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Don’t Look Away (The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone)

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Oh shit oh shit I need a new caption joke.
It’s April 24th, 2010. Usher and will.i.am are at number one with “OMG,” with Lady Gaga, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the worst ecological disasters in history, and Standard & Poor’s downgrades Greece’s credit rating, worsening the Euro crisis. Also, flights resume following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, and we reach the last few days before the UK general election.
While on television, the first-filmed episode of the Moffat era. In the history of Doctor Who, there are two standard tricks that people have come up with to smooth the transition for a new Doctor. The first originates in 1966 with The Power of the Daleks, when Patrick Troughton’s debut was consciously and deliberately overshadowed by the return of the Daleks. Basically, you use existing characters as guest stars to lighten the load a bit on your main actor while he beds in. Variations were used in Spearhead from Space, Robot, Time and the Rani, The Christmas Invasion, and Deep Breath. The other, only ever executed once, but terribly clever all the same, is to film the first few stories out of order so that the new Doctor’s debut sees the actor self-assured and with a more developed take on their character, creating a strong impression so that the audience will subconsciously fill in the gaps when subsequently shown the earlier performances. It was used in Castrovalva. Moffat, faced with the change of the entire lead cast and most of the production team, made the sensible decision to do both, filming The Eleventh Hour as Smith’s fifth episode, and using this two-parter, featuring big iconic returning monsters and a major returning guest star, to let everyone bed in. 
On broadcast, this worked well. As we already discussed, The Eleventh Hour is the one Moffat episode even his detractors tend to embrace, making the exact big splash and statement it was supposed to. And this slotted into the season order nicely, feeling like a big turning point and an event, as opposed to like a production team desperately trying to get up to speed. In hindsight, a number of gaps are present, of which Matt Smith’s hair is only the most obvious. Many are subtle and along those lines – the decision not to pare back Alex Kingston’s makeup once she’s in camouflage, for instance, was a sensible one from a realist perspective (why would she redo her makeup, after all), but it smothers Kingston’s performance. 
But others are larger. Moffat is eventually going to develop a much more nuanced sense of what can be handwaved away and what needs explanation, but here he several times gets bogged down doing exposition about things that could be handled intuitively, while missing key bits of setup. The fact that the gravity globe is never explained in episode one makes what would actually have been a quite cool cliffhanger into a bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 84 (Call the Midwife, Supernatural)

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues, a general badass, and my wife.
In case you missed the boom, Call the Midwife is a BBC period drama about a group of midwives servicing London’s East End in the 1950s, originally based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth. It is the newest big show to hit UK television with ratings roughly matching those of Sherlock and Downton Abbey and surpassing Doctor Who itself. Call the Midwife was also featured in 2013’s Comedy Relief sketch (partnering with Doctor Who in this endeavor) and has Paul McGann’s brother, Stephen McGann as a prominent character in their series. UK TV ends up being a bit incestuous. 

Medical shows are a hard sell to those who work in the medical field. Much in the same way those in the tech field often cannot help but point out the inconsistencies and illogical moments when tech appears in TV or cinema, those of us in the medical field see the problems others can safely ignore. Even “reality” medical shows fall afoul of this issue, I remember yelling at a Mystery Diagnosis episode that “there is dumbing the facts down for the laypeople and then there is outright lying to them!”
But this is a problem that Call the Midwife sidesteps so well. Because the medicine is very rarely, if ever, the focus of the episode. With the emphasis shifted, they only have to include as many medical facts as they see fit. We never get a long and convoluted explanation of what is going on or why things are stressful, we get just enough to see the broad shapes of the situation and are led to conclusions about the situation by the players reactions to it. They stay vague enough to avoid getting things significantly wrong (though I feel I should disclaim all this by mentioning I am very much NOT a maternity nurse, there may be errors I do not pick up on). This era is also just out of step enough with the present that, unless there are glaring “no, that cannot possibly make sense if they’ve got brains in their heads,” I may not necessarily notice the errors. These are all things I appreciate enormously. It is so nice to be able to watch a medical show without the nurse brain picking apart every little detail.
So what’s the focus of Call the Midwife if it’s not the medicine? Well, it’s the people of course. And not in the schmaltzy, soapy Grey’s Anatomy sense. It’s what I adore about Call the Midwife, it’s the key to how they do convey how stressful situations are. It’s never the stress of watching numbers trend down or hearing alarms blaring, it is watching the people who are in the trenches give each other knowing and mildly terrified looks, gritting their teeth and getting through it. It is watching these women get their patients and each other through heart-wrenching, soul-crushing and nightmare-inducing situations. It is about them going home and getting on with their lives after.
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UNIT, a History

