outside the government

May 14, 2014

Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 33

It’s October 11^th, 2010. Cee Lo Green is at number one with “Forget You,” with Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams also charting. Since Sherlock wrapped its first season, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stepped down as the leader of UKIP saying that he is “not much good” at party politics. Ed Miliband proved rather good at party politics, becoming leader of the Labour party and beating his own brother to the job. And the US removed its last combat troops from Iraq.

While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures are back. But The Nightmare Man sees The Sarah Jane Adventures arriving in a very different world. It’s still ostensibly a spin-off of Doctor Who, something that will be stressed loudly in two stories’ time but the Doctor Who of which it is a spinoff is gone. It’s still overseen by Russell T Davies, but Davies no longer has the big show. And the big show has done its farewell to Sarah Jane. While one assumes – or at least, one assumed at the time, before Sladen fell ill – that Sarah Jane was an obvious choice of people to have show up in Doctor Who again, The End of Time went to great lengths to make sure that there was no obligation for any Davies-era characters to return.

So it’s a fundamentally strange thing when, following this, the entire Davies era returns like it’s never been away. This is, of course, a short-lived transitional period. The combination of Miracle Day failing to quite generate the expected audience and Lis Sladen’s unfortunate passing meant that the Davies era shuddered to a halt not too long into the Moffat era. Nevertheless, for the first two years the continued presence of the Davies era exerted an odd pressure on the Moffat era. And The Nightmare Man represents the start of that.

Equally, we should note that this is the nineteenth Sarah Jane Adventures story and the start of the show’s fourth season. It is, at this point, a known quantity with relatively little to do other than show up and be itself. Except, of course, for the detail that the other original member of its child cast, Tommy Knight, is dropping down to a recurring role, so it also has to rejig the cast in the first episode. The sensible way to do that, of course, is to focus the episode on Luke. This being Season Four it doesn’t have to go to great lengths to reintroduce the cast – it can just do a Luke-centered episode and then show him the door.

What’s interesting, then, is the nature of the episode. On the one hand, it’s solidly in children’s television territory, with a villain largely modeled off of a clown and a resolution that amounts to the power of friendship blasting the bad guy into submission. But as with the program’s high point, Lidster’s previous The Mark of the Berserker, there’s a second sense of a program grappling with relatively sizable issues.

…

May 12, 2014

Outside the Government 17: K-9

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 60

At the time I queued this, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter is less than $500 from ensuring thrice-weekly posts until we get to A Christmas Carol. If you’ve not backed yet, consider throwing in for one of the lower-level rewards like the ebook.

Let’s start with the salient and strange fact: there exist people in the world who have watched this. This is an underlying truth of everything that exists in the world of greater media. Somebody’s seen it. Actually, in many ways the stranger and more salient fact is that something like six thousand people are going to read an essay on K-9, the Australian K-9 spinoff that is why the character vanished from The Sarah Jane Adventures for most of Season Four. And some number of those people are going to eventually pay money for a book containing this essay, or pledge money to a Kickstarter to help fund the writing of similarly arcane essays. To quote a similarly arcane object of media, these things’ existence is possible, but not very likely. So why does K-9 exist? For the same reason The Web of Fear exists: people thought they could make some money.

We are, however, at a sort of cultural end here. This is a deeply remote object. It exists and had some traceable impact on the world, and it did in fact come off of Doctor Who, and that’s the sort of thing we make sure to look at here. But in many ways that is all one can do: look at this thing. It passed through the world, and that is worth understanding. Because this thing is dead and sterile. Its Wikipedia article, in 2014, still proclaims with some measure of confidence that it is coming back.

