Eruditorum Press

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capaldi

The Politics of Your Piffling Little Planet (The Caretaker)

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Its gender really is basically attack helicopter

It’s September 27th, 2014. Sigma and Paloma Faith are at number one with “Changing,” while Professor Green, Script, George Ezra, and Taylor Swift also chart. In news, the United States began intervening in the Syrian Civil War, coming in emphatically on the side of dropping bombs on a country that was already blowing itself up, while Mark Reckless, a Tory MP, times his defection to UKIP to coincide with the start of the Conservative Party’s annual conference in a fairly spectacular moment of utter dickishness.

Speaking of utter dickishness, The Caretaker. Actually, let’s pause for a moment. Because I should probably stress up front that I’ve known what I’m going to say in this entry for a while. I’ve been actively thinking about it since September. I’ve literally made major life decisions based in part on the timing of this essay. And though events in the last couple of weeks have shifted the approach slightly, it’s a matter of degree. All the main points are ones I decided on a while ago. I don’t know whether this fact matters, or if it should; nevertheless, it is a fact.

Anyway. The Caretaker is probably the last Doctor Who contribution from my friend Gareth Roberts. I am not so much being sarcastic there as I am layering a preposterous quantity of irony into a single word. I’d say “he was a friend once,” but that starts getting into Doctor/Missy territory, and honestly it’s just not that cool. But for quite a while, Gareth was vocally supportive of TARDIS Eruditorum, including very generously granting an interview for the Graham Williams book. I got along even better with Clayton Hickman, who for a while I was chatting with often enough that Jill took to calling him my Internet boyfriend. These days, they’ve both blocked me on Twitter, Clayton back in January, Gareth a couple weeks ago. Clayton blocked me (after calling me a “pompous arse”) because I used Gareth as an example in a tweet defending enjoying art made by problematic people; Gareth after I tweeted that I was torn between two jokes I could make in this essay about something he said on Twitter. (I worked them both in, for what it’s worth.)

“Problematic people.” “Something he said on Twitter.” Look at me dancing around the issue. Here. Let’s just go ahead and quote the tweets. “I ❤️ how trannies choose names like Munroe, Paris and Chelsea. It’s never Julie or Bev is it? It’s almost like a clueless gayboy’s idea of a glamorous lady. But of course it’s definitely not that.” Yeah. About the best thing you can say about that is that J.K. Rowling hasn’t hit like on it. It’s ignorant, spiteful garbage of the highest order. A clueless gayboy? I mean, I’m a lesbian, so yeah, apparently pretty fucking clueless. And this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of transphobic bilge he regularly tweets these days. Which, to answer Clayton at least, yeah, is a bit of a problem for me.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

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In early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured and had been hacked, resulting in the leak of scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of the other five episodes. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.

These thing, of course, happen, and generally speaking it’s a sign that a show is popular enough to be worth hacking. And it’s generally not actually a problem for the show. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings; indeed they’re among the best-performing episodes of the Capaldi era. Likewise, leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. Certainly it never dings Game of Thrones’s ratings. There are at least some instances, most notably the pilot for Supergirl, where there’s a widespread belief that the network itself leaked the episode for publicity purposes.

More broadly, though, the five leaked episodes were actually good. Good material is not harmed by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But even there, if Capaldi had been a disaster this would have been found out on its own. The leaks are largely beside the point. Nevertheless, these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and placeholder musical cues their basic quality was evident.

And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time. I consider myself in good company, as Moffat admitted that he would have watched them too. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. I lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.…

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They’d Still Be Tapping Out Gibberish (Time Heist)

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“So despite the fact that the best known heist movie is called Ocean’s Eleven and you’re the twelfth Doctor, they called it Time Heist.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Keep slow walking.”

It’s September 20th, 2014. Calvin Harris and John Newman are at number one with “Blame,” with Ten Walls , Chris Brown, and Taylor Swift also charting. Since Listen bowed, the main news is that after a dramatic last minute intervention in which David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband issued a joint statement called “The Vow” promising further devolution, Scotland voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, to the massive relief of Cameron, who probably would have had to resign or something if he’d called a big showy referendum like that and then lost it. Microsoft paid two billion dollars to purchase the company that created Minecraft, while a man with a knife jumped the fence at the White House and made it to the East Room before being subdued, which is rather further than you’re supposed to get doing that.

