that they squeezed their large bodies inside, and removed by opening zippers concealed on the forehead and wriggling out.
The main problem people had when the episode first aired in 2005 was that the aliens were more laughable than menacing. They always had to release excess pressure within their suits, and did so by farting, which often led to a barrage of immature jokes that the aliens made themselves. And that immaturity was present in their personalities, vanishing only when they were out of their skin-suits actively snapping necks, which was not often enough to make them genuinely frightening as Doctor Who can make an enemy. Overall, they were quite underwhelming, completely incapable of generating any gravitas, usually coming off as childish alien jerks.
It was only after several years of watching the new show regularly that I realized that this was the idea. Chief producer Russell T Davies has worked out quite a few ideas through the stories of Doctor Who while he was in charge, and the Slitheen was the first iteration of what was actually a quite intellectually interesting villainous motivation: money. The Slitheen were actually an extended family of cash-strapped alien criminals. Their plan was to blow up a planet with a bombardment of nuclear weapons and sell the radioactive pieces on the black market as fuel. But they didn't have the money to buy a planet's worth of nuclear weapons and blow up a lifeless Earth-sized rock. So, after a little research, they discovered Earth, a planet with many antagonistic governments with enormous nuclear arsenals. All they could afford were a couple of transport ships, pressurized skin-suits, and some surgical equipment for a quickie operation on their fake alien, a pig. And with this cheap equipment, they enacted a plan to fake an alien invasion, gain the launch codes for one of the country's arsenals, and attack the other nuclear powers under the pretext of defending from an invading vessel in orbit. The retaliatory strikes would destroy the planet.
The Slitheen were a band of rather ingenious petty criminals, the Fat Tony of Doctor Who. Russell was interested in exploring how petty crime and greed on a galactic scale can cause civilization-ending destruction. It's an interesting idea that such a cataclysm could be inspired by petty greed, but ultimately it makes for a let-down in the drama. As we watch a story unfold, we see a world-destroying catastrophe being precipitated, and we expect a similar sense of majesty in the motivations of the villains. This is why I was so dissatisfied when I first saw the Slitheen acting like immature school bullies. These people are planning to destroy an entire inhabited planet! Could we at least make them aware of the scale of their actions?
It may be fascinating to consider the extreme selfishness that a character could have destroyed a civilization for some quick cash. I think Russell might have been trying to work through a banality of evil concept in a Doctor Who story, which is intellectually interesting, and morally terrifying. The problem is that while the concept is morally frightening, it's a dramatic letdown. Immense plans are being carried out by pathetic, petty morons. I respect Russell's ambition in trying to make this dynamic work, but the mismatch is just too great for anything but an intellectual consideration. As drama, it just doesn't work.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Here Will Be The Eleventh Doctor
So this is him in 2010, Matt Smith. He'll be 27 when he appears on television as the Doctor. He's worked in television for just two years, and has been in theatre for slightly longer.
What do I think of him? So far, I like what I see, even though I've only seen this six minute interview. But I think his voice, the way he moves his hands as he speaks, and above all his hair will make him a quite distinctive Doctor eleven. I suspect they might play up the detective aspects of his character a little more this time, as well as his alienness. Again, this last is because of the hair, and that very extraordinary jawline.
Russell T Davies has been concerned with humanizing the Doctor, giving him attachments, domesticity. That's been terrific, and we've seen a story over these last four years of the Doctor losing his home and gaining a new one. Smith's Doctor, if I may wildly speculate, seems poised – under Steven Moffat's planning, of course – to be an alien again. Not necessarily alienated from their human friends, as Colin, Sylvester, and Christopher were; but certainly returning the charismatic strangeness to him again. I can imagine Smith and Moffat taking the Doctor into an area more reminiscent of Tom Baker, only with a higher level of sensuality. A kind of weird prince of time.
Pretentious of me, isn't it? Still, 2010 is going to be a good year for this show.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
And a Merry Xmas to All of You at Home
How many Doctor Who fans out there have published blog posts with that name on it? Probably all of them, or at least the ones with no shame. However, after much stumbling around the internet, I've finally managed to watch this year's Doctor Who Xmas Special, The Next Doctor, which I thought was a solidly above average, if not exemplary story. It was considerably appreciated among the general British populace, as is the case with everything the show does today. But I think the biggest problem that arose in the fan community was that none of their wild and insane expectations were satisfied.
