Elizabeth Sandifer

Typically two-dimensional characterization

It’s October 18^th, 2014. Meghan Trainor remains at number one with “Shake it Off,” while Ed Sheeran, Ella Henderson, Jeremih, and Nicki Minaj entering the top ten, the latter with “Anaconda,” which enters one place above Taylor Swift if you’re the sort of person who wants to keep score in years-old short-lived celebrity feuds. In news, Nicola Sturgeon becomes set to take over the Scottish National Party from Alex Salmond by dint of their being no other candidates, and the first case of Ebola to be contracted in the United States is confirmed.

On television, meanwhile, Flatline. Once again, Jamie Mathieson provides a script based around a clever and highly televisual concept. It’s not quite surprising that Doctor Who has never done two-dimensional monsters before; conceptually it’s the sort of thing that’s more likely to show up in the classic series, but it would have been technologically infeasible prior to CGI. Still, it’s the sort of idea that if you asked a casual fan if had ever been done, they’d assume it must have been; it’s self-evidently a Doctor Who idea. In practice the Boneless aren’t quite as crisply realized as the Mummy—their rules become pure handwave once they become 3D—but they look good throughout and are the Capaldi era’s only real stab at a proper new monster (as opposed to henchmen for a human-appearing villain or, the more common case, not-actually-monsters), and certainly the only Capaldi-era foes you could see coming back down the line. (Indeed, they made a dreadfully unsatisfying comics appearance in Doctor Who Magazine that took no advantage of the inherent possibilities of a 2D/3D shifting monster appearing on a 2D page that represents 3D space.) And in any case, they look great, setting up the delightfully Doctor Who phenomenon of an episode that can do shambling zombies that have spontaneously gained an extra dimension persuasively, but that whiffs it completely on doing a convincing train. 

But even moreso than last week the clever premise and well-executing Doctor Whoing of the affair is just the foundation on which something interesting is being built. It’s not that Flatline’s set pieces aren’t worth celebrating; the shrinking TARDIS is a brilliant conceit, and the Doctor hand-walking the miniaturized TARDIS off the railroad tracks as Murray Gold puts his hero theme into overdrive may well be the single greatest moment of Doctor Who in which it’s not entirely clear whether anyone involved is remotely competent at their jobs. But taken on their own these things only get you a better-than-average late season standalone. What distinguishes Flatline is simple: Clara.

Obviously we’ve talked about Clara a lot already. I highlighted her more than most critics are inclined to all the way back in the Series Seven material, and since reviving Eruditorum I’ve tried to give her at least a paragraph per essay, in part because I want to devote attention to female characters, but mostly because I think she’s integral to the Capaldi era’s status as a golden age.…

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Oh no! The Doctor no longer has time to listen to all of “Minimum Wage” before he dies!

It’s October 11^th, 2014. Meghan Trainor is at number one with her body positivity anthem “All About That Bass.” Lower in the charts are Magician, Sigma, and, yet again, Taylor Swift, who has been in with “Shake it Off” consistently since “Into the Dalek” aired. In news, Douglas Carswell wins reelection as a MP, this time as a UKIP member, while the US Supreme Court declines to hear a variety of appeals on same-sex marriage cases, making it legal in all but twenty states.

On television, meanwhile, the consensus best story of Series 8, and, for some tranches of fandom, the Capaldi era. This presents something of a problem. There’s a longstanding tendency in TARDIS Eruditorum where well-liked stories come in for a bit of a kicking. Although heavily informed by my taste, TARDIS Eruditorum is not a series of reviews; it’s a cultural history of Britain that uses Doctor Who as its lens and subject. (As my pitch goes these days, “you can tell a lot about what Britain is afraid of at any given moment by looking at what the Doctor is running down a corridor from.”) And sometimes that means that perfectly nice stories get impressed into service standing in for some cultural concern, perhaps most notably when Earthshock found itself rather unfortunately saddled with being the entry where I dealt with both the Falkland War and the emergent inadequacies of Eric Saward’s writing.

And in some key regards, Mummy on the Orient Express is ripe for that precisely because of its reputation. Coming off of Kill the Moon, a story I’ve emphatically nailed my colors to the mast regarding, the fact that Mummy on the Orient Express is widely beloved in exactly the same crowds that sneer at Kill the Moon. It’s beloved, essentially, as a well-made Hinchcliffe throwback: a scary one where a classic horror movie monster picks people off one by one. The underlying traditionalism in this assessment is not something to be encouraged. Add the fact that there’s something more than a bit unseemly about everyone’s favorite Capaldi story being the Clara-light one and you have all the makings of a sacred cow that’s perfect for the abattoir. 

Thankfully (or not if you’re really into me complaining) two not entirely unrelated things spare it. The first is that the story’s trad admirers largely misunderstand it, or at least engage in a perilously superficial reading of it. The second is that it’s just really freaking good. Let’s start with the first. It’s not that it’s hard to see why a particular tranche of trad fandom glommed onto this episode. The description is accurate. It’s got a well-designed monster marauding through an enclosed space and winnowing down the cast. This is in fact traditional. What it’s not is traditionalist. Jamie Mathieson is, by his own admission, not a classic series fan, having been scared off by Terror of the Zygons and largely avoiding the program until the new series came along.…

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You can’t make an omelet without killing a few moons.

