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Outside the Government: The Sign of Three

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We continue to count down towards the TARDIS Eruditorum relaunch on March 19th with revised versions of some old blog posts on Sherlock. Proverbs of Hell will run its final two installments on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

It’s January 5th, 2014. Pitbull and Kesha are at number one with “Timber,” and while the rest of the charts are pretty similar to four days ago, we’ve got Avicii, Jason Derulo, Martin Garrix, and OneRepublic as artists we didn’t actually mention last week. News is about as sleepy as you’d expect for four days at the beginning of the year, although there’s some flooding in Wales, Scotland, and the west of England. On television, meanwhile, the third season of Sherlock continues its twelve day blitz with The Sign of Three.

Let’s talk about what Sherlock is. Although its main character is a detective, it is not quite a detective show, in that the solving of mysteries is not its main narrative engine. One suspects that had it been comprised of six hourlong episodes a season it would have been, as it would have had several filler episodes each run that would have ended up being case of the week romps, but the reduction to three episodes a year changed it into something weirder. Nevertheless, its basic dramatic engine is still closely related to that of the detective show: the moment of Figuring It Out. Its defining pleasure is the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television, and The Sign of Three is a prime example. It is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death. No effort is made to tease the impending threat of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do in order to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who’s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised—the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic resolution of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else.…

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Outside the Government: The Empty Hearse

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TARDIS Eruditorum will return on March 19th. But as a prelude, we’re rerunning lightly edited versions of some old essays from the earliest days of the Patreon, now reskinned as the Outside the Government essays for Series 3 of Sherlock. I would also be remiss if I did not note that we are in the final 48 hours of the TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 Kickstarter, and it’s a nailbiter whether we’ll make all the stretch goals.
 
It’s January 1st, 2014. Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” has unseated Sam Bailey at number one, while Eminem and Rihanna, Lily Allen, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, and One Direction also chart. In the news, since Matt Smith got old and died it’s been exceedingly quiet. Obama signed a budget deal, marijuana was legalized in Colorado, incandescent light bulbs became illegal to sell in the United States, and Latvia adopted the Euro. While on television, Sherlock informed the audience that it was going to lie to them, and then went on to do just that. It had, in the tradition of fair lies, given ample warning. “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” And so, of course, it was. Indeed, The Empty Hearse is in effect a ninety minute exercise in arguing that the question of how Sherlock survived The Reichenbach Fall is irrelevant, or at least largely uninteresting.
To call this a bold response to one’s own iconic pop culture moment seems an understatement. And the reactions at the time are worth recalling, even if it is only a year on. First and most interesting were those who felt that The Empty Hearse was mean-spirited in its treatment of fandom, a criticism that focused especially on the depiction of slash fiction within the episode. And yet it’s difficult to quite articulate what about the portrayal of slash fans is offensive here. The only person to really mock them is Anderson, and Laura’s observation that her Sherlock/Moriarty slash is no more ludicrous than some of Anderson’s own theories is, in the context of the story’s larger attitude towards the idea of “solving” Sherlock’s survival, significant. She, at least, is in on her own joke, which Anderson never gets to be.

And it is, ultimately, the joke that’s at issue, which is where this episode’s boldness comes in. That The Empty Hearse was going to be read largely in terms of how well it resolved the cliffhanger was, of course, a foregone conclusion. You don’t get to have that kind of media coverage and then not be judged on how you stick the landing. Devoting an entire episode to it instead of, as they had with the cliffhanger of The Great Game, lampshading it with an absurdly trivial resolution was a necessity. But what wasn’t necessary was making The Empty Hearse into a ninety minute exploration of what it means to resolve the cliffhanger in the first place.

Which brings us to the second reaction, the accusation that the story was self-indulgent. Which misses the point in many ways.

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

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This post exists because my Patreon crossed the $310 mark. It’s currently at $318.50, exactly $6.50 away from another bonus post like this on “Night of the Doctor,” which will otherwise wait until the McGann/Eccleston book to be written. You can pledge to help make that happen here.

To recap, in early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured, and that scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight had leaked. 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 Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood, Listen, and Time Heist. 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.
 
