Prefect SlogThere are times when I wonder whether I've simply grown tired of Doctor Who. Saturday night's instalment, The Idiot's Lantern, was one of those occasions. It was nothing as bad as the Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel combo that preceded it - it wasn't anywhere near that big a mess. Neither was it as disappointing. How could it be? There was far less at stake here: all this one had to do was entertain. By the end of it though, the best I could say was that I felt it had managed to distract me for 45 minutes, but that was about it. It was okay - no more, no less - and probably, as result, less memorable than the Cyberman two parter.
It started reasonably enough, with Mr Magpie working late in his shop, being addressed directly by the creepy lady on the telly, whereupon lightning-like energy lashes out and grabs a hold of his head. I thought he was going to be sucked into the telly, like John Ritter and Pam Dawber (Mrs Mork!) in the movie Stay Tuned (1992). No, thankfully it didn't go down that unoriginal road. Instead it pootled along its own entirely predictable course like, well, like that motor scooter of the Doctor's.
There were some expectations attached to this one. I have fond memories of The Unquiet Dead from last season, so I was looking forward to another offering from Mark Gatiss. And at least this one did deliver a nice sense of period, along with a great character actor in a key role. In the place of Victorian times, we have the 50s; in place of Simon Callow as Dickens, we have Maureen Lipman as the Wire.
And right there, I have to stop myself because the comparisons fall down. Actually, there are no comparisons. The characters are nowhere near as well-drawn, the period, although nicely realised, is lacking the atmosphere of the previous Gatiss story and Maureen Lipman, although brilliantly creepy to begin with, is hampered by the fact that she's been called upon to play such a generic alien entity with such a rubbish name and then hamstrung by the fact that she's given a stream of tiresome, repetitive pantomime dialogue. She does her best, she really does, but reduced in later scenes to shouts of "I'm hungry!" and "Feed me!", she comes across as a bizarre humaniform Audrey Two from Little Shop Of Horrors.
With that in mind, I'd have welcomed the Doctor and Rose striking into "You'll Be A Dentist" while riding along on that scooter. At least it would have been a surprise.
The one memorable 'shock' moment would have to be the sight of the faceless granny in the upstairs bedroom. But the creepy potential of these 'Faceless Ones' was somehow left underexploited and the thread with the police whisking them all away appeared contrived as a means of justifying the scene in the warehouse where the Doctor is surrounded by all these featureless somebodies. It did offer one bright spot: the nicely played reversal of position between the Doctor and the copper in the interrogation scene, but the thread as a whole beggared belief. When 'Operation Market Stall' rolled into action - in essence, er, rolling a market stall out into the road and closing a gate - I just laughed at the idea that the Doctor had been so easily duped. Especially this Doctor who, by the constraints of the 45 minute rush-a-thon story, is generally obliged to know or work things out a little too easily. As always, if this had occurred within a great story, I'd have probably overlooked it. But because this one only ever rises to the level of 'all right', it throws such flaws into sharper focus.
I think we were supposed to be shocked and horrified by the sight of a faceless Rose, but the unfortunate downside of that moment was that it confirmed, much too far ahead of time, that all these unfortunate 'faceless ones' were going to have their features restored in a miraculous and barely explicable solution. One that was duly delivered. By the time the celebratory street party was underway, I was yawning and waiting for the Next Week... trailer to roll by.
Through all this, there was some okay character stuff, with the family frictions, but that was fairly basic and again predictable and for me, The Unquiet Dead is proof that Mark Gatiss could have done so much better. I hate to say it (because it's getting as repetitive and tiresome as the Wire's "Feed Me, Seymour"-style exhortations) but the story wasn't helped by the fact that it was another one set on Earth. In London, for crying out loud. And this idea of Russell T Davies', of using Earth as an anchor, is rapidly becoming a ball and chain for this incarnation of Doctor Who. What we want is the kind of telly that kept all those people glued to their sets in the early days, and thus so vulnerable to the Wire's attacks. More of this kind of thing, and the Wire is liable to find even this dedicated Doctor Who idiot forgetting to tune in to his lantern one of these weekends.
Still, I am being overly negative there. On balance, so far this series, I've seen three episodes that impressed, three that sucked, and one - this - that was just 'meh'. So at this midway point, the scales are even. And on a more optimistic note, here's hoping for better things in the second half.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Lead Zeppelin
Prefect SlogWell, that went down a treat. No, wait, it just went down - and not in a good way. After last week's episode climbed to the dizzy heights of mediocrity, the follow-up Age Of Steel managed a nose-dive into the ground, which became something of a race to see whether it could crash spectacularly before the whole thing deflated. Either way, this particular viewer was left to salvage what he could from the wreckage.
To be honest, I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything sufficiently positive to save this sorry shambles. Mickey's departure should have been like a golden light at the end of this two-part tunnel, but by that stage I was so thoroughly dismayed by the whole thing, even that ray of sunshine only managed a dull glimmer. That and the realisation that Mickey, set on a globe-trotting campaign against the Cybermen, was soon to be more widely travelled than the Doctor and Rose. (Next Week: looks like we're headed for... somewhere in the UK, Earth!)
It wasn't that this was the worst Doctor Who episode ever (Timelash? Time And The Rani? Boomtown? You tell me.) It was just that this was such a huge wasted opportunity. This was the Cybermen's big comeback. And it should have been big. Monumental. Event One of this series. Instead, all we got was a load of old Cyber pants.
It started poorly, with the Doctor side-stepping last week's feeble cliffhanger with an even more feeble get-out clause. Even his miraculous deployment of the TARDIS energy crystal might have been redeemed dramatically speaking had he burnt out their only option of escaping this dreary alternative reality. But no - "It'll recharge in 4 hours." Fine, wake me up when it's done.
From there, it went downhill, continuing with a lengthy confinement in the back of a truck for the purposes of some 'vital' plot explanation, interspersed with lots of meaningless metal mayhem, and a convenient Thames-side conference to discuss how to go about defeating the menace, all culminating in a final plummet towards a finale worthy of Independence Day and Stargate SG-1, which may, along with warm woollen mittens etc, be a few of Julie Andrews' Favourite Things, but they're certainly not mine. "Ooh look - an emotional inhibitor chip." "Ooh look, a handy USB port for my mobile phone." I mean, I remember being dissatisfied with the Cybermen's previous Achilles' Heel: their vulnerability to gold was fine enough for the purposes of Revenge Of The Cybermen, but after that it was overused - some would say flogged to death - as subsequent degenerations of Cybermen succumbed to what only amounted to metal fatigue. They just used to show up and blow up. But at least the gold thing was only built in by the writers as a too-convenient plot device. This emotional inhibitor chip override was, on top of that, built in by their creator within the context of the story. Apparently I was mistaken about John Lumic. It really was Trigger in that wheelchair.
I realise the aim here was to make Mickey the hero, but surely there was another way besides coming up with such a dumb resolution? Sorry, but I expected better of a New Series Cyberman story. And what compounds the disappointment here is that we know they were capable of so much better. What a waste.
The Cybermen themselves were only 'scary' when they were standing still - either in the tunnels or staring at Mickey through the fence. Otherwise they were tramping about like a lot of dumb ham-footed robots. (What is it with this need for overly stylised movements? The street-mime Autons from Rose were similarly misjudged.) It didn't help that the Cybermen spoke such electronically treated gibberish, forcing us to concentrate to hear what they were saying, generally to discover that it wasn't much of note. Having their mouths flash lights as they spoke was no help in understanding the dialogue and also had the misfortune of looking A Bit Crap(TM).
The shots of the cyber-surgery and the incinerations might have been more effectively creepy had they not been undermined by all the hard work done by the first part: as they appeared on screen, I couldn't help think back to them operating to the tune of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'. Thanks for that, guys.
During that first episode, the writer side of my brain was too busy thinking of ways in which this could have been done better. During this one, that same side of my brain had reached the conclusion that the only way to go was to scrap the thing and rewrite from scratch. Sadly, that's not going to happen. What's done is done. A lot of actors and production crew wasted their time and talent and I'm left with that overwhelming sense of a thoroughly wasted opportunity.
Unfortunately, rather more of New Series Who than is strictly necessary appears to rely on that old mantra used for crossing yourself (and here, to my shame, I'm remembering a quote from Eric Idle in Nuns On The Run): Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. Essentially, go for a lot of spectacle, throw in some things that are a bit bollocks, give it the big budget treatment and hope to rake in the viewers. Eurovision follows the same philosophy, but it was sad that I actually found that more entertaining than Age Of Steel that evening. (And that included the more compelling mystery of why so many people across Europe voted for Finland - fair enough "The Day Of Rockening" is a priceless lyric, but we can't all share the same sense of humour, surely?) The thing is, we generally get what we expect from Eurovision - but we know that Doctor Who can do so much better.
To be honest, I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything sufficiently positive to save this sorry shambles. Mickey's departure should have been like a golden light at the end of this two-part tunnel, but by that stage I was so thoroughly dismayed by the whole thing, even that ray of sunshine only managed a dull glimmer. That and the realisation that Mickey, set on a globe-trotting campaign against the Cybermen, was soon to be more widely travelled than the Doctor and Rose. (Next Week: looks like we're headed for... somewhere in the UK, Earth!)
It wasn't that this was the worst Doctor Who episode ever (Timelash? Time And The Rani? Boomtown? You tell me.) It was just that this was such a huge wasted opportunity. This was the Cybermen's big comeback. And it should have been big. Monumental. Event One of this series. Instead, all we got was a load of old Cyber pants.
It started poorly, with the Doctor side-stepping last week's feeble cliffhanger with an even more feeble get-out clause. Even his miraculous deployment of the TARDIS energy crystal might have been redeemed dramatically speaking had he burnt out their only option of escaping this dreary alternative reality. But no - "It'll recharge in 4 hours." Fine, wake me up when it's done.
From there, it went downhill, continuing with a lengthy confinement in the back of a truck for the purposes of some 'vital' plot explanation, interspersed with lots of meaningless metal mayhem, and a convenient Thames-side conference to discuss how to go about defeating the menace, all culminating in a final plummet towards a finale worthy of Independence Day and Stargate SG-1, which may, along with warm woollen mittens etc, be a few of Julie Andrews' Favourite Things, but they're certainly not mine. "Ooh look - an emotional inhibitor chip." "Ooh look, a handy USB port for my mobile phone." I mean, I remember being dissatisfied with the Cybermen's previous Achilles' Heel: their vulnerability to gold was fine enough for the purposes of Revenge Of The Cybermen, but after that it was overused - some would say flogged to death - as subsequent degenerations of Cybermen succumbed to what only amounted to metal fatigue. They just used to show up and blow up. But at least the gold thing was only built in by the writers as a too-convenient plot device. This emotional inhibitor chip override was, on top of that, built in by their creator within the context of the story. Apparently I was mistaken about John Lumic. It really was Trigger in that wheelchair.
I realise the aim here was to make Mickey the hero, but surely there was another way besides coming up with such a dumb resolution? Sorry, but I expected better of a New Series Cyberman story. And what compounds the disappointment here is that we know they were capable of so much better. What a waste.
The Cybermen themselves were only 'scary' when they were standing still - either in the tunnels or staring at Mickey through the fence. Otherwise they were tramping about like a lot of dumb ham-footed robots. (What is it with this need for overly stylised movements? The street-mime Autons from Rose were similarly misjudged.) It didn't help that the Cybermen spoke such electronically treated gibberish, forcing us to concentrate to hear what they were saying, generally to discover that it wasn't much of note. Having their mouths flash lights as they spoke was no help in understanding the dialogue and also had the misfortune of looking A Bit Crap(TM).
The shots of the cyber-surgery and the incinerations might have been more effectively creepy had they not been undermined by all the hard work done by the first part: as they appeared on screen, I couldn't help think back to them operating to the tune of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'. Thanks for that, guys.
During that first episode, the writer side of my brain was too busy thinking of ways in which this could have been done better. During this one, that same side of my brain had reached the conclusion that the only way to go was to scrap the thing and rewrite from scratch. Sadly, that's not going to happen. What's done is done. A lot of actors and production crew wasted their time and talent and I'm left with that overwhelming sense of a thoroughly wasted opportunity.
Unfortunately, rather more of New Series Who than is strictly necessary appears to rely on that old mantra used for crossing yourself (and here, to my shame, I'm remembering a quote from Eric Idle in Nuns On The Run): Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. Essentially, go for a lot of spectacle, throw in some things that are a bit bollocks, give it the big budget treatment and hope to rake in the viewers. Eurovision follows the same philosophy, but it was sad that I actually found that more entertaining than Age Of Steel that evening. (And that included the more compelling mystery of why so many people across Europe voted for Finland - fair enough "The Day Of Rockening" is a priceless lyric, but we can't all share the same sense of humour, surely?) The thing is, we generally get what we expect from Eurovision - but we know that Doctor Who can do so much better.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Not Another Doctor Who Top 10, Honest
Prefect Slog
As I sat down this week to enjoy my regular dose of Space:1999 courtesy of ITV4 the horrible wrongness of the opening music (a feeling like tuning into Doctor Who to find the unique Ron Grainer theme replaced with, say, the non-music that fronted every episode of JMS’ B5 spin-off, Crusade) tipped me off that they had jumped to the start of Series Two and the introduction of metamorphosing Maya. I’m sure it will be fun to continue (re)watching them, but right from the outset you know it’s an altogether different series, the point where the whole thing went all Frieberger and cheese - to coin a phrase. Anyway, the unexpectedness of the jump was owing to the fact that I couldn’t really say whether ITV4 have been showing these in the relevant order: as familiar as I am with dear old Space:1999 and the rest of the Gerry Anderson catalogue, I simply don’t have that same intimate knowledge of episode titles, episode order and what have you that I have with some series. Doctor Who, for instance, I’ve long had what amounts to an episode guide in my head, although with a lengthy programme of therapy and learning not to care to quite such an unhealthy extent, it’s become more of an impressionistic work and not the factual compendium with the worrying level of detail it once was. Thank goodness for that, because I wouldn’t want anyone mistaking me for a Fan with a capital F. Still, the fact that I rattle off a review of the New Series episodes each week and am still enthusiastic about the nice continuity touches (Doctor James McCrimmon, International Electromatics, Sarah Jane Smith – sigh!) is an indicator that I still give an f, no matter how lower case it might be.
Anyway, given that I’ve moaned a bit about certain aspects of New Series Who that have been less than satisfying, especially in the light of how the Rise Of The Cybermen fell somewhat short of expectations, I thought it was a good time to leaf through that internal episode guide of mine and come up with a list of my own Top Ten Doctor Who stories.
Now, bear in mind that these lists are about as changeable as a British summer and that, unless you’re compiling a Top Ten of Chantelle’s brain cells (in other more depressing news, the woman has just landed herself a £300,000 deal for her autobiography – dear God) it’s almost impossible to sensibly limit yourself to ten. This exercise was, in any case, prompted by Stuart Douglas, fellow Doctor Who fan and friend-in-blogdom, responsible for Half A Dozen Streets And A Bit Of Wasteland. So I absolve myself of all blame.
As with his worthy list, these are in no particular order:
The Talons Of Weng Chiang (TV – Classic)
A popular choice, apparently, but a fairly obvious one. Okay, the fluffy giant rat could do with being a bit more terrifying and a bit less Basil Brush, but Talons gets away with it. Frankly, I could forgive a lot more of Talons, but there’s precious little else to forgive. It's smogbound Victorian London, it's deadly Chinese Tongs, it's Mr Sin, Magnus Greel, Chang, it's Jago and Litefoot, it's Leela – it is, dare I say it, the Good Old Days. This is not just good Doctor Who, it's essential Doctor Who. Horror and history and science fiction, dark and humorous, great characters, bags of atmosphere and gorgeously realised.
Spearhead From Space (TV – Classic)
You can keep your Roses, this is the best introductory story for any Doctor post-Hartnell ever. (We'll allow David Tennant a few points of handicap for the fact that his was at Christmas so had to incorporate spurious Santas and deadly Christmas trees into what was otherwise a fun romp.) This is the one in which the Autons first broke out of shop windows and this is the one in which they didn’t move around like a bunch of jerky street mimes. This is the one in which they’re scary. The Doctor’s erratic and out of it for much of the time, but thanks to Pertwee’s charisma and screen presence when he is on, we get to know him fairly early. And it introduces Liz Shaw. Sure, the Nestene is just a blob in a tank and a lot of rubber tentacles, but anyone who thinks the CGI blob and the ‘climactic’ fight at the end of Rose is any better has been duped by the often flimsy illusions of better technology and bigger budget.
The Ambassadors Of Death (TV – Classic)
Ah, Season 7. How to choose? They all feature Liz Shaw and so score valuable points over the rest, but it really doesn’t help when it comes to deciding between them. Well, Spearhead’s already earned a slot. I can hardly include Inferno after having a go at the alternate Earth setup in Rise Of The Cybermen – although Inferno, which does suffer from the fact that the Primords are A Bit Rubbish™, is better in that respect since the parallel Earth featured there is more interesting than the real one. So I’m left with a really tough call between Doctor Who And The Silurians, to use its full title, and Ambassadors. Ambassadors has all the requisite James Bond stuff, decent sci-fi stuff that’s half-Quatermass, half-Avengers and one of the best endings ever. It has a similar moral resonance to Silurians in that the monsters are not villains and both stories are presenting something novel. Both stories are long and Ambassadors does involve a lot of runaround (but since some of the running around is done by Liz, we can certainly forgive that) to fill it out, but to be honest every time I’ve watched either of them I just enjoy immersing myself in the adventure for the long term. In the end, well, it comes down to that ending I guess – the Doctor walking away and handing the actual task of first contact over to humanity – and the fact that this one was responsible for what must be my earliest childhood memory of Doctor Who: the simple but effectively creepy images of the alien ‘astronauts’. So Ambassadors wins not by a nose but by a whisker.
