Eruditorum Presscast: Rosa
I’m joined this week by the legendary Kate Orman (along with two cute but really annoying dogs and an intermittent drilling sound that crash the party, though both mercifully say in the background) to talk about Rosa.
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Rosa Review
A strange case where the episode itself matters less than the standards you decide to apply to it. What, exactly, do we want out of “Doctor Who meets Rosa Parks”? What is this supposed to do? A lot of us, myself included, reacted with a measure of wariness to, really, the whole affair. There are a lot of very obvious ways to do this wrong, and very little sense of how you’d do it right. The news that it’s by Malorie Blackman was comforting, but the fact that Chibnall saw fit to rewrite a black woman on Rosa Parks was ominous, and Blackman’s absence from the publicity and relative silence about the episode on Twitter seemed a bad omen.
In light of that, the easiest emotion to feel about the episode itself is relief. This is tightly constructed and coherent in ways previous episodes haven’t been. The character work is appreciably more lively. As a technical object, it’s vastly improved over both of the episodes before it. And despite a few clumsy moments, most obviously the bathos of the “they even named an asteroid after her” sequence, this is mostly considerably more subtle and intelligent than one might have feared. In an episode where the “don’t screw it up” stakes are high and the bar for doing so even higher, the Chibnall era has once again acquitted itself.
None of this, however, answers the question of what we want out of this. The nature of Jodie Whittaker’s casting means that the Chibnall era is essentially unable to even pretend to be apolitical, but this is the first time it’s really stepped up and owned that role. And yet as a framework for talking about race in Doctor Who, Rosa Parks is profoundly limited and, in its own way, lazy. The racism is displaced onto a foreign country, the historical figure is easy to remain hagiographic about, and the targets are soft as can be. In three weeks time we get Doctor Who doing the partition of India, a concept whose politics are equally overt, but that feels dangerous and uncertain in entirely different ways—ways in which it’s a lot less clear what the show is even going to say. Here there’s never really any doubt what the basic political angle is going to be.
Of course, it’s not as though “racism is bad” is an unnecessary message in 2018. Far from it; it’s hard to think of a period in the program’s history where an overt anti-racism stance is more vital. But there are unquestionably framings of that stance that have a hell of a lot more teeth than this possibly can. Yes, the treatment of Ryan throughout the episode (and to a secondary degree Yaz) is viscerally upsetting, but it’s also framed entirely as “look at those people in the past.” They just as easily and justifiably could have hurled racist abuse at him in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. They’ll be perfectly able to next week. The fact that this is unthinkable (regardless of whether it’s a good idea) tells us a lot about how limited a confrontation with the brutal materialism of racism this is.…
Eruditorum Presscast: The Ghost Monument
In which shit is shot by Shana and me, mostly on the subject of the Ghost Monument, but often by whatever shiny thing caught our attention.
The Ghost Monument Review
There’s a typical review structure where I talk about the good things for a while and then lead up to a “but” that brings it all crashing down. I liked this, though, so let’s do it the wrong way around. The biggest problem is in the resolution, and what it ends up doing to the sense of pacing. Having Angstrom and Enzo simply vanish into thin air with all the implications of their characters being left entirely unresolved is deeply weird, or at least it would be if it came from someone other than the guy who found no implications to consider in the Doctor committing stone cold murder in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and who wrote the bewilderingly misshapen The Power of Three. As it stands, it’s a deeply worrisome “ooh, you still aren’t real big on dramatic unities are you?” moment. Jumping from that to a bizarrely unearned moment of the Doctor giving up hope when the TARDIS isn’t on that specific rock at that specific moment is clearly a problem. And similar problems abound. The “Ryan charges out with a gun” sequence is put together with no real thought towards the degree that it renders the already not that compelling robots an object of abject comedy for their sub-Stormtrooper aim. The Stenza reveal communicates “there is an arc” as opposed to actually feeling like anything follows from it. Most particularly, the Bedsheets of Death (clearly a better title for this episode) turning out to be mind-readers that try to terrify you is not set up well at all.
So clearly this is just something we’re going to have to live with in the Chibnall era, because multiple years of pointing it out every week is going to be agonizing. Whatever pleasures are going to be offered by this phase of the show, they’re clearly not going to be rooted in the sense of how structurally tidy things are. Nor, for that matter, are they going to be rooted in any sort of vivid character work. Chibnall’s characters talk like television, and have a thinness because of it. Davies, of course, created his version of Doctor Who by stitching together bits of other television shows, but he was incredibly deft and efficient at creating vividly human characters out of these components. Chibnall isn’t doing that. Ryan and Graham are roles, not people; their dialogue about Grace and their relationship isn’t showing human trauma, it’s communicating what tropes have been chosen for them. And Yaz isn’t even that yet.
