dream lord

May 30, 2011

Three Act Tragedy

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And so it came to pass that Series 3 ended with a trilogy. And Jack looked upon the trilogy. And Jack saw that it was… umm… er…

‘Utopia’

Good stuff; the Master’s return at the end is the least of it. We have to put up with some of the obligatory “gee, aren’t humans just neat?!” stuff from the Doctor, but it passes soon enough. Yana is a touching, melancholic figure. Chantho is one of my favourite characters in all Who. The scene where the Doctor and Jack finally discuss Jack’s immortality is beautifully scripted and acted. The desolated conglomeration is beautiful.

The whole set up is pregnant with intricate, sombre, uncomfortable implications. At the end of everything, with even the galaxies disappearing… amidst a wasteland, haunted by a dead city and one lone survivor (who still clings to her obsolete cultural norms)… amidst all these things, there are two groups of humans… the unreasoningly fierce and cruel “futurekind”, with their gnashing sharp teeth, their flaming torches and their mindless desire to destroy… and the refugees who huddle together for warmth; who value family and friendship; who have created structure and purpose out of bits of scrap, food and dreams of impossible deliverance… and the Futurekind want to smash these aspirations for no real reason, while the refugees keep building even as they near the point of maximum entropy.

This is ‘Gridlock’ part II… but it’s less comfortable than ‘Gridlock’. More bleak. More gloomy. More fully liberal. Hence, more reactionary.

The faith of the refugees is in a better world, like the faith of the gridlockers… but they refugees have given it a name that has political rather than religious associations. ‘Utopia’ is usually thought of now as representing some age-old impossible dream of social perfection and total human equality. In the mainstream discourse, to be Utopian is to share the putative mistakes and delusions of the founders of the 20th century totalitarians. Lenin wanted to make a paradise; that’s why he ended up making Hell on Earth. (This isn’t my view, by the way. It is as simplistic and ahistorical as it is popular.)

‘Utopia’ is one of those stories that I love despite the fact that it’s highly open to a reactionary reading (like ‘Frontios’ for example, with which it shares some ideas).

In ‘Utopia’, the supposed dual nature of humanity is externalised in the form of two seperate tribes (who fight for no reason, as tribes always do in this view of the world), one of which is ‘civilised’ and one of which is ‘barbarous’ for no real reason. There is no reconciling this ‘clash of civilisations’. The nice people, who are associated in the text with science, technology, modernity, family life, democracy (via the concept of Utopia itself), must fight and/or escape the barbarians (with their medieval ways)… or be destroyed.

In the end, they simply have to leave the Futurekind behind (to die) as they blast off in search of Utopia. At least this story holds out some hope that Utopia (i.e.…

May 29, 2011

Village People

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A (positive) review of ‘Amy’s Choice’. Because not even I can complain all the time.

Okay, that’s better. The best episode for quite some time. The first really good one since ‘Turn Left’. Nothing major… but genuinely clever and verbally playful, with nice imagery and a texture of ideas, hints and suggestions.

Simon Kinnear called this, with his customary acuity, a “Freudian farce”. The Dream Lord is the truth of the Doctor as an older man, lusting after a young redhead… or at least, lusting after her attention and loyalty and esteem. He and Rory compete over her as though she’s territory. The Doctor wants Amy’s bump to disappear so that the bumpless reality will prove to be real. Meanwhile, the ancient beings inside the elderly Ledworth residents annihilate the village’s children. The aliens are even ‘oral’. “They’re not going to be peeping out of anywhere else are they?” asks Rory pertinently.

This is all played for laughs and, refreshingly, it’s actually funny. (Thinking back, I remember quite liking How Do You Want Me? whereas Chalk just made me want to kick things.)

The unreal tweeness of Ledworth, which was such a bore in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, here becomes the perfect figurative backdrop to a story about people who are negotiating and renegotiating (with themselves as much as with each other) their emotional priorities and allegiances, their desires, etc. In this story, Ledworth manages to be less the unironic cutesy St. Mary Mead / Avengers setting and becomes a bit more… well, it’s funny but here they manage to make it both more real (with the snobbery of “Upper Ledworth” for example) and more genuinely dreamlike. All the more dreamlike for being sparing with the wanton surrealism.

There’s a witty aesthetic connectedness about it, even down to the way the shifts in reality (which seem like multiple awakenings from dazed unconsciousness) are heralded by the sound of birds tweeting, which recalls the cartoon way of signifying concussion as much it reminds us of Ledworth’s rural pleasures. The first instance of this sort of thing even has a neat verbal pun. The Doctor slips into and then wakes from oblivion as he tries to say the phrase “good old days”… or should that be “daze”?

There’s something smart about the way the three characters compare their different interpretations of the same dream. The differences in emphasis are telling. Amy’s “little village” becomes Rory’s “sweet little village”. The Doctor’s “nightmare” becomes, for reasons of tact, “a really good… mare”. These are gags, but also failures to communicate. For once, the constant quipping seems to actually be playful with language rather than just showoffish… and actually serves plot, concept and characterisation (at least some of the time). And then, just as the puns are about to get tiresome, the episode realises this and starts playing them self-consciously, with the Dream Lord complaining that they’re lost on the Doctor (and us).

Toby Jones is excellent… and his character is effective, not least because he seems more like the old Doctor (I mean the old, prehistoric, C20th Doctor) than any of the new fellas, least of all the latest incumbent (who is good, by the way, given something interesting and not-entirely-glib to do). …