An Unearthly Child (TV – Classic)
This is the best introductory story, full stop. It’s that perfect bridge between the world of the mundane – teachers at a school – and escapism – one of the pupils knows far more than she should but also has telling gaps in her knowledge, and her Grandfather has a time/space ship in the shape of a Police Box in the corner of a local junkyard. With Ian and Barbara we’re crossing over into a whole new dimension and it’s all conveyed with that vital sense of wonder. Their reactions are perfect. Susan’s suitably ‘alien’, and the Doctor is a terrifically remote figure, all the more engaging for his famous irascibility and smug superiority. Never mind all the gubbins with the cave people afterwards - they had to go and travel somewhere so it might as well have been One Thousand Pence, BC. It’s the first episode that counts.
The Aztecs (TV – Classic)
I felt the need to name a purely historical story, and this is the one that stands out best to my mind. Some nice moral questions raised for Barbara and a romance for the Doctor.
Fury From The Deep (Novelisation/Audio)
I'll admit it may well be better in my imagination than it ever looked on screen, but thanks to the highly effective combination of the novelisation and a couple of listens on audio, the imagined version remains intact. Again it scores oodles on atmosphere, it's a great setup for the base under siege scenario and manages to make seaweed creepy, for goodness sake. Plus it has some strong emotional touches with Victoria’s impending departure in the, er, pipeline. Lovely.
Planet Of Evil (TV – Classic)
This one I’m including as an alternative to The Ark In Space, which is brilliant and also gave me lots of welcome nightmares as a kid. (Stuart included Ark in his list and I was tempted to do the same for all the same reasons he cited, but at the same time I didn’t want this gem to be overlooked.) Unlike Ark, it doesn’t have Harry and that is a point against it, but the horror is just as effective and the memories just as vivid. It’s Jekyll and Hyde with a Forbidden Planet vibe, and Sorenson is great in the Jekyll/Hyde role. Also, take note ye makers of New Who (and here’s another reason for including it), it features an alien planet, creepily effective and effectively creepy and all managed on a fraction of today’s budgets. Prentis Hancock is a bit annoying but what else do you expect from Paul Morrow? The one they really needed to enlist from Moonbase Alpha was Sandra Benes, who would have spent the entire story screaming her lungs out. Right up until the mostly-invisible monster with the crackly energy outline sucked her soul out and spat out her horrific dried-up husk of a corpse. Luckily plenty of other Morestrans were on hand to die for our viewing pleasure. Plus Sarah Jane Smith is as gorgeous and terrified as she can be.
Caves Of Androzani (TV - Classic)
Ah, Graeme Harper, what happened? From the superb melodrama of Androzani to the mellow drama of Rise Of The Cybermen. This story’s giant rat is the Magma Creature, of course – a big plastic walking bat that looks, let’s be honest, a bit guano. The odd thing is, it’s really not needed and adds nothing to the melting pot. And what a melting pot. As with Talons, there’s that balance of humour and horror, but here it’s stretched taut as a tightrope, walking a fine line between taking itself incredibly seriously and sending itself up. Morgus talking to camera is completely mad but it really works. Sharaz Jek is a memorable Phantom Of The Opera who does all but break into a chorus of ‘The Music Of The Night’, and the Doctor’s not trying to save the day for a change, he’s just caught up in everyone else’s conflicting motivations, trying to save Peri and paying the ultimate price. Finally, a Davison story that makes you sit right up and pay attention.
Fear Itself (BBC Eighth Doctor Novel)
Best EDA I had the pleasure of reading. (And that’s no offence to the others.) It just had that perfectly judged balance of substance and pace, atmosphere and action, dark and light. Nicely written throughout, some great character material – special mention to poor underrated (and often underserved) Anji – and a lot of neat sf ideas pooled together in a very Doctor Who-ish mix.
Heritage (BBC Seventh Doctor Novel)
Quite simply better than any Sylvester McCoy story on the telly. Doctor Who meets Unforgiven, and better than that makes it sound. The atmosphere is so palpably dark that you feel the presence of monsters where (at least in the expected sense) there aren’t any, and yet somehow it gets away with throwing a dolphin into the mix without detracting from any of it. Quite the opposite, in fact, because Bernard is portrayed with the same conviction as the heartfelt human story at its core. Arabella the crow is as well characterized as the human cast. It also kills off Mel and should therefore be considered definitive, canon and all the rest.
And, bubbling under at Number 11…
One I Haven’t Written Yet
Dear me, that sounds conceited, but I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. Somewhere in me lurks a great Doctor Who story, one of the best, and it wants out. Of course I do have other things to write, quite possibly better things too, but until it’s written that Doctor Who story is not going away. I think it’s probably more of a ‘classic’ Doctor Who, so until we see the return of what was the Past Doctor range to the bookshelves I expect I’m stuck with it, although I may have to just get on and write it in my spare time to get it out of my system. Time will tell.
It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice – least of all mine – that there aren’t any New Series entries here. I don’t think that need be very telling – plenty of great ‘Classic Series’ stories are necessarily missed off the list too! New Series highlights such as The Empty Child and School Reunion might have nudged out The Aztecs, for instance, but for the fact that a pure historical helps to represent the range of stories Doctor Who can do effectively. But to pursue that line is to extend a Top Ten to a Top Twenty, then a Top One Hundred and so on until we’ve ranked all the stories in whatever medium according to their various pros and cons. And none of us wants that, do we? I’ll leave that to the Fans with capital Fs. :)
As I sat down this week to enjoy my regular dose of Space:1999 courtesy of ITV4 the horrible wrongness of the opening music (a feeling like tuning into Doctor Who to find the unique Ron Grainer theme replaced with, say, the non-music that fronted every episode of JMS’ B5 spin-off, Crusade) tipped me off that they had jumped to the start of Series Two and the introduction of metamorphosing Maya. I’m sure it will be fun to continue (re)watching them, but right from the outset you know it’s an altogether different series, the point where the whole thing went all Frieberger and cheese - to coin a phrase. Anyway, the unexpectedness of the jump was owing to the fact that I couldn’t really say whether ITV4 have been showing these in the relevant order: as familiar as I am with dear old Space:1999 and the rest of the Gerry Anderson catalogue, I simply don’t have that same intimate knowledge of episode titles, episode order and what have you that I have with some series. Doctor Who, for instance, I’ve long had what amounts to an episode guide in my head, although with a lengthy programme of therapy and learning not to care to quite such an unhealthy extent, it’s become more of an impressionistic work and not the factual compendium with the worrying level of detail it once was. Thank goodness for that, because I wouldn’t want anyone mistaking me for a Fan with a capital F. Still, the fact that I rattle off a review of the New Series episodes each week and am still enthusiastic about the nice continuity touches (Doctor James McCrimmon, International Electromatics, Sarah Jane Smith – sigh!) is an indicator that I still give an f, no matter how lower case it might be.
Anyway, given that I’ve moaned a bit about certain aspects of New Series Who that have been less than satisfying, especially in the light of how the Rise Of The Cybermen fell somewhat short of expectations, I thought it was a good time to leaf through that internal episode guide of mine and come up with a list of my own Top Ten Doctor Who stories.
Now, bear in mind that these lists are about as changeable as a British summer and that, unless you’re compiling a Top Ten of Chantelle’s brain cells (in other more depressing news, the woman has just landed herself a £300,000 deal for her autobiography – dear God) it’s almost impossible to sensibly limit yourself to ten. This exercise was, in any case, prompted by Stuart Douglas, fellow Doctor Who fan and friend-in-blogdom, responsible for Half A Dozen Streets And A Bit Of Wasteland. So I absolve myself of all blame.
As with his worthy list, these are in no particular order:
The Talons Of Weng Chiang (TV – Classic)
A popular choice, apparently, but a fairly obvious one. Okay, the fluffy giant rat could do with being a bit more terrifying and a bit less Basil Brush, but Talons gets away with it. Frankly, I could forgive a lot more of Talons, but there’s precious little else to forgive. It's smogbound Victorian London, it's deadly Chinese Tongs, it's Mr Sin, Magnus Greel, Chang, it's Jago and Litefoot, it's Leela – it is, dare I say it, the Good Old Days. This is not just good Doctor Who, it's essential Doctor Who. Horror and history and science fiction, dark and humorous, great characters, bags of atmosphere and gorgeously realised.
Spearhead From Space (TV – Classic)
You can keep your Roses, this is the best introductory story for any Doctor post-Hartnell ever. (We'll allow David Tennant a few points of handicap for the fact that his was at Christmas so had to incorporate spurious Santas and deadly Christmas trees into what was otherwise a fun romp.) This is the one in which the Autons first broke out of shop windows and this is the one in which they didn’t move around like a bunch of jerky street mimes. This is the one in which they’re scary. The Doctor’s erratic and out of it for much of the time, but thanks to Pertwee’s charisma and screen presence when he is on, we get to know him fairly early. And it introduces Liz Shaw. Sure, the Nestene is just a blob in a tank and a lot of rubber tentacles, but anyone who thinks the CGI blob and the ‘climactic’ fight at the end of Rose is any better has been duped by the often flimsy illusions of better technology and bigger budget.
The Ambassadors Of Death (TV – Classic)
Ah, Season 7. How to choose? They all feature Liz Shaw and so score valuable points over the rest, but it really doesn’t help when it comes to deciding between them. Well, Spearhead’s already earned a slot. I can hardly include Inferno after having a go at the alternate Earth setup in Rise Of The Cybermen – although Inferno, which does suffer from the fact that the Primords are A Bit Rubbish™, is better in that respect since the parallel Earth featured there is more interesting than the real one. So I’m left with a really tough call between Doctor Who And The Silurians, to use its full title, and Ambassadors. Ambassadors has all the requisite James Bond stuff, decent sci-fi stuff that’s half-Quatermass, half-Avengers and one of the best endings ever. It has a similar moral resonance to Silurians in that the monsters are not villains and both stories are presenting something novel. Both stories are long and Ambassadors does involve a lot of runaround (but since some of the running around is done by Liz, we can certainly forgive that) to fill it out, but to be honest every time I’ve watched either of them I just enjoy immersing myself in the adventure for the long term. In the end, well, it comes down to that ending I guess – the Doctor walking away and handing the actual task of first contact over to humanity – and the fact that this one was responsible for what must be my earliest childhood memory of Doctor Who: the simple but effectively creepy images of the alien ‘astronauts’. So Ambassadors wins not by a nose but by a whisker.
An Unearthly Child (TV – Classic)
This is the best introductory story, full stop. It’s that perfect bridge between the world of the mundane – teachers at a school – and escapism – one of the pupils knows far more than she should but also has telling gaps in her knowledge, and her Grandfather has a time/space ship in the shape of a Police Box in the corner of a local junkyard. With Ian and Barbara we’re crossing over into a whole new dimension and it’s all conveyed with that vital sense of wonder. Their reactions are perfect. Susan’s suitably ‘alien’, and the Doctor is a terrifically remote figure, all the more engaging for his famous irascibility and smug superiority. Never mind all the gubbins with the cave people afterwards - they had to go and travel somewhere so it might as well have been One Thousand Pence, BC. It’s the first episode that counts.
The Aztecs (TV – Classic)
I felt the need to name a purely historical story, and this is the one that stands out best to my mind. Some nice moral questions raised for Barbara and a romance for the Doctor.
Fury From The Deep (Novelisation/Audio)
I'll admit it may well be better in my imagination than it ever looked on screen, but thanks to the highly effective combination of the novelisation and a couple of listens on audio, the imagined version remains intact. Again it scores oodles on atmosphere, it's a great setup for the base under siege scenario and manages to make seaweed creepy, for goodness sake. Plus it has some strong emotional touches with Victoria’s impending departure in the, er, pipeline. Lovely.
Planet Of Evil (TV – Classic)
This one I’m including as an alternative to The Ark In Space, which is brilliant and also gave me lots of welcome nightmares as a kid. (Stuart included Ark in his list and I was tempted to do the same for all the same reasons he cited, but at the same time I didn’t want this gem to be overlooked.) Unlike Ark, it doesn’t have Harry and that is a point against it, but the horror is just as effective and the memories just as vivid. It’s Jekyll and Hyde with a Forbidden Planet vibe, and Sorenson is great in the Jekyll/Hyde role. Also, take note ye makers of New Who (and here’s another reason for including it), it features an alien planet, creepily effective and effectively creepy and all managed on a fraction of today’s budgets. Prentis Hancock is a bit annoying but what else do you expect from Paul Morrow? The one they really needed to enlist from Moonbase Alpha was Sandra Benes, who would have spent the entire story screaming her lungs out. Right up until the mostly-invisible monster with the crackly energy outline sucked her soul out and spat out her horrific dried-up husk of a corpse. Luckily plenty of other Morestrans were on hand to die for our viewing pleasure. Plus Sarah Jane Smith is as gorgeous and terrified as she can be.
Caves Of Androzani (TV - Classic)
Ah, Graeme Harper, what happened? From the superb melodrama of Androzani to the mellow drama of Rise Of The Cybermen. This story’s giant rat is the Magma Creature, of course – a big plastic walking bat that looks, let’s be honest, a bit guano. The odd thing is, it’s really not needed and adds nothing to the melting pot. And what a melting pot. As with Talons, there’s that balance of humour and horror, but here it’s stretched taut as a tightrope, walking a fine line between taking itself incredibly seriously and sending itself up. Morgus talking to camera is completely mad but it really works. Sharaz Jek is a memorable Phantom Of The Opera who does all but break into a chorus of ‘The Music Of The Night’, and the Doctor’s not trying to save the day for a change, he’s just caught up in everyone else’s conflicting motivations, trying to save Peri and paying the ultimate price. Finally, a Davison story that makes you sit right up and pay attention.
Fear Itself (BBC Eighth Doctor Novel)
Best EDA I had the pleasure of reading. (And that’s no offence to the others.) It just had that perfectly judged balance of substance and pace, atmosphere and action, dark and light. Nicely written throughout, some great character material – special mention to poor underrated (and often underserved) Anji – and a lot of neat sf ideas pooled together in a very Doctor Who-ish mix.
Heritage (BBC Seventh Doctor Novel)
Quite simply better than any Sylvester McCoy story on the telly. Doctor Who meets Unforgiven, and better than that makes it sound. The atmosphere is so palpably dark that you feel the presence of monsters where (at least in the expected sense) there aren’t any, and yet somehow it gets away with throwing a dolphin into the mix without detracting from any of it. Quite the opposite, in fact, because Bernard is portrayed with the same conviction as the heartfelt human story at its core. Arabella the crow is as well characterized as the human cast. It also kills off Mel and should therefore be considered definitive, canon and all the rest.
And, bubbling under at Number 11…
One I Haven’t Written Yet
Dear me, that sounds conceited, but I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. Somewhere in me lurks a great Doctor Who story, one of the best, and it wants out. Of course I do have other things to write, quite possibly better things too, but until it’s written that Doctor Who story is not going away. I think it’s probably more of a ‘classic’ Doctor Who, so until we see the return of what was the Past Doctor range to the bookshelves I expect I’m stuck with it, although I may have to just get on and write it in my spare time to get it out of my system. Time will tell.
It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice – least of all mine – that there aren’t any New Series entries here. I don’t think that need be very telling – plenty of great ‘Classic Series’ stories are necessarily missed off the list too! New Series highlights such as The Empty Child and School Reunion might have nudged out The Aztecs, for instance, but for the fact that a pure historical helps to represent the range of stories Doctor Who can do effectively. But to pursue that line is to extend a Top Ten to a Top Twenty, then a Top One Hundred and so on until we’ve ranked all the stories in whatever medium according to their various pros and cons. And none of us wants that, do we? I’ll leave that to the Fans with capital Fs. :)
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Pedal To The Metal
Prefect SlogAfter complaining about the frequently 'rushed' pacing of the new 45-minute format Doctor Who, I am going to feel like such a hypocrite for saying this, but the Cybermen have returned, plodding onto our screens in an episode in which I just couldn't help feeling should have had more of the energy and drive we've been used to seeing. Let me just say that Rise of the Cybermen was not bad, but the most overwhelming impression it left on me come the end credits was how much better it all could have - and should have - been.
Now, to be fair, it had some disadvantages at the outset. For one, I knew it was going to be set on an alternate Earth. Which, sorry, instead of a 'pinch me, I'm dreaming' scenario, leaves me in a 'poke me, I need waking up' frame of mind. It's much harder to care for alternative worlds populated by alternative people - even more so when we're faced with an alternative Mickey and an alternative Jackie Tyler. The other key element hampering this story was one that only really emerged as the episode went on, in that it lacked impact because it was all too much like the Troughton Cyberman story, Invasion. Fortunately, I think the story will have an impact on the young uns who have no idea there was a Troughton Cyberman story, but for this seasoned DW veteran, as much as I enjoyed seeing International Electromatics emblazoned on the side of the truck, I already knew most of what was coming. And I think what I most wanted out of a new Cyberman story was something that could surprise and impress me, as well as the new generation of viewers.
I'll try not to bang on for too long about this one, because it may all come out in the wash, or failing that the second episode (thank you BBC for remembering not to tack a spoiler-packed trailer on the end), but I was left wanting something more - from this week's episode as much as next week's.
