There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood)
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I’ll Explain Later
Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry. Original post.
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It’s May of 26th, 1995 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z Oasis debuts at number one with “Some Might Say Umbrella.” They remain get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week all story. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Maroon 5, Akon, Snow Patrol, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad Booty Luv also chart.
In the news, the Cutty Sark caught fire while under repairs in Greenwich, in what was believed (but not proven) to be an act of arson. The Crown Prosecution Service decides to charge Andrei Lugovoi for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. AC Milan defeat Liverpool in the UEFA Champions League final. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approves a bill funding the Iraq Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and Afghanistan wars, with progressives failing to get a timetable for withdrawal included, while the Supreme Court issues its ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which declares that one cannot sue for discriminatory pay disparity if the initial decision was made more than 180 days ago. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, dissenting, makes the rare decision to read her dissent from the bench, and the Court’s holding is consciously reversed in 2009 by Congress. A has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March. attempt to lift the commercial moratorium on whaling fails, not that this stops them from whaling, since they just claim that it’s “scientific research.” And Scotland Yard determines that Bob Woolmer died of a heart attack and was not, as some suspected, murdered.
While in books on television, Human Nature/The Family of Blood. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie. Let’s get that out of the way, and then, perhaps more importantly, let’s leave it there. We’ll be back to this story eventually, and we can talk about comparison then. But since I know better than to think I can leave it entirely, the book is better than the movie. So let’s just talk about the book. by which I mean focus on it for a bit. First of all, let us note that saying that the book is better than the television version is not, as such, a criticism of the television version. This is an extraordinary story, through and through. Indeed, the basic question of why one is better is largely one of personal taste, having to do with the fundamental differences between the two.
For now let’s look at the question of authorship. Perhaps the most obvious thing to point out is that it would be difficult for a story with this sort of authorship not to be fantastic. The original book was Paul Cornell, working from a plot he hashed out with Kate Orman, with a tiny but significant assist from Steven Moffat (who plotted John Smith’s children’s fantasy book). The density of quality around the book was staggering even before Russell T Davies shows up to start rewriting bits, which he did, at great length. On top of that you have the authorship of twelve years of history, such that we have a second Paul Cornell involving himself in the authorship. So in total we have a story written by two Paul Cornells, Kate Orman, Steven Moffat, and Russell T Davies.Except Davies’s authorship is also complicated – Davies has said that his rewrites involve imitating the original author, while Cornell has said that Davies pushed him to hew closer to the original book than he’d intended. So we have another author that is a strange hybrid of Cornell and Davies. And this is before we start dealing with the authors who are not writers; David Tennant, for instance, whose Doctor is fundamentally different both from Sylvester McCoy’s and from the Virgin Books iteration of McCoy’s Doctor, itself an alteration of McCoy’s television work.
To start, it’s good. Better than good. Back with Warlock we played at the idea that the New Adventures could compete with serious literary science fiction, but the ruse was see-through. Andrew Cartmel doesn’t have the prose style for it, though he’s not dreadful by any stretch of the imagination. But go ahead. Put Human Nature up against The Diamond Age. It can hold its own and then some. Are there enough different ways to calmly explain that this novel is an absolute triumph? Perhaps not.
And yet so what we have is, on the surface, uninspiring a mess. A text with so many authors that determining the actual process of its construction is nearly impossible. And that’s before we get into the messy question of how to treat the different versions as events within Doctor Who. On the one hand, Human Nature/The Family of Blood is used as an explanation for why Human Nature is non-canonical. This is unnecessary in many ways – there are enough differences that the two can exist without contradiction. They take place in different years, at different schools. On the other hand, there is something The plot isn’t just ripped off from Death Takes a Holiday (clearly something in the air, as three years later the movie was remade execrably as Meet Joe Black), it’s unapologetic about it, even still including the Grim Reaper within it. It’s one of those terribly clever awkward about the idea of the Doctor having such a similar adventure twice. Equally, however, there’s something bizarre about deciding that because the New Adventures were so massively influential that one of them was directly adapted to screen that they are therefore not canon.
But the two versions themselves seem to push us in different directions. The first is largely about novels, and its plot seems to mostly be a canvas stretched out so that Paul Cornell can scrawl his usual enthused claims about the virtues of mundane everyday life and , mixed freely, in this case, with stern lessons about the horrors of war, that are using particularly World War I, the single easiest war of the twentieth century to demonstrate the horrors of, to make their point. The premise is clever, but almost inevitable: the most obvious novel Paul Cornell could possibly have written at this point. So what is it about this book that sparks so gloriously?. The second, however, is far more ambivalent about war. In the book, Timothy is a Red Cross volunteer and conscientious objector in World War I, and in the wartime section he saves Hadleman, a character with no equivalent in the television version. In the television version he not only fights in the war, he explicitly rejects Martha’s claim that “you don’t have to fight,” saying, “I think we do.” And he saves Hutchinson, the thuggish (though less thuggish than in the book) and posh schoolboy, who, in the book, is explicitly killed in the same shelling that Hadleman survives. This is not the only place in which the televised version actively softens the anti-violence of the book. Both book and televised version contain scenes in which Hutchinson demands permission to beat Timothy. In the book this leads to a lovely scene in which John Smith at first attempts to get out of having to punish Timothy, and then pulls a fluffy pink slipper out of his bag, happily proclaiming that it shouldn’t hurt, leading Hutchinson to abandon the idea of punishing Timothy. In the televised version, Smith pauses, then grants Hutchinson permission to administer a beating, and that’s the end of it.
[Perhaps the most obvious thing to point out is that it would be difficult for a story with this sort of authorship not to be fantastic. This is Paul Cornell, working from a plot he hashed out with Kate Orman, with a tiny but significant assist from Steven Moffat (who plotted John Smith’s children’s fantasy book). The density of quality around this book is staggering even before Russell T Davies shows up to start and his rewritinges bits. And while it may be an obvious Paul Cornell book it’s worth pointing out that Cornell has never had the freedom to write one of those before. His previous three books were all Big Plot Event books – two wrapping up long-running story arcs and a third doing Ace’s departure. This is actually the first time he’s actually had the freedom to just write a Doctor Who story like he wants to write it without any distractions to speak of. are a complicated business. I manifestly do not mean this ethically. The fact that his rewrites are simply part of the television business is clear. Note that the list of writers he doesn’t touch is clearly not based on quality, but on professional courtesy; he doesn’t rewrite people who have been in charge of their own shows. Davies is on fine ground here – writers like Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon also do rewrites on scripts. Davies, unlike, say, Sorkin, generally does not take a writer’s credit, and his regard for the original authors’ vision is clear. Furthermore, the moments where it feels most objectionable – where he’s talked publicly about it – are almost all from A Writer’s Tale, a remarkable book that works precisely because of its candid and uncensored nature, and because it reveals more than is normally revealed about process. It would indeed be awful if Davies routinely vocally took credit for the writing on every story, but he doesn’t. He talks openly about his process in one very specifically tailored book.]
This is part of a much larger set of differences between the two. Perhaps most tellingly, Human Nature/The Family of Blood has a second title, and one that is perhaps more apt. This is not a story entirely about human nature; it focuses on its monsters in a particular way. The idea that Paul Cornell’s novel could ever be called The Family of Blood, as if it were about monsters as such, is ludicrous. But on television The Family of Blood becomes its own second version of Human Nature.In this regard, Like much of the Tennant era, any Paul Cornell book, Human Nature The Family of Blood is in part a reaction against the Pertwee era Davies-era Doctor Who at large. There is a line of dialogue in it where Hutchinson accuses Timothy of being a coward, and Timothy replies, “oh yes, sir. Every time.” This line, of course, evokes the Ninth Doctor’s declaration to the Daleks in The Parting of the Ways. And yet while Timothy may adopt that position initially, by the end of the episode he has, as we’ve seen, reversed his position, seemingly inspired by the Doctor, such that The Family of Blood serves as a reiteration of the fact that, in the eyes of the series, the Doctor fails in The Parting of the Ways, and it is only Rose who saves him.
