TARDIS Eruditorum

List of ways companions have died on Doctor Who: asphyxiated in space, instantaneously aged to death by the Time Destroyer, spaceship crashed into Earth, a bird flew into her tits

It’s November 21^st, 2015. Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” has unseated “Hello” at number one, with both “Love Yourself” and “What Do You Mean” also in the charts. Jess Glynne and One Direction are also newly in the top ten. In news, Storm Barney strikes Britain, knocking out thousands of people’s power, and not a ton else happens unless you find Bobby Jindal withdrawing from the 2016 presidential election interesting, which you probably shouldn’t.

While on television, the Doctor Who debut of Sarah Dollard. “What’s the most impressive debut of a Doctor Who writer” is a fairly entertaining parlor game. Harness has obvious cred, as does Mathieson. There’s a host of obvious one hit wonders to consider: Peter Ling, Andrew Smith, or Barbara Clegg. There are big classics like Terry Nation, Malcolm Hulke, or even Steven Moffat himself. Or you could go with an impishly perverse choice like Stephen Wyatt. But for the most part the debate’s plausible margin of error evaporates here. Face the Raven may not be the best first story anyone has ever written for Doctor Who, but it is the one in which the fact that it’s a debut is most impressive.

The biggest and most obvious thing to point out is the writing credit. “Sarah Dollard.” Not “Sarah Dollard and Steven Moffat.” In a period where Moffat is willing to take credit for even small contributions such as his work on The Caretaker, his absence here speaks volumes. Sure, we could be cynial and suggest that Moffat was simply aware of the bad optics of publicly rewriting what is only his second female writer, but if you look at the scene you’d most expect Moffat to need to intervene on, the pre-death scene, it doesn’t sound like him. He’d write it differently; there would be eminently quotable lines aching with cleverness. It’d be brilliant, of course, but it wouldn’t be this particular flavor of brilliance. This isn’t Moffat; this is a new voice being shoved out onto the biggest stage imaginable and giving it her absolute all. 

What’s remarkable in all of this is the amount of confidence and trust placed in Dollard, who saw her “trap streets are real” pitch get both Me and the death of Clara added to it. In another era, this sort of layering of added requirements on a relatively green writer got you Time-Flight at best and The Twin Dilemma at worst. This is both an overstuffed banquet and an absolute lynchpin story that you’d expect to go to either a trusted veteran or someone like Phil Ford who was clearly just there to save Moffat the time of a first draft. Instead it goes to the rookie who, it must be stressed, hits it out of the park. 

Let’s start with the big ticket item: the death of Clara.…

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Jeez man most people just use a sleep blindfold

It’s November 14^th, 2015. Adele is at number one with “Hello.” Fleur East, Wstrn, and Justin Bieber also chart, the latter with both “Sorry” and “What Do You Mean.” In news, a series of terrorist attacks take place in Paris including a mass shooting at the Bataclan theatre during an Eagles of Death Metal concert and a series of suicide bombings around the Stade de France during a match between France and Germany. The first storm named by the Met Office, the extratropical cyclone Abigail, hits Scotland, while a series of protests at the University of Missouri lead to the resignation of the president of the system.

On television, meanwhile, a distinctly unusual episode of Doctor Who. Sleep No More is not, by general acclamation, a classic. Even those inclined towards sympathy for Gatiss tend to focus their redemptive efforts elsewhere. And it’s easy enough to see why this might be. It’s a decidedly lumpy story with idiosyncratic pacing that never quite sells its stakes or offers a coherent account of its concept.  Character remains something of an afterthought for Gatiss, which is frustrating for Clara’s last straightforward adventure in a season that broadly underutilized her, and doubly so given that Gatiss has written flat-out great scenes for her in the past. But several of those things are just snooty ways of rephrasing “it was written by Mark Gatiss,” and the rest are products of the fact that it’s doing several other interesting things instead.

So having gently and lovingly placed The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion in the path of an oncoming bus, let’s do that other thing we periodically do and dust off an unpopular story to explain why it’s got more going on than you might think. Because while defending Sleep No More as an overlooked classic in a season with The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, The Girl Who Died, The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent is probably a bit of a reach, slamming it as a bust is, or at least should be, just as ridiculous. This is a story that’s long on ambition, achieves no small part of it, and comes off as a lot more in step with its times than it might have appeared in late 2015. 

