outside the government

It’s October 29th, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “Bleeding Love,” and remains so for both weeks of this story. Take That, Westlife, Britney Spears, and Oasis also chart. So that’s depressing. In news, substantial wildfires break out in California, the UK announces that it will begin requiring passports for Irish people wanting to visit the UK, and a strike breaks out among American screenwriters, effectively ending television production for the 2007-08 season.

On television we have what is clearly designed to be one of the marquee stories of the first season, Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? The basic premise is a standard – an It’s a Wonderful Life number, only mostly staying in the world in which Sarah Jane has been removed instead of on Sarah Jane herself. This conceit is woven around a newly revealed secret origin for Sarah Jane, in which we find out that as a child she was unable to stop her friend Andrea from drowning while they snuck onto a pier during a school trip. Under the machinations of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ signature villain, the Trickster, this is reversed so that Andrea lives and Sarah Jane dies as a child, leading to a world in which only Maria knows what was supposed to happen and tries desperately to set things right.

First and foremost, then, this becomes a showcase for Yasmin Paige, who sparkles in it. Paige is in many ways the secret ingredient of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ first season, proving adept at both the plucky young female adventurer role and at selling real emotional content. She was in many ways the best thing about Eye of the Gorgon, and here she’s left with most of the first episode to anchor on her own, which she manages with aplomb. But in many ways more interesting is the second episode after Maria is similarly taken off the board (this time via a Graske, since the costume was presumably just lying around), leading to the rather charming spectacle of Alan having to save the day.

There are quibbles to be had, certainly. There may never be an entirely persuasive argument for the claim that Sarah Jane really needed a traumatic origin retconned into her life, or that the addition of a dead childhood friend she failed to save adds anything to the character. The central event here, Andrea’s death, doesn’t really fit with Sarah Jane as we know her. Secret tragedies don’t quite become Sarah Jane. It’s not that the actual idea is terribly off – it’s not. It’s just that in introducing it, the fact that Sarah Jane is really, at her core, a Doctor Who companion from 1974 introduced at a point when the female companion was being treated as a profoundly interchangeable part, and elevated to classic status more because of Elisabeth Sladen’s skill than because she was ever intricately conceived or full of nuance. Secret childhood traumas just aren’t things that fit organically with the sort of character she is.…

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It’s October 15th, 2007. Sugababes remain at number one, with Britney Spears, Timbaland, Sean Kingston, and the Freemasons also charting. In news, James D. Watson, the discoverer of DNA who didn’t ever advocate for using LSD, apologizes for advocating scientific racism. J.K. Rowling announces that Dumbledore is gay, and Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan to reenter politics, a decision that ends poorly for her.

While on television, we have the odd duck of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures: Warriors of Kudlak. Indeed, it’s the odd duck of The Sarah Jane Adventures as a whole – the only time the series ever hired a writer who wasn’t steeped in Doctor Who material (although Phil Ford basically used SJA as a way into Doctor Who, his later career makes it hard to argue that he’s not well steeped). Phil Gladwin, the writer, is instead a fairly normative television writer – he’d worked on Grange Hill, The Bill, Casualty, and Holby City. On paper this should be fine – he’s got children’s telly experience and is a basically capable writer, so he should be able to turn out a basically capable script. And he does. Warriors of Kudlak is, in point of fact, a basically capable script.

There are high points. The decision to have Kudlak not actually be an outright villain saves the entire first season’s blushes; for a show about the wondrous things in the universe, it sure does fail spectacularly to show any of them. If any Doctor Who-related show needed to do the “the monsters aren’t actually monsters” story, it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures, and yet it doesn’t, making Kudlak’s late turn towards non-villainy a significant hedge. The detail of having a black girl among the “great laser tag players” kidnapped by Kudlak is one of the most significant and substantive moments of diversity casting the show engages in. It manages to not get the relationship between kids and video games completely wrong, which is impressive in general, and doubly so in a Russell T Davies show.

