Doctor Who 10.13 – Twice Upon a Time

The kid did, however, like this a lot. As well he should. “Twice Upon a Time” is magnificent and charming and occasionally very funny. It’s a great epilogue. Regeneration speech may be a bit long. That’s it. David Bradley, who had played William Hartnell in 2013’s Adventure in Time and Space, now gets to play Hartnell’s Doctor, and why they’re not putting him in a studio to remake “Marco Polo” and “The Myth Makers” and “The Daleks’ Master Plan” can only be chalked up to typical BBC incompetence. Mark Gatiss gets to take a final bow, this time as an actor again, in the role of one of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s ancestors, and since the montage of old friends was contained to the previous episode, the only hugs and smiles this time are contained to the Twelfth Doctor’s actual companions.

Bill and Nardole are represented by glass avatar memory-people, since Bill was extracted from Cyber-conversion and given a new start as a liquid-dimensional lifeform, and Nardole got to live out his days a few floors away from the Cybermen. The memory-people right the wrong of “Hell Bent” and restore the Doctor’s memories of Clara, which is lovely. And there’s one old and bizarrely unexpected old face: Rusty, the self-loathing killing machine from “Into the Dalek”. Anybody who had money on Rusty in the “which character from the previous 39 episodes will turn up” sweepstakes must have cleaned up.

And it’s goodbye here to Steven Moffat, who really does deserve all the applause in the world for writing some of the best stories of the program’s first four revived years, and running a great ship for the next six series. As I’ve said, things wobbled a bit in series six and seven, but it remained watchable and unpredictable and even at its loopiest, there was always a lot to talk about. Bowing out as well, director Rachel Talalay, who is unquestionably among the best directors in the seat in the modern era. She finished really strongly here.

I used to say that my favorite Doctor is the current Doctor, and I always meant it. Since this series grabbed my imagination, I’ve always enjoyed revisiting old stories, some of them repeatedly, but it’s the character’s next adventure that’s the one I most want to see. That changed here. I like Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor a lot – well, I must, I’ve written fic with her twice (haven’t published the second one yet) and I hadn’t completed any fic with any Doctor since about 1993 – and I’m looking forward to series thirteen. I’m also looking forward to giving her run another spin for this silly old blog, starting in November and running to the blog’s conclusion in January. And of course I can’t wait to hear who Russell T. Davies has cast as the Doctor to follow her.

But Capaldi, despite starring in two of the episodes I loathe the most and two others that just broke my heart they were so disappointing, he’s my Doctor for good, I think. The other 36 are all complete gems and I love them to pieces. He was brilliant, just brilliant as the Doctor. When everything clicked, his run was silly, heartbreaking, thrilling, intelligent, and ridiculous. Emphasis on heartbreaking, often. Donna Noble is probably my favorite companion of them all, but Nardole and Bill are right behind her.

The saddest moment in all of Doctor Who comes when he regenerates, and the new hand is smaller, and the wedding ring celebrating the marriage to River Song slips off her finger, and it falls to the floor, and it is never mentioned again.

Davies, get on that.

Doctor Who 10.9 – Empress of Mars

Normally, I keep future events in Doctor Who a secret from the kid, but every so often, I can’t resist. The kid likes the Ice Warriors, so we watched the “next time” trailer a couple of days ago, and then I pulled up episode four of “The Monster of Peladon” to remind him of the Ice Warriors’ weapons.

It was the sort of thing that, once upon a time, the novelizations and the comic strips explained with more color and detail. The Martians use these sonic cannons that cause huge crushes that contort their victims. Back in 1974, they realized this with a simple, but memorable, effect. The image of the actors was reflected in a thin mirrored panel which technicians folded together. These days, special effects tech has moved on, and now… now it just looks ridiculous. It’s grisly and morbid seeing a human being crushed into a sphere about the size of a basketball, but I think unless you’re familiar with old novelizations and comic strips, the actual image is so thunderously silly that it takes you out of the experience.

And it’s just like me being a picky old fanboy to get hung up on that and let it be the most memorable thing about this episode, because there’s just too darn much here to like. It’s the final script – for now – for the series from Mark Gatiss, who debuted back in the first series of the revival with “The Unquiet Dead” and has been a reliable hand throughout the show’s run… and he has a second acting appearance coming up as well before he bows out. I think it’s terrific, and our son enjoyed the daylights out of it. It’s got British soldiers on the moon in 1881, an old music hall song, a criminal with the perfect name of Jackdaw, Nardole making a deal with the devil, and the most delightfully surprising cameo almost at the end.

