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Hey, Turn That Down: The Doctors Revisited (David Tennant)

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At last, we reach the end of history, with an episode that is set up to, basically, repeat the same talking points about the Tenth Doctor that were being used when he was still on screen. This is as straightforward as it is possible to be – an unabashed display case for an era of Doctor Who that everybody knows is a classic.

Which, fair enough. There’s really no getting around the fact that the Tennant era was wildly popular, and that Tennant is always going to be one of the iconic portrayals of the Doctor. There are no apologias to make, and as of 2013, at least, the Tennant era hadn’t slipped into history, not least because Tennant was going to be making a return in less than a month anyway, with no explanation of why he looked older or anything like that necessary. There was, really, no other way to do this.

That said, the selection of what to focus on is interesting. Noticeably absent is any standing in the rain. There’s a little bit of the Bad Wolf Bay scene from Doomsday, but for the most part the two iconic emotional scenes from Tennant’s era, the departures of Rose and Donna, are entirely skipped over. This is even more striking given that Martha’s departure is featured in detail. There’s no mention of Human Nature/Family of Blood either. In other words, all the moments of Tennant’s Doctor being pushed to extremes are skipped.

Instead we get a focus on Tennant in default mode. There are sizeable clips from The Sontaran Stratagem and The Idiot’s Lantern, both of which are fine scenes, but which would appear on almost nobody’s instinctive list of major David Tennant scenes. To some extent, this demonstrates the level of confidence that they clearly have in the material: nobody is trying to sell David Tennant. Indeed, it’s somewhat refreshing to look at him in these scenes. Tennant’s best scenes are indeed extraordinary, but it’s easy to forget that he was also extraordinarily good at just being a foundation for the show to build on.

This also gets at the closest thing to a problem with this episode, however. For all its confidence, it shares the Peter Davison episode’s strange failure to actually ever describe what this iteration of the Doctor is actually like. Loads of talking heads are ready to line up and, quite rightly, say how wonderful David Tennant is, but nobody can actually nail down what his Doctor was like and why he was so iconic. Perhaps it’s simply too soon, but either way, it’s a glaring omission.

The other strange thing is the story chosen. It’s not that it’s a poor choice – indeed, there may be no story quite so Tennanty as The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. But the story notably, gets no coverage in the episode itself, unlike the previous few, which took pains to get the viewer up to speed on what they were going to watch. This works fine – really, who needs a substantial introduction to the most popular Doctor Who story ever?…

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A Split in the Skin of the World (The End of Time, Part Two)

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The lengths people will go to in order to get License to Kill
written out of canon…
A bombed out husk of imagined Londons, all the dead and abandoned futures piled up alongside each other. All the things that could have been, united by their shared experience of a moment where it became obvious that they actually never could be. Futures that have run out, been spent, boiled away to ruins, our cultural memento moris, reminding us all of the looming and inevitable death that is nostalgia. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. I don’t want to go.”
It is tempting to end on a more positive note. It is not as though I don’t enjoy The End of Time, or the Davies era. I quite love both. Really, I do.
But the Davies era has long since ended. We have parted the ways, and faced doomsday. We have seen the journey end and long since seen the next Doctor. We’ve praised it, buried it, critiqued it, and disinterred it several times to do it all again. And now we have The End of Time, an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything. With the Davies era refusing so spectacularly to die, few other options seem to exist but cutting off the very possibility of time’s advancement. End everything and you might just manage to kill it off too. 
If, in fact, there’s even any time left to have. By this point the contours of the last Davies episode are self-evident. It is going too far to suggest that all of Davies’s season finales (and this clearly counts) are the same, but there is a structure to them: a whirling mass of conceptual quotes, flipping channels endlessly until it resolves by declaring the permanence of Doctor Who as a narrative fixture. A regeneration story is going to be no different. A shell game – where in the narrative is the trap that kills the Doctor? Inevitably, the point will not be what kills the Doctor but the fact of his ongoing narrative role: a story that never ends. The justification for this lack of resolution will, as always, be populism. Doctor Who is loved, so it is not cancelled.
Underneath all of this, very low in the mix, is a very different sort of story. In every season after the first, the most interesting moment in terms of Davies’s own scripts has been the inevitable spiky and difficult story – the one where Davies stops trying to be quite so populist and throws something a bit ugly and unnerving on the screen. (And the only reason this can’t be said of the first season is that practically every Davies episode that season does it.) Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight are all cases where one can see a very different sort of Davies: an angry one clearly considerably more skeptical and cynical about the world.
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A Woman (The End of Time, Part One)

