TARDIS Eruditorum

Moffat sent Capaldi off with an acting challenge to rival Heaven Sent, namely selling the line “A Mondasian Cyberman!”

It’s June 24th, 2017. Artists for Grenfell, a charity supergroup including Stormzy, Robbie Williams, Brian May, and Pete Townshend, are at number one with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which lasts for a week before “Despacito” makes its inevitable return. Little Mix, Rita Ora, and DJ Khaled also chart. In news, a terrorist attack occurs in Finsbury Park as a man drives a van into a crowd near a mosque while shouting “Kill all Muslims,” while ISIL destroys the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul. And Theresa May finally reaches an agreement with the DUP to support her government for the low, low price of one billion pounds. 

While on television, the end, or at least, the beginning of it, as Moffat ultimately found himself persuaded to do one more Christmas special, as Chibnall wasn’t going to be ready for one yet. Indeed, this final duology serves to interestingly highlight the nature of a regeneration story by taking the two crucial elements of one and splitting them into different stories. Twice Upon a Timegets the marquee moment in which Peter Capaldi is bathed in glowing light and becomes Jodie Whittaker, which is indeed a crucial scene. But World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is the one that gets the larger structural substance: an adventure that gets out of hand in which the Doctor wins at a terrible price. 

It is this part, I would suggest, that is the more important half of the experience. Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and John Hurt all had regeneration scenes, but they lacked stories of their phyrric victories leading up to those scenes, either going down for minimal reason at the start of their successor’s debut or departing in a scene tacked onto the end of their only story in order to avoid loose ends. And in each case there is something missing—far more of a something than the vaguely cut off and incomplete resolution of The War Games. 

No, there’s something crucial to the story of a Doctor’s fall—something ultimately far more important than getting a monologue about when the Doctor was him or a swirling montage of past companions. The story in which the Doctor loses allows an era to make at least some comment on its vision’s limitations. The fact that the Doctor doesn’t simply always triumph makes the extra-diegetic concerns of actor replacement into diegetic ones, giving each era the opportunity to tell a story that is in part about the need to change and move on. Done correctly, as with The War Games or The Caves of Androzani, the regeneration story becomes a piercing study of an era’s shortcomings. Done wrong, as with Planet of the Spiders or The Time of the Doctor, it’s still an utterly fascinating exercise in drawing a line under what has come before. (That’s not me knocking The Time of the Doctor in general, to be clear, nor even me knocking Planet of the Spiders; they’re just not coherent responses to their eras in the way that The War Games or The Caves of Androzani are.)…

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Finally, he lives up to the name Doctor Disco.

It’s June 17^th, 2017. Despacito continues its endless dominion over the charts, while Charlie Puth, Ariana Grande, Liam Payne, and David Guetta also chart, the latter featuring Justin Bieber, which means that he has three songs in the top ten without being the primary artist on any of them. Ed Sheeran has zero. In news, Otto Warmbier is returned home after over a year in a North Korean prison, with North Korea releasing him largely so he wouldn’t actually die in their custody. Tim Farron resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Republican Congressman Steve Scalise is wounded by gunfire during practice for a Congressional baseball game. And, most significantly, the Grenfell Tower block erupts in flames when a malfunctioning refrigerator started an electrical fire that ignited the exterior aluminum cladding selected for its low cost. Seventy-two people are killed. Numerous buildings across the UK are still using similar cladding, and in many of the buildings that have had their cladding replaced the costs have been passed on to the residents, who often cannot afford them.

Meanwhile, on television, Doctor Who offers one of its most remarkable episodes in The Eaters of Light. The story provides us an extraordinary and singular opportunity to compare a single writer’s work on the classic series and the contemporary one. And yet most of what it turns out to do is frustrate the idea that this is an easy comparison to make. Off the bat, problems arise. Rona Munro, with only her second story, immediately takes the record for longest gap between first and last episodes (previously Terry Nation at fifteen years, nine months) with a twenty-seven year and seven month gap. She also takes the record for longest gap between two episodes (previously Gerry Davis, at seven years, seven months) with basically the same gap. And so what we have here is the difference between a thirty year old playwright who’d gotten into a BBC training course for writers and gotten poached by Andrew Cartmel, who routinely found new and interesting writers there, and a fifty-seven year old highly acclaimed veteran whose plays have gotten international stagings and numerous awards, and who has written screenplays for people like Ken Loach. This difference is, I would argue, on the whole larger than the difference between Terry Nation and Gerry Davis.

