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Outside the Government 19: Doctor Who Confidential Redux

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It is strange in some ways to realize that Doctor Who Confidential has been going on this whole time. It’s not, after all, like anybody watched it. I mean, a few people did, but it was only ever available in the UK, and, well, how to put this nicely… it’s not like it was ever very good. It was fun enough in its first year when it was only a half-hour long and focused as much on the series’ history as on the making of the new series, but the decision to expand it to a forty-five minute format just as they were properly running out of nostalgia trips was, to say the least, puzzling. Instead Doctor Who Confidential became a sort of generic making of show.
But even given that, there are some problems. The making of Doctor Who is indeed interesting, but it’s not necessarily ten-and-a-half hours of interesting for every single year of production. There are only so many times poor Danny Hargreaves can demonstrate styrofoam debris and air cannons while maintaining any sort of semblance of keeping things fresh, and only so many compelling scenes that can be wrung out of Ailsa Berk teaching people in monster costumes how to do the correct funny walk for this week’s episode. As a result, by the end Doctor Who Confidential had become a sort of hodgepodge of strange things, such as the mildly infamous “Karen Gillian drives a car episode,” in which a significant amount of the episode was turned over to, well, Karen Gillian driving a car. But equally, it’s why there exists a montage of the women playing the Weeping Angels dancing to Lady Gaga, which is self-evidently a thing that should exist. (And to their credit, they did montages for both “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” which is good, as picking which song would make the better choice is nearly impossible.)
But let’s pull back the lens a little and look at what Doctor Who Confidential is, or at least, was. First and foremost it was a program on BBC Three, a channel that exists specifically to pull a “younger” audience. It’s going slightly too far to say that Confidential was a children’s program, but it was, with its ostentatious use of pop music and position on BBC Three, clearly meant as a program for teenage fans of the series. In this regard, it fits into a long tradition of Doctor Who being a program with a very, very well-documented production. There’s a generation of people working on Doctor Who who point to the Terrance Dicks/Malcolm Hulke book The Making of Doctor Who as a huge and seminal influence on their being interested in television. Hell, Peter Capaldi became interested in television in part because of things like Barry Letts responding to fan letters by sending him scripts and his interview with Bernard Lodge for a fanzine. So it seems almost certain that there will be another generation who learned how television was made and became fascinated with it because they saw Doctor Who getting made every week on Confidential.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 31 (The Eternity Clock)

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Frezno has done such a nice job continuing The Nintendo Project that I felt like I should let him play on this blog too.

1985 was a very eventful year, when one looks back on it from a broad perspective. Swap out your wide-angle lens and zero in towards two of the important moments of that year, for our purposes. In England, Doctor Who was supposedly struggling to entertain the masses. The Doctor, he of bright coat and bravado, faced off against deadly foes like the Bandrils and the tree mines. The final straw came just as Peri Brown was running away from a cannibal with bushy eyebrows. The program failed to get a passing Grade and was put on hiatus. As has been noted, this was the first major blow to Doctor Who in the 1980’s. One could argue it was the blow that eventually killed it. It got better, though.

You know what else got better? Video games. 1983 saw video games in North America face their own Ragnarok at the hands of over-indulgent capitalists. Howard Scott Warshaw, unfairly maligned man that he is, did what he could. The world ended. It was up to a red and white box from a land that did not exist now. It transcended the sea between worlds and became corporeal, becoming a magical grey box that was bigger on the inside. The Nintendo Entertainment System was born. Video games existed again. Put the wide-angle lens back on, and zoom out to track the course of history that stems from this grey box’s success. The NES gives way to the Super NES. Plans are made to give the Super NES an upgrade, a CD expansion. Nintendo works in tandem with Sony on this, but creative differences cause it to never happen, relegated to a different universe where we all have pods in our ears. Sony, to its credit, uses this knowledge to create the Playstation. Its success gives way to Playstation 2, and then to Playstation 3… and that leads us back to a world where the anoraks have taken over the asylum since the novel days, and Doctor Who is The Biggest Thing On Television. Naturally, licenses are made and agreed upon, the ever-present billowing dress of Lady Capitalism securing the creation of something that will make plenty of money. This, friends, is Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock.