While on television, the Doctor robs a whole bank in Series Eight’s weakest episode. There are two big things sabotaging Time Heist. The first is simply that it comes after Listen. For the most part the question of whether the ultra-cautious approach that characterizes the first half of the season was a good idea is fairly uninteresting; by and large this approach worked, and there’s no real way to know what a different approach would have looked like. But after Listen it clearly became unnecessary, and moving from the confident triumph Listen to another “safe pair of hands” script that’s running on old standards doesn’t feel cautious, it feels timid. This, of course, was unavoidable. In the planning stages, there was no way to know when the turning point for Capaldi’s Doctor would be and thus how many episodes of bedding in he was going to need. So there was always the risk of staying cautious for too long.

The other problem is that Time Heist is crap, and this was entirely avoidable. Stephen Thompson has never been a particularly compelling safe pair of hands; neither Curse of the Black Spot nor Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS were particularly good, and indeed a pretty strong case can be made that they were bad. And despite Moffat apparently performing rewrites, this does nothing to surpass those expectations. Indeed, it sails noticeably below them. Thompson’s previous two efforts were weak but at least suggestive of interesting possibilities. Whenever Time Heist comes to a moment in which it should signify something, however, it draws a curious and frustrating blank.

The problems start with the supporting cast. Psi and Saibra have essentially no traits other than their plot functions. They’re one dimensional characters, stretching from the one thing they can do in the heist to the one thing they want, with no further depth whatsoever. Psi is a hacker who wants his memories back.…

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Fear Makes Companions Of Us All (Listen)

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ur handwriting sux 

It’s September 13th, 2014. Literally; the bulk of this post is a lightly revised version of my initial review, which I cheekily declared would be its TARDIS Eruditorum entry without really considering how I’d feel about that three and a half years later. (Answer: I have some regrets, mostly about providing a satisfying experience for my Patrons, but I figured out how to address them.) Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum.

While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem to really hate this one. Which is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that we seem to have an instant classic. I’ve watched this twice now. And it deserves that and more. It is undoubtedly a “big Steven Moffat statement” of an episode, conceived on the level of The Day of the Doctor or Deep Breath. It is ostentatious and meticulous in the way that Steven Moffat at his best is. This is a writer who knows that he is at the height of his professional career and is cackling madly about it. It is also, unmistakably, him writing the cheap and disposable one with no budget – and doing it, by his own admission, because he wanted to “prove he could still write.” 

He’s used the production schedule of Doctor Who very slyly here, doing a story that a twelve episode season requires, as a piece of BBC-produced drama, if it’s going to throw a whacking big CGI dinosaur into the opening three seconds of the season premiere for no reason other than to set up some jokes and a death scene for the Doctor to start investigating a mystery. It’s just that he then wrote it like it was The Big Finale. It draws all its structural tricks from Nick Hurran and Ben Wheatley, and shares its approach with Time of the Doctor and His Last Vow. Except there’s no actual monster – it’s all creepy edits and lighting changes. It could be the Silence. Maybe it is, and we’ll pay that off in some future episode, because this is only episode four and Doctor Who has plenty of surprises left in its back two-thirds. We’re still in the “introduce Peter Capaldi with episodes by the old hands” phase of things. The actual new writers and experimental phase comes later.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Blood Cell

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For all that the Capaldi era marks a golden age for the series, it also marked a heavy decline in the show’s mass popularity. This was, contrary to paranoiacs on GallifreyBase, not a precipitous decline into crisis—the revived series has still never gone below 30th place in the weekly rankings, which puts its cultural footprint in the general vicinity of the Letts and Hinchcliffe eras. But this is still quite the falling from being the biggest show on television. And the fall is visible outside of ratings. The merchandising explosion that peaked around Series 5 had well and truly dried up by now, with only a handful of action figures for the Capaldi era ever filtering out. (So far as I can tell, Bill never even got one.) The rush of shorts that accompanied all of the Matt Smith seasons and peaked with Night of the Doctor abruptly stopped. Even the tie-in novels, which had released at a rate of at least six a season since the show’s debut, dwindled to three per year. This is admittedly still three more novels than Line of Duty or Call the Midwife put out in a year (although Broadchurch turns out to have been surprisingly prolific), but again, it’s a step back for Doctor Who’s omnipresence.

