capaldi

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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🤣😠🥵 don’t 🤬 🛠 that way

This post, to put it mildly, is not compatible with all devices. It should work fine on up to date Apple devices, and work adequately on most others. If it’s not working for you, an imperfect workaround is available here. And while we’re linking the Patreon, just $16 to go until my final fundraiser goal.

📅 April 22nd, 2017. 🎵🔝 Ed Sheeran’s “🔺 of You,” while ⤵️ in the charts are Julia Michaels, Kendrick Lamar, Clean Bandit, and Harry Styles. 🗞 Theresa May calls a snap 🗳 to try to secure a clear parliamentary majority for Brexit, which is going to go a bit 😬 for her, but that’s another entry. Mike Pence visits 🇰🇷 and goes to the border with 🇰🇵 and glare at it in a 🤔 attempt at ⚛️🚀 disarmament. And Bill O’Reilly is fired from 🦊 News due to his persistent tendency to engage in 🍆 assault.

📺, 😁. Frank Cottrel Boyce’s previous effort, In the 🌳🌳 of the 🌃 (or 🐅 for short), was a curiously mixed affair, combining 😍 ambition with deeply 🥴 execution. With 😁, however, he dials both back, going for a classic 🛸 setup instead of the quasi-🧙🏻‍♂️ approach of 🐅 and then playing it more or less straight. 😁 has essentially 2️⃣ purposes: giving 👩🏾‍🦱 her first proper adventure and exploring its own 🛸💡. The former means that the latter have to largely 🖍 in the lines, offering an easily recognizable set of tropes as a 🖼 against which the audience can clearly distinguish 👩🏾‍🦱. This is largely 😥, because 😁 has some 🤩💡, but, not unlike 🐅, precious little follow through.

Where it is 😎, however, is in terms of 👩🏾‍🦱. The dynamic between her and the 👨‍⚕️ is instantaneous and compelling. We’ve never really gotten to see Capaldi’s 👩‍⚕️ in “just having fun” mode. (The start of 🤖 of Sherwood is about the only exception.) Part of it is that Matt Smith got these equivalent episodes for 👩🏻, but most 👨‍⚕️ still have adventures late in a companion’s run that they get into while larking around. Consider the 👩‍⚕️ and 👩🏻‍🦰 in The 👧 Who Waited, for instance. Or the 👨‍⚕️ and 👩🏼 at the top of ❤️ and 👹. But Capaldi’s 👩‍⚕️ and 👩🏻 did not have a relationship in which the 👨‍⚕️ could easily switch into fun mode, simply because to do so would undermine all of 👩🏻’s carefully crafted obsessions. But the 👩‍⚕️ in 😁 is fundamentally different, literally sneaking off like a truant 👦 skipping 🏫 to have this adventure behind 👨🏻‍🦲 back. 👩🏾‍🦱 is both the cause and beneficiary of this, not only offering the 👨‍⚕️ a reason to go explore an 👽🌍 but getting to have a story that is, for surprisingly long stretches of its runtime, basically a 👐. As a result, we just plain see more of 👩🏾‍🦱 in her first adventure on an 👽🌏 than we did of 👩🏻 in The 💍 of Akhaten or 👩🏼‍🦰 in The 👹 ⤵️.…

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And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

Just a quick update on our Patreon fundraiser, we’re just $28 a week from our final “help El actually be able to build savings instead of constantly bleeding out her Kickstarter money” goal of $700 a week. Thank you all so much for making this possible. I’m unbelievably excited to be going back to being a full-time writer. That said, this final threshold is important, so of you can help put us over this final line, please stop by the Patreon. Your support is extremely welcome. (Also, I’ve got Game of Thrones reviews for $2 patrons…)

