TARDIS Eruditorum

It’s May 8^th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” with Taio Cruz, Usher, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the bombing in Mogadishu is widely blamed on Al Qaeda, protests begin in Greece against austerity measures, and the general election takes place, with results described in a Pop Between Realities post at the start of the Smith era, although the actual formation of a government does not take place this week.

Meanwhile, on television, Toby Whithouse’s The Vampires of Venice. The decision to bring back Toby Whithouse was, in many ways, obvious. He had experience with Doctor Who, but had by this point distinguished himself with Being Human and shown that he could more broadly handle genre-based character drama. But there’s a second and subtler reason at play here, which is that in many ways Whithouse has been brought back to write the same story he did last time. School Reunion was one of the better notes of the 2006 season, but one if its main purposes was to rehabilitate Mickey such that he would serve as a functioning companion instead of the buffoon he was initially portrayed as.

In many straightforward regards, The Vampires of Venice is visibly designed to serve the same purpose. It is the “reintroduce Rory” episode, and, more to the point, the one in which he becomes a regular companion. And Rory served many of the same purposes in The Eleventh Hour that Mickey did way back in Rose – he’s the good but slightly inadequate guy that the new companion leaves in favor of a life of adventure. In that story he’s nobody’s favorite character, and this is by design. His role is to be replaced by the Doctor. And so when he does come back in The Vampires of Venice, the audience’s reaction is necessarily one of slight hostility. He is, after all, a third wheel on our brand new TARDIS team that we’ve been set up to love over the past five episodes. 

Another way of putting this, then, is that the series has so far led us to, if not root for Amy to abandon her wedding and run off in the TARDIS, at least to fail to have any strong feelings that she should go back and marry Rory. It is, at this point in the narrative, more or less impossible to have those feelings: Rory isn’t developed enough as a character to motivate them. And since marrying Rory is explicitly set up as a threat to the fun adventures in time and space, the audience has been carefully positioned to be relatively hostile to the idea. This is not ironclad, of course – surely there exist people who sided with Rory from the start. But the series has been constructed so as to give the sense (without actually having said much of anything about it) that it is on Team Doctor, to borrow another text’s milieu.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Victory of the Daleks is why the Daleks have an air conditioning vent on their spaceship.

It’s April 17^th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are still at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Tinie Tempah, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Usher also charting, the latter working with will.i.am on “OMG.” In news, Poland reacts to the death of a large swath of its government in a plane crash that I forgot to mention last entry, an earthquake kills over 500 people in China, and the first-ever televised leaders debate takes place ahead of the general election, with the general consensus being that Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg came out the best.

Elsewhere on television, the Daleks are back. Here we come to one of the handful of Matt Smith stories with an unambiguously dire critical reception. Those hoping for an enthusiastic redemptive reading are, I fear, going to be disappointed. There’s very little to do with Victory of the Daleks besides either vicious snark or a calm dissection of its many problems. Given the choice, I’ll go with the latter, and wrap it up in one of those slightly heartbreaking structures where I spend a bunch of time talking about what a good story this could have been before hitting a brick wall with a paragraph beginning “Unfortunately…”

Because in its own strange way, Victory of the Daleks is a nearly perfect imitation of its ostensible source material, David Whitaker’s sublime Power of the Daleks. As designed, Power of the Daleks was a crutch. For the bold experiment of recasting the lead role, Innes Lloyd reasoned, the sensible thing to do was to bring the Daleks back to distract everybody. Terry Nation was unavailable, however, and so the script went instead to David Whitaker and Dennis Spooner, who took the premise of “once again, Daleks blow shit up” and turned it instead into a complex meditation on human frailty, the temptation of power, and the mechanics of politics. Victory of the Daleks is almost the exact same thing, only in reverse. 

Very deep within Victory of the Daleks is a profoundly interesting story based on the confluence of several intersecting themes. First is an exceedingly and straightforwardly mythic engagement with the Daleks. From the start the Daleks have served in part as analogies for the Nazis. Setting a Dalek Story in World War II, therefore, ups the stakes in a very particular and methodical way. Equally, however, it risks a profound awkwardness. The Daleks may have started as metaphors for Nazis, but they haven’t really been used that way in a while, not least because the Nazis, as ideas, have gone from being the terrifying face of a narrowly avoided nightmare and have started being a way to do war stories with unambiguous villains. The Daleks, meanwhile, have become metaphors less for the Nazis and more for a sort of complete and utter abyssal horror defined only by their desire to kill absolutely everything ever. 