Despite this decline (or perhaps because of it) the Capaldi era was an interesting one for the novels. Of the nine released, two announced themselves as worth covering. Being worth covering has never meant the same thing as being good, of course, but that’s a topic for the other one. The Blood Cell, released as part of the first tranche of three, is just here because it’s actually a solid Doctor Who novel with actual ambitions, several of which it actually fulfills. Its basic premise—the Doctor is in prison—borders slightly on the obvious, given the show’s tendency to bounce them in and out of captivity over the course of a story. But this isn’t a story where the Doctor gets captured; this is a story about prisons. Which is an excellent premise. I remarked on Twitter the other day that Doctor Who would be a more interesting show if its ongoing topic of ambivalence had been police instead of soldiers. I hadn’t gotten to this book yet, but it largely demonstrates my point. Giving the Doctor a tortured and ambivalent relationship with war is just putting him at odds with some of the underlying assumptions of his genre. But giving him a tortured and ambivalent relationship with law acknowledges the tensions within the character himself—it actually gets at the weird mix of aristocracy and anarchism bound up in the character.

This is not, of course, the first time Doctor Who has focused intently on prisons. Lawrence Miles tackled the issue compellingly back in Interference, where he had the Eighth Doctor caught in a Saudi Arabian prison where his usual tricks of breaking out don’t work because the guards are motivated by no reason beyond capricious brutality.…

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What’s a Tree Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Robot of Sherwood)

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As absurd conceits in Doctor Who go, the fact that Clara can spontaneously grow several feet of hair ranks among my favorites.

It’s September 6th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” with Maroon 5, Sam Smith, and Taylor Swift also charting. In news, a poll showing majority support for Scottish independence sends just about everybody into one sort of frenzy or another. And a massive cache of nude photos hacked from celebrities’ iCloud accounts, most notably and vocally including Jennifer Lawrence, hits the Internet. (Lawrence eventually offers the entirely sensible response that “anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”)

While on television, the inauguration of what we might call late Gatiss. This is not a term or concept we think about as much as late Moffat. Part of this is simply a matter of volume—pinning Robot of Sherwood as the commencement of Gatiss’s late style is, in terms of episode count, equivalent to declaring that Moffat hit late style with The Eleventh Hour. But more of it is simply a general disinclination to treat Gatiss with the sort of seriousness that the phrase “late style” implies. The usual line on Gatiss is that he’s an empty trad nostalgist, an approach that implicitly rejects the idea that one’s style could evolve.

And yet starting with Series Seven, Gatiss clearly began improving. Cold War and The Crimson Horror were among the best scripts in an admittedly uneven season, with The Crimson Horror in particular demonstrating a newfound interest in form. And that broadly continues through his Capaldi-era contributions, none of which are quite as straightforward as unreconstructed nostalgia pastiches, and two of which are at least pretty good. They are still clearly Gatissy in the same way that Moffat’s late work remains Moffaty, but there’s been a concrete shift in their concerns and goals. What previously seemed like a pathological aversion to originality has mellowed to an embrace of simplicity and clarity. Traditionalism has softened to classicism; nostalgia has evolved to homage.

On one level, for instance, Robot of Sherwood is nothing more than a straightforward celebrity historical of the sort Gatiss already did in The Unquiet Dead and Victory of the Daleks. Except, of course, as the Doctor points out, Robin Hood isn’t real. Admittedly, the same can be said of Victory of the Daleks’ depiction of Winston Churchill, but that wasn’t a major plot point. Here, on the other hand, the question of Robin Hood’s fictionality is one of the driving engines of the story. This doesn’t result in something that is radically different from a celebrity historical—all of them are basically just genre romps with prominent guest stars. But to a degree unmatched by anything save The Unicorn and the Wasp (which notably takes the piss out of The Unquiet Dead), this is a story that’s actually open about this fact. This is a story that is not so much open about the fact that it’s storming through all the major set pieces of a Robin Hood story as it is reveling in it, repeatedly lampshading it for the audience.…

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It’s a Game! They’re Taking Me For a Ride! (Into the Dalek)

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WE ARE THE DALEKS. WE HAVE INTERIORITY.

If you want any Eruditorum Press books that aren’t Neoreaction a Basilisk, they’ll be going off sale around 2:00 EST this afternoon. This means it’s your last chance ever to buy Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons.

It’s August 30th, 2014. David Guetta and Sam Martin are at number one, with Taylor Swift, Magic, OneRepublic, Wankelmut, and Union J also charting. In the last week, Modern Family and Breaking Bad won at the Emmys, while Amazon purchased Twitc. Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling debated Scottish Independence, Douglas Carswell defected from the Tories to UKIP, and Kate Bush staged the first concert of her Before the Dawn series, marking her first live performance in thirty-five years.