Let’s start with what this story is doing. Most obviously, it’s a found footage horror story. This is not ambitious in and of itself—it’s just another genre swipe of the sort that Doctor Who can at baseline be expected to do. But what’s interesting is that it’s a genre largely defined by technical concerns as opposed to content-based ones. There are a few constraints on what happens in a found footage horror story; it’s assumed that things will end with some destructive event that leaves the footage as the only remaining record of whatever happened, but past that there aren’t a ton of tropes that define the genre.…

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One of the things you notice a lot more when watching television as a girl is how fundamentally ludicrous a lot of characters’ “no makeup and looking slightly ratty” looks are.

It’s October 31^st, 2015. Adele has debuted at number one with “Hello,” just ahead of Justin Bieber’s also new to the charts “Sorry,” a situation that persists through both episodes of this story. Sam Smith, Ariana Grande, Mnek & Zara Larson, The Weeknd, and Drake also chart. In news, hundreds die in Pakistan and Afghanistan after a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, Paul Ryan becomes Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a Russian plane flying from Egypt to Saint Petersburg is blown up shortly after takeoff, killing 224.

One ought never look a gift coincidence in the mouth when doing psychochronography, so let’s start with the cliffhanger, in which the Doctor’s plane is shot down by a group consciously made to parallel ISIS. On the one hand this is an eerie coincidence, but it’s also the sort of thing that happens when you ostentatiously position your story to be rooted in current events. Comment not on the abyss, as I’m sure someone or other said once.

But we’ll circle around to the politics of this story in good time. Let’s start, in the spirit of cracked mirrors, with the actual split between the two halves. The Moffat-era two-parter structure, after all, is rooted in the idea that the second part should always begin somewhere different than where the first part left off, a rule fashioned after his experience with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and his dissatisfaction with the feeling that the Doctor and company had just been in that basement for a really long time by the time the latter episode rolled around. And so now part twos begin by ostentatiously altering the premise of the story: UNIT shows up, we cut to Missy and Clara, the Doctor is a ghost now, or it’s just an entirely new story that shares a character with the previous one. So what’s the change that breaks the symmetry between part one and part two of this story? Clara obvs.

After all, you can’t do a Zygon story without someone important being a duplicate. The Doctor is the boring answer, the UNIT cast is all even duller, and so it has to be Clara, not least because Jenna Coleman has not to date gotten to do her obligatory villain turn. (Not every companion gets one, but they’re always a bit conspicuous by their absence.) So the big end-of-episode reveal for The Zygon Invasion (as distinct from the cliffhanger itself) is that Clara has been a Zygon all episode. Correspondingly, the big opening shift for The Zygon Inversion is her reinsertion into the narrative as the airplane shooting cliffhanger replays from her perspective. The ensuing showdown between Clara and her duplicate, Bonnie, is scintillating, not just because it’s Clara’s most extended hero moment all season, but because the underlying dynamic is so carefully worked out.…

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Me takes poorly to the Doctor’s “Varys is a mermaid” theory.

It’s October 24^th, 2015. KDA with Tinie Tempah and Katy B are at number one with “Turn the Music Louder (Rumble).” One Direction and Sleepy Tom & Diplo enter the top ten, while Bieber, The Weeknd, Drake, and Ellie Goulding are still around. In news, Hurricane Patricia, the most intense tropical storm ever to hit the western hemisphere and the second most intense ever, strikes Mexico and deals nearly half a billion dollars in damage. The Tories change rules to weaken the power of Scottish MPs by ruling that laws affecting only England must have a majority vote of English MPs. Hillary Clinton spends eight hours testifying in front of the Benghazi Committee, while Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb both drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination. 

On television, meanwhile, the two-part structure of the season begins to break down with an episode by a completely different writer than its nominal part one. Let’s set aside my decision to cover them separately, which is really a decision about how many words I think I can spend on them and not about them per se. The consensus appears to be to treat these as separate stories—Doctor Who Magazine offered them separate previews (unlike Heaven Sent and Hell Bent), and they seem to consistently be listed separately, but they’re certainly more connected to each other than Utopia is with The Sound of Drums, and The Girl Who Died ends with a clear “to be continued” that presents this as part two. Indeed, to an audience untrained in the Doctor Who fandom art of obsessively following writer credits, it’s difficult to imagine that this would not be viewed as the third two-parter in a row. 