This does not appear to be true. Back in 2012 there were murmurings of a second season. There doesn’t seem to be any particular movement on that. The series’ official Facebook page – which is seriously about the only place anything about its current life is documented – reveals that its co-creator, Paul Tams, is currently running a Kickstarter for his and Bob Baker’s latest children’s television series Marti, starring a superhero meerkat. This Kickstarter actually launched at about the same time as mine, looking for £20,000 to create a pilot episode of this series. At the time of writing, it has so far raised £139 from five backers. There are still one hundred positions in the closing credits still open for backers. You can get a DVD of an exclusive behind-the-scenes production information for £15 on this Kickstarter, or, at least, you can if it funds. We’ve got til May 31^st to make it happen, and for my part, I’m backing because that making-of DVD is going to be one of the most remote and minor objects of Doctor Who history, and frankly, I wanna upload it to a torrent site. So make that £162. (Paul Tams, for his part, has only ever backed one Kickstarter, for 21^st Century Tank Girl, which raised £174,130 on April 30^th.

…

May 7, 2014

Outside the Government: The Great Game

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 22

For the record, The Sarah Jane Adventures will start coverage next week with an Outside the Government, with The Nightmare Man running on Wednesday. There is still just over $1000 to go on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter before that run will be upped to thrice weekly – it would need to do that by a week from today in order to impact the first week’s posting schedule.

It’s August 8^th, 2010. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Beautiful Monster,” with Wanted, Flo Rida, Eminem, and Swedish House Mafia also charting. In news, violent protests break out in Pakistan and India over entirely unrelated issues. Sarah Palin’s daughter calls off her engagement with Levi Johnston due to his failure to not have children with other women. Wyclef Jean, in a memorable Wikipedia turn of phrase worth quoting “confirms he is to announce plans” to run for the Presidency of Haiti. (He is deemed ineligible to run eventually.) The World Sauna Championships are permanently abandoned when Russian finalist Vladimir Ladyzhensky dies during the competition. Also, Elena Kagan is sworn onto the Supreme Court.

While on television, just two weeks after it showed up, Sherlock takes its bow. In so many ways, The Great Game appears the perfect response to The Blind Banker – a corrective that shows that Sherlock has learned the lessons it needed to learn. This is, of course, nonsense – The Great Game was in fact the first episode of Sherlock shot, with the season being made essentially backwards, and even if it weren’t, it’s not as though the production of a television show would allow Gatiss to look at the script for episode two and go “right, I see what I need to do differently.”

All of which said, The Great Game is notable for finally and decisively putting to rest the idea that Sherlock is going to be a procedural that does a case every week. Instead it highlights the degree to which solving a mystery is an almost incidental process for Sherlock that holds no meaningful suspense. By the episode’s end the question of “can Sherlock solve the mystery” has been in effect entirely drained of any dramatic tension – so much so that Sherlock is, by the episode’s end, a solid mystery ahead of the plot. Under the hood, this episode is just a rapid-fire succession of perfectly ordinary episodes hung together by the countdown/bomber plot, which is to say, wrapped into a parody of a season of 24.

Few if any people actually talk about the five cases of this episode, and it’s a pity, as they’re all actually pretty good. Taking down cases with an average of eighteen minutes to spend on them is not straightforward, and Gatiss manages to make each of the five cases feel distinct and interesting. The first makes an interesting play and subversion of the epic. On the one hand, it’s a case that requires that Moriarty have been inside Baker Street itself, and more importantly, it’s flagged as Sherlock’s first-ever case.

…

May 5, 2014

Outside the Government: The Blind Banker

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 39

First off, I want to thank everybody for a fantastic first few days on the Last War in Albion Kickstarter. It’s doing better than I’d imagined.

I wanted to throw another announcement of it out alongside a proper Eruditorum post so I could stress the fact that all Kickstarter backers get to read the Doctor Who-related project I’m working on as it’s serialized. The first chapter of it is already up as a backer-exclusive update, and I should have the second one up soon.

I’ve also added a new reward tier – a full set of Eruditorum Press books (TARDIS Eruditorum 1-4 and A Golden Thread, along with the Last War in Albion book) in paperback. That’s $100, but if you’re quick and one of the first ten people to get over there, you can get it for $80.

