smith

It’s June 12^th, 2010. David Guetta is at number one with “Gettin’ Over You,” with Eminem, Alicia Keys, and a duet between Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber also charting. Chris Brown postpones a UK leg of his tour because he can’t get a visa due to the fact that he’s a domestic abuser. The trial of Rod Blagojevich begins, and the World Cup kicks off in South Africa, with England playing their first game, a frankly dismal draw with the United States most notable for goalkeeper Robert Green badly fluffing a routine save. 

While on television, or, rather, slightly later in the day on television, Doctor Who offers a bit of late season levity as a calm before the storm. What’s interesting about The Lodger is, in many ways, just how influential it was. Smith’s Doctor had, from the start, been a creature of eccentricity and physical acting, but it’s not until Gareth Roberts wrote him as the funny man in a good old-fashioned comedy double act that the character became what is now the default and recognized version of the character. As with every major development in the Moffat era, this is at the moment visibly polarizing, but equally, given the sizable bloc of people who quite like the Moffat era, seems destined to eventually settle down into a consensus good thing, with the people who currently hate the Moffat era with a passion eventually fading away as its immediacy dissipates, leaving the Moffat era, like every other popularly successful era of Doctor Who, reflected upon primarily by the people who love it. 

Which is to say that the question of whether the post-Lodger characterization of the Doctor is any good is ultimately just one I’m not that interested in. Nothing is loved by everyone, but Smith’s post-Lodger Doctor is loved by loads of people, which is frankly good enough. Populism is not equivalent to quality, but the particular eccentricities of a version of the Doctor are a means to an end, and populism pretty much works to determine whether or not they’re succeeding at that end. 

Let’s instead, then, look at exactly what quietly changed with The Lodger and why it worked. The Lodger, of course, is itself an adaptation of a Gareth Roberts comic for Doctor Who Magazine featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey. “Adaptation,” in this case, is a terribly loose term. Several of the specific gags are recycled: the Doctor playing football, the sonic screwdriver/toothbrush confusion (although the subject of the gag switches), the “talk the girlfriend into doing something with her life” bit, and even the detail of the Doctor making an omelette are preserved. But “The Lodger” is basically a sequence of one-page gags based around the idea that the Doctor is good at everything, framed by a kind of sweet story about the Doctor trying to make things work between Rose and Mickey. 

The Lodger is straightforwardly a comedy, but its basic joke is different.

It’s June 5^th, 2010. Dizzee Rascal is at number one with “Dirtee Disco,” with Iyaz, Eminem, N-Dubz, and Aggro also charting. In news, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is finally capped, which reduces the spill without actually stopping it. And twelve people die in a killing spree in Cumbria.

On television, it’s Vincent and the Doctor. One of the most interesting innovations that Moffat brought to the program was his focus on bringing in what might be called celebrity writers. His first two seasons feature his most brazen attempts at this, although Neil Cross was no small acquisition and Neil Gaiman was originally supposed to be in the first season, so describing this as a particularly well-structured process might be overstating things. Nevertheless, what jumps out first about Vincent and the Doctor is that it is by Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, creator of Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley, and also the guy who wrote The Boat That Rocked if you want to make him come off not quite as well. 

He is, in other words, not quite the sort of person you expect to be writing Doctor Who. This was, of course, not the series’ first experiment with celebrity writers. Way back in the 1980s it tried to get Christopher Priest to write episodes, and of course, Priest was first approached by a before-he-was-famous Douglas Adams. Andrew Cartmel tried and failed to get Alan Moore to write for the series in 1988, and Stephen Fry’s abandoned script for the early Davies era continues to be the subject of the occasional rumor. And there certainly are cases of reasonably well-established writers making the move to Doctor Who – Philip Martin in 1985, for instance. 

