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Without Friends Or Protection (Gridlock)

136

Get it? Boe-tox?

It’s April 14th, 2007. David Tennant is still terribly happy. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Timbaland, Beyonce, and Shakira also chart, which feels like just about the most 2007 list of musical artists one can muster. Since Shakespeare wrapped things up, the Ministry of Defense allowed the fifteen sailors released by Iran to sell their stories to the press. This was immediately reversed for anyone who did not act on the first day. Johnny Cash’s home in Nashville burns to the ground, and Kurt Vonnegut dies.

While on television we have an unsung masterpiece – Russell T Davies’s best script of Season Three, Gridlock. There is a line of criticism against Russell T Davies that would suggest he is not particularly interested in science fiction. Instead he’s interested in visual spectacle and character bits, and happens to like the way science fiction things look and emotionally feel. But he’s spectacularly uninterested in worldbuilding – his oft cited line about not caring about Zogs from the planet Zog unless there are humans about is not just an observation about the importance of not making things too strange (after all, he did the “no humanoids except for the TARDIS crew” trick on his second script), but an observation about grounding stories in anything other than the day-to-day world of human experience. The creator of Raxicoricofallapatorius, the Moxx of Balhoon, and the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe is clearly not averse to the presence of overt weirdness. What he is averse to is doing a story that isn’t grounded in contemporary Earth culture. And so even when, at the start of the second season, Davies made his high profile “we’re doing an alien planet for the first time” story the alien planet is just New Earth. Davies, in other words, is almost pathologically opposed to alien planets unless he can ground them in day-to-day Earth issues: busses, hospitals, and, in this case, traffic jams. As a writer, he wants either human interaction or massive spectacle.

But in Gridlock we have an odd story in which Davies manages to hit on an approach that does the worldbuilding for him, without him having to actually engage in any of it directly. The basic mechanic of the episode – tons of different people in their cars – means that Davies’s usual trick of “lots of weird and outlandish images” crashes into his other usual trick of “depictions of ordinary people with domestic lives” to create something that Davies never really manages again in Doctor Who: lots of weird and outlandish images of ordinary people with domestic lives. The result is that for the first and only time in the Davies era we end up with a cross-section of an alien society. Because of the particular central image of the story – the act of driving on the highway – it’s possible for Davies to mash up S&M cats, elderly lesbian trainspotters, nudists, and dapper businessmen into something that feels like a sane, coherent world.…

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They’d Take Some Adapting (The Shakespeare Code)

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Come on. I dare you. Shout “Freebird.”

It’s April 7th, 2007. David Tennant remains very happy with the charts, or, at least, with the top of them. His feelings on Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Take That, and Justin Timberlake are, to the best of my knowledge, undocumented. In news, Ukranian President Viktor Yushchenko dissolves parliament. The University of Florida unexpectedly wins the NCAA Basketball championship to the swelling pride of nobody whatsoever in Gainesville, Florida, a town that is known to bring trees down when it wins football. Three people are charged in the 2005 London bombings, and Iran releases fifteen British sailors captured back before Smith and Jones, proclaiming it a “gift.” And, the day this story airs, the 153rd University Boat Race takes place. Cambridge wins by one-and-a-half lengths.

While on television, The Shakespeare Code. Some time ago, I was having lunch with Jane, one of our regular commenters, and we were talking about the blog and the roles various commenters play within it. She mentioned Jack Graham and asked what role he played, and I, without a second thought, replied, “he’s the blog’s conscience.” Which is to say that Jack has a staggering 5,000 word piece on The Shakespeare Code that is the definitive account of it, and I’m humbly penning a brief follow-up sketch. Jack, for his part, savages The Shakespeare Code for what it’s not, which is to say, a story about traveling back and time and meeting Shakespeare. He is, of course, absolutely correct that this is not at all what the story is.

