Elizabeth Sandifer

Technically more a Time Wyvern than a Time Dragon.

It’s May 14th, 2005. Akon has finally unseated Tony Christie, giving the new series its second number one hit with “Lonely.” Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, Will Smith, and Weezer also chart. In news, Manchester United is bought by Malcolm Glazer, which is by any measure a key event in the transformation of the Premier League into a heavily leveraged playground for the super-rich.

While on television, it’s Doctor Who as only Paul Cornell can write it: intimate and Anglican.

Where The Long Game struggled with the need to fit itself into a single forty-five minute capsule, Father’s Day is one that could only ever have worked as a single, contained episode. Its structure functions in part because of its claustrophobia – because there’s outright no way out of the church. By keeping us in the intimate scene without breaks we get a sense of confinement no six-part base under siege ever managed. Because the base under siege is the model of this story, once you go far enough under the hood. Monsters are closing in from the outside, the Doctor is desperately trying to come up with a plan, and deteriorating political factions within the base eventually endanger everybody. (In this case the slowly boiling fight between Jackie and Pete that eventually results in the two Roses touching.)

But we’ve never seen a base under siege like this quite before. The base is so ostentatiously small, such that we can trivially get wide shots of it to stress just how trapped everyone is. Instead of having three Ice Warriors in one room talking about the terrible things they’re going to do to the base we can see the monsters flying around the church, scraping at the windows, laying siege to it. This is partially a case of Cornell’s choice of settings – a church is rather a more intimate sort of base than, say, a space station. But it’s also down to how the new series works, shooting primarily on location and using CGI monsters such that having a bunch of wide shots of a church with time dragons milling about is, if not trivial, at least no harder than knocking up three monster costumes.

And given that, the forty-five minute structure is great simply because it prevents there from being any release from the pressure. And it does so without any significant rushing of the plot. Because, of course, the plot of this is terribly thin. There’s very little actual concept to this: Rose creates a paradox by saving her father, and only her father’s death can right things. Everything else is just a set of contrivances to keep the plot running – most notably the entire “reforming the TARDIS out of the key and a cell phone battery” thing, which exists virtually entirely to get the plot to forty-five minutes. But it’s not like those forty-five minutes are overly stretched, simply because the sci-fi plot isn’t the point here.…

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At last, the new series pays homage to one of the most fundamental transitions of the classic series: monsters that look like cocks.

It’s May 7th, 2005. The damn Tony Christie song is still at number one, stubbornly keeping me from getting to ay anything new. Snoop Dogg is new to the charts this time, as is Destiny’s Child, and Bruce Springsteen’s return to moody acoustic form Devils and Dust is topping the album charts, but it’s mainly a bit of a slow one in music. In news, Tony Blair wins his third successive general election, but with a sharply reduced majority that in effect starts the clock on his resignation as Prime Minister in accordance with the Granita pact. Which is a fairly good week for The Long Game to air during, given that it is, in the end, a story about the way power functions in the background.

It would have been easy not to do The Long Game. Much as the series could have avoided a remake of The Web Planet, it could have avoided ever touching the 1980s stories like this. The Long Game, in terms of structure and concern, belongs to the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy eras. Actually, in a perfectly literal sense it belongs to the Sylvester McCoy era. Its basic story is from the script Davies submitted to the Doctor Who office while Cartmel was script-editing – the one Cartmel rejected with the suggestion that Davies write something more grounded, with the specific suggestion of “a man who is worried about his mortgage, his marriage, his dog.”

The critique is interesting in terms of what The Long Game became. The suture between the two versions is, after all, relatively obvious. The original story consists of the bits about overthrowing a despotic news organization, which fits smoothly into the Cartmel era’s sensibilities. One can fairly straightforwardly imagine Russell T Davies watching Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol and thinking “ah, yes, that’s the way to do it.” Actually, the story The Long Game has the most obvious similarity to is Vengeance on Varos, which, if the 1987 date for Davies’s failed submission is correct, suggests pretty straightforwardly that Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers are the two big antecedents of this.

There are worse things. It’s not like the 1980s were a wasteland of irredeemable stories. There were some high points, and Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers were among them. (For newer readers, yes, Paradise Towers really is absolutely brilliant.) But what’s striking, as I said, is that it would have been easy not to do it. I mean, perhaps not easy to resist turning your fifteen-year-old script submission into an actual episode as a sort of cackling and triumphant “I’m in charge now,” but certainly easy to bury the 1980s. None of it made a particular cultural impression in terms of Doctor Who beyond “they’re the rubbish years.” That is, of course, not true, but it would have been perfectly easy to just never mention it.…

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The most fearsome creature in the universe is known for its love of setting off the fire alarm and toilet papering houses.

