Elizabeth Sandifer

I sit down with one of my favorite nonfiction writers, John Higgs, to talk about The Doctor Falls. Then, after a brief secret message from the future, I interview him about his new book Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and its Ever-Present Past, a psychogeographic tour of the oldest road in Britain. One that, notably, runs up Shooter’s Hill and through Northampton. You can download that here, and you can buy Watling Street on Amazon here. It’s not got a US publisher, so if you’re US based you’ll have to import it. It’s worth it.…

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I first encountered the work of Rian Johnson while reading about Terry Gilliam’s My Neighbor Totoro remake Tideland on Wikipedia, where I stumbled across the factoid that Johnson had declared it and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain to be the two best films of 2006. This claim was notable for being A) self-evidently correct and B) a completely insane statement that nobody but me would actually make. And so I was immediately fascinated by this previously unheard of filmmaker and decided that, on the basis of his taste alone, I’d check out his existent film, a high school noir called Brick. (Also, it was only like $5 on Amazon.) Since then I’ve followed his career on the general logic that he was going to get really big some day. Which, sure enough, he did, so let’s put that knowledge to populist use. (And I’ll just spoil it up front, my favorite Johnson film is The Brothers Bloom, my least favorite is Looper.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brick is that it isn’t funny. Sure, there are moments that are humorous – the recurring urgent discussions about who people eat lunch with, for instance, or any scene whatsoever with the Pin’s mother. But although these things are funny, Johnson makes no effort whatsoever to actually get the viewer to laugh. The scenes are not played with comic timing, the humorous aspects are not pushed to the foreground, and none of the actors deliver their lines as if looking for the laugh.

What’s unusual about this is not that it’s an incongruous genre mashup played straight. What’s unusual is that one of the genres is high school. When you take the other great incongruous high school genre mashup to launch its creator to directing a major Disney franchise film, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it took place not only in a high school, but in an overtly funny high school of the sort familiar from Saved by the Bell or Ferris Bueler’s Day Off or, if you prefer to go back further, Happy Days or Grease. It’s not that Brick is the only serious high school movie ever made, but the core texts of the genre are those comedies or ones like them. So to do a genre mashup that is an objectively funny idea when one of the genres is largely comedic and have it be deadly serious is, on the face of it, interesting.

A genre mashup, done well, is about liminal spaces. In Brick, the key one is the tunnel where Emily is murdered. It’s where the film opens, and it returns there constantly, with Johnson’s camera endlessly cycling back to open mouth and to characters sinking into and emerging out of its darkness. It also returns constantly to the image of Emily’s arm lying in the water, her murder being the key event to take place in this space. This image also features on most of the film’s posters, becoming, along with the line drawing that represents the tunnel, the film’s main visual icon.…

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There’s probably a few people who wanted something more like Blink (or, more plausibly, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang) out of Moffat’s last finale, but it’s hard to imagine what more you could actually ask from it. It’s an episode that has at least one big moment catering to virtually every sensible aesthetic of Doctor Who and one or two of the dumb ones too – the rare thing that manages to solidly delight both GallifreyBase fandom and queer Tumblr fandom. (Although the Moffat Hate crowd is managing to treat Harold’s misogyny as the voice of the author because of course they are.) Entirely separate from any questions of ranking or comparison, it’s self-evidently successful as a finale, anchoring Series 10 as firmly in the “good” column.

Now for comparisons. The obvious point of comparison is The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the equivalent “finale before the era-ending regeneration” story from the Davies era. It’s not that it’s quiet per se – it’s a multi-Master story, after all. But it’s quiet in comparison. Its defining decision, in many ways, is having the Doctor’s big speech be delivered to Missy and Harold, a quiet speech about kindness and decency in which the Doctor explains why this is the hill he’s going to die on. It’s not aiming to outdo Hell Bent or The Day of the Doctor. Like Extremis, it is visibly a work of late style. It’s aiming small and careful, relishing in its details.

Which isn’t quite everything. The Doctor’s reluctance to regenerate is unearned – there’s a line of dialogue with Bill that’s clearly there to set it up, but it’s a pro forma bit of foreshadowing as opposed to something that feels genuine. Heather probably should have come up somewhere, even if only in dialogue, since April 15th. And, perhaps most fundamentally, there’s not actually a reason for Missy and Harold to be here other than so they can listen to the Doctor’s speech – they’re not actually part of the same story as Bill’s salvation. But these are all small problems. It’s not like Missy and Harold clash with the Bill plot, after all. This is an episode that moves between two things, deft at both of them and, for that matter, at the transitions between them. The parts don’t quite add up, but that’s kind of how the whole being greater than the sum of its parts works.