It would probably help, then, to define what The Eternity Clock is. Aside from being a mystical video game Macguffin to be collected. Doctor Who dabbled in video games before. None of them really turned out to be all that good. This isn’t even the first Doctor Who video game since it came back; there were a handful of adventure games with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond running around solving puzzles. The Eternity Clock goes in a different direction, and turns the Doctor Who video game into a cinematic platformer, not unlike Prince of Persia or Another World. Really, it’s the best direction one could have gone with when considering a Doctor Who video game.…

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The Angels Have the Phonebox (The Angels Take Manhattan)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a frankly alarming
haircut.
It’s September 29th, 2012. Script are at number one with “Hall of Fame,” with Psy, Pink, Ne-Yo, and, with an impressive seven letters, Example also charting. In news, resolution is reached regarding the lockout of NFL referees, and, the day after this story airs, the Jimmy Saville story starts to break as it comes out that ITV is planning on airing a documentary accusing him of being a pedophile. 
On television today, however, the last of five episodes in Doctor Who’s 2012 mini-season. The decision to frame the first portion of Season Seven with two returning monsters is interesting. Asylum of the Daleks served as Moffat’s most aggressive feint, at least in terms of the audience, with everything it was sold as disappearing in a haze of Jenna Louise Coleman. But if that story was aggressively forward-looking, here we get the flip side: a story that cannot possibly look forward. All of this is ultimately framed by the paratext: by the fact that even before Asylum of the Daleks aired, Coleman had been announced as the next companion and the departure of the Ponds had been set for this story. To some extent this has been the major problem with this entire run of episodes: it’s clearly just 2012’s filler before we get to 2013, where the main event is, both because of the fundamentally forward-looking nature of the hype machine that fuels Doctor Who and because 2013 – 50 = 1963. But as with Asylum of the Daleks, this paratext is fundamental to understanding the structure of The Angels Take Manhattan, an episode that from the first frame only makes sense if the audience goes in knowing that it’s Amy Pond’s departure story. 
Equally important, however, are the Weeping Angels. “I know how they work,” River says at one point, in a line that is more revealing than it initially appears. The Angels have always been defined, after all, as a game. The heart of their success is that they recognize that the true form of a Doctor Who monster is simply as a set of rules, and that the art comes in telling a story where those rules pay off. The Angels work according to a very simple rule, and, more importantly, one that fundamentally serves as a metaphor for the medium in which they are ensconced. They are, in every sense, governed by the act of looking. Combine with a solid visual design and you have a hit.
But the story draws equally heavily from Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, which quietly reworked large swaths of the Angels’ conception, expanding on the fundamental link between the Angels and televisual storytelling with its chilling injunction that the image of an Angel becomes an Angel. This tied the Angels inexorably into Doctor Who’s qlippothic tradition, which is to say, they represent the border of narrative possibility: an already collapsed and decayed story that is at once called into existence and fundamentally unspeakable within the confines of the existing narrative.
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It Isn’t Really a Disease at All (Closing Time)