His dismissal of what the story actually is holds some water, and I’m certainly not going to be so foolish as to disagree with it, but equally, I’m not, in this case, as interested in the ethics of it as I am in the shape of it. Jack is ultimately making the same observation Tat Wood makes in About Time, which is that Doctor Who has moved to being about people in strange worlds to… ah, but here’s where things fog up. Whatever the ideological case for why this move represents the end of civilization as we know it, it’s not entirely clear what this new take on Doctor Who is.

Whatever it is, Gareth Roberts is surely the iconic example. Gareth Roberts is a writer with little interest in world-building. For Roberts, the point of Doctor Who is to provide cracked mirror reflections of middle class Britain. For him the pinnacle of the series is thus the Graham Williams era, where everything in the universe proved able to become Douglas Adams-esque banter. I said last week that Roberts only ever writes love letters, and this remains an important explanation for his writing. A Roberts script is only ever going to come out of a basic passion for its subject matter. This isn’t a problem – in fact, it’s what makes Roberts’s scripts so much fun. But it means that there’s not a desire to explore the pokey ends of concepts in the scripts.…

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I Borrowed Them From The Hospital (Smith and Jones)

73

The Doctor learns first-hand what Daft Punk mean by “get
lucky.”

It’s March 31st, 2007. At last, the great leap forward. The Proclaimers with Brian Potter and Andy Pipkin are at number one with “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles,” presumably much to David Tennant’s delight. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani (and Akon), Fray, Sugababes vs Girls Aloud, Take That, and Fergie (with Ludacris) also chart. In news, the iPhone was announced, Jade Goody got embroiled in the racism controversy that was briefly what she was best known for, and actually not much more happened.

On television it’s Smith and Jones. On one level, this is a straightforward bit of television. It has a job to do, and it gets on with it. That job is to properly relaunch Doctor Who without Rose Tyler, and to introduce Martha Jones. This is done in the context of a story that is clever enough to provide some solid images and moments, but nevertheless firmly in the realm of what feels like traditional Doctor Who. (Though it’s worth talking briefly about those solid images and moments – Davies apparently spent a lot of effort on doing the best running through corridors sequence to date, and on portraying proper panic for the first time. I mention this because it’s such an utterly idiosyncratic pair of things to focus on, especially in an episode that already has so much heavy lifting to do, and seems to me to speak volumes about how Davies works as a creative figure.)

At the heart of all of this is the idea of Martha, which is, of course, also at the heart of one of  Doctor Who’s great Problem Seasons. We talked back in The Runaway Bride about how the major split within the Davies era is Rose and Donna. Certainly this appears to be true in terms of the British public, and, for that matter, within the Davies era itself – it’s telling that Martha is the only Davies-era companion to, in The End of Time, get squared away alongside another companion, and that she’s separated from the Big Two at the end. Martha, in most regards, seems the forgotten companion – the one that didn’t quite work. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her fans and admirers, nor that those fans are wrong. But they are swimming against the tide, and the show itself contributes to that tide.

There are many reasons for Martha’s falling short. For one thing, she’s hobbled from her first appearance by virtue of the fact that the show defines her as Not-Rose. There’s not really a way back from this within the confines of what the show can do. Nor, however, was there necessarily a way to avoid it. The importance of Rose Tyler within the show’s cultural mythology is hard to overstate. Her absence was necessarily part of the story, and this was unavoidable. This is not, to be clear, some judgment about Rose as a companion – rather it’s a judgment about the cultural narrative of Doctor Who, which relaunched in 2005 in a high profile version headlined by Billie Piper as the new companion.…

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Outside the Government: Invasion of the Bane

, 50

No, no, it’s just that, you know, your profile picture made you
look… and, I mean, this isn’t a criticism, but… less tentacular.

It is still New Year’s Day. Actually, we’ve moved backwards in time a few hours for Invasion of the Bane, the debut of The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is often called the pilot, which, in fact, it wasn’t – a pilot is an episode shot as a demo so that a full series can be considered. The first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was already commissioned when this got shot, and it was, in reality, a New Year’s special for a series that hadn’t actually aired its first episode yet.