If that’s not enough to tempt you, I’m adding two unofficial stretch goals – if the Kickstarter can hit $6000 by the end of the week, I’ll resume thrice weekly posting for the remaining Sarah Jane Adventures stories, thus getting to Season Six just a little bit faster. And if it makes it to $8000, I’ll go thrice weekly for Miracle Day as well, shortening the mid-series gap for Season Six. I figure that while covering both is a necessary part of the blog, it’s nobody except for the person who’s going to pop up in comments objecting to this claim’s favorite stretch, and we might as well give ourselves a way to make it go a bit faster.

It’s August 1^st, 2010. The Wanted are at number one with “All Time Low,” with Swedish House Mafia, Eliza Doolittle, Katy Perry, Eminem, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, significant flooding takes place in China and Pakistan, and Chelsea Clinton gets married.

While on television, Sherlock’s back for another round. First of all, it is customary to point out that The Blind Banker is an unfortunate piece of Yellow Peril adventuring that leaves more than a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth. There’s not a lot to say about this besides pointing out that it is precisely as racist as you would expect from something overseen by two people who think there’s not really anything wrong with The Talons of Weng-Chiang besides the rat. But whereas that story at least makes sentences beginning “other than the racism” understandable, if not necessarily advisable, this one misses the “be really brilliant” part of the equation and ends up as the consensus crap episode of Sherlock.

That said, the reason it’s crap isn’t that it’s racist, but rather that it’s a fundamentally misconceived episode that doesn’t understand what show it’s a part of. This is actually more understandable than it sounds – I would bet good money that a sixty minute draft of this script existed. It is thus the one episode of Sherlock that unabashedly treats the show as though it’s a standard issue case-of-the-week show in which the point is to solve the mystery, tease the season finale, and cut to credits.

…

April 30, 2014

Outside the Government: A Study in Pink

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, smith 56

It’s July 25^th, 2010. Yolanda Be Cool vs D Cup are at number one with “We No Speak Americano,” with a duet between Eminem featuring Rihanna, Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg, Professor Green featuring Lily Allen, and 3OH3 featuring Ke$ha also charting – in fact, only two songs in the top ten are not collaborative: Eliza Doolittle’s “Pack Up” and JLS’s “The Club is Alive.” In news, the World Cup wound down with England eliminated the day after The Big Bang following a pathetic showing against Germany, and Spain ultimately winning in a scrappy final against the Netherlands. Also, Wikileaks releases over 90,000 internal logs of the US Military to a variety of news sources.

While on television Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s massive hit Sherlock debuts with A Study in Pink. Why do Sherlock episode by episode? For one thing, because its production is bound up in Doctor Who’s. The shows respond to each other and learn from each other, and are, as countless critics have noted, a bit similar in some key ways. Yes, they’re also different. Hence “Outside the Government” at all. But to be perfectly honest, you learn more about the Moffat era watching Sherlock than you ever did about the Davies era by watching Torchwood. So here we are. Sherlock from the ground floor: A Study in Pink.

The more one thinks about A Study in Pink the more it becomes evident that it is quite a strange thing. What does it mean, after all, to create an introduction to a show featuring one of the best-known and most iconic fictional characters in existence? One cannot meaningfully introduce Sherlock Holmes as a character, as any introduction one makes is going to be immediately subsumed by the impossibly large paratext of a century of Sherlock Holmes. In its own way, it’s the same problem Moffat faced with The Eleventh Hour – how do you launch a program that’s already massively familiar to viewers and where everything you introduce is going to be read in context with years of existing material.

With The Eleventh Hour, Moffat solved the problem by simply putting the program’s best foot forward and playing to all of its strengths as much as possible – an unapologetic charm offensive that worked. In effect he did everything he wanted to do differently, but in an episode that highlighted only the most superficial of his changes while mostly stressing what had remained consistent. But this was a solution for a program that had been on the air just a few months earlier. The solution isn’t quite going to work here. Nevertheless, A Study in Pink is, like The Eleventh Hour, an exercise in saying “here’s how it is.” It is at times almost television as FAQ – a narratively sequenced list of answers to questions beginning “how are you going to handle…”

That it works is in some ways remarkable. More than almost anything else Moffat has ever written, this is an episode that relies on nothing save for his gifts at humor and exposition.

