The Definite Article

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.

There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”

I see what he’s doing, but—😅

It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.

I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.

Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.

Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.

I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.

I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.

Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?

The Purge

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So now New Who has been around for about as long as Doctor Who was when Sue Malden first did an audit and realized that the BBC no longer retained big hunks of the first eleven years of the show (many of which have since been filled in; many famously will likely never be). To get an idea of the insanity here, what would this look like if transposed to the modern era? Well, it wouldn’t be precise because of all the differences in production, episode length, episode count. We’ve got all these gap years as well. But, we can make a stab at it!

“Heaven Sent” (Doctor Who series 9, episode 11; 2015)

On first tally, much of the material from 2005-2016 would just be gone; no copies known to exist. That would be up through Peter Capaldi’s second series as the Doctor. After freaking out a little, we would later be able to fill the gaps from copies sold abroad or misfiled somewhere, albeit often in the wrong aspect, resolution, framerate—and for reasons, lots of episodes from 2011-2016 would now only exist in black-and-white, so we’d have to find a way to deal with that.

After pulling in all the favors and scouring the globe, we’d be able to lock down everything from series 6 (2011) on in some form or other, though much of it would need heavy restoration work. we’d have most of series 1, 2, and 5, but 3 and 4 would basically just be gone, the odd episode or fragment aside, and we’d only have half the 2009 specials. We would, however, have plenty of screenshots—and, curiously, complete audio for every episode, carefully reassembled from fan reaction videos on YouTube.

From series 1 (2005) we’d really only be missing the renowned early Slitheen story which all the kids remember being excited about at the time, and a middle segment of the finale, “Parting of the Ways.” From series 2, just half of “The Satan Pit” two-parter.

“Aliens of London” (Doctor Who series 1, episode 4; 2005)

Series five (2010), we’d have in entirety except for this one dull-sounding story where the doctor shares a room with someone, that based on the synopsis and the available screenshots regularly comes in at the bottom of episode polls.

Perhaps the most frustrating loss is of 2009’s epic “The End of Time,” which fan circles generally recognize as the best Doctor Who serial ever on the basis of the pivotal material it covers and the fact that the description just sounds really cool you know—as well as the classic favorite “Planet of the Dead.”

Anyway, you see how insane it was when Ms. Malden bothered to look and realized, oh. you know. we just… threw all that away, huh. We wiped every copy, because by 21st-century standards we needed the hard drive space for ongoing episodes of Graham Norton.

See, you get all these apologists waxing about, well, they didn’t know any better back then; it was a different time. Yes they did, though! Other shows—look, the producer of Blue Peter put in an order that every single episode of her show be retained, in consideration of its long-term cultural value. We didn’t just invent basic foresight and reasoning capability in 1980. (Though we may yet find it someday!) Like any kind of garbage. in any given time period there are always people who knew better. When they did The Fucking Talons of Weng-Chiang, it was 1977. There were many people in 1977 who would have been capable of seeing the racial depictions in that serial and noticing that they were in fact Not Okay.

It’s complicated, right. as things will be. The purge was just this comedy of miscommunication, with some people assuming that of course someone would hang onto things in some other department, other people assuming of course they wouldn’t; people forgetting to put in orders of retention; other people misfiling, losing stuff. What we’ve managed to get back is this patchwork: some from the BBC Film Library, which asserted it wasn’t their responsibility to hold onto the show and that they very much shouldn’t have any copies at all actually; some from the Engineering Department, which only held onto tapes until they were needed for something else, which could be a matter of weeks after first broadcast (in the case of some late Jon Pertwee serials).

Most of what survives is a film prints made for foreign broadcast. Most of those were retained briefly by BBC Enterprises before getting burned to clear shelf space—since hey, they were just copies, right? Other prints made their way accidentally back to the Film Library or the National Film Archive, neither of which was supposed to hang onto them, but they were so disorganized that they didn’t bother to sort them out for disposal. Other prints were found abroad or in church basements or rummage sales, years later.

So yeah, the assertion that, nobody knew any better, nobody thought like this back then—that’s… not true. In the same way that it never is. Some people didn’t! Some very much did! The problem is that nobody talked to anyone, everyone just assuming their map of the world was the correct one.

And that problem, that’s… not one that’s gonna go away soon, huh.

The Long Game

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Lady Cassandra O’Brien feels like she should bother me more than she does. On principle she’s… not great, right, but in practice it’s hard to even frown that hard. The trans element is misjudged, probably. but I don’t see it as malicious. I know Davies has readily evolved as he’s learned, and admitted his past limitations.

There’s also this thing with progressive transgressive humor, right. You start by making a joke about something, someone unmentionable. The transgression isn’t in demeaning the unmentionable; it’s for acknowledging it. admitting to an uncomfortable world that it exists. Making it a joke gets it in the door at all. When later that existence is normalized such that we’re not discussing validity and rights and compassion, the initial jokes can come off as cruel and insensitive—the sort of thing the regressive sort will latch onto, to try tear down what legitimacy has been built.

If you keep moving long enough, any landmark that once was a step forward becomes a step back. But that marker, its inherent value isn’t gonna always sit in relation to where things are now.

Doctor Who came back 15 years ago. Davies is an angry, militant anarcho-humanist. The offhanded trans joke with Cassandra was probably tasteless then as it would be now, but all things considered to me it doesn’t read as mean-spirited. Kind of the opposite, weirdly; it’s in the spirit of, can we get away with pushing the window here? If we make it a dumb joke, just maybe! This is in contrast to some other things one could cite, like the dialogue in any given Toby Whithouse episode—or, you know, Gareth Roberts. As a person. I know how Davies’ mind works, at least in creative terms, and so try as I might to disassemble this, it’s… fine?

That angry queerness is what connects 2005 Doctor Who to the last time the show was regularly broadcast, and in some ways back to its anarchist, marginalized roots. If we’re gonna get prescriptive, this is to my mind the mode that the show should be working in.

With the Cartmel era, Ace of course is meant to be… bi at least, if not finding her feet as a lesbian. And then serials like The Happiness Patrol, well. For those outside UK queer circles, section 28 may possibly not mean much in 2020, but it’s no accident that this tale of the state suppression of public displays of melancholy—everyone is compelled to be happy all the time, right—hits at the exact moment as legislation banning public displays of, depiction of, discussion of, homosexuality. Under the terms of that very law we can’t talk about how it’s illegal to be gay—but illegal to be sad? Just reverse the polarity and the censors will never notice. Then we can paint the TARDIS pink, and fill the story with glitter and candy—

Or… by 2018 standards, I guess we can rescue Amazon from the evil labor organizers so that society doesn’t collapse without its cheap merchandise.

The McCoy era of course deeply informed Davies. The 2005 episode, “The Long Game,” is based on an old spec script he wrote at the time for the Seventh Doctor and Ace. If you reach back, there is sort of a long predecessor to The Happiness Patrol in The Macra Terror—my sometimes-vote for maybe the best story of the Troughton era—which itself is a story Davies referenced at his best and most bonkers, in “Gridlock.”

Which, speaking of trans jokes, is a word that… I just… misread as another word entirely.

Basically, Doctor Who should be batshit and earnest, and it needs to have something to say. My mind so often reels when people assert the opposite, as with the popular fan response to Ghost Light, In that story, Ace gives a haunted monologue about a formative memory of a hate crime she witnessed against her friend. Apparently that whole scene, and by extension the serial and the era in general, is prime cringe because Ace references “the white kids” when she herself is white. “The white kids firebombed it!” the fans will chuckle at each other.

The same fans who think the one flaw in Talons is a shitty giant rat puppet.

