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Outside the Government: The Eternity Trap

, 35

It’s November 5th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Fight For This Love,” with Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, and two separate songs by the Black Eyed Peas also charting. In news, Rhode Island re-criminalizes prostitution, the Yankees win the World Series, and a U2 concert at the Brandenberg Gate celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself mired in a strange and ironic controversy as a large wall is build around the venue. 
“I hope this sci-fi show does a story about the conflict between rationalism and superstition,” said no one ever, and yet the wish is still granted for the umpteenth time in The Eternity Trap. The story is not bad – it’s a perfectly competent execution of “let’s do The Stone Tape for children,” managing to be a spooky haunted house story without ever crossing the line into objectionable or overly scarring. There’s something a little sad in the fact that it doesn’t try to scar children for life, but equally, The Sarah Jane Adventures doing a haunted house story probably should target fun instead of traumatic, so, you know. Plus, it’s got Donald Sumpter, who is positively gifted in the art of playing a raving and frothing bad guy named something like “Erasmus Darkening.” 
It’s also worth noting that The Eternity Trap takes a more ambiguous line on the science/superstition debate than is normal. Clear care has been taken in making Darkening inscrutable. The number of times the narrative goes “ah, yes, this may behave 100% like a supernatural event, but actually it’s got a vague scientific explanation” is impressive. No, the creature isn’t an unknowable monster… it’s just a completely unknown one from some parallel dimension. No, Darkening isn’t an alchemist. He’s actually an alien… from a totally unknown planet who created “a computer built from brass and iron,” a phrase that still carefully ties it to the 17th century period it ostensibly hails from. No, the house isn’t haunted by ghosts, because technically the people only got spirited to another dimension as opposed to dying. There’s a constant resistance to completely ceding ground to rationalism even as the underlying ethos of the episode is explicitly rationalist. 
This is, for the most part, more interesting. The arch-skeptical ideology is, let’s face it, boring. But more to the point, it’s preposterous within The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is in no way a rationalist show. I mean, this is the dirty little secret of every single sci-fi show to try to push the hardline rationalist perspective. Sci-fi isn’t rationalist. The Sarah Jane Adventures sure as heck isn’t. I mean, this is straightforward on a basic level. If you flop off to, say, RationalWiki or FreethoughtBlogs and start talking about how all those people who believe in ghosts are cranks because it’s obviously aliens that’s actually done it, you’re not going to be taken seriously. The conspiracy theories that say that the Illuminati is a front for the mind controlling space lizards are not, in point of fact, any more sane than the ones that go with more old-fashioned “it’s paranormal.”
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Outside the Government: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s October 29th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one, with Whitney Houston, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Buble, Jay-Z, and Robbie Williams also charting. In news, Morrissey collapses while performing “This Charming Man” in Swindon. Zine El Abine Ben Ali wins 90% of the votes in Tunisia and a five-year term of office, which seems like a sure bet that he’ll be around for ages. And footballer Marlon King is sacked from Wigan Athletic after a sexual assault conviction.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The biggest thing about this story is, of course, that the Doctor is in it. That this is demonstrably the most important thing about it is also in many regards the fundamental challenge of it: how does one do an episode of a spin-off to Doctor Who that features the Doctor and not have it become a de facto episode of Doctor Who instead of an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The first trick is a relatively obvious one: make the Doctor’s absence a tangible part of the plot. After teasing his appearance repeatedly in The Mad Woman in the Attic, we have a first episode here in which the sound of the TARDIS is in effect used as a sort of accent and punctuation: something that repeatedly teases the eventual arrival of the Doctor. It’s only the second episode in which Tennant features at all, and even there he effectively drops out of the climax so that Clyde can save the day instead. Tennant, in other words, is deliberately treated as something to use sparingly, so that this feels unmistakably like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and not like an episode of Doctor Who that went out with the wrong opening credits.
It is, of course, questionable whether or not this was necessary. There is in the end nothing that would have effectively made this anything other than a story where the guest star overwhelms the show. And in some ways that’s the real point of it: a private episode of Doctor Who for the kids. There is, after all, something thoroughly delightful in that idea. The usually not actually true statement that Doctor Who is for children (as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a show that carefully avoids not being for children) here applies wonderfully. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a secret treat for kids – something that feels a bit like staying up past your bedtime.
In something of a concession to this reality, the second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith revels in these possibilities. Indeed, much of its runtime is devoted to a longer sequence of the Doctor running around with Clyde, Luke, and Rani than the plot actually needs – a sequence that exists mostly, if we’re being honest, to set up things like Clyde actually calling the Doctor out on an “I’ll explain later.” Which is wonderful and worth doing, to be fair.
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Outside the Government: The Mad Woman in the Attic