But what if we just accept that and let ourselves be pleasantly surprised if a guest writer turns up and offers that. After all, it’s nothing we hadn’t gotten good at doing for Mark Gatiss. But what is this era offering if not what most conventional aesthetics of television in 2018 consider to be basic competence? Sure, this question is implicitly damning with faint praise; Chibnall isn’t going to top any of the three previous showrunner/script editors for me. But god, I don’t want to write that for three years straight and I can’t imagine you want to read it.…
Eruditorum Presscast: The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Here’s the first of our Series 11 run of podcasts, in which I’m joined by the ever-wonderful Caitlin Smith to talk about Jodie Whittaker’s debut episode.
Thanks as ever to Pex Lives for hosting our podcast. James continues to be bad at logging into the site to announce his new releases, but there’s been an episode on Snakedance and an installment of City of the Dead since the Ithaca thing I did with James over the summer. Here’s the full list of recent episodes.…
The Woman Who Fell to Earth Review
Well here we go again.
The easiest way to approach the Chibnall era, as a long-term fan, has been with a sort of hopeful dread. So much of the pre-publicity has been spot-on, feeling at once new and aggressively of its time. The diversity both in front of and behind the camera is demonstrated a show with its heart in the right place. It all looked very promising. The only problem is, well… we don’t need to pile on Chibnall’s past career. With more riding on this than any episode since Rose, there was a real sense of “oh god don’t fuck it up.”
Reader, they did not fuck it up. It’s comfortably Chibnall’s best Doctor Who script to date. Neither of these are the loftiest bars to clear, but they are sailed over comfortably. The Woman Who Fell to Earth never threatens to be a classic, but it never flirts with disaster either. It’s a solid, workmanlike episode. Indeed, what stands out most about it in contrast to the preceding six seasons is how straightforward and uninterested in being clever it is. Heck, the preceding ten seasons. This really isn’t invested in impressing the audience.
But that turns out to be very different from playing it safe. I’ve long noted that the main thing I want out of new Doctor Who is something I haven’t seen before. This qualifies. The pacing and way in which information is presented has fundamentally shifted. The way in which alien elements, from the transport pod to the Gathering Coil to the Doctor herself just appear without buildup is strange and off-putting. This episode goes for the Weird in a way the show hasn’t for a while. The way the Doctor works out and explains the plot is new. The dynamic, with a full-on ensemble cast, has a different rhythm to it.
Indeed, the ensemble itself is different. The first middle-aged companion, the first desi companion, and the first disabled companion. That’s quite a medley on its own, and all of it is handled with an unfussy plainness consistent with the episodes general feel of not looking for congratulations. With five new characters to establish in an hour alongside an actual plot nobody gets too fleshed out, but the early strokes are there. And everybody falls well outside both the Davies-style “companionship as self-improvement project” approach and the Moffat “quips and mythos” approach to designing a companion. So far, in fact, they’re back in the Lambert-style “well shit we accidentally got kidnapped by a crazy alien” approach, which is refreshing in the extreme.
And, of course, there’s Whittaker herself. Chibnall wisely dials back the regeneration trauma, mostly sticking to a more pro forma thing where the Doctor passes out for a bit and her forgetting her name until the big monologue Instead Whittaker hits the ground running, immediately jumping into problem solving and general Doctoring. She’s immediately focused on what she does as an identity; notably her big monologue describes her in terms of what she does (“sorting out fair play”) and how she feels (“bit of adrenaline, dash of outrage, and a hint of panic”) as opposed to who she is.…
Outside the Government: The Abominable Bride
If you remained flummoxed/couldn’t be bothered to look for it, Husbands of River Song is here.
It’s January 1st, 2016. The Justin Bieber/Adele block are back to occupying the top four spots, with Fleur East, Coldplay, and Mnek & Zara Larsson also charting. In news, Bill Cosby is arrested on sexual assault charges, while a bevy of storms and flooding hits the UK.
While on television, The Abominable Bride. In some regards a Doctor Who blog is the worst context from which to look at this story, as it forces us to ask “was Under the Lake/Before the Flood worth this?” For a story that already suffers from taking the inflated expectations that Sherlock’s ninety minute structure saddles individual episodes with and adding being a one-off special to it. Really, any terms that are rooted in setting expectations for the story to live up to are going to set it up to fail. This is a bit of fluff that elevates itself unexpectedly in its final act—a bit of goofy filler that turns out to have teeth.
