If I've learned one thing from the angst-festival of Torchwood Season Two, then it's that gay men are happy to use the word "shagging" to describe fleshy man-love. Logically, this shouldn't be a surprise, and I've spent so much time amongst gay men over the last ten years that I'm sure one of them must have used the word at some point. But to me, "shagging" indicates a kind of sex that doesn't work without a uterus. It suggests a male woodland creature pinning down a female, and moving his pelvis backwards and forwards very, very fast; it suggests "rutting" rather than "making love", with all the associated mess and fuss of childbirth; it suggests a little internal alarm that says BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING and won't stop until eggs have been fertilised. The idea that "shagging" might describe butch anal antics - or, in the case of Captain Jack and Jones the Hardware, probably a lot of tender licking and sucking with perhaps just the occasional bout of Resurrection Glove abuse - seems aesthetically wrong, to me. Rabbits shag, but it's not a term I'd apply to "out" animals like bonobos, antelope, or giant squid (the great gay leviathans of the deep).
That aside, the only remotely surprising thing about the second series of Torchwood is its pig-headed refusal to do anything remotely surprising. Everybody had problems with the first series, and even those sci-fi geek-scum who'll watch anything with killer robots in it were left feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Mark sodding Braxton included. Which begs the question… why has nothing changed? Did the overall sense of gloom and disappointment really not make an impression on BBC Wales? A standard-issue TV critic would probably describe the programme as "slicker" these days, and it's certainly more confident in its ability to make the same mistakes over and over again, but none of its problems have actually been fixed. Even the worst episode of Doctor Who is worthy of in-depth analysis and point-by-point dissection (indeed, bad episodes are often more deserving of inspection than good ones, given that "Time and the Rani" tells you more about what happened to television in the 1980s than "Doomsday" tells you about life in 2006), yet Torchwood remains resolutely… filler.
Full-scale reviews of Torchwood episodes are therefore unnecessary, since most of them can be boiled down to a single sentence, quite often "what's the point of this?". But in the interests of rational debate, here's a round-up of the season so far, with a whole honest-to-goodness paragraph per story…
1. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang". Of the many, many design flaws in Torchwood, the greatest is this: whereas it's now de rigeuer for any modern SF series to be under the control of a single godlike chief-writer-cum-producer, whose own hand-written episodes are either measurably better than everyone else's or at least define the direction of the programme, Torchwood has a chief-writer-cum-producer who has no clear vision of where the series is meant to be going; who has no ideas other than things he's seen in other SF shows; and, worst of all, who has little or no understanding of how stories work (at least two of Chris Chibnall's scripts have no visible plot, while the rest have all the structural integrity of Muller Rice). In itself, it's telling that a Doctor Who spin-off should be under the creative influence of the man who wrote the least creative Doctor Who episode ever broadcast. However much the recent work of Steven Moffat may have been overrated ("Blink"… I could piss that in my sleep), surely a gadget-heavy sci-fi show about spunk-filled twentysomethings should rightfully be his gig? "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is the inevitable "lead character meets his evil equivalent" story, and the inclusion of James Marsters just makes it look as if Chibnall's having a competition with himself to see how far he can get Torchwood to look exactly like every other "cult" programme on television.
2. "Sleeper". Of course, if we're making lazy Doctor Who comparisons, then the most obvious problem with the set-up of Torchwood is that it's stuck in modern-day Cardiff every week… or at least, it seems obvious, but look closer. The real trouble isn't that it's tied to Britain circa 2008, but that its attempts to integrate SF ideas into a contemporary setting can alienate us far more than any number of gonzo adventures in time and space. Here, we're supposed to get terribly emotional about a woman who discovers that she's going to cease to exist because she's an alien sleeper agent with an auto-destructing false personality. It's fair to say that very few people in the audience will be able to empathise with this situation, let alone cry in the right places.
3. "To the Last Man". An episode which breaks all the rules of British sci-fi drama by involving a paradoxical timewarp that leads back to World War One instead of World War Two. Although I find it hard to be too critical of Helen Raynor, because frankly, I so would.
4. "Meat". When Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered the fantasy / soap-opera hybrid, it was wise enough to understand that all the fantasy elements have to resonate with the "real" elements: the monsters are hormone-driven manifestations of the characters' own teenage angst, so the fantasy and the soap-opera are ultimately the same thing. Every fantasy-soap since Buffy has completely missed this (fairly essential) point, and given us stories about giant scorpions with "relationship" scenes thrown randomly into the mix, as if giant scorpions aren't interesting enough without the occasional detour into Sex and the City. Here we have a story about an enormously bloated whale-beast that sits around having chunks of fat cut off its body, but which is also about… Gwen having issues with her boyfriend. If I were the actor playing Rhys, then I'd feel offended by the subtext. Naturally, we care more about a six-hundred-ton slab of manatee than about any of the characters' whining, tedious love-lives.
5. "Adam". SF screenwriting is a specific skill, which is why it's not necessarily a good idea to hire a writer who cut her teeth on EastEnders and let her talk about aliens. If you don't know precisely how to pitch a slightly-off-the-wall story involving an interdimensional memory-parasite, then you end up with hideously overwrought dialogue like 'you crave flesh!' or 'it was so beautiful, after the darkness and the stench of fear!', and that's before we even start to process the unintentionally hilarious "Flashback Jack" segments (which are, let's face it, like clips from the worst war movie ever made). But the fundamental problem with "Adam" is that there's no point doing a story about the characters' personal demons when the characters aren't complex enough to have demons, or when the Male Lead is so far-removed from us that it's impossible to take any of his problems seriously, let alone his unresolved issues with his dad. Imagine an episode of Primeval in which the girl from S Club 7 suddenly has memories of childhood sexual abuse while running away from sabre-tooth tigers… that's what Torchwood is like.
6. "Reset". Leaving aside the fact that it begins the most counter-productive story-arc in television history (Owen dies, thus allowing him to mope more), "Reset" actually verges on competence at times, yet it's still hampered by the question of what this episode is actually about. The Mad Doctors aren't making a point about the state of medical research in a twenty-first-century world, they're just… Mad Doctors. So mad, in fact, that they're prepared to go berserk and shoot people dead even though it makes no rational sense for them to do so. In much the same way that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, you can judge an episode of TV sci-fi fodder by the quality of the villains, and here they're just evil for the sake of convenience.
7. "Dead Man Walking". Oh, Christ, it's a resurrection: that's almost as bad as reversing time. Worse, it leads to a script full of portentous, overbaked conversations about the nature of mortality and the trauma of human existence (you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'we fight monsters, but what do we do when we turn out to be the monsters?' is as bad as dialogue can possibly get, yet it's very nearly topped by Martha's histrionic 'it must be death… because it's stolen my life!'), padded out with every terminal cliché of modern fantasy. A black-eyed demonic possession (again?); one of the regulars turning into a geriatric for absolutely no good dramatic reason (again?); a desperate attempt to give some depth to a bog-standard Malevolent Alien Power by wrapping it up in a Medieval legend; an even more desperate attempt to introduce some sort of tension by putting a sick child in jeopardy… all this, plus a conclusion that makes the ending of "The Daemons" look convincing, and might as well have Owen defeating the monster with the Power of Love. Ultimately, though, the real problem with "Dead Man Walking" is that it's got even less to say about death than "The Satan Pit" had to say about religion. Only the vomit remains memorable.
8. "A Day in the Death". What baffles me is that anyone might consider "forty-five minutes of a corpse complaining about being dead" to be a workable basis for a drama programme. Although the fact that the script editor here is Gary Russell - a man who has no background in television scriptwork, whose own attempts at writing have been unfailingly risible, and whose sole qualification for the job is that he's spent the last two decades making everyone else in Doctor Who fandom as miserable as possible - says a lot about this programme's general level of care, attention and competency.