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Wilf reacts to the news that Claire Bloom is playing the Rani.
It’s December 25th, 2009. Rage Against the Machine are at number one with “Killing in the Name,” a feat of countercultural rebellion cooked up by people who got tired of the crown of the Christmas #1 being dominated year after year by The X Factor and who thus decided to try to send a different single to number one. Also in the charts are Lady Gaga, Robbie Williams, Rihanna, Journey, Cheryl Cole, the Black Eyed Peas, and X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
In news, since The Gift made its bow, the Treaty of Lisbon has come into force, Terry Wogan has presented his final breakfast show, and polling in advance of the 2010 general election has shown the Conservatives with various degrees of leads. Also, David Tennant has been all over every talk show imaginable doing a farewell tour as the Doctor, as Christmas marks the first episode of his two-part departure, The End of Time. After all the festivities have died down, long after the episode has aired, it is possible to go and download the podcast commentary from the BBC and to watch the episode again, immediately, with DVD-style commentary. You still can, though it’s harder to do these days. 
The commentary consists of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner, at 8:30 in the morning on December 11th, 2009 doing a straight shot of recording commentary for this and The End of Time Part 2 while simultaneously answering phones and checking e-mails as part of their new normal workday in Los Angeles, where they were in effect sent by the BBC after finishing Doctor Who with the mandate “make us some high profile co-productions, starting with Torchwood.” 
As with most commentaries featuring Davies and Gardner, it is in many ways an extended pat on the back for itself. They are quick to highlight how “marvelous” things are. But equally, they’re not wrong. Their first example, Bernard Cribbins, really is marvelous. But there is a subtler dynamic beneath the surface: Gardner and Davies both praise Cribbins enthusiastically, but then Davies digresses to point out that the street he’s walking down is one they’ve used in every other Christmas special. Gardner sits quietly, and then calmly declares that she wants to go back to talking about Bernard Cribbins, obviously finding the obsessive detail spotting involved in Davies’s fannish observation (which is firmly in the same tradition as any number of other fannish practices – “spot the recycled location/set/prop” is a positively august fan tradition) rather spectacularly less than interesting. It’s not quite a prickly moment, but it’s only one step away from it. And then a moment later the two of them are geeking out ecstatically over the nature of Bernard Cribbins’s acting skill and precisely what it is that he’s so good at. 
In under a minute of commentary the entire sweep of the Gardner/Davies partnership becomes clear. And this is a significant thing.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 29 (The Tennant Doctor Who Magazine Comics)