, 14

It’s October 22nd, 2009. Alexandra Burke and Flo Rida are at number one with “Bad Boys,” with Robbie Williams, Black Eyed Peas, and Michael Buble also charting. In news, about all I can actually find over the last week is the balloon boy hoax in Colorado. Oh, and Jenson Button wins the Formula One Drivers’ Champion. All right then.
So, television – another installment of The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is in some ways surprising that The Mad Woman in the Attic is a relatively messy and underwhelming story, not least because it’s by Joseph Lidster, who wrote the best Sarah Jane Adventures story to date with Mark of the Berserker last season. And yet it is, in fact, a mess. It’s not entirely clear what the problem is. It’s certainly possible that it’s just down to some performances that, while not bad as such, are also not quite up to the level they need to be. Neither Souad Faress as the adult Rani nor Eleanor Tomlinson as the alien Eve quite persuade. It’s not that their performances are bad in any specifically memorable way, but they are equally not particularly compelling or nuanced, which is a problem when both roles are required to carry a lot of the underlying emotional weight of the story. It could also be down to a script that, for all its pedigree, feels crowded and like it has one too many ideas, and that this excess has cost any given idea the space to be interesting. 
But the real problem is with the job the story seems to be trying to solve. This is an odd thing to say. After all, the job is one of the basic and reflexive functions of a series like this. The Mad Woman in the Attic exists to be a character focus episode on Rani. Given that she’s not really had one since her debut, which was so focused on getting her to be a business-as-usual part of the story that she barely had time to develop as a character, this makes total sense. Rani needs to be fleshed out. If this season went by without a heavily Rani-focused episode it would be anomalous to the point of opening serious allegations of sexism.
But Rani has, if not a problem as a cast member, at least a problem as a character. She’s there to fill a narrative contrivance in a manner not dissimilar to how Sarah Jane herself is. And just as Sarah Jane proved oddly unsatisfying as the center of an emotional story in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, so does Rani here. Rani was designed to be a plucky adventuress. She was never really given any character traits beyond that. And so a story about her emotional turmoil is unsatisfying because her character was never really meant to have that. Fault Souad Faress all you want, but it’s not clear what she could have done with this script. Old Rani is defined only by her narrative wrongness – by the fact that she’s not the correct version of the character.
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Outside the Government: Prisoner of the Judoon