At its the heart of its this engagement with the Davies era is an engagement with Human Nature itself, which has an alternate different verision of the question of what the Doctor coming to Earth and living among people would be. Instead of a stand-offish patrician defined heavily by how he separates himself from the world and by his inadequate performance of humanity we get, at last, the alternative: a man who loves being human. Nature is about A man who is, if anything, too good at being human, who does not put himself above the world but allows himself to be pulled into it. And being mid-90s Paul Cornell, that is not a matter of falling to earth. Far from it, in Human Nature the Doctor finds himself rising to earth.
But in The Family of Blood the Doctor most certainly does fall to Earth. In Human Nature, the Doctor becomes human to better understand Benny. In The Family of Blood he does it to avoid a bunch of monsters, as a quickly cobbled together ruse. In Human Nature The parallels to the Pertwee era are instructive, simply because they are so numerous. Not just in the “becoming human” aspect of it, but in a larger set of inversions and parallels. Spearhead From Space is, of course, where the Doctor acquires his second heart, becoming less human than he’d ever been. In Human Nature he sheds it, undoing that mistake. Human Nature reveals itself to have had a Time Lord monitoring the entire situation, turning its events symbolically into a response to The War Games in that it is another test for the Doctor to prove himself in. And, of course, The War Games is heavily concerned with the nature of war, and specifically with the first World War. Instead of landing in early 70s Britain the Doctor this time lands in the lead-up to the same war. If The War Games punished the Doctor for his inability to help the lost soldiers of World War I who were caught up in a mismanaged and disastrous parody of war, Human Nature finally thrusts him in their midst and demands that he find a way to help them. The climax of the book, in which John Smith makes the decision to sacrifice himself, even harkensing back to Troughton’s fateful declaration in The Moonbase about monsters, saying that “there are monsters out there, yes. Terrible things. But you don’t have to become one in order to defeat them.” But in The Family of Blood Smith is (like Eccleston’s Doctor) too much the coward to change back, requiring Joan to push him towards it. And the ending, with the Doctor’s horrific punishments of the Family, makes it clear that in fact you do have to become a monster to defeat them, or, at least, that he does.
And if this comes perilously close to calling PertweeTennant’s Doctor a monster, focusing heavily on his we can at least accept this in the strictest etymological sense. Monster shares a root with “demonstrate,” both deriving from the Latin, and meaning “to show.” Monstrosity is thus primarily a factor of exhibition: of being seen. (This is why the phenomenon of monsters lurking in the shadows is powerful: because the monster must necessarily exit from the shadows and be seen in order to be monstrous, creating tension.) Monstrosity is a visible and spectacular otherness. As a television episode, much of the point of The Family of Blood is simply to show off David Tennant’s acting chops. Tennant is credited in the first episode as playing John Smith, and this is apparently how he introduced himself at the read-through when it came time to announce his name and what part he was playing. It is difficult to say that this is a bad thing as such; Tennant is a very good actor. Indeed, in many ways his presence is what justifies the story. Much as I love Sylvester McCoy, this story wouldn’t actually have worked on television with him. He doesn’t have the flexibility to pull it off. Even though the novel trades gorgeously on the fact that John Smith is not a straightforwardly beautiful leading man, but is instead a weird and unsettling figure, McCoy himself could never do what Tennant does in the closing scenes, successfully playing the Doctor impersonating John Smith and having it be distinct from either the Doctor or John Smith. Few actors could – it’s hard to imagine this story working with Eccleston, or even with Matt Smith. The only other actor the series has ever had that could pull a script like this off got one in the form of The Enemy of the World.
But there’s a narcissism to it – a degree to which this story is simply a matter of showing off. It knows full well that it’s going to pull on the heartstrings, and it engages in a relentlessly methodical quest to get the audience to cry. Yes, it managed handily, but it’s also visibly aware of its inevitable success, so much so that at times it feels like it’s just calmly patting itself on the back for how very, very good it’s being. Again, this isn’t a criticism – it’s actually every bit as good as it thinks. But it also fetishizes its own exhibition in an almost monstrous way.
And that, at least, does describe the Pertwee era, both in terms of Pertwee’s glammed up Doctor and in terms of the era’s conceptual dissonance with the rest of Doctor Who.
This hinges, of course, on something that was invisible to the Pertwee era itself. Following on a mere six years of history, two radically different Doctors and a show that had already wildly and dramatically transformed itself from a broad anthology to a focused weekly roll of Man vs. Monsters, the Pertwee era could throw it all out and reinvent itself. Shows did that. The Avengers, in its first season, had almost nothing to do with the show it became. It’s in hindsight, there’s a that we see the weird dissonance symmetry between this and of it and the way in which an earthbound Doctor was a blind alley that didn’t last two seasons. But the Pertwee era didn’t have the ability to realize that it was, in the larger context of Doctor Who, a narrative collapse. This context is emboited within the story in the form of the Journal of Impossible Things, itself a reworking of Steven Moffat’s contribution to the original novel. It’s telling that the Journal is a fundamentally messy document. It is a Cornell knows it going in. He’s not about to hand Andy Lane a human Doctor who doesn’t travel in space and time and lives in the World War I era. The premise of this book in which is doomed. Everything about it serves to wreck Doctor Who has been as a concept. And since Cornell knows it he’s able to outright invert it. Instead of threatening a narratively collapsed, its textual primacy challenged. The book is full of crossed out passages and chaotic writing, resembling nothing so much as the manuscript for William Blake’s great unfinished work The Four Zoas, which, after abandoning, he and averting it at the end, Paul Cornell just collapses the narrative at the start and spends the entire book threatening to rebuild it. Much as the Doctor rises to earth here, the narrative does not collapse but reassembled into his last great prophetic book, Jerusalem. And yet within it is the history of Doctor Who. Tellingly, within it we get our first proper glimpse of the wilderness years from which Human Nature originated, with all possibility that Paul McGann doesn’t count officially rejected on screen. Except that the book is cobbled together such that we might as well have seen Richard E. Grant. The book is the truth of Doctor Who, but it’s only finding the path by which the Doctor can build himself out of the tattered remnants of his own the show’s identity. This is echoed in other odd and coincidental ways – John Smith’s costume, for instance, is in many ways a dead ringer for Matt Smith’s, while in Human Nature one of the villains’ plans is to impersonate a future incarnation of the Doctor – specifically the Tenth. Entertainingly, Benny sees through the ruse because the supposed future Doctor is not a vegetarian, which, of course, Tennant’s Doctor isn’t either. The story, in other words, is drenched in the iconography of a disassembled and collapsed Doctor.
Put another way, the question that The Family of Blood asks is “who is the Doctor.” In Human Nature, this is answered The key moment comes two thirds of the way through the book, after one of John Smith’s students has just been violently killed by the attacking aliens. Smith considers grabbing a gun and attacking the aliens, but hesitates, realizing that this simply isn’t who he is, no matter who he is. He asks Benny what the Doctor would do, and she answers, “he’d find a way to turn this all around… He’d make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He’d save everybody’s life and find a way to win.” And Smith considers, then turns to his students and declares, “There’s another way. Throw away your guns.” It’s striking to compare this to the account of who the Doctor is given in The Family of Blood: “He’s like fire and ice and rage. He’s like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He’s ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And he’s wonderful.” What’s interesting is that so much of this is more accurate as a description of Human Nature’s Doctor – that is, the New Adventures version of the McCoy Doctor.
This is not So, the unusual for Cornell,: who delights in Gaiman-esque tell-don’t-show statements that triumphantly explain the basic nature of the Doctor. One of his best, of course, harkens from Love and War, where he adapts Terrance Dicks’s “never cruel nor cowardly” . phrase as the Doctor’s self-description. This, of course, has implication for The Family of Blood, where Timothy invokes Eccleston’s previous renunciation of that description.