It’s worth rehearsing the development of the show, though it’s well documented enough. The BBC, following the success of Doctor Who, went a bit spin-off mad, commissioning Totally Doctor Who and Torchwood, then moving on to wanting a children’s drama featuring a teenaged Doctor on Gallifrey and, briefly, considering a set of annual specials under the name Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth. The latter idea was quickly abandoned in the name of peace and sanity, The former, meanwhile, seems to have gotten about as far as Davies and Gardner laughing uproariously and then ordering some people killed.

Once the appropriate heads had been affixed to the appropriate pikes, Davies sent word back to the BBC that while he would not be doing Young Doctor Who, he was eager to do a children’s series focusing on Sarah Jane Smith, who he’d just successfully brought back in School Reunion. Because Davies was at one of those points in one’s career where he was invincible and allowed to do whatever he wanted, his plan to appeal to the youth of Britain with a show about a middle aged woman from 70s television was, in a rare burst of good sense from an entertainment industry that would usually respond to this much like Davies did to Young Doctor Who, enthusiastically approved.

There is an underlying tension here, and it’s one that never quite disappears from The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, it’s television aimed at people who were not actually alive when Doctor Who was originally on the air. On the other, more than any other show in the Doctor Who family The Sarah Jane Adventures is concerned with the material past of Doctor Who. I don’t just mean this in the sense that it features Sarah Jane, returns of three other 70s characters, and bunches of other moments that are overtly and consciously nostalgic for the past. (Really, it’s a wonder the Silurians and Sontarans didn’t make their returns in The Sarah Jane Adventures)

No, what’s really and oddly nostalgic about The Sarah Jane Adventures is that the show is set up to work like classic series Doctor Who, complete with half-hour episodes and cliffhangers. And even though Invasion of the Bane is an hourlong special, it’s still given the most familiar setup imaginable: exciting new technological object, mysterious goings-on, aliens are behind it and turn out to be evil.…

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Outside the Government: End of Days

, 32

Grrr. Argh.

It’s still New Year’s Day, essentially seconds after the close of Captain Jack Harkness, as Torchwood goes out with a two-hour finale event, running End of Days immediately after the preceding episode.

It’s very easy to take shots at End of Days, and some of them are even fair. It attempts to do an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink finale of the sort that Russell T Davies had already made standards elements of Doctor Who, only on a fraction of the budget, and it shows. “Weird things are falling through time all over the world” is a bigger concept than Torchwood can actually pull off, and all we actually get is an ornery Roman and some hazmat suits. It’s tempting to say that this is too big a concept for a one-hour slot, but that’s not really the problem – the problem is that Torchwood doesn’t have anything like the resources to show something this big. It’s trying to conjure a global threat in a show that has the budget, on a really good day, to have three guys in rubber masks lurching through the streets of Cardiff.

On top of that, the pacing wobbles considerably. Much of this is because it wants its third act twist of Abaddon rising up, which would probably have worked better if it had more than three minutes of screen time devoted to it, was remotely set up, and wasn’t a transparent knock-off of The Satan Pit. Instead most of this episode feels overcompressed, making things like the fact that Bilis doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense more obvious than they should be. It turns out that the gambit of “keep the plot moving fast enough that there’s no time to notice the holes” is a more delicate game than it seemed. (My favorite is the fact that they’ve apparently upgraded security to require the butler’s retina print since the last episode.)

And, of course, there’s the character motivation, which requires that Owen’s several-episode idiot plot spontaneously become virulently contagious such that everybody – not just a grief-stricken Gwen, but every single person in Torchwood besides Captain Jack – simultaneously abandoning all semblance of common sense and thinking “if only we were to do the exact same thing that’s already nearly destroyed the world, that would probably fix everything.” This makes the intra-Torchwood conflict scenes something rather short of compelling, and as that’s the central drama of the episode, well, again, there are problems.

All of which said.

Let’s start with Abaddon and his role as a knock-off of the Beast in The Satan Pit. The phrase “knock-off” may undersell this slightly – Abaddon, another name for the devil, is said to be “chained in rock” and “cast out before time,” which isn’t so much copying The Satan Pit as explicitly referencing it. So, OK, apparently Krop Tor was just imprisoning one of several gigantic horned death beasts from before time. But if the episode is going to demand to be read in light of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit then we may as well do so.…

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Outside the Government: Captain Jack Harkness

, 27

Hello Sailor.