(Which is, incidentally, the very best part of the serial. It’s so charming!)

It was such a good thing for this fandom when all the teenage girls began to rush in about 15 years ago, terrifying the aging-out middle-class white cis dudes. And that’s who Davies brought to the game. That’s who he wanted. That’s who he knew would make a difference.

Davies was right. For its own health, the fandom needed a massive change in its gender makeup. It was a Big Trans plot the whole time. His long game, if you will.

Punitive Narrative Justice

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Redemption is a reductive kind of moralism. 

Zuko doesn’t really have a redemption arc, because he was never “bad.” The Diamonds don’t really have a redemption arc, because they never become “good.” Redemption is a weird external moralistic concept that has nothing to do with individual character development or lack thereof.

To put it another way: The Last Airbender never condemns Zuko, so forgiveness isn’t the point of the story; and Steven Universe never forgives the Diamonds, because nothing could ever make up for what they did.

This isn’t to say that the characters don’t change their behavior for the better. What I’m criticizing is a binary and extrinsic reading of morality in relation to narrative function, as opposed to an intrinsic reading of situational character motivation. 

Redemption is an externally imposed concept that doesn’t allow for agency or intention, but rather describes a functional narrative approach to character. It suggests: 

  1. an innate change of a character’s essence, 
  2. to serve the demands of another’s morality…

… which is a simplistic understanding of psychology, social dynamics, and… just, judgment. Really, redemption is all about judgment, which lies in the perspective of the narrative voice. It’s an external thing, where the story passes sentence on characters and demands that they change who they are in order to suit its morality and make up for their past sins, and to thereby be forgiven by the story. Which is a super basic concept of humanity that doesn’t apply in either case above.

Zuko is shown from pretty close to the start as a victim; he’s not a Bad Guy who Turns Good. His arc is a matter of self-realization and emergence from an abuse narrative, and its resolution involves reaching a common understanding, not repaying moral debt.

And the Diamonds, they are never forgiven. They change their behavior out of argument for how it’s not helping them achieve their own individual intentions. Even at the end, they are shown to be extremely self-centered characters who have difficulty understanding anything outside of how it affects them directly. Steven tolerates them at a stretch, once they change their behavior enough that they no longer pose a threat to others. But what they did will never be okay, no matter what they do, and the story makes no pretense of balancing the scales. 

Compare to, say, something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the characters of Angel or Spike. In the case of Spike the protagonists stick a microchip in him, taking away his agency, until he gets used to behaving the way they want him to. With Angel, the change mostly happens before we meet him. But the notion is that they’re Bad characters who become Good, and then feel sorry and try to make amends for what they’ve done. Similarly Missy, in the Peter Capaldi era of Doctor Who, undergoes a redemption after serving penitence for years in solitary confinement and out of a desire to please the Doctor and try to play out his concept of morality. 

In all cases, there’s this notion of penitence and turning from Evil. With Spike the change comes after the microchip, which changes his behavior until he becomes accustomed to the new way of being, even after it’s removed. It’s a punitive, judgmental, carceral sort of a moralism. The idea is to show people how Bad they are until they are ashamed of themselves and they want to stop being Bad—”Go to your room and think about what you did”—all of which ignores the complexities of how and why people do things based on their understanding and their systemic context, and treats others as lacking a degree of agency independent of those passing judgment on them and their own individual interests.

You are not a person, the redemption narrative asserts; you are a story function within my life. 

Capaldi and Coleman: Bigger Than a Joke

  • Reading time:8 mins read
I’m not so wild about Moffat; as a writer, he’d pretty much used up all his ideas by the end of 2007, and from then through 2013 mostly set about remixing them in increasingly self-aggrandizing ways.

But from 2014-2017, something rather astounding happened: he started to listen to people, and he started to look inward. He was still Steven Moffat, but he began to question how and why he did the things he did, and out of that came actual art. Some of the best writing, and best creative direction, the show has ever had; better than nearly anything in the previous 50 years of the show. Granted, this energy began to taper a bit after 2015 — understandably given that 2017 was a padding year, after he’d already resolved to go but before Chibnall was able to take the show off his hands, and that Moffat suffered some personal issues along the way — but his final series was still stronger than anything else he’d done outside of the previous two, and stronger than most runs of Doctor Who in general.

Before 2014, Doctor Who on television hadn’t really been big on character development. I don’t mean growth here; characters had grown, as far back as William Hartnell’s Doctor and particularly over Davies’ time. Even Moffat’s previous writing, stilted as it was on a human level, had characters increasing their RPG stats, if you will, as they went along. But this goes beyond the (wonderful) melodrama of Davies or the later Cartmel era. This is more out of literature: defining a character trait, establishing its logical dimensions, and then spending a book’s length exploring what that means, both in terms of the character’s inner life and behavior, and its consequences when applied to a world defined outside the character.

It’s kind of basic stuff for serious fiction, but it’s not really where Doctor Who has ever gone before. The show has always been too focused on the moment, and how to play up the brilliant, often abstract ideas (or, more likely, plodding base under siege) that it’s exploring right now, to spend much time on the, for lack of a better phrasing, philosophy of its perspective. Even Davies’ characters, as gorgeously as he maps out their minds and reactions and speech patterns, are defined as simple declarations that we’re meant to glom onto and just carry forward, nodding as events bounce off of their defined personalities in ways we can easily trace.

And Moffat has never really been much for psychology. He’s not interested in how other people think, in the way that Davies is. It’s a bit of a truism, yet still mostly true, that as a consequence he has mostly written ciphers. His writing serves to deliver sitcom jokes, often with plot revelations as the punchlines. He’s so manic about control over the narrative and the notion of spoilers for the same reason a comedian doesn’t want you yelling out the punchline before he reaches the end of his joke. That’s his thing. It’s always been his formula as a writer, and he’s only ever had so many jokes to tell. His first three series as showrunner were labored attempts at building bigger, more complex versions of those same few jokes, each retelling more tortured than the last as he tried so hard to cast the structure in a new light. In this model, Moffat’s characters are as two-dimensional as the foils in a vaudeville routine. They’re not meant as earnest explorations of the human condition; their function is vehicles to deliver jibes. Which is why in place of Davies’ carefully blended dialogue with Moffat we mostly get one-liners, put-downs, and pure exposition.

His run from 2014 to 2015 changes all of that. He’s still Steven Moffat, and he’s still carrying around his well-worn sack of tricks, but here he approaches the show from a different angle entirely. He’s more settled, more measured. More thoughtful. And somehow out of that convoluted, often tortured long-joke structure he carves room for meditation. A kind of meditation that hadn’t come before, from any writer or era; not at this kind of a length, not with this much time and control to keep on dwelling and prodding. And out of this we have the most psychologically complex Doctor and companion, and Doctor-companion relationship, in the show’s history. With this as the show’s new story and narrative baseline, Moffat is free to Moff off and toss his toys around the room, as in otherwise by-then trad scripts like “Listen,” and suddenly they take on a greater significance by the tricks acting in aid of a greater narrative cause rather than simply to conduct the story in their own right.

Of particular note is series 8. On top of the sudden focus on character development, there’s this excited shift in narrative structure, with a mix of nonlinear scene editing (e.g., that whole sitcom sequence in Into the Dalek where Danny fails to ask Clara out on a date) and longer scenes with more dialogue, a pair of minor innovations that play out to their logical extremes early on, in “Listen,” but then continue throughout the run. And then there’s the way it revels in recurring thematic beats, in a way I’m not sure the show has before. Nearly every episode, leading up to the finale, involves one or more of the following:

  • Soldiers
  • Cyborgs
  • Cyborg soldiers
  • A companion who wasn’t, possibly for one of the above reasons

That’s off the top of my head. When I was watching the first time I had a longer list of things the scripts kept riffing on, prodding from different angles, lending the whole run of episodes an unprecedented sort of thematic unity. But I’m sure it’s clear what character and story elements the above serve to reflect.

