smith

March 26, 2014

Some New Man (The Eleventh Hour)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a hospital roof.

It’s April 3^rd, 2010. Lady Gaga and Beyonce are at number one with “Telephone,” while Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Boyzone also chart. I regret to inform my readership that we have also entered the dark days of the world: Justin Bieber is at number three. While we’ve been away Togo withdrew from the Africa Cup of Nations after an attack on their national football team, the Winter Olympics took place, and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. While in last week, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church as “petty gossip,” rescuers reached 153 trapped miners in Shanxi, China, the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by North Korea, and, on April 3^rd itself, the iPad was first released.

Of the exact same age as the iPad, then, is the Matt Smith era, which kicks off with The Eleventh Hour. What jumps out the most about The Eleventh Hour with nearly four years of hindsight is how confident it is. This is the one of Moffat’s scripts for his own era that hardly anybody seems to have a bad word for. Even the fiercest critics of the Moffat era tend to make some comment about the squandered promise of this episode. This is one of the rare episodes of Doctor Who that seems to basically please everybody.

Its major challenge is that this was, in practice, a bare minimum. Moffat, Wegner, and Willis have essentially nothing to rest on save for their own talent. This was a moment where every critic was sharpening the knife. The resulting episode had to be absolutely critic-proof. It could get people to tune in based on the accumulated good will the series had from the Russell T Davies era, but equally, more than any other moment in the series’ history, this was a point where everybody had a ready-made excuse to stop watching. Even a whiff of “not as good as it used to be” would be devastating to the series right now, and so this has to be the episode of Doctor Who that anybody who is ever going to like an episode of Doctor Who will like.

The easy way to do this, by which I mean the way that would have gotten the series cancelled, would have been to do something that could more or less be described as Doctor Who by numbers – a story that was functionally indistinguishable from the Russell T Davies season openers. Admittedly, those expecting a decisive break from the Russell T Davies era are ultimately frustrated by The Eleventh Hour, which is still grounded in the structure of the Davies era. Indeed, the entirety of Series Five is, on a superficial level, structured like a Davies series. The first three episodes almost perfectly track those of Series One – a present day alien invasion story introducing the new Doctor and companion, a kind of weird future story, and a celebrity historical.

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March 24, 2014

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 77: Snapshots of 2010

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No Future

Near future prediction is always a rough game. The 1984 film 2010, an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel, managed a double error that almost perfectly defines the way in which the classic science fiction vision of the future fizzled. It’s first important to note the sort of endearing hubris of the film in the first place. In 1968, when 2001 came out, the future was thirty-three years off. But in 1984 the future was only twenty-six years off. There was still the resplendent belief in the onrushing scientific utopia that the culture had promised – a utopia wrapped up as a historical inevitable consequence of the then-present. Hence 2010’s amusing double error – the belief that humanity would be on the verge of going to Jupiter and the belief that the Cold War would be rumbling on.

Instead the American space program spent 2010 winding down, each of the three surviving Shuttles making their penultimate flights. The Cold War is dead and gone. Indeed, the entire apparatus of the future is long since gone, and has in fact quietly disappeared into the rear view mirror. Time memorably spend the tail end of 2009 declaring the aughts to have been the “worst decade ever,” and while this should be taken as Comic Book Guy style hyperbole with periods after every word, the case was compelling enough. A decade long war on terror culminated in a massive financial crash and the growing realization that electing a black dude President of the United States was not actually going to fix everything.

Even the replacement future hastily drafted in after the original draft withered on the vine was floundering. It’s not that the Internet was underperforming as such, but on the other hand, its transformative promise was somewhat less than advertised. What had started as revolutionary technology was now just Facebook.

The future had never really been built past the change of the millennium, and without that to anchor it there was just a vast, featureless present. Even technological advancement had become oddly fixed and predictable. The future came in regularly scheduled product launches headlined by Steve Jobs, incremental, predictable, and mostly leaked to rumor sites a few weeks in advance. It was not even a hugely pessimistic historical moment. Rather it was one captured by a grim banality. Nothing changes. Humanity sits past the ghost point, all the ideas and storming progress of the twentieth century ground to a point. For a hundred years now we had assumed we were building to something – that there was some sort of stable endpoint that all the churn and upheaval pointed towards. Whether that endpoint was utopia or armageddon was up in the air, but the broad idea that history was going somewhere wasn’t. Instead, however, the wheels simply fell off, and the tow truck never came. We sat, abandoned on history’s roadside, left thinking, “is this all there was?” And, seeing no sign of civilization, we tweeted about it.

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March 21, 2014

Guest Post: Steven Moffat – A Case For The Prosecution

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Personally, as I’ve said, I quite like the Moffat era. I dare say I love it. But I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and it seems fair, before we go in, to give the opposition a chance to state the case against. So here’s Jack Graham doing what he does best: being loud, angry, and leftist about Doctor Who. We’ll be back on Monday with a Pop Between Realities to kick off the Moffat era, and then The Eleventh Hour on Wednesday. Also, to clarify, the illustration on this one was my pick, meant as a cheekily representative example of anti-Moffat criticism, and not Jack’s at all.