Actually, now I think about it... 'the darkness and the stench of fear' is how the memory-parasite describes the experience of travelling through an interdimensional void. Can you have a stench, in a void? If there's no air, then how do you smell? (Like a dog with no nose, possibly.)
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Which is Worse: Langford or Tate?
What we've learned from history is this: there can come a point in the career of any Doctor Who producer when the years spent hanging around with minor celebrities and Cybermen begin to take their toll, and he finds himself either lost in space or lost in showbiz. In 1986, John Nathan-Turner went berserk simply because nobody really liked Doctor Who any more, hence his decision to retreat from the world by pretending to be famous and hanging around with as many People From Telly as possible. In the case of Russell T. Davies, renowned scriptwriter turned championship-level shark-jumper, the problem is that everybody likes Doctor Who and nobody's capable of slamming on the brakes. But the end result is the same: the tendency to pick a well-known ginger personality from the world of Light Entertainment to play the Lead Human, rather than a proper actor. And it's easy to make a connection between the two, because the casting of Catherine Tate in 2007 has provoked a very similar response to the casting of Bonnie Langford in 1986… which is to say, a very similar response amongst actual viewers, not amongst coke-happy BBC3-addled media types who still believe Catherine Tate to be the Hip New Thing in Television and probably think The Friday Night Project is funny. (This morning, a relative of mine greeted me with the words: 'Shame about Doctor Who, isn't it?' This is interesting, not because he thought that Tate was a cripplingly bad choice - everybody outside the BBC thinks that - but because he automatically assumed I'd agree with him, suggesting that everybody knows everybody outside the BBC thinks that. The official announcement was much like a news report about an earthquake in India, something to unite the nation in a response of 'tt'.)
Clearly, the key difference between Langford and Tate is that hardly anyone saw the episodes featuring Langford, whereas these days Doctor Who actually has an audience. The end result of this situation is, of course, international terrorism. There's a logic here. Britain is currently reeling from a wave of deeply rubbish terrorist attacks, apparently organised by Islamic extremists who don't really have any ideas about using terrorism to elicit political change, but who - faced with the nation's failure to pray five times a day and cover up Katie Price - feel so impotent that their only release is to drive cars into airports. Ineffectually. Doctor Who fans will already be familiar with this feeling of helplessness: consider the notorious postings on Outpost Gallifrey after Christopher Eccleston's early retirement, by emotionally-retarded monomaniacs who wanted to launch an organised campaign of harassment against him for the heinous crime of "being knackered". Leaving aside the obvious ethical problems with wanting to give a punishment beating to an actor… what, precisely, did they want to achieve? As with the Rubbish Bombers in London and Glasgow, their purpose wasn't really to change anything but to provide an outlet for frustrated rage. At around the time that Bonnie Langford became the new companion, one Doctor Who fanzine ran the headline "John Nathan-Turner Must Die". And since Langford only handicapped the programme rather than making it a completely unworkable proposition, the offices of BBC Wales must surely be a greater area of risk than Heathrow. We should also beware of people dressing up in Tetrap costumes and setting themselves on fire.
So which is really worse, Langford or Tate? In order to draw a line under this whole hideous issue, the evidence has been broken down scientifically, and we'll be comparing their performances - and their potential for damage - in five key areas…
1. Ability to Be Unpopular. This is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it may seem. In 1986, Bonnie Langford was universally loathed amongst the general population, known throughout the land as a B-list game-show filler who'd once been a shrieky child star and who apparently hadn't changed much. Comedy shows of the day treated her as an all-purpose object of hatred, much like Jade Goody or Ann Widdecombe today. On the other hand, Catherine Tate is supposedly popular, supposedly because it's hard to find anyone outside the media who actually likes her. Her sketch show gets reasonable-but-not-great viewing figures, yet this seems to be a result of the BBC's drive to push every new "catchphrase comedy" series as the Next Big Thing rather than a result of audience enthusiasm. More crucially, though, there's the problem that catchphrase comedy - let's not call it "character comedy", we don't want to overstate things - irritates a lot more people than it attracts. Hire an actor from a sitcom, and most people will be ambivalent. Hire someone who makes a living by shouting the same joke over and over again, only with increasingly unlikely co-stars (up to and including jovial war criminal Tony Blair), and… well, for every viewer who likes it, there'll be nine who say "Christ, I can't stand her". It is, if you will, like installing Crazy Frog on the TARDIS computer. Nonetheless, we're forced to conclude that some real people actually like Tate, which certainly wasn't true of Langford in the mid-'80s. Langford 9/10, Tate 7/10.
2. Ability to Completely Distort the Nature of the Series. Bonnie Langford is, beyond the surface layer of mewling '80s showbizness, not actually a bad actor. Mediocre, possibly, but not bad. Whereas Catherine Tate is… not an actor at all. Like Peter Sellers before her, she specialises in a kind of performance which is more interested in getting the audience's attention than in making any part seem credible. She gets one single, straightforward scene in Bleak House, and she utterly destroys it, responding to every line of dialogue as if she's doing a "comic reaction" and therefore warping everything around her. Her comedy-drama vehicle for ITV was much the same, although thankfully, nobody can even remember what it was called. The point is that this isn't acting, it's what old-school comedians used to call schtick. In "The Runaway Bride", there are moments when she looks as if she's desperately trying not to look straight into the camera while she's doing her "surprised face" mugging; she gets away with it, almost, because this is the one-off Christmas Special and we know we're not going to have to put up with it for long. The idea of living with this for thirteen weeks, however, is much like the idea of watching Ali Bongo do the same water-in-the-newspaper trick for nine hours on end. The problem worsens when you realise that a lot of writers on Doctor Who just don't like the companions very much. In the gap between "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code", Martha Jones goes from being acute, intelligent and inquisitive to being an ignorant she-parrot who makes cock-obvious statements and then says either 'yeah?' or 'you are kidding me' at the end of the sentence, basically a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007. Given a character like Donna Noble, who already is a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007, what are the odds of Tate even trying to play the part properly? Langford 4/10, Tate 9/10.
3. Ability to Play a Character Who Makes No Sense in This Context. We thankfully never get to see the moment when Melanie Bush joins the TARDIS, despite the attempts of various fan-fic writers to provide us with an Origin Story. As all good fanboys will know, she turns up in chronologically-confusing circumstances between the story that's probably called "Mindwarp" and the story that's not really called "Terror of the Vervoids", and perhaps this was a deliberate damage-limitation strategy on the part of the script editor: in much the same way that George Lucas couldn't possibly kill Jar Jar Binks at the end of Revenge of the Sith (because the audience would just cheer), the programme couldn't possibly show us the moment when the Doctor turns to Mel and says 'would you like to come with me…?' (because the audience would throw things at the screen). Mel is the woman with no personality, no background, no reason for being there and - ultimately - no reason for leaving, apart from the obvious "universal hatred" one. But while she is there, her presence on the TARDIS at least makes a form of sense. Mel is an all-purpose roll-on roll-off companion, who does all the things companions are supposed to do and squeals like a child when she gets overexcited. And it's Bonnie Langford, so being overexcited covers most of her existence. By contrast, Donna Noble is a petty, self-obsessed reject from Footballer's Wives who believes the fate of the cosmos to be Somebody Else's Problem. Not a single thing about her in "The Runaway Bride" is remotely likeable - or feasible, but that didn't seem so bad, when we thought she was just meant to be a joke - yet at the end of it all, the Doctor asks her to stay with him. This puzzled many viewers, although it makes sense when you realise that Russell T. Davies has actually come to like his creation, and can't understand that nobody else does. The comparison with Jar Jar Binks is a good one, because even he served a specific function, i.e. to make small children laugh. Donna can't even do that. Langford 6/10, Tate 7/10. Which brings us to…
4. Ability to Alienate a Large Portion of the Audience. If Doctor Who chased the ratings then it wouldn't be worth watching, but there's a sizeable gulf between "trying something controversial" and "just pissing everyone off". A lot of people hated Peter Kay as a big green bogeyman, and others couldn't understand why "Gridlock" was full of people talking when the whole thing could have been about giant CGI space-crabs, but no individual episode can wreck the set-up of the whole series. Nor could Mel, who may have been a non-person but who still performed her companionly duties to the best of her ability. When she has to say things like 'how utterly evil!' and (most astonishing of all) 'a megabyte modem!!!', we can at least tell ourselves that we might get something completely different next week. But Donna as TARDIS-fodder destroys the programme's entire dynamic. We need a point-of-view character, however exotic or annoying, in order to make sense of both the Doctor and his universe. Even if we could feel any sense of compassion for Donna at all, she'd still seem less believable than any of the monsters, and she'd still change the shape of the series from "young explorer and lonely god" to "a couple of grown-ups bickering". For once, you really have to feel sorry for the people at BBC Books, who are actually going to have to provide novels for ten-year-olds which use her as the central character. Given Bonnie Langford's perpetual childishness, an opening line like "Melanie Bush stood in the TARDIS console room, on the way to another exciting adventure in time and space" would at least be conceivable, whereas the words "Donna Noble stood in the TARDIS console room" can only really be followed by something like "wondering whether a promotion to head of the HR department would require shoes with bigger heels". For this reason alone, the casting of a 39-year-old should have raised questions in the BBC hierarchy - a companion who's older than the actor playing the Doctor could work, but only if the non-middle-aged parts of the audience were given something else to hold on to - yet if she's playing the same character who got on our tits so much in "The Runaway Bride", then it's hard to understand why even Big Russell was allowed to get away it without someone slapping him round the chops and telling him to wake up. Langford 5/10, Tate 8/10.