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It’s strange, I’ve been writing about the Tennant era for nine months now, and yet reading the compiled Tenth Doctor comics from Doctor Who Magazine the thing that jumps out most immediately is the amount of time enveloped in them. It helps that there’s a change in editors and a late change of direction as a result, but even without that there’s a sense of size and history here that is perhaps lost when looking at the story-to-story changes of the Tennant years.
Actually, let’s start with that change in editors. The majority of the Tenth Doctor’s comics are edited by Clayton Hickman. No account of of Doctor Who is ever going to allege that Hickman is one of the great and most important figures in the history of the series, which is true in a sort of blandly factual sense, but obscures the fact that on the occasions where Clayton Hickman does enter the margins of the story he inevitably acquits himself marvelously. Whether as the talking head who obligingly filled in context so that some washed up 70s actress or another appears to actually make sense in Doctor Who Confidential, as Gareth Roberts’s funnier writing partner on audio, television, and ideally, a bizarre and inscrutable DVD extra for The Masque of Mandragora, as the cover designer for the classic series DVDs, as the terribly sweet seeming judge for Companion Academy, or just as that nice man on Twitter who keeps mistakenly saying good things about my blog, Clayton Hickman is very possibly the figure in Doctor Who it is least possible to say mean things about without feeling like a complete and utter bastard.
But one thing that becomes clear reading the commentary at the end Panini Press collections of Tenth Doctor comics is that there is nowhere in his contributions to Doctor Who that Hickman is more in his element than editing the comics for Doctor Who Magazine. None of this is meant as a knock against the last run of Tenth Doctor comics, edited by Tom Spilsbury. The final run, an ongoing story with a comics-exclusive companion, is a satisfying homage to the way comics were before the arrival of Doctor Who as a global megabrand, and the final Donna story, “The Time of My Life,” is both clever and terribly moving. But nowhere in the Panini books does one get the sense of Tom Spilsbury as an editor who lived and breathed the details of the comic. (Although it’s certainly possible he’s actually just less prone to talking about himself.) 
(It’s also worth briefly acknowledging the second line of comics in Doctor Who Adventures – over five hundred pages of short done-in-ones that tended to pick up with the Doctor and Rose already in some sort of danger, and to romp madly through absurd premises. Good fun, but not something I’m going to cover in detail.)
Hickman, on the other hand, is clearly the sort of nightmarish editor a good writer dreams of: one who is going to challenge detail after detail, who has no tolerance whatsoever for crap, and who is going to make damn sure anything that goes out under his editorial name is going to be brilliant.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 28: The Forgotten

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A commissioned essay for ?ukasz Bury.

The Forgotten is a different sort of Doctor Who comic to any we’ve discussed before. For one thing, it’s American – so American, in fact, that it didn’t even get a UK release. This was a peculiarity of IDW’s deal to acquire the license: because Panini has the UK license already, none of IDW’s Doctor Who comics could be distributed in the UK (which is why their Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover led with Star Trek – because that made it technically a Star Trek comic that could thus get UK distribution. No, really, the licensing rules are that dumb). 
IDW, upon acquiring the license, commenced with a two-pronged approach. First was a six issue run of Tenth Doctor/Martha Jones comics by Gary Russell, with art by Nick Roche, which was published alongside reprints of 70s/80s Doctor Who Magazine material starting with Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, all with quite slick colouring. (These books are presumably out of print or on their way out of print now that IDW has lost the license, and I actually highly recommend them if you can track them down. Voyager has never looked so good.) The initial Ten/Martha series was followed by Doctor Who: The Forgotten, intended to be by Tony Lee and Pia Guerra, the latter fresh off the esteemed Y: The Last Man series with Brian K. Vaughan, and the former a writer with some Doctor Who pedigree, having written a few Tenth Doctor strips for Doctor Who Magazine (which we’ll speak more of on Wednesday). Technically this is a bit old – it’s properly set right after Journey’s End. But I like doing comics stuff at the end of a Doctor – it’s become quasi-traditional. So. 
The major hook for The Forgotten was that it was the first “all the Doctors ever” story of the new series. That this would be at all novel already feels like an odd historical moment – even if we’ve not had a televised The Thirteen Doctors due to some actors being inconsiderately dead, we get compilations and sets of the entire line of Doctors fairly regularly at this point. And given that this was pointedly not “all the Doctors meet” but rather a story about the Tenth Doctor regaining his memories by exploring a museum of his past selves. Still, this was by far the most substantive crossover between the new series and the classic series that existed to date – especially given that the first issue predated The Next Doctor, and thus predated our first on-screen montage of the classic series.
On the one hand, then, this is a fairly slick production. Tony Lee knows his stuff pretty well, and has researched the rest. There are bits where his characterizations are a bit inept – his Hartnell never feels right, and his Romana is miles off base – but it’s not as though plenty of longstanding Doctor Who writers haven’t fluffed characterizations in their day.
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Outside the Government 16: Dreamland