[And typical of Cornell, he goes with the employs Gaiman-esque imagery at a key moment, using a strategy of tell-don’t-show, giving the Doctor through a nice, proper monologue about how this is the Doctor punishes the Family, imprisoning one in chains forged in the core of a dwarf star, and another in “every mirror,” which is an image nicked directly from Gaiman, who in Sandman locates Despair’s realm as lying behind every mirror. who he is, as either Smith or the Doctor, and how he doesn’t want to give that up. It works beautifully, as ever. It’s all the sort of unapologetic frockery that defines Paul Cornell. The book even has a joke about it, as Benny, upon reading the Doctor’s instructions on what’s going on, stomps off for the wardrobe room, proclaiming that “this adventure was going to require a serious frock.”]It’s a good phrase, and an important one, as it gets at an easy thing to miss about But what’s really telling about this is how it shows the fundamental thematic differences between Human Nature and The Family of Blood. Human Nature is ultimately about the old frock/gun debate that raged during the wilderness years. Cornell was always an unrepentent advocate of the , which is that it’s equivalent to the comedy/drama division, or even the serious/unserious division. Which should be obvious, as nobody would have come up with a whole new distinction just to do comedy/drama. I’ve used the phrase “serious drama” more than a few times, but in general as a sort of mocking phrase that implicates a particular type of drama that is deeply invested in its own self-seriousness. In its most extreme form “serious drama” becomes borderline unwatchable – the sort of thing one watches purely because it’s “serious drama” and thus one has some sort of moral obligation to do so. This was the crux of my ambivalence over Sanctuary – that it was trying for “serious drama.” And more to the point, that Doctor Who just isn’t all that good at that.
But implicit in this critique of “serious drama” is the idea that “serious” and “drama” are in some way inherent allies, or that “unserious drama” or “serious comedy” are non-sensical things that are obviously inferior. And this is at the heart of the gun/frock debate: ultimately both sides are shooting for drama. Even the most comedic of the frocks, which is probably Gareth Roberts, consistently grounds his stories in human drama and experience and tries to tell genuinely moving stories. And this also gets at the ways in which the “gun” side is almost completely outflanked in this debate. The frock perspective, which allows itself a Terrance Dicks-style ambivalence that recognizes that the dramatic and the over-the-top romantic are not only not antagonistic but actively complimentary. In Human Nature, in fact, Cornell openly mocks Whereas the gun perspective, by deciding that drama comes out of gravitas, leaves itself wide-open to critique. A critique, it should be noted, that Cornell gives voice to, having a character muse about “how close masculinity is to melodrama.” Which, well, yes. Yes it is. And that’s the problem with the gun side – it so rarely realizes just how silly it is.
The problem is that Human Nature was such a wild success that it basically killed the gun/frock debate off. The frocks won, much like Xena: Warrior Princess, know exactly how silly they are, but decline to accept that this in some way imposes a limitation on what they can do. And this book is Paul Cornell going ahead and demonstrating just how far frockery can go and just how dramatic and effective it can be. Nobody who watches the new series can seriously doubt that A story that is unabashedly sentimental, full of humor and warmth, and can nevertheless be genuinely and unapologetically dramatic. But this, in turn, makes the This also makes sense of the somewhat over-obvious World War I setting strangely unnecessary. In the Because this isn’t a book that’s retreading the ground explored by Blackadder Goes Forth about the horrors of war. It’s a book, World War I is needed to show about how a man who is never cruel or cowardly can stand up to ithose horrors. It needuses World War I not as an easy crutch to make a statement about how horrible war is, but as the single most horrific moment of war available to it, so that it can show the Doctor as up to the task of outshining it.But by the time of The Family of Blood this isn’t necessary in the same way, and so World War I becomes a scene of tragic honor, a point hammered home by the episode ending with the Doctor and Martha paying an elderly Timothy one last visit. Which is, in many ways, the central problem with The Family of Blood. And, of course, the real point is that this sort of drama can only happen from Cornell’s approach. A serious-minded dramatic approach could never come close to the emotional impact of Human Nature comes specifically from the context of 1995. It comes from the fact that Paul Cornell is at once a hopeless romantic and an heir to the social justice-minded approach of the Cartmel era – that he has one foot in the angry punk world and one in a more optimistic one. It’s a book by a twenty-eight-year-old who still entertains the possibility that blowing up the world might be a good idea, whereas this is television by an older and wiser forty-year-old. In the end, I’m more sympathetic to the twenty-eight-year-old, but then again, as a thirty-one-year-old, one imagines I would be. But the result is that what was originally a book about righteously making a case for a particular vision of what Doctor Who could be becomes a television story about confidently telling the story of a doomed love affair. Human Nature worked because it had the possibility of controversy. In a The book only works because it openly invites the reader to be an unrepentant romantic about things. It’s not just that this works dramatically, it’s that its sense of levity and joy is the reason it works. This is Cornell killing the gun/frock debate off. And fair enough. Well done. Aesthetically speaking, debate over, frocks win. This is the future: an aesthetic that where everyone recognizes that irony, camp, and outright silliness are not only wholly compatible with drama, they make it is somewhat less better and more effective.
But so much of this comes down to how titanically good the original was. In a better world we’d be able to jump ahead here. Not that there aren’t some marvelous books to come in the next decade of Doctor Who, but let’s be honest, because hindsight lets us be ruthlessly accurate here: this is a good enough Doctor Who story to be made for television in the modern era. It was good enough to get a Hugo nomination a decade later, and for a version of itself that wasn’t even as good as this book. In the original post I a better world wishe’d we could just skip the intervening decade and bring Doctor Who back now while by frantically waving this book around and saying “Look! Look! See how good it can be!” We caouldn’t. We didn’t. And This is the nasty consequence is that when the circumstances arose and the series could come back, some vital part of the book’s fire had drained away. The original book burns with a passionate vision of what of that whole gap we discussed about Sliders. Too many people think that Doctor Who could be is just like, even as it runs into the agonizing frustration that it cannot be that, at least not as a piece of mass culture, and that were it to come back, it would in practice end up as a cut-rate Sliders. The Family of Blood honors the book’s success, as well it should. This is the last time we’ll talk about Paul Cornell on the blog, and there are few better ways he could go out. That the series was able to acknowledge the debt it owes to his 90s work, and to admit that he provides the missing link between the Cartmel and Davies eras is as good a thing as the fact that Terrance Dicks got to write a Tenth Doctor novel. And the episode is On a good. It’s better than good, really – it’s day it’s just like The X-Files, which is at least a halfway decent show, but is still little more than as well-done as cult a television can be done. version Human Nature can possibly be.
But in between these two versions, in the space between vision and revision, made up of fragments of the two is the true Human Nature. The one that properly demonstrates the inexpressibly When in fact Doctor Who is like this – something more remarkable and weird and beautiful than any of those. But there’s nothing close to this in the vocabulary of television yet. Right now the closest thing on television to a working model for Doctor Who is Xena: Warrior Princess, and it’s utterly, comically limited compared to this. So instead of a twenty-eight-year-old cutting away to victory we get ten years of Doctor Who second-guessing itself and stumbling around messily while television tries to finally catch up to Paul Cornell. Alas. Hooray.
September 18, 2013 @ 1:19 am
You know, I actually prefer the TV version. I agree that Timothy shouldn't have been fighting and his reply that Martha leads a dangerous life (when's it's a fictional one and WWI was REAL) is a little cringe-making; I'd have had him saying "they'll need a doctor…".
But I do prefer the love story resolution. The TV Doctor comes across as an unfeeling bastard, unlike the sympathetic Smith. He tells Joan he can feel everything Smith does, when we know he can't; the book has him apologising that he can't feel that way and Joan blandly accepts it with good wishes.
I hate all that "fire and ice" stuff but I don't think we're meant to like the Doctor in the TV version.
And why punish the Family at all if they're going to die in a month anyway?
By the way, your essay would be easier to read if you put the earlier article in first, rather than lacing them together and striking one out. 🙂
September 18, 2013 @ 1:28 am
Wow. Thank you Phil. Thank you indeed.