That’s the thing about a good story: however complex it may be, it tends to be a fractal, with any part representing the whole and the whole representing any part. Again this is fairly basic when we’re talking about literature, but — well, Doctor Who has never really aimed for literature before. It’s been doing its own thing, often rather well. Here, Moffat takes aim with his golden arrow and nails that space ship right in the bull’s eye.

Series 9 is an astoundingly good sequel, exploring the fallout of everything that drives series 8, and the two of them make a greater whole, but series 8 is where most of the hard work happens. It’s where Moffat learned to listen. So that’s the one that really stands out to me as a revelation.

(Although Series 10 is in more ways than one Moffat’s hangover series, and both stretched thin and disjointed in a way the previous two aren’t, it’s also often the most refined culmination of Moffat’s artistry, and individual moments over these twelve episodes are some of the best moments of the entire show. It’s an afterthought, but also a worthy coda.)

It helps that at this time Moffat also found a new backing band; a more sympathetic stable of writers, interested in pushing the show to new extremes and exploring its creative fabric more than the ultra-trad fan contingent on whom Moffat had largely relied to that time (when he wasn’t chasing down one-off celebrity writers). The likes of Dollard and Mathieson embody Moffat’s own shift in priorities, and their earnestness mixed with roiling creative insight give the show the added boost of energy to really develop it into its own thing. It’s interesting to see that even as the first half of series 8 mostly uses “safe hands” to pedal in the new Doctor, Moffat still co-writes nearly every script, shaping it to be a bit more than it would otherwise be. This is unprecedented for him, and it shows the extent to which he actually had a vision for the show, that none of the familiar writers were of much help in capturing.

None of this is new from me. I play my own familiar tunes. But I really think the last three years have been a creative renaissance of the sort we haven’t seen since Andrew Cartmel. But it’s all the more remarkable, because it’s more like Andrew Cartmel had never existed, and instead somehow those last three years of the 1980s had been Saward all along, after some major revelation, and they had turned out exactly as they did. I’m not sure we’ll see a progression like this again, and it’s a pretty damned interesting case study.

A Town Called Mercy

  • Reading time:7 mins read

It’s been a few years, and I imagine that this episode has rightly faded from memory for most people — and yet its writer, Toby Whithouse, is still regularly held in a mystifying high regard by Doctor Who fans, to the extent that many were disappointed he wasn’t picked for the new showrunner over Chris Chibnall.

To the best I can figure, this acclaim is based on two crutches: that he happened to write the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the show (along with K-9), and that since then he hasn’t done anything to dramatically upset the ship. At least, not until his series 10 episode, which I suppose stands most clearly in contrast with the two identical yet decreasingly interesting episodes that preceded it.

It’s in this light that I think back to “A Town Called Mercy,” one of my votes for worst-ever New Who episodes, yes. Only a couple of other clear contenders for the prize, and none has gone as far to disrupt my faith in the show and its creative rudder.

To quote another commentator, homunculette:

It’s like Toby Whithouse decided to write a Western without attempting to do any research into what Westerns are like or any historical research into the time period and instead just wrote it from his memories of seeing like one Clint Eastwood movie as a kid. It’s mind-numbingly boring, morally trite, and tosses off a casually transphobic joke for no reason.

This honestly describes so many scripts of the era (e.g., “Curse of the Black Spot”). But “Mercy” is just particularly vacuous, even for Whithouse and even for seasons 6-7. It doesn’t even begin to make an argument for its existence, beyond showing off a different location. One of the fun things about a tired form is that it’s ripe for deconstruction, or salvaging. Sergio Leone did this to astounding success, and there’s no reason a show like Doctor Who couldn’t find something to interrogate about the Wild West.

It’s done it before, of course. However one may feel about The Gunfighters, it’s a genuinely funny and unapologetically weird comedy that makes a point of playing off and against genre tropes, as with the Doctor getting increasingly exasperated that people keep putting guns in his hand. Even if the finished serial is an acquired taste (one I have acquired), it’s written with wit and observation, neither of which is in evidence with Whithouse’s work.

That lack of wit or observation — and lack of concern about that lack, which might spur curiosity and research — is to me one of Whithouse’s defining qualities. He very much reads to me as the kind of guy who takes a course in a subject, successfully follows a practice blueprint that was laid out for him, and decides he’s now got it down to a science. Every script of his, it’s like he’s playing Mad Libs with an entry level screenwriting textbook; just lifting stock conflicts and conversations and scenarios whole-cloth, and rearranging them according to the instructions. It’s the definition of mediocrity. And fandom being what it is, of course, for that he gets credit. Good job, Toby. You didn’t color outside of the lines. Solid work. What more could we reasonably ask?

Compared to some of the other modern-era mediocrity, which tends to exist in balance with some extenuating virtue, I find Whithouse’s total white-bread adequacy pernicious in regard to its stifling, blunting factor on the series. I nearly gave up on the fucking show, a show I’d obsessed over since 1999, after his cowboy episode. Others I know did give up on it halfway through his series 9 two-parter, and nothing can draw them back again.

Matthew Graham is a prime counter example. Everyone hates his first episode, and you’ll find few vocal defenders of his later two-parter. People will wonder why his Who work was so bad, compared to Life on Mars. But, seriously, take a look at how he writes. All his writing follows the same patterns, as does all of Whithouse’s, and your answers to his successes and failures are right there. Graham is also a deeply mediocre writer, who like Whithouse got lucky with a breakout genre mash-up sci-fi show. But Life on Mars is different from Being Human, and more substantial for its problems, in the same way his Doctor Who material is.

Graham is superb at coming up with pitches: visionary concepts, that he’ll flesh out with well-drawn characters, sparkling dialogue, and some astute thoughts about how and why they do what they do. This comes through in the main draw to Life on Mars — the scenario, the people who inhabit it, and how they interact — and in Rose and the Doctor’s dialogue in “Fear Her,” and all of the psychology of the Flesh duplicates. But then, once he’s sketched that basic picture, Graham has no fucking clue what to do next; where to go from there. So Life on Mars just ambles on, following no clear plan, reiterating its premise a couple times an episode for two years, until in a panic, when Simm’s had enough, Graham just picks one explanation and calls it done. Similarly, Rose and the Doctor arrive to investigate, then just mill around a suburb for 20 minutes, facing scribble monsters and other directionless first-draft material, and squandering what good will their best characterization all season may otherwise have earned.

Peter Harness is superb with coloring outside Whithouse’s carefully manicured lines, with bold, confident strokes that trace new and inspiring forms to expand the imagination and the boundaries of what the show can and should be… and then squanders much of that with a stultifying ignorance about the topics he so loves to explore. It’s exciting to see the show tackle the issues that he bring up, and then frustrating to see such a dangerously uninformed take on such prickly topics, be they science, politics, ethics. Less confidence and more research, even a modicum of research, would do Harness a wonder.

The thing about each of these cases is that the mediocrity is an end sum; a result of a real strength that benefits the show and an undisciplined tedium that nearly pulls it back to zero. In the process, though, there is dynamism. They do things with the show, that help to redefine it and internally that help to justify the effort even it it does level out in the end. Any next script might be the one where they learn to mop up their fog and their strong points will shine out clearly.