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My god, there really is an action figure set based on “Children
of the Revolution.”
It’s September 24th, 2011. One Direction are at number one with “What Makes You Beautiful,” while Pixie Lott, Example, Calvin Harris, and Maroon 5 also chart, the latter continuing to just hover at #2 with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, the US policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is finally repealed in favor of letting gay and lesbian service members serve openly, the NBA lockout results in cancelling a bunch of preseason games, and Occupy Wall Street starts getting some press coverage.
While on television, it’s the sequel to The Lodger, namely Closing Time. “You know that absolutely brilliant thing you did? Do it again” is, as assignments to creative people go, something of the biggest nightmare imaginable. Almost certainly, after all, you used the best ideas you had for the concept on the first go-around. Especially in the realm of something comedic, where you’ve almost certainly done a winnowing process the first time around, since the way being funny tends to work is that you try about five to fifty times as many ideas as you actually need so that you can cut the 80-98% that aren’t actually good enough. So the comedy sequel is an absolutely brutal thing.
And that applies very well here. So much of why The Lodger works is that it gets in, it executes a couple of great gags about the idea of the Doctor trying to live with a perfectly ordinary person, it throws in a romantic comedy plot, and then it finishes up and makes way for the Pandorica. It doesn’t need five minutes more, little yet forty-five. And in a real sense, a sequel is a terrible idea, because it cannot possibly live up to the original. All it can be is “the next best forty-five minutes of Craig/Doctor jokes.” 
And so from the start, Gareth Roberts makes an extremely sensible decision and makes this a different premise. This isn’t “the Doctor moves in with Craig again.” Indeed, in many ways Craig is a completely different character such that, other than a single scene in which he pouts at the Doctor, he’s a basically functional companion who broadly speaking understands how Doctor Who stories work. Given that the entire premise of The Lodger was that the Doctor was living in the spare room of a romantic comedy and mucking everything up, the change to a setup in which the primary guest star is now good at being in a Doctor Who story is such that it barely seems to count as a sequel.
So instead, the story focuses on the fact that Craig’s a father now. What’s interesting here is that this really doesn’t follow from The Lodger in any particularly logical sense. Fatherhood is not a logical follow-up to any of the issues there except inasmuch as sometimes when people fall in love there are babies. Craig isn’t out of character as such, but precisely none of the concerns that defined him in The Lodger are still in play here.
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A Great, Great Partnership (The God Complex)

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No, no, that’s fine. I’ll find a different table. Really. It’s OK.
It’s September 17th, 2011. Pixie Lott has the number one slot with “All About Tonight,” with Olly Murs, Calvin Harris, and Ed Sheeran also charting. In news, a petrol pipeline explodes in Nairobi, killing 100, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is passed, putting an end to the practice of Prime Ministers getting to call for an election at a time they find strategically satisfying, and, on the day this story aired, a protest organized by Adbusters brought a thousand people to Zucotti Park in New York under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street.”
This last event did not end up getting any media coverage at the time, however, leaving plenty of room for everyone to pay attention to Doctor Who instead. And Doctor Who obliged, serving up a fairly marvelous episode with The God Complex. Let’s start with the less interesting bits, and build up to the real point. First of all, an obligatory complaint: the “Amy Williams” line is absolutely awful. Even if you try to pack in redemptive readings like that the Doctor is trying anything to break Amy’s faith in him so he can save her, the truth is that the episode doesn’t actually refute the Doctor. Of the writers on Doctor Who, it’s Whithouse who is most likely to go for a relatively unreformed deconstruction of the Doctor as a hero. This is someone who nicked a bit of Miracleman for a key scene in Being Human, so, you know, his influences are at least clear and consistent. And so the idea that the Doctor might not be a hero or worth having faith in isn’t something he pushes beyond the most superficial level in the script. In this regard, much as I like Whithouse as a writer, he’s behind the rest of the season, where Moffat has long since taken the “dark” hero notion on board and then moved past it. But that’s not a problem for the season – The God Complex ends up stating a set of positions that stories like A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song exist to surpass. It really does think it’s “I wasn’t talking about myself” line at the end is the height of thematic resonance. Which it isn’t, but it’s a useful stooge in that regard.
But within that, taking a character who had previously been defined in part by the fact that her marriage was “Mr. and Mrs. Pond” and not her husband’s name, because that’s just how it works for a character like Amy, and reverting her to her maiden name to put her in her proper place and disabuse her of these silly ideas she has is absolutely horrifying. And within this episode, that’s what happens. “Amy Williams” is treated as Amy’s “correct” identity, while Amelia Pond is a deviant little girl who’s too invested in fairy tales. It should never have seen transmission, and is, for my money, the single most misogynistic moment of the Moffat era, and possibly of the new series altogether.
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Yes, I Shall Come Back (The Girl Who Waited)