And that’s before you get to structural differences. Even if we downplay the thematic shifts around things like the role of the companion—easier to do with Munro than almost any other classic series writer given the particular story she wrote—Doctor Who in 2017 is a very different thing than Doctor Who in 1989, a gap that is after all literally longer than the gap between An Unearthly Child and Survival. With a five-minute and surely Moffat-penned Missy scene tacked onto the end, this is a thirty-eight minute episode, or just over half the length of Survival. The fact that it doesn’t have to take breaks for cliffhangers mitigates that a little bit, but the fact is still that this is a much smaller piece of televisual real estate than Munro had previously written Doctor Who upon, a fact that fundamentally changes what you can do with it.…

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With Alpha Centauri only appearing on a screen, the “looking like a giant penis” needs of this episode had to be filled elsewhere.

It’s June 10^th, 2017. Despacito? Despacito. Ariana Grande makes it up to number two, while Niall Horan, French Montana, and Ed Sheeran also chart, with the latter having his last week in the top ten following the great Sheeraning. In news, Montenegro joins NATO, a Saudi Arabian-led blockade of Qatar begins, and James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the big news is the general election, which ends with a hung parliament after unexpectedly large gains for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, resulting in Theresa May forming a confidence and supply agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party that gives her an incredibly narrow majority that would require near unanimous support from within her own party for any major legislation such as, say, a Brexit agreement. 

Speaking of Brexit, on television we have Empress of Mars. This is a story that, by all rights, should be easy to dislike. It’s Gatiss doing pure and unadulterated fanwank, without any of the wider concerns that allowed things like The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End or Hell Bent to justify their excesses. Its very existence is not a sign of a healthy program. On a very basic level, functional TV programs do not resolve storylines in ways that depend on the audience recognizing the forty-three year old supporting character who’s making a cameo for the final scenes to make any sense. This absolutely and unequivocally should be a hot, steaming mess. So why is it so utterly delightful?

Part of it is that Empress of Mars provides the natural culmination for the project we’ve been identifying as “late Gatiss.” Much of Gatiss’s late style has emerged from what seems like a greater sense of comfort with his own approach. His early work often seemed to struggle at fitting what he does to the strictures of the modern series, particularly the themes and approaches established by Russell T Davies, which are ultimately where The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks, and Night Terrors all trip up. But starting with his Series Seven contributions, Gatiss seems to have resolved to stop trying to tailor what he does to larger expectations of what modern Doctor Who is like and to instead just write Gatiss episodes. The results have been consistently charming and, with Robot of Sherwood and Sleep No More, have done non-trivial amounts to expand the concept of what a Gatiss episode can be. But with Empress of Mars, this hard-earned “let Gatiss be Gatiss” ethos is taken to its endpoint and we finally get to appreciate how good an idea it was in the first place.

It’s notable that Gatiss required some work to get to that point with the episode. His first instinct, correctly squashed, was to try to pen a sequel to Sleep No More given that story’s ambiguity-laden resolution. It is unsurprising that this did not quite work, as the downer ending was central to that story and revisiting it could only diminish the idea.…

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This is not actually a screenshot of the episode, but a candid photograph of Peter Capaldi shortly after recieving the script.

It’s June 3^rd, 2017. “Despacito” isn’t going anywhere, but Captain Ska and Jonas Blue are newly in the top ten, while Ed Sheeran, DJ Khaled, and Clean Bandit continue their runs. In news, the US government announces its intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and Arsenal eats Chelsea to win the FA Cup. While on the day this episode airs, Reality Winner is arrested for leaking information about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election to journalists, and a few hours after it airs, a terrorist attack on London Bridge kills eight people.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Lie of the Land. This is a story that fits smoothly into an important tradition of Doctor Who stories, along with things like The Celestial Toymaker, The Dominators, The Monster of Peladon, Warriors of the Deep, Planet of the Dead, or Nightmare in Silver. Which is to say, fundamentally lazy fuckups at the tail end of otherwise good eras. There are a number of ways to get to this sort of story—Nightmare in Silver, in particular, is bad in ways that are difficult to relate to any generally applicable principle beyond, perhaps, the all too often realized “Cybermen don’t work as a sole villain.” But all of them are united by a sense of creative exhaustion—a feeling that the people in charge are just too tired to put in the effort they might ordinarily to make a bad script into a vaguely acceptable one.