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A commissioned essay for Assad Khaishgi.
Since Doctor Who first hit upon the idea of doing stories set in the present day, a fundamental aspect of its mythology has been the question of how civil authorities might respond to the bizarre events that take place in the Doctor’s wake. The most enduring answer to this question is UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, formerly the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce – a military organization specifically focused on unexplained events, particularly aliens. This, in turn, is most iconically connected to the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor was at one point a full-time employee of UNIT living on Earth, and throughout his tenure treated UNIT headquarters as a sort of home base on Earth to which he would regularly return. But while this is the most iconic iteration of UNIT and thus of officially sanctioned responses to alien threats, it is not the only version of either, and must be taken in a larger context.
At first, the governmental response to crises was imagined to be ad hoc. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the first two present day crises – The War Machines and The Faceless Ones – took place on the same day. The government simply responds to them to the extent that they find out about them, and they are treated as, in effect, freak occurrences. Where this begins to shift is The Web of Fear, which also introduces the character with whom UNIT is most associated: the Brigadier. Well, sort of. As we said back at the time, The Web of Fear is clearly not trying to introduce a major new character, nor for that matter an official and consistent answer to how the government will handle alien attacks. Instead, it assembles a military crew straight out of a bunch of standard war movies, and then drops a character named Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in as a commander midway through. Lethbridge-Stewart is notable as a relatively realistic, sensible military commander – quite unlike the cliches he’s generally surrounded by. He’s an effective officer put in impossible circumstances, and he acquits himself well considering. 
On his second appearance, however, in the next year’s The Invasion, Lethbridge-Stewart has seen a promotion to Brigadier, and is now in charge of UNIT. This constituted a major shift in his character. Where before he was a reasonably straightforward military character who got dumped into a strange situation, now he was the person designed to lead a human response to the unknown. This still required being imperfect, not least because the entire point is to have the Doctor be the person who gets things right, but he’s nevertheless a character who is designed for the purpose of doing extraordinary things. This is, in and of itself, a major shift. The first three big “a threat to contemporary Earth” stories are all based around the idea that this is out of the ordinary. But from The Invasion on, threats to contemporary Earth are sufficiently common that there are standard responses to them.
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Hai! (The Power of Three)

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It’s basically what watching this feels like.
A reminder that I’m doing a launch party for the latest TARDIS Eruditorum book at the Way Station in Brooklyn tomorrow at 3:30 PM. It’s at 683 Washington Ave. I hope to see you there.

It’s September 22nd, 2012. Script is at number one, with Ne-Yo, Pink, Flo Rida, and Fun also charting. In news, Dale Cregan kills two police officers and is arrested, and the NHL begins a player lockout. While on television, it’s Chris Chibnall’s second effort for Season Seven, The Power of Three.