The first thing to say is both obvious and controversial: it was fine. 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. Just like the 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. It’s to the point where it’s widely believed that the recent leak of the Supergirl pilot was deliberate on CBS’s part. 
 
No, that’s not the same as saying that leaks can’t hurt shows. Certainly it helps that the five leaked episodes were actually good. It’s hard to hurt good material 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 these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and dodgy 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, especially as Moffat has admitted that he would have watched them. 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. 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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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Cucumber, Banana, Tofu

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This is a bonus post, the topic of which was selected by my backers on Patreon. Voting is currently going on for next month’s bonus post, with candidates including Orphan Black and China Mieville. Also Deadwood. Please, if you enjoy my blog and my work, consider chipping in a buck a week or so. Thanks.

Let’s start with the title – mine, in this case, although Davies’s is magnificent in its own right. I say this mostly as disclaimer – there’s an awful lot to say about these three shows. They are very, very good. They deserve reams of analysis, and much of that really ought to come from within queer communities. They’ve gotten some, but not nearly enough. Nevertheless, I am me, and not the vast and polyvocal assemblage of queer communities, and I’m best known for writing a blog about Doctor Who, so the main angle here is going to be an auteur-centric take on the work of Russell T Davies. Much is left unsaid. Above anything else, I recommend watching them – if you’re in the UK, I assume they exist via some sort of catch-up or video on demand service. If you’re in the US, it looks like Logo TV is running them starting on April 13th, and hopefully they’ll make iTunes and Amazon appearances at the same time.

Seriously, watch them, because they are the best work of Russell T Davies’s career, and whatever we might say about the slow march towards an inevitable and entirely predictable end that was the tail end of Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who, Davies remains one of the best television writers in the history of the medium, so a phrase like “the best work of Russell T Davies’s career” carries some fucking weight.

So, to recap, after Miracle Day landed with the wet slap of a piece of tofu, Davies began developing a series for Showtime to be called Cucumber. This was a show he’d been talking about making since the latter days of his time on Doctor Who – a show about middle-aged gay men. Unfortunately production on this got delayed when his partner was diagnosed with cancer and the pair moved back to the UK, beginning a several year period of Davies basically not working save for Wizards vs Aliens and an episode of Old Jack’s Boat that I bet you haven’t seen either. Until, eventually, Cucumber re-emerged, now at Channel 4, and with a pair of spin-off shows in the form of Banana and Tofu.

The names, as Davies cheerily explained way back when he was making it in the US, and explains again in the opening scene of Cucumber, come from a study he read that classified the male erection into categories based on produce, with tofu being the softest and cucumber being the hardest. Indeed, much of the show is unchanged from the early teases, with the first episode retaining much of the description Davies gave Ben Cook back in The Writer’s Tale when talking about what he wanted to do next.…

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Regeneration: A Personal History of Doctor Who

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A planned guest post for today fell through at the last minute, and Anna Wiggins graciously stepped in to deliver her thoughts on Missy and trans issues, which is not really in chronological sequence, but again, the planned post fell through. And more to the point, it’s brilliant, so really, who cares about chronology. This is a blog about time travel, dammit. 

Also! The fantastic folks at the Pex Lives podcast invited me on this month to talk about The Ribos Operation and Last Christmas. It was a hoot to record. I’m mostly just ranting and pontificating, but if you enjoy me spontaneously staking out excessively bold critical positions, you’ll love this.

It is the summer of 1993. I am watching PBS, which is showing a weird old British sci-fi show that I enjoy watching whenever I catch it on. On screen, Romana (a character I like a lot) is trying on different bodies. It’s silly, and the Doctor is being kind of mean to her, (I don’t know to use the word sexist yet) but the idea of trying on a new body is amazing. In the most secret part of myself, I wish I could do that. I wish I could look like princess Astra.

It is the end of summer, 1998. I don’t want to be alive any more. In a couple of weeks, I will try to kill myself. I will slip outside in the middle of the night, walk several miles into the woods down trails only I know about, to a clearing I spend a lot of time hiding in. I will take the razor blade on my swiss army knife and try to cut my wrist open. But the blade won’t be sharp enough, and the pain and shock of seeing my own blood will stop me before I go too far.

I will spend the next ten years feeling like a coward. I will regret failing. I will think often about trying again.

