TARDIS Eruditorum

All this week my coauthor Alex Reed and I are guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in celebration of our book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood coming out on Thursday. The latest post is my short essay “How to be Fifteen,” a reflection on teenage music fandom in the late 90s. If you miss the Nintendo Project, this post is in a similar vein.

It’s March 19th, 2008. Duffy’s at number one with “Mercy,” with Leona Lewis, Alphabeat, Utah Saints, and Nickelback also charting. Nickelback has been charting for a really long time, actually. It’s kind of unnerving. In news, Queen Elizabeth opens Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Geraldine Ferraro resigns from the Clinton campaign for saying stupid things, and Wales win the Six Nations tournament, taking the rugby Grand Slam in the process. There’s sizable unrest in Tibet, Bear Stearns goes under as the Great Recession gathers steam, and Obama gives his big race speech in Philadelphia.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Adrift. Where Something Borrowed marked a satisfying return to Torchwood’s strengths, Adrift marks an unabashed celebration of those strengths. Double banked with Fragments, it pushes the bulk of the regular cast to the margins to tell a story that is focused intimately on Gwen Cooper and on her personal supporting cast of Rhys and Andy. From the start of the series it has been clear that Gwen is its real star. Captain Jack may have the Doctor Who connection and the leading man charisma, but Gwen has the astonishingly gifted Eve Myles, who routinely offers an impressively brave performance that imbues the character with a warmth and humanity that never makes her feel like she was designed to be part of a generic action-adventure ensemble.

What really underlines just how impressive Gwen is as a character is the fact that even here, at the end of the first season, elements of her character that were designed to let her function as the “viewpoint” character are still in place. Initially, after all, Gwen was the character through which we found out about Torchwood Three. The first few episodes used the order in which she learned things as the order in which they were revealed to the audience, and her character was defined by her inexperience and lack of knowledge. By this point in the show, of course, that’s long gone; Gwen is thoroughly experienced with Torchwood and hyper-capable.

And yet elements of her initial characterization persist. Gwen wasn’t just a fish-out-of-water character, but a character who was defined by the fact that she did not originate in the world of Torchwood, which was first presented as a strange and eccentric space that superimposed itself over her world. What’s key in Everything Changes is in hindsight the way in which she slowly remembers her trip to the Hub, as a flickering dream that plays out over her world, not quite making contact. She is an ordinary person who comes to Torchwood. The next episode makes clear that this is a trait unique to her – every other member of Torchwood either originates from that world or has their ordinary life torn down around them before they join.…

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It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.

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It’s March 5th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” H Two O, OneRepublic, Basshunter, and David Jordan also chart, along with several more… notable artists. In news, former Thai Prime Minister and owner of Manchester City Thaskin Shinawatra returns to Thailand to face corruption charges. Prince Harry returns from a deployment in Afghanistan due to his location being leaked by the press. The Presidential Primaries rumble on in the US, with Hillary Clinton winning the Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas primaries, but Obama winning Vermont and the Texas caucuses, which results in him getting more delegates overall out of that state. John McCain, meanwhile, officially secures the Republican nomination.

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It’s February 27th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Kylie Minogue, Adele, Nickelback, Rihanna, and Kelly Rowland also charting. In news, the British Government officially nationalizes the failing Northern Rock bank, Tottenham Hotspur defeat Chelsea in the Carling Cup final, and Pakistan, in an attempt to censor the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, blocked access to YouTube and, in doing so, inadvertently took the site down worldwide.

On television, Torchwood, broadly speaking, improves. It would be overstating things to suggest that A Day in the Death works. It doesn’t. But it fails in an interesting way more evocative of Season One than of the banal mediocrities of Series Two. Whatever else might be said of it, A Day in the Death is trying to do something interesting and new. It’s an intimate character piece that focuses tightly on Owen and works to give us his perspective on his new status quo as an animated corpse. It’s a story that works hard to stay on the human level.