Now here's the context. In an interview this Fall, David Tennant confirmed that he was leaving the role of the Doctor at the end of 2009, so the four television movies that will be released over the next year will be his last. He'll regenerate during the last tv movie just before the start of season five in spring 2010. Shortly after this announcement, the title of the Xmas 2008 special was revealed as The Next Doctor, and that the title character would be played by David Morrissey, one of the bookmakers' favourites to replace Tennant. The fan community was all a-flutter and a-squee on the internet, with the majority interpreting this evidence along these lines. Morrissey was booked to become the eleventh Doctor in 2010, and Tennant was going to overlap with his own personal future and meet him.
I rejected that plot as just too obvious, especially when the BBC released a teaser clip in November of the pre-credits sequence of The Next Doctor. Tennant appears in Xmas 1851 by himself to chill out for a while, hears a woman shouting for The Doctor, and runs to help. But she keeps shouting when he gets there, and David Morrissey appears wearing Victorian clothes and speaking with a bunch of vocal mannerisms that Tennant himself uses for the character. Rather than Tennant meeting his future self, I guessed that instead this "next Doctor" would be an imitator. Perhaps he was a fan who found opportunity to take up the mantle of his hero, or a time travelling con man out to use his identity for fun and profit. It turned out that neither of these was the case, and Morrissey's "Doctor" (but I should say 'Professor') had a far more compelling, engrossing, and tragic back story than I had imagined. My expectations had been completely thrown and I couldn't have been more pleased.
Some, however, were not pleased at all. Behind the Sofa is a blog that has become a pillar of the community of Who fans, and while they began as a bunch of barely literate prats slagging off their favourite show for a bunch of fanboyish slights, they have evolved into a group of solid reviewers. But they still have their fannish moments. All of these reviews have spoilers, so if you want to watch the story without them, go do that first.
I mentioned that I was glad to have my expectations overturned, since to create the novel and unexpected is what art is all about. However, one negative review of The Next Doctor seemed entirely occupied with the writer, Neil Perryman's, disappointment that he had guessed wrong about Morrissey's character. Iain Hepburn gave a much better negative review, since he didn't like the story for much better reasons. Among them was what he perceived as a by-the-numbers Russell Davies adventure script, a lack of the chemistry between Tennant and Morrissey that they had shown when previously working together on the miniseries Blackpool, some lacklustre special effects, and a tired performance from Tennant himself.
Overall, this is the kind of story structure that Russell Davies writes in his sleep, and that has become a tad old at this point. The story certainly had some unfortunately silly elements, such as the Cybermen secretly using an army of Dickensian street urchins to build a fully functional steampunk 20-story Cyber-mech. Both of these points Frank Collins discusses in his overall positive review of the episode at Behind the Sofa. As for myself, I found Tennant's performance to fit the tiredness of the Doctor himself at this point in his character development. Being forced, for all practical understanding, to euthanize your best friend Donna at the end of season four does not put one in the best of moods, and the Doctor is without doubt tired. His encounter with Morrissey is an opportunity to take stock of the man his tenth self has become.
Indeed, this movement is at the heart of what I thought was a quite intense and dramatic interaction between Tennant and Morrissey. Of course, the chemistry isn't going to be the same as in Blackpool; they were antagonists then. Indeed, the best part of the story was its first forty minutes, where the Doctor works out just who Morrissey is, and helps him come to terms with himself and what he can do. When we meet Morrissey, he's a man who thinks he's a hero, and over the course of the story, the Doctor helps him become a hero himself. It was a perfect ending as well, with Morrissey helping the Doctor become what he didn't think he could be again, a friend.
It's a shame the villain's evil plan didn't make any sense, or this would have been brilliant from start to finish. As it is, The Next Doctor was 70% brilliant and 30% mindless fun that could have been much better as mindful fun.
Now here's the context. In an interview this Fall, David Tennant confirmed that he was leaving the role of the Doctor at the end of 2009, so the four television movies that will be released over the next year will be his last. He'll regenerate during the last tv movie just before the start of season five in spring 2010. Shortly after this announcement, the title of the Xmas 2008 special was revealed as The Next Doctor, and that the title character would be played by David Morrissey, one of the bookmakers' favourites to replace Tennant. The fan community was all a-flutter and a-squee on the internet, with the majority interpreting this evidence along these lines. Morrissey was booked to become the eleventh Doctor in 2010, and Tennant was going to overlap with his own personal future and meet him.