But all of these crumble under much further inspection. Kudlak isn’t a non-villainous monster. All we actually get is “the monsters are actually monsters, they’re just mildly more sympathetic than they initially appeared.” Beyond that, the setup for that twist is shambolic. Gladwin makes no move to hint that Kudlak might have noble intentions in the first episode. It’s shoe-horned into the second episode, effectively making the second episode one that’s working from a subtly different premise from the first. It’s one thing – and a very good thing – to have a cliffhanger or a twist that alters what the audience thinks they know about a story. It’s another to just lazily swap premises without setup.

And this is a larger problem with the story – the human henchman, for instance, drops out of the narrative completely once he’s done providing his not-actually-all-that-essential plot function of teleporting Sarah Jane and Maria up to the spaceship. Instead the whole thing feels like two distinct episodes, one of which exists to get to the cliffhanger (which comes several minutes too late in the episode – the henchman menacing Sarah Jane with a gun is much scarier than Kudlak), and the other one of which exists to get to the ending, but which are not actually intended to link together to tell a new story.…

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It’s October 1st, 2007. The fact that Sugababes are at number one is definitely relevant now, and they remain there all story. Feist, Kanye West, Mark Ronson and Amy Wimehouse, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Gordon Brown decides against calling an early election, and Larry Craig is not allowed to withdraw his guilty plea for soliciting sex in a Minnesota bathroom, but declines to resign from the Senate anyway. One of my favorite things about Wikipedia is that someone has posted a photo of the bathroom in question, so that if you’re ever in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, you can visit. It’s the one between Royal Zero Shoe Shine and Talie.

On television, meanwhile, Eye of the Gorgon. In many ways Eye of the Gorgon is puzzling. Certainly it does not fit into anything one would on the surface expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. After two stories that are at their heart based around the day-to-day lives of people who are ostensibly like the audience, we get one that is grounded almost entirely in other sorts of narrative. In the broad strokes, this is not particularly unusual. The Sarah Jane Adventures’s parent show, after all, regularly reaches for genres that are in no way intrinsic to what might be called normative British childhood experience. Nobody has ever fretted about whether or not a spaceship that’s going to fall into the sun in forty-two minutes is too far removed from the experiences of British children. Sure, there’s Davies’s Fear of a Zog Planet, but the fear there is a lack of connection to any human experience. Typically, for Davies, an obvious connection to an existing popular genre is sufficient to solve the problem of having a way into the premise of a story.

And there is an existing genre here. Evil nuns on a quiet country estate (which is what Lavender Lawns looks like, even if it is in practice a nursing home) is a standard enough horror trope. It’s not hard to imagine the basic setup of a bunch of nuns worshipping a Gorgon in secret serving as the premise of an episode of Ace of Wands or The Tomorrow People. Or, for that matter, as the premise of some Season Thirteen story of 70s Doctor Who. Indeed, coming so soon on the heels of Blink, it’s hard not to see the use of the Gorgon as an expansion on that idea of making the act of watching a source of fear. Eye of the Gorgon is ultimately not just a story in which a 70s-style threat recurs, but one where the threat feels as though it comes out of the deeper fabric of what Doctor Who is. It’s not a recurring monster so much as a monster that just makes sense in Doctor Who: of course there are things that just looking at is fatal.

So it’s not the setting or premise that’s unusual as such. What’s unusual is simply that this isn’t the sort of show The Sarah Jane Adventures initially appeared to be.…

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It’s September 24th, 2007. Sean Kingston is at number one with “Beautiful Girls,” but is unseated a week later by Sugababes’s “About You Now,” a fact that only arguably counts in terms of this story. Shayne Ward, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Rihanna, and the Foo Fighters also chart. Since Last of the Time Lords, the last Harry Potter book came out. Dick Cheney is President of the United States for two-and-a-half hours, and spends the time penning a bizarrely self-serving letter about terrorism to his grandchildren. And Alberto Gonzales finally resigns, long after everyone had given up hoping. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown enjoys a momentary wave of popularity, but fails to have the good sense to hold an election, and manages to squander the lead within a few months. And the United States Episcopal Church agrees to back off on consecrating gay bishops or blessing same-sex marriages in an attempt to smooth over schisms in the Anglican Communion.