It’s April 15th, 2017. Harry Styles is at number one with “Sign of the Times.” Lower in the charts, the remnants of the Sheeraning continue, along with Clean Bandit, Drake, and Martin Jensen. Since Sherlock, meanwhile… well, let’s start with UK news. It’s simpler. The UK triggered Article 50 and began the actual Brexit process, starting what was at the time a two year clock to departing the European Union. The new pound coin was released. And that’s basically it for major news. In the US, meanwhile… well, Donald Trump is inaugurated as President. He almost immediately commences with an attempt on his promised ban on Muslims entering the country, which immediately triggers a rash of lawsuits and protests. Less than a month later, Michael Flynn, his National Security Advisor, is forced to resign after it emerges that he lied about pre-election contacts with Russia. It emerges that another Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka, is a member of a Hungarian Nazi group. Neil Gorsuch is nominated to the Supreme Court to take the seat that Mitch McConnell kept Obama from filling. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests are forcibly crushed. And that gaffe where the Oscars accidentally name the wrong film as Best Picture. Yeah. It’s been a big few months.

Thankfully, at last we have Doctor Who to distract us. The Pilot is a strange artifact. Its title is justified within the narrative, but clearly pulls a double duty, meta-referencing the common terminology for the first episode of a series, shot as a proof of concept for network approval. Moffat, in other words, is proclaiming a clean start. This is, of course, a partial lie. This is not a new beginning for the show, but rather an epilogue that’s marking time so Chibnall can finish saying “not all men” before casting Jodie Whittaker. But the mild perversity of that double duty is the point of the exercise here. Moffat has spoken in interviews of his idea of a mayfly Doctor, in which you do a bit of stunt casting for a Doctor who regenerates at the end of their first story. (He sort of did this with John Hurt, but that’s beside the point.) Here we get a mayfly series—a from first principles revamp of Doctor Who that starts with its expiration date already marked on the calendar. 

Indeed, the ways in which it’s not a fresh start are easy to rattle off.…

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Sure, yes, you feel pain, but tell me… do you bleed?

It’s December 25th, 2016. Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye” remains at number one, while Rag ‘n Bone Man, Little Mix, Zara Larsson, and the annual re-charting of Mariah Carey also chart. In news since Class got lost, the CIA reported to Congress that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, which President-elect Trump described as “ridiculous,” the Obama administration allowed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to pass, and a riot broke out in a Birmingham prison, the worst British prison riot since the Thatcher era. 

On television, meanwhile, for the first time in a year, Doctor Who. When this aired at the brutal end of 2016, suspended between Carrie Fisher’s heart attack and her death and in the immediate wake of George Michael’s, it felt like a baffling way to bring the show back after its longest gap between episodes since Rose. Two years and change later, it feels like a baffling artifact from another world. At its heart, it features Moffat making a well-earned return to autopilot. He will not phone it in for the entirety of Series 10, mercifully, but he is manifestly out of the weird, frenzied renaissance that launched with The Day of the Doctor. The ambitions of The Return of Doctor Mysterio are set firmly at “be an entertaining piece of fluff for an hour and then air a trailer for the upcoming series.” This is accomplished, inasmuch as that matters to us.

What is interesting is the utter batshit craziness of the method by which this relatively banal task is accomplished. On paper, the underlying concept of “Doctor Who does superheroes” is straightforward. They’d been the dominant genre of filmmaking for years, and were a genre Doctor Who had not meaningfully engaged with on television in forty-eight years. What that description of the concept fails to account for, however, is that Steven Moffat does not actually have the slightest interest in just dropping the Doctor into a superhero film. 

There is a standard plot structure that animates most superhero films (and indeed most contemporary films in general, in the same way that Campbell provided a satisfying straitjacket to another generation) derived from Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide Save the Cat. Extensive breakdowns of it are easy enough to find, but the basic idea is a three act structure where act one consists of a statement of theme and a main character whose life undergoes some upheaval. Act two is the main character living through this upheaval and the story relishing in its premise, ending in things going wrong for the main character. Act three is the main character successfully integrating the theme into their psyche and triumphing against the odds. 

Here is what the Save the Cat beats are not. Act one: Flashback setup of one main character’s origin at the hands of the other, followed up by their reuniting later in life to face a common enemy. Act two: Extended farce about secret identities and child rearing.…

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