By contrast, Whithouse studiously avoids shining, in favor of an even, calculated mediocrity from start to end. This is true of his own show (compare “what if modern-day UK cop landed in corrupt 1970s department?” to “What if three monsters fashionable in other pop culture at the moment lived in apartment together?” in terms of the thought and thematic potential involved), and it’s true of his tediously recycled Lego kit Who scripts. The best you can reasonably say of the guy is that he effectively maintains the status quo and avoids making waves. And to my mind that’s also one of the most damning, and an imminent threat to a show as dynamic and reliant on vibrant change as Doctor Who.

“A Town Called Mercy” is the barest and most damning example of what he doesn’t have to say as a writer. Its only grace I can see is a ready case study for how to kill the show, or avoid doing so, to assign to future writers.

The casual transphobia is just the perfect garnish to its existential blight on the show at one of its more creatively vulnerable moments.

(On the topics of pernicious mediocrity, dangerous ignorance, and casual bigotry, I also have things to saw about Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts. But, not here; not now.)

JNT

  • Reading time:8 mins read
On a Web forum that I will not mention, a viewer on a voyage through Classic Who asked a question, before he set forth through season 18. He understood that JNT was a topic of some controversy, and wanted to know what he was in for over the next nine seasons. Is it that everyone hates JNT? What’s the deal with this era, exactly? My response:

It’s a tricky and complicated question, and to answer it we need to be careful about what exactly we’re talking about. Are we criticizing JNT as a person? Are we talking about his creative judgment? Are we talking about his approach to being a producer? Are we using JNT as metonymy for the show itself under his watch? All of these are different questions, each with a complicated and inconclusive answer.

The easiest and least troublesome topic is the show that he presided over. To that end, obviously everyone has their own view but these days you’ll see a fair consensus that JNT’s Doctor Who both began and ended well; it’s the stuff in the middle that’s up for debate.

Others have said the same here, and to my view it’s true; broadly speaking, seasons 18 and 25-26 are amongst the best Doctor Who that’s hit the TV. They’re the most consistently authored portions of the classic series, with strong views about how to use the show as a platform to communicate ideas. You get that in bits and pieces elsewhere, particularly with writers like Malcolm Hulke, but it’s rarely this focused before Davies comes around.

Part of the reason for this is, as Homunculette says, JNT’s approach to his job. And here we’re starting to get a little dicier, in that we’re starting to approach JNT as a person. But we’ll come to that slowly.

More than any other producer on the show, JNT kept rigidly to the letter of his role. He was not a creative person, by any stretch of the imagination, and his only input to the show’s content tended to be superficial: how things looked, how they were presented, what kinds of gimmicks might get people talking and increase viewership. JNT came up through the system, as a floor assistant, floor manager, and so on. When he took over the show, it was because he had put the work in and it was his time — not because he had a creative vision. The BBC was concerned about giving him the job, so for his first season they set up Barry Letts to oversee. From season 19 on, though, JNT was on his own.

With JNT’s focus almost exclusively on the practical nuts-and-bolts of balancing the budgets, networking, and getting the show made, with a growing side shift of promotion, that left the burden of the show’s “content” almost exclusively with the show’s script editor. So from a creative standpoint, under JNT the script editor basically is what we would now call a showrunner, except with little tangible executive power. They were solely responsible for the show’s creative vision.

Ergo, under JNT the show is only ever as good as the script editor. Beyond just the high-level vision and practical talents, the script editor’s relationship with JNT, and their ability to cope with the logistical demands of the job, tended to determine the show’s ultimate quality. Bidmead had a strong idea for what to do with the show, and was able to both cope with and incorporate JNT’s odd executive decisions and to push back when JNT’s decisions weren’t going to work in the show’s best interest. Cartmel had one of the most intense visions of anyone who has had creative control over the show, had a very strong knack for finding and nurturing talent, and had the fortune of landing his job in an era where JNT had pretty much checked out, allowing Cartmel to proceed without the degree of weird micromanagement that Bidmead and Saward faced.

Eric Saward is… a very polite man, and a reflective one. He’s also a perpetual victim. You listen to him long enough, and somehow through all his self-effacing eloquence he has an explanation for how everything is someone else’s fault. This negativity and lack of ownership comes through in his work; where Bidmead or Cartmel would find a way to work with and incorporate JNT’s dictums, Saward would just push back, say, “Oh, that’s awful,” and then fold and stand away, with the attitude of “Okay, you brought this on yourself.”

You do this enough, on enough levels of production, and it’s going to affect what ends up on-screen. And boy howdy, does it. Increasingly, as Saward’s resentment grows over the years. This is not to say that Saward is without talent or virtue, and that nothing good ended up resolving under his tenure, but for whatever reason there’s a lack of creative guidance here. Whatever coherent voice comes through tends to do so accidentally, and it’s not very pleasant.

Which brings us to JNT as a person. Accounts here vary widely depending on who’s speaking, but it’s fair to say that JNT was a strong personality. He had his views and his notions, always presented as a strong, definitive objective yet often based on a whim or whoever talked to him last. (E.g., he cast Colin Baker as the Doctor after enjoying his company at a wedding reception.) Again he had no understanding of the creative process, which could make him paranoid about what writers and artists were “up to.” He was terrified of someone trying to sneak a message into the program that he didn’t understand, that might make for a PR disaster.

JNT’s judgment tended to reflect what made for an easy production and clean books, and not having to deal with tempermental artists and things that were beyond his understanding. So, for example, regarding the end of season 21, he considered Caves of Androzani something of a disaster because of Graeme Harper’s unconvential behavior, Saward’s commissioning of an established writer who had more political pull than JNT, and generally a sense that the whole production was out of control. Meanwhile, he thought that The Twin Dilemma was the best thing he’d ever overseen, because it was produced with no fuss, it came in under budget and to technical standard, and it reflected well on him with upper management.

So, he was a tempermental person of questionable judgment and fitness for his job. He was loud and assertive, and due to his own prioririties often focused on the least helpful of all possible topics. Like when he demanded that Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, and everyone stop wasting time researsing for the show because he wanted to do a highly public Christmas panto. Promotion always trumped production, and production always trumped creativity.

He became obsessed with the growing fan community, and started to weigh decisions based on how they would go over with the convention crowds, the fanzine editors, the letter writers, and particularly the alpha fan hangers-on; the people who would regularly come by and hang out in the viewing gallery at Television Centre to schmooze with cast and crew and watch the show being filmed. The Ian Levines and company.

Which brings us to Marson’s book. JNT was of course openly gay at a time when this was still socially, even legally, dicey, and so understandably he indulged in the gay community that surrounded the show at the time. Which is neither here nor there, except that when you’re in a position of power and you use that position as a tool to exert that power over those who are vulnerable… it creates a problem.

It’s unclear that JNT was ever explicitly predatory, though he certainly enjoyed the fruits that his position brought him. However with his partner, Gary Downie, there is no mistake. He was a sexual predator, who used his position on the show to actively, aggressively pursue underage boys. Richard Marson includes in his book an anecdote from his youth where he personally had to run into an empty room and hide under a table to escape from Downie. Marson plays off his own experience for the surreality of the moment, but throughout the book he makes a damning case against Downie, all the time sketching JNT as an elusive, all but unknowable figure behind all that bluster.