More to the point, though, the whole is more than the sum of some absolutely astonishing parts. This is a story where the details are exquisitely crafted. The switches between the human and the Cyberman versions of Bill were done perfectly, maintaining the agonizing horror of it while not getting in the way of Mackie’s farewell performance. There’s a lot of coasting on the body horror of World Enough and Time, but the point of a forty-five minute windup is surely that you can coast on it after, wringing vast amounts of emotion out of a few seconds of carefully deployed Tenth Planet voice.…

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I’m joined this week by Chris O’Leary, author of Rebel Rebel, to talk about World Enough and Time. You can get that here.…

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I should probably link the book I wrote on Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Which I just cut the price of. Buy that here.

I saw Wonder Woman opening night, with a big group of friends. Standing outside the theater afterwards, everyone in the group – mostly female – expressed their love for the film, until eventually all eyes turned to me, and I confessed that I kinda hated it. Since then, I have largely opted to shut up about it. What I want out of a Wonder Woman film is, after all, by definition idiosyncratic, and in no small part incompatible with mass audiences. More importantly, however, despite having literally written the book on Wonder Woman (or at least a book), this was very clearly just not my conversation. I didn’t, and indeed still don’t want to be the guy who shits on the first superhero film to actually offer serious female representation largely untainted by the male gaze. There are widespread reports of women crying with joy at seeing a female superhero on screen, including ones who don’t even like superheroes that much. That matters more than a weirdo blogger who happens to have written a book.

Still, it’s been a few weeks now, and we’ve got a nice little lull between seasons of Hannibal, so let’s finally tackle this. First, I want to reiterate that nothing I say here is intended to take away from the basic importance of representation, both in front of and behind the camera. The elation female audiences have had for this film matters. It matters a lot more than tracking the particular movement of Wonder Woman as a signifier within the larger context of superheroes and specifically DC Comics. Nevertheless, tracking that movement is a thing I do, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least sketch my thoughts on the matter. Consider this a distant appendix rightfully buried at the end of the cultural report on Wonder Woman; an obscure dissent that’s gone at least three contrarian twists too far.

Let’s start with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Longtime readers of mine will know that I am a Zack Snyder apologist. And while Batman v. Superman is a hot mess of a movie that either needed to be an hour shorter or two hours longer and a TV series (preferably the latter, really), it remains in fundamental ways more interesting than the bulk of what has by this point definitely become an obscene glut of superhero movies. Much of this – indeed essentially all of it – is down to the bizarre cynicism of Snyder’s view of superheroes. Batman v. Superman spends its first half hour in outright fear of its title characters, treating them as objects of horror, an idea inherited from Man of Steel’s controversial resolution in which Superman kills Zod after a city-wrecking battle. And it never really backs away from this view. This is a film that views superheroes as at best morally dubious, embracing the Grant Morrison “superheroes as gods” take while viewing gods as awful intrusions into the world of mortals.…

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As an excuse to let Peter Capaldi exclaim “a Mondasian Cyberman!” it’s a solid one. This is not an inherently less worthwhile pursuit than getting Ysanne Churchman back to do the Alpha Centauri voice, so let’s roll with it. After all, the other Peladon-related angle to work here is “the Monster of Peladon to Dark Water’s Curse,” and we wouldn’t want to get snarkily contrarian in the first paragraph, now would we? 

After all, there’s a lot that’s good to outright brilliant. Stripping the Mondasian Cybermen back to the medical horror that inspired Kit Pedler the weekend after the US Senate unveiled its plan to fund a tax cut for the wealthy by murdering poor is probably the second most audaciously on the nose classic series deep cut that Doctor Who could have done this week. (Third is Brexit of Peladon; first, of course, would be a Paradise Towers sequel with a prominent scene about fire.) It’s beautifully executed – Rachel Talalay nails the horror as you’d expect, and Moffat’s eye for the macabre has never been finer than the volume knob. The Mondasian Cybermen are exquisitely creepy, and the extended buildup of their iconography before Bill’s eventual conversion is absolutely delicious. But past that, pretty much everything there is to say about it hinges entirely on The Doctor Falls.