I have not read Human nature and had not read any of the New Adventures at the time when the televised version aired. I knew they existed in 2005, but did not have any as I had absolutely no contact with the show or it's books during the Time war Years. I have since picked up some copies of books such as The Left-handed Hummingbird and Blood Harvest.
So without knowing the book at all in any way whatsoever, I was blown away by the story when I first watched it. Imagine coming across this tale as an innocent in the world of Who. That's how it felt for me and my heartstrings were indeed tugged and I was very happy to allow that.
I can really understand that from the perspective of those who read the book first that this televised version would pale in comparison. I think though this was an amazing achievement to choose to take such a book and present it to the unaware mass audience – mindblowing it was for me, really. (not that I am mass audience, I am now again a die hard fan!)
So thanks again Phil – I agree that this is a great story made up of the past and present, many writers and all of the spaces in between Even when I watched it the first time, oblivious of the story's history, it felt as if the tale had the mass of some unseen greater life intruding into it.
September 18, 2013 @ 3:47 am
You got your Navidson Record in my Doctor Who blog.
September 18, 2013 @ 4:11 am
Interesting stuff. The bit about the differences between the Two Tims is significant, to me at least. Self-pimping is rather infra-dig, but I'm going to quietly leave this here:
http://www.tardisbigbang.com/Round1/16_two_smiths10.php
September 18, 2013 @ 5:07 am
Practical thanks: If I ever land a university position where I have to teach Heidegger/Derrida, this is how I'll illustrate the strikeout technique of talking about traces. In fact, it makes far more sense for a new audience to that style of writing to see it here, when they haven't learned enough of the philosophical tradition to feel its weight. I read the book first too, in the early 2000s when the BBC made some notable and hard-to-find Virgin books available on its website for free. This too was a reiterated version: there were extra illustrations that gave a better visual sense to the story's events.
Because in this case, that really is a brilliant way to describe how the original book (and your original essay on the book) haunts the current television version (and your new essay on the television version). The contrast also allows us a better view of the subtleties of how the Seventh Doctor worked. The Virgin era frequently cast McCoy's Doctor in epic terms, how much he was a monster or otherwise alien from the humans he befriended, but many of the stories, and the Seventh Doctor's own conscience, brought him back into camaraderie with humanity. That historical contrast also helps us see how truly monstrous the Tenth Doctor can be. Especially in his last conversation with Joan, the Seventh Doctor is aware of his failings and admits them, apologizing for them. The Tenth Doctor is convinced that he's the same person as Smith, when the whole story has already demonstrated that he isn't.
Tim serves a completely different function in the televised story because he speaks to the above problem here, when in the original book he was a voice for pacifism. On TV, he delivers the monologue that justifies the Doctor by describing precisely what a monster he is: the fire and ice monologue. This is the Doctor who's capable of doling out those hideous punishments to the Family, and will culminate in the ethical repugnance of the Time Lord Victorious, the Doctor whose ultimate expression is the demand to be obeyed ("You would make a good Dalek"). Where did that come from?
Anyway, Tim, yes. Tim. Because he praises the Doctor for his monstrousness, he doesn't have to face that challenge from Joan that the Doctor is ethically better when he's humanized. When I watched this story, Joan's point always stuck with me, lingered with me as an expression of a truth about the Doctor that he didn't want to hear. And I didn't want to hear it either, because I didn't want the Doctor to reach a point where it needed saying. My first Doctor was McCoy, the Doctor who could be monstrous, but limited himself because he understood his tendency to monstrousness as an ethical failing on his part. Tim's monologue always struck me as perverse, situating the Doctor in an order more like The Great Old Ones, when he should be in our order. The episode (and its various trailers both for this episode and throughout the Davies era) positions Tim as voicing the heroic elements of the Doctor. But this epic character has always been what alienates me from the Davies era, even as I love so many individual stories and I'm so glad he brought the show back from its cult. The conscience of the young Cornell, and the conscience of the Seventh Doctor, haunts the middle-aged Cornell, Davies, and Tenth Doctor with the knowledge that his epic existence is not to be celebrated, but is a reason for therapy.
September 18, 2013 @ 5:22 am
"And why punish the Family at all if they're going to die in a month anyway?"
Because death isn't the punishment we often think it is. Not compared to immortality.
September 18, 2013 @ 5:26 am
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September 18, 2013 @ 5:30 am
Blimey, that was hard to read – but in a good way.
I lose a lot of the impact of this analysis, though, through not having read the book. Must do so, someday – I've still got the eBook downloaded from the BBC website Way Back When lurking on my hard drive, somewhere.
September 18, 2013 @ 5:31 am
"By the way, your essay would be easier to read if you put the earlier article in first, rather than lacing them together and striking one out."
Easier, but not better. Such juxtapositions! Such mirroring! And, I dunno, it really conveys the sense of wholesale rewriting, as if from an other editor. Like what Davies did with Cornell's script, but also what Cornell's script did with Cornell's book. Reminds me of the "editing essay" Phil posted a few weeks back. And it also speaks to how much the vocal Who critics clamor for the old division of Producer/Script Editor.
September 18, 2013 @ 5:32 am
Lindos — they're not just for breakfast anymore!
September 18, 2013 @ 5:37 am
By the way, your essay would be easier to read if you put the earlier article in first, rather than lacing them together and striking one out. 🙂
But where's the fun in that?
September 18, 2013 @ 5:58 am
I started watching Who with repeats of Tom Baker in America. I re-started watching Who with Matt Smith and have gone back and watched all of new Who. I'm not in the process of watching old Who (just about to finish Hartnell).
I find it fascinating to observe the evolution of The Doctor with the constant question of whether he is the universe's greatest pacifist or its greatest monster constantly struggling throughout. It's the question that is really at the core of what makes the character of The Doctor so fascinating. As children, we might like to think of The Doctor as this lovable, silly man with a magic box. But as we grow up we realize that there is a side to him that is truly frightening (the story of Amy is almost a proxy for the relationship of long-time viewers to the show).
The question, of course, can never be truly answered. Because, if it was, then the show would have to end. We can't have that.
September 18, 2013 @ 6:04 am
Love the description of A Journal of Impossible Things as a corrupted version of Doctor Who itself rather than the Doctor's diegetic memories. It makes this serial, in my mind, seem like some kind of anti-Mind Robber…where the Doctor becomes trapped in the Land of Non-Fiction and must struggle to become fictional once more.
(Which I initially dismissed as a silly idea…until I remembered the names John Smith gave to his parents…)
September 18, 2013 @ 7:01 am
I can't really judge Human Nature the book. I don't consider them "canon" and, frankly, have found them most often lacking in entertainment value. (Oddly enough, I do like the straightforward stories as mentioned in your write up on Terrance Dicks … a book I thoroughly enjoyed.)
Human Nature/Family of Blood is really an anomaly that I sometimes forget about completely. Not that its bad in anyway, but that it drifts so far from the norm. I find its like a blank spot in my mind. But, I do like the story quite a bit.
But, I would also point to this as the beginning of the "rot" in the RTD era. It is, as you say, an acting exercise for David Tennant and that seems to be the basis for future inexcusably silly such "exercises" that Tennant could not pull off. In my opinion, it works here because it is so different. He IS John Smith for much of the story, not the Doctor.
One thing I should mention is that, for me, this episode is very much about Martha. She is the Doctor in this episode. Since you were very much interested in the novel vs show, I think you missed that opportunity to discuss "The Doctor crashes into "All Creatures Great and Small" or something to that effect.
A lot of random thoughts thrown out … flame away. 🙂
September 18, 2013 @ 7:40 am
By the way, your [strike]essay would be easier to read if you put the earlier article in first[/strike] shoelaces are undone; you might consider [strike]rather than[/strike] lacing them [strike]together and striking[/strike] ; over and [strike]one[/strike] out.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:00 am
Point the First: An absolute Corker! I love these entries. It might take some work on my part but I get far more out than I put in.
