outside the government
It’s October 10th, 2011. Rihanna is at number one with “We Found Love,” a song whose video, consisting of shots of Belfast, provides a perhaps unintentional but amusing sense of what is meant by “a hopeless place.” One Direction, LMFAO, Dappy, and the Goo Goo Dolls also chart, the latter, still mysteriously, with “Iris.” In news, Paul McCartney gets married again, Steve Jobs dies, and mutterings begin that Occupy Wall Street will be moved out of Zuccotti Park so it can be “cleaned.”
While on television, The Curse of Clyde Langer, Phil Ford’s final script for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil Ford is an odd duck. His two best scripts are co-authored – The Waters of Mars before this and Into the Dalek after. His Torchwood script is quite good, and arguably the highlight of a weak season. His Sarah Jane Adventures stories range from the quite solid to the Curate’s eggs. In many ways, he epitomizes The Sarah Jane Adventures, in that he is a writer one wishes was slightly better than he is, but who could be a lot worse. Certainly, as the primary writer of the series, he kept it at the basically watchable, which is more than one can say of Chris Chibnall on Torchwood.
The Curse of Clyde Langer is in many ways the archetypal Ford script, in that it has some lovely bits and some crap bits, and is in other ways the archetypal Sarah Jane Adventures story, in that it could have fallen very flat, but is ultimately saved by Daniel Anthony. In this regard, most of what is good about it is the sort of thing we have come to expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. The eponymous curse means that upon hearing Clyde’s name people instantly hate him, turning his friends and family against him. Clyde’s sputtering fear as he begs his friends not to abandon him is marvelous, as is his steady determination to survive and figure something out.
The obvious transition here is that what’s bad about the story is for the most part more interesting. A major plot of the story concerns Clyde’s relationship with a homeless woman who gives her name as Ellie, and who takes him into a homeless community when he’s forced away from home. Some of this is also brilliant. In casting the story, someone had the absolutely brilliant idea of casting Lily Loveless, famous from seasons three and four of Skins, as Ellie. The result is that with very little screentime, Clyde and Ellie feel like a real friendship and budding relationship, as Loveless and Anthony are more than capable of selling the hell out of it. There’s also some great dialogue around it – when Clyde first meets her, before he’s cursed, he gives her money when she begs for it. Sky asks why she needed money, and he answers, “because she’s a scrounger.” Then Sky asks why he gave it to her, and he answers, “because it’s probably not her fault.”
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Outside the Government: Sky
It’s October 3rd, 2011. Sak Noel is at number one with “Loca People,” with One Direction, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dappy also charting. There is presumably some reason why the Goo Goo Dolls are charting with “Iris,” a years old song at this point, but I certainly don’t know it off the top of my head. In news, really basically nothing has happened in the two days that have passed since The Wedding of River Song. There’s a factory fire in Surrey, and Amanda Knox’s conviction is overturned. And the day the second episode of this airs, there’s a car bombing in Mogadishu.
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures returns with Sky. There is, of course, something of an dilemma here in terms of how to approach this final season of The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, they are a clear memorial to Lis Sladen – a run of episodes that can only be taken in the context of her death. On the other, they were never meant to be this. They’re just the first half of Season Five, shot alongside Season Four in the expectation that everyone would be back in a few months to finish the run. It’s just that the second half never got made because Lis Sladen died of cancer not long after these filmed. This paradox hangs over the entire season in a way that can’t be ignored.
It’s something we’ve talked about before, but it’s perhaps worth stressing once more how much of a blow Sladen’s death was. For a variety of reasons. The fact that it came so close after Nicholas Courtney’s was one. I mean, fandom always takes deaths of major players in Doctor Who kind of hard. On aggregate, we take actors the worst, and fair enough, because far more people know who Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney are than know who Verity Lambert and Barry Letts are. But Sladen and Courtney were big even by the standards of actors. They were people who figured generationally in people’s lives. Children who grew up watching Sarah Jane and the Brigadier watched Sarah Jane and the Brigadier with their children. Parents who grew up watching them watched them with their grandchildren. That hurts in its own unique ways.