It is interesting, then, how often what goes wrong for these stories includes the political. The Celestial Toymaker, The Dominators, and The Monster of Peladon are to be sure bad for a lot of reasons, but their politics are both undeniably among them and are all weirdly egregious in their awfulness. The other three are less ostentatiously bad in their politics, although Warriors of the Deep certainly has its problems, and I could just have easily decided Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, with its deeply questionable decision to make its team of bumbling thieves all black, was the Matt Smith example of this particular phenomenon. But The Lie of the Land is a despondent return to the early days of Doctor Who, in which the show does not just throw out any poory thought out piece of tedious garbage but a offers a politically noxious poorly thought out piece of tedious garbage. 

The production timeline makes it clear that Whithouse was writing this in response to the rising threat of fascism that Trump represented, doubly so given that it had the Doctor namecheck fascism in his otherwise largely incoherent monologue pretending he really had sided with the monks. But, to make an obvious point, there’s nothing especially fascist about the monks. They’re not a populist and far-right authoritarian program. The mass movement that is in point of fact a central aspect of fascism is utterly absent.…

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More likely than not, aliens invented airplanes.

It’s May 27th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito,” while Liam Payne, Charlie Puth, Harry Styles, and DJ Khaled also chart. Narrowly missing the top ten is Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time,” which re-enters the charts more than two years after its last appearance. This provides us a grim transition to the news, where a terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena kills twenty-two people during one of her concerts. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey stage their final circus show, while on the day of this story six out of seven leaders at the G7 summit reaffirm their commitment to the Paris climate accord. No points for guessing who the odd man out is.

Meanwhile, on television, we have The Pyramid at the End of the World. The Pyramid at the End of the Worldmay or may not have the messiest gestation of any Moffat era story. Certainly it has the messiest one to play out in public. Announcement of Harness’s involvement was left extremely late, and when it came he was laden with the season’s only cowriting credit. The story of this finally emerged in Doctor Who Magazinein Ben Cook’s preview of the episode, in which Moffat made an unprecedented public apology to Harness for how the story was handled. Describing his drafts as dazzling, Moffat notes that he “was imposing too many things on Peter—put this in, put that in,” and explains that the final draft of The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcame due at the same time that Moffat’s mother fell ill, and that Moffat, lacking the time to work closely with Harness to polish the script, literally wrote the final draft by his mother’s deathbed. As he puts it, “I don’t feel great about that—Peter deserved better from me, frankly.” Clearly this is an immensely sad story, and a reaction along the lines of blame or second-guessing the decisions that got made is beyond unhelpful. Nevertheless, the archeology project of excavating the stories that The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcould have become is interesting and fruitful in its own right. And since I happen to have all of the draft scripts handy…

The Pyramid at the End of the Worldbegan life as a script entitled We Dare Not Go a-Hunting, was submitted on April 28, 2016 (Drake was at number one with “One Dance”). This was to be the first part of a two-parter, the second half of which would be called For Fear of Little Men. Harness never wrote a full draft of part two—there’s about twelve pages of loose scenes (compared to 49 pages of the fully drafted We Dare Not Go a-Hunting). Behind the scenes, what went wrong here was simple: Harness had a vacation scheduled that conflicted with the required production schedule, and so his contribution was pared down to a single episode, with Toby Whithouse assigned to write the concluding half of the story. …

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Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m sure the Chibnall era will be fine

It’s May 20^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito.” J Hus, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Clean Bandit, and French Montana also chart, the latter presumably introducing enough consumer confusion to explain Miley Cyrus being stuck at #11. In news, Chelsea Manning is released from prison. It emerges just how bad Trump’s firing of James Comey was, resulting in the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the election. Trump makes his first foreign visit as President, to Saudi Arabia, leading to that low key amazing supervillain photo of Trump, the king of Saudi Arabia, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi all touching that glowing white globe.

On television, meanwhile, Extremis. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the monks arc as a whole; there’s time enough to talk about what could have been, what was, and how that happened. Contrary to the greatest moment of Jack’s podcasting career, Extremis is too interesting for that. That said, the monk arc hangs over it in that there is no way to talk about Extremis without talking about failure. In many regards, Moffat set this story up for failure from the moment of its promotion, describing it as a weird experimental piece in the vein of Listen and Heaven Sent, which is to say holding it up to a standard that one doesn’t need the rest of the fingers on your hand to count off the other stories to meet. Extremis is done no favors by being the successor story to these when it is, in reality, a slightly hasty hodgepodge that’s trying to do the Missy reveal and set up the monks arc without necessarily having a clear idea why these two things to together.