Speaking of being a picky old fanboy, the list-making teenager that I was in the eighties would like to note that while the Ice Warriors occasionally picked fights with Cybermen and Draconians in the old comics, this is the first story I’ve ever seen that has both the Warriors and the Master in it. On the other hand, Missy doesn’t actually share any screen time here with them. Ah, well!

Maybe Gatiss has told all the Who tales that he really wants to tell, and maybe after being a regular and reliable scriptwriter and – I suspect – sounding board for thirteen years (!), he might well be done. But I enjoyed most of his stories very much, and I probably liked “Sleep No More” more than anybody else did, so I’d be thrilled to see him return. I am writing this, after all, just the day after the BBC announced that Russell T. Davies is coming back to take the show over again in 2023. Stranger things have definitely happened.

Doctor Who 9.9 – Sleep No More

After the last Doctor Who story that we watched, we talked to our kid about how, even at its dopiest and most unlikely, good science fiction should make you think about something in the real world that isn’t quite right. In that case, it was war and radicalization. In this one, I’m reminded of how the stories about Amazon tell us that the warehouse employees’ restroom breaks are monitored and how spending that half-minute washing your hands is a good way to find your advancement prospects limited. For what it’s worth, a co-worker who used to be on my team before moving to another department, who had no reason to lie about it, came to us from the Amazon warehouse a few miles north of Chattanooga, and he said those stories are blown out of proportion and he really enjoyed working there.

Well, true or half-true, within the found-footage horror story about monsters made from sleep mucus, there’s a beautifully angry revelation in Mark Gatiss’s script for “Sleep No More” about the business world of the 38th Century. They’ve figured out a way to compact sleep into five minutes so that workers can keep pushing and get an edge on their corporation’s competitors. It isn’t a wholly original idea – Judge Dredd introduced sleep machines in the late seventies, I think – but the way the episode presents this to the audience via a sales pitch from the company is remarkably devious and real. Compare to how angry the episode “Oxygen” from the next series will be about a similar issue, and then marvel at the missed opportunity of “Kerblam!” in series eleven.

We see Doctor Who on BBC America, whose unfortunate employees are tasked with the unenviable job of finding places to insert commercials. The program always suffers from this, because it’s not made with any kind of rise or fall in the narrative to stick an ad in it. But somehow “Sleep No More” was one of the episodes that I felt was wrecked by ads more than almost any others, and in fact we ended that night in 2015 kind of disappointed with it. It wasn’t until I gave it another spin after the DVD release in the middle of the night that it clicked with me. I think it’s a very strong story with lots of fun little surprises, and who can resist the Doctor and Clara arguing about putting “space” in front of common words just because they’re not on Earth and need to identify a “space restaurant,” or who gets to name the new monsters. Of course the Doctor gets to do that. If you let somebody like Fulton Mackay name them, they end up being called Silurians instead of Eocenes or Devonians.

Doctor Who 8.3 – Robot of Sherwood

Sadly, for me, Mark Gatiss’s “Robot of Sherwood” is overshadowed by the BBC’s last-minute decision to hack a minute out of the climax. Shortly before it aired, terrorists operating out of Iraq murdered two American journalists by beheading them. Somebody at the BBC decided that having the Sheriff of Nottingham lose his head and reveal that he’s a robot and it didn’t bother him too much was too close to the ugly reality. So they edited the broadcast master to lose the decapitation, and, owing to some internal policy about not issuing alternate versions and forcing British taxpayers to pay to see the full, intended edition, it has not been seen on Blu-ray or DVD. Fortunately, a black and white work print had been floating around file-sharing sites. Finding the “Robot of Sherwood” deleted scene only takes seconds.

I think it’s vandalism, pure and simple, and I hate that it overshadows such a fun and silly romp. I like this episode’s speed: it rockets from set piece to set piece with barely an establishing shot. Our son doesn’t have a huge amount of experience with Robin Hood, apart from the Disney cartoon, so I made sure to show him the publicity photo of Patrick Troughton from the 1953 series, which is surely among the very best of all Doctor Who Easter eggs. He enjoyed it very much, especially the dungeon scene.