Point the Second: This is where Tennent's Doctor and I parted ways. I had a great deal of affection for him until this point, and he had been in the running to replace McGann as my Doctor. And then…there was this story. Which at the time I found kind of abhorrent and continue to. Everyone who dies in this story, does so because the Doctor chose to run instead of stand. Because he chose to try and wait out his foes instead of take care of them. And the result? 4 Dead to provide hosts to the family, the headmaster and (IIRC) several people at the town dance. The Doctor says he cannot risk them gaining his lifespan or access to the TARDIS. So why not take them on a chase through time and space for a month? Or put their vessel in a situation where it pops out of the vortex and is destroyed? Or materialize on board an sabotage the vessel?
Well because it would not make a very good episode you say. Well an extra diegetic answer is not good enough for me. Would a man who is “never cruel, nor cowardly” let monsters rampage across the country side trying to wait them out so his hands might stay clean? And as for cruel? Have we ever seen the Doctor do something like this before? This is where we see the core of the Tenth: he is arrogant and believes in his own right to decide what happens, and damn the cost. He would rather pay lip service to his morals rather than put them in action. It’s all good to not kill, to try and preserve life and let the family flame out. And if 7 or 8 bald apes need to die so the Time Lord’s hands remain clean, then so be it.
This is an excellent story. There are some knockout performances. Martha is at her best here. The Family is creepy and unsettling. It’s only a shame that it comes with an episode where I lose my taste for this regeneration.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:01 am
The strikethrough technique is interesting, but it's really the sideways excerpts in the "margins" that make it; without them it would be just Word's Compare Documents feature. With them it's your own Journal of Impossible Things.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:17 am
You must have been pleased to find the Blake illustration. It had me wondering for a moment whether this and Blink were originally broadcast in reverse order.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:19 am
I presume the Doctor expected to hide more effectively. He underestimated the Family's ability to track him.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:48 am
I hate, hate, hate this story, partially for the reasons you describe, and partially because so many others seem to love it so much. Aside from the utter nonsense of attempting to wait out antagonists who can travel freely through time, for me it comes down to this: this person who devises elaborate, eternal punishments for his foes is not the Doctor, and for anyone (including RTD) who believes otherwise, this is where we part ways. No argument, no compromise; leave your jusifications and explanations about the alchemical nature of the show at the door. That the script never even once contemplates the obvious alternative to this Doctor-in-name-only's attempt at being merciful–simply NOT being cruel and cowardly–makes me hate it all the more.
September 18, 2013 @ 8:49 am
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September 18, 2013 @ 8:51 am
David Anderson: Which does not take away from the fact he'd rather keep his hands clean and put a large group of defenseless people in danger rather than clean up after himself.
David Thiel: I am glad at least one person agrees with me about this.
September 18, 2013 @ 9:00 am
Great post but I have to say I'm a little disappointed you didn't tackle the "Martha deals with racism" angle to this story. I know there is a LOT more going on, but it's the one and only time, to my memory, that the new show tackles racial inequality issues head-on.
September 18, 2013 @ 9:05 am
I agree with you, but considering the over-arching project of the RTD years seems to be that the Doctor fails his own ideals as often as he upholds them, I can accept it. It makes me mad at the Doctor but not the show. The Doctor is not an uncomplicated, one-dimensional hero, and I think the overall narrative of Who is the stronger for it.
September 18, 2013 @ 9:51 am
1) Reading a post obviously written in the spirit of Molly Bloom; expecting to find the reason for that revealed during the text, maybe as a punchline
2) Not having encountered expected explanation, asking yourself if "Hooray" is meant to echo "yes I said yes I will Yes", which is among the less far-fetched theories you come up with
3) Learning that the Feedly app for Android completely ignores the strike-through tag
September 18, 2013 @ 10:29 am
That makes it no easier to sit down and watch a man we are supposed to find heroic, get innocent people killed. It might fit into a larger arc, it might make the narrative strong from a distance but how does it feel to watch it? I am left cold. Not really wanting to see anything else with this man who calls himself the Doctor.
It's a good thing Blink has so little of the Doctor in it. After this I always need a pallet cleanser.
September 18, 2013 @ 11:18 am
I tend to agree; I don't expect the Doctor to be an uncomplicated one-dimensional hero (I'm a McCoy fan for heaven's sake), but I prefer it when he's not actually the monster.
September 18, 2013 @ 11:48 am
But why does he have to be either a Hero or a Monster? He's both at the same time…which is pretty human, really. OK so you want him to be a hero. But a "hero" in the classical sense always has a fatal flaw which causes him to over-reach himself. A hero who never makes any mistakes is a god.
The Doctor doesn't want to be (and the show doesn't want him to be) a god, and so he makes mistakes, then runs from them, tries to deny them, over-reacts to compensate for them. He is punishing the Family for his failures, and it's that kind of over-reach that leads to his downfall. It's all part of the revamp of the Doctor from Icon to Character that began with McCoy. You'd never spend a minute puzzling over what the Fourth Doctor's motivations are, or what the Second Doctor might feel guilty about. Whereas RTD's show is a thorough interrogation of the very idea that we want flawless heroes to believe in.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:07 pm
His behavior here is monstrous. It is callous and self serving. It's not a fatal flaw, because in a classical sense it would lead to HIS undoing. Here? It gets innocent people killed while he gets to walk away. What does this adventure cost him? Nothing.
The interrogation fails if you want to abandon the show in disgust. We still have to want to see more of him. Whenever I hear that noise and see the Tenth Doctor walk out, I feel disappointment. There is only one version of our Time Lord that I enjoy less.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:13 pm
I assume we're supposed to believe that the Doctor thought hiding would minimise the probable number of innocent deaths. Any other course of action would be more likely to get people killed. (Also, he was planning to open the watch at the first sign of trouble. Also, it was the TARDIS that picked that time and place.)
I don't think we're meant to exonerate the Doctor entirely, but at the same time I think it's preferable to assume he made a reasonable decision rather than an unreasonable one if assuming the former is more enjoyable.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:16 pm
And there's no reason for any of it. Three weeks prior, Mr. "No Second Chances" was pleading for rapprochement with the Daleks. The Daleks. Then along comes a set of third-string villains, and suddenly the Doctor is so full of fire and ice and unlimited rice pudding that the only way he can stop himself from subjecting them to cruel, Gaimanesque torments is to wipe his own mind and hide out amongst a bunch of soft targets. No. This is not only not the Doctor as I know him, it's not the character he was the week before, or will be the week after.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:25 pm
Yeah, I was also getting a House of Leaves vibe from this post.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:31 pm
That's fine. It's not the same show it was last week or next week either.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:33 pm
Yes. But "Fear Her" or "Daleks Take Manhattan" did not make me actively dislike the either of the main characters of the program nor make it less likely for me to watch the week after.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:46 pm
Did any of you have a look at my longer comment from earlier this morning? Because Phil and I are both speaking to your concerns. His essay concentrates on the differences and similarities of the novel and the TV story, but those differences include a shade of monstrousness to the Tenth Doctor that the Seventh Doctor purposely stepped away from. And Tim's role in the story completely changes. He was a voice for a pacifist perspective on problem solving in the novel, but on TV, he's a voice for the epic conception of the Doctor's character that situates him as beyond the concerns of humans. The presence in the story of Tim's praise lets the Doctor forget Joan's lesson that the Tenth Doctor's disconnection from humanity takes him beyond good and evil in a destructive way.
I also think some of you guys miss the point of the Doctor's original plan in the story. He hid so he could let the Family drift until they died without doing any harm, just like the third-rate villains they were. They were so violent to the people the Doctor cared about (all the townspeople, the school students and officials, Joan, and Smith himself) once they found him, that he wasn't going to let them off easy again. He gave into vengeance only AFTER the Family's massacres. And he justified that vengeance as punishment. They were punishments specifically speaking to the fact that they were third-rate villains trying to punch above their weight. They received epic punishments far beyond their own powers to teach them not to tangle with gods. "Gods like me," says the Tenth Doctor. It reminded me of those old Greek stories where mortals tried to mess around with godly business and were casually given theatrical punishments of eternal torture.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:47 pm
OK so a lot to comment on.