, 30

It’s October 15th, 2009. Chipmunk are at number one with “Oopsy Daisy,” with Shakira, the Black Eyed Peas, and two separate Jay-Z tracks also charting. In news, since July, Ireland approved the Lisbon Treaty on the second attempt, the 2016 Olympics were given to Rio di Janeiro, and North Korea freed two American journalists following intervention by former President Bill Clinton. While more around the time of this story, Tim Berners-Lee publicly apologizes for excessive backslashes in urls, a Ugandan MP proposes making certain instances of homosexual activity capital offenses, and Stephen Gately, one of the lead singers of Boyzone, died in Spain. Also, Edgar Allen Poe’s funeral is held.
On television, meanwhile, The Sarah Jane Adventures is back. It is interesting to compare the positions of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures going into their third seasons. Torchwood was a show in visible need of some sort of revamping or, at the very least, of Davies actually being heavily involved in the season instead of largely sitting on the sidelines. The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was rapidly perfecting a sort of business-as-usual approach that served it well. So where the mantra of Children of Earth amounted to “everything really does change for once,” the mantra of The Sarah Jane Adventures in its third season amounted to “let’s do it again.”
Prisoner of the Judoon exemplifies that, ticking all the boxes of what one would expect a season premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures to be while still managing to be its own thing. You’ve got the return of a Doctor Who monster, a story built so that everybody gets at least one moment to shine, and a nice high-concept premise to hold it all together. The latter, of course, is that Sarah Jane’s found herself possessed for the first time since The Hand of Fear. Lis Sladen, unsurprisingly, plays it with gleeful relish – Sarah Jane as possessed by the Androvax is all lascivious growl and menace. 
It’s an interestingly calibrated performance – it would have been easy to make the big “Sarah Jane is possessed” story an opportunity to be scary. The last time Sarah Jane was absent from the story was Mark of the Berserker, which used her absence to make the story scarier. Without Sarah Jane to keep things in line, Clyde’s father became an extremely threatening figure capable of doing much more damage than any villain possibly could when Sarah Jane is around. This time, however, Sarah Jane’s absence is, if not comedic, at least a source of fun – an opportunity for Lis Sladen to let her hair down and act out instead of being the buttoned-up, straight-laced figure. The story is a big party in the same way that New Earth was for Billie Piper.
Meanwhile, the rest of the cast gets to shine as well. Luke gets to capably act as a surrogate Sarah Jane and stop the aliens, Rani gets some lovely comedy bits with her parents, and Clyde gets to be practical and a leader figure.
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

, 18

[previously] On the other hand, the idea that the Doctor would deliberately murder a child to save the day is unthinkable. In fact, the degree to which it is unthinkable is central to Moffat’s soft retcon of the Time War to give the Doctor an out in Day of the Doctor. The way that Moffat renders the Doctor’s double genocide unthinkable is by declaring that Gallifrey was full of children – a thought that is unimaginable in the context of Davies’s vision of the Time War as an event in which the dead are simply brought back from an earlier point in time to fight again and again and the Time Lords became monsters as unthinkable as the Daleks. Moffat alters this by saying that the Time Lords weren’t all monsters, and he does this through unabashed reproductive futurism. Jack, on the other hand, has at this point functionally killed fourteen kids, putting him six shy of Adam Lanza.

And yet for all of that, he is unambiguously framed as the hero. When he is absent from the narrative for the entirety of “Day Two” it is consciously a disruption to the narrative’s function, and when he’s restored in “Day Three” he gets a cheeky and thoroughly gratuitous sequence where his hero coat is restored to him. There’s no way of reading Children of Earth as anything other than a story about Jack Harkness, the hero who saves the day. 
It’s tempting to read this as the frankly overly common trope of the tortured and morally ambiguous antihero – this is, after all, released almost exactly a year after The Dark Knight, when the love of taking heroes to “dark” places was at its highest. But Davies has never shown a particular attachment to the tortured antihero, and much as he pushes Jack into grim territory, he does ultimately end by putting Jack in a position to return to his galavanting, space-faring roots. For all that Jack’s actions and ending are grim, we should think about the next place we see him: a raucous bar full of all manner of colourful CGI characters. “The hero Cardiff deserves” this ain’t.
Which is to say that we are forced to take Jack’s actions as morally serious. This is, to be fair, not actually difficult. At the end of the day, it’s just another trolley problem, and the solution Children of Earth settles on is a perfectly mainstream answer to it. Killing twelve people to save twenty-five million is, if not straightforwardly ethical, at least reasonable and defensible. Killing one to save even more is likewise. The only things that make Jack’s actions especially horrific are aesthetic issues: the fact that the person he’s killing is a kid, and, more than that, his grandson. (Strangely, the fact that he’s also saving children has relatively little impact in practice.) 
And so by embracing this queer ideology in all its awful splendor, Jack liberates himself from the entire world. It’s interesting to note that his final scene is not actually necessarily a scene about how awful he found it to have to kill his own grandson.
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