It’s April 10^th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Delirious, Tinie Tempah, and Inna also charting, as well as most of the crowd from last week. Including Bieber, yes. In news, the miners in Shanxi were rescued, and the next day a cole mine in West Virginia explodes, killing twenty-five. Wikileaks releases the “Collateral Murder” video, showing the killing of civilians by the US military in Iraq, which was leaked to them by Chelsea Manning. Riots continue in Kyrgyzstan, and Gordon Brown asked permission to dissolve parliament, triggering the election that will, in a month’s time, remove him from power.

On television, meanwhile, the Moffat era carries on with its second story. A story seemingly destined to always seem a bit out of place, The Beast Below was not quite what anybody expected and, perhaps more to the point, is not quite like anything that has come since. The knowledge that the production got away from the new team and that this story was thus made under very trying circumstances makes it easy to write the strangeness off as an artifact of a production team that was still learning what they were doing, much as Aliens of London/World War Three is often read in part as the result of the Davies/Gardner team finding themselves overwhelmed by the scope of what they were doing.

This is, of course, complete tosh. What’s bizarre about The Beast Below is that it’s unlike almost everything else Moffat has ever written for Doctor Who. This is in many ways an artifact not of the production circumstances on Series Five, but of the production circumstances on Series Six and Seven. Because the split season structure of Series Six and Seven, everything Moffat wrote after Series Five was either a season opener, a season finale, or a standalone special. With Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone existing to further the ongoing River Song plot, The Beast Below is therefore the only Moffat-penned story from his era to largely serve as a blank slate that Moffat can do as he pleases with. This is markedly unlike the Davies era, where every season provided Davies at least one opportunity to do something unusual and more personal: The Long Game, Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight being the obvious examples. (And notably, all of those stories feel at least a little strange in their respective seasons, much as this one does.) But The Beast Below is really the only instance in the Moffat era where we just get to see what Moffat is inclined to write when left to his own devices. Indeed, it’s one of the only times at all – Moffat’s Davies-era scripts may not have been rewritten, but they were generally prepared to specific briefs. Here, for the first and last time, Moffat just gets to come up with an idea and write it. 

It’s April 3^rd, 2010. Lady Gaga and Beyonce are at number one with “Telephone,” while Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Boyzone also chart. I regret to inform my readership that we have also entered the dark days of the world: Justin Bieber is at number three. While we’ve been away Togo withdrew from the Africa Cup of Nations after an attack on their national football team, the Winter Olympics took place, and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. While in last week, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church as “petty gossip,” rescuers reached 153 trapped miners in Shanxi, China, the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by North Korea, and, on April 3^rd itself, the iPad was first released.

Of the exact same age as the iPad, then, is the Matt Smith era, which kicks off with The Eleventh Hour. What jumps out the most about The Eleventh Hour with nearly four years of hindsight is how confident it is. This is the one of Moffat’s scripts for his own era that hardly anybody seems to have a bad word for. Even the fiercest critics of the Moffat era tend to make some comment about the squandered promise of this episode. This is one of the rare episodes of Doctor Who that seems to basically please everybody.

Its major challenge is that this was, in practice, a bare minimum. Moffat, Wegner, and Willis have essentially nothing to rest on save for their own talent. This was a moment where every critic was sharpening the knife. The resulting episode had to be absolutely critic-proof. It could get people to tune in based on the accumulated good will the series had from the Russell T Davies era, but equally, more than any other moment in the series’ history, this was a point where everybody had a ready-made excuse to stop watching. Even a whiff of “not as good as it used to be” would be devastating to the series right now, and so this has to be the episode of Doctor Who that anybody who is ever going to like an episode of Doctor Who will like. 

The easy way to do this, by which I mean the way that would have gotten the series cancelled, would have been to do something that could more or less be described as Doctor Who by numbers – a story that was functionally indistinguishable from the Russell T Davies season openers.  Admittedly, those expecting a decisive break from the Russell T Davies era are ultimately frustrated by The Eleventh Hour, which is still grounded in the structure of the Davies era. Indeed, the entirety of Series Five is, on a superficial level, structured like a Davies series. The first three episodes almost perfectly track those of Series One – a present day alien invasion story introducing the new Doctor and companion, a kind of weird future story, and a celebrity historical.