Speaking of writerly readings, it is with this episode, in his penultimate season, that Moffat finally addresses the embarrassing problem that his writing teams are consistently all male. This is a tricky needle to thread. “The first female Doctor Who writer in more than seven years” is not something to celebrate in 2015 so much as something to be actively ashamed of. For whatever it’s worth, Moffat recognized that and repeatedly acknowledged that it was a problem, but, well, it still took this long. Still, on the bright side, we have Catherine Tregenna, she of the actually good Torchwood episodes. Her hire for this appears to have been something of a specialist hire—she noted that she never really felt like Doctor Who was a good fit for her, but was specifically pitched writing about an immortal woman and agreed that she could do well with that, which was an obvious conclusion to anyone who’s seen Out of Time or Captain Jack Harkness.

The resulting story is an odd one. For large swaths it’s effectively a two-hander between Capaldi and Williams, which is one of those ideas that’s self-evidently going to work with an even remotely competent script, a bar Tregenna clears by several miles.…

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A girl has no spacesuit

It’s October 17^th, 2015. Justin Bieber is still at number one, with The Weeknd and Jamie Lawson newly entering the charts. In news, Home Office figures are released showing that hate crimes in England and Wales have risen by 18% in a year, and the first primary debate for the 2016 Democratic Party nomination is held in Las Vegas, over the course of which Donald Trump gained more Twitter followers from live-tweeting events than any of the actual candidates.

On television, meanwhile, it’s the return of Jamie Mathieson and the debut of Maisie Williams’s Ashildr/Me. Let’s start with the latter, as it’s Series Nine’s big piece of celebrity stunt casting, and one the show seeks greater mileage out of than, say, Keeley Hawes or David Suchet’s appearances. Part of this is that Maisie Williams is coming to Doctor Who from a currently-airing hit show. But Game of Thrones is not the cultural juggernaut in the UK that it is in the US; its all-time high ratings were 3.5m for the Season Seven finale, which is more than a million lower than Doctor Who’s worst-ever episode, and more to the point came two years after this aired; the record at the time was the Season Five debut, at 2.6 million. This is still quite good, especially for a premium channel like Sky Atlantic, but the fact remains that at least in the UK, Maisie Williams is moving up a weight class in appearing on Doctor Who; indeed she pulled four million more viewers for this than she ever had on Sky Atlantic, and it remains the highest rated thing she’s ever appeared on in her native country.

And yet all of the marketing treated this as an absolutely huge thing. Williams’s casting got headlines, she’s prominent in the promotional photos for both this and The Woman Who Lived, and her returns at the end of the season are treated as big, audience-pleasing surprises. This is low-key odd, to be sure, though not hard to explain. What matters, obviously, is that Maisie Williams’s celebrity impact is bolstered by the fact that she’s famous for appearing on a hit sci-fi/fantasy show. This isn’t unheard of in Doctor Who—consider the guest casting of Jacqueline Pearce in The Two Doctors. But the era we’re reaching back to there is significant as well. As with the continuity-packed opening of The Magician’s Apprentice, there’s a clear statement about what sort of show Doctor Who is and who its intended audience is. The show is unapologetically catering to genre fans. This obviously isn’t being done with the gross incompetence of the late-Saward/Nathan-Turner era, nor in a way that’s overtly hostile to other types of viewers, but the core audience here is very clearly geeks. It’s an expansive definition of geeks that’s miles from the sort that use phrases like “ethics in video game journalism,” but it’s geeks all the same.

That said, understanding Williams’s casting entirely through the lens of marketing is a mistake.…

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For once I don’t have a joke about this, it’s just a screenshot that adds further support to one of my points.

It’s October 3^rd, 2015. Sam Smith has debuted at number one with “Writing’s On the Wall,” while the rest of the top ten is basically the same as last week. Justin Bieber takes the number one slot back a week later, when Philip George & Anton Powers and Drake also enter the charts, the latter with “Hotline Bling.” In news, NASA announces that there’s liquid water on Mars, which can’t mean anything bad at all, the US accidentally bombs a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan, and a mass shooter at Umpqua Community College in Oregon kills ten after apparently warning posters on 4chan to stay home from school. 