But Richard Curtis doesn’t feel like any of these. He’s not a sci-fi writer first and foremost. And while Philip Martin was well-established, it wasn’t like he had an Oscar nomination to his name. Only Stephen Fry seems in the same ballpark, and Fry has always been a bit of a geek. Curtis, on the other hand, bristles with middlebrow respectability. At least in theory, he writes the sort of thing that people who hate Doctor Who like. Getting him to write an episode of Doctor Who, in other words, is both strange and a shot across the bow. 

What is remarkable about the episode is twofold. First, it works quite well. Second, it’s visibly written by someone who has seen next to no Doctor Who before in their lives. (Curtis has admitted that he was not a fan, and that it was not until seeing The Next Doctor with David Morrissey that he decided to accept Moffat’s invitation to write for the series.) In some ways this is oddly liberating – it is in many ways the first time we’ve seen a Doctor Who story conceived of entirely in terms of what the series has been since 2005. 

It’s May 22^nd, 2010. Roll Deep remain at number one with “Good Times,” which is unseated after a week by Bob and Bruno Mars with “Nothin’ On You.” with Jason Derulo, Usher, Fyfe Dangerfield, Leeds United Team & Supporters, and the cast of Glee also charting. In news, the so-called Borisbus design is debuted. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, and David Miliband all announce that they’ll stand for leadership of the Labour Party. And not much more happens.

While on television, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, a nice, meaty, two-parter. Which is to say, a relic. The two-parter, as a story structure, has seemingly been deprecated, becoming the pure historical of the new series. Like the pure historical, it lingers into the second major creative era of the show before being quietly and unremarkably done away with – two-parters are a mainstay of Series Six Part One, and have suddenly vanished by the back half.

Moffat has spoken about two-parters skeptically as a structure, arguing that the way in which they can be made to work is to have the second episode start in a markedly different place from the first – a logic that, when taken to its extreme, eventually gets you things like The Snowmen and The Bells of Saint John or The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor in which the broadest form of the two-parter is preserved, but the individual stories are wholly distinct. And sure enough, the five two-parters of the Moffat era almost all do this, with  the setting change in Flesh and Stone, the unexpected time jump in Day of the Moon, and the introduction of the Ganger Doctor in The Rebel Flesh. There’s a notable exception here, of course, and it’s this story.

It tries, certainly – the switch to a historical narration from the perspective of 3020 is an attempt to make Cold Blood a materially different sort of story than The Hungry Earth. But it’s a feeble attempt designed to try to cover up the truth, which is that The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a case of the new series doing a two-parter that is utterly faithful to why there are two-parters in the first place, namely a desire on the part of Russell T Davies to preserve the cliffhanger structure of the classic series. 

In this regard the most interesting question about these episodes, in many ways, is what Tat Wood is going to think of them. As one of the few people capable of suggesting that the new series ought be more like the classic series without sounding like an utter fool, these episodes ought be of particular interest to him. Not least because they harken back consciously to the Pertwee era in more than just the choice of antagonists. The opening sequence is drenched in Pertwee iconography, from a giant drill (Inferno) to the bucolic Welsh setting (The Green Death).

It’s May 15^th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” a song that sounds from the title very much like it is about sober and responsible behavior. Plan B, Aggro Santos, and Professor Green also chart. I’m going to go ahead and admit I’ve not heard of any of these. News I remember – BP continues to do a very bad job of stopping the Deepwater Horizon spill. Gordon Brown announces that he will resign as head of the Labour Party, which precedes David Cameron forming a coalition government with Nick Clegg. The Queen approves of this, apparently. Oh, and Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud started wandering by again. 

While on television, the midpoint of the season, Amy’s Choice. Let’s start with the end, since its implications are easy to overlook. In amidst the revelation that the Dream Lord was just a twisted reflection of the Doctor (which is to say, literally what he appeared to be all episode, as opposed to merely figuratively), it is easy to overlook the larger point, which is that Amy’s choice was always a false one. The episode spends most of its runtime positioning Amy to make a choice as to which of the two worlds is real, with this choice symbolically standing in for her choice between Rory and the Doctor. The final revelation is that this choice was illusory. 