The Power of Three has its faults, most of them seemingly fairly broad, and few of them actually the objections usually raised. Yes, the villain is a bit rubbish, but that’s largely the point. This isn’t actually a story about alien invasion, it’s a story about the Ponds. It’s the first time we really start to see the narrative acceleration of Season Seven used with some purpose and deliberateness – the resolution of the plot is sped through because it’s not actually the part of the story that matters. The beats are all there, they’re just not given room to breathe. Really, the only two solid criticisms are that “the year of the slow invasion, when the Doctor came to stay” is rather badly undermined by him going away for the bulk of the year, and the closing monologue, with its painfully ham-fisted integration of the title, is absolutely wretched.
But on the whole, we have a story where the oddness of the previous three finally starts to be justified. I mean, in its own way it was in Asylum of the Daleks, which was at least a generative and productive hot mess. This is a simpler thing, though – a story that uses the sped up narrative to fit unusual things in the margins of a Doctor Who story. It’s not, obviously, the first time we’ve played in the margins of Doctor Who stories – that’s what Love and Monsters and Blink were for. But it’s the first time we’ve done it without largely removing the Doctor Who story from focus. Instead of looking at a Doctor Who adventure an odd angle, we’ve got a Doctor Who adventure playing out at an odd speed, so that we get to put the emphasis on different parts. However stuttering the execution, in hindsight, this is the first time they actually show us where this is all going, creatively. 
More interesting, however, is the title. Under the fan nomenclature that sprung up around the new series, The Power of Three refers clearly not just to the numerical operation of “cubing” a number, nor just to the Doctor-Amy-Rory triad, but to the iteration of the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-74. And true enough, Three looms large over this entire story. As he looms large over any “invasion of Earth” story, that being the format that defines his tenure. This is somewhat odd if one stops to think about it for too long – over his five years and twenty-four stories, only Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, and Planet of the Spiders are actually alien invasions as such.
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You’re Fast Becoming Prey to Every Cliché-Ridden Convention in the American West (A Town Called Mercy)

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The problem of Susan.
It’s September 15th, 2012. Ne-Yo is at number one with “Let Me Love You,” with Pink, Public Enemy, and Fun also charting. In news, an attack on the American embassy in Libya results in the death of the US Ambassador, among others. Andy Murray wins the US Open. Also, I turn thirty. How ghastly. 
While on television, A Town Called Mercy. It is easy to find fault with this story. This does not, however, make it any less worth doing. First and most simply is, of course, Susan, the trans mare. This marks the second time Toby Whithouse has completely fucked up trans representation (the first being his gobsmackingly transphobic bit of dialogue for Jack in Greeks Bearing Gifts over on Torchwood). One can certainly argue that Susan was not actually trans, and indeed, I am forced to do so, but let’s be clear that I am doing so only because the alternative is to have the Doctor misgendering someone, and no. One might argue that the intent was good, although I think you run aground pretty quickly when you realize that thus far all trans representation on Doctor Who has been for the purpose of jokes, which is actually pretty much the opposite of good intentions no matter how much you state it. It’s past fucking time we have a trans character on Doctor Who, played sincerely and sympathetically. Ugh.
Moving on, then, we get to more substantive issues. When looking at the allocation of episodes in this mini-season, the Moffat bookends seemed likely to be good, the Chibnall episodes seemed solidly unpromising, and then you had Toby Whithouse in the middle. Whithouse is an interesting writer – his three previous stories were good. His Torchwood script was at least well-crafted, which is one of the nicest sentences you can write that begin with the words “his Torchwood script.” Being Human is fabulous. He’s probably one of the more interesting possibilities for next showrunner, in that he’s got the basic ability to write in a bunch of different tones and to change things up within an episode. He can do scary, tragic, and funny in the same forty-five minutes, he’s got experience on big dramas. I’m really interested to see The Game when it drops, which, curiously, seems like it will be in the US before the UK. And so this looked quite promising.
But with A Town Called Mercy we see one of his basic virtues as a Doctor Who writer turn unexpectedly to vice. One of the things Whithouse has always been very good at is what we might call high-theme writing – the sort of thing that, in Doctor Who, came out of Paul Cornell’s early 90s embrace of Neil Gaiman’s “tell don’t show” approach, where you make sure whatever big statement about Doctor Who you want to make is actually delivered, as dialogue, within the text. This has been characteristic of the new series, and is actively reinforced with the famed “tone meetings” in which all the different departments are put on the same page about what the story is doing and then turned loose to contribute actively to the storytelling.
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Good Grief, It’s a Stegosaurus! (Dinosaurs on a Spaceship)

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Title accomplished. 