An Adventure in Space and Time (2013)

Y’all know me, or at least regular readers do. I love surprising our son with what we’re going to watch. And if I say so myself, I was positively devilishly clever in surprising him this week. As always, he demands to know what’s coming up – and often I do tell him, because I’m mischievous and not mean – and this time, I was pretty whimsical. I told him that we were watching something with three actors he’s seen fairly recently in Doctor Who. It stars Jessica Raine, who he saw earlier this month in the episode “Hide”, as a television producer, along with Sacha Dhawan, the Master in the most recent series, as a television director, and David Bradley, who was the villain in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, as an actor who gets the role of a lifetime. Plus it was written by Mark Gatiss, who had written all sorts of Who adventures.

Of course, the downside to being deliberately oblique and obscure is that it dampens the enthusiasm somewhat. There was no boy standing at the foot of the stairs at the crack of dawn demanding an immediate start to the promised spectacle. This was a boy who took his sweet time finding breakfast and flopped on the sofa with the weight of obligation. Then I told him it was a true story and had no explosions, chase scenes, or fight scenes. But his eyes widened and he started to smile when he recognized the weird and distinctive “howlaround” visuals used in the original Who title sequence.

Hey, waitaminnit, my copy of that book has William Hartnell’s face on it!

Anyway, as part of Who‘s 50th anniversary celebrations, Mark Gatiss successfully pitched the idea of a docudrama about William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor, and how the show was made, from an idea by a Canadian avalanche of an executive named Sydney Newman, played here by the awesome Brian Cox, and built into life by Verity Lambert and a team that included director Waris Hussein, associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, and designer Peter Brachacki. The show takes a few small liberties with history – but don’t they all? – but it’s also full of love and in-jokes and affection.

Put another way, I enjoy most of Gatiss’s Who stories very much, and I still wonder where in the world a TV adaptation of his novel Nightshade is hiding, but An Adventure in Space and Time may be his masterpiece. This was the fourth time I’ve watched this movie and I’ve been a teary mess every single time. Lots of stories are full of triumph and feature long, sad endings, but there’s so much affection and care for this story that it just punches me in the gut, hard.

One small part of this is a weirdly personal one. Without his Hartnell wig, David Bradley looks quite a lot like my grandfather, Joseph Trummie Goggans. During the climactic “I don’t want to go” moment, he looks precisely like my grandfather. The first time I saw this, in between moments of cold fury at BBC America for all the breathtakingly poorly placed commercial breaks, I probably stopped breathing from sorrow. Then when Hartnell looks across the TARDIS console and sees that everything will be okay… I had to dry my left eye again just now typing this.

Unfortunately, for a nine year-old, that long, sad ending was probably a little too long and a little too sad. Our son enjoyed this to a point, but really it was just the triumphs that kept him rivetted. Happily, the triumphs are really spectacular. The introduction of the Daleks, the “pied piper” bit on Hartnell’s day off in the park, and Newman telling Lambert that the space monsters had brought them 10 million viewers all scored. He stays mostly quiet during movies, but he enjoyed getting in a dig when the ratings justified the budget overspending that Newman was discussing with some BBC executive played by Mark Eden. Eden is one of several performers from the original run of Who to make little cameos. William Russell, Carole Ann Ford, Jean Marsh, and Anneke Wills also got to enjoy the fun.

An Adventure in Space and Time is a beautiful look back to London, 1963, full of great clothes and hair and cars and the BBC’s big round television centre and the smoke from a million cigarettes. If the movie has a flaw at all, it’s that they cut too much out of the very short segment where electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire and her associate Brian Hodgson demonstrate their work, but at least more of it’s available as a deleted scene on the Blu-ray. But it’s a film full of magic and wonder and sadness and it’s far better than most movies that were released on the big screen. Do I like it more than the actual 50th anniversary episode? We’ll see later this week.

Doctor Who 7.12 – The Crimson Horror

It’s not like I was chomping at the bit for a Paternoster Gang spinoff series in 2013 – I’m nowhere near as enamored of these characters as their many fans – but it felt absolutely true then that the BBC missed a trick in not making one, and it feels triply true today. First because the Disney+ streaming service is proving pretty conclusively that there is definitely a market in keeping spinoffs rolling along and engaging fans, and second because our son likes the characters even more than I’d have guessed. Why is the corporation lazily trundling forward making fewer hours of Doctor Who every year? I guess they don’t have enough money. They certainly don’t have enough ambition.

Anyway, Mark Gatiss’s “The Crimson Horror” isn’t a favorite, but there’s still a lot to like. Diana Rigg is the villain, which is pretty appropriate, since the story feels a lot like it’s an Avengers plot in places. I particularly enjoyed Jenny learning that the factory is a fake, with old gramophones playing the sounds of machinery in an otherwise empty room. That’s exactly the sort of visual Mrs. Peel would have stumbled onto forty-seven years previously.