This is not a small thing. The conventional wisdom, after all, would hold that Amy and Rory getting married would bring about the exact result it seems to in this story: they’d settle down in Leadworth and stop having adventures. Because growing up is antithetical to adventures. That’s the entire point of the Amy/Amelia dichotomy and the whole “run off with the Doctor the night before her wedding” idea. Instead of your Mickey-esque terrestrial partner you fall in love with a madman with a magical box. Of course for Amy, for whom sexual confidence is one of the first traits given, this was always going to be somewhat less chaste than the Rose Tyler era. Especially once she’s met River, and thus been tacitly invited to view the Doctor as a sexual being. 

And this logic is hardly unique to Doctor Who. Just over two years prior to this story Marvel Comics went to great lengths to undo the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man comics, saying that “When people get married, they tend to settle down — life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship.” Just over two years after it, DC did a big reboot of its universe and, in the process, undid the Clark Kent/Lois Lane marriage before, eventually, clarifying that they were simply opposed to the idea of any superheroes being married, saying, “heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives.”

It’s May 8^th, 2010. Roll Deep are at number one with “Good Times,” with Taio Cruz, Usher, Plan B, and Timbaland also charting. In news, the bombing in Mogadishu is widely blamed on Al Qaeda, protests begin in Greece against austerity measures, and the general election takes place, with results described in a Pop Between Realities post at the start of the Smith era, although the actual formation of a government does not take place this week.

Meanwhile, on television, Toby Whithouse’s The Vampires of Venice. The decision to bring back Toby Whithouse was, in many ways, obvious. He had experience with Doctor Who, but had by this point distinguished himself with Being Human and shown that he could more broadly handle genre-based character drama. But there’s a second and subtler reason at play here, which is that in many ways Whithouse has been brought back to write the same story he did last time. School Reunion was one of the better notes of the 2006 season, but one if its main purposes was to rehabilitate Mickey such that he would serve as a functioning companion instead of the buffoon he was initially portrayed as.

In many straightforward regards, The Vampires of Venice is visibly designed to serve the same purpose. It is the “reintroduce Rory” episode, and, more to the point, the one in which he becomes a regular companion. And Rory served many of the same purposes in The Eleventh Hour that Mickey did way back in Rose – he’s the good but slightly inadequate guy that the new companion leaves in favor of a life of adventure. In that story he’s nobody’s favorite character, and this is by design. His role is to be replaced by the Doctor. And so when he does come back in The Vampires of Venice, the audience’s reaction is necessarily one of slight hostility. He is, after all, a third wheel on our brand new TARDIS team that we’ve been set up to love over the past five episodes. 

Another way of putting this, then, is that the series has so far led us to, if not root for Amy to abandon her wedding and run off in the TARDIS, at least to fail to have any strong feelings that she should go back and marry Rory. It is, at this point in the narrative, more or less impossible to have those feelings: Rory isn’t developed enough as a character to motivate them. And since marrying Rory is explicitly set up as a threat to the fun adventures in time and space, the audience has been carefully positioned to be relatively hostile to the idea. This is not ironclad, of course – surely there exist people who sided with Rory from the start. But the series has been constructed so as to give the sense (without actually having said much of anything about it) that it is on Team Doctor, to borrow another text’s milieu.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Victory of the Daleks is why the Daleks have an air conditioning vent on their spaceship.

It’s April 17^th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are still at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Tinie Tempah, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Usher also charting, the latter working with will.i.am on “OMG.” In news, Poland reacts to the death of a large swath of its government in a plane crash that I forgot to mention last entry, an earthquake kills over 500 people in China, and the first-ever televised leaders debate takes place ahead of the general election, with the general consensus being that Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg came out the best.