But Courtney was 81, mostly retired, and had been in ill health, while Sladen was 65 and still a television star. For those who paid attention there was a sense something might be wrong, but for the most part it felt as though one minute she was on BBC One watching David Tennant regenerate, the next she was dead. I mean, it was the first time I decided to post something other than an actual TARDIS Eruditorum post on the blog, because it hit so hard that I felt like I just had to say something about it, because it was one of those days where writing was how I grieved. I remember a friend messaging me on Facebook just saying “Oh No.
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Outside the Government 19: Doctor Who Confidential Redux
It is strange in some ways to realize that Doctor Who Confidential has been going on this whole time. It’s not, after all, like anybody watched it. I mean, a few people did, but it was only ever available in the UK, and, well, how to put this nicely… it’s not like it was ever very good. It was fun enough in its first year when it was only a half-hour long and focused as much on the series’ history as on the making of the new series, but the decision to expand it to a forty-five minute format just as they were properly running out of nostalgia trips was, to say the least, puzzling. Instead Doctor Who Confidential became a sort of generic making of show.
But even given that, there are some problems. The making of Doctor Who is indeed interesting, but it’s not necessarily ten-and-a-half hours of interesting for every single year of production. There are only so many times poor Danny Hargreaves can demonstrate styrofoam debris and air cannons while maintaining any sort of semblance of keeping things fresh, and only so many compelling scenes that can be wrung out of Ailsa Berk teaching people in monster costumes how to do the correct funny walk for this week’s episode. As a result, by the end Doctor Who Confidential had become a sort of hodgepodge of strange things, such as the mildly infamous “Karen Gillian drives a car episode,” in which a significant amount of the episode was turned over to, well, Karen Gillian driving a car. But equally, it’s why there exists a montage of the women playing the Weeping Angels dancing to Lady Gaga, which is self-evidently a thing that should exist. (And to their credit, they did montages for both “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” which is good, as picking which song would make the better choice is nearly impossible.)
But let’s pull back the lens a little and look at what Doctor Who Confidential is, or at least, was. First and foremost it was a program on BBC Three, a channel that exists specifically to pull a “younger” audience. It’s going slightly too far to say that Confidential was a children’s program, but it was, with its ostentatious use of pop music and position on BBC Three, clearly meant as a program for teenage fans of the series. In this regard, it fits into a long tradition of Doctor Who being a program with a very, very well-documented production. There’s a generation of people working on Doctor Who who point to the Terrance Dicks/Malcolm Hulke book The Making of Doctor Who as a huge and seminal influence on their being interested in television. Hell, Peter Capaldi became interested in television in part because of things like Barry Letts responding to fan letters by sending him scripts and his interview with Bernard Lodge for a fanzine. So it seems almost certain that there will be another generation who learned how television was made and became fascinated with it because they saw Doctor Who getting made every week on Confidential.
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Miracle Day and Death
Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues. She’s also my wife, and would be as happy as I would be if you backed my Patreon campaign for weekly episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who. Then come back here and read her being righteously and beautifully angry.
It’s November 28th, 2013. Martin Garrix’s “Animals” tops the charts only to be ousted by Lily Allen’s “Somewhere Only We Know” two days later. Elsewhere in the world, mass protests are occurring in Thailand as tensions between the opposition party and the prime minister’s family (read: his exiled brother) mount and, apparently, The New York Times has shown it’s first front-page nipple. So there’s that.
On TV: in a world in which no one can die, a young woman who has suffered what would formerly have been a fatal blood clot in her lungs. She is pregnant when this happens and is currently connected to all manner of drains and tubes and medical equipment in order to allow this fetus to gestate in her essentially dead body. She and the fetus she is carrying were deprived of oxygen thanks to that blood clot and her husband and parents look on in horror at the entire ordeal. Both the young woman and her husband were paramedics and understood the limits of what modern medicine could do, neither of them wanted her preserved this way. The Miracle destroyed any autonomy in death this young woman would have and should have had.