5. Ability to Generally Irritate. A tough one, this, although… with hindsight, it's difficult to say exactly how Bonnie Langford's debut looked to us in 1986. Yes, the whole world seemed to hate her, and those who still bothered tuning into Doctor Who had difficulty believing it was really happening. But watching it back on video, you realise how little difference there was between Langford's "character" and her public image at the time. Was this supposed to be ironic? Is there an element of self-referential angst in the fact that when we see the Doctor and Mel in the TARDIS console room for the first time, she's going out of her way to irritate him, her never-ending sparkiness making him feel the same way we feel? Were we supposed to laugh along with the programme-makers, and if so, then did we? Much of the irritation she caused while on-screen has to be put down to the writers rather than Langford herself, who might have been able to make a proper go of it if (say) she'd been told to play a murderous Victorian prostitute who turns out to be the daughter of Jack the Ripper. Or anything, in fact, other than TV's Bonnie Langford. This "potential irony" issue returns to haunt us in 2007, since Catherine Tate's character is also supposed to be annoying, to an extent. She's not playing TV's Catherine Tate, though, she's playing… the kind of character who might typically be played by TV's Catherine Tate. We don't see Donna as a person, we see her as a comedy persona with a known celebrity behind it, and that's definitely the sort of thing John Nathan-Turner would have gone for. The upshot is that as with Langford, Tate's ability to irritate might possibly be kept in check by the scripts, as long as they don't give her any opportunity to do her "surprised" schtick or her "shouting at the end of sentences" schtick. The chances are slim, but we'll give the programme-makers the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise her horrible miscasting would be too depressing to even think about. Langford 7/10, Tate 7/10.
Clearly, the key difference between Langford and Tate is that hardly anyone saw the episodes featuring Langford, whereas these days Doctor Who actually has an audience. The end result of this situation is, of course, international terrorism. There's a logic here. Britain is currently reeling from a wave of deeply rubbish terrorist attacks, apparently organised by Islamic extremists who don't really have any ideas about using terrorism to elicit political change, but who - faced with the nation's failure to pray five times a day and cover up Katie Price - feel so impotent that their only release is to drive cars into airports. Ineffectually. Doctor Who fans will already be familiar with this feeling of helplessness: consider the notorious postings on Outpost Gallifrey after Christopher Eccleston's early retirement, by emotionally-retarded monomaniacs who wanted to launch an organised campaign of harassment against him for the heinous crime of "being knackered". Leaving aside the obvious ethical problems with wanting to give a punishment beating to an actor… what, precisely, did they want to achieve? As with the Rubbish Bombers in London and Glasgow, their purpose wasn't really to change anything but to provide an outlet for frustrated rage. At around the time that Bonnie Langford became the new companion, one Doctor Who fanzine ran the headline "John Nathan-Turner Must Die". And since Langford only handicapped the programme rather than making it a completely unworkable proposition, the offices of BBC Wales must surely be a greater area of risk than Heathrow. We should also beware of people dressing up in Tetrap costumes and setting themselves on fire.
So which is really worse, Langford or Tate? In order to draw a line under this whole hideous issue, the evidence has been broken down scientifically, and we'll be comparing their performances - and their potential for damage - in five key areas…
1. Ability to Be Unpopular. This is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it may seem. In 1986, Bonnie Langford was universally loathed amongst the general population, known throughout the land as a B-list game-show filler who'd once been a shrieky child star and who apparently hadn't changed much. Comedy shows of the day treated her as an all-purpose object of hatred, much like Jade Goody or Ann Widdecombe today. On the other hand, Catherine Tate is supposedly popular, supposedly because it's hard to find anyone outside the media who actually likes her. Her sketch show gets reasonable-but-not-great viewing figures, yet this seems to be a result of the BBC's drive to push every new "catchphrase comedy" series as the Next Big Thing rather than a result of audience enthusiasm. More crucially, though, there's the problem that catchphrase comedy - let's not call it "character comedy", we don't want to overstate things - irritates a lot more people than it attracts. Hire an actor from a sitcom, and most people will be ambivalent. Hire someone who makes a living by shouting the same joke over and over again, only with increasingly unlikely co-stars (up to and including jovial war criminal Tony Blair), and… well, for every viewer who likes it, there'll be nine who say "Christ, I can't stand her". It is, if you will, like installing Crazy Frog on the TARDIS computer. Nonetheless, we're forced to conclude that some real people actually like Tate, which certainly wasn't true of Langford in the mid-'80s. Langford 9/10, Tate 7/10.
2. Ability to Completely Distort the Nature of the Series. Bonnie Langford is, beyond the surface layer of mewling '80s showbizness, not actually a bad actor. Mediocre, possibly, but not bad. Whereas Catherine Tate is… not an actor at all. Like Peter Sellers before her, she specialises in a kind of performance which is more interested in getting the audience's attention than in making any part seem credible. She gets one single, straightforward scene in Bleak House, and she utterly destroys it, responding to every line of dialogue as if she's doing a "comic reaction" and therefore warping everything around her. Her comedy-drama vehicle for ITV was much the same, although thankfully, nobody can even remember what it was called. The point is that this isn't acting, it's what old-school comedians used to call schtick. In "The Runaway Bride", there are moments when she looks as if she's desperately trying not to look straight into the camera while she's doing her "surprised face" mugging; she gets away with it, almost, because this is the one-off Christmas Special and we know we're not going to have to put up with it for long. The idea of living with this for thirteen weeks, however, is much like the idea of watching Ali Bongo do the same water-in-the-newspaper trick for nine hours on end. The problem worsens when you realise that a lot of writers on Doctor Who just don't like the companions very much. In the gap between "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code", Martha Jones goes from being acute, intelligent and inquisitive to being an ignorant she-parrot who makes cock-obvious statements and then says either 'yeah?' or 'you are kidding me' at the end of the sentence, basically a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007. Given a character like Donna Noble, who already is a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007, what are the odds of Tate even trying to play the part properly? Langford 4/10, Tate 9/10.