It’s September 8th, 2012. Little Mix is at number one with “Wings,” with Florence and the Machine, Sam and the Womp, and Taylor and the Swift also charting, the latter with “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which is the second best title we’re going to discuss in this post. In news, since it’s been a while since we’ve checked in, there’s been most of the US Presidential campaign, and at this point it’s settled to a nice, drab Mitt Romney vs Barack Obama contest. 620 million people lost power in India. The Mars Rover Curiosity landed. Oh, and there was Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, which was celebrated by forcing unpaid workers to sleep under a bridge.

While on television, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, which is about what you’d expect. It’s not entirely unfair to accuse this story of aiming for mediocrity and hitting it squarely. Its title announces a somewhat spectacular lack of ambition – a Snakes on a Plane riff. That said, Doctor Who can fairly be expected to occasionally do frothy adventure stories, or, as we call them in fandom, romps. This one may come off as being particularly unambitious, but equally, there’s a brazen cheek to it that appeals.

Still, let’s look at what’s in this simple little romp. First, of course, is the premise – a Silurian ark that got hijacked by a man who can discern the value of anything in space and time, but who can’t actually fly it. The ship is given enough little details to be memorable – the tidal power is a clever image, although the physics of it seem strained at best. The “two people of the same genetic line” piloting is a contrivance, but again, at least a memorable one. We’re back in the territory of Doctor Who being about unraveling the nature of a world, which is always a nice sort of return.
There’s also the villain, Solomon, who’s one of the nastiest pieces of work the show has had in a while. David Bradley is one of several bits of top notch casting in this story, but in many ways what really jumps out is the fact that Solomon is so different from Bradley’s other recent famous nasty piece of work in a sci-fi/fantasy show. There’s a casual sadism to Solomon that crackles, especially in the blasé way that he describes killing off the Silurians. He’s sufficiently nasty that what would normally be the slightly shocking resolution of the Doctor actively killing him (which we all know he’s not supposed to do unless the villain isn’t human) seems oddly satisfying.
Also significant in terms of the premise is the Indian Space Agency, which is notable as the closest thing Doctor Who has ever done to actually setting a story in India or in any substantive way engaging with Indian culture. It’s a small touch, but one that carries real weight, even if the ISA ultimately just does the same stuff that every earth-based governmental organization always does when aliens are involved in Doctor Who, namely delay a bit and then try to blow them up to provide a climax to the story. 
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A Good Dalek (Asylum of the Daleks)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as Oswin Oswald.
If you missed it, the latest volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is out. Print availability glitched yesterday, but it’s now fixed and available for ordering. My apologies for the screwup.
It’s October 14th, 2014, and this goes up in eleven hours. It’s a bit of a late start. My fault. People were wrong on the Internet.
If you’re reading this in the blog version, this is the first regular-season Moffat story to be placed in the proper order since The Beast Below, a tactic that has had the effect of jumbling the narrative of his stewardship of the program, slightly obscuring the business of actually making history out of it. If you’re reading this in the book version, this sentence will have a better ending reflecting whatever my final decision is on how to do the River entries there. (I’m kind of unhappy with the idea of the Tennant book not having Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and with the Smith book lacking Name of the Doctor. And if the conceit of the entries works out, ultimately reading the River Song entries in their correct places ought to work just as well as scrambling them.) 
It’s not the best time to be writing this, honestly – a statement with sly double meaning given that the real deadline is three hours, as that’s when Jill comes home from work and we need to head to bed, because it’s another 5am wakeup tomorrow. God help me, I’m on days. But what I mean is on October 14th, 2014, with what are probably just four more episodes of Clara’s story to air. Here I have to tackle the first part, and there’s an impossibly large amount of potential foreshadowing that might be worth highlighting. To pick just one possible example – something that could turn out to be a meaningless blip, or could turn out to be a major thematic point: Clara quite literally makes a good Dalek. Who knows what else there is. 
This is a characteristic of Moffat’s plotting, and is worth unpacking. There’s a popular theory within media criticism that says that, when plotting an extended storyline in a serialized medium, you should know where you’re going when you start. This, after all, helps with that whole Aristotelean unity thing. If you know the ending, you can set it up at the beginning. Many people – Alan Moore still visibly holds a grudge over this – say that’s what was wrong with Lost all along: that they were making it up as they go along. And yet there’s clearly an extent to which this is not true. I’ve been leafing through The From Hell Companion lately, and it’s full of amusing anecdotes highlighting the ways in which From Hell did and didn’t unfold according to a set design, and how Moore’s conception of it changed based on what Campbell did with the art. Yes, there are many ways in which the broad strokes were in place from the start, and even many specific details, but there was also lots that changed along the way.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 33 (Assimilation²)