…

March 10, 2014

Outside the Government 16: Dreamland

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 6

The first question with one of these, and by “one of these” I mean bits of Doctor Who made post-2005 that are not television episodes, is why it exists. This is not pejorative in the least – it’s just that with all the brand management that goes into Doctor Who post-2005, causing an officially licensed story featuring David Tennant’s Doctor as the lead character to exist is non-trivial. There are meetings, and budgets, and all sorts of non-trivial processes and hoops to jump through. Which means that a project like Dreamland only exists because of a complex network of politicized corporate decisions.

In the context of 2009, at least, it’s easy to understand. Doctor Who was being very naughty, after all. Coming off of its hottest year ever, a program that was pulling in a fantastic amount of money for the BBC decided to kick up its feet and take a year off prior to returning in a new and altogether more uncertain form. It was a massively high risk strategy, and the fact that Davies (and Moffat) could get away with it speaks volumes about how successful Doctor Who was and how unassailable Davies’s position was at that time. Nevertheless, there were, so to speak, bills to pay and favors due all around. The absence of Doctor Who proper meant an unusual amount of what we might call Doctor Who improper; things like The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.

Which is to say that a fair part of why the BBC whipped up a roughly episode-length string of six animated episodes to throw onto the recently renamed BBC Red Button service was because Doctor Who owed the BBC a promotional favor, much as the outsized presence of Tennant and Piper in the 2005 Children in Need broadcast existed as a counterweight to the unusual decision to make “Pudsey Cutaway” a straight bit of Doctor Who instead of something that gave way to a comedic conceit at some point. The major purpose of Dreamland was to give the BBC Red Button service something a-list to air.

At least, that’s the one hand. On the other hand, Dreamland is a rather obviously cheaply made bit of fluff that got farmed out to a de facto Big Finish team with Gary Russell directing and Big Finish stalwarts David Warner and Lisa Bowerman popping up to act. Large swaths of the cast, most blatantly Tim Howar, have clearly not looked at the script prior to recording lines for it. Tennant, as with The Infinite Quest, is on autopilot that’s tempered only by his underlying skill. And the animation style is, to be charitable, complete shit.

This is, to say the least, a problem. There’s a general assumption that animation is somehow easy or trivial – within Doctor Who it’s seen most clearly in the reflexive belief that animating any missing stories that Phil Morris doesn’t happen to be sitting on is just a straightforward and unambiguously sane thing to do, not, apparently, realizing that animation is phenomenally difficult and complex unless you’re actively going for something that supports what might be called a low-fi aesthetic (South Park, for instance, where the fact that the characters all look like paper cutouts is part of the show’s point and conceit).

…

March 6, 2014

Outside The Government: The Gift

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 32

Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow.

It’s November 19^th, 2009. The charts haven’t changed. STS-129, the third-from-last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, launches. Barack Obama makes an international trip to China. The Original of Laura, an unfinished novel by Nabokov, is published over his wish that it be burnt upon his death. France qualifies for the 2010 World Cup due to Thierry Henry committing a deliberate handball to score. Oprah Winfrey announces the impending end of her television show. The Large Hadron Collider is turned back on.

While on television… oh dear. The third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures has been in many ways uneven, but The Gift is frankly an unmitigated disaster. Attentive readers may recall a kerfuffle back in the first season of Davies-era Doctor Who when Lawrence Miles, enfant terrible of the late Wilderness Years, famously and controversially lambasted The Unquiet Dead for its alleged xenophobia. The argument went that the episode went to great lengths to have the Doctor refute Rose’s objections to the aliens being allowed to use human cadavers as bodies only to prove Rose right when the aliens really do turn out to be evil. At the time, I largely sided against Miles, suggesting that he was making a reading of the episode that no actual viewer would make, and thus was talking in a vacuum.