What I wanted less of was Rose Tyler's family, alternative or otherwise. Too much focus on the domestics and you're going to end up with a very domestic, dare I say pedestrian feel to the thing. It started well, I thought, with Roger Lloyd Pack engaging wheelchair-bound Rotwang mode, but then followed it up with a lot of padding, too much plodding and too many misjudged moments. Of the latter, off the top of my head, the ones that stood out the worst were the premature 'solution' to the dead TARDIS situation (what was the problem with leaving the Doctor & Co stranded in this reality with no hope of escape?) and (dear oh dear) cyber-surgery to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Tarantino pulls this sort of thing off, using "Stuck In The Middle With You" to accompany a chilling act of torture. This was just a poor choice of soundtrack for the moment, whatever effect the director was aiming for. On a much smaller point, they could have also saved the Rose-is-a-dog-in-this-reality gag until Rose gets to discover the amusing fact for herself. A joke loses something in the repetition. Also, I did wonder why, when everybody was equipped with natty earpieces, the Cybus signal bothered to patch into stray mobile phones.
These are fairly minor points, but they're part of what added up to 45 minutes of me in writer-mode, thinking how it could have been done differently. Instead of me being absorbed, involved and enthralled, the way I generally prefer.
There were a loose collection of positives that I should cite, by way of balance: the Metropolis-style Cybermen (although, going back to the plodding, probably a bit too much focus on those clumpy great feet); good to see Don Warrington as the President of the UK (although he did ask for it at the end, didn't he, harping on about what would happen if he refused the Cybermen's offer of an upgrade - D'uh!); the scene with Mickey and his blind Grandma was nicely played (although a bit too much of an attempt to shoehorn in some background for the character now that he's a companion, when really we should have been let in on some of it before, given how long we've had to put up with him).
But, further to that parenthetical aside, the last thing the story needed was more domestic stuff to hold up the pace. Impatience is not something I'm used to feeling in a Doctor Who story these days, and I am all for allowing the story time to develop and come alive, but most of what we got here was diversionary and, since the Rose and her family kitchen sink stuff has been done more than adequately before, a bit old hat. The time should have been taken to build up the Cybermen - the clue was there in the title! - but at the end of the day, they simply weren't given the chance to be scary enough. As I say, the whole thing may well have had much more impact on the youngsters and that's to its credit, but for me this one lacked the necessary metal.
Now, to be fair, it had some disadvantages at the outset. For one, I knew it was going to be set on an alternate Earth. Which, sorry, instead of a 'pinch me, I'm dreaming' scenario, leaves me in a 'poke me, I need waking up' frame of mind. It's much harder to care for alternative worlds populated by alternative people - even more so when we're faced with an alternative Mickey and an alternative Jackie Tyler. The other key element hampering this story was one that only really emerged as the episode went on, in that it lacked impact because it was all too much like the Troughton Cyberman story, Invasion. Fortunately, I think the story will have an impact on the young uns who have no idea there was a Troughton Cyberman story, but for this seasoned DW veteran, as much as I enjoyed seeing International Electromatics emblazoned on the side of the truck, I already knew most of what was coming. And I think what I most wanted out of a new Cyberman story was something that could surprise and impress me, as well as the new generation of viewers.
I'll try not to bang on for too long about this one, because it may all come out in the wash, or failing that the second episode (thank you BBC for remembering not to tack a spoiler-packed trailer on the end), but I was left wanting something more - from this week's episode as much as next week's.
What I wanted less of was Rose Tyler's family, alternative or otherwise. Too much focus on the domestics and you're going to end up with a very domestic, dare I say pedestrian feel to the thing. It started well, I thought, with Roger Lloyd Pack engaging wheelchair-bound Rotwang mode, but then followed it up with a lot of padding, too much plodding and too many misjudged moments. Of the latter, off the top of my head, the ones that stood out the worst were the premature 'solution' to the dead TARDIS situation (what was the problem with leaving the Doctor & Co stranded in this reality with no hope of escape?) and (dear oh dear) cyber-surgery to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Tarantino pulls this sort of thing off, using "Stuck In The Middle With You" to accompany a chilling act of torture. This was just a poor choice of soundtrack for the moment, whatever effect the director was aiming for. On a much smaller point, they could have also saved the Rose-is-a-dog-in-this-reality gag until Rose gets to discover the amusing fact for herself. A joke loses something in the repetition. Also, I did wonder why, when everybody was equipped with natty earpieces, the Cybus signal bothered to patch into stray mobile phones.
These are fairly minor points, but they're part of what added up to 45 minutes of me in writer-mode, thinking how it could have been done differently. Instead of me being absorbed, involved and enthralled, the way I generally prefer.
There were a loose collection of positives that I should cite, by way of balance: the Metropolis-style Cybermen (although, going back to the plodding, probably a bit too much focus on those clumpy great feet); good to see Don Warrington as the President of the UK (although he did ask for it at the end, didn't he, harping on about what would happen if he refused the Cybermen's offer of an upgrade - D'uh!); the scene with Mickey and his blind Grandma was nicely played (although a bit too much of an attempt to shoehorn in some background for the character now that he's a companion, when really we should have been let in on some of it before, given how long we've had to put up with him).
But, further to that parenthetical aside, the last thing the story needed was more domestic stuff to hold up the pace. Impatience is not something I'm used to feeling in a Doctor Who story these days, and I am all for allowing the story time to develop and come alive, but most of what we got here was diversionary and, since the Rose and her family kitchen sink stuff has been done more than adequately before, a bit old hat. The time should have been taken to build up the Cybermen - the clue was there in the title! - but at the end of the day, they simply weren't given the chance to be scary enough. As I say, the whole thing may well have had much more impact on the youngsters and that's to its credit, but for me this one lacked the necessary metal.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Lost: A Leap of Faith
Prefect SlogFor those of you who, like me, are irrevocably hooked on Lost, something to think about. This whole thing with the bunker and the pressing the button every 108 minutes, it's just a metaphor for us, the hopelessly addicted viewers, isn't it? We have to keep tuning in every 168 hours, otherwise we're afraid something dreadful will happen. In our case, of course, we're afraid something dreadful will happen and we'll miss it. C4 kept trailing the series' return with the tag line, "Finally, some answers" and, as expected, all we have are more questions. They really threw a curve ball my way by having that guy, Desmond, turn up in the bunker. WTF? I thought, not for the first time. Yes, I can accept polar bears, black smoke, bad robots and all sorts of twisty turny stuff, but for some reason I can't quite explain, Desmond was possibly a stretch too far. Now, for all I know, the producers have a wham-bam, huge WOW of an explanation for all of this, but the more the series goes on throwing curve balls, the better that explanation is going to have to be. If you've ever read a Peter F Hamilton SF epic, you'll know that the conclusion has to be proportionate to the time invested in following the story - and that it rarely is! So I do wonder if the whole business with the button is a deliberate tongue-in-cheek metaphorical piss-take stuck in there by the producers because they know what they're doing to us. Naturally, they're afraid we'll all stop tuning in every 168 hours. In the case of poor old Locke and Jack and the others it's only by *not* pressing that damned button they will ever find out the truth - whether there's anything really explosive to it, or whether it's just a scam to keep them pressing the button. All I can say is, to the producers, I am going to keep pressing the button, but there had better be something big at the end of all this; and to anybody out there who has stopped pressing the button, what is it like? Did the world implode? Are you plagued with curiosity? Or do you just get on with your lives and snigger at the rest of us poor deluded individuals who are continuing to take the Lost leap of faith?
Sunday, May 07, 2006
The Doctor Almost Dances
Prefect SlogOf all the writers contributing to this season of Doctor Who, Steve Moffat had the most to live up to. With last year's The Empty Child, he showed how brand new 45-minute Who should be done and with The Doctor Dances, despite a slightly painful to watch extended dance mix on the end, set the bar for the two-parter. The title of last night's episode, The Girl In The Fireplace, suggested something similarly creepy, to the point where I had to wonder if Mr Moffat had a thing about creepy children. But before I get done for defamation of character, the end result was I came at last night's episode with an unpredictable combination of a great deal of positive feeling and high expectations. Things could have gone either way.
I certainly didn't expect a time-spanning love story - and anyone who's read my own Doctor Who books will know how fond of those I should be (Emotional Chemistry ranges from the 51st Century back to the early 19th, so Mr Moffat threw a few extra decades on his temporal fire, but hey). And I didn't expect the second story in a row to bring a tear to the eye and a lump in the throat. Bastards! I'm a grown man - there's only so much I can take!
This is less surprising when you realise that the stories are thematically similar. Sophia Myles is, no offence, no Sarah Jane, but in The Girl In The Fireplace we have a whirlwind romance that is, in effect, the answer to the questions raised in School Reunion. Questions that were already answered in that episode, but here they're illustrated, shown rather than told. I've heard it suggested that the stories should have been shown farther apart, but the other alternative would have been to press them closer together. Thus, in School Reunion we could have been prompted to wonder why the Doctor moves on and leaves his companions behind, often - as in Sarah Jane's case - without so much as a by your leave (sniff), and then in The Girl In The Fireplace we could have been shown the answer. The curse of the Time Lords: the Doctor lives on while those he loves fade and die.
In fact, The Girl In The Fireplace should really have been a two-parter in its own right. It's positively crammed with stuff, but once more it's given the whiz-bang treatment and the Doctor's romance with Reinette is conducted at such a whirlwind pace that they omit the one vital scene where they actually dance. 'Dance' in The Doctor Dances meant something else entirely, of course, but here I'm not speaking in metaphors. A revolution or three around the grand ballroom, the Doctor and Reinette losing themselves n each other until they are the only ones there would have spoken volumes and would have had the added benefit of looking gorgeous. Honestly, six episodes of the BBC's Pride & Prejudice (the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle one) and not a minute goes by without a major dancing epidemic, and they can't even give us one bloody waltz where it really counts. It stood out as such an obvious missing piece at the time that I was left dismayed, while they cut straight to the scene where the drunken Doctor rescues Mickey and Rose (who are, funnily enough, something of a couple of spare parts in this anyway) from a spot of clockwork surgery.
Then to be further dismayed by the sound of the Doctor spouting insults at the androids like Edmund Blackadder: "Mr Thickety Thick Thick Thick." And when you're producing such a curious, wonderful blend of fantasy, history and sf, you need to take care not to jump your audience out of the action with oddities like that.
Luckily, for the most part, as with School Reunion, I was so absorbed and involved by the human story that I could quickly forget that little glitch and, more importantly, overlook the flaws and inconsistencies in the more Doctor Who-ish aspects of the plot.
Indeed, it was all so magical that at the time (the station reminded me of the house in Gulliver's Travels, full of mirrors leading to different times, and the Doctor riding through the mirror on horseback was the stuff of fairy tales) I wasn't questioning the logic of 1) the time portals (how, exactly, did they work and why, if the androids knew so much about Madame Pompadour's history, didn't they go straight to when she was thirty-seven?), 2) the clockwork androids (why?) or 3) the cannibalising of the crew for parts (I mean, okay, a heart's a pump and a liver's a filtration unit, but there are a limited number of useful parts in the human body when it comes to patching up a spaceship). A mate of mine picked far more holes than those and to be honest, I couldn't disagree with any of them. But nevertheless we ended up with diverse impressions of the episode. And it's just another illustration of what often happens with Doctor Who, old or new: namely, that it comes down to a measure of what you're willing to forgive, based on the overall impression left on you by a given story. With School Reunion, the feeling was overwhelmingly positive, with The Girl In The Fireplace, slightly less so, but more than sufficient to prompt me to look on it like the clockwork androids: illogical, but beautiful.
They certainly gave me the chills, with their creepy masks, the most effective scene of course being where the Doctor is rooting one of them out from under the young Reinette's bed. But there's really not enough time to savour that creepiness after that, and the whole thing, as usual, flies by in a rush. To be fair, the story may have needed a few more complications in order to warrant a two-parter, but the dividends might well have been worth it. Ultimately, with this one, everything would appear to hang on whether you buy into the love story or not. Me, I'm a hopeless romantic and a writer of a Doctor Who love story myeslf and therefore an easy target. There was a tangible chemistry there, fairly obviously, between Tennant and Myles, and it's especially obvious in the kiss, which did much to convince. (Sophia Myles is also one of those actresses who looks like she's born for period costume and short of hiring Kate Winslet, whom some of us might have liked to have seen in a Doctor Who, she does the job admirably enough.) And the mind-meld works well to cement their bond - I particularly loved the turnaround, where Reinette is able to step through and see into the Doctor's thoughts. But two parts would have lent the story an epic feel more befitting a story that's meant to span 3000 years and allowed us to really experience the two-speed romance as it should have been experienced: at two speeds. Most crucially, two parts would have allowed plenty of time for that missing scene in the ballroom. This was one occasion where the Doctor definitely needed to dance. With that, I might have loved it unequivocally. Without it, I still loved it, but it was more of a fleeting love affair that did well to last past the end credits.
I certainly didn't expect a time-spanning love story - and anyone who's read my own Doctor Who books will know how fond of those I should be (Emotional Chemistry ranges from the 51st Century back to the early 19th, so Mr Moffat threw a few extra decades on his temporal fire, but hey). And I didn't expect the second story in a row to bring a tear to the eye and a lump in the throat. Bastards! I'm a grown man - there's only so much I can take!
This is less surprising when you realise that the stories are thematically similar. Sophia Myles is, no offence, no Sarah Jane, but in The Girl In The Fireplace we have a whirlwind romance that is, in effect, the answer to the questions raised in School Reunion. Questions that were already answered in that episode, but here they're illustrated, shown rather than told. I've heard it suggested that the stories should have been shown farther apart, but the other alternative would have been to press them closer together. Thus, in School Reunion we could have been prompted to wonder why the Doctor moves on and leaves his companions behind, often - as in Sarah Jane's case - without so much as a by your leave (sniff), and then in The Girl In The Fireplace we could have been shown the answer. The curse of the Time Lords: the Doctor lives on while those he loves fade and die.
In fact, The Girl In The Fireplace should really have been a two-parter in its own right. It's positively crammed with stuff, but once more it's given the whiz-bang treatment and the Doctor's romance with Reinette is conducted at such a whirlwind pace that they omit the one vital scene where they actually dance. 'Dance' in The Doctor Dances meant something else entirely, of course, but here I'm not speaking in metaphors. A revolution or three around the grand ballroom, the Doctor and Reinette losing themselves n each other until they are the only ones there would have spoken volumes and would have had the added benefit of looking gorgeous. Honestly, six episodes of the BBC's Pride & Prejudice (the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle one) and not a minute goes by without a major dancing epidemic, and they can't even give us one bloody waltz where it really counts. It stood out as such an obvious missing piece at the time that I was left dismayed, while they cut straight to the scene where the drunken Doctor rescues Mickey and Rose (who are, funnily enough, something of a couple of spare parts in this anyway) from a spot of clockwork surgery.
Then to be further dismayed by the sound of the Doctor spouting insults at the androids like Edmund Blackadder: "Mr Thickety Thick Thick Thick." And when you're producing such a curious, wonderful blend of fantasy, history and sf, you need to take care not to jump your audience out of the action with oddities like that.
Luckily, for the most part, as with School Reunion, I was so absorbed and involved by the human story that I could quickly forget that little glitch and, more importantly, overlook the flaws and inconsistencies in the more Doctor Who-ish aspects of the plot.
Indeed, it was all so magical that at the time (the station reminded me of the house in Gulliver's Travels, full of mirrors leading to different times, and the Doctor riding through the mirror on horseback was the stuff of fairy tales) I wasn't questioning the logic of 1) the time portals (how, exactly, did they work and why, if the androids knew so much about Madame Pompadour's history, didn't they go straight to when she was thirty-seven?), 2) the clockwork androids (why?) or 3) the cannibalising of the crew for parts (I mean, okay, a heart's a pump and a liver's a filtration unit, but there are a limited number of useful parts in the human body when it comes to patching up a spaceship). A mate of mine picked far more holes than those and to be honest, I couldn't disagree with any of them. But nevertheless we ended up with diverse impressions of the episode. And it's just another illustration of what often happens with Doctor Who, old or new: namely, that it comes down to a measure of what you're willing to forgive, based on the overall impression left on you by a given story. With School Reunion, the feeling was overwhelmingly positive, with The Girl In The Fireplace, slightly less so, but more than sufficient to prompt me to look on it like the clockwork androids: illogical, but beautiful.
They certainly gave me the chills, with their creepy masks, the most effective scene of course being where the Doctor is rooting one of them out from under the young Reinette's bed. But there's really not enough time to savour that creepiness after that, and the whole thing, as usual, flies by in a rush. To be fair, the story may have needed a few more complications in order to warrant a two-parter, but the dividends might well have been worth it. Ultimately, with this one, everything would appear to hang on whether you buy into the love story or not. Me, I'm a hopeless romantic and a writer of a Doctor Who love story myeslf and therefore an easy target. There was a tangible chemistry there, fairly obviously, between Tennant and Myles, and it's especially obvious in the kiss, which did much to convince. (Sophia Myles is also one of those actresses who looks like she's born for period costume and short of hiring Kate Winslet, whom some of us might have liked to have seen in a Doctor Who, she does the job admirably enough.) And the mind-meld works well to cement their bond - I particularly loved the turnaround, where Reinette is able to step through and see into the Doctor's thoughts. But two parts would have lent the story an epic feel more befitting a story that's meant to span 3000 years and allowed us to really experience the two-speed romance as it should have been experienced: at two speeds. Most crucially, two parts would have allowed plenty of time for that missing scene in the ballroom. This was one occasion where the Doctor definitely needed to dance. With that, I might have loved it unequivocally. Without it, I still loved it, but it was more of a fleeting love affair that did well to last past the end credits.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Me & Sarah Jane
Prefect SlogWe go way back, we do. Surely my earliest crush, and unlike the girls my age at school, she'd come round to my house every Saturday - even though she was busy fighting monsters or peering around corners and whispering 'Doc-tor' in that irresistibly timorous way of hers. She had that perfect balance of fearful and fearless, she was an intrepid investigator who knew when to be afraid. She was a bona fide, 100% real Doctor Who companion and, damn it, I lurved her. It was wonderful to see her return in School Reunion last night and no wonder at all that the Doctor greets her with the boyish excitement and delight of a fan. I'd be the same.