It’s January 1st, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” while Iron Maiden, Take That, Girls Aloud, Gwen Stefani, and Chris Cornell also chart. Since Christmas, Gerald Ford died. The UK paid off its last World War II debts to the United States and Canada, although it still has a few bits from the Napoleonic Wars and a rather large amount from World War I. And, of course, Saddam Hussein was executed. Also, it’s International Heliophysical Year. Aw yeah!

On television we have a triple-header – two episodes of Torchwood and the hour long premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures all on the same day. Since we’ve been on a Torchwood kick, I’ll sort those two out first, and then we’ll do Sarah Jane on Friday. First, then, is Captain Jack Harkness, notably the only episode of Torchwood to earn a Hugo nomination, although, inevitably, it lost to Blink. This is, in many ways, not surprising. Captain Jack Harkness is an “issues” story that was well-timed. The beginning of 2007 was more or less peak time for a high profile television show to do a gay romance. And Torchwood did it well by not making a big deal of that aspect except inasmuch as Original Jack’s public embrace of Our Jack amounted to a public coming out and acceptance of his sexuality. Even still, there’s no reaction to it except a puzzled “what’s he doing” from one of Original Jack’s men. The episode is in no way about the fact that it’s the “gay men” episode, a quiet confidence that such an episode doesn’t need to be a Very Special Episode that’s about the glories of its own existence.

There is, of course, a reasoned objection to be had here, which is that it is maybe just a little too optimistic to think that 1941 was a time in which a captain in the US Air Force could publicly snog another man and get away with it, even to the extent of flying a fatal mission the next day. But this is an odd sort of objection that requires that we treat Torchwood as the sort of show in which real history is displayed. We’ll discuss this more next week when we get to The Shakespeare Code, but suffice it to say that there is little in Doctor Who that suggests that this sort of romantic view of history would be avoided. It’s obvious wish fulfillment, sure, but it’s not an unreasonable wish, and the little details elsewhere like remembering to depict Tosh’s difficulties as an Asian woman in 1941 give needed reassurance that the production team knows what rules they’re bending.

And without the bending of rules you don’t have an episode like this. Because this isn’t just “Captain Jack falls in love with a man in the past,” but rather “Captain Jack falls in love with his own erased history,” a concept that is, in many ways, actively set up and worked towards over the course of the first season of Torchwood.…

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I Happened To Be Wearing This Old Thing (The Runaway Bride)

60

One wonders why she was fooled. After all, everyone
knows that spiders are from Mars.
It’s Christmas, 2006. So we’ve made it a whole day forward since Combat. There hasn’t really been any news, and the charts remain the same. On television, it’s an actual Doctor Who episode.
A side effect of Torchwood is that it increases the sense of time between the Doomsday and The Runaway Bride when compared to The Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion. Actually, some of that is just the ludicrously compressed cultural timeframe of the first season. The point where bet shops opened odds on what Bad Wolf was overlapped with the release of The Gallifrey Chronicles, and both came long after the announcement of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. The Christmas Invasion feels as much like the culmination of Series One as it does the start of Series Two. It’s much harder to say that about The Runaway Bride, in part because it feels like nearly a season’s worth of television has happened since the end of Doomsday. 
In hindsight, of course, this feels like the debut of Donna Noble, companion extraordinaire. As we said last time, this is true in exactly the same way that The Web of Fear introduces the Brigadier, which is to say, not really at all. Catherine Tate isn’t playing a prospective companion here, she’s playing a part that’s written to fit in seamlessly on The Catherine Tate Show, but that happens to not actually be one of her own creations. The point of The Runaway Bride is simply to mash up “a Catherine Tate character” with the Doctor for an hour. Whereas the Donna of Season Four is all about running away from being this character and giving Tate the fully rounded character she should have gotten the first time around.
Put another way, you can see why, when Catherine Tate’s casting in Season Four was announced, the consensus reaction in fandom was that Russell had finally gone completely mad. (Although the fact that we were coming off Last of the Time Lords didn’t help with that.) Because in this story she’s pitched as the annoying comedy sidekick, and is allowed to give voice to everybody in the (sizable) Christmas audience who thinks Doctor Who is complete rubbish. Needless to say, this makes her abrasive to fans even as it causes the episode to work perfectly well for the large casual audience the series acquires for Christmas. (For all I point them out, the problems with Donna in The Runaway Bride are narrow and have to do with the ending not quite coming off – most of the buildup is actually quite lovely. As entertaining screen-filler, the Doctor trapped in a Catherine Tate sketch is lovely. Davies just had no good way to resolve the thing.)
The thing is, there’s no point in the series’ history where the “oh God, do we have to watch Doctor Who” audience would have been culturally more on the run.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 68 (The Catherine Tate Show)