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Josh Marsfelder of Vaka Rangi, a critical history of Star Trek (he’s just started The Next Generation) and related topics (including an essay on Doctor Who), writes on the Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover comic by IDW. Also, speaking of comics, no reviews this week I’m afraid – won’t be around to pick up my books due to those Cleveland talks. 

Let me preface this by saying I am not a comics person. My first, and only, sojourn into the world of mainline United States sequential art was around the time there were several different Spider-Mans running around Marvel while at DC Supergirl was some kind of pink alien goo matrix or something. I took one look at that, promptly decided comics were fucked up and never looked back. I am, however, apparently something of an authority on Star Trek, which is why Phil has so graciously invited me to say a few words about the first, and to date only, time that other big polyauthored science fiction TV franchise crossed over with Doctor Who.
The one exception I made to my self-imposed rule of avoiding US comics at all costs came anytime there was a four-colour adaptation of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during the late 80s and early 90s, during the tail-end of the period I’ve come to call the Long 1980s. Back then, you couldn’t just queue up Netflix or Hulu (or other places) to rewatch your favourite show-You had to wait for it to be re-aired, which was if not rare, at the very least unpredictable, or wait for it to come out on VHS, which took a long time. And,  at least if you were someone like me, collecting TV shows on VHS was simply out of the question: Not only was it expensive (I’ve never been a terribly wealthy person), but it took forever for home video releases to come out, and it was hard to keep enthusiasm going that long. If I wanted new adventures with my favourite Star Trek heroes, I was limited to my imagination (which I daresay I’ve been blessed enough to have in abundance), or to the tie-in comic lines from DC and Malibu. Indeed, especially in the case of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, much of my memories of and perspective on the show came not from the TV episodes themselves, but the comics. 
It didn’t hurt that this was something of a golden age for tie-in comics: Most of them were written by talented authors and artists who also happened to have a deep appreciation for the source material they were tasked with adapting. Indeed, Ron Moore said a number of times that he was a big fan of Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos’ run on the DC Star Trek: The Next Generation book, because it was the only way he could actually experience new stories with a cast of characters he’d come to love as a member of the audience.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 83 (The 2012 Olympics)

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“One measures a circle starting anywhere.” – Charles Fort, quoted by Alan Moore in From Hell

Before we begin, a touch of housekeeping. The Williams book should be out within the week. I think it has something that will make a fair number of you excited in amidst the extra essays. Also, if you’re in the Cleveland area, I’m giving a pair of talks this week at the Lakewood Public Library. On Wednesday, at 7pm, I’m talking about Wonder Woman, doing “a comic for more or less every decade,” and then on Thursday at 7pm I’m doing one on Doctor Who that will be “a brief history of overthrowing the government.” Both talks are free, there will be books for sale and I’ll be signing, and it’ll be a good time, so if you’re local, please do come out. Now, on to the Olympics.