I like the style of it – did you write the book/Pertwee-era comparison knowing it could be adapted (as it were) to TV-story/Davies-era comparison?
“In this regard, Like much of the Tennant era, The Family of Blood is in part a reaction against the Davies-era Doctor Who at large.”
Considering the Tennant era is much of the Davies-era that's an odd notion but I understand what you mean, I think.
The question of the Time War hovers over this era.
I think partly this is why Remembrance Day is brought to the fore, as that means World War II as well as World War I, which gives greater meaning to the “you don’t have to fight,” – “I think we do” lines, especially given the longstanding Nazi parallels of the Daleks.
Between the broadcast of this story and today, the last known trench veteran of World War I, who was British, died.
So for that reason also – veterans were still remembering that day – I think it was appropriate to acknowledge Remembrance Day during 2007.
“fluffy pink slipper” So very different from the TV version.
I haven't read the book – this element, lost for the TV, sums up perhaps a difference: for this TV story, John Smith is very much a regular human, and the John Smith of the book sounds like a Doctorish human.
That scene, different from the book, and John Smith's casual racism regarding Martha emphasise this is NOT the Doctor.
“In Human Nature, the Doctor becomes human to better understand Benny. In The Family of Blood he does it to avoid a bunch of monsters, as a quickly cobbled together ruse.”
Interesting point – the Doctor on TV doesn't even want to understand humanity.
“The book is full of crossed out passages and chaotic writing”
“And yet within it is the history of Doctor Who. Tellingly, within it we get our first proper glimpse of the wilderness years from which Human Nature originated, with all possibility that Paul McGann doesn’t count officially rejected on screen.”
So to continue that reading, that book, like the wilderness years contains the essentials of what Doctor Who is, including the Eighth Doctor, but it's rewritten and amorphous.
I like how the Cybermen as drawn are the essence of the Cybermen, their head-handles and blank expression and not much else.
“This context is emboited within the story in the form of the Journal of Impossible Things, itself a reworking of Steven Moffat’s contribution to the original novel.”
Fractal-tastic.
September 18, 2013 @ 12:54 pm
It's meant to be a story, in part, about how monstrous the Tenth Doctor can be when he lets himself escape his human obligations and walk in the realm of gods. If the story makes you uncomfortable by doing that, then it succeeded.
September 18, 2013 @ 1:28 pm
Adam, I've written about 7 or 8 replies but I'm having trouble putting my feelings on this into words properly. You have a point about exploring his monotonousness, but that exploration made this entire incarnation of the character less enjoyable for me. The best episodes in the Tenth Doctor's run are Doctor Light episodes. I think that's fairly telling.
For myself (And David as well it seems) this is a fairly mortal blow to the Tenth Doctor's ability to serve as a protagonist.
September 18, 2013 @ 1:54 pm
Like I said, that's the centre of my relative alienation from the Davies vision of Doctor Who — the monstrousness of the Doctor for his life in the realm of gods. It doesn't keep me from enjoying the stories of the Tennant era: the productions themselves are of good enough quality overall for me to love them, and Tennant's character clearly is the Doctor.
For all the comparisons I've seen of Eccleston to him, I really think Tennant's Doctor is closest to the concept of Colin Baker's Doctor. The only difference is that Tennant's Doctor is charming and seductive, even while his arrogance and occasional monstrosity slide him into villainous territory. And the overall quality of his scripts charms the audience to him as well. A big reason Colin's Doctor failed on TV was because so few of the writers were up to the difficult task of finding a way for his Doctor to be charming. Ultimately, Tennant's Doctor (along with Colin's, some moments of Sylvester's, and the early stories of the brash and cowardly Hartnell or the manic Troughton) is sometimes a Doctor you can't quite trust. He isn't a monster all the time; just when he's pushed into that territory.
I don't think Matt Smith's portrayal shades into monstrosity at all — he's wrathful sometimes, but never monstrous. And I don't think Tennant's Doctor is always monstrous — he sometimes does villainous things, and isn't quite self-conscious enough to understand that villains aren't villains by nature, but people who do villainous things frequently. Nonetheless, Tennant's Doctor alienates me from him because he's capable of this villainy, and it jars more deeply with the rest of his character because he's otherwise capable of such incredible charm.
I think it's a major factor as well that the Tenth Doctor only reaches truly monstrous levels in punishing the Family and in The Waters of Mars. On both occasions, he's alone. He's left Martha on Earth to wait for him while he carries out the Family's punishments, and he's been travelling alone for a while by the time he shows up at Bowie Base. Donna was right in The Runaway Bride that the Tenth Doctor specifically needs someone to stop him. His conscience isn't always powerful enough to hold him back.
September 18, 2013 @ 2:26 pm
In your list of "Doctors you can't trust", you mention five of the ten Doctors so far. That would suggest that untrustworthiness is a general trait of the character. But the Doctors you don't mention include Pertwee, Tom Baker and Davison. That means there's a long stretch from 1970 to 1984 in which the Doctor is straightforwardly heroic (at least inasmuch as Tom Baker can be said to be straightforwardly anything). So a large cohort of fans grew up with their Doctor being of the heroic variety, only coming to appreciate other versions when they were older. At an emotional level, many fans on this cohort expect the Doctor to be unambiguously heroic and for the narrative to justify his actions, and it's not surprising that they get upset when this doesn't happen. To fans more emotionally connected to Sylvester McCoy or William Hartnell, the dark side of the tenth Doctor is something they can take in their stride, but to fans who formed their attachment to the Doctor in the 70s and early 80s, this is harder to reconcile with the Doctor they grew up with.
September 18, 2013 @ 3:30 pm
Untrustworthiness (or to be more accurate to the nuance of the character, trust-skepticism) is, I would say, a perennial trait of the Doctor. The Doctor has always had dickish characteristics, mostly having to do with the various articulations of his arrogance. Even among the Doctors I could call, according to my schema in my last comment, unambiguously heroic, Pertwee could be an imperious prick, Tom Baker gruff and insulting, the same as Eccleston, Davison tetchy and irritable, the same as audio McGann and Smith. But in those five, I don't think those traits interfered with the Doctor's heroism, with his trustworthiness.
In the early period of Hartnell, which Phil so beautifully described as the time before he learned to be a hero, the Doctor could be a coward and manipulative. Troughton was a tornado, and even his friends couldn't always be sure what he was up to or whether they'd survive his schemes. McCoy was similarly cagey. No Doctor was a bigger asshole than TV Colin Baker (even audio Colin definitely had his moments) to the point where his television stories and era were actively ruined by the character (and the writers who had no idea how to write a douche charismatically or a companion as anything other than peril monkey).
Tennant has this arrogance that, when it operates on a particular scale, carries over into monstrosity: the wrathful god, the Time Lord Victorious. That arrogance is of a different character than the earlier Doctors' brands of dickishness. It's fascinating in that a writer who knows how to use this trait while maintaining the Doctor's charisma (basically just Davies and Cornell) can make a brilliant, intriguing story, like Human Nature/Family of Blood and Waters of Mars. But dickish arrogance taken to an epic scale becomes monstrous, and that alienates me a little from the Tennant Doctor. Not enough that I'd actively hate his era (I enjoy the Tennant era and own all the dvds), but enough that I stand a little more distantly from Tennant's Doctor as a character than I do over just about any of the others.
The only more distant one was TV Colin Baker, because he was an asshole, and Davison whenever Eric Saward wrote him, because Saward seemed to have no idea how Davison's Doctor could be heroic without shooting something or having someone shoot something.
September 18, 2013 @ 3:41 pm
Agreed.
When I read House of Leaves, my initial assessment was "40% interesting ideas, 60% pretentious crap", however about 3/4 of the way through I decided to re-imagine it as a lost Doctor Who novel from the time war era after which it got much more enjoyable.