On television, meanwhile, we get the actual start of The Sarah Jane Adventures with Gareth Roberts’s Revenge of the Slitheen, which is more or less the episode you’d expect from that description. Roberts, as ever, is a precise writer who focuses on honing existing concepts to perfection. In this case it’s the Slitheen. Aliens of London/World War III was not a classic, less because of any specific flaw than a myriad of slightly off-kilter decisions. This led to the mistaken belief that the Slitheen didn’t work, and were just dumb farting aliens. It’s true that their original two-parter put two much emphasis on the fart jokes, just as the head-unzipping happened a few too many times to remain interesting (and had a profoundly annoying sound effect to boot). In fact, as Roberts demonstrates, the Slitheen are a marvelous concept that got slightly lost underneath the episode they appeared in.

At their heart, what’s most interesting about the Slitheen is not the green bug-eyed monsters, but the scenes in which they are wearing their skinsuits, in which they’re playing authority figures that we know are wrong. They are in this regard that most basic of children’s television fodder: the authority figure that the children know is illegitimate, but that nobody else can see. It’s one of the most basic moves of children’s fiction, and one of the cleverest bits of Aliens of London/World War III was elevating this logic to the higher stakes setting of Downing Street.

Even this stays within the general margins of children’s entertainment, however. One of the cultural assumptions underlying the entire idea of childhood is the idea that children have a measure of special innocence and moral sense. And so the point isn’t just the revelation that New Labour’s march to the Iraq War was in fact carried out by alien psychopaths; it’s the fact that their villainy is so obvious that even a child can see it. (Not, to be clear, that only a child can see it – for all that Doctor Who takes children’s perspectives seriously, it never goes for that “children are magic” twaddle.)…

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The Infinite Quest is almost completely unsuited to the form in which anyone actually encounters it these days. These days it’s reskinned to appear like an episode of Doctor Who that happens to be animated – complete with a cold open and credit sequence. In reality, it’s a thirteen episode serial consisting of short episodes lasting roughly three and a half minutes that were one of several components of the second and final season of Totally Doctor Who.

We’ve covered Totally Doctor Who and its inadequacies at the end of the second season. To recap, it was a show that did a poor job of engaging with Doctor Who, treating its audience like they’re idiots. Given this, The Infinite Quest is actually not that bad. Everyone is clearly putting effort into it – the animation is by the remnants of Cosgrove Hall, who did Scream of the Shalka and the two episodes of The Invasion. David Tennant and Anthony Head both do quite well for dealing with a script that they clearly first saw about twenty minutes before they started recording. Freema Agyeman is rougher, turning in a shockingly poor performance, but to be fair, voice acting is a different skillset from screen acting, and there’s not actually an inherent reason why being good at one means you’re good at the other. (Actually, I’m curious when this was recorded – given the lead time needed for animation, it wouldn’t surprise me if Agyeman did this before she’d substantially gotten to work with the character.)

The problem is that, structurally, it seems messy. Several ideas seem underdeveloped in the extreme. For instance, early on it introduces a world in which interplanetary oil piracy to free needed resources from powerful corporations is common. This is a neat, politically incendiary premise. Indeed, it goes politically further than the series is usually willing to, coming off better than, for instance, the attempt to deal with exploitative labor conditions next season in Planet of the Ood. The problem with it is that it seems to be dealt with and discarded shockingly quickly, taking up only about ten minutes of screen time total.

But this is just an illusion caused by repackaging The Infinite Quest into a quasi-episode of Doctor Who. In reality the oil pirates storyline was explored for three or four weeks, roughly (based on the timing in the episode), from Gridlock through to The Lazarus Project. Far from seeming like an underdeveloped theme, this is actually quite a substantial amount of time spent. And the idea that the entire story should have focused more tightly on one or two ideas is ludicrous. The Infinite Quest was designed to be experienced over the course of three months. It has as many episodes as The Daleks’ Masterplan (counting Mission to the Unknown). Of course it jumps around a lot – spending ten weeks of Doctor Who in one setting with one idea would be unbearably dull.