, 80

There’s a decision we have to make going into The Runaway Bride, which is, in effect, the same decision we make about The Web of Fear – namely whether or not we’re going to treat the episode as extra important because it includes a character who was brought back later in a retooled and far more popular form. Grudgingly following the precedent of The Web of Fear, we should at least acknowledge it, while simultaneously explaining why this is transparently not the way the episode was read in 2006. Still, there’s a question worth squaring away up front: why is it that a comedian known for playing a variety of grotesques came to be what is, by a significant chunk of audience, the greatest companion of the new series?

First we should understand Catherine Tate herself. Or perhaps more accurately, we should understand David Tennant, as it is very specifically his Doctor that Donna ends up being a spectacularly good companion for. It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine Donna pairing well with Matt Smith’s kinetic and physical performance, nor with Eccleston’s often brooding portrayal. (Although arguably she’s exactly what Paul McGann always needed, and by arguably I mean “is Lucie Miller bovvered?”) It is something about the interaction of Donna with Ten specifically – or, more broadly, given that they’ve also produced compelling turns at both sketch comedy and Shakespeare, about the interaction of Catherine Tate and David Tennant.

We have previously discussed the way in which Tennant’s performance is based on a visible density of decisions. That is to say, when Tennant plays a part, his approach is usually to pack every scene and every line development with as many moments where he makes a visible decision, particularly a decision to change what he’s doing, as possible. The result is a very mannered performance, though not at all in a bad way. When one is watching David Tennant, however, one is always aware that one is watching a performance. There’s not a sense of Tennant trying to maintain an illusionary unity between actor and character. His performances are based profoundly on the longstanding British acting tradition in which the point is not the authenticity of the character but the business of communicating information to the audience.

Another way of putting all of this is that Tennant’s performance is not entirely dissimilar to a comedic performance, with particular similarity to comics who develop characters. A third way is that Tennant is, as actors go, an extremely cerebral one. He’s the sort of actor who says, with all seriousness, that as a child he had his parents explain what television actors were, and him immediately realizing that was what he wanted to do, and furthermore saying that he understood “the difference between the fantasy and reality of that, and that making it even more exciting.” He’s profoundly analytic in his approach.

All of which is to say that, quite separate from the question of which of his costars is the most skilled actor, on the basic level of technique, Catherine Tate was obviously a natural fit for him.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 67 (About Time)

, , 35

I went back and forth over whether to run this as an Eruditorum post or as a side post. Ultimately, I wanted to put it in before we started talking about The Runaway Bride, so it got an Eruditorum slot. Nevertheless, this is a book review of About Time Volume Seven, out on September 10th from Mad Norwegian Press, who were kind enough to give me a preview copy, which I spent two days doing nothing but reading. The short form is that it’s brilliant and you should buy it. The long form actually makes sense to describe in context of the series’ history, because About Time occupies a particular and important place in that history.