It’s October 4^th, 2014. Jessie J, Arianna Grande, and Nicki Minaj are at number one with “Bang Bang.” Iggy Azalea, Calvin Harris, Lilly Wood also chart. In news, protests in Hong Kong rapidly amp up as tens of thousands of people take to the streets in opposition to the proposed “electoral reforms” that would dramatically increase the Chinese Communist Party’s control over Hong Kong. And the US has its first domestically diagnosed Ebola case in Dallas.

While on television, magic. I can still vividly remember the first time I watched Kill the Moon. There’s a rare experience occasionally generated by art, best described as a high or altered state. It comes on as a buzzing thrum, a torrent of associations and realizations and vibrant, ecstatic sense of things coming together. This does not always correspond with greatness; one need only look to my moment of vivid and absolute certainty that Journey to the Center of the TARDIS was about to become an origin story for the Silence. But when it does come together and the work of art actually manages to pay off that thrilling crescendo of possibility the result is one of the most flatly extraordinary experiences in the world. The last time it happened to me with a new episode of Doctor Who was The Big Bang, and, well, here we are a million or so words into the consequences of that. So when Kill the Moon repeated the feat it was kind of a big deal, and I took off to the blog to write a review about it in which I proclaimed it “the single best episode of Doctor Who ever.”

What I did not realize at the time was that this would not, in fact, be a particularly widely held view. Instead Kill the Moon became, charitably, a divisive episode, and less charitably an outright hated one. It was narrowly beaten to the coveted Kinda slot in the 2014 Doctor Who Magazine poll, and was listed in a Guardian article on the Moffat era as a clunker on par with Fear Her and Planet of the Dead. And so boldly declaring it to be an absolute triumph became something of a signature position for me. Regardless of whether it’s the hill I wanted to die on, fate seems to have selected it as the one I did. If there’s one story that defines where TARDIS Eruditorum’s taste departs from mainstream taste, this is apparently the one. 

Let’s rehearse the basic argument one more time. Kill the Moon announces what it’s going to do in the cold open; a direct address to camera from Clara, who peers Troughton-like through a set of scan-lines. She speaks in the first person plural: “we have a terrible decision to make.” “We’re on our own.” And the kicker, the line that seals the deal in terms of what this episode of television is doing, “we have forty-five minutes to decide.”…

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Its gender really is basically attack helicopter

It’s September 27^th, 2014. Sigma and Paloma Faith are at number one with “Changing,” while Professor Green, Script, George Ezra, and Taylor Swift also chart. In news, the United States began intervening in the Syrian Civil War, coming in emphatically on the side of dropping bombs on a country that was already blowing itself up, while Mark Reckless, a Tory MP, times his defection to UKIP to coincide with the start of the Conservative Party’s annual conference in a fairly spectacular moment of utter dickishness.

Speaking of utter dickishness, The Caretaker. Actually, let’s pause for a moment. Because I should probably stress up front that I’ve known what I’m going to say in this entry for a while. I’ve been actively thinking about it since September. I’ve literally made major life decisions based in part on the timing of this essay. And though events in the last couple of weeks have shifted the approach slightly, it’s a matter of degree. All the main points are ones I decided on a while ago. I don’t know whether this fact matters, or if it should; nevertheless, it is a fact.

Anyway. The Caretaker is probably the last Doctor Who contribution from my friend Gareth Roberts. I am not so much being sarcastic there as I am layering a preposterous quantity of irony into a single word. I’d say “he was a friend once,” but that starts getting into Doctor/Missy territory, and honestly it’s just not that cool. But for quite a while, Gareth was vocally supportive of TARDIS Eruditorum, including very generously granting an interview for the Graham Williams book. I got along even better with Clayton Hickman, who for a while I was chatting with often enough that Jill took to calling him my Internet boyfriend. These days, they’ve both blocked me on Twitter, Clayton back in January, Gareth a couple weeks ago. Clayton blocked me (after calling me a “pompous arse”) because I used Gareth as an example in a tweet defending enjoying art made by problematic people; Gareth after I tweeted that I was torn between two jokes I could make in this essay about something he said on Twitter. (I worked them both in, for what it’s worth.)

“Problematic people.” “Something he said on Twitter.” Look at me dancing around the issue. Here. Let’s just go ahead and quote the tweets. “I ❤️ how trannies choose names like Munroe, Paris and Chelsea. It’s never Julie or Bev is it? It’s almost like a clueless gayboy’s idea of a glamorous lady. But of course it’s definitely not that.” Yeah. About the best thing you can say about that is that J.K. Rowling hasn’t hit like on it. It’s ignorant, spiteful garbage of the highest order. A clueless gayboy? I mean, I’m a lesbian, so yeah, apparently pretty fucking clueless. And this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of transphobic bilge he regularly tweets these days. Which, to answer Clayton at least, yeah, is a bit of a problem for me.…

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“So despite the fact that the best known heist movie is called Ocean’s Eleven and you’re the twelfth Doctor, they called it Time Heist.” “I don’t want to talk about it. Keep slow walking.”