, 13

[previously] Reproductive futurism invests itself in a future without content. It has to, because the future is defined as the place where we don’t live but where our children do. But Jack, as we said, does live in the future. He’s not just from the future, he is ageless and deathless such that he will, in practice, live to see the entirety of it, outliving the Earth itself. This is why he is a queer figure, in the end.
But in opposition to this is the idea of temporal attachments – that is, the longstanding themes of immortality in which the immortal figure must mourn how everyone they love grows old and dies. This is alluded to at the start of the story, with Jack’s declaration that he doesn’t like being a couple – “couples” being, after all, the basic unit of temporal attachments and reproductive futurism. Ianto’s death, then, consists of forcibly severing Jack’s ties to that rhetoric and allowing him to fully embrace the queer ideology he truly represents. It is worth looking at the specific context of Ianto’s death – coming as it does in the midst of a big, heroic scene in which Ianto and Jack attempt to heroically speak of humanity’s potential and how there’s nothing they won’t do to protect their children. That is, they speak in defense of reproductive futurism, which is spectacularly ineffectual. Ianto dies, thus forcing Jack to a new type of strategy – one that actually works, but that works precisely because it completely rejects reproductive futurism and instead involves murdering his own grandson.
It is worth noting that the particulars of Ianto’s death – a virus – hold specific symbolic weight. One of the things that has most often been important in understanding Davies’s work, particularly when same-sex relationships show up in it, is the difference between homosexuality as a sexual orientation and the specific institution of gay culture. This is what’s ultimately invoked in the memorable monologue way back in Bob and Rose in which Bob declares that “I was born gay, I’ll die gay and I’ll have a gay gravestone” – not, self-evidently, that he therefore was never going to be attracted to a woman, but that his self-identity and image came out of gay culture. (A fact implicit in the idea that a gravestone can be gay.) And Davies often writes about gay culture as much, if not more than he writes about same-sex relationships. Indeed, his inclination in much of his later work is specifically to avoid making same-sex relationships a topic – observe, for instance, how Ianto basically plays a reverse version of the Bob and Rose game, rejecting any identity implicit in his romance with Jack when asked by Rhiannon. Gay culture, to be clear, is in no way coextensive with homosexuality – it does not provide a description fitting all or even most gay men. Nevertheless, it still has significant cultural impact.
All of which is to say that the fact that Jack – an ostentatiously queer character who, especially in 2009 once John Barrowman had become a ubiquitous presence on television such that it was impossible to look at his character in Torchwood and not see in part the high-profile gay man playing him – loses his lover specifically to a deadly virus is impossible not to read in part as a quiet invocation of the role that HIV/AIDS played in gay culture and gay history. 
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three

, 46

[previously] It is here, then, we have to turn to Jack’s sexuality. One of the most enduring discussions about Jack is the way in which his sexuality evolves over the course of the series, as he goes from a pansexual action hero to, steadily, an almost exclusively gay male figure – indeed, Barrowman, in at least one interview, describes the character as a gay man. This transition is understandably significant to a large number of people, and there’s a really nasty strand of bisexual erasure that quietly goes on as Jack becomes increasingly normative and less prone to stories like his bizarre story in Boom Town involving fifteen naked people and a monster with tusks. But this ignores the degree to which Jack is more broadly a queer figure – that is, a figure who in some fashion rejects heteronormative reproductive futurism. That his queerness steadily converges on being a gay man is perhaps revealing as to exactly what sort of queer figure he is, but in many ways what is most important about Jack is the fact that he represents an ideology other than, to quote another Davies script, “grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it.” 
But this challenge does not come exclusively from Jack’s sexuality. It also, as we can see by looking at it in terms of reproductive futurism, comes from Jack’s immortality. Jack is queer because his life rejects the entire structure of the world in which those things happen. Jack is a character for whom hedonism has no consequence, and who does not face the prospect of death, and so has no reason to fetishize an imagined future given that he’ll be stuck living in the actual one. So much so that when he does engage in reproductive futurism and has a child, that relationship is impossibly strained.
This, of course, brings us around to Alice. Alice is not what you would call a well-developed character. She suffers from a smattering of difficulties – the “oh look, a key event in Jack’s past we’ve never mentioned before but that is crucial to the plot” twist is one that essentially never works well, and it must be noted that Children of Earth relies upon it twice, neither time with particular success. The first at least provides a necessary plot hook – even though the actual revelation of what Jack was up to in 1965 is a bit muted (with Ianto and Gwen basically going “well that was rather crap of you” and moving on), it’s necessary to provide the killer opening episode hook of nuking the Hub. But the second, the existence of Alice, feels downright contrived. Alice has very little to do in most episodes – she manages to spend about three episodes getting kidnapped, although her “whack the soldier with a cutting board and steal his gun” scene is magnificent. She has few traits other than “she is Jack’s daughter and doesn’t get on with him.”
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two