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For once I’ve picked the image because it illustrates a point and not to make
a bad joke about it. So I’ll just give you a bad joke with nothing to do with
the image. What’s brown and sticky? A stick.
It’s September 10th, 2011. Example are at number one with “Stay Awake,” with Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Olly Murs, and Calvin Harris also charting. There’s not exactly been a ton of news in the last twenty-four hours, with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces declaring a state of emergency, along with Barack Obama, the former covering Egypt, the latter Texas. While on television, it’s The Girl Who Waited. 
The Girl Who Waited marks one of a handful of times that more or less the entire Doctor Who fandom was properly blown away and surprised. Nothing about Tom McRae’s previous Doctor Who story, the largely unloved Tennant Cybermen two-parter, really suggested that he was capable of this story. And so when McRae was announced as the writer, a large swath of the audience was not particularly enthused. It wasn’t until the title, which magnificently baited the audience by drawing unapologetically on the Moffat era’s established iconography and mythos, that things started to seem a bit more interesting, and not until the revelation of the story’s real premise, the heavily aged Amy Pond, that it started to become clear that, far from being a dud filler episode marking time between the big River episodes on either side of this half-season, The Girl Who Waited was a stunningly interesting episode in its own right.
First and foremost, The Girl Who Waited is a piece of superlative character work. There’s a school of thought, not entirely unjustified, that suggests that Karen Gillan’s interest in Amy declined over the course of the show, and that she phoned in large swaths of Season Six and more or less the entirety of Season Seven. There’s another that says that Gillan was actually fine, but that Moffat ran out of things to write about the character, hence her spending most of Season Six as fridge bait. This school of thought is, as we’ve seen, self-evidently ludicrous, but it’s worth acknowledging as well. Both, ultimately, end up treating Amy as something of a problem companion in this period. But in many ways, both lines of criticism almost necessarily have to avoid this story (and it’s telling, I think, that the “Moffat is an arch-misogynist” crowd mostly steers around this story in their criticisms) in order to work.
Certainly, whatever one might say about her in Season Seven, Gillan is absolutely on fire here, managing to distinguish Young Amy and Old Amy as real and distinct characters through a host of subtle but deliberate ways. Old Amy carries her body differently, speaks with a slightly different timbre, and genuinely, properly feels like a different character to Young Amy. The entire episode is set up to live or die by the strength of Gillan’s performance, and she rises to the occasion magnificently in a way that anchors everything around her.
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Miracle Day and Death

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Jill Buratto is a nurse specializing in end of life issues. She’s also my wife, and would be as happy as I would be if you backed my Patreon campaign for weekly episode reviews of Season Eight of Doctor Who. Then come back here and read her being righteously and beautifully angry. 
It’s November 28th, 2013. Martin Garrix’s “Animals” tops the charts only to be ousted by Lily Allen’s “Somewhere Only We Know” two days later. Elsewhere in the world, mass protests are occurring in Thailand as tensions between the opposition party and the prime minister’s family (read: his exiled brother) mount and, apparently, The New York Times has shown it’s first front-page nipple. So there’s that. 
On TV: in a world in which no one can die, a young woman who has suffered what would formerly have been a fatal blood clot in her lungs. She is pregnant when this happens and is currently connected to all manner of drains and tubes and medical equipment in order to allow this fetus to gestate in her essentially dead body. She and the fetus she is carrying were deprived of oxygen thanks to that blood clot and her husband and parents look on in horror at the entire ordeal. Both the young woman and her husband were paramedics and understood the limits of what modern medicine could do, neither of them wanted her preserved this way. The Miracle destroyed any autonomy in death this young woman would have and should have had. 
Except it wasn’t the Miracle that caused this. It was us. Her name was Marlise Munoz and she was 33 years old when she died. Her husband did everything right, but there was nothing to be done. She was brain dead. But, the definition of death for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas was somewhat more… flexible. They kept her heart beating for weeks because of a loophole in the law stating that life support could not be revoked from a pregnant woman despite her wishes. It was only when the hospital was sued for the “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse” and they admitted that the fetus was developing “abnormally” that Marlise was allowed to rest.
Miracle Day goes out of its way to make a parallel of our world, a world in which this could happen. It builds a platform for an argument about the treatment of illness, dying and death in our culture. It meticulously constructs a modest proposal indicating the natural extreme of our death-denying culture. So, after all that effort, what does Miracle Day end up saying about death? Well, it says nothing at all.
No, that is perhaps a bit harsh and untrue. Miracle Day clearly says that the way we treat the sick and the dying is bad and we should feel bad. Which is worth examining.
There is an inherent classism in healthcare on a global scale. Despite the long list of countries who have decided that healthcare is a basic human right, globally, healthcare is available only to those who have the means.
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Outside the Government: The Blood Line