It is April of 2010. A new friend of mine is in town, and is talking about how great the new Doctor Who is. He suggests I watch it some time. My hazy, pleasant memories of Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward help make his case, and a few weeks later I marathon series 1 with my husband. I am hooked, and catch up just after series 5 ends.

It is May 14th, 2011. The Doctor’s Wife is on TV. Neil Gaiman just used some throwaway dialogue to casually write in the possibility of time lords changing gender when they regenerate. The exact dialogue is a bit irksome, but I don’t care; this is huge and affirming and very clearly a challenge for the showrunners to live up to. I’m thrilled about this. Exactly one month ago, I legally changed my name to Anna Rose Wiggins.

It is August 4th, 2013. I am watching a live stream of the Peter Capaldi announcement. The last few weeks have been interesting for me, because this is the first regeneration I’ve been an active fan for.…

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Doctor Who in 2014

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This post was supported by my Patreon. If you would like to continue seeing essays on this blog, please consider backing it, as the continuation of all parts of this blog besides The Last War in Albion past February 9th is contingent on the success of the Patreon. Basically, for a dollar a week, I’ll keep blogging. Also, today is the last day of my post-Christmas ebook sale. All my Eruditorum Press books, for cheap. Comics reviews later today, though I think it’ll only be one issue. Last War in Albion tomorrow. 

I think it’s probably best to say everything in the form of the big, ultimate point of the exercise, which is a Top Twelve Doctor Who Stories of 2014 list. Here it is, with changes relative to my post-Death in Heaven list indicated and letter grades. This is based on having done a rewatch between Death in Heaven and Last Christmas, except for Last Christmas itself, which I rewatched tonight.

#12: Time Heist (-2, C)

Let me start by reiterating that 2014 was, for my money, the best year of Doctor Who I’ve been active for. I think it was better than 2005. Not more historically important or culturally impactful, but better. It’s the first year since 1989 you can credibly argue had no bad stories. And there aren’t a lot of years before 1989 you can really say that about either. Still, something has to be last.

Ultimately, the slight complaints I made about the direction in my initial review, on a rewatch, proved bigger than I thought. The Teller looks marvelous, but the lengthy section in the cement vaults with sets blatantly redressed with nothing but lighting gels looks cheap and tawdry. It’s worth going back and watching that leaked workprint, just for informational purposes. It is a much, much better episode in black and white. Mackinnon is, as I said in my Cold War Eruditorum post, kind of the Mark Gatiss of directors. He’s functional, but the direction is never the highlight of one of his stories. Here he’s given a script that’s functional, and nobody manages to raise it above that.

I observed early on that the first half of the season was all “let’s redo standards with a new Doctor, but with old Doctor Who veterans doing the scripts,” while the back half was very “let’s try something new.” That was the right way to structure a season that had a new Doctor to introduce, but I suspect nothing would have been harmed by having the transition to “let’s try something new” come with the sixth episode instead of the seventh. This, ultimately, is the skippable episode. Best damned with faint praise: it’s astonishingly good for a team-up of director of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and the writer of Curse of the Black Spot.

#11: Robot of Sherwood (+1, B-)

At the time, I described it as unambitious but well executed. That basically still applies. It’s damning with faint praise again, but the nice thing about Mark Gatiss is he doesn’t generate undue expectations.…