Except it wasn’t the Miracle that caused this. It was us. Her name was Marlise Munoz and she was 33 years old when she died. Her husband did everything right, but there was nothing to be done. She was brain dead. But, the definition of death for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas was somewhat more… flexible. They kept her heart beating for weeks because of a loophole in the law stating that life support could not be revoked from a pregnant woman despite her wishes. It was only when the hospital was sued for the “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse” and they admitted that the fetus was developing “abnormally” that Marlise was allowed to rest.
Miracle Day goes out of its way to make a parallel of our world, a world in which this could happen. It builds a platform for an argument about the treatment of illness, dying and death in our culture. It meticulously constructs a modest proposal indicating the natural extreme of our death-denying culture. So, after all that effort, what does Miracle Day end up saying about death? Well, it says nothing at all.
No, that is perhaps a bit harsh and untrue. Miracle Day clearly says that the way we treat the sick and the dying is bad and we should feel bad. Which is worth examining.
There is an inherent classism in healthcare on a global scale. Despite the long list of countries who have decided that healthcare is a basic human right, globally, healthcare is available only to those who have the means.
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Outside the Government: The Blood Line
It’s September 9th, 2011. Maroon 5 is at number one with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, India and Bangladesh resolve their border dispute, and a ferry disaster off the coast of Zanzibar kills 240 people. On television, meanwhile, Miracle Day finally wraps up with “The Blood Line.”
You can say this about “The Blood Line”: At least it’s clear that Russell T Davies had something to do with this one. Guessing who did what in a coauthored script is always a bit of a mug’s game, but the writing credits here make it at least somewhat easy to figure out what happened here. Story by Russell T Davies, Script by Davies and Espenson suggests that, in effect, this is by Davies in the same way that The Daleks’ Masterplan is by Terry Nation, which is to say that some notes and scenes were dropped off by cab at Espenson’s door and she proceeded to try to build an episode out of them.
Parts of it are unmistakably Davies, in other words, or at least, Espenson doing an impeccable Davies imitation. Gwen’s whole “the breath” speech is vintage Davies, mixing the structure of Rose’s “this is how I died” speech with content and spectacle that is exactly the sort of thing Davies writes and excels at. The underlying dynamic – a two-sided confrontation at opposite sides of the world, the “introduce blood at both ends” approach, the elevator access to Shanghai, and the basic theatrical “everybody in one room” setup of the finale – is also very Davies-esque, very much feeling like it came from the same mind that approached Rose’s departure from the image of “two levers” or Tennant’s regeneration from the image of the two-chambered box.
So the appearance is that of a story that Davies had a beginning and end in mind for, entrusted to other people for the middle, and kind of wandered away from entirely. This is not necessarily a surprise – it really does appear that Davies was burnt out on sci-fi by this point, and it’s telling the show he’s working on now, Cucumber, is one he’d been talking about while Miracle Day was still going out. This feels like the contractual obligation album.
But for all of that, there’s an interesting underlying dynamic of the show. It starts feeling like Americanized Torchwood and ends feeling like a Welshed version of the generic American thriller. The final scene is a gratuitous tease for a fifth series that never came, but it also functions as a delightfully unsubtle queering of the show, where the ultra-generic American character who’s been a bit homophobic through the entire series finally gets queered by Jack. (And there’s some properly potent imagery in having immortality come from a blood transfusion – a sort of bizarre reverse-HIV image that feels like something amazing could have been done with it, although we obviously never got to explore it.) The breath is a marvelous image, and handling the tail end of Gwen’s monologue in a time-dilated reaction shot after the climax, unpacking a single breath into a long moment right before everything goes to hell, is a great shot.
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Outside the Government: The Gathering
It’s September 2nd, 2011. Katy Perry is at number one with “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” In the five days since Let’s Kill Hitler aired, the Battle of Tripoli wrapped up. That’s about it. And Miracle Day ticked one week closer to being over, of course.