3. Ability to Play a Character Who Makes No Sense in This Context. We thankfully never get to see the moment when Melanie Bush joins the TARDIS, despite the attempts of various fan-fic writers to provide us with an Origin Story. As all good fanboys will know, she turns up in chronologically-confusing circumstances between the story that's probably called "Mindwarp" and the story that's not really called "Terror of the Vervoids", and perhaps this was a deliberate damage-limitation strategy on the part of the script editor: in much the same way that George Lucas couldn't possibly kill Jar Jar Binks at the end of Revenge of the Sith (because the audience would just cheer), the programme couldn't possibly show us the moment when the Doctor turns to Mel and says 'would you like to come with me…?' (because the audience would throw things at the screen). Mel is the woman with no personality, no background, no reason for being there and - ultimately - no reason for leaving, apart from the obvious "universal hatred" one. But while she is there, her presence on the TARDIS at least makes a form of sense. Mel is an all-purpose roll-on roll-off companion, who does all the things companions are supposed to do and squeals like a child when she gets overexcited. And it's Bonnie Langford, so being overexcited covers most of her existence. By contrast, Donna Noble is a petty, self-obsessed reject from Footballer's Wives who believes the fate of the cosmos to be Somebody Else's Problem. Not a single thing about her in "The Runaway Bride" is remotely likeable - or feasible, but that didn't seem so bad, when we thought she was just meant to be a joke - yet at the end of it all, the Doctor asks her to stay with him. This puzzled many viewers, although it makes sense when you realise that Russell T. Davies has actually come to like his creation, and can't understand that nobody else does. The comparison with Jar Jar Binks is a good one, because even he served a specific function, i.e. to make small children laugh. Donna can't even do that. Langford 6/10, Tate 7/10. Which brings us to…
4. Ability to Alienate a Large Portion of the Audience. If Doctor Who chased the ratings then it wouldn't be worth watching, but there's a sizeable gulf between "trying something controversial" and "just pissing everyone off". A lot of people hated Peter Kay as a big green bogeyman, and others couldn't understand why "Gridlock" was full of people talking when the whole thing could have been about giant CGI space-crabs, but no individual episode can wreck the set-up of the whole series. Nor could Mel, who may have been a non-person but who still performed her companionly duties to the best of her ability. When she has to say things like 'how utterly evil!' and (most astonishing of all) 'a megabyte modem!!!', we can at least tell ourselves that we might get something completely different next week. But Donna as TARDIS-fodder destroys the programme's entire dynamic. We need a point-of-view character, however exotic or annoying, in order to make sense of both the Doctor and his universe. Even if we could feel any sense of compassion for Donna at all, she'd still seem less believable than any of the monsters, and she'd still change the shape of the series from "young explorer and lonely god" to "a couple of grown-ups bickering". For once, you really have to feel sorry for the people at BBC Books, who are actually going to have to provide novels for ten-year-olds which use her as the central character. Given Bonnie Langford's perpetual childishness, an opening line like "Melanie Bush stood in the TARDIS console room, on the way to another exciting adventure in time and space" would at least be conceivable, whereas the words "Donna Noble stood in the TARDIS console room" can only really be followed by something like "wondering whether a promotion to head of the HR department would require shoes with bigger heels". For this reason alone, the casting of a 39-year-old should have raised questions in the BBC hierarchy - a companion who's older than the actor playing the Doctor could work, but only if the non-middle-aged parts of the audience were given something else to hold on to - yet if she's playing the same character who got on our tits so much in "The Runaway Bride", then it's hard to understand why even Big Russell was allowed to get away it without someone slapping him round the chops and telling him to wake up. Langford 5/10, Tate 8/10.
5. Ability to Generally Irritate. A tough one, this, although… with hindsight, it's difficult to say exactly how Bonnie Langford's debut looked to us in 1986. Yes, the whole world seemed to hate her, and those who still bothered tuning into Doctor Who had difficulty believing it was really happening. But watching it back on video, you realise how little difference there was between Langford's "character" and her public image at the time. Was this supposed to be ironic? Is there an element of self-referential angst in the fact that when we see the Doctor and Mel in the TARDIS console room for the first time, she's going out of her way to irritate him, her never-ending sparkiness making him feel the same way we feel? Were we supposed to laugh along with the programme-makers, and if so, then did we? Much of the irritation she caused while on-screen has to be put down to the writers rather than Langford herself, who might have been able to make a proper go of it if (say) she'd been told to play a murderous Victorian prostitute who turns out to be the daughter of Jack the Ripper. Or anything, in fact, other than TV's Bonnie Langford. This "potential irony" issue returns to haunt us in 2007, since Catherine Tate's character is also supposed to be annoying, to an extent. She's not playing TV's Catherine Tate, though, she's playing… the kind of character who might typically be played by TV's Catherine Tate. We don't see Donna as a person, we see her as a comedy persona with a known celebrity behind it, and that's definitely the sort of thing John Nathan-Turner would have gone for. The upshot is that as with Langford, Tate's ability to irritate might possibly be kept in check by the scripts, as long as they don't give her any opportunity to do her "surprised" schtick or her "shouting at the end of sentences" schtick. The chances are slim, but we'll give the programme-makers the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise her horrible miscasting would be too depressing to even think about. Langford 7/10, Tate 7/10.
Sunday, 1 July 2007
The Doctor Who Thing: An Apology
In last week's review of "The Sound of Drums", the author of this journal commented: 'I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.' The suggestion in this article was that if Doctor Who were to hire a media-friendly yet grotesquely overrated comedy performer, whose talents only extend as far as Doing Silly Voices and whose attempts at drama tend to distort the rest of the production so badly that the "real" actors look as if they're in a completely different programme, then casting Matt Lucas as the Doctor would be as bad as it could possibly get. In light of today's announcement by the BBC, we now accept that this is not the case.
The review of "The Sound of Drums" also criticised Russell T. Davies' belief that the audience can only "accept" regular characters from a contemporary suburban background, describing it as "insulting" and pointing out that the programme's obsession with all things present-day is becoming both repetitive and embarrassing. This paragraph should, of course, have ended with the words: 'The result is that the ideal companion is now a one-dimensional caricature of Someone Typically 2007 who wouldn't even be acceptable in an episode of Footballers' Wives, an individual whom the programme-makers believe to be "modern" despite the fact that there isn't a single section of the audience which is capable of relating to her, even if she weren't played by a comedian whose idea of "acting" is to put on a generic surprised-looking face and start shouting when she thinks it might get a laugh.'
The review went on to suggest that Mr Davies is now so well-insulated in the Doctor Who bunker that he's no longer capable of seeing things from the audience's point of view. This was clearly written before we learned that the new regular on board the TARDIS will be a forty-year-old woman with relationship issues and a job in an HR department, a character who will simply be bewildering to any children watching, and whose presence will inevitably cause life with the Doctor to become a BBC3 sitcom about bickering grown-ups who occasionally get interrupted by annoying things like "having adventures" while they're trying to agonise about their biological clocks. We therefore freely acknowledge that we underestimated the scale of the problem, and that "we couldn't possibly have expected them to do anything this rubbish" is not an adequate excuse.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. As, indeed, should BBC Wales.
We'd also like to ask whether we can have Bonnie Langford back.
The review of "The Sound of Drums" also criticised Russell T. Davies' belief that the audience can only "accept" regular characters from a contemporary suburban background, describing it as "insulting" and pointing out that the programme's obsession with all things present-day is becoming both repetitive and embarrassing. This paragraph should, of course, have ended with the words: 'The result is that the ideal companion is now a one-dimensional caricature of Someone Typically 2007 who wouldn't even be acceptable in an episode of Footballers' Wives, an individual whom the programme-makers believe to be "modern" despite the fact that there isn't a single section of the audience which is capable of relating to her, even if she weren't played by a comedian whose idea of "acting" is to put on a generic surprised-looking face and start shouting when she thinks it might get a laugh.'