There are problems. Maggie is perhaps a bit overdone – losing her husband is probably sufficient reason for her to be up on a rooftop contemplating suicide without needing to add the bathos-inducing wedding day car crash. The ending is mawkish. Owen’s overall plot still doesn’t really do anything; it’s not a functional lens on any aspect of human experience. There’s some stuff that’s vaguely evocative of people putting their lives together after an extreme trauma, particularly one leaving them with permanent disabilities, but the metaphor never quite crystalizes. There’s too much focus on the imagery of death, and particularly on Torchwood’s usually more interesting “there’s nothing” image, and it distracts from the plot being about anything other than its own science fiction conceit. It’s not that science fiction only works when exploring understandable and familiar spaces; that’s the opposite of true. But it is that science fiction that’s just about coming up with weird concepts isn’t very interesting. Yes, something odd is happening to Owen, but there’s no metaphoric depth to it, not even here, in the episode that focuses on it.

But there are real strengths. Richard Briers does a phenomenal amount with his brief appearance, although it lacks some of the intensity of his previous appearance within Doctor Who. The bizarre alien artifact that serves as the story’s MacGuffin is, in fact, just a pretty alien artifact that emits beautiful light displays. It’s completely harmless; it wasn’t keeping Henry alive, and it wasn’t a bomb. This is a wonderful plot beat of the sort that Torchwood (and for that matter Doctor Who) doesn’t do often enough; one in which the world of the alien is actually the wondrous thing it’s usually advertised as being instead of just a source of unimaginable horror. And while it seems strange to mention it, Martha works quite well here. She’s a minor character and her departure scene is shoehorned in in a fashion that’s utterly extraneous to the plot, but she actually has something to do here that both extends sensibly from her character and fits into the story such that she doesn’t need to be knocked out of the plot at the two-thirds mark by some contrivance.…

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It’s February 20th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” Goldfrapp, Kelly Rowland, H Two O, and Feeling also chart. In news, Kosovo declares independence from Serbia. Steve Fossett is declared legally dead. Toshiba abandons the HD DVD standard, leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray format as the preferred physical medium for high definition content, which would be great if digital distribution weren’t about to eat physical media alive. And Fidel Castro resigns the Presidency of Cuba.

On television, meanwhile, we have Dead Man Walking, the first episode featuring the reincarnated Owen. From the start, there is something odd and haphazard about this plot line. The nature of the plot was changed at the last minute – originally it was to be Ianto who would die and quasi-return. Similarly late in the game was the decision to kill Owen and Tosh in the season finale – they weren’t informed until a month or so before filming began on the episode. This is, in other words, not entirely well thought through, as evidenced by the kind of weird double death of Owen.

On the other hand, the basic contours of this plot are so very nearly bullet proof that it’s difficult to complain too much. From its first episode, with the resurrection glove and the revelation of Jack’s immortality, Torchwood has been a show about death. The way in which Dead Man Walking returns to these basic tenets of Torchwood gives it an odd power that other episodes this season have lacked. For the first time since Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang we have a story that only Torchwood could actually do.

The problem is that there’s still a significant muddiness to this. Yes, it’s a very Torchwood story, but giving the series a second quasi-immortal character is a strange decision. It’s difficult to read Owen as anything but a poor man’s Jack. Even the adventure this time feels like a knock-off. The incarnation of death itself feels like a weaker version of Abaddon from End of Days, right down to Owen’s eyes turning jet black and him chanting in incomprehensible languages, which is apparently a fixation for Matt Jones, who previously wrote basically the same thing in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, and which similarly evokes the “ancient evil coming out of the darkness” thread of those stories. Even the resolution – the immortal character allowing death to attack him and proving too strong – is essentially the same.