While overall he liked this one a lot, our son was confused by Diana Rigg’s character leading a temperance sermon about the moral decay of the age in order to drive recruiting for her mysterious planned community. We paused to explain how this sort of thing was very common, and how he’d actually seen something a little similar in an episode of Legend that we watched a little over a year ago. With typical nine year-old behavior, he could tell you everything about Ezra and Ahsoka and all the tech in any given episode of Star Wars Rebels, but old Westerns that he politely tolerated have mostly evaporated. “I must not have liked that story very much,” he shrugged.

Doctor Who 7.9 – Cold War

During supper tonight, I gave the kid – and Marie, who knows little of early eighties synth music – a potted history of Ultravox, from their cold and clinical early days with John Foxx as the singer through their huge success with such hits as “Vienna” and “Reap the Wild Wind.” I even sang that bit from “Vienna,” which nobody appreciated. I explained that Ultravox, like all acts who have a solid period with lots of hits, reached the end of their period of massive sales quicker than anybody would like, and split up about 1987. Nothing lasts forever.

“So we’re watching Doctor Who tonight?” our son asked.

“What makes you think Doctor Who has anything to do with Ultravox?” I replied.

“Because it’s more likely that a show about time travel would have something to do with Ultravox than a show set in Zoo Neeland or ancient Greece.” Clever kid.

This focus on fondly-remembered musical acts kept him perfectly distracted, satisfying him as guest star David Warner warbled “Vienna” almost as badly as I did, so the surprise appearance of an Ice Warrior, back in the show after a thirty-nine (!) year absence blindsided him wonderfully. The more excited he gets, the more babbling he can’t stop, and he could not stop babbling for an hour. He was thrilled.

I enjoy most of Mark Gatiss’s scripts for Who. I think this one sags a bit in the middle, the result of too much action at the top and the tail, but it’s still very entertaining and fabulously claustrophobic. It’s one of those Whos that plays out in nearly real time, meaning that Martian spaceship at the end must have a heck of a good radio receiver and quite an engine. The kid was thrilled and said that he knew he was going to like it when he realized it was an Ice Warrior, but he liked it even more than he thought he would. I like the Ice Warriors a lot. I even like them more than I like Ultravox.

Doctor Who 6.13 – The Wedding of River Song

I think our kid summed up the majority of viewers when he called this one “completely and totally ridiculous.” It’s a mess, sometimes a very entertaining mess, but I really believe this was a draft or two away from being really satisfying. I did warn him that Steven Moffat’s story throws viewers right in at the deep end, which is part of the problem for me. There’s so much lunatic spectacle, with Romans and pterodactyls and Wars of the Roses eating up so much time that could have been spent detailing the story and giving the characters more room and time to breathe.

The biggest disappointment that comes from this business of throwing everything at the wall is that the Doctor and River’s handfasting is far, far too rushed. There’s about a minute of screen time regurgitating that business of “the universe thinks you’re wonderful and won’t let you die” bit from Moffat’s “Curse of Fatal Death” that could have been given to the Doctor and River to just talk quietly about how she felt, instead of desperately shouting because there’s no time.

I don’t know why I wanted this in particular to be better, but I really did. The whole production is achingly close to pleasing me, but there’s just too much going on to distract from the heart and soul of it.

On the other hand, Moffat pulls a really great sequence out of his hat when the Soothsayer starts telling Ian McNeice’s character of Emperor Churchill what all has gone wrong with time. Over the space of about three minutes, the Doctor decapitates a damaged Dalek, looks for dead men in shady taverns, is a contestant in a game of coliseum death chess, and deals with some carnivorous skulls in a catacomb. I’ve often referred back to the wonderful line of comics from Doctor Who Magazine, and this sequence feels effortlessly like kicking back and reading about six of those Steve Moore – Dave Gibbons one-shots from 1981 back to back. Montages like this happen a few times in Moffat’s tenure, but this is my favorite of them.

Oh, and the actor playing death chess against the Doctor is actor/writer Mark Gatiss, under a ton of prosthetics and makeup, to look like Rondo Hatton. He’s credited under the pseudonym “Rondo Haxton.” I thought about asking the kid whether that character didn’t look an awful lot like the big mean henchman in The Rocketeer, but I don’t think he enjoyed the story enough to appreciate it. Maybe he’ll like the DVD bonus mini-episodes better.

