Twice Upon a Time Review
So that’s the Moffat era. There’s a very small number of stories we might compare this to, and most of them are unenlightening. Understood as a multi-Doctor story, it is simply perplexing. As a regeneration story, it’s similarly perplexing, but at least Time of the Doctor (and I suppose technically The Tenth Planet) provides a vague point of comparison. Which leaves The End of Time, the series’ sole other example of a Christmas special showrunner/Doctor send-off. Here to, Twice Upon a Time looks odd, but at least the contrast is consistent. Davies talks in The Writer’s Tale about his discarded initial plan for Tennant’s regeneration, which was to do a self-consciously small episode with none of the epic grandeur you’d expect. And so Moffat, finding himself with an extra episode after the bombast of World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, takes up Davies’s discarded idea for a story in which the Doctor waits around to die and there’s no actual villain.
On one level, this confirms that Davies had a good idea there. Going small in regeneration stories works, as Time of the Doctor (which I’ll defend to the bitter end) demonstrates. Yes, it only works if there are also regeneration stories that go the other way (and Time of the Doctor at least had it both ways), but a small and intimate regeneration story is a move that works and works well. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the previous time Moffat thought he might be on the way out, he had similar instincts, penning a River Song farce. The trouble is that in Twice Upon a Time, the quietly striking impact of going small works to cover up a myriad of fairly aggressive faults.
This isn’t surprising. We’re two Christmas specials past The Husbands of River Song. For all its genuine heights, it’s clear that Series 9 was the natural endpoint of Moffat’s tenure, and that Series 10 was essentially the television equivalent of a bonus disc of album outtakes and remixes. This is nowhere near Moffat’s best work, but we had no right to expect that given the circumstances. But none of that gets rid of the persistent sense of “will this do?” underlying the entire thing. There’s a persistent misjudging of weight through the entire thing. I don’t think there was anyone who, when making a list of the ten loose threads from the Moffat era they hoped got resolved in Twice Upon a Time, would have picked Rusty the Good Dalek. (Indeed, I’m pretty sure the Dalek Eternal would have appeared on more lists, if only because I’d have picked it.) Likewise, the return of Clara was an obvious delight, but going from that to the return of Nardole is clearly just sequencing the emotional beats in what’s clearly the wrong order. And it’s notable that virtually every Twitter and Tumblr quotation of Capaldi’s regeneration speech simply omits the detour about the Doctor’s name.
And then, of course, there’s the big one, which is that it’s not entirely clear why David Bradley is here.…
Check back tomorrow for the annual Eruditorum Press ebook sale, and Wednesday (probably later in the day) for my Twice Upon a Time review.
SECONDO: The heavier of the two main courses, typically meat-based. This is in no way a heavier or more substantive episode than “Primavera,” so do what you want with that.
Proverbs of Hell will return next week.
PRIMAVERA: Hoo boy. OK, so the course of an Italian menu between antipasto and secondo is supposed to be “primo.” This is often a pasta course, but can also be a risotto, a soup, or some similar hot course. One such dish certainly could be pasta primavera, which is a pasta and vegetable dish that takes its name from the Italian word for spring, which is “primavera.” This dish, however, is not actually Italian – it’s an American dish dating to the 1970s and likely first prepared in Nova Scotia. And more to the point, “primavera” on its own is not actually a food word at all. In fact this episode belongs more to the titling scheme of the second half of the season, as we’ll see in a bit.
ANTIPASTO: And so we move to Italian cuisine for seven episodes. Antipasto is the starter course, distinct from the amuse bouche or sakizuki in that it is a heavier dish, often with cold meats, as befits this unusually dense premiere.
The Dark Knight Rises
It seems silly to start anywhere besides the Joker. We’ll set aside the cynical but not entirely unfounded question of whether the performance would be as celebrated as it is were it not for Heath Ledger’s untimely death and the ghoulish speculation (since refuted) that the psychological intensity of the role was a cause. Sure, it’s tough to imagine a Batman film winning an acting Oscar under less tragic circumstances, but that’s in no way what’s interesting here. What’s interesting is that Ledger and Nolan took the most oversignified character in Batman mythos (and yes, of course I’m including the big rodent himself) and offered a game-changing take on him. The hunched, disheveled figure with a Glasgow smile is a new angle, skewing the Joker towards a materialism that is generally precisely what’s discarded in other efforts to make him more grandiosely crazy. Ledger and Nolan offered a new way for the Joker to be.