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It’s September 9th, 2011. Maroon 5 is at number one with “Moves Like Jagger.” In news, India and Bangladesh resolve their border dispute, and a ferry disaster off the coast of Zanzibar kills 240 people. On television, meanwhile, Miracle Day finally wraps up with “The Blood Line.”
You can say this about “The Blood Line”: At least it’s clear that Russell T Davies had something to do with this one. Guessing who did what in a coauthored script is always a bit of a mug’s game, but the writing credits here make it at least somewhat easy to figure out what happened here. Story by Russell T Davies, Script by Davies and Espenson suggests that, in effect, this is by Davies in the same way that The Daleks’ Masterplan is by Terry Nation, which is to say that some notes and scenes were dropped off by cab at Espenson’s door and she proceeded to try to build an episode out of them.
Parts of it are unmistakably Davies, in other words, or at least, Espenson doing an impeccable Davies imitation. Gwen’s whole “the breath” speech is vintage Davies, mixing the structure of Rose’s “this is how I died” speech with content and spectacle that is exactly the sort of thing Davies writes and excels at. The underlying dynamic – a two-sided confrontation at opposite sides of the world, the “introduce blood at both ends” approach, the elevator access to Shanghai, and the basic theatrical “everybody in one room” setup of the finale – is also very Davies-esque, very much feeling like it came from the same mind that approached Rose’s departure from the image of “two levers” or Tennant’s regeneration from the image of the two-chambered box.
So the appearance is that of a story that Davies had a beginning and end in mind for, entrusted to other people for the middle, and kind of wandered away from entirely. This is not necessarily a surprise – it really does appear that Davies was burnt out on sci-fi by this point, and it’s telling the show he’s working on now, Cucumber, is one he’d been talking about while Miracle Day was still going out. This feels like the contractual obligation album. 
But for all of that, there’s an interesting underlying dynamic of the show. It starts feeling like Americanized Torchwood and ends feeling like a Welshed version of the generic American thriller. The final scene is a gratuitous tease for a fifth series that never came, but it also functions as a delightfully unsubtle queering of the show, where the ultra-generic American character who’s been a bit homophobic through the entire series finally gets queered by Jack. (And there’s some properly potent imagery in having immortality come from a blood transfusion – a sort of bizarre reverse-HIV image that feels like something amazing could have been done with it, although we obviously never got to explore it.) The breath is a marvelous image, and handling the tail end of Gwen’s monologue in a time-dilated reaction shot after the climax, unpacking a single breath into a long moment  right before everything goes to hell, is a great shot.
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Build High For Happiness (Night Terrors)