Quite simply, *every* moment of that story was exquisitely judged, beautifully performed and everything it needed to be. And by 'that story', of course I mean the 'Reunion' part. The 'School' part - the vampire-like Krillitane (surely a food additive?) taking over the school, feeding the kids brain-enlarging chips and trying to crack the something paradigm or the Da Vinci Code or whatever - was like the narrative equivalent of the musical score - mostly incidental, sometimes intrusive. There was nothing terribly wrong with that side of things - apart from the dreadfully convenient fact that the aliens' own oil was lethal to them, which is probably just another product of having to tell these stories too fast. When I saw the trailer the week before, I was mildly concerned that they were attempting to cram too much into their usual 45 minute slot: Sarah Jane, K9, Mickey, Anthony Head, aliens invade Grange Hill etc - and to a certain extent that turns out to be true. A fair bit of the "tell don't show" principle, and no real development on offer. And, not that its relevant, a lot of kids tapping away at keyboards according to the Space:1999 school of possessed computer programming - as a result of which I envisaged a Krotons-style scenario, where the aliens were skimming off all the High Brains for their own devices. Curiously, the bat-creatures are a tad too reminiscent of the Reapers from Father's Day, last year's Doctor Who blub-fest, but it might have been one continuity-dredge too far to explain that they had evolved thus as a result of an encounter with those particular monsters. But the 'School' part is anyway, let's face it, there for the kids - what better setting to rope in the younger audiences, especially with the obligatory blowing up of the school at the end. And the rest of it, the 'Reunion', was so absolutely perfect, that it didn't matter what was going on in the background. Actually, that played in its favour, because equally it didn't matter much if there were flaws with the alien menace plot.
The emotion in every scene that counts is played out beautifully - from that first meeting, to Sarah's encounter with the TARDIS, all the way through to that heart-warming and heart-wrenching goodbye. It's all played out naturally too - it's like they know the heartstrings are going to be playing themselves, especially for us sad old fans who know what it all means, so there's no need to pull on them. Even K9's return is handled deftly, with gently mocking humour, while at the same time allowing him to do what made him such a story liability in the first place - i.e. to save the day.
Then there's the emotional angle between Sarah and Rose - "the ex and the missus" as Mickey says, and you won't often find me quoting him. Sheer brilliance, and again there's a progress to it that feels perfectly natural, all the way up to and including that touching farewell, where Sarah tells Rose to look her up if she ever feels the need. Of course, when bickering they could have thrown names of visited planets at each other, but we know how that would have looked. Sarah Jane: "Earth, Peladon, Mars, Karn, Zeta Minor, Skaro, Voga etc." Rose: "Earth, Earth, Earth, a station orbiting the Earth, Earth, Earth, and an alien planet called New Earth." Compared to SJS, Rose's list reads like the Monty Python Spam song. With the monsters thing, they at least achieve the illusion of a balance they can work from. Although Rose all but blows her game by playing the Slitheen card. :)
But see, even though it gives me the chance for some evil humour, that Rose-Sarah Jane scene was, like so many other aspects of this very human story, pitch perfect. And to have the Doctor walk in and find them laughing about him is pure magic.
Even Mickey, dear God I can't believe I'm going to say this, is bearable here. Although he's perhaps one character too many in this all too short 45 minutes, he does serve a purpose and it's worth it for the aforementioned line and his comparison of himself to the 'tin dog'. Cue my first real Metal Mickey joke opportunity.
Obviously I am going to have to watch this one again. In part, to remind myself of the 'School' part of the story, which I'm afraid may remain forgettable even after a second viewing. But chiefly, just to savour that 'Reunion' again. I mean, I know I'm a married man and all, but - between you and me - you have to envy the Doctor that ecstatic final hug. :)
Quite simply, *every* moment of that story was exquisitely judged, beautifully performed and everything it needed to be. And by 'that story', of course I mean the 'Reunion' part. The 'School' part - the vampire-like Krillitane (surely a food additive?) taking over the school, feeding the kids brain-enlarging chips and trying to crack the something paradigm or the Da Vinci Code or whatever - was like the narrative equivalent of the musical score - mostly incidental, sometimes intrusive. There was nothing terribly wrong with that side of things - apart from the dreadfully convenient fact that the aliens' own oil was lethal to them, which is probably just another product of having to tell these stories too fast. When I saw the trailer the week before, I was mildly concerned that they were attempting to cram too much into their usual 45 minute slot: Sarah Jane, K9, Mickey, Anthony Head, aliens invade Grange Hill etc - and to a certain extent that turns out to be true. A fair bit of the "tell don't show" principle, and no real development on offer. And, not that its relevant, a lot of kids tapping away at keyboards according to the Space:1999 school of possessed computer programming - as a result of which I envisaged a Krotons-style scenario, where the aliens were skimming off all the High Brains for their own devices. Curiously, the bat-creatures are a tad too reminiscent of the Reapers from Father's Day, last year's Doctor Who blub-fest, but it might have been one continuity-dredge too far to explain that they had evolved thus as a result of an encounter with those particular monsters. But the 'School' part is anyway, let's face it, there for the kids - what better setting to rope in the younger audiences, especially with the obligatory blowing up of the school at the end. And the rest of it, the 'Reunion', was so absolutely perfect, that it didn't matter what was going on in the background. Actually, that played in its favour, because equally it didn't matter much if there were flaws with the alien menace plot.
The emotion in every scene that counts is played out beautifully - from that first meeting, to Sarah's encounter with the TARDIS, all the way through to that heart-warming and heart-wrenching goodbye. It's all played out naturally too - it's like they know the heartstrings are going to be playing themselves, especially for us sad old fans who know what it all means, so there's no need to pull on them. Even K9's return is handled deftly, with gently mocking humour, while at the same time allowing him to do what made him such a story liability in the first place - i.e. to save the day.
Then there's the emotional angle between Sarah and Rose - "the ex and the missus" as Mickey says, and you won't often find me quoting him. Sheer brilliance, and again there's a progress to it that feels perfectly natural, all the way up to and including that touching farewell, where Sarah tells Rose to look her up if she ever feels the need. Of course, when bickering they could have thrown names of visited planets at each other, but we know how that would have looked. Sarah Jane: "Earth, Peladon, Mars, Karn, Zeta Minor, Skaro, Voga etc." Rose: "Earth, Earth, Earth, a station orbiting the Earth, Earth, Earth, and an alien planet called New Earth." Compared to SJS, Rose's list reads like the Monty Python Spam song. With the monsters thing, they at least achieve the illusion of a balance they can work from. Although Rose all but blows her game by playing the Slitheen card. :)
But see, even though it gives me the chance for some evil humour, that Rose-Sarah Jane scene was, like so many other aspects of this very human story, pitch perfect. And to have the Doctor walk in and find them laughing about him is pure magic.
Even Mickey, dear God I can't believe I'm going to say this, is bearable here. Although he's perhaps one character too many in this all too short 45 minutes, he does serve a purpose and it's worth it for the aforementioned line and his comparison of himself to the 'tin dog'. Cue my first real Metal Mickey joke opportunity.
Obviously I am going to have to watch this one again. In part, to remind myself of the 'School' part of the story, which I'm afraid may remain forgettable even after a second viewing. But chiefly, just to savour that 'Reunion' again. I mean, I know I'm a married man and all, but - between you and me - you have to envy the Doctor that ecstatic final hug. :)
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Fang Horror Rocks!
Prefect SlogNo, not a new variant of Scissors Paper Stone, but a brief summary of my response to Tooth & Claw, the second episode of the second series of new Doctor Who. Was that the werewolf's bollocks or what? Okay, it kicks off with the guys from the BBC One idents giving up their waterside T'ai Chi for a spot of Matrix style ass-whupping, but that just serves as a welcome reminder that it's only really in Doctor Who that you're going to get warrior assassin monks, a spacefaring werewolf and Queen Victoria in the same episode.
To tell the truth, throughout it all I was getting two strong past DW story vibes, one of which was of The Unquiet Dead: simple ghost story, terrific atmosphere, beautifully executed and featuring a key historical figure played brilliantly by a great character actor. Replace 'ghost' with 'werewolf' and replace 'characters helplessly trapped in a room at the end' with 'a Doctor who's actually doing something to solve the situation', and that's pretty much what you get here. With more action.
The other strong vibe I was getting was one of Horror Of Fang Rock: period piece, isolated setting, classic horror with an sf twist, diamonds etc. So much so that somewhere in the middle I actually commented that if the Doctor adapted the telescope into a laser to destroy the beast, that would certainly clinch it. And lo and behold...!
Of course, the major difference - er, other than the lack of a lighthouse and the fact that the isolation is achieved by a cordon of armed monks instead of stormy seas and fog - is that we have a single 45 minute episode and the whizz-bang storytelling that comes with it. But it's the episodes that achieve this kind of standard within that framework that remind us that new Doctor Who needs to be judged by its own new set of rules. I.e. they set the bar and show what can be done with that new pacing. I recall when Rose first appeared, I bemoaned the fact that 'We have no time to stand and scare'. It's the same here: the scaring has to be done on the move. But when it's done well, it makes all the difference between a rush and a rush job.
I'm afraid that these reviews have to be done at much the same speed at the moment, because of writing commitments and what have you (hopefully I can make an announcement before too long), but I'd have to scrabble around a bit to find much worth criticising in this one. Yes, it all turns a bit Buffy when they're in the library leafing through books for a clue as to how to defeat the monster. Yes, I did wake up this morning wondering what the hell had happened to all the monks surrounding the house. At the death of their leader Wolfie, they *might* have dropped their weapons and wandered off to resume their pondside callisthenics between BBC One programming, but I missed what happened to them. (Basically I'm going to have to rewatch it to find out if I blinked at the wrong time or something, but a rewatch is no trouble at all in this case.) And yes, the episode should have ended with Rose and the Doctor departing in the TARDIS, laughing their socks off at the royal family and howling like wolves - instead of that ham-fisted ad for the spinoff series, Torchwood, that was tacked on at the end.
I mean, I've heard fans complain about nods to the past - well, phooey, I loved the bit where the Doctor refers to himself as Dr James McCrimmon - means nothing to anyone watching DW for the first time, but it's a nice touch for those of us in the know. Whereas, by contrast, this little nod to the future as Queen Vic plugs the spinoff felt unnecessary and clumsy - and others who had no idea Torchwood was on the way have told me much the same thing. They were left wondering what the hell that was about. Surely a subtle reference in Torchwood to the idea that they'd been established by Queen Victoria would have sufficed to build a subtler but just as firm bridge?
But really, never mind. Last season, it wasn't until episode 3 that I really felt like Doctor Who was back. This year, it's an episode earlier and that's a step in the right direction. And next week: the return of Sarah Jane Smith. So woo, and indeed, hoo!
To tell the truth, throughout it all I was getting two strong past DW story vibes, one of which was of The Unquiet Dead: simple ghost story, terrific atmosphere, beautifully executed and featuring a key historical figure played brilliantly by a great character actor. Replace 'ghost' with 'werewolf' and replace 'characters helplessly trapped in a room at the end' with 'a Doctor who's actually doing something to solve the situation', and that's pretty much what you get here. With more action.
The other strong vibe I was getting was one of Horror Of Fang Rock: period piece, isolated setting, classic horror with an sf twist, diamonds etc. So much so that somewhere in the middle I actually commented that if the Doctor adapted the telescope into a laser to destroy the beast, that would certainly clinch it. And lo and behold...!
Of course, the major difference - er, other than the lack of a lighthouse and the fact that the isolation is achieved by a cordon of armed monks instead of stormy seas and fog - is that we have a single 45 minute episode and the whizz-bang storytelling that comes with it. But it's the episodes that achieve this kind of standard within that framework that remind us that new Doctor Who needs to be judged by its own new set of rules. I.e. they set the bar and show what can be done with that new pacing. I recall when Rose first appeared, I bemoaned the fact that 'We have no time to stand and scare'. It's the same here: the scaring has to be done on the move. But when it's done well, it makes all the difference between a rush and a rush job.
I'm afraid that these reviews have to be done at much the same speed at the moment, because of writing commitments and what have you (hopefully I can make an announcement before too long), but I'd have to scrabble around a bit to find much worth criticising in this one. Yes, it all turns a bit Buffy when they're in the library leafing through books for a clue as to how to defeat the monster. Yes, I did wake up this morning wondering what the hell had happened to all the monks surrounding the house. At the death of their leader Wolfie, they *might* have dropped their weapons and wandered off to resume their pondside callisthenics between BBC One programming, but I missed what happened to them. (Basically I'm going to have to rewatch it to find out if I blinked at the wrong time or something, but a rewatch is no trouble at all in this case.) And yes, the episode should have ended with Rose and the Doctor departing in the TARDIS, laughing their socks off at the royal family and howling like wolves - instead of that ham-fisted ad for the spinoff series, Torchwood, that was tacked on at the end.
I mean, I've heard fans complain about nods to the past - well, phooey, I loved the bit where the Doctor refers to himself as Dr James McCrimmon - means nothing to anyone watching DW for the first time, but it's a nice touch for those of us in the know. Whereas, by contrast, this little nod to the future as Queen Vic plugs the spinoff felt unnecessary and clumsy - and others who had no idea Torchwood was on the way have told me much the same thing. They were left wondering what the hell that was about. Surely a subtle reference in Torchwood to the idea that they'd been established by Queen Victoria would have sufficed to build a subtler but just as firm bridge?
But really, never mind. Last season, it wasn't until episode 3 that I really felt like Doctor Who was back. This year, it's an episode earlier and that's a step in the right direction. And next week: the return of Sarah Jane Smith. So woo, and indeed, hoo!
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Moving Swiftly On...
Prefect SlogOkay, I'd just gotten over my disappointment at discovering that there were in fact six more episodes of Invasion to crawl through - serves me right for checking an incomplete episode guide on the net, huh - and now the return of new DW for a second season leaves me with a meh feeling. Usually, I'd rewatch an episode before commenting here, but on the one hand it left vivid impressions and on the other it lacked that degree of re-watchability that's in the classics. Still, it's something that was missing from a great deal of the first season, so I can't hold that too greatly against it. A friend of mine was only commenting yesterday that she supposed I had all the first series on DVD and was surprised to discover that wasn't the case. In the first place, I'd generally watched them again right away for the purpose of scribbling a review and in the second place, that was generally enough. This one wasn't helped by the fact that I'd been so hugely looking forward to it and in part that's owed to the strengths of the first season, but probably in equal part that's owed to its weaknesses - i.e. I was hoping to see some marked improvements.
But don't get me wrong, what we had in the opening episode New Earth was not actively awful in the same way as, for example, World War III or (heaven forbid) Boomtown. No, it was a curious mix of dazzling and dumb, with the rough edges taking the shine off the gems, and the shiny bits not managing to dazzle enough to take your mind off the flaws. By no means terrible, but as it used to say on too many of my school geography reports, 'Could do better', and this morning I find, disappointingly, no immediate desire to watch it again.
Inevitably it's reminiscent of End of the World, but doesn't have the advantage of the wow factor of seeing this kind of Doctor Who for the first time - and doesn't have the brilliant 'chips' scene at the end. But it also reminded me of Time and the Rani, the rampantly silly debut of McCoy's Doctor, complete with the companion-villainess switcheroo. Mostly a nonsensical runaround. Unlike the McCoy debut, it's liberally sprinkled with bright ideas, so gives it that feeling of being rushed, but there's nowhere near enough of note in it to fill out a two parter.
The list of plus points is impressive: outstanding performances from everybody who really counted, brilliant cat make-up, terrific set design (special mention to the Intensive Care Unit, although I was temporarily jumped out of the action by the fact that the Doctor and Rose apparently had to descend through the Nestene chamber from Rose to get there), oodles of witty dialogue and some intriguing stuff with the Face of Boe. Against that you have a story that feels hastily cobbled together and sadly lacking, plus some wobbly CGI (the modern hi-tech equivalent of wobbly sets) where the cityscape and all the flying cars are poorly married to the foreground, a so-so opening that was perhaps required viewing for anyone who needed reminding that Mickey and Jackie will be back this year but that didn't do much for me. And a troublingly quick character U-turn from Cassandra at the end: "I don't want to die. Oh, all right then." Bah. The Doctor here is much more proactive in the resolution than previously, but again there are shades of End of the World where the action finale and the way the situation is resolved is a bit more than faintly ludicrous. Unfortunately, the most positive enduring impression the show left me with came from the trailer for next week's episode and how bloody good that looks. So, as I say, in the spirit of a Doctor who apparently likes to rush about, moving swiftly on...