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The first question with one of these, and by “one of these” I mean bits of Doctor Who made post-2005 that are not television episodes, is why it exists. This is not pejorative in the least – it’s just that with all the brand management that goes into Doctor Who post-2005, causing an officially licensed story featuring David Tennant’s Doctor as the lead character to exist is non-trivial. There are meetings, and budgets, and all sorts of non-trivial processes and hoops to jump through. Which means that a project like Dreamland only exists because of a complex network of politicized corporate decisions.
In the context of 2009, at least, it’s easy to understand. Doctor Who was being very naughty, after all. Coming off of its hottest year ever, a program that was pulling in a fantastic amount of money for the BBC decided to kick up its feet and take a year off prior to returning in a new and altogether more uncertain form. It was a massively high risk strategy, and the fact that Davies (and Moffat) could get away with it speaks volumes about how successful Doctor Who was and how unassailable Davies’s position was at that time. Nevertheless, there were, so to speak, bills to pay and favors due all around. The absence of Doctor Who proper meant an unusual amount of what we might call Doctor Who improper; things like The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. 
Which is to say that a fair part of why the BBC whipped up a roughly episode-length string of six animated episodes to throw onto the recently renamed BBC Red Button service was because Doctor Who owed the BBC a promotional favor, much as the outsized presence of Tennant and Piper in the 2005 Children in Need broadcast existed as a counterweight to the unusual decision to make “Pudsey Cutaway” a straight bit of Doctor Who instead of something that gave way to a comedic conceit at some point. The major purpose of Dreamland was to give the BBC Red Button service something a-list to air. 
At least, that’s the one hand. On the other hand, Dreamland is a rather obviously cheaply made bit of fluff that got farmed out to a de facto Big Finish team with Gary Russell directing and Big Finish stalwarts David Warner and Lisa Bowerman popping up to act. Large swaths of the cast, most blatantly Tim Howar, have clearly not looked at the script prior to recording lines for it. Tennant, as with The Infinite Quest, is on autopilot that’s tempered only by his underlying skill. And the animation style is, to be charitable, complete shit.
This is, to say the least, a problem. There’s a general assumption that animation is somehow easy or trivial – within Doctor Who it’s seen most clearly in the reflexive belief that animating any missing stories that Phil Morris doesn’t happen to be sitting on is just a straightforward and unambiguously sane thing to do, not, apparently, realizing that animation is phenomenally difficult and complex unless you’re actively going for something that supports what might be called a low-fi aesthetic (South Park, for instance, where the fact that the characters all look like paper cutouts is part of the show’s point and conceit).
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Outside The Government: The Gift

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Last War in Albion will be up tomorrow.

It’s November 19th, 2009. The charts haven’t changed. STS-129, the third-from-last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, launches. Barack Obama makes an international trip to China. The Original of Laura, an unfinished novel by Nabokov, is published over his wish that it be burnt upon his death. France qualifies for the 2010 World Cup due to Thierry Henry committing a deliberate handball to score. Oprah Winfrey announces the impending end of her television show. The Large Hadron Collider is turned back on.