It being an odd-numbered episode, tit’s time for the show to revamp itself once again, with characteristic subtlety. Now we’re in a big metaphor about the financial crash. Way back with Partners in Crime, I suggested that Davies got very lucky with Donna, creating a character who was visibly about the anxieties of ordinary middle class people in a declining economy. Now Davies has the exact opposite luck: he’s decided to make this show focus on the financial crisis, and he ends up doing it after the London riots and two weeks before the Occupy movement kicks up. He’s almost, but not quite, as completely screwed over as Mark Gatiss is in this regard, but that’s for Monday.
It’s not that Davies’s approach is wrong in light of the Occupy movement and all of that. But there’s something casually jarring about it. The empty streets and quiet resignation of the world isn’t a bad guess for what the world would be like in the wake of crises like the ones Torchwood has shown, but it’s a guess that lacks all of the immediately compelling and arresting imagery of the world it’s being transmitted into. Even before you take up any questions about the quality of what “The Gathering” has to say about the world, you’re stuck with the fact that summer of 2011 just doesn’t quite feel like the time to be saying it. It feels not entirely unlike the Pertwee era in Season Eleven, or the Troughton era in Season Six – however good it may be at a given moment, it’s become a tired and old-fashioned sort of show.
One need only look over at Doctor Who to get a sense of this. However awkward Let’s Kill Hitler may be, almost nothing about Doctor Who in this era is playing it safe. Whereas Torchwood feels the exact opposite at this point – like it’s just using a well worn playbook with minor variations to tell stories that, if they’re not past their sell-by date, it’s only because someone slapped on a new label with a later date. To be honest, the biggest impact Miracle Day has had so far was keeping A Good Man Goes to War from using Jack like it was originally intended to. This isn’t a show that knows why it exists anymore, save perhaps to be a big American co-production. It exists to try the formula that worked in the UK in the US, in the hopes that it’ll make more money. And even that’s been quietly usurped by Doctor Who, which has finally hit it big in America and had major episodes done with co-production money from an American network.
So we shuffle grimly towards a finale in which everything has been arbitrarily reconfigured yet again.
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Outside the Government (End of the Road)
It’s August 26th, 2011. Katy Perry is at number one with “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a song that sounds suspiciously like it is about having fun. How ghastly. In other outdoor places, rebel forces begin the battle that will seize Tripoli and overthrow the reign of Muammar Gaddafi. In a more indoor flavor of news, a dying Steve Jobs steps down from Apple. Also, there’s crap on television to tolerate.
It is in some ways helpful and convenient for Miracle Day to cough up an outright bad episode, if only so that the rest of the season can be put into some sort of perspective. Like “Rendition,” “End of the Road” is essentially a bottle episode concerned with getting the story from point A to point B. Also like “Rendition,” it runs into the problem that there is not actually very much room between point A and point B. Unlike “Rendition,” it doesn’t cover this up with an extended piece of ludicrous goofiness involving ripping apart an airplane to chelate someone’s blood with degreaser. This is, shockingly enough, a pity.
Instead what we have is a return to the bad old days of Season Two of Torchwood, with an episode that is just completely misconceived and misbegotten. The plot consists entirely of Captain Jack sitting around in a room all episode. Sometimes, for variety, they cut to a hallway, or even have some characters go outside. There’s the most impressively expedient character death ever as Nana Visitor’s character is blown up in a thoroughly contrived car bomb once her exposition is resolved. Esther’s sister comes back purely to motivate Esther to do something stupid again. The episode doesn’t even entirely understand where its reveals are, dropping the discovery that Charlotte works for the Families in a completely swallowed plot beat. The contact lenses acquire magical new powers out of nowhere. And the plot holes are worse and bigger than usual. (I particularly like that Jack is brought to the Colasanto estate so that Angelo can tell him how the Miracle started despite the fact that a) Angelo doesn’t know and b) Angelo is dying and apparently can’t speak.)