In this regard, though unquestionably a minor work in the Moffat renaissance that runs from The Day of the Doctorthrough The Husbands of River Song, it is still clearly a part of that era, full of the confidence and panache that characterizes this period of Moffat’s work. Although, of course, it’s not just Moffat’s work; this is a cowrite with Gatiss. That said, for all that we’ve waxed at length about the subtle nuances of collaboration and the impossibility of nailing down a single author for individual parts of a collaborative work, figuring out which of Moffat and Gatiss contributed “let’s do Sherlockin the Victorian period” and which contributed “OK but let’s make the third act a weird Inceptionriff about addiction and the value of women” is not exactly a Sherlock Holmes level of deduction.
But let’s avoid the easy trap there of focusing entirely on Moffat’s simultaneous recycling of Last Christmas and precycling of Heaven Sent and talk about Gatiss, who after all we’ve also developed a newfound interest in the style of. The two-thirds of the episode that are most actively Gatissy are another clear sign of his increasing confidence and deftness. Gatiss has always been above his average quality for Sherlock, but there’s a relaxed confidence to The Abominable Bride that he can’t always muster. Often with Gatiss there’s a sense that he’s slightly too eager to win the audience over—as though he’s aware that his love of Victoriana, grotesquery, and vintage horror might not actually be a straightforward ticket to popular success. But here there’s a welcome swagger to proceedings. It has what the kids these days are calling big dick energy. Everybody knows the novelty of this, the fact that the show’s been off the air for two years, and the fact that the BBC can still do Victorian England in its sleep can carry them for an hour without incident. And so the story just gets on with it without worrying about its reception.
To Think of a Way to Save Her (The Name of the Doctor)
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| What do you mean it’s not back until next Christmas? |
Not the post you expected to see today? Think about how the River Song posts worked in the past and work it out. Or just wait for me to put the link on Twitter later in the day. Or heck, someone’s probably put it in the comments by now.
It’s May 18th, 2013. Daft Punk and Pharrell are at number one with “Get Lucky,” with Pink, Will I am, Chris Malinchak, and Passenger also charting. In news, Angelina Jolie announces that she has had a double mastectomy, David Beckham announces his retirement, and, three days after this story airs, the House of Commons votes to allow same sex marriage in England and Wales.
While on television, Doctor Who’s seventh season since its triumphant 2005 return concludes with The Name of the Doctor. As a season finale, of course, it is written by Steven Moffat. For the most part the format of a season finale has been consistent since the series returned; a narrative collapse storyline. But in other ways the format has changed dramatically. First and foremost, for two seasons running, due to the split season structure, the season finale has been a one-parter instead of a two-parter. More to the point, there’s been a dramatic shift in the nature of endings over the last few seasons. Davies’s season finales typically focused primarily on wrapping up stories and serving as endings, with a quick tease about the future thrown in at the very end (if at all – c.f. Journey’s End). Moffat’s finales, however, have a much more anticipatory structure. They’re much more directly concerned with pointing towards the future. Even The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, for all that its ending feels like a Russell T Davies finale, is packed with future teases in a way no Davies finale is. But after that the structure changed to what we have here – a story that ties up a season-long arc as an almost incidental detail of an episode that is primarily about looking forward. The Name of the Doctor resolves the mystery of the multiple Claras and reveals a key detail about Trenzalore, yes, but on the whole its real structure is forward-looking. It is much more about being the first part of Moffat’s Noun of the Doctor trilogy.
Ostensibly, of course, it wraps up not only the Impossible Girl storyline but the Great Intelligence storyline. But what’s telling is how much both of these storylines are feints. The Great Intelligence is, from his first new series appearance, something of a comical villain, best defined by the inept excesses of his schemes. He’s a clever marketing double joke. First he allows for the new series to make an arcanely humorous classic series reference to what was, at the time of The Snowmen, a missing story. The joke is overtly that the Great Intelligence is kind of rubbish—hence Madame Vastra and Jenny making fun of his absurd schemes (which are, of course, the actual schemes he used in his two Troughton appearances).
…
Impossible Girl (Hell Bent)
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| For the second episode running, the Doctor struggles to eat soup. |
It’s December 5th, 2015. Justin Bieber still has three songs in the top ten, with “Love Yourself” at number one. Wstrn, the Weeknd, and Grace featuring G-Eazy also chart, with Adele still in there too. In news, the United Nations Climate Change Conference convenes in Paris, beginning the process of the Paris accords. A terrorist attack in San Bernandino, California kills fourteen, while the UK begins air strikes in Syria following a parliamentary vote to authorize them.