The review went on to suggest that Mr Davies is now so well-insulated in the Doctor Who bunker that he's no longer capable of seeing things from the audience's point of view. This was clearly written before we learned that the new regular on board the TARDIS will be a forty-year-old woman with relationship issues and a job in an HR department, a character who will simply be bewildering to any children watching, and whose presence will inevitably cause life with the Doctor to become a BBC3 sitcom about bickering grown-ups who occasionally get interrupted by annoying things like "having adventures" while they're trying to agonise about their biological clocks. We therefore freely acknowledge that we underestimated the scale of the problem, and that "we couldn't possibly have expected them to do anything this rubbish" is not an adequate excuse.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. As, indeed, should BBC Wales.
We'd also like to ask whether we can have Bonnie Langford back.
Sunday, 24 June 2007
The Doctor Who Thing, Week 12.3 (Now Reassembled into a Single Coherent Chain of Thought)
God, that was boring.
It seems strange to use the word "boring" when describing something which ends
with the sky being ripped open and six-billion machine-creatures pouring onto the
Earth to destroy one-tenth of the human population, but therein lies the problem. If
nothing else, then "The Sound of Drums" marks the point at which modern Doctor
Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can positively, definitively
say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story, and you positively,
definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like in advance. It's always
been taken as read that the series will return to the same tourist-friendly, politicallysuspect
version of the early twenty-first century for at least one "big" story per year,
but now there's also the assumption that modern London is obviously going to be
the venue for the season finale, because attacking the capital is a way of making
things seem important. Yet as we've already seen, the idea that the audience
"needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the idea that it can only "accept"
regular characters from the present day - is not only wrong, but rather insulting. And
the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump himself, by making the alien
hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time, is getting embarrassing.
And even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from other two-part stories,
nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it needs. It certainly doesn't have
the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to believe that the Doctor / Master faceoff
is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we don't, because John Simm just isn't
interesting enough. We're supposed to be impressed by the epic political scale of
the story, but we're not, because this sort of thing happens every year. We're
supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane (literally) decimating the population, but
we're not, because to us it looks no different to what the Cybermen did twelve
months ago. We're supposed to be appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man,
but we're not, because... well, it looks silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out
that this happened in "The Leisure Hive", but the most important thing to notice is
that it made sense there: "The Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal.
Here, it's simply gratuitous.) Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who,
we might draw a comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite
notoriously - because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of
their own creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point
of view. Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that
Michael Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than
the Calvi Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in
would think that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension.
To Russell, these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To
the rest of us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him
that? Are you going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure
he's not going to listen to a word I say.
On the plus side... in an episode which puts so much store in its special effects, the
special effects are at least remarkable. "Remarkable" in the truest sense of the
word, because this is about artistry rather than proficiency. CGI is now so everyday
that effects work has become a matter of one-upmanship, and we're asked to be
impressed by computer-generated set-pieces because they're "big" or "technically
advanced" instead of being meaningful in themselves. The result of this has been
bloated, artless garbage like The Lord of the Rings and "The Satan Pit", and a
sense that it'll soon be impossible to tell the difference between movies and their XBox
tie-ins. But used properly, CGI can produce something genuinely beautiful
rather than simply oversized. The Lazarus Horror aside, this year's stories have
seen the crew at The Mill graduate from technicians to aesthetes, making New New
York look like a place you'd actually want to live and giving "42" a sense of menace
even while we're being bored gutless by the script. Now "The Sound of Drums"
gives us the most beautiful apocalypse we're ever likely to see, and a flying aircraftcarrier
that makes us go "ooh" because it looks like a great work of engineering
rather than because we want to give a round of applause to the software that
generated it. We even have a vision of the Doctor's homeworld which lives up to
forty-four years of expectation, at least until the script turns Gallifrey into Hogwart's.
It's not enough to save the story, of course. Perhaps the saddest thing is that this
pathological need to raise the stakes every year, this pattern of putting more and
more people in jeopardy from more and more elaborate CGI sequences, plays
against the author's strengths. Less accomplished writers generally seem to feel
that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or
credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama" means bashing goodie-stereotypes
and baddie-sterotypes against each other until something "dramatic" happens (the
most egregious example of this in modern-day Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's
Lantern", in which even the members of the POV character's family only exist so
that they can make loud, grating comments about beating homosexuals, but the old
series is full of this sort of clunking stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength
has always been his ability to let characters exist on their own terms, even when
they're only on-screen for thirty seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed
hospital consultant in "Smith and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory
than anybody in "The Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this
kind of detail is bound to suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane.
Suddenly, humanity is represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook
and President Winters, not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard
not to be on the Master's side... especially since the only genuinely human human
character around here is his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to
the end of the world. When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sexkick
out of genocide turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family,
something's gone mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
Good! Now I've written a review I'm happy with, I can formally delete it.
It seems strange to use the word "boring" when describing something which ends
with the sky being ripped open and six-billion machine-creatures pouring onto the
Earth to destroy one-tenth of the human population, but therein lies the problem. If
nothing else, then "The Sound of Drums" marks the point at which modern Doctor
Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can positively, definitively
say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story, and you positively,
definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like in advance. It's always
been taken as read that the series will return to the same tourist-friendly, politicallysuspect
version of the early twenty-first century for at least one "big" story per year,
but now there's also the assumption that modern London is obviously going to be
the venue for the season finale, because attacking the capital is a way of making
things seem important. Yet as we've already seen, the idea that the audience
"needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the idea that it can only "accept"
regular characters from the present day - is not only wrong, but rather insulting. And
the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump himself, by making the alien
hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time, is getting embarrassing.
And even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from other two-part stories,
nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it needs. It certainly doesn't have
the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to believe that the Doctor / Master faceoff
is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we don't, because John Simm just isn't
interesting enough. We're supposed to be impressed by the epic political scale of
the story, but we're not, because this sort of thing happens every year. We're
supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane (literally) decimating the population, but
we're not, because to us it looks no different to what the Cybermen did twelve
months ago. We're supposed to be appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man,
but we're not, because... well, it looks silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out
that this happened in "The Leisure Hive", but the most important thing to notice is
that it made sense there: "The Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal.
Here, it's simply gratuitous.) Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who,
we might draw a comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite
notoriously - because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of
their own creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point
of view. Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that
Michael Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than
the Calvi Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in
would think that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension.
To Russell, these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To
the rest of us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him
that? Are you going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure
he's not going to listen to a word I say.
On the plus side... in an episode which puts so much store in its special effects, the
special effects are at least remarkable. "Remarkable" in the truest sense of the
word, because this is about artistry rather than proficiency. CGI is now so everyday
that effects work has become a matter of one-upmanship, and we're asked to be
impressed by computer-generated set-pieces because they're "big" or "technically
advanced" instead of being meaningful in themselves. The result of this has been
bloated, artless garbage like The Lord of the Rings and "The Satan Pit", and a
sense that it'll soon be impossible to tell the difference between movies and their XBox
tie-ins. But used properly, CGI can produce something genuinely beautiful
rather than simply oversized. The Lazarus Horror aside, this year's stories have
seen the crew at The Mill graduate from technicians to aesthetes, making New New
York look like a place you'd actually want to live and giving "42" a sense of menace
even while we're being bored gutless by the script. Now "The Sound of Drums"
gives us the most beautiful apocalypse we're ever likely to see, and a flying aircraftcarrier
that makes us go "ooh" because it looks like a great work of engineering
rather than because we want to give a round of applause to the software that
generated it. We even have a vision of the Doctor's homeworld which lives up to
forty-four years of expectation, at least until the script turns Gallifrey into Hogwart's.
It's not enough to save the story, of course. Perhaps the saddest thing is that this
pathological need to raise the stakes every year, this pattern of putting more and
more people in jeopardy from more and more elaborate CGI sequences, plays
against the author's strengths. Less accomplished writers generally seem to feel
that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or
credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama" means bashing goodie-stereotypes
and baddie-sterotypes against each other until something "dramatic" happens (the
most egregious example of this in modern-day Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's
Lantern", in which even the members of the POV character's family only exist so
that they can make loud, grating comments about beating homosexuals, but the old
series is full of this sort of clunking stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength
has always been his ability to let characters exist on their own terms, even when
they're only on-screen for thirty seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed
hospital consultant in "Smith and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory
than anybody in "The Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this
kind of detail is bound to suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane.