On television, meanwhile, Peter Capaldi climbs around inside a Dalek. On one level, this is another example of playing Capaldi’s rollout inordinately safe, going from a conservative Robot-inspired debut immediately to a Dalek story. On another, however, there’s a compulsive strangeness to this Dalek story. It’s based on what is clearly a kind of batty idea. Fantastic Voyage with Daleks is several miles from the sanest Doctor Who pitch ever. This is not necessarily a bad idea, of course. Some of the best Doctor Who stories ever come from completely insane pitches, and we all know what Series Eight story I’m thinking of here. But battiness is not a guarantee of success either, or else Daleks in Manhattan would be good. 

More broadly, there is an element of “will this do?” to every Dalek story since about Doomsday. The answer to that question is often “yes,” and even sometimes “and then some,” but there’s still a niggling sense of “well we have to do Dalek stories occasionally so let’s see if we can come up with something” to them all. And Into the Dalek exhibits this more than most. It’s not fair to say that nobody was excited to see Phil Ford named as a writer for Series Eight, but those that were probably overestimated his contributions to The Waters of Mars and didn’t watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. Those who did recognized Ford as a writer who turns out unremarkable mediocrities with tedious repetitiveness, and his hiring as a clear and conscious lack of ambition for this story. The cynical way to frame it is that Ford is here to be rewritten by Moffat, a task he basically succeeds at. 

Certainly anyone looking for reasons to slag off Into the Dalek is going to have a fairly easy time of it. Most of its best ideas were plagiarized from Rob Shearman. Nobody has actually come up with an interesting idea of what should be inside a Dalek, and the resulting set design is insipid. The CGI largely aspires to adequacy. But none of these are catastrophic problems. And while the same can be said of the stories’ virtues—none of them really manage to justify the whole—the story attains a sort of harmless mediocrity, neither particularly loveable or hateable.

…

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Like Breath on a Mirror (Deep Breath)

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Get it oooooon. Bang a gooooong. Get it on.

It’s August 23rd, 2014. Nico and Vinz are at number one with “Am I Wrong,”  with Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea, Cheryl Cole and Tinie Tempah, and Charli XCX and herself also charting. Ed Sheeran tops the album charts. In news, since Time of the Doctor took its bow there’s been an Ebola epidemic, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, there was a military coup in Thailand, and Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, kicking off the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re also in the last month of the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, which isn’t technically the sort of thing that goes in these sections since it’s just sort of an ongoing thing, but clearly I’m out of practice and anyway it’s kind of relevant. Oh, and a week before this airs some jackass makes a big blog post about how an indie game designer he used to be dating supposedly cheated on him, which really doesn’t seem like it should be the sort of thing that should make a news section but actually serves as a perfect summary for how the news is going to go over the next three years and change.

While on television, Peter Capaldi makes his long-awaited third appearance as the Doctor, just over a year after his announcement. This was not, it should be stressed, an unusually long gap between announcement and first episode. Indeed, the gap was shorter than Smith’s, and looks set to be shorter than Whittaker’s as well. But there was a clear, if slightly ineffable difference between Capaldi’s debut and these others. With both Smith and Whittaker there was a tremendous amount of mystery over what their Doctor would be like—Whittaker because of the obvious gender issues, Smith because he was young, relatively unknown, and working with a new showrunner. But Capaldi was a known quantity—an already well-respected actor who, indeed, already had what would have been a perfectly good career-defining role in Malcolm Tucker. As a result, in addition to the usual excitement and goodwill a new Doctor gets there was an unusual level of expectation as to what Capaldi’s take on the character would be. And the promotion for Series Eight leaned into this, with trailers emphasizing the “where are we going,” “into darkness” and “am I a good man,” “I don’t know” exchanges from Into the Dalek and Moffat talking to Doctor Who Magazine about putting a “Capaldi moment” into every episode in which the Doctor “slightly alarms you.” By any sane accounting, Deep Breath had all the stars aligned – a pleasantly uncompetitive week just before the real heavy hitters of the fall debuted, a receptive audience, and a clear set of marks to hit. 

So why, then, is Deep Breath so ostentatiously cautious? This is, after all, the new Doctor story where you could most get away with just storming out of the gate as you mean to go on. Instead, however, Moffat consciously models the story on Robot, letting Capaldi wreck havoc on Smith’s supporting cast for seventy-five minutes.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows

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By rights, Moffat should have left. Sure, he’d done a season less than Davies, but it was clearly time. Each of his three seasons had been a step down from the one before, with Series Seven being an openly miserable experience. The Day of the Doctor and Matt Smith’s departure provided an occasion where he could leave on a high. His style had become exceedingly recognizable and recognized, which is the phase right before utter stagnation. It was time to go, and if he didn’t he risked—indeed, given the tenacity of his critics, essentially ensured—that there would be accusations that he stayed too long. But, of course, he didn’t. He retrenched, got a new star and executive producer, and went back to try again. This is the story of how that went, and of what may be Doctor Who’s most unexpected golden age.