But don't get me wrong, what we had in the opening episode New Earth was not actively awful in the same way as, for example, World War III or (heaven forbid) Boomtown. No, it was a curious mix of dazzling and dumb, with the rough edges taking the shine off the gems, and the shiny bits not managing to dazzle enough to take your mind off the flaws. By no means terrible, but as it used to say on too many of my school geography reports, 'Could do better', and this morning I find, disappointingly, no immediate desire to watch it again.
Inevitably it's reminiscent of End of the World, but doesn't have the advantage of the wow factor of seeing this kind of Doctor Who for the first time - and doesn't have the brilliant 'chips' scene at the end. But it also reminded me of Time and the Rani, the rampantly silly debut of McCoy's Doctor, complete with the companion-villainess switcheroo. Mostly a nonsensical runaround. Unlike the McCoy debut, it's liberally sprinkled with bright ideas, so gives it that feeling of being rushed, but there's nowhere near enough of note in it to fill out a two parter.
The list of plus points is impressive: outstanding performances from everybody who really counted, brilliant cat make-up, terrific set design (special mention to the Intensive Care Unit, although I was temporarily jumped out of the action by the fact that the Doctor and Rose apparently had to descend through the Nestene chamber from Rose to get there), oodles of witty dialogue and some intriguing stuff with the Face of Boe. Against that you have a story that feels hastily cobbled together and sadly lacking, plus some wobbly CGI (the modern hi-tech equivalent of wobbly sets) where the cityscape and all the flying cars are poorly married to the foreground, a so-so opening that was perhaps required viewing for anyone who needed reminding that Mickey and Jackie will be back this year but that didn't do much for me. And a troublingly quick character U-turn from Cassandra at the end: "I don't want to die. Oh, all right then." Bah. The Doctor here is much more proactive in the resolution than previously, but again there are shades of End of the World where the action finale and the way the situation is resolved is a bit more than faintly ludicrous. Unfortunately, the most positive enduring impression the show left me with came from the trailer for next week's episode and how bloody good that looks. So, as I say, in the spirit of a Doctor who apparently likes to rush about, moving swiftly on...
Friday, March 24, 2006
Paging Doctor Scully
Prefect SlogBip…Bip…Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip. The patient's crashing, the doctors are crowding around, their hands up to all sorts of busy, gruesome things just out of shot. "Charging to 300! Clear!" ZAP! Suddenly they have a rhythm again and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. But it's only a temporary respite and suddenly the patient's in V-fib again, and it's time to call it. Time of death, episode 13. But don't be mistaken: ER's monitor is giving out its steady beep-beep, delivering its customary standard of drama - and babies too, with a surprise pregnancy for Abby (because, let's face it, the woman has not had enough ups and downs in her life yet) and an episode where we're left genuinely wondering which way she will decide. Yes, it's all a little quieter than the plane crash episode, but ER's still good at this sort of thing.
No, the patient in question is INVASION. (Did you see? I even did my best to tilt the S there, because that's what sets it apart from other like shows.) It's been flatlining for far too long already, then along comes an episode where you can almost see the medical teams firing as many volts into it as their rattly old post-hurricane diesel generator can muster and suddenly there's the sense that, maybe, just possibly there might be life in the series yet. The Sheriff's run off with the kids, with something in a big black bag, there are stalkers outside the house, stuff is actually *happening* and it turns out the Sheriff's been shipping arms and equipment to a paramilitary alien boot camp in the Florida Keys. Finally, we're getting the idea that there's a real *invasion* going on. But no, it's not enough. They just don't have a decent power supply and the whole thing's slipped into the same old tachycardia again and we know why the S is tilting on its side. There’s been this huge (protracted) build-up about the locked closet in the Sheriff’’s household and when we finally get to see inside it – it’s empty. Clearly, it was where he was keeping all those guns he was smuggling out to the boot camp, but since we already saw those it was kind of pointless having all those meaningful shots of the locked closet door. Yawn.
There's a lesson in there: if you're going to mix soap with water-based sci-fi, make sure it lathers.
Oh well, I had a quick Google for an episode guide and it turns out there aren't that many more to go. They still have to wheel its corpse all the way to the mortuary.
Meanwhile, ignoring all of INVASION's warnings to 'stay away from the water', we've continued watching SURFACE. This show seemed like a marine counterpart to INVASION, but now that's mostly by virtue of the fact that we started watching them at the same time. SURFACE may not be Emmy award winning material - it's not - and it may be hugely derivative at times - but in contrast with the plodding INVASION, it has managed to keep up a good rate of knots in the pace department, and it's been (well, apparently, as of the last episode we saw) bold in that, while it may have borrowed heavily from the Elliot-ET boy-alien relationship, it went ahead and shot ET. For all I know, for good. (Having said that, of course, the little critter is going to be miraculously resurrected in the next instalment, isn't he? It's all right, don't write in and tell me, I'll watch it - nervously - soon enough.) It still has to deliver when the show reaches full term, but the weekly dosages of action, suspense and mystery are well measured and give the impression it will be worth staying the course. Sorry, just seeing if I can't stretch these medical metaphors as far as INVASION's plotline.
Thankfully, in these days of DVD and digital channels with plenty of airtime to fill, if new telly lets us down, there's always old telly. Avengers, Space:1999, UFO and now I notice ITV4 has even dredged up the old Planet Of The Apes TV series. Well, at least the first three of those are worth an essay in their own right, but I'd best just be brief for now and compare them to wines: a sparkling bottle of bubbly; a surprisingly dark red with something of an acquired taste, but basically a good vintage and a great bottle design; neon pink lambrusco in an orange plastic beaker.
And on DVD, my wife and I have just made our way through THE X FILES: SEASON ONE. Yes, it scares me to think that this too is now 'old telly'.
When I bought the box set, I decided I was going to limit myself to the first series and, while a few scattered episodes after that may yet tempt me to break that resolution, I feel like it was a good decision. My wallet agrees with me and Season One has a sense of completeness about it, there's something nicely circular to it, helped by the repeat of the scene where Cigarette Smoking Man files away the evidence in a Pentagon store room among countless identical boxes, one of which must surely contain the Lost Ark. Size permitting. And the 'cliffhanger' - the closing down of the X Files - works well as a tail end question mark, the sort of open conclusion that might have fit just as nicely if the series had been discontinued right there and then.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it didn't, because there were a few scattered gems to follow, but it did eventually outstay its welcome and essentially all you need to know about the conspiracy - and the alien-human hybrids - is all there in the first series, and the imagination can take it on from there at least as well as the actual show managed.
Overall it holds up well and you can see why it was the success it was: it’s slickly produced, glossy and atmospheric, and it’s played with that rare combination of conviction and humour. Admittedly there aren’t a whole lot of comic episodes in the first series and it’s a show that at this point wants to be taken seriously, but the humour’s there in the characters and in its very knowing approach to the paranormal – most of the incidents under investigation are pretty stereotypical UFO or psychic or general paranormal stories, and if you’ve ever read the Fortean Times you’re not going to encounter anything much that’s new. There are even a number of episodes that are homages - or rip-offs, you decide – from movies. But it’s all nicely packaged and presented as new, and for the most part walks the fine line between ‘truth’ and ‘out there’ with a perfectly judged sense of balance.
Grounding it in the FBI gives us a realistic foundation we can easily buy into, opens the doors to mystery/detection and affords a great anchor for when we step out into the realms of the less believable. The lead characters are – interesting. They’re different: she’s unconventionally stunning and intelligent, he’s kind of curious-looking (if you ask me) but more immediately likeable with his quiet wisecracks and geekish passion for his subject, and their chemistry starts to work very quickly. And to cap it off, it opens with one of those instantly memorable themes that is note perfect for the content. Right up there with Doctor Who.
And now, just to prove to the makers of INVASION that it is possible to do things faster, I’ll take a whirlwind tour through the individual episodes…
Pilot: Good. No question, it’s not an amazing story, but it’s a solid intro and there’s an immediate sense of the kind of show we’re in for, plus there’s the real beginnings of the will-they-won’t-they chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Simple and effective, everything a pilot episode should be.
Deep Throat: Good. Cool stealth planes using UFO technology, the conspiracy starts here.
Squeeze: Good. Bizarre idea for a serial killer, and (forgive the pun) stretches the credibility, but effectively creepy.
Conduit: Okay. Somebody has clearly seen Close Encounters, but it’s a reasonable re-telling.
Jersey Devil: Poor. Has its moments, but when Stig of the Dump pops up out of the hole at the end, I groaned the first time and knowing that ending was coming didn’t help this time round.
Shadows: Good. Simple story, but I like the idea of a protective ‘shadow’ and there’s the chance for some nice detective work.
Ghost In The Machine: What were they thinking? HAL9000, I guess, but the story’s so old and doesn’t work here – and the ‘twist’ is a straight and very predictable line.
Ice: Good. Yes, somebody saw The Thing, but this lower budget re-telling has some great tension and its more modest creature works.
Space: Oh dear. It starts with the ‘face’ on Mars and goes downhill, it’s a wonder they didn’t feature the infamous ‘World War II bomber on the Moon’. It also looks cheap and is padded out with a lot of NASA shuttle launch footage. Mulder’s boyish enthusiasm for space is fun.
Fallen Angel: Good. Somebody switched channels and saw Predator, but again it’s an effective little reworking. And the character of Max is fun, a one-man precursor to the Lone Gunmen.
Eve: Good. The little girls are creepy, Harriet Harris is wonderfully insane, nice little mystery with some decent twists.
Fire: Okay. Let down by a wandering Oirish accent and Amanda Pays who manages to be an unconvincing English detective. Mostly I appreciated it for the character touches – including Mulder’s weakness in the face of fire. We like our heroes to be shown to be fallible.
Beyond the Sea: Brilliant. I love this episode. A wonderfully human story, and a completely successful reversal of the Mulder-Scully believer-sceptic dynamic. Top notch performances – Brad Dourif is scary - and beautiful emotional depth from Gillian Anderson. You can even forgive it for including the bald general from Stargate:SG1 - they couldn't have known what he was going to go on to! There’s much more I could say about this episode but I promised to keep it brief.
Gender Bender: Huh? Somebody saw Witness – and possibly Manhunter too - but thought it needed aliens. It’s an okay hunt for a serial killer but what is the deal with that ending?
Lazarus: Quite good. But would have been so much better if it had been left ambiguous: actual soul-swap or just a traumatized cop who’d spent too long over-obsessing about the criminal he’d been after. As it is, the trick with the tattoo rather spoils that.
Young At Heart: Hmm. Does have its moments and the Mulder background material is good, but quite honestly it can’t be very memorable because I’ve already forgotten much of it again.
EBE: Good. More of the conspiracy and the tissue of lies might not be as strong or long as a roll of Andrex, but there’s a nice sense of Mulder coming painfully close to the truth and the carrot’s dangling so close you can almost taste it.
Miracle Man: Good. A decent exploration of an evangelical ministry, with good performances and nice twists. And I liked the personal angle with Scully’s Catholic background. Any sf show straying into the realm of religion is asking for trouble, but I thought this pulled it off surprisingly well.
Shapes: Okay. By this time, we’re well enough into the series to have expectations, and when we realize The X Files is going to do werewolves, we sort of expect more. The Native American angle makes for a good basis, but again you sort of want more.
Darkness Falls: Good. Wonderfully creepy and the idea of these inexorable little green bugs is brilliantly effective. (Especially the scene where Scully wakes and realises these things are all over her.) But they’re too inexorable, and the whole thing’s let down by the fact there’s no actual ending. Mulder and Scully really should die in this one. (Reminds me, in fact, of my very own Drift in its earliest form, where the ice creature was too formidable and I was stuck for a way to defeat thing.)
Tooms: Poor. That’s being a bit unfair, but again expectations come into play and when you know you’re in for a sequel to Squeeze, you really want it to be better than this one.
Born Again: Good. Another creepy little girl, and another chance for some decent detective work. And a chance for us to appreciate just how good Maggie Wheeler is as Janice in Friends, because she’s refreshingly normal here.
Roland: Okay. Not a great story, balanced out by how good Zeljko Ivanek is in the title role – once you can get past the fact that he’s Assistant DA, Ed Danvers in Homicide: Life On The Street. Plus you’ve got to laugh at the chalk lines around the pieces of a shattered victim.
The Erlenmeyer Flask: Good. See earlier where I go on about how the season ‘arc’ is nicely rounded off.
So, yes, there are some clunkers. Mostly, I remember them as being clunkers the first time out, so not much change there; while other stories which fall under the heading of ‘average’ perhaps come off a little better than they deserve because of a certain warm comfortable feeling of familiarity watching them again. In any case, if I felt inclined to be more tolerant it’s only because of the series’ strengths: a good enough show can certainly get away with being average from time to time and as often as not it’s things like character touches, dialogue or just the handling of the story that raise it that crucial few notches – things that tend to score well with me.
It’s only when it dips below that standard that you have to shake your head and pretend the episode didn’t happen.
But take note, INVASION: alien-human hybrids were the meat and potatoes of the X Files. Standard fare all those years ago and not exactly new then. If you’re going to serve up that kind of thing now, you really have to do it with some flair and panache – or something. As it stands, it’s not even getting old very fast.
No, the patient in question is INVASION. (Did you see? I even did my best to tilt the S there, because that's what sets it apart from other like shows.) It's been flatlining for far too long already, then along comes an episode where you can almost see the medical teams firing as many volts into it as their rattly old post-hurricane diesel generator can muster and suddenly there's the sense that, maybe, just possibly there might be life in the series yet. The Sheriff's run off with the kids, with something in a big black bag, there are stalkers outside the house, stuff is actually *happening* and it turns out the Sheriff's been shipping arms and equipment to a paramilitary alien boot camp in the Florida Keys. Finally, we're getting the idea that there's a real *invasion* going on. But no, it's not enough. They just don't have a decent power supply and the whole thing's slipped into the same old tachycardia again and we know why the S is tilting on its side. There’s been this huge (protracted) build-up about the locked closet in the Sheriff’’s household and when we finally get to see inside it – it’s empty. Clearly, it was where he was keeping all those guns he was smuggling out to the boot camp, but since we already saw those it was kind of pointless having all those meaningful shots of the locked closet door. Yawn.
There's a lesson in there: if you're going to mix soap with water-based sci-fi, make sure it lathers.
Oh well, I had a quick Google for an episode guide and it turns out there aren't that many more to go. They still have to wheel its corpse all the way to the mortuary.
Meanwhile, ignoring all of INVASION's warnings to 'stay away from the water', we've continued watching SURFACE. This show seemed like a marine counterpart to INVASION, but now that's mostly by virtue of the fact that we started watching them at the same time. SURFACE may not be Emmy award winning material - it's not - and it may be hugely derivative at times - but in contrast with the plodding INVASION, it has managed to keep up a good rate of knots in the pace department, and it's been (well, apparently, as of the last episode we saw) bold in that, while it may have borrowed heavily from the Elliot-ET boy-alien relationship, it went ahead and shot ET. For all I know, for good. (Having said that, of course, the little critter is going to be miraculously resurrected in the next instalment, isn't he? It's all right, don't write in and tell me, I'll watch it - nervously - soon enough.) It still has to deliver when the show reaches full term, but the weekly dosages of action, suspense and mystery are well measured and give the impression it will be worth staying the course. Sorry, just seeing if I can't stretch these medical metaphors as far as INVASION's plotline.
Thankfully, in these days of DVD and digital channels with plenty of airtime to fill, if new telly lets us down, there's always old telly. Avengers, Space:1999, UFO and now I notice ITV4 has even dredged up the old Planet Of The Apes TV series. Well, at least the first three of those are worth an essay in their own right, but I'd best just be brief for now and compare them to wines: a sparkling bottle of bubbly; a surprisingly dark red with something of an acquired taste, but basically a good vintage and a great bottle design; neon pink lambrusco in an orange plastic beaker.
And on DVD, my wife and I have just made our way through THE X FILES: SEASON ONE. Yes, it scares me to think that this too is now 'old telly'.
When I bought the box set, I decided I was going to limit myself to the first series and, while a few scattered episodes after that may yet tempt me to break that resolution, I feel like it was a good decision. My wallet agrees with me and Season One has a sense of completeness about it, there's something nicely circular to it, helped by the repeat of the scene where Cigarette Smoking Man files away the evidence in a Pentagon store room among countless identical boxes, one of which must surely contain the Lost Ark. Size permitting. And the 'cliffhanger' - the closing down of the X Files - works well as a tail end question mark, the sort of open conclusion that might have fit just as nicely if the series had been discontinued right there and then.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it didn't, because there were a few scattered gems to follow, but it did eventually outstay its welcome and essentially all you need to know about the conspiracy - and the alien-human hybrids - is all there in the first series, and the imagination can take it on from there at least as well as the actual show managed.
Overall it holds up well and you can see why it was the success it was: it’s slickly produced, glossy and atmospheric, and it’s played with that rare combination of conviction and humour. Admittedly there aren’t a whole lot of comic episodes in the first series and it’s a show that at this point wants to be taken seriously, but the humour’s there in the characters and in its very knowing approach to the paranormal – most of the incidents under investigation are pretty stereotypical UFO or psychic or general paranormal stories, and if you’ve ever read the Fortean Times you’re not going to encounter anything much that’s new. There are even a number of episodes that are homages - or rip-offs, you decide – from movies. But it’s all nicely packaged and presented as new, and for the most part walks the fine line between ‘truth’ and ‘out there’ with a perfectly judged sense of balance.