— spoilers for House of Leaves, sort of —
The house is a crashed TARDIS, damaged by the war. Its pilot is dead, and control console destroyed, but the TARDIS itself is still alive although blind and in pain.
Its chameleon circuit is still active, letting it appear as an ordinary house. (One character more-or-less describes it as "not a hours, but something pretending to be a house" – can't be bothered to look up the exact quote). Its trans-dimensional nature persists, leading to the "bigger on the inside" character* with an (apparently) infinite range of corridors and rooms contained within. Explorers of the house occasionally experience dramatic shifts in the local gravity such as having a wall transition to a floor.
Our crashed TARDIS retains the ability to reshape its internal topology and to "dematerialize" objects left within the house. Both actions are accompanied by a noise that is variously described as a "growling" or "groaning" – witnesses in the book are divided on whether it is an animal or mechanical noise.
It also retains its telepathic circuits, leading to the observed behavior that the house seems to respond to the mental state of its inhabitants. For example a character that feels "trapped" encounters a series of smaller and smaller rooms. Other characters initially experience the a staircase (which they suspect might be infinite) as several kilometers high taking several days to traverse, while a later character who knows the staircase is finite finds the same staircase to only be a few hundred feet high.
And of course the telepathic feedback between the TARDIS (in pain, desperate for escape) and the minds of the inhabitants leads to the depression and madness.
I call it "This House Will Never Let Us Go".
*Seriously: how can you hear "bigger on the inside" (a phrase which appears dozens of times in the book) without thinking of a TARDIS?
September 18, 2013 @ 4:48 pm
Also interesting that every time the word "house" is written, it appears in blue.
September 18, 2013 @ 5:08 pm
Writing a character as likable and even admirable, yet also an asshole, is tricky, but perfectly possible, as both Sherlock and Tony Stark attest. I would have loved to see Colin Baker's doctor get such a treatment.
September 18, 2013 @ 6:36 pm
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September 18, 2013 @ 6:57 pm
It was actually this story that allowed me to enjoy stories involving Tennant's Doctor finally. For so much before this, it felt like the show genuinely believed that his Doctor was this wonderful, incredible person. This story carries that on, but in such a morally abhorrent way that it allowed me to dissociate Tennant from any concept of Doctor Who that I enjoyed. For me, series 4 was the 'Donna in the Tardis' show with David Tennant as a guest star because this story made me accept that I could never enjoy his Doctor, so why bother? Then it was followed by an episode Tennant contributes 10 minutes to and it's the best episode of his era, proving that Doctor Who would actually do better without this particular Doctor.
September 18, 2013 @ 7:17 pm
I'm pretty sure I saw the TV version first and then sought out a used (and only slightly expensive) copy of the novel, which I'd missed the first time around when I started to lose interest in the Virgin line (which I regret, because I appreciate it so much more now). It might be the better order, because then you can be wowed by the TV version and even more wowed by the book, rather than superwowed by the book and then let down a little by the TV version.
But there's still plenty of amazing left in the TV version, and some days I still think this is the best the new series has to offer. I don't particularly like the Tenth Doctor, and I'd agree with David Thiel and Theonlyspiral that this episode is exhibit A, and I'd agree with Adam and Seeing_I that this is a strength of the story and not a weakness. Plus the Tenth Doctor is essentially absent for almost all of this, and John Smith is quite charming, allowing us to enjoy Tennant without Ten.
When I first saw this, it struck me for some reason as the most classic-feeling story we'd had so far. Partly it was the pace (a two-parter is closer to the length of most classic stories), partly the monsters (who feel trad in a way I find hard to pinpoint), partly probably the relative lack of modern-day references and flavors. And then of course it was mashed up with stuff the classic series never really did: romance, big themes at the forefront rather than the background, an absent Doctor.
I'm pretty sure this was the story that convinced me I wanted to sign on for the long haul, after 2.5ish seasons of holding the new series at arm's length. I think now that I was nuts to remain unsold for so long, but hindsight is 20/20.
I'm not sure I believe no other Doctor could have pulled this off onscreen. I actually think Matt Smith is the actor to beat in the new series, and maybe (I haven't seen enough Troughton to be sure) in the old series as well. But I think what Tennant does is indeed stunning and I don't think any other Doctor could have done it better.
September 18, 2013 @ 7:29 pm
@Adam: Yes, I read your post. Did you not read mine? I simply do not care about whatever point this story is trying to make. It's a betrayal of a character who was once described, as noted above, as "never cruel or cowardly." Suddenly, he's both cowardly AND cruel, without cause or justification.
People like to point out the First Doctor wanting to bash in a caveman's head, but that was literally the first story. The writers were still trying to figure out who the character was. And Seven was manipulative, but there's a huge difference between allowing the Daleks to blow themselves up and inventing exotic, ironic, eternal tortures.
And yes, I understood the Doctor's plan. But again, the notion that one could outwait a group of time travellers is nonsensical. How would you ever know you'd succeeded? How many years would Martha have to had played a maid to John Smith's racist girlfriend before she could be absolutely certain that the Family weren't going to pop out of the Vortex?
While the Doctor's punishments were indeed meted out in response to the Family's actions, the implication was that the reason he hid from them was to save them from himself, that if he was to deal with them there would assuredly be fire, blood and crushing of the lesser races. You know, as opposed to NOT doing any of those things. Soldeed was punching above his weight too, and the Doctor didn't build an infinite maze for him to wander forever.
As I wrote above, if this is your idea of the Doctor, it's not one which I can in any way share. And the only reason that this didn't turn me off the show permanently was that by the next week they forgot that it ever happened.
September 18, 2013 @ 11:31 pm
But as has been pointed out, "cowardly" isn't a part of the Doctor's motivation at any point in this story. You may not like or be convinced by the alternative explanation it offers – and I can see why, because it's not fleshed out as much more than a fig leaf covering the obvious fact that the real reason he does this is because the concept of the episode requires it), but it's still explicitly there. Cruel…yeah, that one I can see, but it's also notable that, as you point out, this only creeps into his characterisation on a tiny pair of extreme circumstances, and is counterbalanced elsewhere by any number of instances of extreme kindness, sympathy, and nobility.
I'm not going to try to persuade you that you should like the Tenth Doctor, any more than I should like the Third (who I find similarly dislikeable, but try – like you – not to let it interfere with my enjoyment of his better stories). But I don't think it's accurate to define the Tenth Doctor as a character solely on these terms, any more than it would be fair to allow the occasional moments of misogyny, racism, arrogance (the latter of which has directly led to the deaths of far more characters than anything Tennant does in this story, under almost every Doctor), colonialism or selfishness that have occasionally marred the character of every incarnation to date.
September 18, 2013 @ 11:33 pm
Gaah. I hate writing on my phone. Please assume that there's some form of meaning hidden behind the garbled syntax of the previous post.
September 19, 2013 @ 12:01 am
Also also (and I apologise for post-spamming – I'll try to gather my thoughts and wait to respond properly from an actual computer next time)…
"the implication was that the reason he hid from them was to save them from himself, that if he was to deal with them there would assuredly be fire, blood and crushing of the lesser races"
Really? I didnt take it that way at all, and I'd be very surprised if that was the intent. I took it as him saying that if he'd fought against them he'd have ended up having to kill or imprison the Family themselves, and as their lifespan was so short, and their only hostile intent (at that point) was directed against the Doctor himself, that it would be kinder simply to let them live out their lives occupied with a fruitless search for him, during which there'd be less chance of them hurting anyone else. He was collossally wrong, of course, but that's par for the course.
The chase-through-time concept doesn't make a lick of sense, it's true, but by that measure nor does almost any time travel story in the history of the show, from 'The Chase' through to 'The Name Of The Doctor'. The horse has, I fear, well and truly bolted on that one.
September 19, 2013 @ 1:43 am
Troughton is frequently cowardly. Or at least, he has a far firmer belief that discretion is the better part of valour than, say, Pertwee has. Don't shoot me, I'm a genius, indeed.