And yet there’s a complication here. You’ll note that my account of exactly which parts of The Infinite Quest contain the oil pirates plot is speculative.…

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No, no, it’s just that, you know, your profile picture made you look… and, I mean, this isn’t a criticism, but… less tentacular.

It is still New Year’s Day. Actually, we’ve moved backwards in time a few hours for Invasion of the Bane, the debut of The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is often called the pilot, which, in fact, it wasn’t – a pilot is an episode shot as a demo so that a full series can be considered. The first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was already commissioned when this got shot, and it was, in reality, a New Year’s special for a series that hadn’t actually aired its first episode yet.

It’s worth rehearsing the development of the show, though it’s well documented enough. The BBC, following the success of Doctor Who, went a bit spin-off mad, commissioning Totally Doctor Who and Torchwood, then moving on to wanting a children’s drama featuring a teenaged Doctor on Gallifrey and, briefly, considering a set of annual specials under the name Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth. The latter idea was quickly abandoned in the name of peace and sanity, The former, meanwhile, seems to have gotten about as far as Davies and Gardner laughing uproariously and then ordering some people killed.

Once the appropriate heads had been affixed to the appropriate pikes, Davies sent word back to the BBC that while he would not be doing Young Doctor Who, he was eager to do a children’s series focusing on Sarah Jane Smith, who he’d just successfully brought back in School Reunion. Because Davies was at one of those points in one’s career where he was invincible and allowed to do whatever he wanted, his plan to appeal to the youth of Britain with a show about a middle aged woman from 70s television was, in a rare burst of good sense from an entertainment industry that would usually respond to this much like Davies did to Young Doctor Who, enthusiastically approved.

There is an underlying tension here, and it’s one that never quite disappears from The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, it’s television aimed at people who were not actually alive when Doctor Who was originally on the air. On the other, more than any other show in the Doctor Who family The Sarah Jane Adventures is concerned with the material past of Doctor Who. I don’t just mean this in the sense that it features Sarah Jane, returns of three other 70s characters, and bunches of other moments that are overtly and consciously nostalgic for the past. (Really, it’s a wonder the Silurians and Sontarans didn’t make their returns in The Sarah Jane Adventures)

No, what’s really and oddly nostalgic about The Sarah Jane Adventures is that the show is set up to work like classic series Doctor Who, complete with half-hour episodes and cliffhangers. And even though Invasion of the Bane is an hourlong special, it’s still given the most familiar setup imaginable: exciting new technological object, mysterious goings-on, aliens are behind it and turn out to be evil.…

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Grrr. Argh.

It’s still New Year’s Day, essentially seconds after the close of Captain Jack Harkness, as Torchwood goes out with a two-hour finale event, running End of Days immediately after the preceding episode.

It’s very easy to take shots at End of Days, and some of them are even fair. It attempts to do an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink finale of the sort that Russell T Davies had already made standards elements of Doctor Who, only on a fraction of the budget, and it shows. “Weird things are falling through time all over the world” is a bigger concept than Torchwood can actually pull off, and all we actually get is an ornery Roman and some hazmat suits. It’s tempting to say that this is too big a concept for a one-hour slot, but that’s not really the problem – the problem is that Torchwood doesn’t have anything like the resources to show something this big. It’s trying to conjure a global threat in a show that has the budget, on a really good day, to have three guys in rubber masks lurching through the streets of Cardiff.

On top of that, the pacing wobbles considerably. Much of this is because it wants its third act twist of Abaddon rising up, which would probably have worked better if it had more than three minutes of screen time devoted to it, was remotely set up, and wasn’t a transparent knock-off of The Satan Pit. Instead most of this episode feels overcompressed, making things like the fact that Bilis doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense more obvious than they should be. It turns out that the gambit of “keep the plot moving fast enough that there’s no time to notice the holes” is a more delicate game than it seemed. (My favorite is the fact that they’ve apparently upgraded security to require the butler’s retina print since the last episode.)