With obvious thanks and considerable apologies to Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, and Lars Pearson. About Time Volume Seven is out at the end of the summer, and will be absolutely phenomenal. 

Dalek

(Serial 1.6. One Episode, 30th April 2005.)

Which One Is This? To the general public and to long-standing fans, the return of the Daleks. Or, at least, one Dalek. To newcomers, the one where the Doctor inexplicably freaks out at a robotic salt shaker.

Firsts and Lasts: In new series terms, it’s the first appearance of the Daleks, the first story set in the near future, the first time the TARDIS is pulled off course, the first earthbound story set outside the UK, and the first mention of the Doctor having two hearts. It’s also the first new series appearance of the Cybermen, albeit not one that “counts.” In overall terms it’s the first appearance of quasi-companion Adam Mitchell, the first appearance of the Davies-era Dalek design, and the first time on television that they’ve been voiced by Nicholas Briggs. Visible only to fans, it’s the first time a story from the wilderness years has been reworked for television. And to the general public, it’s the first time that Daleks ever climbed stairs, since nobody ever actually saw Remembrance of the Daleks. And for production personnel, it’s the first of three stories directed by Joe Ahearne.

Two Things to Notice About Dalek

1. The list of debuts masks the fact that, more than any other story so far, this one is crafted to work simultaneously on two levels. To established fans – which is to say anybody reading this – the obvious focus is the perversity of the Dalek doing things like having its eyestalk droop in sadness while it says “I am alone…”, while Eccleston’s performance, while solid, is nothing less than they’d expect from this Doctor meeting the Daleks. To new audiences – and they do exist – what’s striking is in fact the Doctor goes completely unhinged here, and begins torturing what appears to be a trapped robot. The effect is similar either way – a sense that fundamental rules are being broken and that something very wrong is happening here.

{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?

Dalek is haunted by the series’ past. “The stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit.” It’s telling that the Cybermen, i.e. the inadequate second rate Daleks, actually make their first new series appearance before the Daleks do. The Daleks are not just symbolic of their usual connotations, but of the still-lurking terror of what the series was. Van Statten represents the way in which Doctor Who and its past were generally considered, particularly in the 1990s. He’s an egotistical, overly privileged asshole who collects Doctor Who props without understanding the beauty of any of them. He’d probably give you that life-sized Dalek prop he owns in exchange for a missing episode.…

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But Mummy, I thought the television screens were in their stomachs. And that they didn’t kill people for fun.

It’s April 16th, 2005. That Tony Christie song is still at number one, with Will Smith, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey, and a variety of Elvis songs also charting. In news, Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles, Pope Benedict XVI was elected, and, most significantly, on the day World War III aired, YouTube’s first video, of co-founder Jawed Karim talking about elephants and how cool their long trunks are, was uploaded.

While on television, as mentioned, the first two-parter of the new series, Aliens of London/World War III. This is, if we’re being honest, probably the story most responsible for the wave of people who advocate skipping Eccleston’s tenure when getting into the series. Aliens of London/World War III is a profoundly awkward story, and the first point where the new series appears to falter. There’s a lot to say about the quality of the story, but I actually don’t really want to get into issues like quality on the new series for a while, so I’m mostly going to punt on that. Suffice it to say that any discussion of Aliens of London/World War III and its quality needs to first come up with at least some general theory of the opening two-parter, since in practice whatever this story’s flaws may be it was used as the template for the first two-parter of every subsequent Russell T Davies-era series, was recycled as the second two-parter for Series Five, and persisted in one-part form in Series Seven as The Power of Three. And that however dumb the farting aliens may be, they were deemed worthy of not just one but two comebacks. So we’ll deal with the basic question of why stories like this persist in Doctor Who on one of this story’s many descendants.

I also do want to briefly point out that this, more than anything else in the first series, is where you can really see that they’re still working on being good at making Doctor Who. There are mistakes here that are just down to still figuring out the format. Davies falls into an extremely lazy cliffhanger in the tradition of the classic series’ lamest: ones where a danger is spuriously invented and discarded after an episode’s worth of time. The mechanics of cliffhangers and two-parters are things that the new series keeps working on through to the present series, in which Moffat seemingly just gives up on them in despair. But before giving up on them he and Davies eventually developed the realization that you couldn’t just have a cliffhanger, you had to find a way to start the second half in a very different place than where the first half left off. And, on a very basic level, there’s the fact that the “next time” trailer comes before the credits, a wretched decision that got reversed for the very next two-parter. (As it stands it completely blunts the impact of the cliffhanger, which, given that it’s a soft cliffhanger to begin with, is deeply unfortunate.)…

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