I rejected that plot as just too obvious, especially when the BBC released a teaser clip in November of the pre-credits sequence of The Next Doctor. Tennant appears in Xmas 1851 by himself to chill out for a while, hears a woman shouting for The Doctor, and runs to help. But she keeps shouting when he gets there, and David Morrissey appears wearing Victorian clothes and speaking with a bunch of vocal mannerisms that Tennant himself uses for the character. Rather than Tennant meeting his future self, I guessed that instead this "next Doctor" would be an imitator. Perhaps he was a fan who found opportunity to take up the mantle of his hero, or a time travelling con man out to use his identity for fun and profit. It turned out that neither of these was the case, and Morrissey's "Doctor" (but I should say 'Professor') had a far more compelling, engrossing, and tragic back story than I had imagined. My expectations had been completely thrown and I couldn't have been more pleased.
Some, however, were not pleased at all. Behind the Sofa is a blog that has become a pillar of the community of Who fans, and while they began as a bunch of barely literate prats slagging off their favourite show for a bunch of fanboyish slights, they have evolved into a group of solid reviewers. But they still have their fannish moments. All of these reviews have spoilers, so if you want to watch the story without them, go do that first.
I mentioned that I was glad to have my expectations overturned, since to create the novel and unexpected is what art is all about. However, one negative review of The Next Doctor seemed entirely occupied with the writer, Neil Perryman's, disappointment that he had guessed wrong about Morrissey's character. Iain Hepburn gave a much better negative review, since he didn't like the story for much better reasons. Among them was what he perceived as a by-the-numbers Russell Davies adventure script, a lack of the chemistry between Tennant and Morrissey that they had shown when previously working together on the miniseries Blackpool, some lacklustre special effects, and a tired performance from Tennant himself.
Overall, this is the kind of story structure that Russell Davies writes in his sleep, and that has become a tad old at this point. The story certainly had some unfortunately silly elements, such as the Cybermen secretly using an army of Dickensian street urchins to build a fully functional steampunk 20-story Cyber-mech. Both of these points Frank Collins discusses in his overall positive review of the episode at Behind the Sofa. As for myself, I found Tennant's performance to fit the tiredness of the Doctor himself at this point in his character development. Being forced, for all practical understanding, to euthanize your best friend Donna at the end of season four does not put one in the best of moods, and the Doctor is without doubt tired. His encounter with Morrissey is an opportunity to take stock of the man his tenth self has become.
Indeed, this movement is at the heart of what I thought was a quite intense and dramatic interaction between Tennant and Morrissey. Of course, the chemistry isn't going to be the same as in Blackpool; they were antagonists then. Indeed, the best part of the story was its first forty minutes, where the Doctor works out just who Morrissey is, and helps him come to terms with himself and what he can do. When we meet Morrissey, he's a man who thinks he's a hero, and over the course of the story, the Doctor helps him become a hero himself. It was a perfect ending as well, with Morrissey helping the Doctor become what he didn't think he could be again, a friend.
It's a shame the villain's evil plan didn't make any sense, or this would have been brilliant from start to finish. As it is, The Next Doctor was 70% brilliant and 30% mindless fun that could have been much better as mindful fun.
Friday, November 21, 2008
New Doctors and New Movies (Goodbye David, Prematurely)
The news has been out for a while, confirmed by the company and the star himself in a mostly unsurprising interview. David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who when he finishes filming the tv-movies that will broadcast over the course of 2009. At the end of the movie broadcasting over Xmas 2009, David will regenerate (for real this time) into the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor. Naturally, I'll miss him, though we'll always have those dvd box sets.
He's been an excellent Doctor, comparable to William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and Tom Baker in terms of the consistent quality of his Doctor performance. And his acting skills themselves are in the same league as Hartnell, Troughton, and Peter Davison. And as my friend Kelli-rae told me when I broke the news to her over the internet, her sexual fantasies are never going to be the same. It wasn't just the sexy characterization and plot structure of Doctor #10 that enraptured people. He was also one of the best looking actors to play the part.
I knew he was a huge fan of the show when he joined for the 2005 Xmas movie, and when his performance was good, it was so good that I hoped he would stay long enough to break Tom Baker's seven year tenure. But four years was long enough for him, and he's made some wonderful stories. His first amazing performance was season two's The Girl in the Fireplace, where he completely sold falling in love and losing her through a cruel twist of fate and time portals in one episode. Rise of the Cybermen was a multifaceted story that called on the Doctor to run through the full palette of his character. Then The Impossible Planet's chilling atmosphere and imagery, witty script, and genuinely intriguing philosophical investigation made me qualify it as the best Who story of all time.
Season three had a fairly consistent quality of writing aside from three mediocre stories and a rather silly final episode after a brilliant bait-and-switch and Doctor-on-the-run combo leading up to it. David's best performance of the year was in Human Nature, where he spent most of the story playing a fictionalized personality instead of the Doctor. But season four was undoubtedly the best of the revived show, arguably the best season since the legendary season 14 of 1977. Every performance from David was perfect, especially the horrifying desperation of the closing moments of Midnight. But the series hit its height with the terrifying, surreal, irreal, mind-bending, soulful, beautiful Silence in the Library.