And, of course, there’s the character motivation, which requires that Owen’s several-episode idiot plot spontaneously become virulently contagious such that everybody – not just a grief-stricken Gwen, but every single person in Torchwood besides Captain Jack – simultaneously abandoning all semblance of common sense and thinking “if only we were to do the exact same thing that’s already nearly destroyed the world, that would probably fix everything.” This makes the intra-Torchwood conflict scenes something rather short of compelling, and as that’s the central drama of the episode, well, again, there are problems.

All of which said.

Let’s start with Abaddon and his role as a knock-off of the Beast in The Satan Pit. The phrase “knock-off” may undersell this slightly – Abaddon, another name for the devil, is said to be “chained in rock” and “cast out before time,” which isn’t so much copying The Satan Pit as explicitly referencing it. So, OK, apparently Krop Tor was just imprisoning one of several gigantic horned death beasts from before time. But if the episode is going to demand to be read in light of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit then we may as well do so.…

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Hello Sailor.

It’s January 1st, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” while Iron Maiden, Take That, Girls Aloud, Gwen Stefani, and Chris Cornell also chart. Since Christmas, Gerald Ford died. The UK paid off its last World War II debts to the United States and Canada, although it still has a few bits from the Napoleonic Wars and a rather large amount from World War I. And, of course, Saddam Hussein was executed. Also, it’s International Heliophysical Year. Aw yeah!

On television we have a triple-header – two episodes of Torchwood and the hour long premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures all on the same day. Since we’ve been on a Torchwood kick, I’ll sort those two out first, and then we’ll do Sarah Jane on Friday. First, then, is Captain Jack Harkness, notably the only episode of Torchwood to earn a Hugo nomination, although, inevitably, it lost to Blink. This is, in many ways, not surprising. Captain Jack Harkness is an “issues” story that was well-timed. The beginning of 2007 was more or less peak time for a high profile television show to do a gay romance. And Torchwood did it well by not making a big deal of that aspect except inasmuch as Original Jack’s public embrace of Our Jack amounted to a public coming out and acceptance of his sexuality. Even still, there’s no reaction to it except a puzzled “what’s he doing” from one of Original Jack’s men. The episode is in no way about the fact that it’s the “gay men” episode, a quiet confidence that such an episode doesn’t need to be a Very Special Episode that’s about the glories of its own existence.

There is, of course, a reasoned objection to be had here, which is that it is maybe just a little too optimistic to think that 1941 was a time in which a captain in the US Air Force could publicly snog another man and get away with it, even to the extent of flying a fatal mission the next day. But this is an odd sort of objection that requires that we treat Torchwood as the sort of show in which real history is displayed. We’ll discuss this more next week when we get to The Shakespeare Code, but suffice it to say that there is little in Doctor Who that suggests that this sort of romantic view of history would be avoided. It’s obvious wish fulfillment, sure, but it’s not an unreasonable wish, and the little details elsewhere like remembering to depict Tosh’s difficulties as an Asian woman in 1941 give needed reassurance that the production team knows what rules they’re bending.

And without the bending of rules you don’t have an episode like this. Because this isn’t just “Captain Jack falls in love with a man in the past,” but rather “Captain Jack falls in love with his own erased history,” a concept that is, in many ways, actively set up and worked towards over the course of the first season of Torchwood.…

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Fight off the lethargy Don’t go quietly

It’s Christmas Eve, 2006. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” with Girls Aloud, Booty Luv, and Chris Cornell also charting, alongside the Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll and Cliff Richard with attempts at Christmas success. In news, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons resume. The Home Office floats the exciting idea of having foreign nationals carry ID cards linked to their fingerprints, and a feud between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan worsens as Uzbekistan doubles the price at which it will sell natural gas to Kyrgyzstan.

While on television we begin one of the most remarkable runs of Doctor Who related content ever. Combat airs on Christmas Eve, the day before The Runaway Bride. A week after that, oddly on a Monday instead of a Sunday, comes both Invasion of the Bane and the final two episodes of Torchwood’s first season, meaning that over the course of nine days fully five hours of Doctor Who-related material aired.