, 17

[previously] It should, of course, be remembered that the character who makes this proposal, Denise Riley, is the same one who we’re told is going to succeed the Prime Minister following Bridget’s calm overthrow of him in the story’s conclusion. Which is to say that the problem really pointedly is not Frobisher but the system he represents. Ultimately, a woman who unquestioningly consented in ordering the covert and extrajudicial assassination of four British citizens helps make a person who actively advocated for culling the poor the next Prime Minister in the name of a man who helped orchestrate both plans. This is what passes for political victory – the replacement of the absolutely and unfathomably bad with the slightly differently absolutely and unfathomably bad.
In this regard, Children of Earth is something that Doctor Who, under Davies, only occasionally got to be: very, very angry. Davies lashed out occasionally – his embittered Iraq satire in Aliens of London/World War III and his delightfully bleak turn in Midnight stand out – but for the most part, under Davies, Doctor Who is a series about hope. Torchwood has always been allowed to be at least somewhat more cynical, but it’s not until Children of Earth that we see Davies pen something for within Doctor Who that is just unabashedly bitter and pessimistic. 
This is not uncharacteristic for Davies as such. A trawl through his earlier work reveals him to be a hopeless romantic, but he is also someone who has said more than once that his ideal vision of love is unrequited love, which speaks volumes as to the nature of his romanticism. For him, the romantic and optimistic is a howl in the dark – the one piece of meaning or hope that can be found in a desperately bleak world. In Doctor Who, at least, this is framed in terms of the fantastic nature of the show – the romance comes, often, not from the world but from a radical escape from it brought on by interaction with a completely barmy time traveller. 
So Children of Earth, in positioning itself in a somewhat aggressively normal environment, consciously steps away from the saving wonder of the fantastic. There’s only one alien and they don’t even bother with names or descriptions. We don’t even ever properly see them – they’re forever cloaked in fog. The aliens are little more than representatives of the unknown and unknowable – forces of nature to which people have to respond. 
Instead we get Gwen’s episode five monologue about why the Doctor doesn’t show up, with the suggestion that it is a judgment of humanity. This is clearly at least partially metaphoric – after all, it’s not as though the Doctor checks in to see how humanity is doing with an alien invasion before deciding if he’ll intervene. The point is rather much like that of Turn Left. Indeed, that story we suggested that the message “without the Doctor, Britain would become fascist” was a bit stretched.
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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

, 23

The Last War in Albion will run tomorrow – scheduling snafu meant I failed to get it imaged up in time. Though frankly, this is not as dissimilar as TARDIS Eruditorum sometimes is.
It’s July 6th, 2009. Cascada is at number one with “Evacuate the Dancefloor.” Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, La Roux, and Michael Jackson also chart, the latter with two songs, this being mainly due to him being dead. In news, since Planet of the Dead there’s been swine flu and protests in Iran over the almost certainly fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While during the five days of this story, a coup d’etat takes place in Honduras, an earthquake takes place in China, and Al Franken is finally sworn in as a US Senator, wrapping up the 2008 elections that took place some eight months earlier. 