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Last Christmas Review

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Instant reaction has it with 76.88% at an 8-10, with an 8 being the most popular rating, which is pretty standard issue. And to be fair, its faults announce themselves somewhat forcefully. There’s a bit of a pacing problem – the ten minutes or so after Santa wakes everybody up the first time and before the sleigh sequence are an entirely unnecessary bit of padding, and I found myself getting restless on first viewing. Second viewing was kinder, but also solidified my sense that there’s a problem there. Yes, it resolves a few levels of the Inception pastiche, but it’s not delivering any significant development, and mostly seems there to get a forty-five minute story to take an hour. Also, the “last Christmas” metaphor is a bit vapid, or, at least, seemingly missing a definite article. 
But the reason these problems seem so visible is because this story’s chief virtue is its sheer level of confidence in what it’s doing. Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus. The fact that Doctor Who is at a point where it can do that, for a mass Christmas audience with an unusually large number of non-fans, is genuinely impressive. And yet the episode just gets on with it, trusting that the individual components of this are all broad and high concept enough to work so long as you spend a little time establishing them. 
A corresponding part of this is also the confidence that they can do all of this. Here the virtue of casting Nick Frost really announces itself. He’s a fantastic choice for Santa, or, at least, for Steven Moffat’s Santa, which, as you’d expect, is mostly a series of jokes about how Santa is no harder to explain than anything else in Doctor Who. Frost’s instincts on how serious to pitch the performance are spot on. But there’s also a tremendous amount of confidence in the visuals. The sequence in which Santa arrives to save the day, with an army of toys marching into the polar base is flat out one of the maddest things Doctor Who has ever done, but there’s not a trace of the program seeming embarrassed by this or worrying whether or not it can get away with it.
As a result, it pretty much does get away with everything. Even the obvious accusation that Moffat is recycling things, and he unabashedly is, seems silly here. It’s difficult to imagine how the sentence “it’s business as usual: Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus” would even seem like a sensible and coherent thing to say about Doctor Who only two years ago. That this feels like a completely organic and sensible thing for the show to be speaks volumes about the degree to which the program has become flexible and varied even by the standards of Doctor Who.
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Death in Heaven Review

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Thank you so much to the 171 people on Patreon who made these reviews possible. It’s not been the easiest past two months, and this has been an absolutely huge help. Come Christmas, I’ll be back with one more review, and a season wrap-up, and then a bit after that I’ll have something or other about future uses of Patreon, as it’s been rather lovely, frankly. So thank you very much. This has been a wonderful bit of fun. 

Well here we are, for one last round before, you know, the next round. Twitter is a somewhat mixed reaction. GallifreyBase has 71.65% on 8-10, with 34.62% of those tens. Me? I loved it. 
It’s ostentatious as hell. It builds on Moffat’s previous tricks in so many interesting ways. You can accurately describe it as “the Doctor Who version of His Last Vow” or as “Eric Saward done right,” it’s got the first companion departure to top Doomsday (Donna is disqualified for the horrific consent violation involved), and it manages an entirely different take on the phrase “tomb of the Cybermen” than the one we had last week. It frames that perfectly, with Clara and the Doctor having the exact inverse of the conversation Clara was trying to have with Danny at the beginning. It’s the Master as an evil River Song, while Clara plays out Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with Danny in River’s role. It’s as perfectly timed for Remembrance Sunday as Deep Breath was for the sunset. Clara applies the moral legitimacy she earned in Kill the Moon to the question of granting her boyfriend’s request for assisted suicide. The opening credits recycle the trick from the sixth episode of Jekyll. Clara’s an adult Linda. The fucking Brigadier. Moffat, a writer whose work is defined by narrative substitutions, plays it completely straight while doing weird inversions of everything else around him while telling a more or less straightforward point A to point B story over ninety minutes. 
It works. There are plot holes. I identified several in the immediate aftermath. On a second pass, all of them have, at the very least, a line of dialogue. Yes, Missy’s entire reason for bringing the Doctor and Clara together and intervening in their timestreams to keep them together was that Clara would eventually lead the Doctor to try to rescue a loved one out of heaven. It’s a scheme by the Master, what did you expect, sanity? The Doctor probably could have commanded the army to self-destruct, but he recognized that Danny was the right person to do it. They’re not always satisfying payoffs, though for the most part, they’re as satisfying as they need to be for the amount the show built them up – if fans inflated the minor mysteries further, that’s their problem.
And when anything falters, it’s willing to get through on sheer bravado. Moffat returned to the two-parter on the back of Sherlock, and built one with a corker of a cliffhanger.
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Dark Water Review

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This review was brought to you by 169 people on Patreon. There’s still one left, if you want to be number 170.