It’s September 20^th, 2014. Calvin Harris and John Newman are at number one with “Blame,” with Ten Walls , Chris Brown, and Taylor Swift also charting. Since Listen bowed, the main news is that after a dramatic last minute intervention in which David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband issued a joint statement called “The Vow” promising further devolution, Scotland voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, to the massive relief of Cameron, who probably would have had to resign or something if he’d called a big showy referendum like that and then lost it. Microsoft paid two billion dollars to purchase the company that created Minecraft, while a man with a knife jumped the fence at the White House and made it to the East Room before being subdued, which is rather further than you’re supposed to get doing that.

While on television, the Doctor robs a whole bank in Series Eight’s weakest episode. There are two big things sabotaging Time Heist. The first is simply that it comes after Listen. For the most part the question of whether the ultra-cautious approach that characterizes the first half of the season was a good idea is fairly uninteresting; by and large this approach worked, and there’s no real way to know what a different approach would have looked like. But after Listen it clearly became unnecessary, and moving from the confident triumph Listen to another “safe pair of hands” script that’s running on old standards doesn’t feel cautious, it feels timid. This, of course, was unavoidable. In the planning stages, there was no way to know when the turning point for Capaldi’s Doctor would be and thus how many episodes of bedding in he was going to need. So there was always the risk of staying cautious for too long.

The other problem is that Time Heist is crap, and this was entirely avoidable. Stephen Thompson has never been a particularly compelling safe pair of hands; neither Curse of the Black Spot nor Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS were particularly good, and indeed a pretty strong case can be made that they were bad. And despite Moffat apparently performing rewrites, this does nothing to surpass those expectations. Indeed, it sails noticeably below them. Thompson’s previous two efforts were weak but at least suggestive of interesting possibilities. Whenever Time Heist comes to a moment in which it should signify something, however, it draws a curious and frustrating blank.

The problems start with the supporting cast. Psi and Saibra have essentially no traits other than their plot functions. They’re one dimensional characters, stretching from the one thing they can do in the heist to the one thing they want, with no further depth whatsoever. Psi is a hacker who wants his memories back.…

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As absurd conceits in Doctor Who go, the fact that Clara can spontaneously grow several feet of hair ranks among my favorites.

It’s September 6th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” with Maroon 5, Sam Smith, and Taylor Swift also charting. In news, a poll showing majority support for Scottish independence sends just about everybody into one sort of frenzy or another. And a massive cache of nude photos hacked from celebrities’ iCloud accounts, most notably and vocally including Jennifer Lawrence, hits the Internet. (Lawrence eventually offers the entirely sensible response that “anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”)

While on television, the inauguration of what we might call late Gatiss. This is not a term or concept we think about as much as late Moffat. Part of this is simply a matter of volume—pinning Robot of Sherwood as the commencement of Gatiss’s late style is, in terms of episode count, equivalent to declaring that Moffat hit late style with The Eleventh Hour. But more of it is simply a general disinclination to treat Gatiss with the sort of seriousness that the phrase “late style” implies. The usual line on Gatiss is that he’s an empty trad nostalgist, an approach that implicitly rejects the idea that one’s style could evolve.

And yet starting with Series Seven, Gatiss clearly began improving. Cold War and The Crimson Horror were among the best scripts in an admittedly uneven season, with The Crimson Horror in particular demonstrating a newfound interest in form. And that broadly continues through his Capaldi-era contributions, none of which are quite as straightforward as unreconstructed nostalgia pastiches, and two of which are at least pretty good. They are still clearly Gatissy in the same way that Moffat’s late work remains Moffaty, but there’s been a concrete shift in their concerns and goals. What previously seemed like a pathological aversion to originality has mellowed to an embrace of simplicity and clarity. Traditionalism has softened to classicism; nostalgia has evolved to homage.

On one level, for instance, Robot of Sherwood is nothing more than a straightforward celebrity historical of the sort Gatiss already did in The Unquiet Dead and Victory of the Daleks. Except, of course, as the Doctor points out, Robin Hood isn’t real. Admittedly, the same can be said of Victory of the Daleks’ depiction of Winston Churchill, but that wasn’t a major plot point. Here, on the other hand, the question of Robin Hood’s fictionality is one of the driving engines of the story. This doesn’t result in something that is radically different from a celebrity historical—all of them are basically just genre romps with prominent guest stars. But to a degree unmatched by anything save The Unicorn and the Wasp (which notably takes the piss out of The Unquiet Dead), this is a story that’s actually open about this fact. This is a story that is not so much open about the fact that it’s storming through all the major set pieces of a Robin Hood story as it is reveling in it, repeatedly lampshading it for the audience.…

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