The result is decidedly one of Moffat’s failures. But while that list contains cringeworthy banalities like The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, it also contains things like The Beast Below that, while they might not quite come together as episodes of television, are still fascinating and basically delightful. Extremis falls into the later camp: an episode that does not belong anywhere near anyone’s lists of Moffat’s greatest triumphs, but that is nevertheless profoundly satisfying to delve into.

The thing that makes Extremis fascinating and compelling is that for all its hot mess tendencies, it’s one of those Doctor Who stories that are remarkably plugged into the zeitgeist. Simulationism is the sort of fun science idea you write about in 2017 the same way you did black holes in 1973. Add reincarnation on computers, escaping AIs, and ideas that drive you mad and you have one of the most shockingly on the nose Doctor Who episodes ever, at least from the perspective of the bitch who wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk.

To some extent, despite literally writing the book on it, I’m in no position to explain why these ideas go together.…

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I heard they had a space program; when they sing you can’t hear there’s no air

It’s May 13^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi is at number one with the Despacito remix. DJ Khaled, Ed Sheeran, French Montana, and Shawn Mendes also chart. In news, the WannaCry ransomware attack goes off, affecting hundreds of thousands of computers in a hundred and fifty countries, with major effects on the NHS. And Donald Trump fires FBI director James Comey on the pretext of an objection to his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but in reality, as Trump admits the next day in a meeting with Russian officials in which he also shares classified intelligence obtained from Israel, in an attempt to derail investigations into his campaign’s involvement in Russian attempts to influence his election.

On television, meanwhile, Oxygen. It is traditional, especially towards the end of an era, for me to take a good story that I enjoy and write an entry that is generally quite down on it. Even when writing the review of Oxygen, it was obvious that this would be the Capaldi story I did it to. The point of that exercise, after all, is not to indulge in the spurious pleasure of complaining or of contrarianism. Rather, it’s something baked into this project’s approach to Doctor Who, which holds that the show has a mandate to change and do better that applies equally to good eras and bad. If I don’t show the inadequacies of its triumphs, I’m not doing my job. And Oxygen was perfect for this: the most overtly anti-capitalist story in Doctor Who, written by one of the great writers of the era. I could either worship at its feet or be unsatisfied. The latter is more interesting by far.

What surprised me when actually rewatching it, then, was how much the episode made my job easy by failing to quite engage me in the first place. Upon initial airing, this was a huge sigh of relief after a desperately uneven first third to the season. Revisited two years later, its grim and gunly traditionalism stands out as an aggressive conservatism. It gets away with this for the simple reason that Jamie Mathieson is very good, and is capable of pulling off the minimum requirement of such an aggressively traditionalist-pandering story, which is to actually do everything basically perfectly. But the fact that only a writer like Mathieson would make this exercise worthwhile is not the same as the exercise actually being a good idea. More than anything else this season and possibly anything else in the Moffat era, this is a cynical box-checking exercise informed by GallifreyBase notions of what fans want. This is rearguard action, designed to placate a particular sort of hater. 

It is in light of this that we need to look at this story’s politics. The first thing to note is that the aesthetic conservatism helps the story get away with the anticapitalism. To make a very obvious point, Series 11 not only has nothing that’s even close to this story’s level of overt leftism, it contains Kerblam!…

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Is this some kind of joke?

It’s May 6th, 2017. DJ Khaled is at number one with “I’m the One,” backed by Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, and Lil Wayne. Ed Sheeran, Drake, and Shawn Mendes also chart, as do Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, who see their Spanish-language “Despacito” jump from 22nd to 4th on the back of another Justin Bieber guest appearance. In news, it is announced that Prince Philip will be stepping down from his public engagements in the fall, and local elections see the Tories make heavy gains. Impressively, nothing really happens in the US. Don’t worry. We’ll make up for it next week.