I think this will be the last time we do a Pop Between Realities that’s about a cultural event as opposed to another television series. Those have been sporadic features, and from time to time I’ve cheated – I did the Three Day Week of 1973 in the same post as Dad’s Army, for instance. But they’ve been a major part of what TARDIS Eruditorum is. So here we have yet another ending for the blog. Another tradition wrapped up. Another step towards the present.

The nature of how I write it these days is much closer to the early days than to most of the blog. I’m not back to writing things the day they post and them thus going up at erratic times, as they once did, but I am writing this about twelve hours before it goes up, trying to finish before bedtime, which is in about four hours because Jill and I are on days this week. I’ve just posted my Kill the Moon review, and have been enjoying the fires it lit. Over on Tumblr today, Jack Graham got an ask about TARDIS Eruditorum, and said some very sweet things, but mentioned a couple of objections, all of which are completely reasonable and insightful. But one managed to get under my skin, as the best criticism, which was his observation that I’m “overly teleological in this attitude towards the development of the show, especially with regards to the dawn of BBC Wales.” Which I absolutely am. Largely because I’m stuck being so. There’s always been a telos to TARDIS Eruditorum. Even when the specifics of its ending point weren’t completely fixed, it was always building to an ending out of necessity: eventually it was going to run out of Doctor Who. And because it’s presented itself as a narrative, that makes for an ending. Sure, I’ll do a Capaldi book eventually, and probably knock out a book whenever there’s an end of an era of Doctor Who, because I like writing about the series and the money’s good. But we’re still coming up on the end. Everything else will really just be appendices at that point.
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Outside the Government: The Reichenbach Fall

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It’s January 15th, 2012. Jessie J is at number one with “Domino,” with Flo Rida, Coldpay, David Guetta, , and Rizzle Kicks also charting. In news, the Scottish government announces that the independence referendum it’s been promised will go forward in 2014, and William Daley steps down as White House Chief of Staff. 
And on television, Sherlock finishes up its second season. To those paying attention to such things as writers, this looked ominous in one key regard, in that it seemed a mirror of the one outright dud in the first season of Sherlock – the one written by Steve Thompson and not directed by McGuigan. Thompson’s oeuvre at this point, at least in terms of things Doctor Who fans looked at, consisted of The Blind Banker and Curse of the Black Spot. To give him the big epic finale seemed an exercise in madness. And yet the result was the peak of Sherlock’s cultural capital – an iconic cliffhanger that casually owned popular culture for a while in its wake, and again in the lead-up to its resolution. It’s difficult to overemphasize how big this episode was. It may have been the lowest rated of its season, but it was by far the most impactful. In the immediate aftermath of transmission, the pop culture was absolutely obsessed with the cliffhanger. It may not be the most watched or the best episode of Sherlock. But the end of this one is the iconic and defining moment of the series. 
Cynics will suggest, not without reason, that this story was by Thompson in the same way that The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit was by Matt Jones or The Celestial Toymaker was by Brian Hayles. And certainly there’s no way that Thompson wasn’t closely supervised here. It’s also the case that when watched without the giddy excitement of context the joins and frailties of the script are somewhat more visible. This is a desperately untidy affair in which the twin motors of a plot that moves faster than its holes and the sense of Aristotelean tragedy keep afloat a story that could easily have gone the way of Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. 
Which is, to some extent, the reason that putting Thompson on this story was always going to be OK, because the sheer scope of the story was going to overwhelm its quality. For all that this owned popular culture momentarily, ultimately, it’s only the last bit of the episode that anyone cares about. And fair enough – it is a wonderful cliffhanger, simply because it embraces its own inevitable resolution. The episode doesn’t even bother trying to leave any ambiguity or suspense over whether Sherlock survives. Even his death isn’t really trying to be sincere, with a carefully and meticulously scripted bit of John’s POV that’s clearly there to leave enough space in the margins to come up with a plausible means of Sherlock’s survival. The episode never deludes itself into thinking its mystery is going to be “whether” and not “how,” and leans into it beautifully.
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