On television, meanwhile, Moffat’s masterpiece. This is, I imagine, a rather more controversial claim than last week. Sure, Hell Bent had a 2% higher AI rating than Heaven Sent, which means that it’s objectively as good as Kill the Moon and Aliens of London, but I don’t actually think that joke needs a punchline. The consensus here is clear: Heaven Sent is a brilliant and emotional triumph, while Hell Bent is a hot mess. To an extent I can’t even argue with this. Hell Bent is unequivocally messy, and it has Jenna Coleman in that blue-grey sweater. But many of my favorite Doctor Who stories are messy. Heck, possibly all of my favorite Doctor Who stories are messy.
Hell Bent, of course, is exceptionally so; a story that positively revels in the number of unrealized parallels and allusions it has going on, constantly seeming like it wants to foreshadow things it in reality has no intention of paying off. Beyond that, there is a willfully perverse sense of importance here. This is a story that brings to Moffat’s post-Day of the Doctor Gallifrey arc to a close with little more than a shrug, resurrects Rassilon for the sake of kicking him out of the story at the sixteen minute mark, radically redoes our entire idea of what the Matrix is to provide a neat horror setting for ten minutes in the middle, and concludes the entire hybrid plot with a shrug and a hand-wave. For people who don’t like it when Moffat does things like this—and obviously there are a fair number of them—this borders on trolling. Certainly when Moffat’s structural tics are being deployed at this scale and on the back of such an imperiously confident run as the last eighteen episodes it’s easier to read this as a decisive pair of middle fingers to the haters than as mere incompetence.
For those of us who have bought into Moffat’s idiosyncrasies, however, this is something altogether different. Moffat doesn’t decline to pay something off out of laziness; he does it to make a point about whatever it is he pays off in its stead. And he’s consistent in how that bait and switch works: he promises a grandiose epic of manpain and then offers an intensely human story, typically but not always about women. Within this framework, the question of what the story of Clara’s death would end up focusing on was a non-question: it would focus on Clara.…
This Nightmare Would Have Ended (Heaven Sent)
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| I got a rock. |
It’s November 28th, 2015. Justin Bieber continues his assault on the top ten, holding number one with “Sorry” while “Love Yourself” and “What Do You Mean” are also in the top ten. One Direction and Nathan Sykes also chart. In news, a gunman attacks a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and Turkey shoots down a Russian jet on the Syrian border, sparking a bit of an international incident.
On television, meanwhile, Moffat’s masterpiece. Which means that we should start by talking about Blink, the story to which any supposed Moffat masterpiece must be compared. It is not that Blink is straightforwardly and unquestionably the best Moffat story; picking The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang or Day of the Doctor is an eminently respectable choice. But a masterpiece is different from a mere best, implying not just raw quality but a sort of technical proficiency that shows off the writer’s skill. This is why Blink serves as the type specimen for Moffat—a story long on formal constraint and ostentatiously clever structure that plays elaborate games with time and causality. Its ostentatious grandeur hangs over the whole Moffat era, a high watermark whose reputation seems to foreclose the possibility of ever topping it.
And yet Heaven Sent brazenly tries to. This is clear from the basic technical premise: a one-hander, in which Peter Capaldi is left to carry an entire fifty-five minute episode by himself, with no co-stars save for a silent monster, a cameo by Jenna Coleman, and a young boy with no dialogue in the cliffhanger. Where Blink was a doctor-lite episode, Heaven Sent is its radical opposite, an episode that is not so much Doctor-heavy as it is Doctor-exclusive. There’s an almost petulant quality to the anxiety over self-plagiarism, a sense that in going to the opposite extreme Moffat has only confirmed the validity of the comparison. But what is perhaps more telling is the nature of the technical challenge laid out. Blink existed because of a scheduling challenge, minimizing the Doctor’s appearances so it could be double blocked with Human Nature/Family of Blood, Heaven Sent is a one-hander for no reason other than to be impressive. It’s not a clever solution to a production problem; it’s clever because the show wants to be appreciated for how clever it is.
Is this arrogant? Narcissistic? Self-congratulatory? Yes, of course it is. There is no point in pretending that Heaven Sent is not an exercise in vanity that seeks to put a final and decisive triumph on Moffat’s record before he departs. That it unequivocally succeeds does not change the task in question. But we’ve kind of buried the main point in all of that. Heaven Sent is a story that only makes sense in the context of Moffat’s presumptive departure. Its presence in the season is a crystal clear sign that he’s reaching the end of what he has to say about Doctor Who. This can hardly be called a surprise. He’s already done a season more than Davies, and somewhere in the midst of The Zygon Inversion he surpassed Robert Holmes for total minutes of Doctor Who written over the course of his career.…