Can Doctor Who get better than Silence in the Library? I don't know, and I'm hesitant to answer the question in either direction since I had asked that very thing two years ago after I watched The Impossible Planet. And I asked it the year before that when I saw the uncensored version of 1977's The Talons of Weng-Chiang on dvd the year before that. And I asked it as a kid when I watched Genesis of the Daleks on YTV.
Of course, David had his wince-worthy moments too, especially in his first year. At times, he articulated his Doctor's manic enthusiasm as a cloying mawkishness that bordered on the childish. This was especially evident in his almost idiotic performances in New Earth, The Idiot's Lantern, and at some moments early in Army of Ghosts. These were toned down quite a bit by the end of the season, and by The Runaway Bride, David had achieved a perfect balance of enthusiasm and gravitas that only became more nuanced as the next two years went by. Perhaps he found this as he delved into the subtleties of the philosophical and emotional conundrums in the script for The Impossible Planet, the last story to be filmed for season two, even though it was numbered episodes eight and nine.
As soon as his departure was confirmed, the bookies were on the job, ranking odds as to the probable successors. David Morrissey leads the pack, already cast in the upcoming Xmas tv-movie as the title character, The Next Doctor. But this is so obvious, it has to be a red herring. The preview clip of Morrissey's performance broadcast as part of a BBC charity special this month illustrates it as well. Morrissey's "Doctor" plays like the arrogant manic moments of #10 in season two, dressed in the Victorian outfits of Paul McGann's #8. My own theory is that he'll turn out to be an imposter, perhaps a con man or a superfan who decides to emulate his hero. There's an old audio play (The One Doctor) where the Doctor meets a man who pretends to be him, and I think this would be the rough source material. It wouldn't be the first time an audio has served as loose inspiration for a tv story. Look at Dalek (Jubilee), and Return of the Cybermen (Spare Parts).
But the real story has to do with a slip of the tongue that has worked its way onto the internet as an actual plausible clue: Paterson Joseph. One of his co-stars recently let it slip that he's been in negotiations with Steven Moffat the new showrunner for 2010 onwards. And he's been interviewed by BBC Entertainment, and said he would relish the role if he had it. Joseph has even worked with Moffat before, as a scenery chewing villain on his series Jekyll. And he's worked on Doctor Who before, as a scenery-chewing dick in the first season finale. In fact, the Jekyll connection supported the rumours that Jekyll star James Nesbit would be up for the eleventh Doctor. But Nesbit doesn't want it anyway.
You can probably guess what I think Paterson's weakness will be in his characterization if he does get the part: his propensity to chew scenery. But there's also a villainous edge to him, a harder quality in his voice and his manners than David, or even Christopher Eccleston had. Paterson has the potential for a contribution to the Doctor's character that we've never really seen before. William could pull it off when the situation required, but he couldn't put the physical force into it. Colin Baker could lose his temper, but this is more than just anger. Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was written this way, but he could never quite sell it in his performance.
I'm talking about menace. To his enemies, the Doctor is a villain, and Paterson Joseph can sell villainy. It would be an interesting companion dynamic too, because Paterson has an icy quality that could seriously alienate his friends simply from seeing it. The Doctor can be cruel sometimes, and Paterson would give his cruelty an extra cold spice, a menace, and a sneer. It could make for one of the most intriguing and enrapturing Doctor performances yet.
This is all incredibly premature, of course, since David has the role for another year, during which we'll see him in four tv-movies. But the fact that we know of his departure so early will just build up the expectation to that moment at the climax of Xmas 2009 when we'll say goodbye and hello. After all, there's a black President in America. Why not a black Doctor in the TARDIS?
He's been an excellent Doctor, comparable to William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and Tom Baker in terms of the consistent quality of his Doctor performance. And his acting skills themselves are in the same league as Hartnell, Troughton, and Peter Davison. And as my friend Kelli-rae told me when I broke the news to her over the internet, her sexual fantasies are never going to be the same. It wasn't just the sexy characterization and plot structure of Doctor #10 that enraptured people. He was also one of the best looking actors to play the part.