Doctor Who 6.9 – Night Terrors

Our son remained silent and attentive through this story until about forty minutes in, when he grumbled “There are some episodes of some programs that I just don’t like, and this is one of them.” He didn’t connect to this story about a terrified kid with psychic powers at all. We talked a little afterward and figure it’s possibly because even though our son has his own nighttime rituals, he’s never really experienced the monster-under-the-bed sort of phobias that this kid has, and couldn’t understand why George was afraid of absolutely everything.

As for me, Matt Smith sells a really excellent moment where the Doctor talks about how far into space George’s psychic message traveled, and structurally it’s a far better script than Mark Gatiss’s previous contribution, “Victory of the Daleks”, but it dissolves into another power of love resolution and never really gelled for me. Our son noticed the similarities between this apartment block and the Powell Estate from series one and two, but that location seemed much more real and full of people. The only people we see in this building have speaking parts. There’s no life or energy in the script or in the place they filmed it.

Doctor Who 5.3 – Victory of the Daleks

Yesterday afternoon, I finished watching the Blu-ray set for Who season fourteen – you can announce the next one now, please, BBC Studios – and our son joined me for the hilarious little TV commercial for the line of Doctor Who dolls from 1977. The funniest thing about these dopey toys is that the Dalek is massively out of proportion with the other characters, coming up to Leela’s chest, which sparked some discussion about how tall the Dalek should be. Then the very next episode we watch introduces some new, taller Daleks, as if to confuse the issue.

Ian McNeice’s character of Winston Churchill, seen in a little cameo in the previous episode, makes his second of four appearances in this story. It was written by Mark Gatiss and it’s my least favorite of his otherwise splendid scripts by about a million miles.

The worst moment? Out of lots of possibilities, it’s the way it feels like Gatiss and Moffat were keenly aware of fans and critics grumbling about “power of love” resolutions to various Russell T. Davies-era stories and so, just to remind everybody who’s in charge, they literally defuse a sentient bomb with false memories by reminding it how unrequited love feels. Then everybody hugs and pats themselves on the back to remind viewers how brilliant and amazing they are, and despite Churchill’s desire for war-winning tech being a running gag, they leave the sentient bomb in wartime London instead of dropping it and the rest of the alien gadgets off on a Robot Free Planet in the Andromeda Galaxy in the 276th Century.

The kid loved it, of course. I try to tell myself that’s all that matters, but one day he’s going to grow up and move out and, at least for a time and maybe even for good, will lose interest in Doctor Who and I’ll be sadly reflecting that it only took Gatiss and Moffat three weeks to show an episode as bad as Davies’s worst. Oddly enough, that episode, “Fear Her,” had one of those “power of love” endings as well.

I think the second half of the Silurian story is even worse. We’ll see in a couple of weeks.

Doctor Who 3.6 – The Lazarus Experiment

Our kid’s figuring this whole television thing out. We pointed out that this was not the first time that a mysterious figure called “Harold Saxon” was mentioned in the recent set-on-Earth stories. He chewed on it for a second and said “We’ll probably find out who he is at the end of the season.”

So today’s episode is a pretty simple monster movie that bends, with minimal effort, into the Who format, although giving a scientist who wants to live forever and cheat death a name like Lazarus is a bit on-the-nose for any silly sci-fi adventure. Lazarus is played by Mark Gatiss, who had written a couple of previous episodes and has a few more really good scripts to come. Lazarus, in a supremely silly moment even for this often exceptionally silly series, somehow transforms into an enormous CGI monster. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it does result in an eye-poppingly grotesque beast to scare the kids. Our son described this one as “a skeleton-human-scorpion mix” and really enjoyed being grossed out – slash – frightened by it.

Despite being every bit as scientifically nonsensical as the previous story, I still have a soft spot for this one for lots of small reasons. I like Martha’s relationship with her family, I like Gatiss as the villain, and I really do enjoy the ending, which is set in a big old London cathedral. In much the same way that “Gridlock” had been a small tribute to 2000 AD, this story is a clear tip-of-the-hat to the BBC’s original Quatermass serial from 1953, which also ends in a big showdown in a cathedral. The later episodes of that serial were shown live and were never actually telerecorded – almost as though the BBC wanted to save its people the trouble of actually destroying them twenty years later – but the story was remade as a film by Hammer in 1955 called The Quatermass Xperiment which most everybody involved in this episode knew backwards and forwards. That’s certainly the case with both David Tennant and Mark Gatiss, who had actually performed in a live restaging of The Quatermass Xperiment for BBC Four just two years before they made this!