Suddenly, humanity is represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook
and President Winters, not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard
not to be on the Master's side... especially since the only genuinely human human
character around here is his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to
the end of the world. When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sexkick
out of genocide turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family,
something's gone mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
Good! Now I've written a review I'm happy with, I can formally delete it.
The Doctor Who Thing (Week 12.2)
To recap, then. On first viewing:
* * * * *
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
God, "The Sound of Drums" is boring.
* * * * *
On second viewing:
* * * * *
Actually... it's not that boring. But if nothing else, then it marks the point at which
modern Doctor Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can
positively, definitively say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story,
and you positively, definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like. A
problem which might easily be cured by going back to 1963-basics rather than
1970-basics, and by making sure that the TARDIS never lands in the sodding
early-twenty-first century ever again (or at least, by making sure there are no
comical politicians around if it does end up there). Because as we've already seen,
the idea that the audience "needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the
idea that it can only "accept" regular characters from the present day - is not only
wrong, but rather insulting. And the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump
himself, by making the alien hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time,
is getting embarrassing.
But the biggest problem here, even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from
other two-part stories, is that nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it
needs. It certainly doesn't have the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to
believe that the Doctor / Master face-off is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we
don't, because John Simm just isn't interesting enough. We're supposed to be
impressed by the epic political scale of the story, but we're not, because this sort of
thing happens every year. We're supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane
(literally) decimating the population, but we're not, because to us it looks no
different to what the Cybermen did twelve months ago. We're supposed to be
appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man, but we're not, because... well, it looks
silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out that this happened in "The Leisure
Hive", but the most important thing to notice is that it made sense there: "The
Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal. Here, it's simply gratuitous.)
Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who, we might draw a
comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite notoriously -
because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of their own
creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point of view.
Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that Michael
Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than the Calvi
Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in would think
that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension. To Russell,
these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To the rest of
us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him that? Are you
going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure he's not going
to listen to a word I say.
* * * * *
Now, on third viewing (and at this point, anyone might think I've got too much time
on my hands):
* * * * *
Perhaps the worst part is that this pathological need to raise the stakes every year,
this pattern of putting more and more people in jeopardy from more and more
elaborate CGI sequences, plays against the author's strengths. Less accomplished
writers generally seem to feel that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God
forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama"
means bashing goodie-stereotypes and baddie-sterotypes against each other until
something "dramatic" happens (the most egregious example of this in modern-day
Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's Lantern", in which even the members of the
POV character's family only exist so that they can make loud, grating comments
about beating homosexuals, but the old series is full of this sort of clunking
stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength has always been his ability to let
characters exist on their own terms, even when they're only on-screen for thirty
seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed hospital consultant in "Smith
and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory than anybody in "The
Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this kind of detail is bound to
suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane. Suddenly, humanity is
represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook and President Winters,
not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard not to be on the Master's
side... especially since the only genuinely human human character around here is
his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to the end of the world.
When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sex-kick out of genocide
turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family, something's gone
mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
And: "Paradox Machine"? Dear God, even I never sank that low. It's like The
Ancestor Cell all over again.
* * * * *
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
God, "The Sound of Drums" is boring.
* * * * *
On second viewing:
* * * * *
Actually... it's not that boring. But if nothing else, then it marks the point at which
modern Doctor Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can
positively, definitively say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story,
and you positively, definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like. A
problem which might easily be cured by going back to 1963-basics rather than
1970-basics, and by making sure that the TARDIS never lands in the sodding
early-twenty-first century ever again (or at least, by making sure there are no
comical politicians around if it does end up there). Because as we've already seen,
the idea that the audience "needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the
idea that it can only "accept" regular characters from the present day - is not only
wrong, but rather insulting. And the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump
himself, by making the alien hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time,
is getting embarrassing.
But the biggest problem here, even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from
other two-part stories, is that nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it
needs. It certainly doesn't have the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to
believe that the Doctor / Master face-off is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we
don't, because John Simm just isn't interesting enough. We're supposed to be
impressed by the epic political scale of the story, but we're not, because this sort of
thing happens every year. We're supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane
(literally) decimating the population, but we're not, because to us it looks no
different to what the Cybermen did twelve months ago. We're supposed to be
appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man, but we're not, because... well, it looks
silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out that this happened in "The Leisure
Hive", but the most important thing to notice is that it made sense there: "The
Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal. Here, it's simply gratuitous.)
Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who, we might draw a
comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite notoriously -
because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of their own
creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point of view.
Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that Michael
Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than the Calvi
Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in would think
that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension. To Russell,
these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To the rest of
us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him that? Are you
going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure he's not going
to listen to a word I say.
* * * * *
Now, on third viewing (and at this point, anyone might think I've got too much time
on my hands):
* * * * *
Perhaps the worst part is that this pathological need to raise the stakes every year,
this pattern of putting more and more people in jeopardy from more and more
elaborate CGI sequences, plays against the author's strengths. Less accomplished
writers generally seem to feel that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God
forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama"
means bashing goodie-stereotypes and baddie-sterotypes against each other until
something "dramatic" happens (the most egregious example of this in modern-day
Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's Lantern", in which even the members of the
POV character's family only exist so that they can make loud, grating comments
about beating homosexuals, but the old series is full of this sort of clunking
stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength has always been his ability to let
characters exist on their own terms, even when they're only on-screen for thirty
seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed hospital consultant in "Smith
and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory than anybody in "The
Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this kind of detail is bound to
suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane. Suddenly, humanity is
represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook and President Winters,
not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard not to be on the Master's
side... especially since the only genuinely human human character around here is
his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to the end of the world.
When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sex-kick out of genocide
turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family, something's gone
mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
And: "Paradox Machine"? Dear God, even I never sank that low. It's like The
Ancestor Cell all over again.
Saturday, 23 June 2007
The Doctor Who Thing (Week Twelve)
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Christ, "The Sound of Drums" was boring.
Ten minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the clock and said "Hell, there's thirty-five
minutes left, it can still be good". Twenty minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the
clock and said "Hell, there's twenty-five minutes left, it can still be good". Thirty
minutes in…
…you get the idea.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent.
Boring.
Arse.
Not one single redeeming feature. Nothing interesting in the whole episode.
Nothing worth watching in the entire 45 minutes.
Just… boring.
Boring, and based on the media-happy conceit that presenting John Simm as a
Time Lord will excuse everything. Sorry, but no, it doesn't work that way: John
Simm just isn't very good. He's flat, dull, humourless (which is to say, he attempts
humour, but it doesn't come off), and as drab as everything else in the episode.
Setting him up as the anti-Tennant would only work if he were as sparkly as
Tennant. He patently isn't. He's… boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent…
…like "Aliens of London", but without the surprise value…
…arse.
Russell… ? You've lost it. Sorry, but you've just lost it. It's boring. You're trying to
pull off exactly the same trick you used two years ago, and no trick works twice. So
stop it.
Boring.
Boring.
Really, really boring. No-point-even-watching-the-second-half boring. "Doctor Who
has jumped the shark" boring.
I mean, we did the "Evil Tony Blair" idea in 2005. Bit late to go through the same
shit now, don't you think?
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Christ, "The Sound of Drums" was boring.
Ten minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the clock and said "Hell, there's thirty-five
minutes left, it can still be good". Twenty minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the
clock and said "Hell, there's twenty-five minutes left, it can still be good". Thirty
minutes in…
…you get the idea.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent.
Boring.
Arse.
Not one single redeeming feature. Nothing interesting in the whole episode.