So, the JNT era of Doctor Who is… controversial. As is the man who oversaw that era. My suggestion is to keep JNT in mind as a background notion, but in viewing those last nine years of the show to focus more intently on the script editor. The show’s whole creative model shifted over that period, and you can’t look at it in the way you’d look at any other period of the show, or draw conclusions the exact same way. More so than any other period of the show, before you make up your mind about what you’re seeing, there’s a tangle of asterisks to consider. Why are you seeing what you’re seeing? Why was it made the way that it was? Well, let me tell you a story…

Half-Baked

  • Reading time:7 mins read
Bad-ass title sequence aside, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is the period that nearly broke Doctor Who. Same as the Lennie Briscoe era of Law & Order. It’s where the show found its successful formula, settled in, and learned to coast. This is Doctor Who at its most dangerously comfortable. (Note how many people perceive this era as “correct” Doctor Who, and extrapolate or compare its tendencies to the show as a whole.) It’s not until circa 1987 that the show started to get systemically weird again, in a way that let the show continue to grow and breathe and live (Much like seasons 18-20 of Law & Order!), and led into its modern-day incarnation. (Unlike Law & Order!)

It’s not that the era is awful; it doesn’t do much for me, but there are some nice parts (Deadly Assassin, say). If I’m hard on it, it’s less about the era in itself than about the negative influence it had on the show going forward. Like, if after Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the show had gone in a wildly different direction again, then fine. Things change; they move on. We try things, then we try something else.

But this is where the show achieved a sort of stasis, both in terms of its future creative momentum and its public perception. It’s not even the most interesting stasis they could have picked for the show. Yes, let’s rip off a popular horror movie and put the TARDIS in the middle. Inspiration incarnate. What galls me is how quickly this became What Doctor Who Is, and anything that varied from the formula was wrong. It’s so daft that even the serials within the Hinch/Holmes era that don’t match the template (e.g., Android Invasion) are considered awful, no matter what neat ideas they may bring to the table. They’re different, so they’re wrong.

Which, for a show like Doctor Who, which more than any TV program I can think of, embodies and glorifies change, is very nearly a profane mode of thought.

Again, it’s not like the Hinch/Holmes vision is invalid. It’s as worth exploring as anything, and resulted in a few epiphanies (Deadly Assassin, again). But then it had to keep moving, and it didn’t. It started into a downward spiral of trying to maintain or replicate or work against these few months of production. All of Doctor Who became a precursor to or an attempt to return to this supposed glory period, when the show had become so very small and isolated. It nearly destroyed everything.

There are other weird things that crystallized here as The Way Things Are Meant To Be, even though they never really were before. Like, the way old-school fans today muse and scoff about the notion of story arcs and long-form storytelling. Doctor Who stories are all supposed to be self-contained! That way you can watch them in any order and nothing matters! But… until season 13, that was never the case. In the 1960s, serials all ran into each other; characters often harked back to events from weeks earlier, even if it was a different story entirely. The Hartnell era is full of rather complex character development. The Pertwee era makes far less sense out-of-sequence, as stories are constantly referring to what happened before, and B-plots develop over the course of multiple seasons. (See the Mike Yates thread in the last couple of seasons.) The Doctor’s situation, and its relation to the Master’s situation, are in a state of continual development. It’s all vibrant, alive. Then after Barry Letts moved on from his supervisory role in season 12, the show just became a movie-of-the-week thing, with little to no context. And, Bidmead and Cartmel aside, this largely became the status quo for the remainder of the original run.

Then there’s the cast makeup. Pertwee had changed the dynamic by turning the Doctor into an individual action hero — the star of the show, rather than the anchor of an ensemble cast — but he still was surrounded by an expanded regular or semi-regular cast, to flesh out storytelling as needed. This is I think an element that allowed the Pertwee era to be so much more sophisticated, on a narrative level, than what had come before: it had more roles to employ, in a greater number of capacities — and you didn’t necessarily have to use them all, every week. It’s even more of an ensemble than it was before. Hinchcliffe and Holmes strip that right away, especially after the Letts legacy of season 12, and again basically boil the show down to the bare necessities and divorce it of any greater context or narrative potential or significance. One Doctor, who now is very clearly the show’s hero rather than a catalyst for the main character(s), and one lady who’s largely there to make the Doctor look smart and give him someone to talk to.

To my view, this is just as damaging a systemic collapse as the absolution of continuity. We’re going down a path to an unsupportable level of stasis, which will lead to the exact kind of irrelevance that plagued the show throughout the 1980s. Granted, someone of greater creative talent could still elevate the show, as happened in seasons 18 and 24-26, then again from 2005. But if you will, the entropy had now set in. Everything else would be a struggle, and the show’s end was ordained. What had to happen in 2005, for the show to work again, was to strip away most of the damage done during seasons 13-14, and return it to a model more closely aligned to the last time the show worked under its own steam — namely the Pertwee era. Which Davies has made a point of declaring, over and over, what he was doing. Making a new Pertwee era. Ergo his quoting the start of Spearhead at the start of each new series.

The Pertwee era was, more often than not, about something larger than itself. It used Doctor Who as a platform for social, political commentary. Explorations of colonialism, capitalism, indigenous rights, apartheid, consumerism, the military industrial complex, environmentalism, early feminism, isolationism. Dicks and Letts go on the record that they felt there was no point in telling a story unless it was about something. And then there’s the Malcolm Hulke influence.

By comparison, the Hinch/Holmes goal was to “scare the little fuckers,” as phrased on one of the DVD extras. And it largely approached this narrow goal through borrowed glory, hollowing out existing horror stories and putting the TARDIS in the resulting cavity.

This is not as sustainable a mission. It’s a smaller view. It’s an easier view. It’s a safe template because it means you can just plug things in without having to worry about any greater significance.

This is the era when Doctor Who began its descent into irrelevance because of its conscious self-isolation from structural and thematic elements that would allow it to meaningfully grow or adapt.

This is where the cult of No Meaning finds its roots.

No continuity in MY Doctor Who!

No character development in Doctor Who.

No cultural commentary.

No political commentary.

The Doctor must be the sole hero.

The sole assistant must keep to her place.

The show must not challenge my preconceptions or make me think about anything other than plot.

Doxtor Who is entertainment only. It must not try to engage me in a discussion. It must hew to my specific desire.

This is poisonous.

From here, development becomes a simple question of how “light” or “dark” the show can afford to be, which leads to decisions like putting Eric Saward in control for half the 1980s.

Though you lose a few nice trinkets here and there (The Deadly Assassin, season 18, Douglas Adams), the show would be so much better off to just regenerate Pertwee into McCoy. I honestly don’t think you lose much, and you retain the momentum built up through the first 11 years, that the following 12 so thoroughly squandered.

The Cosmology of Doctor Who

  • Reading time:2 mins read
So we know that Doctor Who’s cosmology is different from ours. There, the Moon was (according to 1970s theory) an adopted planetoid… which was, in fact, an egg.

Bizarre thing is, Kill the Moon actually fits classic Who’s jump-the-gun science, that Chibnall said “duh” and perpetuated 40 years later. More than fits it; it makes sense of it.

In the Who timeline, where I guess Earth formed around a (coincidentally egg-laden) Racnoss ship, Gaia (early pre-Earth) must never have collided with Theia (another rocky planet in our orbit, that shattered on collision), as seems to have happened in our world.

What this seems to imply, then, is that in the Who timeline Theia must have remained in Gaia’s solar orbit, somewhere far enough back that the two never collided.

Why didn’t they collide? Possibly that Racnoss ship; it may have altered the early accretion of proto-planetary debris just enough to butterfly (er, spider?) effect away a different spacing and possibly greater mass for the two proto-planets.

Which is to say, the fuckery in Kill the Moon just happens to be consistent with the Silurian recounting of events (as RTD’s weird whimsy), which in turn makes Mondas plausible.

Thanks to Peter Harness, somehow a mountain of awful and/or outdated science balances out to plausible consistency.

All praise the Egg.