So it’s an incompetently made mess. Fair enough. And certainly some of the problems – the use of American cult film/television stars for hazily defined cameo roles, the plot holes, the tendency to bring in seemingly major events just to motivate a plot development and then discard them – are endemic to Miracle Day in general, merely coming to a particular head here. The writing credit speaks volumes – “Story by Ryan Scott, Teleplay by Ryan Scott and Jane Espenson,” which is to say, they had a script in particularly dire shape and handed it off to Jane Espenson in a desperate attempt to fix it. (Also rather sizable is the fact that Jane Espenson gets script salvage duties, which is to say, Russell T Davies isn’t even involved enough to be doing rewrites.)
But what really stands out is the degree to which this isn’t normal for Miracle Day.
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Outside the Government: Immortal Sins
It’s August 19th, 2011, and the last week in which “Party Rock Anthem” is at number one. In news, Michele Bachmann briefly appears to be a credible Presidential candidate due to the inherent silliness that is the Ames Straw Poll, and not a lot else happens. It’s a dull enough week that Miracle Day’s “Immortal Sins” is actually one of the highlights.
Though truth be told, more than any other episode of Miracle Day, this is the showpiece. Two interleaved stories that are virtually two-handers, one of which finally and triumphantly gives us the Gwen/Jack content that the show has been missing, the other one of which gives an effectively touching and tragic love story that sets up a bunch of background on the Miracle. Rex and Esther are pushed almost entirely to the margins of the story, while Oswald sits out another week entirely. This is, more than any other episode of the run, one that is made for people who were familiar with Torchwood and invested in it as a long-running show as opposed to as a new thing on Starz.
It is in many ways the Gwen/Jack scenes that are the highlights. Eve Myles has always been Torchwood’s strongest element, and she’s always been capable of getting John Barrowman to up his game. Gwyneth Horder-Payton, directing, doesn’t have to do much more than get some basic camera angles on a car and let the two of them go, and through some marvelous use of mirrors to control how the characters can and can’t look at each other she makes their scenes together absolutely sing. Underlying it is an absolutely majestic dynamic: two people who are absolutely best friends but who are also immediately ready to accept that only one of them is walking away from this. Their joy at being saved, accompanied by their firm reiterations that they take back nothing they said, is marvelous, and it’s almost certainly the best set of scenes in Miracle Day.
The scenes with Jack and Angelo are not quite as solid, but are still quite good. Espenson writes a relationship deftly and efficiently, and Daniele Favilli plays Angelo with deft humanity, making his betrayal of Jack seem like an inevitable price for Jack’s hubris in assuming he can charm his way out of everything. Espenson makes a couple really deft decisions, including giving Jack the faux-confession scene in which Barrowman, for the first time in Torchwood, gets to play the character as the libidinous rake he did in the Eccleston season of Doctor Who.
Ah, yes, Doctor Who. Because that’s the other thing “Immortal Sins” does – play up Torchwood’s heritage as a product of Doctor Who, with explicit acknowledgment of both that show and The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is, to say the least, weird. Not least because attempting to fit Miracle Day into any sort of coherent shared universe with Doctor Who is, shall we say, a challenge. Not necessarily a huge one – it’s not exactly unbelievable that the Miracle would fail to come up in any of the on-screen conversations we see within Doctor Who.
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Outside the Government 18: A Romance in Twelve Parts
A commissioned essay for Tiffany Korta
And so here we are again, at Faction Paradox. Let’s start, just because this is eventually going to be collected in the Matt Smith book, far from any other Faction Paradox material, with an account of what this is. It starts, as with most things these days, in the 90s, shortly after Doctor Who failed to return in the wake of the Paul McGann movie. The movie was used as the occasion to move the license for producing original Doctor Who fiction from Virgin, who had been doing a highly acclaimed line of books featuring Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, to the BBC, who proceeded to do a noticeably less acclaimed line of books featuring Paul McGann’s Doctor.