Grounding it in the FBI gives us a realistic foundation we can easily buy into, opens the doors to mystery/detection and affords a great anchor for when we step out into the realms of the less believable. The lead characters are – interesting. They’re different: she’s unconventionally stunning and intelligent, he’s kind of curious-looking (if you ask me) but more immediately likeable with his quiet wisecracks and geekish passion for his subject, and their chemistry starts to work very quickly. And to cap it off, it opens with one of those instantly memorable themes that is note perfect for the content. Right up there with Doctor Who.
And now, just to prove to the makers of INVASION that it is possible to do things faster, I’ll take a whirlwind tour through the individual episodes…
Pilot: Good. No question, it’s not an amazing story, but it’s a solid intro and there’s an immediate sense of the kind of show we’re in for, plus there’s the real beginnings of the will-they-won’t-they chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Simple and effective, everything a pilot episode should be.
Deep Throat: Good. Cool stealth planes using UFO technology, the conspiracy starts here.
Squeeze: Good. Bizarre idea for a serial killer, and (forgive the pun) stretches the credibility, but effectively creepy.
Conduit: Okay. Somebody has clearly seen Close Encounters, but it’s a reasonable re-telling.
Jersey Devil: Poor. Has its moments, but when Stig of the Dump pops up out of the hole at the end, I groaned the first time and knowing that ending was coming didn’t help this time round.
Shadows: Good. Simple story, but I like the idea of a protective ‘shadow’ and there’s the chance for some nice detective work.
Ghost In The Machine: What were they thinking? HAL9000, I guess, but the story’s so old and doesn’t work here – and the ‘twist’ is a straight and very predictable line.
Ice: Good. Yes, somebody saw The Thing, but this lower budget re-telling has some great tension and its more modest creature works.
Space: Oh dear. It starts with the ‘face’ on Mars and goes downhill, it’s a wonder they didn’t feature the infamous ‘World War II bomber on the Moon’. It also looks cheap and is padded out with a lot of NASA shuttle launch footage. Mulder’s boyish enthusiasm for space is fun.
Fallen Angel: Good. Somebody switched channels and saw Predator, but again it’s an effective little reworking. And the character of Max is fun, a one-man precursor to the Lone Gunmen.
Eve: Good. The little girls are creepy, Harriet Harris is wonderfully insane, nice little mystery with some decent twists.
Fire: Okay. Let down by a wandering Oirish accent and Amanda Pays who manages to be an unconvincing English detective. Mostly I appreciated it for the character touches – including Mulder’s weakness in the face of fire. We like our heroes to be shown to be fallible.
Beyond the Sea: Brilliant. I love this episode. A wonderfully human story, and a completely successful reversal of the Mulder-Scully believer-sceptic dynamic. Top notch performances – Brad Dourif is scary - and beautiful emotional depth from Gillian Anderson. You can even forgive it for including the bald general from Stargate:SG1 - they couldn't have known what he was going to go on to! There’s much more I could say about this episode but I promised to keep it brief.
Gender Bender: Huh? Somebody saw Witness – and possibly Manhunter too - but thought it needed aliens. It’s an okay hunt for a serial killer but what is the deal with that ending?
Lazarus: Quite good. But would have been so much better if it had been left ambiguous: actual soul-swap or just a traumatized cop who’d spent too long over-obsessing about the criminal he’d been after. As it is, the trick with the tattoo rather spoils that.
Young At Heart: Hmm. Does have its moments and the Mulder background material is good, but quite honestly it can’t be very memorable because I’ve already forgotten much of it again.
EBE: Good. More of the conspiracy and the tissue of lies might not be as strong or long as a roll of Andrex, but there’s a nice sense of Mulder coming painfully close to the truth and the carrot’s dangling so close you can almost taste it.
Miracle Man: Good. A decent exploration of an evangelical ministry, with good performances and nice twists. And I liked the personal angle with Scully’s Catholic background. Any sf show straying into the realm of religion is asking for trouble, but I thought this pulled it off surprisingly well.
Shapes: Okay. By this time, we’re well enough into the series to have expectations, and when we realize The X Files is going to do werewolves, we sort of expect more. The Native American angle makes for a good basis, but again you sort of want more.
Darkness Falls: Good. Wonderfully creepy and the idea of these inexorable little green bugs is brilliantly effective. (Especially the scene where Scully wakes and realises these things are all over her.) But they’re too inexorable, and the whole thing’s let down by the fact there’s no actual ending. Mulder and Scully really should die in this one. (Reminds me, in fact, of my very own Drift in its earliest form, where the ice creature was too formidable and I was stuck for a way to defeat thing.)
Tooms: Poor. That’s being a bit unfair, but again expectations come into play and when you know you’re in for a sequel to Squeeze, you really want it to be better than this one.
Born Again: Good. Another creepy little girl, and another chance for some decent detective work. And a chance for us to appreciate just how good Maggie Wheeler is as Janice in Friends, because she’s refreshingly normal here.
Roland: Okay. Not a great story, balanced out by how good Zeljko Ivanek is in the title role – once you can get past the fact that he’s Assistant DA, Ed Danvers in Homicide: Life On The Street. Plus you’ve got to laugh at the chalk lines around the pieces of a shattered victim.
The Erlenmeyer Flask: Good. See earlier where I go on about how the season ‘arc’ is nicely rounded off.
So, yes, there are some clunkers. Mostly, I remember them as being clunkers the first time out, so not much change there; while other stories which fall under the heading of ‘average’ perhaps come off a little better than they deserve because of a certain warm comfortable feeling of familiarity watching them again. In any case, if I felt inclined to be more tolerant it’s only because of the series’ strengths: a good enough show can certainly get away with being average from time to time and as often as not it’s things like character touches, dialogue or just the handling of the story that raise it that crucial few notches – things that tend to score well with me.
It’s only when it dips below that standard that you have to shake your head and pretend the episode didn’t happen.
But take note, INVASION: alien-human hybrids were the meat and potatoes of the X Files. Standard fare all those years ago and not exactly new then. If you’re going to serve up that kind of thing now, you really have to do it with some flair and panache – or something. As it stands, it’s not even getting old very fast.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Old Square Eyes Is Back
Prefect Slog
I mean, if it doesn’t get prematurely canned and if it answers all the questions and if it ties up all the tangled threads come the end, it’s going to have to come up with something so impossibly amazing that the fear of a big let down accompanies the watching of every episode. And yet I continue to watch. And will continue to do so when it returns. What can I do. It’s got me hooked.
I mean, if it doesn’t get prematurely canned and if it answers all the questions and if it ties up all the tangled threads come the end, it’s going to have to come up with something so impossibly amazing that the fear of a big let down accompanies the watching of every episode. And yet I continue to watch. And will continue to do so when it returns. What can I do. It’s got me hooked.
Maybe they are making it all up as they go along, but it’s good telly. And it’s so far fetched it’s about the furthest thing from reality TV you could wish for. And with snatches of Celebrity Big Brother infesting all the recordings of my favourite C4 or E4 shows lately, that’s such a good thing. Big Brother - like sports - should be confined exclusively to its own channel and never allowed to leak over into the mainstream televisual environment. Radical, I know, but there it is. Meanwhile, thank heavens for some good telly as a counterpoint.
Of course, since a good proportion of it is on either E4 or C4, as well as small but painful doses of Big Brother, you have to be prepared to put up with 118-118 sponsorships, an increasing frequency of annoying ad breaks and relentless ‘First Look’ and ‘It’s a 9 Thing’ trailers. Flog your shows, by all means, Channel 4, but really, do you have to flog them to death?
Really, because the ones I watch, managed to sell themselves after an episode or two.
‘ER’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ are back, of course. And where would we be without them. It says something that after only one season – well, if we’re being honest, long before that – the latter show qualifies as essential viewing. It was great to welcome it back, and it has a comforting familiarity to it, while it forges ahead with its new season storylines, and such a lot of warmth for a show so loaded with cynicism. I have to wonder just how sustainable it all is, and how much life there can really be in the series, but other shows have gone a surprising distance and maintained the standard. Like ‘ER’, for instance.
Okay, I’m a fan and therefore biased. But at the same time, I recognized a noticeable dip in Season 10 when they clearly had no idea what to do with Elisabeth Corday and exhibited some of their laziest writing ever, not doing the character or themselves any favours. The series bounced back in Season 11, seeming to find its legs again with a real sit-up-and-take-notice opening episode and some terrific stuff firing on all cylinders throughout the season. So with the current one, Season 12, I’d be the first to admit I found the beginning pretty subdued and pretty much delivering to standard. Essentially, nothing special for ‘ER’, but still better than most shows. (And part of it is having to adjust to a cast that, with even Carter now departed, feels just a little too new and a little too thoroughly young. If the average age gets any lower, it’ll be ‘Doogie Howser MD’ all over again. On top of which I now have to get used to the idea that the new chief of nursing is not in fact an alien from Third Rock From The Sun.) Still, it says something that when ‘ER’ is merely delivering to standard, there’s the potential for disappointment. But that’s basically because we’ve been spoilt over the years. Four episodes in, and after that initial lukewarm response, I’m getting more into it again and I’d like to see other shows maintain that standard for that length of time.
Although, clearly not including ‘Lost’. That would just drive me nuts. ‘Lost’ really needs to wrap things up a long time before Season 12.
So, what else has been squaring my eyes lately? Well, there’s been ‘Invasion’, ‘My Name Is Earl’, ‘Surface’, to name the ones that I’ve sampled and so far stuck with. An eclectic mix, but variety is the spice of life, even if some of them might only turn out to be a mild korma.
Or karma, in the case of ‘Earl’, of course. Of the three, it’s the more immediate success. A great and superbly daft idea, well realized, with a touch of the Coen Brothers about it, the opener left me with a definite desire to see more, rather than the more common sense of, well, I might keep watching that to see what it’s like.
Which is more where ‘Invasion’ (C4) and ‘Surface’ (ITV) come in. They’re not bad. In fact they’re pretty good, dishing out a reasonable slice of sci fi drama each episode, with their respective takes on aquatic menaces. One is more localized, the other more global, each is seasoned with enough domestic drama to make sure it stretches at least a whole season. They take the ‘Lost’ approach, in that they’re both in for the long haul, keeping an ongoing arc up in the air by virtue of some soap opera seasoning. And why not if it keeps the audiences following faithfully along. Although to be honest, neither would seem to have more than one season in them, at least without stretching their respective plots past the point of elasticity, but this far into them ‘Invasion’ may be the one to continue further.
‘Invasion’, with its ‘American Gothic’ style evil Sheriff, thus far doesn’t seem to be telling us anything especially new, but at least it’s telling it well. There are enough interesting characters in its soap opera mix and it’s got the measure of the cliffhanger all right. The challenge is going to come when it has to eventually reveal what it’s all about. What’s the big twist that sets this one apart from every other invasion story? The best guess I can come up with is that it’s not an alien invasion at all, and is either the result of some military marine experiment or the creatures have some more natural(ish) origin, as I think must be the case in ‘Surface’. There are no aliens and there’s just something funny in the water making some of the residents of Florida go doolally. It’s possible. Otherwise, it’s your standard aliens taking people over scenario, and to be honest, it’s going to struggle to survive – and struggle even harder to impress – if that turns out to be the “big secret”. The makers must know we’ve seen all that before, surely.
They must also know that after how many episodes of orange lights in the water we are basically dying to see an alien. Show us one now, people.
The ecologically themed ‘Surface’ scores better in that respect. We’ve seen the creature. Lots of them, from the little bitty baby one in the ever-so-ET-like boy-adopts-creature-as-pet plot thread to the massive boat-swallowing grown-up sea monster. And it’s inherently more interesting because on the surface, haha, at least it appears to be doing something a bit different. Even if the characters are generally less compelling and some bits are a little too blatantly stolen from things like Close Encounters – there was a guy this week obsessed with the whirlpool shape featured in the previous episode, and his wife takes the kids and leaves him, driving off while he hangs on the car. I mean, come on, you may as well have him sculpt Devil’s Tower, Wyoming in his mashed potato. Richard Dreyfuss and Terri Garr these people are not. It also suffers somewhat in that the programmers are under the impression that, like a shark, the show has to keep swimming around the schedules in order to stay alive. Which is the opposite of the truth.
What I’d have preferred to see in either of them was some of the wit and sparkle of ‘Desperate Housewives’. Certainly ‘Invasion’ could have been offering something very different given that slant. But it’s in the nature of these things to take themselves seriously. Every time.
Still, for all their respective flaws, they both remain watchable and there’s enough of a hook to keep me hanging on.
Of course, what with ‘The Avengers’ on BBC4, and ‘UFO’, ‘Space:1999’ and ‘Homicide: Life On The Street’ (assuming you can find it in the schedules) on offer, some potentially good TV inevitably falls by the wayside. We gave BBC’s ‘Life On Mars’ a shot, for instance, and it was an average idea well told – some sparkling scripting in evidence, great dialogue and John Simm is an effective lead. But. I don’t know, it just didn’t grab enough – as an idea it feels like the only way someone could bring back ‘The Sweeney’ and get away with it in this pc day and age, and the alleged mystery as to whether he’s travelled back in time or is in fact in a coma is no mystery at all, as far as I can tell. So between an overall average British show and an overall average US one, I’ll apparently pick the American contender.
My lack of patriotism aside, I’m a self-confessed sci-fi fan, so you’d expect the sci-fi shows to fire my enthusiasm much more, but of all the series currently on parade, I’d have to say that it’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ that stands head and shoulders – or is it Herbal Essences – above the rest. It’s early days for ‘My Name Is Earl’ but that one’s a solid hit already, and all it has to do now is to keep hitting those home runs for a full season.
With such things to keep us entertained until March, it’s easy being patient for the return of ‘Doctor Who’ and I’m not that bothered about what happens next in ‘Lost’. Honest, guv. Some of it’s average in a lot of respects, but average seems pretty good at the moment.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
The Christmas Invasion
And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Well, I don’t know about you but in between playing with my new Remote Control Dalek, I did sit down and watch The Christmas Invasion, the Doctor Who Christmas Special. And I say that as if we’re actually used to having a Doctor Who Christmas Special – like it’s a tradition or something. Yeah, as if. But perhaps it will be.
This one was full of the Christmas buzz, like opening up an extra present in the evening. Partly down to being starved of new Doctor Who for six months, but I’m sure it was also due to the fact that we were getting a new Doctor as well. In the wake of David Tennant’s introduction, somebody commented “Christopher Who?”, which is a little mean-spirited, but he was more immediately likeable and his performance, in my eyes, more immediately established him as the Doctor. Where Eccleston was hampered was by only really coming home to me as the Doctor somewhere in Dalek, a few episodes after we knew he was going to be leaving the role. Tennant’s main disadvantage, when he was first announced in the role, was that I hadn’t seen him in anything else and he didn’t seem to have enough of a face to hang much character on – but that turned out to be more of a Christmas hamper, and he really delivered the goods. (Ha ha.) Especially as he spent half of the story asleep – something that severely undermined Davison’s debut in Castrovalva. But Tennant gets away with it, and his Doctor strikes me as having the youth of the Davison Doctor, but he backs it up with force of personality and a surprisingly substantial presence.
Don’t get me wrong, I still wanna see an older Doctor (calling Ian McDiarmid!), but I’m more than happy to see Tennant take up residence in the role for a good while. Welcome to the TARDIS. And, yay! he’s a more proactive Doctor than his predecessor, actually being instrumental in the resolution of the whole thing – even if part of it was just down to pressing one button and chucking a satsuma at another. But he gets serious points for the sword fight, the Lion King line and the nod to Arthur Dent, to name but a few golden moments.
There seemed to be a light sprinkling of Hitch Hikers throughout the whole thing, from the more obvious dressing gown to the question as to whether the Doctor might have been a diphallic terrata like Zaphod, the comical moment as the Guinevere satellite bumps into a whopping great alien spacecraft and some more comedy with the alien translation devices.
But hark at me – it’s as if he was the only good thing in it. And that’s simply not the case. Far from it. It wasn’t all roses, but it felt like the best of the Davies-scripted stories we’ve had so far. So what was right and what was wrong? Well, all of it obviously J
Billie was great as ever as Rose, giving it her all, with some potent emotional scenes and her comical appeal to the Sycorax leader. Her only downside was that her character had apparently gone a bit feeble in the face of the alien invasion, presumably a touch of Seasonal Adjustment Disorder kicking in just in time for Christmas. She was never this helpless in The Parting Of The Ways, when the Doctor packed her off while he prepared to face death etc. Can’t help feeling it would have been better if she’d had the Doctor carted into the TARDIS and tried to do something – which still would have served the plot in exactly the same way and we still could have seen her fighting to hold herself together emotionally. And she does really really labour the point as she works out why she’s suddenly hearing the Sycorax leader speak English, when the rest of us had worked it out about a year ago.
There was Mickey and Jackie too, of course. And Jackie had a few funny lines, but I still look forward to a time when the show isn’t exceeding the recommended dosage of these two. Please. Kill Mickey. Convert him into a Cyberman and let us enjoy the inevitable round of Metal Mickey jokes. Give us something.
But no. Instead the halfway decent UNIT commander gets it in the neck – with a Sycorax whip. At least Adam Garcia was more memorable in this as the PM’s aide than he was in Coyote Ugly, but then if you’re going to have lots of women dancing on bars in your movie, you really can’t expect me to notice the male lead. But none of these supporting cast types can match Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.