Twelve Thoughts

  • Reading time:10 mins read
I’m staggering into well-trod ground here, I realize, but bear with me. I’m going to lay out a series of thoughts, and let’s see where they may lead.

Thought #1: Steven Moffat has been on a mission lately to wrap up dangling story threads, from River Song and her screwdriver to Simm’s regeneration into Gomez, to the “missing” regenerations between old series and new, to generally resetting the show to its factory settings (as well as that’s even a thing) for the next show-runner to make use of at will — putting Gallifrey back in the sky, putting the Doctor on the run, returning major foes to recurring status. Not all of these threads are his own; some, he inherited from Davies. Some predate Davies, to an extent. If there’s a loop to close, late-era Moffat has gone out of his way to close it.

Thought #2: Moffat also has gone out of his way to cater to Capaldi’s whims. Capaldi said over and over how much he’d like to face off against the Mondasian Cybermen; how if he was to go out, how great it would be to be done in by one of them. Moffat scoffed, and he scoffed. But, look what happened. He’s been sending the scripts (e.g., the upcoming special) past Capaldi for review, taking on board minor and major suggestions, and altering them accordingly. In turn, Capaldi, being a fan since the show’s beginning, has his share of suggestions — not all realistic, but many well-informed and well-intentioned.

Thought #3: In wrapping up his era — in fact, the whole “revival” era of Doctor Who — Moffat is not only returning the show to its factory settings. He’s bringing Capaldi back to his own first memories of the show. Capaldi gets his own Mondasian Cybermen, which is fine — and then as he denies his regeneration he’s transported back to the Doctor’s first encounter with those same Cybermen, which is in turn the Doctor’s first regeneration. Dramatically, this is some good stuff: some by-the-book thematic mirroring, to draw clear metaphors and enhance semiotic coherence amongst far-flung events, creating a sense of epiphany and oneness. It’s kind of like Chekhov’s Gun, or advanced intercutting (a technique with which Moffat overtly experimented throughout series 8, e.g. in “Listen” and “Into the Dalek”), in terms of James Burke-ing a sense of holistic significance on the chaotic and often desperate causality that tends to define the show’s narrative.

Thought #4: Moffat not only hews to Capaldi’s whims; he also seems to take an impish glee in running with off-handed remarks that tickle him enough for Moffat to make mental notes, e.g. the Doctor’s electric guitar. There were no plans to insert an electric guitar into the show, but after the first series Moffat asked Capaldi what changes he’d like to see; Capaldi had no clue, so, being an ex punk rocker, he joked about putting a guitar amp in the console room. Of course that would be silly; he just didn’t didn’t know how to respond to the question, in that moment. So, for no reason other than to rise to the ridiculousness of the suggestion, Moffat did as he wasn’t really told. Likewise at a convention panel, in response to Moffat’s canned joke about Hartnell not returning his calls for the 50th anniversary special Capaldi fleetingly suggested they could have got David Bradley in. And Moffat had a Larry David moment, staring off into space and thinking, “Oh.” So, lo, William Hartnell’s impostor is the Fender Stratocaster of series 10.

Thought #5: There is one glaring, famous unresolved thread of continuity to this series that presents itself in every clip show, at the show’s every anniversary, that people tend to collectively pull up their collars and avoid mentioning, lest they stray into “Paul McGann is the Rani” territory. You just don’t go there, for some reason, like it’s an unwritten law. For someone of Moffat’s impulses and humor, that challenge must seem awfully tempting.

Thought #6: Moffat is not exactly known for the expansiveness of his toolbox. In Capaldi’s era he’s become more adept at using his few tricks more constructively to tell meaningful stories, as opposed to flashing them around at the audience to show how shiny his tools all are (see: the Matt Smith era). Still, his scripts are typified by a few concepts that he uses over and over again. For instance, out-of-sync relationships with extreme time gaps. We first see this with Reinette, where we meet her as a girl, then a few minutes later as an adult, then eventually the Doctor pauses too long yammering about the plot only to find her dead — that he just missed her by moments. The same concept is remixed a bit for River Song, is worked into a monster-based story for “Blink” (e.g., when Sally turns her back only for Kathy to turn up dead, her note for Sally as delivered by a relative echoing Reinette’s for the Doctor), becomes basically the entire basis for Amy Pond, nearly becomes Clara’s exit in “Last Christmas”, and has some of its final echoes in the way Capaldi’s Doctor misses Bill by just a few hours, as a result of getting distracted by exposition back at the top of the ship. Moffat has a half-dozen patterns that he uses over and over, but this one seems to be his favorite.

Thought #7: Earlier, between the filming of series 8 and 9, a certain actor from the show’s past visited the current production and was shown by Capaldi around the TARDIS set. He said to that actor, oh, you need to come back, seriously. Then he went to Moffat, and said, oh, Steven, wouldn’t it be great to see them back? Moffat gave a non-committal response, as one does to that luvvie nonsense. Yeah, sure. Everyone should come back. Put them all in a boat with a single oar, and see what happens. We’ll broadcast it exclusively in IMAX at 2 a.m. Apply in the affirmative; nod and smile; yes, of course, let’s do it. Now let’s move on.

Thought #8: As further evidenced by the selling point of the forthcoming Christmas special, Moffat sort of a has a thing for screwing around with Hartnell’s continuity. He’s had Clara visit the Doctor as a young boy, then several hundred years later shown a splinter of her interfere with the Doctor’s choice of an escape capsule. Outside of the modern era, there’s no other part of the classic series that Moffat has shown such a significant and repeated interest in reinterpreting. This interest is starting to border on an obsession, and considering that Moffat is now brazenly dancing into the events surrounding Hartnell’s regeneration — something already fairly well-documented if one ignores that the episode in question is in fact missing — one wonders how deep this obsession will go.

Thought #9: Throughout series 10 — and here, if you’ve somehow been glazed over with my argument so far, you should be ready to groan — the Doctor has two photographs on his desk, representing the painful dangling threads of his family. One of those, Moffat took the care to resolve two Christmases ago, so for us her portrait is more of a recent, rather warm, reminder — though for the Doctor it’s a certain recent and raw trauma, as obliquely addressed in his Missy flashbacks. The other portrait is the one we’re not supposed to talk about, lest we look like total loons. And yet there it is, receiving regular camera focus — a recent continuity reminder, sitting with equal status beside what we must interpret as another deep-dive continuity reference, of the sort the show seems to do more and more under Moffat (e.g., Hartnell’s face turning up on that dingy machine in “Vincent and the Doctor”). Which is fine. Though, the camera really does like to focus there.

Thought #10: It has become something of a modern series cliche at this point that at the moment of regeneration the Doctor revisits the companions of his recent past. David Tennant’s narcissistic Doctor claimed his “reward” by visiting every major companion of his era, including threatening to bring on a paradox by visiting Rose several months before she ever met him — or, rather, met his previous incarnation. Smith’s Doctor had his weird “Head Amy” moment while Clara stared on. The recent trailer confirmed that Pearl Mackie is making one last round this Christmas, despite apparently having left in the previous episode, and well-informed whispers suggest that her predecessor has also put in at least a cameo.

Thought #11: At the start of the recent trailer, we were graced with a tampered Hartnell quote. It wasn’t the quote, the quote that you’ll always expect someone to use, for instance at the start of The Five Doctors (the previous time that Hartnell’s Doctor was recast with a not-quite lookalike); it was a moment from Hartnell’s final serial, into the final moments of which Moffat has chosen to insert his own final script for the show — in much the way that Hartnell’s visage weirdly morphs into David Bradley, to misdeliver his last few words. The quote used for the trailer was appropriate for its provenance, and yet because of its positioning and because of the expectations set about by prior art, it is conspicuously not the quote that we’re looking for. If anything, it seems to undermine that expectation. To read in some possibly unwarranted motivation, almost to misdirect from that expected quote — and by so doing, to create a dissonance that sets up a certain subconscious expectation.