I knew he was a huge fan of the show when he joined for the 2005 Xmas movie, and when his performance was good, it was so good that I hoped he would stay long enough to break Tom Baker's seven year tenure. But four years was long enough for him, and he's made some wonderful stories. His first amazing performance was season two's The Girl in the Fireplace, where he completely sold falling in love and losing her through a cruel twist of fate and time portals in one episode. Rise of the Cybermen was a multifaceted story that called on the Doctor to run through the full palette of his character. Then The Impossible Planet's chilling atmosphere and imagery, witty script, and genuinely intriguing philosophical investigation made me qualify it as the best Who story of all time.
Season three had a fairly consistent quality of writing aside from three mediocre stories and a rather silly final episode after a brilliant bait-and-switch and Doctor-on-the-run combo leading up to it. David's best performance of the year was in Human Nature, where he spent most of the story playing a fictionalized personality instead of the Doctor. But season four was undoubtedly the best of the revived show, arguably the best season since the legendary season 14 of 1977. Every performance from David was perfect, especially the horrifying desperation of the closing moments of Midnight. But the series hit its height with the terrifying, surreal, irreal, mind-bending, soulful, beautiful Silence in the Library.
Can Doctor Who get better than Silence in the Library? I don't know, and I'm hesitant to answer the question in either direction since I had asked that very thing two years ago after I watched The Impossible Planet. And I asked it the year before that when I saw the uncensored version of 1977's The Talons of Weng-Chiang on dvd the year before that. And I asked it as a kid when I watched Genesis of the Daleks on YTV.
Of course, David had his wince-worthy moments too, especially in his first year. At times, he articulated his Doctor's manic enthusiasm as a cloying mawkishness that bordered on the childish. This was especially evident in his almost idiotic performances in New Earth, The Idiot's Lantern, and at some moments early in Army of Ghosts. These were toned down quite a bit by the end of the season, and by The Runaway Bride, David had achieved a perfect balance of enthusiasm and gravitas that only became more nuanced as the next two years went by. Perhaps he found this as he delved into the subtleties of the philosophical and emotional conundrums in the script for The Impossible Planet, the last story to be filmed for season two, even though it was numbered episodes eight and nine.
As soon as his departure was confirmed, the bookies were on the job, ranking odds as to the probable successors. David Morrissey leads the pack, already cast in the upcoming Xmas tv-movie as the title character, The Next Doctor. But this is so obvious, it has to be a red herring. The preview clip of Morrissey's performance broadcast as part of a BBC charity special this month illustrates it as well. Morrissey's "Doctor" plays like the arrogant manic moments of #10 in season two, dressed in the Victorian outfits of Paul McGann's #8. My own theory is that he'll turn out to be an imposter, perhaps a con man or a superfan who decides to emulate his hero. There's an old audio play (The One Doctor) where the Doctor meets a man who pretends to be him, and I think this would be the rough source material. It wouldn't be the first time an audio has served as loose inspiration for a tv story. Look at Dalek (Jubilee), and Return of the Cybermen (Spare Parts).
But the real story has to do with a slip of the tongue that has worked its way onto the internet as an actual plausible clue: Paterson Joseph. One of his co-stars recently let it slip that he's been in negotiations with Steven Moffat the new showrunner for 2010 onwards. And he's been interviewed by BBC Entertainment, and said he would relish the role if he had it. Joseph has even worked with Moffat before, as a scenery chewing villain on his series Jekyll. And he's worked on Doctor Who before, as a scenery-chewing dick in the first season finale. In fact, the Jekyll connection supported the rumours that Jekyll star James Nesbit would be up for the eleventh Doctor. But Nesbit doesn't want it anyway.
You can probably guess what I think Paterson's weakness will be in his characterization if he does get the part: his propensity to chew scenery. But there's also a villainous edge to him, a harder quality in his voice and his manners than David, or even Christopher Eccleston had. Paterson has the potential for a contribution to the Doctor's character that we've never really seen before. William could pull it off when the situation required, but he couldn't put the physical force into it. Colin Baker could lose his temper, but this is more than just anger. Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was written this way, but he could never quite sell it in his performance.
I'm talking about menace. To his enemies, the Doctor is a villain, and Paterson Joseph can sell villainy. It would be an interesting companion dynamic too, because Paterson has an icy quality that could seriously alienate his friends simply from seeing it. The Doctor can be cruel sometimes, and Paterson would give his cruelty an extra cold spice, a menace, and a sneer. It could make for one of the most intriguing and enrapturing Doctor performances yet.
This is all incredibly premature, of course, since David has the role for another year, during which we'll see him in four tv-movies. But the fact that we know of his departure so early will just build up the expectation to that moment at the climax of Xmas 2009 when we'll say goodbye and hello. After all, there's a black President in America. Why not a black Doctor in the TARDIS?
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