But to understand that unexpectedness we must first understand the landscape that Doctor Who was returning into. Because the problem wasn’t just that Moffat’s tenure looked long in the tooth on its own merits. It was that outside Doctor Who’s window, the world was catching up. In one sense this was not a surprise. Doctor Who was onto its eighth season, and while obviously it had an unusually strong precedent for long runs, the new iteration was definitely a televisual senior citizen. But it’s worth appreciating the degree to which both Doctor Who and Moffat’s defining arsenal of tricks had been absorbed into the popular culture.

The obvious place to start is with the relentless blockbuster factory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Quietly chugging along in the background since the late Russell T Davies era, by 2014 Marvel was well into Phase Two of their cinematic expansion, going back over the franchises they’d used to build up to The Avengers to give them sequels while introducing a handful of new ones alongside them. The wisecracking sci-fi action-comedy of Guardians of the Galaxy might seem the more obvious 2014 comparison, but its primary debt is clearly to Star Wars, and anyway, it’s the whole we’re interested in more than the individual parts. Because what the MCU does on aggregate is apply a relatively consistent narrative structure to a bevy of different genres.

This isn’t done in the exact same way that Doctor Who does it, of course. Doctor Who has a narrative conceit that directly fuels its genre hopping. The Doctor can drop into any sort of story they please and muck it up. The MCU, on the other hand, accomplishes its genrefluidity by having access to any character Marvel hadn’t already sold off to Fox or Sony. And so over the course of Phase Two it moves from a technothriller to high fantasy to a political thriller to a Star Wars riff to its big crossover set piece before closing out with a heist comedy. And by Phase Three it’s cycling in even more approaches. The result moves more slowly than Doctor Who—only the political thriller and the Star Wars riff come out in 2014, for instance.…

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Outside the Government: His Last Vow

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It’s January 12th, 2014. Pharrell Williams is happily at number one, with Beyonce, Eminem, Ellie Goulding, and Pitbull also charting. In news, a cold snap in the US has all fifty states with at least somewhere below freezing, and a chemical leak in West Virginia leaves 300,000 without clean water. In the UK, the death of Mark Duggan, which kicked off riots in the summer of 2011, is ruled to have been lawful, while Keith Wallis pleads guilty for falsely claiming to have heard Andrew Mitchell call some police officers “plebs.” 

On television, meanwhile, the shooting star that is Sherlock Series Three finishes its arc across the firmament with the Moffat script. His Last Vow is an odd thing. There are days on which I think it might be Moffat’s greatest ever script. But I mean “great” in its most complexly troubled sense. Moffat has been open about the fact that Series Seven of Doctor Who and The Day of the Doctor were miserable experiences. If the latter was him hauling himself back into fighting shape, then, this is the script with which he means to take back the mantle of being one of the most essential voices on television. But that means that this story lacks the runaway sense of triumph the fiftieth anniversary had. This is the long, hard title fight in which Moffat goes the distance with a set of ideas that are right on the edge of his capabilities. The result is harder, spikier, and far less approachable. It’s also the far greater accomplishment. Chris O’Leary, writing about “Station to Station,” describes the song thusly: “One of the many lies we tell children is that there’s no limit to the imagination. Of course there is. Even the most consuming and perceptive of minds reaches its borders and retreats. Expanding the mind is dog’s work, as grueling as it’s often fruitless; few attempt it, fewer succeed in it, and those who do often come out twisted and torn. In 1975, binging on cocaine, living in paranoid isolation and making a rock record, David Bowie succeeded.” One doubts Moffat’s version of this involved quite so much cocaine, but there is a similar sense of an artist clawing his way, bloodied and stunned, to a peak he knows even as he reaches it that he will never surpass. 

But while Moffat’s script is the element that’s pushing to new heights, it comes off because he’s backed by an absolutely staggering array of talent. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and especially Abbington rise to the ambition of the material, while Nick Hurran shows why he’s become one of Moffat’s most trusted collaborators. With Moffat at the frayed ends of his powers, he needs everyone to show up. They do, and the effect is an entire show determined to see just how far it can push things. In answering that question, then, we basically have to start at the ending, in which Moffat comes down firmly on the side of shooting Rupert Murdoch in the face. …

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