Thought #12: In the recent past, Moffat has shown great willingness to bring back old characters when it suits the story, and to totally refuse to unless it does. In the forthcoming special alone, we’re already bringing back the (recast) first Doctor, and — to enormous surprise — a recast Polly Wright in some capacity. Clearly bringing back the two of them suits the story that he wants to tell about Capaldi’s Doctor. About facing the regrets and the pain and exhaustion that prevent him from feeling entitled to, or even to want, redemption. It seems to me there’s one deep regret that the Doctor has never addressed, that his fourth and twelfth incarnations may both share with a similar (if in one case more present) ache. If the Doctor is going to move on, and unreservedly accept a new, unburdened life, it may be some therapy to release that pain.

All of which is to say, the Doctor never did come back, did he. At least, not in dramatic terms, in the primary continuity of the television show. He made a bad call, and he knows it, and he’s been avoiding it ever since.

And, all things considered, it seems to me this may at last be his moment of catharsis.

Hostile Mythology

  • Reading time:2 mins read
The more I think about it, the more I like about the premise of Class as well. It’s like tragically, grimly accidental continuity.

Coal Hill is just this school, in a formerly working class, quickly gentrifying area of London. Full of kids, teachers, living their lives. But, a jerk in a time machine has punched enough holes in the universe that unspeakable horrors have begun to pour in.

So the school has turned into a place of incomprehensible danger and fear, that people have no rational way of quantifying. What can you do? Put up a memorial to the dead and the vanished, renovate and modernize, try to rationalize, try to keep living. But everyone knows. What had just been a normal school has turned into an urban legend, a place of dread… that still remains in operation.

What had randomly been the location for Doctor Who’s first episode, then a subtle continuity touchstone for decades, is now a character. Coal Hill has become mythologized in its own right, as a casualty of the cavalier adventure narrative of the parent show.

And into that mythology step a few brighter-than-average kids, who through it face horrors they are unequipped to cope with. THANKS DOCTOR.

coal-hill

When you see the Coal Hill emblem now, it comes not just with dry geeky recognition but with a sense of living menace. It has been corrupted. What had been benign, slightly wonky continuity has become a hostile mythology. It has taken on its own life, and that life is tragic.

A-Level English

  • Reading time:5 mins read
As a writer, Patrick Ness regularly emphasizes the words that we’re using and the weight that we give them. In episode one, Ram’s father interjects about his son’s sloppy word choice.

RAM: Oh, my God! If you tell me one more time, I might literally go insane.
VARUN: Don’t abuse the word literally. It’s a good word that young people squander.

Note that he doesn’t criticize Ram’s misuse of the word; rather, the lack of consideration that seemed to go into its selection. The point isn’t a prescriptive approach to language, but rather a deliberate one.

In the case of this show, I think the most important word may be its title, Class. I think that the conflicts in the end will be less a matter of malevolence than about the consequences of righteousness and entitlement.

There are some key elements that the show has set up already: Charlie’s justified attitude toward slavery; his imperiousness when questioned on it by Tanya; that telling early moment where Ram asks him why he sounds like the Queen; his detachment, that initially we read as dorky obliviousness, upon walking into the conflict of Matteusz’s family; his calm and calculation in bringing the Cabinet with him, and in his following demeanor — on which Quill checks him in the first episode; the failure of the… whatsit in episode three to tempt him with visions of his parents.

I’m starting even to question his actions in slapping away April’s hand when she shoots at Corakinus. He justifies it by saying he hesitates in killing a friend, but at that point he hasn’t really done much to suggest he thinks that much about April. Really, his whole attitude toward the others is genial but disinterested. He’s fascinated with them, particularly with Matteusz, but they’re just tools to entertain him while he bides his time.

What have I been waiting for?
Been wasting all my time,
Watching my youth slip away
Surely is a crime.

It’s not that Charlie is an evil, malicious person out to do harm. It’s a matter of class. As Charlie loves to remind everyone, he is a prince. He is above everyone and everything, and he has his entitlement. Whatever he does, it is just — because of who and what he is. He simply is better than everyone. It’s the way he was raised, and it plays deeply into his understanding of the world. Within that framework he’s easygoing and pleasant enough, and seems willing to listen to others and entertain their views to a point. But, he’s not even the same species as these people.

To that end, it’s a little unclear what his motivation might be, but it is telling that he has this box on Earth that can in effect empty out all of the people on the planet and replace them with his own people. He’s already wearing a human skin, so it’s not like the concept is that much of a leap for him.

The issue about his parents, we can read a few ways. The initial viewing gives us a sad sentimental glow; he was the poor little royal boy who nobody really loved except as a tool (aside: how might that have affected his views of others?), and here he’s found a real family. Take another look, and we see that maybe he doesn’t miss his parents because he has a plan and he’s not so bothered that they’re gone for the moment. Dwell a bit more, and you start to wonder if the Shadow Kin were on his planet altogether by their own device. Did he play some part in orchestrating what happened? Is there a strategic reason why he might want Corakinus around?

I’m not sure that the story will go as far as that, but I think it’s becoming clear that the big turmoil in this show is going to be around Charlie’s ethics and his decisions about who he wants to be, what he cares about, how he wants to behave. And I don’t think he’s going to come to (what we would consider) the right decision very easily. “Nice” he may be, as with April, but he’s not exactly kind. It’s not natural for him to relate to others as equals. And it may take something big to force him to accept that leap.

Probably involving a few slaps from Quill.

Afterthought: Most of the sense in the main cast comes from the people of color, and the immigrant boyfriend. In the first episode Ram and Tanya joke about how glad they are to talk about something other than what the white people are up to. Ram is clearly the main character of the show; he is most affected by what’s happening around him, and goes on the most visible personal journey. The first episode opens to Ram, engaging Charlie in petty conflict — or rather, Charlie being lightly “terrorized” by Ram (see his excuse about the Quill) — and that conflict continues for some time.

Even in episode two Ram is reluctant to get involved with the chosen ones, a status that he scorns yet Charlie wears more naturally than his human skin. This really all is happening because the Doctor plopped Charlie down in the middle of Shoreditch, and being an alien — a royal alien, at that — he’s pretty tranquil about the whole thing.

So, yeah, Charlie is a problem. That’s going to be the big thing to unpack by the end of the season.

From the North

  • Reading time:3 mins read
That first year of RTD’s Who is acidic about social justice. There are other things going on, but one major nerve is the contempt of the upper classes for the cannon fodder underclass. Whether we’re talking the Slitheen/politicians, the Daleks/mass media, the likes of Lady Cassandra — or even the aspirational Rose, talking to Gwyneth. Rose is working class and should know better; indeed she chided the Doctor one episode earlier. But she so wants to pass as middle-class. This aspiration, or vague sense of entitlement, is one of her major character flaws that gets her into trouble again and again.

“Why do you sound like you’re from the North?” she asks, unsure whether someone with an accent like that could genuinely have as much authority as the Doctor seems to. That he could really be someone. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it’s part of her preconceptions. One more beat among many.

Adam’s contempt comes back and bites him. Jack’s almost sets off an apocalypse — but he manages to ground himself, and find redemption. For Rose’s part, the first chance she gets she also turns her new status to her own advantage — or tries to — by changing her own past. That doesn’t go well either.