Which brings us to The Gift, a story in which a pair of Raxicoricofallapatorians explain that they are not members of the villainous Slitheen family, who had previously been the only Raxicoricofallapatorians we’d seen, but instead members of the virtuous Blathereen family. Much of the cast, particularly Clyde, treats them with suspicion, assuming from the outset that they’re evil. Rani is the only person who defends them, and even Sarah Jane stresses the importance of being suspicious of aliens. Eventually it turns out that the aliens are in fact irredeemably evil – so evil, in fact, that Sarah Jane has to kill them – and we get a final monologue about how there are some good aliens, while offering an overall moral that suspicion and paranoia are the correct way to treat people who are different than us until proven otherwise.

That this is done with the Slitheen, whose original concept was a deliberate cut against the idea that aliens are best identified as a species, is even crueler. The entire point of the Slitheen is that they were set up to trick the audience into thinking they were monsters, when in fact they were people and characters. And the vague hedge that the Blathereen were actually half-Slitheen accomplishes little other than suggesting that there are some people who are just irredeemably evil because they have bad blood in them, and they should probably be killed via explosive farts.

So really, fuck The Gift. It’s consciously and deliberately xenophobic, there’s no way to read it as anything other than that, and it’s also unambiguously for children, which means that The Sarah Jane Adventures closes out its third season with an act of overt and conscious evil.

…

February 28, 2014

Outside the Government: Mona Lisa’s Revenge

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 12

It’s November 12^th, 2009. JLS are at number one with “Everybody in Love,” with Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Westlife, and Lady Gaga also charting. In news, Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela to “prepare for war” against Colombia, the US House of Representatives passes the first version of the health care law these days more commonly known as Obamacare, and, in a desperate attempt to get a third news item, Willie Bain wins the Glasgow North East by-election.

While on television, it’s Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It is difficult to get around the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge features the TARDIS as the Mona Lisa. That this involves certain eccentricities of chronology does not even seem like much of a problem: after all, in The Doctor’s Wife one of the major conceits is that the TARDIS does not experience time chronologically, and thus there is no particular reason why the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge was made two years earlier should have any bearing on the causality here.

We must also admit that Mona Lisa’s Revenge ties in conspicuously with City of Death, the previous time that Doctor Who has intersected the Mona Lisa. From that we know that the Mona Lisa that comes to life here is, if not a fake, at least not strictly speaking the original – that da Vinci in fact painted six additional versions on canvases onto which the Doctor had scrawled “this is a fake” in felt tip marker.

This latter fact is worth stressing simply because back when we dealt with City of Death, one of our primary concerns was the fact that it was a story about the nature of authenticity – what Walter Benjamin deemed “aura” in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is to say, City of Death is a story about the strange and quasi-mystical allure of the authentic object. The thing that has been touched by the hand of the artist, as it were. Mona Lisa’s Revenge, for all that it is an odd bedfellow to that story, is firmly in the same tradition.

After all, the key event of the story is the presence of the Mona Lisa – the fact that it is on loan from the Louvre, and in the UK. The museum is drenched with Mona Lisa merchandise, and the story thus stresses in a number of ways how many copies and imitations of the image there are. But what’s important is the fact that the Mona Lisa – the one that comes to life and turns out to be rather evil – is the one that Leonardo da Vinci painted. Indeed, the explanation for what’s going on in this story, such as it is, hinges entirely on the medial reality of the painting. The Mona Lisa comes to life because she was painted with paint that happened to have alien rocks in it, or something like that. The explanation is terribly vague, but the underlying point stands: everything that happens in this story stems from the physical object of the Mona Lisa.

…

February 26, 2014

Outside the Government: The Eternity Trap

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 35

It’s November 5^th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Fight For This Love,” with Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, and two separate songs by the Black Eyed Peas also charting. In news, Rhode Island re-criminalizes prostitution, the Yankees win the World Series, and a U2 concert at the Brandenberg Gate celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself mired in a strange and ironic controversy as a large wall is build around the venue.

“I hope this sci-fi show does a story about the conflict between rationalism and superstition,” said no one ever, and yet the wish is still granted for the umpteenth time in The Eternity Trap. The story is not bad – it’s a perfectly competent execution of “let’s do The Stone Tape for children,” managing to be a spooky haunted house story without ever crossing the line into objectionable or overly scarring. There’s something a little sad in the fact that it doesn’t try to scar children for life, but equally, The Sarah Jane Adventures doing a haunted house story probably should target fun instead of traumatic, so, you know. Plus, it’s got Donald Sumpter, who is positively gifted in the art of playing a raving and frothing bad guy named something like “Erasmus Darkening.”