On top of that we still have Martha, although in this case she’s sidelined relatively early, and in such a way that she has a sensible function within the story. With Owen serving as the episode’s central mystery, he can’t very well do all the medical technobabble himself, which is a problem given that the mystery, in this case, is all medical technobabble. Having another doctor in place is useful, and Martha is one who can be imported without much explanation. Notably, once the story gets out of “explain the technobabble” and into the actual adventure at the hospital Martha is completely sidelined through what is pure plot contrivance, allowing the actual Torchwood cast to get on with it.…

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It’s… still February 13th, 2008. Torchwood has rejiggered its schedule slightly, showing next week’s Torchwood a week early on BBC Three immediately following the BBC Two broadcast. This has an interesting effect, as it moves the first airing of the show away from its main airing. Torchwood is still treated as a BBC Two show. But it now has a “for the fans” transmission a week early. It, in effect, makes Torchwood the opposite of event television.

Which is funny, because Reset is, in practice, an event episode. First and foremost, of course, is its ending, which features the shock death of Owen Harper. Although the contours of this are questionable since, again, once this goes out on BBC Two it’s immediately resolved by “Dead Man Walking” showing on BBC Three. (This seems to have basically worked, in fact – 849k of the 3.8m people who watched Adam tuned into Reset on BBC Three. The next week, one million of Reset’s 3.2m viewers went for Dead Man Walking. The total ratings, however, remained about level, making this a curious experiment.) But the other big event is that this is the first of three Torchwood episodes in which Martha Jones makes a guest appearance.

Bringing Martha Jones back is tricky business, to say the least. She has to be brought back, of course. The world of the new series forces that on you. Because companions never really leave and we get them bound into their home lives, returning them to their home lives isn’t a departure. This isn’t a complaint, though it does force a sort of ludicrous escalation of stakes on companion departure episodes as writers try to find bold new ways of stranding someone so that the Doctor can never see them again. The move towards companions who have lives outside the TARDIS is, on balance, a good thing, in that it allows companions who are more than just plot functions. Even the classic series had basically moved to that by the end, with Ace’s disconnection from her life on Earth becoming a factor of Ace actively wanting to get away fro her life, as opposed to just an incidental and unacknowledged fact.

This really is important. Because plot-wise, the companion’s job is fairly straightforward. They’re supposed to act in a particular way within the narrative. In that regard they’re fairly interchangeable. Most basic plots would work with any companion. Nothing about what Jo Grant does is that noticeably different from what Mel or Rose or even Romana would do in a similar situation. Yes, the flavor of it would change – the dialogue changes, and some of the mechanisms by which characters accomplish things change, but the basic shape they fill in a plot is the same. Which leads to a sort of diminishing returns – all you can do with them is switch the iconography around. A knife-wielding savage! A bossy Australian stewardess! Bonnie Langford!

By giving companions lives outside the TARDIS you get the ability to do different sorts of stories – ones in which who the companions are matters.…

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It’s February 13th, 2008. Still Basshunter at number one, with the same bunch of folks on the lower charts, along with Lupe Fiasco, David Jordan, and Wet Wet Wet. In news, Mitt Romney drops out of the GOP primaries, the Writers Guild of America strike resolves, and Obama keeps winning stuff, leading to a desperate shakeup in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which continues to be blatantly unable to win a majority of delegates. The military government of Myanmar agrees to a referendum on a new constitution that will begin devolving power from it, Anonymous bursts onto the scene of political protest with a series of actions against Scientology, and the US decides that maybe waterboarding isn’t nice and should be banned.

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It’s February 6th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with Adele, Nickelback, Kelly Rowland, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Hot Chip also charting. I put Hot Chip on the list mainly because it’s funny to end that list with “Hot Chip.” In news, several undersea cables are severed, disrupting Internet service through large parts of the world. Barack Obama acquires what is functionally an unassailable delegate lead following “Super Tuesday” such that Hillary Clinton has no meaningful chance of winning the nomination, ensuring a several month long nomination process.

While on television, we have the succinctly titled Meat. Meat is an interesting story in a large part because of its particular pairing of writer and story. Catherine Tregenna made her name in the first season of Torchwood with a pair of quiet character pieces, which happened to be two of the standout episodes of the season to boot. But with Meat she ends up with a more action-based premise – much more dashing around and solving crimes, and much less quiet focus on character. It’s not characterization-free by any measure, but it’s also not the quiet sort of story Tregenna’s previous work suggested.