While on television, airing on five consecutive nights, is Torchwood: Children of Earth – the zenith of that series’ popularity, which means that it did about as well as poorly rated episodes of Doctor Who did. Nevertheless, it is something of a cultural milestone – Torchwood’s one stab at a big event. While its ratings weren’t quite as impressive as Doctor Who’s, all five episodes placed in the top twenty, and everything after the first got AI figures in the 90s. This is, in other words, hugely successful television.
To start, at least, the important thing to realize about Children of Earth is that it is very long. It’s nearly an hour longer than The War Games and five minutes longer than The Daleks’ Masterplan. Only if you are one of those very strange people who wants to count Trial of a Time Lord as a single story, or if you want to argue that Torchwood doesn’t count as Doctor Who, do you have an easy way to argue that Children of Earth is not the single longest televised story in Doctor Who’s history to date. 
This is all the more extraordinary given that it comes in an era where the narrative velocity has increased dramatically. The War Games and The Daleks’ Masterplan came from a highly serialized era of the show’s history in which things simply happened more slowly. Children of Earth, on the other hand, is medially dense piece of work that makes a habit of communicating information through all sorts of means – dialogue, acting, camera angles, sound design, et cetera. All of which is to say that there’s nothing quite like it in Doctor Who. The fact that it is intensely serialized, done as a straight shot, five episodes in five days single story gives it a narrative heft. It goes out of its way to demand to be treated as a single thing – even above and beyond most miniseries. Even the episode titles – the very simple “Day One” through “Day Five” – seem designed primarily to efface themselves, existing as parts of a whole.
This is not to say that it is not clearly constructed on an episode-by-episode basis.
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Guest Post: Torchwood and Cardiff

, , 11

Steffan Alun writes on the subject of Torchwood and Cardiff…

It’s October 22nd, 2006.  I’ve been back in university for a few weeks, and I’ve just come back from a choir trip.  Some music is in the charts, but I don’t have to listen to it, because I’ve finally acquired a DAB radio, allowing me to listen to Radio 4 despite Aberystwyth’s unacceptable inability to find it on FM.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts, and I am extremely interested in the portrayal of Cardiff in this show.  Most of my old school friends went to Cardiff for uni, but the city is still reasonably unfamiliar to me.  I spend most of my visits in their rented accommodation, talking about Doctor Who.

Fast-foward to the present day, and I now spend most of my time on public transport thinking about comedy.  I am a standup comedian, a job which takes me all over the UK.  I’ve performed hundreds of gigs, but nearly a quarter of them have been in Cardiff.  It is, by now, a city I know incredibly well.  Thanks to the particular eccentricities of standup comedy, I can even tell you how high the ceilings are in over thirty venues.

Let’s quickly cover the history of Cardiff and Doctor Who so far.  Russell T Davies (like me, he’s from Swansea – in fact, we grew up on the same street, decades apart) has revived the show and made it a BBC superbrand.  That’s their word, not mine, but I quite like it.  Superbrand.  It’s fun to say.  The show is filmed in Cardiff, as part of the offer made to get Julie Gardner on board.  Julie Gardner is also from a part of Wales.  My parents never thought to tell me where she grew up, so let’s Occam’s Razor the question of where she’s from and assume that she, like Russell T Davies and Steffan H Alun, grew up on Lôn Cae Banc.  Anyway, the first new series of Doctor Who features two episodes set in Cardiff, one of which was filmed in Swansea.  Following so far?  Good.

What we have in Everything Changes, the first episode of Torchwood, is something that starts off looking like tedious Joseph Campbell nonsense, but ends up as a wonderful subversion.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … until the reality of the supernatural turns out to be so horrific that a woman whose job it is to research the supernatural takes her own life.  “The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”  No, the hero joins a team who research alien powers without the slightest intention to share these powers with anyone else.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.  You only need to know one of those reasons – specifically, that while Gwen slowly learns about Torchwood, the audience is slowly learning about Cardiff.  Most of the audience is familiar with the idea for Torchwood – I’d be amazed if many of the 2.8m viewers hadn’t seen any of the first two series of Doctor Who, and even more so if “secret organisation fighting aliens” was new to them.…

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