TARDIS Eruditorum

“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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WE ARE THE DALEKS. WE HAVE INTERIORITY.

If you want any Eruditorum Press books that aren’t Neoreaction a Basilisk, they’ll be going off sale around 2:00 EST this afternoon. This means it’s your last chance ever to buy Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons.

It’s August 30th, 2014. David Guetta and Sam Martin are at number one, with Taylor Swift, Magic, OneRepublic, Wankelmut, and Union J also charting. In the last week, Modern Family and Breaking Bad won at the Emmys, while Amazon purchased Twitc. Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling debated Scottish Independence, Douglas Carswell defected from the Tories to UKIP, and Kate Bush staged the first concert of her Before the Dawn series, marking her first live performance in thirty-five years.

On television, meanwhile, Peter Capaldi climbs around inside a Dalek. On one level, this is another example of playing Capaldi’s rollout inordinately safe, going from a conservative Robot-inspired debut immediately to a Dalek story. On another, however, there’s a compulsive strangeness to this Dalek story. It’s based on what is clearly a kind of batty idea. Fantastic Voyage with Daleks is several miles from the sanest Doctor Who pitch ever. This is not necessarily a bad idea, of course. Some of the best Doctor Who stories ever come from completely insane pitches, and we all know what Series Eight story I’m thinking of here. But battiness is not a guarantee of success either, or else Daleks in Manhattan would be good. 

More broadly, there is an element of “will this do?” to every Dalek story since about Doomsday. The answer to that question is often “yes,” and even sometimes “and then some,” but there’s still a niggling sense of “well we have to do Dalek stories occasionally so let’s see if we can come up with something” to them all. And Into the Dalek exhibits this more than most. It’s not fair to say that nobody was excited to see Phil Ford named as a writer for Series Eight, but those that were probably overestimated his contributions to The Waters of Mars and didn’t watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. Those who did recognized Ford as a writer who turns out unremarkable mediocrities with tedious repetitiveness, and his hiring as a clear and conscious lack of ambition for this story. The cynical way to frame it is that Ford is here to be rewritten by Moffat, a task he basically succeeds at. 

Certainly anyone looking for reasons to slag off Into the Dalek is going to have a fairly easy time of it. Most of its best ideas were plagiarized from Rob Shearman. Nobody has actually come up with an interesting idea of what should be inside a Dalek, and the resulting set design is insipid. The CGI largely aspires to adequacy. But none of these are catastrophic problems. And while the same can be said of the stories’ virtues—none of them really manage to justify the whole—the story attains a sort of harmless mediocrity, neither particularly loveable or hateable.

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Get it oooooon. Bang a gooooong. Get it on.

It’s August 23^rd, 2014. Nico and Vinz are at number one with “Am I Wrong,”  with Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea, Cheryl Cole and Tinie Tempah, and Charli XCX and herself also charting. Ed Sheeran tops the album charts. In news, since Time of the Doctor took its bow there’s been an Ebola epidemic, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, there was a military coup in Thailand, and Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, kicking off the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re also in the last month of the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, which isn’t technically the sort of thing that goes in these sections since it’s just sort of an ongoing thing, but clearly I’m out of practice and anyway it’s kind of relevant. Oh, and a week before this airs some jackass makes a big blog post about how an indie game designer he used to be dating supposedly cheated on him, which really doesn’t seem like it should be the sort of thing that should make a news section but actually serves as a perfect summary for how the news is going to go over the next three years and change.

While on television, Peter Capaldi makes his long-awaited third appearance as the Doctor, just over a year after his announcement. This was not, it should be stressed, an unusually long gap between announcement and first episode. Indeed, the gap was shorter than Smith’s, and looks set to be shorter than Whittaker’s as well. But there was a clear, if slightly ineffable difference between Capaldi’s debut and these others. With both Smith and Whittaker there was a tremendous amount of mystery over what their Doctor would be like—Whittaker because of the obvious gender issues, Smith because he was young, relatively unknown, and working with a new showrunner. But Capaldi was a known quantity—an already well-respected actor who, indeed, already had what would have been a perfectly good career-defining role in Malcolm Tucker. As a result, in addition to the usual excitement and goodwill a new Doctor gets there was an unusual level of expectation as to what Capaldi’s take on the character would be. And the promotion for Series Eight leaned into this, with trailers emphasizing the “where are we going,” “into darkness” and “am I a good man,” “I don’t know” exchanges from Into the Dalek and Moffat talking to Doctor Who Magazine about putting a “Capaldi moment” into every episode in which the Doctor “slightly alarms you.” By any sane accounting, Deep Breath had all the stars aligned – a pleasantly uncompetitive week just before the real heavy hitters of the fall debuted, a receptive audience, and a clear set of marks to hit. 

So why, then, is Deep Breath so ostentatiously cautious? This is, after all, the new Doctor story where you could most get away with just storming out of the gate as you mean to go on. Instead, however, Moffat consciously models the story on Robot, letting Capaldi wreck havoc on Smith’s supporting cast for seventy-five minutes.…

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