On television, meanwhile… *sigh*. Ultimately, every story about a hot streak ends the same way. No matter how imperiously brilliant, no matter how ambitious, eventually it all falls apart. The story of how it happened this time is simple enough: Moffat had to go make The Abominable Bride, and so needed two episodes of Doctor Who by someone he wasn’t going to extensively rewrite. With the frontline pick for that job also working on Sherlock with him, in came Toby Whithouse, who did what Toby Whithouse does, which is turn in a banal mix-and-match base under siege that’s not about anything but cliches about difficult men weighed down by the gravity of their serious morality. Actually it’s a step worse than we’re used to from Whithouse, who could previously be trusted to have some semblance of plot logic whereby a majority of events either set up other events or were themselves set up. Here, however, we just have a melange of Doctor Who cliches flowing into one another without anything that can traditionally be recognized as reasons. It’s not merely derivative crap, it’s incoherent and pointless derivative crap.

But we have 2000 words to spend on it all the same, so let’s see what we can do. Let’s start with the basic setup of the base, since it is, charitably, really weird. This is a pretty committedly fanwanky story, with explicit references to Dark Water/Death in Heaven, The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, Kill the Moon, The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, The God Complex, a throwaway about the Autons, and probably a few others I can’t be bothered to go looking for, and so it would be malpractice not to contextualize this in the larger timeline of Doctor Who. The problem, simply put, is that this ends up being completely mad. The contextualization in terms of Kill the Moon makes conspicuous the fact that this is set sixty years after The Waters of Mars, and thus thirty years after Susie Fontana Brooke’s lightspeed trip to Proxima Centauri. We are, in other words, well into the space-based future. Stories that have taken place by this point include Paradise Towers and Nightmare of Eden, which is to say that Earth is setting up colonies and expanding across the galaxy.…

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The hand mines were understandably agrieved that nobody had ever asked if they wanted chairs.

It’s September 19^th, 2015. Justin Bieber is at number one with “What Do You Mean,” while Sigala, the Weeknd, Ellie Goulding, Calvin Harris and Disciples, and Rachel Platten also chart. In news since the whole Dream Crab infestation got cleared up, gunmen killed twelve in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Saudi Arabia-led coalition intervened in the civil war in Yemen, FIFA was rocked by a corruption scandal when US officials arrested a host of officials leading to the farcical scene of Sepp Blatter handily winning reelection as FIFA President and then stepping down a week later, the newly elected leftist government of Greece held a referendum on whether to defy the European Union on debt repayment and then immediately ignored the result. In the week before the story aired Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister in Australia, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, and it emerged that Volkswagen had been cheating on emissions tests, while over the week it aired John Boehner announced his resignation as Speaker of the House.

On television, Doctor Who is back. Last time we spoke about an actual episode, we noted that there would inevitably be some sort of price paid for the show’s arrogance, and particularly the decision to avoid changing things up at the end of Series Eight. Here, off the bat, we see it: 1.1 million viewers shed from Death in Heaven to The Magician’s Apprentice, and another .8 million for The Witch’s Familiar. This is the first time in the new series that a season premiere hasn’t broken the top ten, and the first time since The Eleventh Hour that a season premiere failed to top the previous season’s finale, and that was following the rather special case of Journey’s End. The previous nadirs of the new series ratings were, numerically, The Satan Pit with 6.0 million and Silence in the Library in 27^th. Series 9 would see those records broken twice apiece, with The Witch’s Familiar and Under the Lake both notching record low numbers (5.7 and 5.6) while Sleep No More and Face the Raven came in at 28^th and 30^th place respectively, resulting in the first-ever season with no top ten episodes whatsoever. And the damage would continue into Series 10, which bottomed out with The Eaters of Light pulling just 4.7m viewers. (Which is actually the fewest viewers to tune into a Rona Munro episode ever, episode two of Survival having managed 4.8.)

It is easy to overstate how big of a problem this is, and numerous threads on GallifreyBase devoted to exactly that. A show that’s never dropped out of the top 30 and continues to produce massive international sales and significant merchandising is in no meaningful danger of cancellation. Doctor Who is simply too important to the modern BBC’s finances to be cancelled without some genuine efforts at improving it.…

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