steve gallagher

May 28, 2011

The Big Squib

Jack Graham autons, daleks, JN-T Day, steve gallagher, steven moffat, the big bang, the pandorica opens, whinge 0

Acres of irrelevant grumbling about the Series 5 finale.

Oh great. River’s back. Again. Un-yippee and un-hurrah. Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve. In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.

The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than ‘End of Time’ Part 1. There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River’s pleasantly spooky trip to Amy’s empty house… but, really, how generic is all this? A secret chamber under Stonehenge? An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it?

Mind you, they could’ve turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn’t been so obvious right from the start. I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies). The only thing worse than what we got would’ve been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable ‘Old Ones’ or some other ‘horror from before time’ when opened. So it could’ve been worse. But could also have been much better.

Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat’s usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe… by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him. For some reason.

The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing. What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers. Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him. This is so dumb it defies description. I mean, I know the Doctor always wins… but surely they don’t need to be scared of him when he’s standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands? Just zap the silly sod! You don’t even have to go anywhere near him!

On the subject of that speech… really, when did the character turn into this kind of person? When did this become the point of him? I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still…

The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. “he’s almost as clever as I am” etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass ‘tough cop’ cypher (i.e.…

May 22, 2011

Rolling the Boulder

Jack Graham 80s, binro, Black Guardian, class, day of the moon, Enlightenment, fiona cumming, history, immortality, JN-T Day, John Nathan-Turner, Mawdryn Undead, nixon, peter grimwade, sam harris, steve gallagher, Terminus, the x files, uneven and combined development 4

It’s JN-T Day! In honour of the late and much-maligned Mr Nathan-Turner – who rescued Who from the stylistic doldrums, produced a slew of stone classics and stuck around longer than he wanted to because he knew his departure would mean the end of the show – here is my Timelash II stuff on the stories usually called the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’. Much undervalued, all three of them.

For John Nathan-Turner.

‘Mawdryn Undead’

Once you get past the Billy Bunter bibble of the opening (and even that is pleasingly unexpected) this develops into a highly satisfactory bit of concept-driven sci-fi, cleverly using time travel (never a major concern of the old-style show) as part of a complex but admirably clear plot, aware of itself as myth-reiteration (immortality as curse, the Flying Dutchman, etc.) and with a submerged political sense in its depiction of crime, power, unscrupulousness and luxury.

It engages with the Who mythos without being enslaved to it, using concepts from the show’s backstory to create a genuinely dramatic conflict situation in the characters’ here and now.

You can see everyone’s point of view here, even if you don’t like the way they’re behaving. There are no clear goodies or baddies except for the jarringly satanic Black Guardian, but even he works as a figure on the sidelines trying to manipulate and influence events through his conflicted avatar Turlough, who constitutes a bravura bit of experimentation: the companion who is unsure whether he’s bad or not!

The production design is superlative… with the mutants’ ship, the obelisk, the transmat capsule, the crystal, the stolen gallifreyan machine, the hall of portraits, etc., all impressing and lingering in the memory.

The acting is very good, with David Collings giving it the full RSC and Nick Courtney very carefully and skillfully delineating the differences between the alternate versions of the Brig. Davison is never better than when called upon to play the Doctor as thinking through events and figuring out his situation… and this story plays to that strength… also allowing him to bring an almost suave air of intelligence, particularly when he tosses the crystal back to Turlough with a look of sardonic calculation.

And you have to admire the sheer off-the-wall combinations. A public school comedy that develops into a story about time travelling mutants on a luxury cruise liner, featuring an alien teenager (though obviously played by a grown man) and one of his teachers being split into two personas… well, we’ve come a long way from stomping monsters invading Southern England every week.

It may not be as spectacular as some of the other stories from this era, but if this is the 80s show chugging along as normal then they’re obviously doing something very right.

I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

It’s almost relentlessly cold, austere, alienating, unsympathetic, brutal and nihilistic, set in an explicitly godless universe which is depicted as teeming with sickness, decay, cowardice, failure, pettiness, selfishness and great crashing waves of existential boredom.…

November 24, 2010

Rise Like Lions

Jack Graham angel of history, anti-cuts, day x, history, protests, season 18, steve gallagher, tharils, tom baker, walter benjamin, warriors gate 2

Even as I type this, protestors are clambering over the stone lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, waving anti-cuts placards while sat astride the petrified leonine relics of an imperial age that is still decaying… and trying to take us all with it.

‘Warrior’s Gate’ came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today. It seems almost ridiculously appropriate. Well, it does to me anyway.

Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:

The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Benjamin’s exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee… but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc. To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in – the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.

The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.

The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago.…