Brilliantly played and with such conviction that I actually want to vote for her. Yes, even at the end when she does the ‘bad deed’. Which, to be honest, while it leads to a great scene and the Doctor’s clever use of those six words – “Don’t you think she looks tired” – I found myself thinking was the right thing to do. That is, the right thing for a PM to do in those circumstances. As much as the Doctor was getting all self-righteous and pacifistic - by no means an un-Doctorish thing to be – the fact is the Sycorax were not themselves rendered suddenly peaceful and would likely have ranged elsewhere in the Universe to try their hand at subjugating some other planet. It struck me that Harriet Jones was only taking care of unfinished business and making the really tough decision that the Doctor avoided. Hm. Food for thought, and makes a change from turkey.
The Sycorax themselves were not the greatest of aliens in terms of cultural and sociological concept and their invasion plans, let’s face it, sucked. But I loved their design. Until I discovered the mask was just a mask. That was a big disappointment, when the leader removes his mask and reveals something less than brilliant underneath. Possibly a metaphor for the bluff that formed such a part of their less than brilliant invasion plan, but from purely a design point of view, a bit of a let down. And there is no way on Earth anyone would believe they were aliens just from seeing them on the telly.
But there we reach the level of those same kinds of minor niggles that cause the whole thing to unravel like a stubborn paper chain when you’re trying to hang the Christmas decs. Why do the British government have an alien translation device that works so well with an unknown language? Why doesn’t anyone think to physically stop their loved ones from marching off – especially the kids who aren’t too old to be picked up by an anxious mum? Why do none of the hypnotized people tumble off the edge when hit by the shockwave from the arriving spaceship? Why do the Sycorax have a button on the outside of their ship that conveniently releases a bit of the material around the edge? (I mean, it’s handy for the Doctor but I can’t envisage a use in, er, normal operations.) Why, in short, oh why.
One of the two biggest whys though had to be: what was the deal with the ‘pilot fish’? Clearly this was a plot device so that we could have the Santas wreaking havoc and a manic killer Christmas tree, all in fine Doctor Who fashion – but it smacks too much of the Avengers movie, in which many admirably bizarre things happen for no good reason. First of all, I couldn’t help feeling they should have been Autons. That, or so completely unlike Autons that I wasn’t left thinking they should have been Autons. Second and chiefly of all, on first watch I was left feeling that their plan might have actually made less sense than those of the Sycorax. It didn’t help that they seemed to know all about the Doctor’s presence, while the Sycorax appeared to know nothing until the TARDIS showed up on their scanners; while at the same time, when faced with the Doctor and his dreaded sonic screwdriver, they ‘beam up’ with the same effect as the Sycorax teleport device. Do they live on the same asteroid ship, making use of the Sycorax technology, or what? Why do they leave the Christmas tree at the Tyler household door instead of just walking in and shooting everyone with their flame-throwing trombones? It’s a reasonable question, and the public have a right to know. :) At the end of the day, it’s all good fun of course, and I only wish they had been better embedded in the plot as a whole.
The second of the biggest whys has more to do with production than plot though, and why the swordfight scenes out on the exterior of the very lovely spaceship had to appear cheap compared with the impressive interior shots, with the great arena lined with its ranks of Sycorax. Clearly the outside scene was vital if the leader was to be plunged off the edge with the deft application of a satsuma in the right spot, and if they were that necessary, why weren’t they handled with greater care and attention. Cutting off the Doctor’s hand as a nod to Star Wars is one thing, cutting off the combatants’ legs so we can’t actually see anything of the setting is just unconvincing and comes across as a deliberate and transparent attempt to save money. For such a crucial part of the climax, it looked a bit rubbish.
And I lied: there’s a third big why. Why do so many scenes have to be drowned out by such intrusive music? I know it’s Christmas, but turn it down a bit, people, some of us want to listen to the dialogue.
Despite being so bung full of all these flaws, it succeeds really well because it’s delivered with such energy and enthusiasm, and the idea of scale – that it’s happening on a global level – is, bearing in mind it’s telly, as well-realised, with the simple inclusion of US news bulletins and a shot or two of people set to leap off foreign landmarks, as in Independence Day. And maybe it’s like some of those Christmas presents – even the ones you had to go and exchange – it’s the thought that counts. On a second watch, without the initial buzz, some of the appeal fades, but that’s unavoidable, and the important thing is, the shiny bits still shine.
The whole thing is tailed off with a medley of teasers for the second series, possibly giving away a bit more than I’d have liked, but whetting the appetite sufficiently. And when the Doctor at the end of The Christmas Invasion declares that there’s so much out there he’s looking forward to seeing, I’m thinking “You and me both, mate”, and part of that promise of pastures new rubs off on this Christmas special.
Let’s see this new more proactive Doctor in more challenging adventures and I think future shows can afford to set the bar higher, but in the meantime I enjoyed this particular Christmas present, thanks very much. Now pardon me, while I go and play with my Remote Control Dalek.
Happy New Year.
This one was full of the Christmas buzz, like opening up an extra present in the evening. Partly down to being starved of new Doctor Who for six months, but I’m sure it was also due to the fact that we were getting a new Doctor as well. In the wake of David Tennant’s introduction, somebody commented “Christopher Who?”, which is a little mean-spirited, but he was more immediately likeable and his performance, in my eyes, more immediately established him as the Doctor. Where Eccleston was hampered was by only really coming home to me as the Doctor somewhere in Dalek, a few episodes after we knew he was going to be leaving the role. Tennant’s main disadvantage, when he was first announced in the role, was that I hadn’t seen him in anything else and he didn’t seem to have enough of a face to hang much character on – but that turned out to be more of a Christmas hamper, and he really delivered the goods. (Ha ha.) Especially as he spent half of the story asleep – something that severely undermined Davison’s debut in Castrovalva. But Tennant gets away with it, and his Doctor strikes me as having the youth of the Davison Doctor, but he backs it up with force of personality and a surprisingly substantial presence.
Don’t get me wrong, I still wanna see an older Doctor (calling Ian McDiarmid!), but I’m more than happy to see Tennant take up residence in the role for a good while. Welcome to the TARDIS. And, yay! he’s a more proactive Doctor than his predecessor, actually being instrumental in the resolution of the whole thing – even if part of it was just down to pressing one button and chucking a satsuma at another. But he gets serious points for the sword fight, the Lion King line and the nod to Arthur Dent, to name but a few golden moments.
There seemed to be a light sprinkling of Hitch Hikers throughout the whole thing, from the more obvious dressing gown to the question as to whether the Doctor might have been a diphallic terrata like Zaphod, the comical moment as the Guinevere satellite bumps into a whopping great alien spacecraft and some more comedy with the alien translation devices.
But hark at me – it’s as if he was the only good thing in it. And that’s simply not the case. Far from it. It wasn’t all roses, but it felt like the best of the Davies-scripted stories we’ve had so far. So what was right and what was wrong? Well, all of it obviously J
Billie was great as ever as Rose, giving it her all, with some potent emotional scenes and her comical appeal to the Sycorax leader. Her only downside was that her character had apparently gone a bit feeble in the face of the alien invasion, presumably a touch of Seasonal Adjustment Disorder kicking in just in time for Christmas. She was never this helpless in The Parting Of The Ways, when the Doctor packed her off while he prepared to face death etc. Can’t help feeling it would have been better if she’d had the Doctor carted into the TARDIS and tried to do something – which still would have served the plot in exactly the same way and we still could have seen her fighting to hold herself together emotionally. And she does really really labour the point as she works out why she’s suddenly hearing the Sycorax leader speak English, when the rest of us had worked it out about a year ago.
There was Mickey and Jackie too, of course. And Jackie had a few funny lines, but I still look forward to a time when the show isn’t exceeding the recommended dosage of these two. Please. Kill Mickey. Convert him into a Cyberman and let us enjoy the inevitable round of Metal Mickey jokes. Give us something.
But no. Instead the halfway decent UNIT commander gets it in the neck – with a Sycorax whip. At least Adam Garcia was more memorable in this as the PM’s aide than he was in Coyote Ugly, but then if you’re going to have lots of women dancing on bars in your movie, you really can’t expect me to notice the male lead. But none of these supporting cast types can match Penelope Wilton as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.
Brilliantly played and with such conviction that I actually want to vote for her. Yes, even at the end when she does the ‘bad deed’. Which, to be honest, while it leads to a great scene and the Doctor’s clever use of those six words – “Don’t you think she looks tired” – I found myself thinking was the right thing to do. That is, the right thing for a PM to do in those circumstances. As much as the Doctor was getting all self-righteous and pacifistic - by no means an un-Doctorish thing to be – the fact is the Sycorax were not themselves rendered suddenly peaceful and would likely have ranged elsewhere in the Universe to try their hand at subjugating some other planet. It struck me that Harriet Jones was only taking care of unfinished business and making the really tough decision that the Doctor avoided. Hm. Food for thought, and makes a change from turkey.
The Sycorax themselves were not the greatest of aliens in terms of cultural and sociological concept and their invasion plans, let’s face it, sucked. But I loved their design. Until I discovered the mask was just a mask. That was a big disappointment, when the leader removes his mask and reveals something less than brilliant underneath. Possibly a metaphor for the bluff that formed such a part of their less than brilliant invasion plan, but from purely a design point of view, a bit of a let down. And there is no way on Earth anyone would believe they were aliens just from seeing them on the telly.
But there we reach the level of those same kinds of minor niggles that cause the whole thing to unravel like a stubborn paper chain when you’re trying to hang the Christmas decs. Why do the British government have an alien translation device that works so well with an unknown language? Why doesn’t anyone think to physically stop their loved ones from marching off – especially the kids who aren’t too old to be picked up by an anxious mum? Why do none of the hypnotized people tumble off the edge when hit by the shockwave from the arriving spaceship? Why do the Sycorax have a button on the outside of their ship that conveniently releases a bit of the material around the edge? (I mean, it’s handy for the Doctor but I can’t envisage a use in, er, normal operations.) Why, in short, oh why.
One of the two biggest whys though had to be: what was the deal with the ‘pilot fish’? Clearly this was a plot device so that we could have the Santas wreaking havoc and a manic killer Christmas tree, all in fine Doctor Who fashion – but it smacks too much of the Avengers movie, in which many admirably bizarre things happen for no good reason. First of all, I couldn’t help feeling they should have been Autons. That, or so completely unlike Autons that I wasn’t left thinking they should have been Autons. Second and chiefly of all, on first watch I was left feeling that their plan might have actually made less sense than those of the Sycorax. It didn’t help that they seemed to know all about the Doctor’s presence, while the Sycorax appeared to know nothing until the TARDIS showed up on their scanners; while at the same time, when faced with the Doctor and his dreaded sonic screwdriver, they ‘beam up’ with the same effect as the Sycorax teleport device. Do they live on the same asteroid ship, making use of the Sycorax technology, or what? Why do they leave the Christmas tree at the Tyler household door instead of just walking in and shooting everyone with their flame-throwing trombones? It’s a reasonable question, and the public have a right to know. :) At the end of the day, it’s all good fun of course, and I only wish they had been better embedded in the plot as a whole.
The second of the biggest whys has more to do with production than plot though, and why the swordfight scenes out on the exterior of the very lovely spaceship had to appear cheap compared with the impressive interior shots, with the great arena lined with its ranks of Sycorax. Clearly the outside scene was vital if the leader was to be plunged off the edge with the deft application of a satsuma in the right spot, and if they were that necessary, why weren’t they handled with greater care and attention. Cutting off the Doctor’s hand as a nod to Star Wars is one thing, cutting off the combatants’ legs so we can’t actually see anything of the setting is just unconvincing and comes across as a deliberate and transparent attempt to save money. For such a crucial part of the climax, it looked a bit rubbish.
And I lied: there’s a third big why. Why do so many scenes have to be drowned out by such intrusive music? I know it’s Christmas, but turn it down a bit, people, some of us want to listen to the dialogue.
Despite being so bung full of all these flaws, it succeeds really well because it’s delivered with such energy and enthusiasm, and the idea of scale – that it’s happening on a global level – is, bearing in mind it’s telly, as well-realised, with the simple inclusion of US news bulletins and a shot or two of people set to leap off foreign landmarks, as in Independence Day. And maybe it’s like some of those Christmas presents – even the ones you had to go and exchange – it’s the thought that counts. On a second watch, without the initial buzz, some of the appeal fades, but that’s unavoidable, and the important thing is, the shiny bits still shine.
The whole thing is tailed off with a medley of teasers for the second series, possibly giving away a bit more than I’d have liked, but whetting the appetite sufficiently. And when the Doctor at the end of The Christmas Invasion declares that there’s so much out there he’s looking forward to seeing, I’m thinking “You and me both, mate”, and part of that promise of pastures new rubs off on this Christmas special.
Let’s see this new more proactive Doctor in more challenging adventures and I think future shows can afford to set the bar higher, but in the meantime I enjoyed this particular Christmas present, thanks very much. Now pardon me, while I go and play with my Remote Control Dalek.
Happy New Year.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Previously, On Doctor Who...
"A man is the sum of his memories, even more so for a Time Lord," said the Doctor in The Five Doctors. Or something like that. It was the 20th Anniversary Special, it was ages ago and I can't be expected to remember it exactly. The point is, Doctor Who, like many a resurrected cult classic, is the sum of memories - yours and mine - and it's the impressions that stick in your mind that characterise your favourite show(s). I know I mentioned before that in the run up to the New Series there was talk of how this one wasn't going to be all wobbly sets and men in suits like the old series, and the fact is, that wasn't what I remembered about 'classic' Doctor Who at all. I don't even remember a lot of model spaceships, even though I know the series featured them as a cheaper alternative to the real thing. It's only when we get to stories like 'Underworld' that things like dodgy CSO start to leave a lasting impression. I'd have to check what year that was, but my guess is I was beginning to grow up. By the time I'd reached 'Horns of Nimon' I'd achieved such a mature level of discernment I could tell it was, frankly, rubbish.
Ah, how often have I sat down to watch an old favourite episode with a slight sense of trepidation, wondering if it will be as good as I remember. (Strangely, I never stop to wonder if ‘Nimon’ was *better* than I remember.) That was back when they were on UK Gold though and when I was collecting them avidly on VHS, when I was seeing them for the second time for the first time, as it were. These days, I'm past that and although I'm selective when it comes to which episodes I'll buy on DVD, I'm selecting those ones for a reason: and that is, whatever their deficiencies in the fx department and so on, they are, in a word, magic. They're not exactly as I remember them - of course they're not, because the wonky bits were always filled in by my childhood imagination - but they tap into that. If you’re susceptible to their charm, then the illusion holds together.
So what of this new big budget version of our old favourite, where the fx are at least (we’d hope) a foregone conclusion and the illusion is by and large all done for you? Setting that aside though, I believe good Doctor Who is born of the same rules and the same essential ingredients – whatever they are J - regardless of budget. On the one hand, this version had a lot to live up to, on the other, we all wanted to love it so it had a lot of positive karma in its bank balance to begin with.
Clealry, the show was a popular success - and an almost instant one at that. It could be argued that if you plugged anything sporting a natty Doctor Who label into the vacuum that was Saturday night TV by that stage, you were going to attract viewers, but the main trick isn't attracting viewers, it's keeping them. And the show did that, all the way through. It's a talking point of conversation amongst ordinary non-Doctor Who people. And there's a sense of anticipation and interest in the series from people who previously showed no interest whatsoever - like both of my sisters, and the BBC for instance. As to its success at being Doctor Who, well, the only way I have to measure that is by the little cold shivers I experienced when watching it, and the enduring quality of those impressions.
Obviously, I'm not a kid any more and am, sadly, far less impressionable, so it's difficult to leave me with such indelible images as the Sea Devils rising out of the ocean that will last a lifetime. But given that I’ve not yet rewatched more than one episode since the series’ first run, this is more about what has stayed with me for the intervening months.
Since I’ve already covered the episodes individually, it’s reasonably safe to say that my opinion hasn’t changed a great deal with regard to any of them. (For my initial impressions of each story, comb through the archives!) The good bits endure: the tingle when Rose enters the TARDIS for the first time, the thrill of seeing the Dalek doing all the things I already knew Daleks could do but had not yet seen on screen, the sheer creepy joy of ‘The Empty Child’. The niggles still niggle: the prolonged inaction finale of ‘Rose’, the ‘Galaxy Quest’ climax of ‘The End Of The World’, the transparent twist of ‘The Unquiet Dead’. And the sucky parts still suck: Mickey’s plastic grin in ‘Rose’, the two-part fart gag that was ‘Aliens of London’ and ‘World War Three’, and the, er, wasted opportunity of ‘Boomtown’. And in the midst of all that, the least memorable episode of the lot was ‘The Long Game’, which has the dubious privilege of being too average to stick in the mind for any special reason. A rewatch may alter some of that, but for the most part time and reflection have made little difference.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now confirm that the Doctor’s passive nature was down to his being scarred by the Time War and all that jazz, and as a thread linking the series it works. It’s a bold experiment that succeeds on that level, but still, for me, leaves the shadow of a disappointing Doctor. (Also, I got that he was something of a depressed Doctor, but did he have to be so bi-polar in his opinions: everything either "Stupid!" or "Fantastic!" - but I may well have said enough on that in previous posts!) It might have worked better had Christopher Eccleston continued in the role, allowing his Doctor to recover and reassert his own strengths, or had we been treated to a season beforehand in which we saw his Doctor being, well, more of a Doctor. Because with hindsight I appreciate more fully that he was, in fact, brilliant in the role – there are far too many moments where he shines to think otherwise: gloating over the Dalek, being gloated over by the Dalek, the ‘chips’ scene from ‘End of the World’, and his holographic farewell to Rose in ‘Parting of the Ways’, all real oh-my-god Doctor moments that will live in the memory for some time. But the unfortunate conjunction of character concept and premature regeneration mean we will never get to see him as anything but an essentially weak Doctor. And the whole of the first series is littered with ineffectual endings where we are forced to wonder about the fate of the world if it weren’t for the ‘lucky’ happenstance of the occasional deus ex machina (‘Boomtown’, ‘The Parting of the Ways’), or a plot built like a three-piece jigsaw so that it pretty much solves itself (‘The Unquiet Dead’). It’s a shame, but I hope that when I do get to rewatch some of the episodes, I get to appreciate the performance more in context than I might just be left wondering what might have been. And not wincing too much every time he says "Fantastic!".