While on television… oh dear. The third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures has been in many ways uneven, but The Gift is frankly an unmitigated disaster. Attentive readers may recall a kerfuffle back in the first season of Davies-era Doctor Who when Lawrence Miles, enfant terrible of the late Wilderness Years, famously and controversially lambasted The Unquiet Dead for its alleged xenophobia. The argument went that the episode went to great lengths to have the Doctor refute Rose’s objections to the aliens being allowed to use human cadavers as bodies only to prove Rose right when the aliens really do turn out to be evil. At the time, I largely sided against Miles, suggesting that he was making a reading of the episode that no actual viewer would make, and thus was talking in a vacuum.
Which brings us to The Gift, a story in which a pair of Raxicoricofallapatorians explain that they are not members of the villainous Slitheen family, who had previously been the only Raxicoricofallapatorians we’d seen, but instead members of the virtuous Blathereen family. Much of the cast, particularly Clyde, treats them with suspicion, assuming from the outset that they’re evil. Rani is the only person who defends them, and even Sarah Jane stresses the importance of being suspicious of aliens. Eventually it turns out that the aliens are in fact irredeemably evil – so evil, in fact, that Sarah Jane has to kill them – and we get a final monologue about how there are some good aliens, while offering an overall moral that suspicion and paranoia are the correct way to treat people who are different than us until proven otherwise.
That this is done with the Slitheen, whose original concept was a deliberate cut against the idea that aliens are best identified as a species, is even crueler. The entire point of the Slitheen is that they were set up to trick the audience into thinking they were monsters, when in fact they were people and characters. And the vague hedge that the Blathereen were actually half-Slitheen accomplishes little other than suggesting that there are some people who are just irredeemably evil because they have bad blood in them, and they should probably be killed via explosive farts. 
So really, fuck The Gift. It’s consciously and deliberately xenophobic, there’s no way to read it as anything other than that, and it’s also unambiguously for children, which means that The Sarah Jane Adventures closes out its third season with an act of overt and conscious evil.
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Time Can Be Rewritten Final: The Day of the Doctor

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Which makes it all the stranger that he doesn’t.
Even before time was rewritten, of course, this was true. Davies deliberately inserts a gap between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, even opting to develop the running Queen Elizabeth I joke within it. In this regard, The Day of the Doctor slots in with precision, just as it does with The End of Time, which it goes out of its way to make sure it still fits in with. So much so that Tumblr became an entertaining place in the immediate wake of The Day of the Doctor, as scads of people cried foul about how it contradicted the Davies era only to have scads of people point out all of the tiny little things that Moffat did to actively and meticulously match the Davies era. 
As with many fan debates on Tumblr, the immediate fallout of The Day of the Doctor had no shortage of straw men, with people angrily reacting against points that never actually got made. (See also the “legions” of fans who aren’t going to watch Peter Capaldi because he’s old and unattractive.) Still, there’s an interesting fault line that opens up in the question of just how much of a retcon The Day of the Doctor is – one that is revealing in terms of the sorts of details that each argument prioritizes. 
For one entirely sensible camp, The Day of the Doctor is a retcon only in an additive sense. It simply says “and here’s a bunch of stuff you didn’t know was happening” while playing very actively within the lines of what has gone before. What jumps out here is not the addition of an entirely new incarnation of the Doctor and the wholesale reversal of the end of the Time War, but rather on the numerous conscious nods to the series’ past inserted throughout the episode. So when the Time Lords declare that the High Council’s plans have already failed, this is notable precisely because it checks the box of “how does this fit in with The End of Time,” just as the decision to declare that Arcadia is a Gallifreyan city nicely nods at Doomsday. 
For another entirely sensible, The Day of the Doctor is a massive retcon because of how drastically it shifts the nature of the Time War from an abstract conflict of horrors in the vein of Faction Paradox’s Book of the War to being, basically, a Star Wars movie. Perhaps more significant is the nature of the Doctor’s ultimate weapon. In a Time War, a weapon called the Moment sings of strange and uncanny power. The sense is that the Doctor does not possess a weapon in a conventional sense, but a piece of time itself. Instead we find out that he has a bomb that can wipe out a galaxy and that happens to project an avatar of Billie Piper on the side. The question isn’t, in other words, whether you nod at all the details, but whether you nod at the substance of what the original stories were saying.
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I Couldn’t Save Any Of Them (The Waters of Mars)