Nothing worth watching in the entire 45 minutes.
Just… boring.
Boring, and based on the media-happy conceit that presenting John Simm as a
Time Lord will excuse everything. Sorry, but no, it doesn't work that way: John
Simm just isn't very good. He's flat, dull, humourless (which is to say, he attempts
humour, but it doesn't come off), and as drab as everything else in the episode.
Setting him up as the anti-Tennant would only work if he were as sparkly as
Tennant. He patently isn't. He's… boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent…
…like "Aliens of London", but without the surprise value…
…arse.
Russell… ? You've lost it. Sorry, but you've just lost it. It's boring. You're trying to
pull off exactly the same trick you used two years ago, and no trick works twice. So
stop it.
Boring.
Boring.
Really, really boring. No-point-even-watching-the-second-half boring. "Doctor Who
has jumped the shark" boring.
I mean, we did the "Evil Tony Blair" idea in 2005. Bit late to go through the same
shit now, don't you think?
Boring.
Saturday, 2 June 2007
The Family of Blood
This week I'd like to ignore the complex issues of mortality and social responsibility raised by "The Family of Blood", and talk about monsters. Old monsters. Dirty old stinking monsters.
Once, many years ago - or at least, more than ten, which qualifies as "many" because I'm attempting to sound wise while still retaining a facade of youthful enthusiasm - I read a Doctor Who book in which the villain was a malignant bodiless intelligence who could control the minds of human beings. On the whole, this was no more interesting than any of the other malignant bodiless intelligences we've seen over the years, yet I still found myself wondering about the similarities between this spurious new aether-monster and the Great Intelligence from "The Abominable Snowmen" (1967, although you probably knew that). And, weirdly assuming that this was "continuity" rather than a desperate lack of imagination, I heard myself think: 'Wow, the Great Intelligence! This might be its first appearance in the series for nearly thirty years!'
Looking back on it, this was clearly a moment of epiphany. The moment when I was hit by the sudden, shocking realisation that… if it did turn out to be the Great Intelligence, then it wouldn't actually make the story any more interesting.
This revelation was less obvious than it might now seem. Bear in mind that I entered fandom (of a kind) via Doctor Who Weekly, and learned most of what I knew about the history of the series from chunky "anniversary" volumes like Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, now clogging up the shelves of Oxfam shops nationwide. Most of these books were hugely inaccurate, but that's beside the point. In the years before cheap video, the fans were obsessed with the series' past - a past we never thought we'd actually see, not even the bits that hadn't been taped over by the BBC - leading to intense debates about whether the Daleks or the Master were the Doctor's greatest enemy, depending on whether you counted their appearances in terms of stories or individual episodes. I was part of the generation which thought about Doctor Who in much the same way that American sports fans think about baseball, with scorecards and statistics for every occasion: part of me still "knows" that there are nine-and-a-half Cybermen adventures, even though this information is clearly out-of-date as well as completely useless. In the 1980s, the return of any "old" monster was greeted with a great whooping and cheering, because (in effect) it improved that monster's batting average. Even the producer came to think this way after a while, which is why he kept bringing back the Master even when everyone was sick of the bastard. So, a brand-new story featuring an arch-enemy not seen since 1967…? Even if it only happened in print rather than on TV, it still scored points. As if attaching the name of something from the before-I-was-born era of Doctor Who was in some way an excuse for the wretched banality of it all.
I've been thinking about this a lot, in the wake of "Human Nature". For all its highs, there are parts of the episode which just seem slow, but… not in the ways we might expect. The slow bits aren't the "talky" bits: in fact, the three-and-a-half-sided love-triangle between the Doctor, the New Girl, the Semi-Doctor and This Year's Love Interest are a pleasant reminder of what things were like in the days of "proper" telly, when characters were allowed to have quiet conversations and not everything had to be rapid-cut or filmed with a shaky hand-camera. No, the slow bits are the "monstery" bits. Aliens disguised as human beings are never interesting, and in the case of "Human Nature", they spend the whole episode establishing themselves as generic body-snatchers. In a series that treats spaceships and bodily possessions as an everyday occurrence, it really shouldn't take four minutes of screen-time for Baines to find a UFO and then demonstrate that he's been taken over. We've seen all of this before, many, many times, so it's not as if we need to be told every little detail. Nor do we need all those scenes of possessed people acting out-of-character and plotting amongst themselves, when we know they're going to say exactly the same things that alien plotters always say in these situations. Because while the Family of Blood is indulging in all this routine villainy, the regulars are doing something much more involving, and even the fourteen-year-old boy on the games field is going all Twelve Monkeys on us.
But: a-hah, I thought. A-hah. The Doctor describes these aliens as hunters. They track their prey by smell. They have a strong sense of family. They insert themselves into human bodies, they've got a thing for strange gases, and they clearly prefer fat victims. Even Rebekah Staton looks like a younger, cuter Annette Badland. Is the message not clear, I asked myself? After all, the villains in the original novel of Human Nature were far less generic, and why would any writer make his own creations less interesting unless he were planning to turn them into some other form of monster? In short: are these not the Slitheen, or at least some other Raxicoricofallapatorian family? Is this not likely to be the big twist in the second half of the story? True, they seem more reliant on other people's flesh than the Slitheen we used to know, and their mother is so degenerate that she's become a vapour who lives inside a novelty paperweight (unless, of course, she's a Slitheen guff who's somehow acquired the power of speech). But they have so much else in common, even more so than the Bane from the Sarah-Jane pilot, who might be considered Slitheen wannabes anyway. Then there's the curious fact that although we don't see any Slitheen when Smith flips through his Journal of Impossible Things, there's a later scene in which Nurse Redfern specifically points to a portrait of one, just so we get a close-up of its smug Raxicoricofallapatorian face. As if we're being gently prodded to remember something. Oh, yes: ah-hah is very much the word.
I thought.
The Slitheen turned out to be like all other gas-men, though: I waited for them all day, and they never turned up. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that's wholly of my own making. But the question remains… even if the School Bully and the Scary Little Girl had unzipped their heads and revealed themselves to have big green baby-faces, would that have made any difference? Because whatever their true nature had turned out to be (and it's got to be said, their status as vaguely-defined near-immortals seems to have served the plot rather well in the end), it wouldn't have changed the fact that the first half of the story is still a bit slow when the bad guys are on the screen, or that the Family is still made up of generic body-snatchers. The Slitheen in "Aliens of London" work because they avoid the usual gamut of "possession" clichés: putting big flabby monsters inside politicians isn't an attempt to generate hokey sci-fi suspense, it's a way of turning them into Hogarth-style grotesques. They don't waste time creeping about the place with mad staring eyes, the way the Family of Blood does. Whatever you call the villains in "Human Nature", hokey sci-fi suspense is their stock-in trade, and it's the one whacking great flaw in the story. Although admittedly, they automatically become more interesting once they're dumped in collapsing galaxies or trapped in mirrors.
I've never believed that a single line of dialogue, or even a single name, is enough to change the basis of an entire script. Generations of fanboys have (for example) tried to claim that "Image of the Fendahl" raises the stakes of the whole series, because it pits the Doctor against an enemy which "is" death, and yet… we only know it's supposed to "be" death because the Doctor says so, once, in a single line of a single scene. Watch the rest of the story, and the Fendahl just looks like any other poxy life-sucking monster we've seen over the years. And clearly, a generic disembodied intelligence doesn't become any more worthwhile if it's a generic disembodied intelligence from 1967, although it took me a distressingly long time to break the '80s fan-conditioning and notice this. Likewise, only Mark Braxton would be a big enough arse to believe that if the Doctor refers to some giant CGI crabs as "Macra" - rather than as "Crabulons", or "Clawrentulas", or "Sniptrodines", or any other spurious sci-fi name - then it changes the nature of an episode to such a degree that it's even worthy of a mention in the Radio Times. Yet somehow, I find myself disappointed that a bunch of family-obsessed hunting-monsters in 2007 don't have the same name as a bunch of near-identical family-obsessed hunting-monsters from 2005. Even by my standards, this is irrational.