Elsewhere on television, the Daleks are back. Here we come to one of the handful of Matt Smith stories with an unambiguously dire critical reception. Those hoping for an enthusiastic redemptive reading are, I fear, going to be disappointed. There’s very little to do with Victory of the Daleks besides either vicious snark or a calm dissection of its many problems. Given the choice, I’ll go with the latter, and wrap it up in one of those slightly heartbreaking structures where I spend a bunch of time talking about what a good story this could have been before hitting a brick wall with a paragraph beginning “Unfortunately…”

Because in its own strange way, Victory of the Daleks is a nearly perfect imitation of its ostensible source material, David Whitaker’s sublime Power of the Daleks. As designed, Power of the Daleks was a crutch. For the bold experiment of recasting the lead role, Innes Lloyd reasoned, the sensible thing to do was to bring the Daleks back to distract everybody. Terry Nation was unavailable, however, and so the script went instead to David Whitaker and Dennis Spooner, who took the premise of “once again, Daleks blow shit up” and turned it instead into a complex meditation on human frailty, the temptation of power, and the mechanics of politics. Victory of the Daleks is almost the exact same thing, only in reverse. 

Very deep within Victory of the Daleks is a profoundly interesting story based on the confluence of several intersecting themes. First is an exceedingly and straightforwardly mythic engagement with the Daleks. From the start the Daleks have served in part as analogies for the Nazis. Setting a Dalek Story in World War II, therefore, ups the stakes in a very particular and methodical way. Equally, however, it risks a profound awkwardness. The Daleks may have started as metaphors for Nazis, but they haven’t really been used that way in a while, not least because the Nazis, as ideas, have gone from being the terrifying face of a narrowly avoided nightmare and have started being a way to do war stories with unambiguous villains. The Daleks, meanwhile, have become metaphors less for the Nazis and more for a sort of complete and utter abyssal horror defined only by their desire to kill absolutely everything ever. 

It’s April 10^th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Delirious, Tinie Tempah, and Inna also charting, as well as most of the crowd from last week. Including Bieber, yes. In news, the miners in Shanxi were rescued, and the next day a cole mine in West Virginia explodes, killing twenty-five. Wikileaks releases the “Collateral Murder” video, showing the killing of civilians by the US military in Iraq, which was leaked to them by Chelsea Manning. Riots continue in Kyrgyzstan, and Gordon Brown asked permission to dissolve parliament, triggering the election that will, in a month’s time, remove him from power.

On television, meanwhile, the Moffat era carries on with its second story. A story seemingly destined to always seem a bit out of place, The Beast Below was not quite what anybody expected and, perhaps more to the point, is not quite like anything that has come since. The knowledge that the production got away from the new team and that this story was thus made under very trying circumstances makes it easy to write the strangeness off as an artifact of a production team that was still learning what they were doing, much as Aliens of London/World War Three is often read in part as the result of the Davies/Gardner team finding themselves overwhelmed by the scope of what they were doing.

This is, of course, complete tosh. What’s bizarre about The Beast Below is that it’s unlike almost everything else Moffat has ever written for Doctor Who. This is in many ways an artifact not of the production circumstances on Series Five, but of the production circumstances on Series Six and Seven. Because the split season structure of Series Six and Seven, everything Moffat wrote after Series Five was either a season opener, a season finale, or a standalone special. With Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone existing to further the ongoing River Song plot, The Beast Below is therefore the only Moffat-penned story from his era to largely serve as a blank slate that Moffat can do as he pleases with. This is markedly unlike the Davies era, where every season provided Davies at least one opportunity to do something unusual and more personal: The Long Game, Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight being the obvious examples. (And notably, all of those stories feel at least a little strange in their respective seasons, much as this one does.) But The Beast Below is really the only instance in the Moffat era where we just get to see what Moffat is inclined to write when left to his own devices. Indeed, it’s one of the only times at all – Moffat’s Davies-era scripts may not have been rewritten, but they were generally prepared to specific briefs. Here, for the first and last time, Moffat just gets to come up with an idea and write it.