It’s also worth noting that The Eternity Trap takes a more ambiguous line on the science/superstition debate than is normal. Clear care has been taken in making Darkening inscrutable. The number of times the narrative goes “ah, yes, this may behave 100% like a supernatural event, but actually it’s got a vague scientific explanation” is impressive. No, the creature isn’t an unknowable monster… it’s just a completely unknown one from some parallel dimension. No, Darkening isn’t an alchemist. He’s actually an alien… from a totally unknown planet who created “a computer built from brass and iron,” a phrase that still carefully ties it to the 17^th century period it ostensibly hails from. No, the house isn’t haunted by ghosts, because technically the people only got spirited to another dimension as opposed to dying. There’s a constant resistance to completely ceding ground to rationalism even as the underlying ethos of the episode is explicitly rationalist.

This is, for the most part, more interesting. The arch-skeptical ideology is, let’s face it, boring. But more to the point, it’s preposterous within The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is in no way a rationalist show. I mean, this is the dirty little secret of every single sci-fi show to try to push the hardline rationalist perspective. Sci-fi isn’t rationalist. The Sarah Jane Adventures sure as heck isn’t. I mean, this is straightforward on a basic level. If you flop off to, say, RationalWiki or FreethoughtBlogs and start talking about how all those people who believe in ghosts are cranks because it’s obviously aliens that’s actually done it, you’re not going to be taken seriously. The conspiracy theories that say that the Illuminati is a front for the mind controlling space lizards are not, in point of fact, any more sane than the ones that go with more old-fashioned “it’s paranormal.”

…

February 24, 2014

Outside the Government: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 26

It’s October 29th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one, with Whitney Houston, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Buble, Jay-Z, and Robbie Williams also charting. In news, Morrissey collapses while performing “This Charming Man” in Swindon. Zine El Abine Ben Ali wins 90% of the votes in Tunisia and a five-year term of office, which seems like a sure bet that he’ll be around for ages. And footballer Marlon King is sacked from Wigan Athletic after a sexual assault conviction.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The biggest thing about this story is, of course, that the Doctor is in it. That this is demonstrably the most important thing about it is also in many regards the fundamental challenge of it: how does one do an episode of a spin-off to Doctor Who that features the Doctor and not have it become a de facto episode of Doctor Who instead of an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The first trick is a relatively obvious one: make the Doctor’s absence a tangible part of the plot. After teasing his appearance repeatedly in The Mad Woman in the Attic, we have a first episode here in which the sound of the TARDIS is in effect used as a sort of accent and punctuation: something that repeatedly teases the eventual arrival of the Doctor. It’s only the second episode in which Tennant features at all, and even there he effectively drops out of the climax so that Clyde can save the day instead. Tennant, in other words, is deliberately treated as something to use sparingly, so that this feels unmistakably like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and not like an episode of Doctor Who that went out with the wrong opening credits.

It is, of course, questionable whether or not this was necessary. There is in the end nothing that would have effectively made this anything other than a story where the guest star overwhelms the show. And in some ways that’s the real point of it: a private episode of Doctor Who for the kids. There is, after all, something thoroughly delightful in that idea. The usually not actually true statement that Doctor Who is for children (as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a show that carefully avoids not being for children) here applies wonderfully. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a secret treat for kids – something that feels a bit like staying up past your bedtime.

In something of a concession to this reality, the second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith revels in these possibilities. Indeed, much of its runtime is devoted to a longer sequence of the Doctor running around with Clyde, Luke, and Rani than the plot actually needs – a sequence that exists mostly, if we’re being honest, to set up things like Clyde actually calling the Doctor out on an “I’ll explain later.” Which is wonderful and worth doing, to be fair.

…

«‹ 4 5 6 7 ›»