Mind you… given that the Family wants to be the Doctor, it's tempting to imagine that each member of the group is a distorted aspect of the Doctor himself, especially since this is the only twenty-first century story in which we see the (hurriedly-sketched) faces of his previous selves. We might suppose that the Fat Bloke is Colin Baker, or that the One Who Looks Much Too Young is Peter Davison, and they've even got an army of Jon Pertwees circa Worzel Gummidge.
Once, many years ago - or at least, more than ten, which qualifies as "many" because I'm attempting to sound wise while still retaining a facade of youthful enthusiasm - I read a Doctor Who book in which the villain was a malignant bodiless intelligence who could control the minds of human beings. On the whole, this was no more interesting than any of the other malignant bodiless intelligences we've seen over the years, yet I still found myself wondering about the similarities between this spurious new aether-monster and the Great Intelligence from "The Abominable Snowmen" (1967, although you probably knew that). And, weirdly assuming that this was "continuity" rather than a desperate lack of imagination, I heard myself think: 'Wow, the Great Intelligence! This might be its first appearance in the series for nearly thirty years!'
Looking back on it, this was clearly a moment of epiphany. The moment when I was hit by the sudden, shocking realisation that… if it did turn out to be the Great Intelligence, then it wouldn't actually make the story any more interesting.
This revelation was less obvious than it might now seem. Bear in mind that I entered fandom (of a kind) via Doctor Who Weekly, and learned most of what I knew about the history of the series from chunky "anniversary" volumes like Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, now clogging up the shelves of Oxfam shops nationwide. Most of these books were hugely inaccurate, but that's beside the point. In the years before cheap video, the fans were obsessed with the series' past - a past we never thought we'd actually see, not even the bits that hadn't been taped over by the BBC - leading to intense debates about whether the Daleks or the Master were the Doctor's greatest enemy, depending on whether you counted their appearances in terms of stories or individual episodes. I was part of the generation which thought about Doctor Who in much the same way that American sports fans think about baseball, with scorecards and statistics for every occasion: part of me still "knows" that there are nine-and-a-half Cybermen adventures, even though this information is clearly out-of-date as well as completely useless. In the 1980s, the return of any "old" monster was greeted with a great whooping and cheering, because (in effect) it improved that monster's batting average. Even the producer came to think this way after a while, which is why he kept bringing back the Master even when everyone was sick of the bastard. So, a brand-new story featuring an arch-enemy not seen since 1967…? Even if it only happened in print rather than on TV, it still scored points. As if attaching the name of something from the before-I-was-born era of Doctor Who was in some way an excuse for the wretched banality of it all.
I've been thinking about this a lot, in the wake of "Human Nature". For all its highs, there are parts of the episode which just seem slow, but… not in the ways we might expect. The slow bits aren't the "talky" bits: in fact, the three-and-a-half-sided love-triangle between the Doctor, the New Girl, the Semi-Doctor and This Year's Love Interest are a pleasant reminder of what things were like in the days of "proper" telly, when characters were allowed to have quiet conversations and not everything had to be rapid-cut or filmed with a shaky hand-camera. No, the slow bits are the "monstery" bits. Aliens disguised as human beings are never interesting, and in the case of "Human Nature", they spend the whole episode establishing themselves as generic body-snatchers. In a series that treats spaceships and bodily possessions as an everyday occurrence, it really shouldn't take four minutes of screen-time for Baines to find a UFO and then demonstrate that he's been taken over. We've seen all of this before, many, many times, so it's not as if we need to be told every little detail. Nor do we need all those scenes of possessed people acting out-of-character and plotting amongst themselves, when we know they're going to say exactly the same things that alien plotters always say in these situations. Because while the Family of Blood is indulging in all this routine villainy, the regulars are doing something much more involving, and even the fourteen-year-old boy on the games field is going all Twelve Monkeys on us.
But: a-hah, I thought. A-hah. The Doctor describes these aliens as hunters. They track their prey by smell. They have a strong sense of family. They insert themselves into human bodies, they've got a thing for strange gases, and they clearly prefer fat victims. Even Rebekah Staton looks like a younger, cuter Annette Badland. Is the message not clear, I asked myself? After all, the villains in the original novel of Human Nature were far less generic, and why would any writer make his own creations less interesting unless he were planning to turn them into some other form of monster? In short: are these not the Slitheen, or at least some other Raxicoricofallapatorian family? Is this not likely to be the big twist in the second half of the story? True, they seem more reliant on other people's flesh than the Slitheen we used to know, and their mother is so degenerate that she's become a vapour who lives inside a novelty paperweight (unless, of course, she's a Slitheen guff who's somehow acquired the power of speech). But they have so much else in common, even more so than the Bane from the Sarah-Jane pilot, who might be considered Slitheen wannabes anyway. Then there's the curious fact that although we don't see any Slitheen when Smith flips through his Journal of Impossible Things, there's a later scene in which Nurse Redfern specifically points to a portrait of one, just so we get a close-up of its smug Raxicoricofallapatorian face. As if we're being gently prodded to remember something. Oh, yes: ah-hah is very much the word.
I thought.
The Slitheen turned out to be like all other gas-men, though: I waited for them all day, and they never turned up. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that's wholly of my own making. But the question remains… even if the School Bully and the Scary Little Girl had unzipped their heads and revealed themselves to have big green baby-faces, would that have made any difference? Because whatever their true nature had turned out to be (and it's got to be said, their status as vaguely-defined near-immortals seems to have served the plot rather well in the end), it wouldn't have changed the fact that the first half of the story is still a bit slow when the bad guys are on the screen, or that the Family is still made up of generic body-snatchers. The Slitheen in "Aliens of London" work because they avoid the usual gamut of "possession" clichés: putting big flabby monsters inside politicians isn't an attempt to generate hokey sci-fi suspense, it's a way of turning them into Hogarth-style grotesques. They don't waste time creeping about the place with mad staring eyes, the way the Family of Blood does. Whatever you call the villains in "Human Nature", hokey sci-fi suspense is their stock-in trade, and it's the one whacking great flaw in the story. Although admittedly, they automatically become more interesting once they're dumped in collapsing galaxies or trapped in mirrors.
I've never believed that a single line of dialogue, or even a single name, is enough to change the basis of an entire script. Generations of fanboys have (for example) tried to claim that "Image of the Fendahl" raises the stakes of the whole series, because it pits the Doctor against an enemy which "is" death, and yet… we only know it's supposed to "be" death because the Doctor says so, once, in a single line of a single scene. Watch the rest of the story, and the Fendahl just looks like any other poxy life-sucking monster we've seen over the years. And clearly, a generic disembodied intelligence doesn't become any more worthwhile if it's a generic disembodied intelligence from 1967, although it took me a distressingly long time to break the '80s fan-conditioning and notice this. Likewise, only Mark Braxton would be a big enough arse to believe that if the Doctor refers to some giant CGI crabs as "Macra" - rather than as "Crabulons", or "Clawrentulas", or "Sniptrodines", or any other spurious sci-fi name - then it changes the nature of an episode to such a degree that it's even worthy of a mention in the Radio Times. Yet somehow, I find myself disappointed that a bunch of family-obsessed hunting-monsters in 2007 don't have the same name as a bunch of near-identical family-obsessed hunting-monsters from 2005. Even by my standards, this is irrational.
Mind you… given that the Family wants to be the Doctor, it's tempting to imagine that each member of the group is a distorted aspect of the Doctor himself, especially since this is the only twenty-first century story in which we see the (hurriedly-sketched) faces of his previous selves. We might suppose that the Fat Bloke is Colin Baker, or that the One Who Looks Much Too Young is Peter Davison, and they've even got an army of Jon Pertwees circa Worzel Gummidge.
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