On television, meanwhile, we have Knock Knock. If Thin Ice represents the optimistic long-term future of Doctor Who—the bit of 2017 that most resembles what one might hope for from 2027, then Knock Knock is the bit of 2017 that most accurately prefigures 2018. And the fact that this entry spent the better part of a week consisting of that previous sentence and nothing more speaks volumes as to what that’s going to be like for me. Knock Knock is a true oddity within the Moffat era in that it steadfastly refuses to cohere into anything. It’s a messy and misshapen thing that doesn’t have much to say and isn’t sure how to say it, but that never goes far enough off the rails for it to be fun to just angrily dismantle it. It’s just sort of there, taking up time between Thin Ice and Oxygen. 

Still, we’re going to have to get used to dealing with this sort of shit, so let’s have at it. The obvious starting point is Moffat’s celebrity writers initiative. Throughout his tenure, Moffat has made a point of commissioning the writers of other hit series for Doctor Who. Starting with Simon Nye and Richard Curtis in Series Five and continuing through Neils Gaiman and Cross, the practice seemed to wind down with the Capaldi era only to, in his final season, come back with an aim towards making up for lost time. We’ll deal with the second one of these—a Scottish playwright who worked with Ken Loach—later, but Mike Bartlett was hired off of the tremendously successful Doctor Foster, a Suranne Jones led thriller about marital infidelity. 

This approach has generally worked for Moffat. Sure, Gaiman’s second script was something of a wet fart, but Vincent and the Doctor remains an oft-cited highlight of his tenure, The Doctor’s Wifeis infuriatingly good, and Rings of Akhaten is potentially the most underrated story of the new series. It also served to get a number of interesting and compelling voices into Doctor Who, even if four out of five prestigious television writers hired by Moffat were white guys, and none were people of color. We still got takes on Doctor Who from some major writers who wouldn’t normally bother writing single episodes of a TV show as work for hire. And Bartlett seems on paper like an obvious choice—Doctor Foster was a massive hit, and Bartlett was a long-time Doctor Who fan who chatted happily to Doctor Who Magazine about his memories of the McCoy era.…

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The Doctor and Bill frantically try to warn Chibnall off his staffing decisions.

It’s April 29th, 2017. Clean Bandit and Zara Larsson are at number one with “Symphony.” Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Shawn Mendes, and Jason Derulo (backed with Nicki Minaj and Ty) also chart. In news, things are fairly sleepy. Work begins in New Orleans to dismantle some Confederate memorials. Anthony Joshua becomes WBA heavyweight champion. It’s a slow week. We don’t get those very often anymore.

On television, meanwhile, Thin Ice As we’ve discussed, one of the major features of the Capaldi era, especially compared to the Smith era, is Moffat’s development of a stable of writers who can fill out a large portion of every season with solid, compelling results. The core of this are Jamie Mathieson, Peter Harness, and Sarah Dollard, who among them contribute at least three of the non-Moffat scripts in each of Capaldi’s seasons, and thus ensuring a minimum of seven episodes every season that were good or better. Add in Gatiss’s late career bloom and the reason the Capaldi era is such a golden age becomes clear even before you start thinking about Moffat’s own late style renaissance.

Of that core stable, Dollard is the oddity, in that she arrived in Series Nine and only did two episodes. Harness and Mathieson each have twice as many data points from which to draw conclusions about their interests and work. With Dollard, however, we get Face the Raven and this. It’s not that this is insufficient. Plenty  of other important Doctor Who writers exist with a similar paucity of stories: Ian Briggs, Stephen Wyatt, Philip Martin, Christopher Bailey, Stephen Gallagher, Robert Banks Stewart, Don Houghton, and Donald Cotton all turned in two stories and are clearly writers it’s both possible to draw a bead on and worth doing so. Even more exist in the new series, where two story writers are common. But Dollard feels extraordinary even within this company, which, let’s note, includes some of the finest writers to grace the series.

One big and obvious reason for this is that she is the first woman to feel like a major writer for televised Doctor Who. Obviously other women have written for the series, including Helen Raynor, Rona Munro, and Jane Baker as ones to have multiple credits. But neither Raynor nor Munro feel era-defining, while Jane Baker is, let’s say, not necessarily a positive model. Dollard is joined only by Kate Orman on the short list of women who have felt like era-defining figures in a remotely positive way. And in an era like the late 10s, when one of the most pressing issues facing Doctor Who and SF/F media in general is the need to foreground diverse voices, having Dollard as the first major woman writer of Doctor Who is an important thing to understand.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you want to be a major woman writer of Doctor Who, it helps to be Australian. Which is great news for Caitlin.…

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