This was always going to be the tricky one. Part one of two. I’ve actually never written a review of a partial story before. I mean, arguably An Unearthly Child versus 100,000 BC, but they are by distinctly different writers, and have their origins in different places. My point there was that it does make sense to treat them differently, even if it also makes sense to treat them as one. I sort of did with End of Time Part One and End of Time Part Two, but that was a slightly joke. So I think this is the first time I’ve ever really tried to think extensively about the aesthetic goals and merits of individual parts of multi-part stories. 
Let’s start with the raves on Twitter, and the GallifreyBase ratings, which are 84.62% in the 8-10 range, 36.53% at a 10/10. Which is around what you’d expect a huge season finale to get if it’s working well, honestly. And as always with Moffat, it’s about expectations. In more ways than one. Everything that’s going to make headlines assembled the way you’d expect. Everything that’s based on clues given away in early episodes goes how you’d think. Yep, the Cybermen are using the dead. Sure enough, the Invasion homage is the cliffhanger. Missy is indeed the Master, which is a twist, but hardly the most shocking of them. The episode’s biggest twist came at the very beginning. 
It’s a good twist. Danny, the sublimely ordinary good man, turns out to have no secrets, and dies in the most ordinary, mundane, banal way imaginable. A plot contrivance par excellence, existing only to set a larger story in action. It’s played well – for all that “he was hit by a car, it came out of nowhere” is a classic lame twist, the decision to start with Clara frantic and surrounded by post-its explaining the past of the series, as though there’s some terrible secret she’s about to reveal, hides the twist perfectly.
And it’s a big enough premise to immediately escalate the stakes. Getting the volcano scene out of the way early, as Clara’s actually very clever and desperate attempt to get the Doctor to do the impossible for her when she needs it, works wonders as well. It’s a one-two punch that quickly and efficiently ratchets the tension up to a breaking point.
It’s also worth looking at these sequences in terms of just being brilliant. Clara’s betrayal is such a perfect encapsulation of her character, good and bad. But what really makes it is the Doctor’s reaction, and it’s the details of Peter Capaldi’s performance that really makes it. Moffat writes them a good scene. But part of what’s so good about it is that it gives them an incredibly large range of ways to play it. It’s just Capaldi, Coleman, and a familiar set. The emotional beats are all clear.
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In the Forest of the Night Review

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Thanks as ever to my 168 backers on Patreon.

Let’s play the Kill the Moon game again and put aside the question of public opinion, not look at comments, and just go straight out. Not because I’m about to go on another rave about how this is a transcendent piece of Doctor Who, although it basically is. You can basically fairly accuse it of being Kill the Moon as if it were the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and that’s a fair criticism, so, spoilers, I’m going to put it in second. Well, though you can fairly accuse Kill the Moon of being a pro-life parable. So I guess in the end it goes down to the aesthetics of the thing, and personal preference. I think the ending of Kill the Moon is paced a bit better. So still second, but damn, that’s close.

But the real reason I’m putting public opinion aside is that this is, as many thought possible, the Blake episode. And I should set that reading up quickly, because it’s tremendously important to the episode and how I’m going to read it. If you’re a Blake geek, this is a hell of a thing. So. The Doctor suggests that the forest comes from the manipulation of time, and specifically mentions the date 1795. That is the year Blake began printing the combined volume Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from which his famed poem “The Tyger” emerges. This is the poem the episode’s title is taken from, and the tacit reason that the Doctor, Clara, and Maebh are menaced by a tiger. 
This connection is reinforced by Maebh’s description of seeing and hearing “ideas” flying around her, a description that consciously evokes Blake’s biography. Blake, and there’s not really another way to put this, had visions. These visions directly inspired and shaped his work, which was often an attempt to express the revelations he experienced. His famed miniature The Ghost of a Flea is, for instance, an illustration of a literal ghost he claimed to see. There is very little reason to think Blake was a charlatan in this regard. Certainly if he was, his act was terribly ineffectual. He lived in poverty his whole life, stubbornly clinging to his visionary art despite clearly being talented enough to fashion a career if only he were more disciplined. If he was a charlatan, the adaptability needed to craft so convincing an act failed him in every other aspect of his life. No, any reckoning of William Blake as a great artist and writer must accept up front – his art was the product of visions. Numerous hypotheses exist as to the nature of these visions, but they genuinely motivated his work. 
So when Maebh Arden stands within a forest from 1795, and says she sees ideas, she is in explicit communion with whatever strange source was tapped to produce Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and America a Prophecy. She communes with the hand that dared seize the fire.
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