I’m here to up the anti, so to speak. As such, I’m a sacrificial lamb. Firstly, I’m going to annoy you all by delaying the arrival of the proper posts about the Moffat/Smith era. And Phil specifically asked me for a polemic, so what follows will be an angry screed. There really isn’t space here to do more than gesticulate irritably at the issues (since I’ve tried to have some mercy on you regarding word count). I’ve had to leave out lots of points, cut loads of stuff about the wider political context (I promise you – it was all in the first draft, and it was brilliant) and, of necessity, simplify. So this post is going to sit here seething, vulnerable and alone, a hostage to fortune, as Phil winds up his phenomenal Eruditorum project with a series of (doubtless) nuanced and subtle redemptive readings of the era I’m about to intemperately trash. At least nobody can say I balked at making myself a sitting target.

(I must acknowledge Phil’s own ‘Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post’, which I used as a springboard, and the generous assistance of Richard Pilbeam and Jonathan Barlow, from whom I have cribbed shamelessly. All errors are, of course, mine alone.)

Phil’s recent, devastating piece on ‘The End of Time – Part 2’ describes what I find most worrying about the late RTD era. But for Phil, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was probably like the cavalry turning up. For me, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was like the cavalry turning up and immediately opening fire on me.

It’s interesting to note that whereas RTD usually drafted in celebrities – Chris Morris style – to satirise themselves without knowing it (which they always fell for), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore in to be flattered. RTD got Sharon Osbourne and Anne Widdecombe to endorse Harold Saxon (i.e. the Anti-Christ). Moffat gets Sir Patrick to play himself as a charming, twinkly-eyed expert. Aside from lauding a well-known reactionary and sexist, Moore’s guest appearance is emblematic of a wider complacency. Amy’s village is a retreat from anything like the Powell Estate. This is maundering ‘long shadows on village greens’ territory. The episode celebrates cutesy, ostensibly lovable, eccentric Britishness.

There’s a near-immediate attempt to problematize such things in ‘The Beast Below’… but the actual result is instructive. Starship UK is all of Britain, divided into counties that are now housed within tower blocks.

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January 1, 2014

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 78 (The Time Traveller’s Wife)

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Alison J Campbell’s piece on LOST was so well received, she was inspired to write something else. How could I possibly say no? Technically this one should go somewhere in the Moffat era, but I’m still on vacation, so think of it as a message from the future, a New Year’s present – for the moment.

Aviary Box by Joseph Cornell. Trust me on this.

The problem with time-travel stories isn’t in the contradictory nature of their construction — neither in the apparent paradox of information that doesn’t seem to have a causal origination, nor in the notion that time can be rewritten. The main problem with time-travel stories is that they’re too often taken literally. Time travel stories are inherently metaphorical, because our most basic conceptions of time itself are ensconced in metaphor. Without the metaphor of Time as a Dimension of Space, wherein everything we know experientially about moving through the three dimensions gets applied to Time, we would never have the concept of time-travel, let alone time-travel stories. (We also conceive of Time as a Moving Object, particularly a River; and third as a Resource, something that can be apportioned and managed as other resources are.)

The second and much less trivial mistake is that time-travel stories aren’t logical constructions, but are laid on the foundation of dramatic concerns. It’s in this respect that Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife really shines (unlike its botched movie adaptation) and most likely why it’s been so thoroughly pilfered by Doctor Who.

Indeed, it bears many features of a Doctor Who story. First and foremost, it plays with the notion of smashing different genres together. One the one hand, we’ve got the stalwart SF trope of time-travel, presented in science terms – Henry DeTamble is a Chrono-Displaced Person, his Chrono-Impairment deriving from some redundant “clock genes” that create an electromagmetic pulse in his brain, not unlike an epilectic seizure, which sends him careening backwards in forwards in time, without apparent rhyme or reason, and certainly without any control. In this respect he’s not unlike the good Doctor himself, at least in the early days of the show, when he could barely navigate the TARDIS.

On the other hand we’ve got a romance, detailing his relationship with Clare Abshire, who isn’t a time-traveler. We get first dates, hot sex, a wedding, and triangles for them both. Henry is the leading candidate for Reformed Rake, the bad-boy turned good by the influence of the right woman; for much of the story, Henry and Clare are Star-Crossed Lovers, kept apart by Henry’s fatalistic displacement; at the same time, they are truly Fated To Be Together. There are, in fact, a lot of novel ways that Romance tropes can be exploited through the mechanism of time-travel.

Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that TTTW is neither a SF story, nor a Romance, nor really a weird cross-breed of the two. On the one hand, it’s rather slim in its use of SF tropes – the genetic explanation is dodgy as all hell, and aside from the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals that Henry takes in a vain attempt to master his condition, there aren’t any scientific concerns to speak of at all, at all.

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