Of these, Combat has to be the oddest fit, being a spectacularly ill match for Christmas. This seems like an artifact of the decision to start with a two hour premiere – had Day One aired a week later then Out of Time, an episode that’s explicitly set around Christmastime, would have been the one to end up on Christmas Eve, which makes, on the whole, a lot more sense than Torchwood’s take on Fight Club, which is more or less what Combat is.

In her absolutely splendid novel Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson has a character ask whether a given book counts as eastern literature. In reply, Vikram the Vampire says, “There is a very simple test. Is it about bored, tired people having sex?” When the character confirms that the book does, Vikram proclaims it western literature. It’s terribly clever, but omits a key subgenre: bored, tired people being terribly violent. This is, after all, a veritable cliche of contemporary literature – angry and soul-dead men who can only find any sort of meaning or fulfillment in fighting one another. It’s the Chuck Palahniuk/Bret Easton Ellis school of thought.

In literature, where novels of that style work – and it’s worth noting that both Palahniuk and Easton Ellis have far more tricks up their sleeve than this theme – it’s usually based around a complex tonal structure – the literally fractured personality of the narrator and Tyler Durden, or the tense ambiguity of whether Patrick Bateman’s crimes are real or fantasies. What’s interesting isn’t actually moping around about how existentially bleak the lives of capitalism’s lesser nobility is, it’s the jagged edge between that banality and a world in which existential bleakness actually makes any sense.

At first glance, then, it appears that Combat misses the mark. The key problem is that Owen ultimately succumbs to the existential bleakness, having his moment of true masculinity as he faces down the Weevil, but being saved from death at the last second by Captain Jack.…

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Have I done the “wrong image” joke recently? I can never remember.

It’s December 17th, 2006. Take That remain at number one. Cliff Richard stalls at number two with his attempted Christmas number one “21st Century Christmas,” while Gwen Stefani, Chris Cornell, P. Diddy, and Lazy Town also chart, as do the Pogues and Kristy MacColl with their now annual chart run of “Fairytale of New York.” In news, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller announces that she will step down from her position at the head of MI-5. Time Magazine proclaims you to be the person of the year. And Ban Ki-moon is officially sworn in as the United Nations Secretary-General.

Torchwood is a series I first watched with my ex-wife, while we were in the earlier stages of our relationship. She lived in upstate New York and I lived in Florida, but she moved down to be with me after a few months of distance relationship and, for her, a frustrating grad school experience she was not happy with. We would pirate the episodes as soon as they aired and watch them on our laptops, syncing them and then talking in AOL Instant Messenger about the episode as we watched. They were our long distance dates on weeks we couldn’t make the travel back and forth from New York to Florida work. (We were very good at a cheap set of flights from Albany to Gainesville) 

On television, Out of Time. Returning to the approach of “see what kind of range Torchwood has as a concept” (which is, on the whole, the most endearing aspect of Torchwood’s staggeringly inconsistent first season – the fact that at least some of that inconsistency is the product of a genuine desire not to be a predictable television show), Out of Time presents Torchwood doing a triptych of people out of time, structured primarily as a love story with two parallel storylines to add depth and nuance.

In each case the central theme is, ultimately, death, or, at least, the past, which is essentially the same thing. On the one hand the past is inaccessible and dead – a place defined primarily by the fact that it cannot be returned to. And on the other the past is, we know, a place populated by people with, as the song goes, loves and hates and passions just like mine. This is the fundamental puzzle of death and the past – the fact that people and life goes on without us even as the world as we understand it cannot possibly do so.

I remember the big Christmas glut of episodes – a one week period with three Torchwoods, a Doctor Who, and a Sarah Jane Adventures. I remember divvying them up. I remember the different places I watched different episodes – some in my bedroom in Florida, others, once Christmas break started up, at my parents’ house in Connecticut. She moved to Florida midway through the season to pursue a different graduate program, but there was still a lot of distance to deal with as she’d have to go back to handle stuff in New York, or to visit family, and the whole season ended up being eaten by distance.…

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