That, notably, wasn’t true of Dark Water, which hinged on the shock twist of killing Danny in the cold open, delivering the astonishing volcano confrontation in its first half before moving on to its expertly inevitable assembly of the promotional pieces. Here, however, we have an episode that really is just forty-five minutes devoted to getting the audience caught up with Doctor Who Magazine. No, it’s not a problem that the show is made for the other 100% of the audience, but equally, that’s the hundred percent of the audience that doesn’t know who the Mondasian Cybermen are and may or may not remember John Simm’s last appearance eight years ago. It’s just that, well, that’s the episode – the efficient and moody delivery of a cliffhanger by assembling a bunch of pre-announced elements into what’s basically the only shape they could ever have fit into. The only potential surprise is John Simm getting his Leon Ny Taiy on with a comedy prosthetic, which is admittedly absolutely delightful. 

If this is a triumph, it’s going to be because of how The Doctor Falls plays with what it’s been given. Certainly the trailer makes it look as though it’s a more complex matter than “Missy is evil after all,” which you’d expect. I mean, Moffat has always been fond of mirroring past lines and structures, so the implicit inversion of Dark Water in which the Doctor is trying to get Missy to be his friend again instead of the other way around is intelligent. And it’s unlikely that the cowriter of Into the Dalek is going to declare Missy beyond redemption. This absolutely has the ability to turn into something extraordinary.…

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At long last, we’ve got this week’s podcast up, so you can kill an hour before “World Enough and Time” comes on. Our guest this week is Elliot Chapman, and you can listen to our discussion here.…

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The nearest precedents for a classic series writer returning to do a new series episode were probably the P.J. Hammond episodes of Torchwood. And indeed, those two episodes provide a handy map to the pros and cons. “Small Worlds” felt brave and refreshing, “From Out of the Rain” like a clumsy collection of random ideas that belonged to a different show. More to the point, they do this without actually being very different as scripts, which goes to show you that the comeback tour is on a knife’s edge in terms of whether it works or not. And while Hammond and Munro are very different writers, The Eaters of Light has similar problems to the Hammond scripts. Most notably, the characterizations are slightly off. Bill has unexpectedly caught Amy Pond’s already fairly idiosyncratic fascination with Roman Britain, only without the “invasion of the hot Italians” explanation. The Doctor, meanwhile, has rolled back two seasons and change of characterization, becoming more surly and uncharitable than he’s been in ages. (Note the two very Series 8 catchphrases – he’s “against” charm and back to calling human lifespans “hilarious.”) Both Hammond and Munro visibly come from a pre-”tone meeting” generation of writers – these aren’t scripts that bother with the idea that your climactic scene has to pay off some thematic thread so that the whole episode is “about” one specific thing. All the stuff I keep saying Toby Whithouse is very good at the formal structure of but never bothers to develop? This episode mostly doesn’t even bother with it.

But that doesn’t answer the question of whether this is any good or not. After all, a forty-five minute episode of Doctor Who is a container that can’t possibly hold all the things a story is supposed to do. Every story has to pass on some aspects to make room for others. So this one is a bit threadbare on the TARDIS crew’s characterization and doesn’t hammer home a theme. What does it do? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly for a returning classic series writer, it splits the TARDIS crew up from the word go, has each side meet a different faction, and then spends a lot of time teasing out the mystery of what’s going on.

Oddly, the result doesn’t feel as much like a classic series throwback as Empress of Mars did. Gatiss is still a new series guy, after all, and wrote an episode built for 45 minutes, with a modern structure, which let the very classic series thematic components shine. This, on the other hand, is so committed to doing its own thing that it doesn’t actually quite feel like anything. Some parts of it are very new series – the entire “this is a myth about why crows caw” aspect is something you’d never see in the 1980s. But this in a lot of regards this doesn’t feel like a classic series throwback because it’s so steeped in an older tradition that it just feels weird instead. It simply doesn’t bother with the modern “move through 2-3 set pieces” structure.…

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Another week, another podcast. This time we’ve got Ian McDuffie, writer and artist of Feels and the force behind Violet Mice. And a Gatiss episode. One of those is worth getting excited about. The other is… fine. Find out which is which here.…

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