I wonder if this idea of the Doctor was born out of some need to bring him down to the level of the companion. If so, I can only think the best way to go would have been to strengthen the companion – and as things turned out, the fact is, they wouldn’t have needed to at all. What worked far more successfully, for me, was Rose’s journey. Piper is terrific as Rose. That’s the plain and simple truth. She’ll never have the same place of affection in my heart as some of the previous companions (no, not Mel or Adric), but that’s much more a fault of my age than her performance in the role or the writing. For fear of making her seem weak next to the Doctor, they may have overcompensated. She’s wide-eyed enough to marvel at the things that need to be marveled at, conveying the sense of wonder you’d expect when whisked off in the TARDIS. She’s tough and independent in her way, and they even allow her to be helpless from time to time without undermining her strengths. I personally still don’t get that whole Bad Wolf business, and frankly the series and the character could have done perfectly well without it, but Rose in and of herself was great. In her way, she may even prove more memorable than the Doctor.
And she was of course very down to Earth. Which has its unfortunate side effects on the series, firstly in that she comes with baggage in the form of a mother and a boyfriend – both of which, I’m sorry, still irritate now that they’re just memories rather than cropping up every second episode (not helped by the knowledge that they’re set to come back). And secondly, in that the TARDIS just couldn’t get away from the place: the furthest it managed was a presumably fairly high Earth orbit. It shows a lack of adventure and a certain ‘safe’ attitude to the series that I don’t think did it any favours. Even my sisters who had been won over to Doctor Who for the first time in their lives were beginning to get really fed up with it by ‘The Empty Child’, and it’s a shame if their enjoyment of that story was only spoiled, even moderately, by the fact that it was couched between so many other Earth-based adventures. I’m all for touching base, but if you do it too often you’ll never get anywhere and as successful as ‘Aliens of London’ was (yes, it did have its very good points too) in exploring the effects of Rose having ‘been away’, I can’t help thinking that would have been helped by the still greater contrast of some truly alien worlds.
Then there’s Jack, of course. Or Cap’n Jack as he seems to have become known. Personally, I thought he was great, livening up the screen when he was on, always entertaining – except in ‘Boomtown’ when he was shoved into the scenery – and a good ‘action man’ time traveller to contrast with the Doctor. But as fond as I was of the character, I do wonder now if he will prove all that memorable, especially in the light of his woeful resurrection. Of course he’s being brought back in the BBC’s Torchwood spin-off, but in the context of Doctor Who, he may have proven more long-lived if he’d been allowed to stay dead.
Then there was, um... Adam. Yes. Well. What was that about? I really hope he is revealed as the new father of the Cybermen or something, because otherwise I will always be left wondering whether there was any point to him at all.
But here I’ve been banging on about this and that and I’ve not even touched on the memorable monsters. Um… well, there were the Daleks. Honestly, now that I turn my mind to the subject, it’s the Daleks that stand out in the memory, heads and, er, shoulders above the rest. That’s down to the imagery we were treated to, the way they were allowed to show off for us, as much as the fact that it’s the Daleks. And the credit is shared surprisingly equally between ‘Dalek’ and the less satisfactory overall ‘The Parting of the Ways’. Probably because we got to see billions of the things streaming out of their spaceships – and thankfully that truly awe-inspiring scene does much to gloss over the less fortunate way in which they pootled around the space station, waiting to get shot at. The ones that rise into view to take care of Lynda with a ‘y’ or ‘i’ – I can’t remember which! – are responsible for one of the great moments, almost – almost – up there with the Sea Devils surfacing through the waves and wading ashore.
But if I trawl through my recollections for other memorable monsters, unfortunately I keep coming up with the Slitheen – and for all the wrong reasons. They are too much like the Tetraps of the new series or, dare I say, the Nimon. They just don’t – work, for me. Maybe it’s the big baby eyes, maybe it’s the all too visible contrast between the lumbering man in the suit version and the CGI counterpart, maybe it’s the farcical or just plain lacking nature of the stories that featured them. They’re just poor, and like Jackie and Mickey, all the worse for the fact that you just know they’re engineered to be a returning, er, menace.
As for the rest, Cassandra will probably stick in the minds of most kids, and perhaps the eructating wheelie bin, but my money is not on the Nestene or the thing stuck to the ceiling in The Long Game. For sheer creepiness and exquisite simplicity, the best vote goes to the kid in a gas mask in ‘The Empty Child’. Not really a monster, but definitely the stuff of nightmares. And that really does equate with the Sea Devils, Giant Maggots, the Wirrn grub and Uncle Tom Cobley and all that Doctor Who has managed to throw at us nervous, impressionable types in the past.
Overall then, like the original ‘classic’ series, the end result is better than the sum of its parts. We forgive its flaws and embrace it warts and all, because the good bits are really so good and there is still nothing else like it on TV. As is evidenced even in individual episodes, in that ‘The Unquiet Dead’, for all its 45-minute flimsiness, remains one of my favourites. But you see, where it may share some of the flaws of other episodes, it has all the character, atmosphere and just general Doctor Who-ness anyone could wish for and was the first episode in which I knew for a hundred percent certainty that I was watching Doctor Who. For every cloud, there’s a silver lining and in the case of Doctor Who probably several. One of the measures of the series’ success, ironically, is that it leaves far too much to actually discuss than I could ever cite here with any hope of anyone reading through it all.
So I’ll stop soon.
In short, I loved it. It’s a qualified love and will have to go some considerable way to promote that to the same unconditional love with which I embraced the show as a child. But from what I hear, many a kid has embraced this new series with just that same kind of affection, and really I suppose that was the main aim.
Old fans like us are secondary, but we’re glad that this young whipper snapper still has something to offer us. And there are plenty of memories that will stay with me, for all the right reasons, at least until I get a chance to watch the episodes again.
Meanwhile, I look forward to the Christmas Invasion with huge amounts of anticipation. In part because the design of monster for that one really looks the business. And in part because, in my days of running the Doctor Who roleplaying game, I came up with scary Santas yonks ago. Of course they were Autons and one of my player characters had great fun running one over repeatedly in a stolen police car, but that really is another story and almost certainly couldn’t compare with anything the new series can come up with.
And if the Queen mentions Doctor Who in her Christmas speech this year, we'll finally know the full extent of its popular success.
Merry Christmas.
Ah, how often have I sat down to watch an old favourite episode with a slight sense of trepidation, wondering if it will be as good as I remember. (Strangely, I never stop to wonder if ‘Nimon’ was *better* than I remember.) That was back when they were on UK Gold though and when I was collecting them avidly on VHS, when I was seeing them for the second time for the first time, as it were. These days, I'm past that and although I'm selective when it comes to which episodes I'll buy on DVD, I'm selecting those ones for a reason: and that is, whatever their deficiencies in the fx department and so on, they are, in a word, magic. They're not exactly as I remember them - of course they're not, because the wonky bits were always filled in by my childhood imagination - but they tap into that. If you’re susceptible to their charm, then the illusion holds together.
So what of this new big budget version of our old favourite, where the fx are at least (we’d hope) a foregone conclusion and the illusion is by and large all done for you? Setting that aside though, I believe good Doctor Who is born of the same rules and the same essential ingredients – whatever they are J - regardless of budget. On the one hand, this version had a lot to live up to, on the other, we all wanted to love it so it had a lot of positive karma in its bank balance to begin with.
Clealry, the show was a popular success - and an almost instant one at that. It could be argued that if you plugged anything sporting a natty Doctor Who label into the vacuum that was Saturday night TV by that stage, you were going to attract viewers, but the main trick isn't attracting viewers, it's keeping them. And the show did that, all the way through. It's a talking point of conversation amongst ordinary non-Doctor Who people. And there's a sense of anticipation and interest in the series from people who previously showed no interest whatsoever - like both of my sisters, and the BBC for instance. As to its success at being Doctor Who, well, the only way I have to measure that is by the little cold shivers I experienced when watching it, and the enduring quality of those impressions.
Obviously, I'm not a kid any more and am, sadly, far less impressionable, so it's difficult to leave me with such indelible images as the Sea Devils rising out of the ocean that will last a lifetime. But given that I’ve not yet rewatched more than one episode since the series’ first run, this is more about what has stayed with me for the intervening months.
Since I’ve already covered the episodes individually, it’s reasonably safe to say that my opinion hasn’t changed a great deal with regard to any of them. (For my initial impressions of each story, comb through the archives!) The good bits endure: the tingle when Rose enters the TARDIS for the first time, the thrill of seeing the Dalek doing all the things I already knew Daleks could do but had not yet seen on screen, the sheer creepy joy of ‘The Empty Child’. The niggles still niggle: the prolonged inaction finale of ‘Rose’, the ‘Galaxy Quest’ climax of ‘The End Of The World’, the transparent twist of ‘The Unquiet Dead’. And the sucky parts still suck: Mickey’s plastic grin in ‘Rose’, the two-part fart gag that was ‘Aliens of London’ and ‘World War Three’, and the, er, wasted opportunity of ‘Boomtown’. And in the midst of all that, the least memorable episode of the lot was ‘The Long Game’, which has the dubious privilege of being too average to stick in the mind for any special reason. A rewatch may alter some of that, but for the most part time and reflection have made little difference.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now confirm that the Doctor’s passive nature was down to his being scarred by the Time War and all that jazz, and as a thread linking the series it works. It’s a bold experiment that succeeds on that level, but still, for me, leaves the shadow of a disappointing Doctor. (Also, I got that he was something of a depressed Doctor, but did he have to be so bi-polar in his opinions: everything either "Stupid!" or "Fantastic!" - but I may well have said enough on that in previous posts!) It might have worked better had Christopher Eccleston continued in the role, allowing his Doctor to recover and reassert his own strengths, or had we been treated to a season beforehand in which we saw his Doctor being, well, more of a Doctor. Because with hindsight I appreciate more fully that he was, in fact, brilliant in the role – there are far too many moments where he shines to think otherwise: gloating over the Dalek, being gloated over by the Dalek, the ‘chips’ scene from ‘End of the World’, and his holographic farewell to Rose in ‘Parting of the Ways’, all real oh-my-god Doctor moments that will live in the memory for some time. But the unfortunate conjunction of character concept and premature regeneration mean we will never get to see him as anything but an essentially weak Doctor. And the whole of the first series is littered with ineffectual endings where we are forced to wonder about the fate of the world if it weren’t for the ‘lucky’ happenstance of the occasional deus ex machina (‘Boomtown’, ‘The Parting of the Ways’), or a plot built like a three-piece jigsaw so that it pretty much solves itself (‘The Unquiet Dead’). It’s a shame, but I hope that when I do get to rewatch some of the episodes, I get to appreciate the performance more in context than I might just be left wondering what might have been. And not wincing too much every time he says "Fantastic!".
I wonder if this idea of the Doctor was born out of some need to bring him down to the level of the companion. If so, I can only think the best way to go would have been to strengthen the companion – and as things turned out, the fact is, they wouldn’t have needed to at all. What worked far more successfully, for me, was Rose’s journey. Piper is terrific as Rose. That’s the plain and simple truth. She’ll never have the same place of affection in my heart as some of the previous companions (no, not Mel or Adric), but that’s much more a fault of my age than her performance in the role or the writing. For fear of making her seem weak next to the Doctor, they may have overcompensated. She’s wide-eyed enough to marvel at the things that need to be marveled at, conveying the sense of wonder you’d expect when whisked off in the TARDIS. She’s tough and independent in her way, and they even allow her to be helpless from time to time without undermining her strengths. I personally still don’t get that whole Bad Wolf business, and frankly the series and the character could have done perfectly well without it, but Rose in and of herself was great. In her way, she may even prove more memorable than the Doctor.
And she was of course very down to Earth. Which has its unfortunate side effects on the series, firstly in that she comes with baggage in the form of a mother and a boyfriend – both of which, I’m sorry, still irritate now that they’re just memories rather than cropping up every second episode (not helped by the knowledge that they’re set to come back). And secondly, in that the TARDIS just couldn’t get away from the place: the furthest it managed was a presumably fairly high Earth orbit. It shows a lack of adventure and a certain ‘safe’ attitude to the series that I don’t think did it any favours. Even my sisters who had been won over to Doctor Who for the first time in their lives were beginning to get really fed up with it by ‘The Empty Child’, and it’s a shame if their enjoyment of that story was only spoiled, even moderately, by the fact that it was couched between so many other Earth-based adventures. I’m all for touching base, but if you do it too often you’ll never get anywhere and as successful as ‘Aliens of London’ was (yes, it did have its very good points too) in exploring the effects of Rose having ‘been away’, I can’t help thinking that would have been helped by the still greater contrast of some truly alien worlds.
Then there’s Jack, of course. Or Cap’n Jack as he seems to have become known. Personally, I thought he was great, livening up the screen when he was on, always entertaining – except in ‘Boomtown’ when he was shoved into the scenery – and a good ‘action man’ time traveller to contrast with the Doctor. But as fond as I was of the character, I do wonder now if he will prove all that memorable, especially in the light of his woeful resurrection. Of course he’s being brought back in the BBC’s Torchwood spin-off, but in the context of Doctor Who, he may have proven more long-lived if he’d been allowed to stay dead.
Then there was, um... Adam. Yes. Well. What was that about? I really hope he is revealed as the new father of the Cybermen or something, because otherwise I will always be left wondering whether there was any point to him at all.
But here I’ve been banging on about this and that and I’ve not even touched on the memorable monsters. Um… well, there were the Daleks. Honestly, now that I turn my mind to the subject, it’s the Daleks that stand out in the memory, heads and, er, shoulders above the rest. That’s down to the imagery we were treated to, the way they were allowed to show off for us, as much as the fact that it’s the Daleks. And the credit is shared surprisingly equally between ‘Dalek’ and the less satisfactory overall ‘The Parting of the Ways’. Probably because we got to see billions of the things streaming out of their spaceships – and thankfully that truly awe-inspiring scene does much to gloss over the less fortunate way in which they pootled around the space station, waiting to get shot at. The ones that rise into view to take care of Lynda with a ‘y’ or ‘i’ – I can’t remember which! – are responsible for one of the great moments, almost – almost – up there with the Sea Devils surfacing through the waves and wading ashore.
But if I trawl through my recollections for other memorable monsters, unfortunately I keep coming up with the Slitheen – and for all the wrong reasons. They are too much like the Tetraps of the new series or, dare I say, the Nimon. They just don’t – work, for me. Maybe it’s the big baby eyes, maybe it’s the all too visible contrast between the lumbering man in the suit version and the CGI counterpart, maybe it’s the farcical or just plain lacking nature of the stories that featured them. They’re just poor, and like Jackie and Mickey, all the worse for the fact that you just know they’re engineered to be a returning, er, menace.
As for the rest, Cassandra will probably stick in the minds of most kids, and perhaps the eructating wheelie bin, but my money is not on the Nestene or the thing stuck to the ceiling in The Long Game. For sheer creepiness and exquisite simplicity, the best vote goes to the kid in a gas mask in ‘The Empty Child’. Not really a monster, but definitely the stuff of nightmares. And that really does equate with the Sea Devils, Giant Maggots, the Wirrn grub and Uncle Tom Cobley and all that Doctor Who has managed to throw at us nervous, impressionable types in the past.
Overall then, like the original ‘classic’ series, the end result is better than the sum of its parts. We forgive its flaws and embrace it warts and all, because the good bits are really so good and there is still nothing else like it on TV. As is evidenced even in individual episodes, in that ‘The Unquiet Dead’, for all its 45-minute flimsiness, remains one of my favourites. But you see, where it may share some of the flaws of other episodes, it has all the character, atmosphere and just general Doctor Who-ness anyone could wish for and was the first episode in which I knew for a hundred percent certainty that I was watching Doctor Who. For every cloud, there’s a silver lining and in the case of Doctor Who probably several. One of the measures of the series’ success, ironically, is that it leaves far too much to actually discuss than I could ever cite here with any hope of anyone reading through it all.
So I’ll stop soon.
In short, I loved it. It’s a qualified love and will have to go some considerable way to promote that to the same unconditional love with which I embraced the show as a child. But from what I hear, many a kid has embraced this new series with just that same kind of affection, and really I suppose that was the main aim.
Old fans like us are secondary, but we’re glad that this young whipper snapper still has something to offer us. And there are plenty of memories that will stay with me, for all the right reasons, at least until I get a chance to watch the episodes again.
Meanwhile, I look forward to the Christmas Invasion with huge amounts of anticipation. In part because the design of monster for that one really looks the business. And in part because, in my days of running the Doctor Who roleplaying game, I came up with scary Santas yonks ago. Of course they were Autons and one of my player characters had great fun running one over repeatedly in a stolen police car, but that really is another story and almost certainly couldn’t compare with anything the new series can come up with.
And if the Queen mentions Doctor Who in her Christmas speech this year, we'll finally know the full extent of its popular success.
Merry Christmas.
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