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Drip with me.
It’s November 15th, 2009. The charts have changed, but little else has. The Black Eyed Peas are at number one now with “Meet Me Halfway,” with Cheryl Cole, Ke$ha, and Britney Spears also charting. In the meager two days of news, New Zealand qualified for the 2010 World Cup, Belle de Jour, writer of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, upon which the Billie Piper vehicle Secret Diary of a Call Girl was based, revealed her real life identity as Dr. Brooke Magnanti, largely in order to scoop journalists from the Daily Mail who were working to out her, and Barack Obama met with the government of Burma/Myanmar, becoming the first US President to do so.
While on television, The Waters of Mars. If there is one thing about The Waters of Mars that remains curiously unfocused on, it is, of course, the ending. I do not, of course, mean the Time Lord Victorious stuff and Adelaide’s suicide, a sequence that has practically blotted out the remainder of the episode, but rather the final title card, dedicating the episode to the recently deceased Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who during the Jon Pertwee era. 
Letts is easy to overlook in the list of great Doctor Who visionaries, which is odd given that he presided over one of the program’s populist high points. It’s true that in many ways the program he made is the least like any other era of Doctor Who, but for a program defined by an aesthetic of strangeness it seems as though being the odd era out should be a badge of honor. And yet Letts and the Pertwee era retain their “problem era” status in spite of their historical and for that matter continual popularity. 
Much of this, as the several months and book dedicated to the Pertwee era will demonstrate, is a consequence of the fact that Letts’s version of the show was consciously good at doing a couple of things, and rarely was inclined to stray outside of its comfort zone. That these things were unique to the era doesn’t get around a sense that there is a certain lack of adventurousness in the era. Which, to be honest, is a criticism that it’s fairly easy to level at the Davies era as well, with its relatively formulaic season structure that meant that even the adventurous stories slotted into pre-ordained positions in the running order clearly marked out as “here things get a bit weird.” That Davies was doing things that nobody had done with Doctor Who before masked this to an extent, but ultimately no more than UNIT masked the repetitiveness of the Letts era. 
Central to Davies’s approach is what we noticed back when we started the Davies era all those months ago, with Rose: a mode of storytelling that is about the act of switching among differing narrative codes. A Davies story is often a shell game – a case of moving rapidly among different types of stories, trying to get the reader to forget a key component just in time for Davies to reintroduce it and interrupt an expected progression.
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Outside the Government: Mona Lisa’s Revenge

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It’s November 12th, 2009. JLS are at number one with “Everybody in Love,” with Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Westlife, and Lady Gaga also charting. In news, Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela to “prepare for war” against Colombia, the US House of Representatives passes the first version of the health care law these days more commonly known as Obamacare, and, in a desperate attempt to get a third news item, Willie Bain wins the Glasgow North East by-election.
While on television, it’s Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It is difficult to get around the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge features the TARDIS as the Mona Lisa. That this involves certain eccentricities of chronology does not even seem like much of a problem: after all, in The Doctor’s Wife one of the major conceits is that the TARDIS does not experience time chronologically, and thus there is no particular reason why the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge was made two years earlier should have any bearing on the causality here.
We must also admit that Mona Lisa’s Revenge ties in conspicuously with City of Death, the previous time that Doctor Who has intersected the Mona Lisa. From that we know that the Mona Lisa that comes to life here is, if not a fake, at least not strictly speaking the original – that da Vinci in fact painted six additional versions on canvases onto which the Doctor had scrawled “this is a fake” in felt tip marker. 
This latter fact is worth stressing simply because back when we dealt with City of Death, one of our primary concerns was the fact that it was a story about the nature of authenticity – what Walter Benjamin deemed “aura” in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is to say, City of Death is a story about the strange and quasi-mystical allure of the authentic object. The thing that has been touched by the hand of the artist, as it were. Mona Lisa’s Revenge, for all that it is an odd bedfellow to that story, is firmly in the same tradition.
After all, the key event of the story is the presence of the Mona Lisa – the fact that it is on loan from the Louvre, and in the UK. The museum is drenched with Mona Lisa merchandise, and the story thus stresses in a number of ways how many copies and imitations of the image there are. But what’s important is the fact that the Mona Lisa – the one that comes to life and turns out to be rather evil – is the one that Leonardo da Vinci painted. Indeed, the explanation for what’s going on in this story, such as it is, hinges entirely on the medial reality of the painting. The Mona Lisa comes to life because she was painted with paint that happened to have alien rocks in it, or something like that. The explanation is terribly vague, but the underlying point stands: everything that happens in this story stems from the physical object of the Mona Lisa.
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