gareth roberts

May 14, 2013

Not With A Bang

Jack Graham closing time, cybermen, gareth roberts, the slow death of western civilisation 12

Some assumptions ‘Closing Time’ relies upon: a man being rubbish at looking after a baby is richly hilarious; James Corden has talent of some kind; it’s still amusing when someone wrongly thinks two men are a couple. All very questionable.

And, as ever, (heteronormative) love conquers all. It kills Cybermen because emotions ‘n’ stuff, yeah? Okay, they did something like that in ‘The Invasion’, but at least there it was any emotion, and it made the Cybermen go bonkers instead of just conveniently dying of endoftheepisodeitis. Notice the utterly pedestrian, idea-free logic here. You kill the loveless things with love. That’s like saying you kill poor people with money. I know the gold thing was stupid, but at least that suggested the logic of using a magical metallic talisman against the zombies. And at least, when the Cybermen got killed by gold or gravity or radiation, they were simply defeated and chased off rather than being negated or solved. Kill a Cyberman with radiation and you simply defeat his physical presence. Kill him with love and you solve him. You explain him away. You fill the empty space that he once was… with syrup. The Cybermen are worthless now. They have been emptied out of all threat because their hollowness has been stuffed with candyfloss. Thus is the rump gothic ritually defeated by the power of comforting banalities.

By the way… remember when Gareth Roberts scathingly wrote about how silly ‘The Green Death’ was because nobody in the audience needed to be told that pollution was bad? Well… does ‘Closing Time’ mean that he now believes people need to be reminded that loving your baby son is good? Are we to understand that banal statements about political issues are a Bad Thing while banal statements about personal feelings are Inspirational Drama? I guess so, since the former is about boring stuff like public health and business ethics, while the latter is about interesting stuff like oooo i wuv my pwetty ickle baby. Why are the British public assumed to need weekly reminders that love is a good thing? Why, furthermore, must love always be reduced to a simple and unambiguously positive thing, as though it’s a kind of neurological Angel Delight? And why is it thought that they need to be constantly reassured that it can conquer absolutely anything just by being felt? What right to these fucking hacks have to inform us how we are obliged to feel in order to be normal and earn the Doctor’s gormless yawp of excited approval? And isn’t this constant emphasis on love as something overpowering and perfect just an emotional version of the media peddling of body images? Just as we are constantly told how we should look, are we not also being told that our feelings should be just as glossy and perfect and swaggeringly healthy? There is a catwalk for the feelings, and yours must be capable of poseurising their way down it, looking just right. Fuck off.

There is something repellently wholesome and healthy about garbage like ‘Closing Time’. …

July 13, 2011

Welcome Matt

Jack Graham asylum seekers, christmas carol, donna, eleventh hour, gareth roberts, hungry earth, lodger, matt smith, paul cornell, river song, series 5, silurians, steven moffat, time of angels, turn left, vincent and the doctor, weeping angels 8

Timelash II. Series 5. You know the drill. Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.

The Eleventh Hour

How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn’t realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.

I’ll post seperately on The Beast Below. I’ve looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here. The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys.

The Angels Two-Parter

I like the bit with the angel on the screen. Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.

Otherwise… well, I’ll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:

Just what ‘Who’ needed – another straight-to-video style ‘Aliens’ rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can’t bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It’s hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun…Yawn

One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps… will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So… Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.

Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about. Here is my (positive) look at Amy’s Choice.

The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens… and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of ‘common descent’, etc. It comes to something when Who can’t even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.

The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it’s in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal… all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.

Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans… but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist… sorry, I mean a Silurian… for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity.…

March 7, 2011

Sound and Fury

Jack Graham gaddafi, gareth roberts, shakespeare, the shakespeare code, theatre 17

The comedian Ed Byrne says that the only ironic thing about the Alanis Morrisette song ‘Ironic’ is that it contains no irony. Well, one of the many ironic things about ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is that it contains no code, and little that meaningfully refers to Shakespeare… and yet its title is rather apt. Really, the episode might just as well have been called ‘Billy Shakespeare and the Goblet of Fire’, yet the very arbitrariness of the title, and the fact that it tries to make the audience smile at a modern cultural reference, makes the title perversely appropriate for the story… because the story itself throws lots of modern cultural references at us but fails to engage with Shakespeare as a man or an artist.

A TELEVISED THEATRE

When it was shown, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ was probably the most visually spectacular episode of Doctor Who yet made. It still looks absolutely marvellous. But there is a complex of ironies here.

There’s always been a kind of affinity between Shakespeare (as a category of play) and Doctor Who. Like Shakespeare, Who is a sort of genre of its own, which comprises many different types of story, some of which are of dubious canonicity and some of which are hard to categorise. Doctor Who is highly theatrical. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare productions, can be very camp. Doctor Who often presents highly implausible plot developments. People who criticise RTD for sloppy endings should check out Cymbeline in which the god Jupiter turns up (in a real deus ex machina!) to sort out the plot. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, tends to buy into the ‘King list’ theory of history. Many of the early historicals are clearly indebted to Shakespeare, or to various writers’ idea of him. And Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, often presents us with fictional social worlds (shown in microcosm) in order to explore political themes. Both Shakespeare and Doctor Who create little worlds representing great societies which exist ‘offstage’, as it were.

Moreover, Doctor Who grew in a BBC culture that considered TV drama to be like ‘televised theatre’. Who always strained against this… what with Sydney and Verity both being grounded in commercial telly… but most of the classic series looks much more like a televised play, with occasional inserts filmed on location… highly reminiscent, in fact, of the early seasons of the BBC Shakespeare series.

In many ways, Doctor Who‘s development over the years is a perfect example of the way that TV drama has gradually shifted away from this ‘televised theatre’ tradition, towards the prevalent style now, which is to make TV dramas look as much as possible like little films. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ may be the ultimate example of this trend in fruition… yet the irony is that it looks cinematic mostly because of its huge, impressive central set… which isn’t a film set at all but an actual theatre! What’s more, this theatre was built as a recreation of a place where Shakespeare and his company put on his intensely political plays, plays that built fictional worlds in order to examine politcal ideas and themes, plays that confronted their audience with unusually strong depictions of women, plays that had no choice but to summon up huge armies and black nights using only words, there being little in the way of special effects available… though the theatre of the English Renaissance certainly did attempt spectacle (with opulent costumery being a particular draw). …