That whole run of episodes is threaded with this subtle point of distinction between putting on airs, acting better than others, and actual self-improvement. Which is to say, seeing beyond the lot you’ve been handed and working toward good, versus trying to climb the ladder by putting your boot in people’s faces, knowing that your new status will protect you from the consequences.

That ongoing discussion of our social roles and responsibilities to each other, mixed with flimsy satire about the structures that make us turn against our own self-interests and those of our neighbors, is just… important. Paper-thin jabs about massive weapons of destruction aside, the basic discussion at hand is wound so tightly into the stories and the characters and the way that they speak to each other that it doesn’t stand out as outright grandstanding — but rather a sort of furious lead by example.

Davies is an angry man, extremely cynical about the world that he lives in, and it comes through in his urgency for us to just treat each other as people and to be curious and interested in what’s happening around us, and why, and how.

The casting of Eccleston as the Doctor just anchors all of this discussion — as does Piper’s depiction of Rose. No other Doctor/companion combination would really lend itself to the discussion that goes on over these thirteen episodes.

A Deeper Pool

  • Reading time:7 mins read
The biggest problem with New Who lies in the writers pool. With the exception of the two showrunners, few unusually talented or original writers return after writing one or two scripts. With the exception of the two showrunners, every writer who has contributed more than two scripts has demonstrated a talent somewhere between mediocre and diabolical. Many of those have improved over the years; since 2010 Gareth Roberts has shown competence bordering on genuine artistic value. With each script, Mark Gatiss grows less disposable. Others, like Toby Whithouse, seem unable to think in terms outside of a writer’s course he took fifteen years ago. (Yes, lad. You would make Robert McKee proud. You nailed every item on that list, and failed to fall down the stairs along the way. Good job.) Yet every time there’s a fresh voice, offering a life perspective outside of the experience of a middle-aged white male middle class sci-fi fan with few other interests, he delivers one script, maybe two, then vanishes forever. (And yes, it has always been a he. The only female writer to date was on the diabolical end, edging toward mediocrity, and she was at the time the show’s primary script editor — so not exactly an outside perspective.)

What was rather distressing is that prior to 2014 the number of new writers seemed to diminish with each passing year. Over Moffat’s tenure the cast of characters became even more entrenched than in Davies’ era. Aside from a few glorious (often celebrity) one-shots like Simon Nye (Amy’s Choice) and Richard Curtis (Vincent & the Doctor), mostly we just see the same few uninspired names over and over — sometimes growing and improving their craft, sometimes not so much. Series 6, the year of Moffat’s horrifying sci-fi rape plot, was where the situation became really clear: this show is no longer about new or novel perspectives on life. It’s about dumb sci-fi nerds, and what they think is cool or surprising. At that point that status quo wasn’t much better than videogame or American comic book fandom.

The second half of series seven was a little better, thanks to the deeply ingrained efforts of Neil Cross — whose other show, Luther, has never quite clicked with me, but it’s a hell of a lot more literate than Life on Mars or Being Human — but the show was still treading water, relying too much on familiarity and gimmickry.

Then came 2014, and the show became something else. Moffat seemed to clue up to all of his own bad habits and tackle them head-on. In the first half of the series he took an active role in co-writing most of the old guard’s scripts, all of which manage a refreshing layer of character or thematic resonance despite the familiar nuts-and-bolts story material underneath. In the second half, it’s all new guys — plus Moffat’s ballsiest story ever. Most of the scripts are brilliant. The ones that don’t work are at least brave. They go for something bizarre, and if they don’t nail it — well, okay. At least they use their premises to ask interesting questions, make unusual observations. Kill the Moon has the worst understanding of grade school physics that I’ve ever seen, to the point that it makes me a little angry to think about — yet the basic idea is so bewilderingly strange that I applaud the effort, and it contains a couple of the best individual dramatic character moments that the show has ever presented. Peter Harness needed an editorial pass from a third-grader, but fuck if he didn’t bring something new and useful to the show. Jamie Mathieson came straight from screen-adapting Douglas Adams to write two of the best episodes of 21st-century Who — one on the basis of good ideas well explored; the other on exquisite control of his craft. Frank Contrell Boyce wrote some of the most observant, believable lines given to a child character in a TV show. If he also failed basic physics, he at least did it in the name of (seemingly sincere) poetry.

So, we now seem to know the script roster for 2015. It’s all two-parters this year, which means six stories of 90 minutes in length. The first and last are by Moffat, naturally enough. On recent form, I figure he’s got things under control. We’ve got a two-parter by Whithouse, which… I hope will be enough to convince anyone that his biggest successes have been flukes due to factors outside his actual authorial value. There’s an apparent two-parter by Gatiss, which I actually anticipate — maybe with that amount of space he will be able to explore the nuances of his perspective rather than just wallow in nostalgia and hit plot points.

That leaves two out of six stories, four out of twelve episodes to fill. Well, we know that one of them is split peculiarly between a Mathieson/Moffat team and Catherine Tregenna — Mathieson of the two series 8 stunners, and Tregenna of the absolute best Torchwood episodes to lie outside of Children of Earth. That may sound like faint praise, but Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness are truly lovely, nuanced scripts and the only times that the show actually lived up to its ostensible premise. I always wondered why she never graduated to the main show — and now she has, granted in a peculiar script arrangement. So this should be interesting.

Now we know the final author — and it’s our Moon Dragon Man. Peter Harness is back to alternately infuriate and inspire. Given the scope of his last script (in which the Moon is revealed as an egg — and then when it hatches, threatening the entire planet, the Doctor deliberately runs off to force Clara into deciding for herself how to handle the situation), I am curious what he will do with 90 minutes. This seems like an experiment worth undertaking. How whacked-out is this going to be, and how will it use that to explore characters and consequences? And how simultaneously unsubtle and confusing will its metaphors be, this time around? I don’t really like his last script, but I respect his voice — and I want to see more of it. It’s so strange, and what it lacks in logistical rigor it more than makes up for with human insight. Which is what the show has substantially lacked under Moffat, and up until last year.

So, yes. This year looks like it will be interesting. An experimental structure, which simultaneously brings us back to 20th century Who and offers a chance for unusual breadth and consequence and exploration of topics promised in the previous series, with its long lingering scenes and extended conversations, that thanks to its development environment 20th century Who mostly only hinted toward. We’ve got fewer writers than most years, yet a good balance of dull and pointed and more space for each to make its case, use its voice to do something distinctive. I know to only expect four episodes of tedium, and even then with all of the pressure of filling 90 minutes of screentime they can’t possibly be throwaway stories. So even that will be curious to see.

I’m with it. I think this will turn out well.

Cappin’ All Dese

  • Reading time:2 mins read
Rewatched Death in Heaven on the way to work. Enjoyed it even more the second time — though those last 15 minutes are interminable. And if there is a logic behind the bracelet and Danny’s last wish, the script makes no effort to establish it. I could do without that whole beat. It’s bad enough to nearly undermine the previous two episodes’ worth of loveliness. Nearly a Doctor Dobby/clap if you believe in David Tennant moment. But it’s small enough to mentally blink while it passes. Whatever.

Otherwise, this is probably the strongest series finale yet — both unto itself and as a conclusion to the previous eleven episodes of character and thematic development. For all its missteps, the show is working on another level now. Rather than glib and facile, it feels brave and confident — ready to use its format to explore notions outside itself, instead of spiraling into a shrinking well of self-recursion. I’m excited to see where it goes next, now that the transition is done.

Lord, I don’t know what Moffat was doing the last four years, but it looks like we’re out of the tunnel now. I’m still astonished how fresh this all feels, considering how much is built with familiar pieces, by familiar hands.