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Council estates are nothing to be scared of, unless you are frightened of inequality. 
– Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History
Oh boy, creepy children/dolls! I’ve never seen those before!
It’s September 3rd, 2011. Olly Murs is at number one with “Heart Skips a Beat,” with Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, and Emeli Slade also charting. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of news since “The Gathering.” Actually, literally the only thing I can find is that a plane belonging to the Chilean Air Force crashed, killing all twenty-one on board. And, of course, Night Terrors aired.
I have in the past come out on record as saying Night Terrors is my least favorite story of the new series. This sets up a somewhat awkward situation, in that the expectation becomes that I am now going to explain why it is my least favorite story of the new series, which I can do, but the answer is pretty underwhelming: because I enjoy watching it less than all the others. I know. Which is to say, if you’re looking for some definitive argument about why this is the absolute worst episode and Victory of the Daleks or The Sontaran Stratagem or 42 or Fear Her are superior, sorry. It’s just that if you told me I had to watch one of those six, I wouldn’t pick Night Terrors.
Nevertheless, I do think the episode has significant problems that are worth talking about. Although even there, I have to admit that some of the problems it has are not entirely it’s fault. First and foremost, it was painfully poorly served by the last minute decision to switch it with Curse of the Black Spot (a decision taken so late that Night Terrors is featured prominently in the post-Christmas Carol trailer). This proved problematic for two reasons, one of which should have been apparent at the time, the other one of which was wholly impossible to predict and, nevertheless, ultimately the larger problem with the story.
The foreseeable issue was largely structural. This is not what you would call a terribly complex story. It wears its intentions on its sleeve, or, at least, in its title. It’s supposed to be the scary one – the definitive take on the haunted house story. That’s its entire brief: be the extremely scary one. This was, ostensibly, why it was moved: because putting it in the first half of the season meant that essentially the entire first section of the season was scary, dark, and indoors, and by swapping it with Curse of the Black Spot they added a story that was scary, dark, and outdoors instead. But what this ended up doing was moving this story away from the position it would have originally had, where it would have, in effect, served as the definitive statement on how to do straightforward Doctor Who horror before a bunch of other stories started to change things around a bit. Even there it would have suffered coming after The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, which already changed the “scary Doctor Who” paradigm dramatically, but it would have been improved.
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Outside the Government: The Gathering

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It’s September 2nd, 2011. Katy Perry is at number one with “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” In the five days since Let’s Kill Hitler aired, the Battle of Tripoli wrapped up. That’s about it. And Miracle Day ticked one week closer to being over, of course. 
It being an odd-numbered episode, tit’s time for the show to revamp itself once again, with characteristic subtlety. Now we’re in a big metaphor about the financial crash. Way back with Partners in Crime, I suggested that Davies got very lucky with Donna, creating a character who was visibly about the anxieties of ordinary middle class people in a declining economy. Now Davies has the exact opposite luck: he’s decided to make this show focus on the financial crisis, and he ends up doing it after the London riots and two weeks before the Occupy movement kicks up. He’s almost, but not quite, as completely screwed over as Mark Gatiss is in this regard, but that’s for Monday. 
It’s not that Davies’s approach is wrong in light of the Occupy movement and all of that. But there’s something casually jarring about it. The empty streets and quiet resignation of the world isn’t a bad guess for what the world would be like in the wake of crises like the ones Torchwood has shown, but it’s a guess that lacks all of the immediately compelling and arresting imagery of the world it’s being transmitted into. Even before you take up any questions about the quality of what “The Gathering” has to say about the world, you’re stuck with the fact that summer of 2011 just doesn’t quite feel like the time to be saying it. It feels not entirely unlike the Pertwee era in Season Eleven, or the Troughton era in Season Six – however good it may be at a given moment, it’s become a tired and old-fashioned sort of show. 
One need only look over at Doctor Who to get a sense of this. However awkward Let’s Kill Hitler may be, almost nothing about Doctor Who in this era is playing it safe. Whereas Torchwood feels the exact opposite at this point – like it’s just using a well worn playbook with minor variations to tell stories that, if they’re not past their sell-by date, it’s only because someone slapped on a new label with a later date. To be honest, the biggest impact Miracle Day has had so far was keeping A Good Man Goes to War from using Jack like it was originally intended to. This isn’t a show that knows why it exists anymore, save perhaps to be a big American co-production. It exists to try the formula that worked in the UK in the US, in the hopes that it’ll make more money. And even that’s been quietly usurped by Doctor Who, which has finally hit it big in America and had major episodes done with co-production money from an American network. 

So we shuffle grimly towards a finale in which everything has been arbitrarily reconfigured yet again.
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