About Time is a fascinating example of a book series swallowed by history. It started and premiered before the announcement of the new series, and continued over the course of the series’ development. You can watch, reading it, as the new series exerts its gravity and changes the project out from under Miles and Wood, so that what the books are changes over the course of the series. Given that the series was released out of order, starting with Volumes Three through Five, doubling back for One and Two, and then finally concluding with the Wood-only Volume Six and Wood’s solo rewrite of Volume Three, this gives an interesting sense of things. What started as an attempt to do the most thorough episode guide ever took on an oddly elegiac feel, becoming something more like an attempt to make the definitive statement of what Doctor Who was prior to the new series, before the cultural gravity of the new series erased the ability to see it. In doing so, it went from being a very long guidebook to being the definitive account of it.

Let’s be clear: if you like TARDIS Eruditorum and have never read any of About Time, get thee to Amazon. About Time is indispensable. It’s not that TARDIS Eruditorum wouldn’t exist without it – in fact, if I’d known it existed when I decided to start the blog I’d probably have been intimidated out of starting it, because you’d have to be mad to look at About Time and say “yeah, I just think there’s more to say.” But discovering it a few entries into the Hartnell era was perfect, even if I do have a nagging sense that my Season One coverage is forever compromised by the fact that all the essays started absent the context of About Time. Because About Time got to what I was doing first. It’s an attempt to explain all of Doctor Who – everything about it. Which meant I got the wonderfully easy job of just sitting back and responding to it.

This is, of course, ridiculous as a goal. Doctor Who is far too big to be pinned down into a single explanation. Which is, of course, part of the conceit of About Time, which immerses itself so deeply in the minute particulars of Doctor Who as to willfully lose all sense of Doctor Who as a singular object.…

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Outside the Government: Combat

, 14

Fight off the lethargy
Don’t go quietly

It’s Christmas Eve, 2006. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” with Girls Aloud, Booty Luv, and Chris Cornell also charting, alongside the Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll and Cliff Richard with attempts at Christmas success. In news, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons resume. The Home Office floats the exciting idea of having foreign nationals carry ID cards linked to their fingerprints, and a feud between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan worsens as Uzbekistan doubles the price at which it will sell natural gas to Kyrgyzstan.

While on television we begin one of the most remarkable runs of Doctor Who related content ever. Combat airs on Christmas Eve, the day before The Runaway Bride. A week after that, oddly on a Monday instead of a Sunday, comes both Invasion of the Bane and the final two episodes of Torchwood’s first season, meaning that over the course of nine days fully five hours of Doctor Who-related material aired.

Of these, Combat has to be the oddest fit, being a spectacularly ill match for Christmas. This seems like an artifact of the decision to start with a two hour premiere – had Day One aired a week later then Out of Time, an episode that’s explicitly set around Christmastime, would have been the one to end up on Christmas Eve, which makes, on the whole, a lot more sense than Torchwood’s take on Fight Club, which is more or less what Combat is.

In her absolutely splendid novel Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson has a character ask whether a given book counts as eastern literature. In reply, Vikram the Vampire says, “There is a very simple test. Is it about bored, tired people having sex?” When the character confirms that the book does, Vikram proclaims it western literature. It’s terribly clever, but omits a key subgenre: bored, tired people being terribly violent. This is, after all, a veritable cliche of contemporary literature – angry and soul-dead men who can only find any sort of meaning or fulfillment in fighting one another. It’s the Chuck Palahniuk/Bret Easton Ellis school of thought.

In literature, where novels of that style work – and it’s worth noting that both Palahniuk and Easton Ellis have far more tricks up their sleeve than this theme – it’s usually based around a complex tonal structure – the literally fractured personality of the narrator and Tyler Durden, or the tense ambiguity of whether Patrick Bateman’s crimes are real or fantasies. What’s interesting isn’t actually moping around about how existentially bleak the lives of capitalism’s lesser nobility is, it’s the jagged edge between that banality and a world in which existential bleakness actually makes any sense.

At first glance, then, it appears that Combat misses the mark. The key problem is that Owen ultimately succumbs to the existential bleakness, having his moment of true masculinity as he faces down the Weevil, but being saved from death at the last second by Captain Jack.…

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