Among the only books in this line that was acclaimed was a book called Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which featured concepts like the Doctor encountering his own corpse, the declaration that the Doctor’s body is a terrifying weapon, the idea that Time Lords are defined by something called “biodata,” which is simultaneously genetic material and the sum total of their impact upon time and history, and the idea of a big and apocalyptic war that the Time Lords do not anticipate surviving. Given that none of these ideas have ever been reused by Steven Moffat or Russell T Davies, it’s similarly ridiculous to suggest that the other big idea in Alien Bodies might have any impact on the era at all. That idea is the time traveling voodoo cult of renegade Time Lords known as Faction Paradox.
Miles wrote two more books for the BBC Books line in which he fleshed out these ideas more before a falling out with the editors drove him away from Doctor Who (save for one brief return that had little to nothing to do with his contributions to the Doctor Who mythos), and his ideas were wrapped up in a desperately unsatisfying manner by other writers. Miles, meanwhile, took the concepts he had the rights to, which were mainly Faction Paradox, and shopped them to a variety of small presses that made audio adventures, Faction Paradox novels, and an exceedingly brief comic series. These mostly had very little impact on the world, and we’ve largely checked in with them occasionally as a sort of sad “ah yes, this forgotten and dusty corner of Doctor Who.”
Eventually Faction Paradox’s rights settled in with a charming publisher called Obverse Books, who kicked off their line of Faction Paradox stories in 2011 with a collection of short stories called A Romance in Twelve Parts, which brings us to the present topic. In terms of the narrative of Doctor Who, this is a terribly obscure book. Based on Amazon sales rank I’d guess, and I could very well be wrong, that it sells something on the order of a copy a month, if that. It is a small and minor book with very little impact on the world.
Of course, it’s worth expanding the view a little bit.
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Outside the Government: The Middle Men
It’s August 12th, 2011. “Party Rock Anthem” will never die. Never. In news, in the UK at least, it’s all riots, as protests over the death of Mark Duggan expand into riots in Tottenham, which in turn spark riots across the country. Cameron’s government responds with a strong law and order platform that includes such reasonable things as a six month prison sentence for stealing a case of bottled water. In the US, meanwhile, it’s mostly just reeling from the aftermath of the latest debt ceiling showdown.
While on television. More perhaps than any other episode of Miracle Day, “The Middle Men” is a sequel to the previous. We’ve talked already about how Miracle Day is in many ways an expanded version of Children of Earth’s structure, with each pair of episodes serving as a distinct phase of the operation. But with “The Categories of Life” building to the cliffhanger it does, “The Middle Men” ends up having very little to do except to resolve its plot lines. And so we get the final disposal of Colin Maloney and the Cowbridge camp.
What’s odd, then, is how much of this episode feels at a slight disjoint to the previous one. Certainly they have dramatically different themes. “The Categories of Life” is straightforwardly an attack on particular political trends that builds towards a shock death. “The Middle Men,” on the other hand, is making a more philosophical point. The phrase “middle man” appears twice, once in reference to Colin, and the other time as a self-description of Ernie Hudson’s character. The thematic implications are in classic Miracle Day fashion, crashingly unsubtle.
Although the particulars of how this is put together are, to say the least, elusive. Ernie Hudson’s character appears to be intended as a suggestion that the evil is not, in fact, individual actors but a fundamentally corrupt system. And yet Colin is equally clearly held up as an individual evil. And the larger message of the story, hammered home in Gwen’s monologue before blowing up Cowbridge, in Ralph’s intervention to save Esther and Rex, and, in one of the story’s few moments of grace and subtlety, in the nameless camp worker who silently aids Gwen’s escape, is the power of individual actions and defiance in fighting institutional corruption. And in many ways this is a strong point of the episode. It is, after all, a sensible transition – “The Categories of Life” is about institutional horror, and “The Middle Men” offers a meaningful response to it.
Which ought to render Ernie Hudson’s character a more substantive villain than he is. His entire speech about a vast and faceless system, after all, cuts against the moral message of the story. Everything else is declaring that, actually, the system isn’t what matters, the willingness of individuals to take a stand or to remain violently complicit with the system is. And yet he’s not really challenged – instead he’s given a fairly significant voice within the narrative, serving as the major bit of exposition for the story, even if that exposition amounts to little more than a contextless word that could mean anything.
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