In some ways this is a mistake, though not really one of Tregenna’s making. As with the previous time the brief included “let’s do the biggest Doctor Who monster ever,” insufficient thought was given to whether they could actually pull it off, leaving the story with a spectacularly unconvincing and rubbish monster as its centerpiece. This obscures the fact that Tregenna’s actual writing of an action/suspense thriller is actually quite solid, and that it’s merely sandbagged by having a lot of the key scenes take place in a giant warehouse dominated by a massive CGI slug that, accordingly, have to be shot from strange angles to cut down on the number of F/X shots, since Torchwood is the cheap show and doesn’t get many of those.

Nevertheless, Meat is a surprising story, especially coming off the heals of two stories that were terribly predictable and a third that was interesting along a narrow but substantive band. And it’s not interesting just for the decision to shake up the status quo and let Rhys in on the premise of his own show. Though this decision is interesting and worth talking about. These sorts of decisions are always a bit complex; on one level, it leads to the steady dismantling of the series’ original premises, and shows a small amount of desperation. In this regard it resembles major character deaths, not that Torchwood is ever going to do any of those. In any given premise there’s a set number of stories you can do that involve knocking down pillars of the premise. Doctor Who, for instance, could write any of its main characters out of the show, destroy the TARDIS, or reveal where the Doctor came from. All of which it did within the first six seasons before, somewhat sensibly, basically stopping and not doing any more of those save for The Deadly Assassin.…

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It’s January 30th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with the underchart being basically unchanged. Kelly Rowland is added to it. That’s about it. In news, the longest running magazine in Australia, The Bulletin, ceases publication. In the US, Obama handily wins the South Carolina primary, opening a handy lead in delegates over Hillary Clinton. And in the UK, virtually nothing whatsoever happens. (The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions resigns. That’s what you’ve got.)

On television, Torchwood’s second season rumbles merrily on with Helen Raynor’s To the Last Man. It’s an odd thing that Torchwood takes the initial three episodes of its first season as quite so much of a template for its second season. Nevertheless, that is what we have here – an episode focused on reintroducing the team, an episode focused on Gwen bonding with an alien victim, and a ghost story by Helen Raynor. This time the focus of the ghost story is Tosh, not Owen, but nevertheless, the pattern is remarkably consistent.

But where Ghost Machine was an odd and oblique number with a structure that continually twisted out of shape, To the Last Man works with straightforward linearity, moving from its initial premise to its inevitable conclusion with a placid efficiency. This is not, in this case, a bad thing. To the Last Man picks a reasonably potent set of images such that it’s direct path from start to finish is tragic rather than predictable. Save a slight pacing glitch at the end (Tosh having to project into Tommy’s mind feels like using an extra scene to do what should have been done earlier), this marches along towards a satisfyingly doomful end.

Beyond that, it’s flecked with character moments. Tosh would use Tommy as a surrogate for an actual relationship. And Tommy’s bewildered disappointment at the things Tosh doesn’t pursue in her life stings just right. Better yet is Owen’s genuinely concern for Tosh, and the way in which it pays off longer standing character bits. Those who have seen the series know exactly why Owen is the one warning Tosh about the dangers of time-displaced love affairs. Even a somewhat lightweight scene, such as Tommy’s railing against the stupidity of continuing war as we cut to a news broadcast about Iraq is quietly elevated. The cliched bashing of the “war to end all wars” descriptor of World War I, which is usually employed because it’s the most lazily straightforward way to criticize militarism imaginable, is enlivened immeasurably by the tiny detail of Tommy describing World War II as “three weeks later.”

Indeed, Tommy in general is a particularly deft example of the man out of time. The decision not to emphasize Tommy’s anachronistic nature is a sound one. He largely understands the world around him. He takes on an interesting role within the world, able to make meaningful statements about it precisely because he’s seen snapshots of it over the course of nearly a century. 2008 is a peculiarly good time for a World War I story, coming right as the last of the veterans were swallowed up by the past, such that what we have with this story is one of someone whose sense of our history exceeds that of anyone save for Jack himself.…

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