September 19, 2013 @ 1:43 am
Delurking after everyone has stopped reading these comments to say that I like both Hartnell's and McCoy's doctors, and agree that the Doctor is not always straightforwardly trustworthy. He is not an entirely safe and one-dimensional hero – not even, always, in the Tom Baker era (Davison's was probably the most reliably nice, and Pertwee the most standard heroic leading man).
I am also not particularly worried by his Family of Blood avoidance strategy, except to say that it does illustrate a problem with a interventionist strategy as opposed to a non-interference directive: if the Doctor gets involved a lot, he makes enemies, and thence becomes a target, and therefore is always a source of risk to those standing near him.
But I agree with David Thiel in that I don't remember any other instance of the Doctor being gratuitously and never-endingly cruel to defeated enemies (calling it 'punishment' does not change this). That's quite different from Hartnell's panicked desire to bash in the skull of a caveman he's frightened of, or to McCoy's chess-playing. Personally I don't find the answers of the 'character is complex, show depends on variety, theme is interesting' quite enough here. Hartnell, Troughton and McCoy – and less successfully C. Baker – do show how the Doctor can be imperfect, complex, difficult and even scary, but for me the end of Family of Blood isn't an evolution, it's a complete rewrite. It doesn't make me dislike the tenth Doctor, it makes my previously suspended disbelief thump downwards while I think 'Oh look, the writers are hitting their hubris-leads-to-darkness theme again' (am I right in thinking that all people involved here are from the right generation to have seen Star Wars at a formative age?). Clearly a lot of people think his character can stretch this far, but if you don't it's very jarring. And as (too late) a final point: an appeal to the intrinsic variability of Doctor Who won't solve all problems: if the character shifts too radically in accordance with whatever theme a writer feels like exploring, the variety loses what it is playing off. A completely fluid character is not a character at all.
September 19, 2013 @ 3:26 am
A bit late to the party, but I am glad I was not the only person scratching his head over the Doctors strategy in this story.. and a bit perturbed by the Godfather-like montage of his vengeance (while he weeps over the Master.. something odd here..). So I am curious about what elements were Rusty's rewrites and what elements were Cornells? Is that clarified in the Writers Tale? Because the Doctors vengeance seems unlike Paul Cornells usual depiction of the Doctor (I will have to point out, though, that Love & War is the only Cornell Who piece I have not read…).
September 19, 2013 @ 3:43 am
The situation with the Family is a bit of a tricky one for the Doctor's well-established moral framework; they're chasing him, and if they hurt other people, it's not because they're attacking those other people, but because those other people are in the Family's way as they try to get The Doctor.
And this means that the Doctor's choice is to either kill the Family in self-defense, or to run away. This is the moral sticking point for the Doctor: if he kills the Family, it's not "Defend the helpless even though it might lead to the aggressors being killed," it's outright "Chase down and execute these bad people", and I have no problem with the idea that he considers that the moral line he's unwilling to cross — in fact, I think it's probably the line I'd draw too.
September 19, 2013 @ 3:47 am
@David Thiel: People like to point out the First Doctor wanting to bash in a caveman's head, but that was literally the first story. The writers were still trying to figure out who the character was.
And MacGyver used a submachine gun in the first episode.
And yes, I understood the Doctor's plan. But again, the notion that one could outwait a group of time travellers is nonsensical. How would you ever know you'd succeeded?
This is a non-issue; the idea that time travelers are tethered to each other in some way is so engrained in the series that it's always shocking when that isn't the case. It's entirely clear that when the Doctor says they'll die in a few months, he means "wherever we go in time and space, if we wait for a few months and don't see them, they're dead dead dead.
September 19, 2013 @ 5:24 am
@Dinah: Yes to all of this. Tennant is still my favorite Doctor despite this episode, which I see as less about him than it is about whatever the writers felt they had to make him for the sake of the story they wanted to tell.
What I'm saying is this: those scarecrows aren't the only strawmen on display. This fire and ice Doctor exists solely as a counterpoint to John Smith, giving Joan an opportunity to heap scorn on the character–and, by extension, the series–that the audience loves. Which might be acceptable if next week the show was renamed "John Smith" and was about a schoolteacher and his despicably racist girlfriend, who don't travel through space and time battling monsters, but rather sit at home making judgmental comments about the more interesting people they meet.
September 19, 2013 @ 7:09 am
Actually, BerserkRL, once I started using velcro shoes, I never went back!
September 19, 2013 @ 5:56 pm
Variaga, that is a fantastic idea (and the 40/60 interesting/crap ratio is exactly right).
September 20, 2013 @ 12:05 pm
The theme of the Doctor's "cowardice" actually comes up rather frequently throughout the show, mostly in relation to his reluctance to kill. In Resurrection of the Daleks, Davros calls him a coward for refusing to kill him and thereby prevent the carnage he is planning. "Action requires courage," Davros tells the Doctor, "something you lack." The Ninth Doctor also opts for this sort of cowardice in The Parting of the Ways, when he has to choose between wiping out humanity and the Daleks or inaction. "Then prove yourself, Doctor," the Emperor demands, "What are you, coward or killer?" And the Doctor replies, "Coward. Any day." So Ten's reluctance to kill here is actually entirely in keeping with the Doctor's established character.
And honestly, refusing to kill them straight off the bat simply is the better choice. His choice, he thought, was between hiding out for three months and allowing the Family of Blood to die without causing any damage, or fighting them and risking others being hurt. His plan backfired only because Tim took the watch, and he was unable to turn back into the Doctor in time to easily defeat the Family and prevent any sort of harm from befalling the people in the town. If it hadn't been for that, no one would've been harmed at all. He would have turned back into the Doctor the moment Martha saw the ship land.
Additionally, as for classic-series Doctors being unlikely or incapable of the sort of behavior Ten displays at the end of Family of Blood, well, you're all entirely right. You know what the key difference is between Ten and the other Doctors is? The Time War. Fighting on the front lines of a war that bloody and violent, as a soldier, had an indelible effect on the Doctor's personality. You cannot expect him to behave as though he is the same person. Because he isn't. Ten's struggle to understand and accept the limitations of his power–his arrogance–is a direct result of the Time War. With the Time Lords gone, there is no one powerful enough to stop him from going too far, from overreaching. (In The Waters of Mars, Adelaide asks him, “Is there nothing you can't do?” And Ten replies, “Not anymore.”) Classic-series Doctors always had the threat of the Time Lords looming over them to prevent them from breaking the Laws of Time, for example, or to serve as a safety net in case they failed. Ten does not. The power vacuum left by their death is something Ten repeatedly struggles with–because he feels that it is his responsibility to fill it. (In New Earth, he says to Novice Hame, "If you don't like it, if you want to take it to a higher authority, then there isn't one. It stops with me.") His character arc is the gradual realization that simply because he CAN do something, that does not necessarily mean that he SHOULD, that he risks becoming a monster if he strays too far in that direction. This flirtation with monstrousness was necessary in the aftermath of the Time War. It was a lesson the Doctor needed to learn, so that future incarnations could be content to be rather more humble. And it was, in my opinion, an interesting storyline for RTD to toy with, something that it had never really been possible to do before.
September 22, 2013 @ 2:06 pm
"with a tiny but significant assist from Steven Moffat (who plotted John Smith’s children’s fantasy book)"
Hang on a second! Are you saying that the story in which the Doctor is a human inventor from Victorian England who builds a time machine, discovers primordial Gallifrey, and essentially creates Time Lord civilisation before fleeing the oppressive bureaucracy it becomes… was written by Steven Moffat? This holds fascinating implications for Moffat's conception of the Doctor's identity. Is there anywhere we could read more about this?
September 22, 2013 @ 2:19 pm
Not really – it's on the acknowledgments page of the book: "Andy Lane, Steven Moffat, Helen Reilly – Criticism and structural advice. (Steven also plotted Dr. Smith's fantasy story.)" That's the extent I know about it.
October 5, 2013 @ 2:31 pm
Iraq.