Only Fools And Cybermen

Last night saw the return of the show’s spin-off sitcom Two Pints Of Vraxoin And A Packet Of Jelly Babies, penned by Gareth Roberts and currently enjoying a season of only one episode a year. This time it’s The One With The Cyberman In The Changing Room and, like The One With All The Football, it’s funny stuff.

Unlike the Cybermen, our hero Craig (James Corden) has progressed, becoming a dad and the episode gives us a far more credible portrait of a father struggling to cope than Doctor Who’s earlier (and less hilarious) Night Terrors. This rarely falls short of being entertaining, liberally peppered with laugh-out-loud lines – and even Corden is liberally peppered at one point – with pepper – as customary guest star, the Doctor, does a dazzling bit of faffing about in the kitchen shortly after his arrival. It’s just one of many inspired touches of visual comedy to go with the positively fizzing dialogue. And Roberts does a good job of running with Moffat’s idea that the Doctor can speak baby. You’d have to be a fool or a Cyberman not to find this amusing.

Indeed it’s so good, the sooner Gareth Roberts lands a BBC 3 sitcom commission and retires from Doctor Who, the better for us all.

Briefly, I had to cast my attention back to what I wrote about The Lodger last year, because as I pondered the delights of this episode I grew wary of repeating myself. Because – very like the Cybermen – this is exactly like the previous iteration but slightly worse. For the framework for all the domestic comedy antics, I can only imagine Gareth retained the original script and did a quick cut and replace on a few details. Hidden TARDIS-like ship upstairs becomes hidden Cybership downstairs, defeated by the combined psyches of the two singularly unadventurous protagonists becomes destroyed by emotional feedback from one of said protagonists.

Honestly, Mr Roberts, did you deem your own story so forgettable that we wouldn’t notice? Lazy, abysmal stuff. Utterly unworthy of most of the writing that fuels proceedings, insulting to the audience and the people who paid your cheque, and about par for the Gareth Roberts course.

I remember being pleasantly surprised by The Lodger because, finally, it seemed that Roberts had found his appropriate level and delivered something that wasn’t entirely expected. (1. The Shakespeare Code: comprehensively unsurprising Who-meets-Shakespeare-by-numbers, feeble resolution. 2. The Unicorn And The Wasp: atrocious and puerile Who-meets-Agatha-Christie-by-numbers guff, feeble resolution. 3. the 'special', Planet Of The Dead. Overblown and shallow Pitch Black imitation, feeble resolution.) The Lodger is still his best offering – on this steeply downward sliding scale - but unfortunately now this new (sitcom) format seems to be the new pro forma.

In Who writer terms, Roberts always strikes me as the equivalent of one of those X Factor contestants who really shouldn’t have been let through to the judges’ houses but, you know, Louis Walsh insisted because they were ‘fun’ and camp enough to promise some basic lowest common denominator popular appeal. Jedward or Wagner, say. In this regard he does, I suppose, realise his potential.

It’s a shame, because there’s cleverness at work here and there and the man plainly has a gift for funny lines. But ultimately his tales fall over like, well, Cybermen in the face of pretty much anything.

Far from my (admittedly remote) hopes for realising the Cybermen’s potential, this tale blatantly fesses up and admits just how crap they really are. I don’t know what it is exactly, a syndrome or a disease, but for the series ‘second best’ monster, they’ve been treated abominably by their writers over the years. Here, only the poor deluded Cyberleader believes that six would be enough to conquer the world. I’m only stunned that the Doctor doesn’t contest this point, shrug off the ‘threat’ and go and have a nice dish of fish fingers and custard with Craig and little Stormageddon. An army of them would be about as dangerous as the stockpile of Iraqi WMD we all went to war over a few years back.

Through the course of the series, these poor machine creatures have been susceptible to radiation, gravity, gold stars for mathematical excellence and a zippy silver-clad mime artist. Here, they reach their saddest nadir yet, courtesy of the emotional inhibitor chip introduced in modern Who, defeated by a father’s love for his wee bairn. Awww. (I’m reminded at this point of that great sound effect from The Five Doctors of a Cyberman throwing up.) Spare parts? Spare us.

What makes this painfully worse is that the Cybes have apparently downgraded their conversion process to an eminently reversible process of ‘donning a suit of armour’. This regression is in keeping with their modern clunky, trudge-dread aesthetic, but it beggars belief that, in a universe where technological advances outpace evolution by a factor of umpty-gazillion, a machine-race are not constantly evolving. Hate to say it, but Star Trek:TNG’s rather plodding and pedestrian Borg addressed the perpetual adaptation concept better, even if it was only to add the occasional bit of hosepipe or groinal socket attachment.

Worst. Cyberman. Story. Ever.

Ah, but of course it’s not a Cyberman story. It is, as stated, a story of a guy struggling with his recent promotion to fatherhood. That’s the key and it’s echoed in the way this episode opens with a nod to Rose (assistant staying late to close up shop, something lurking in store): Who is less about Auton mannequins breaking out of shop windows to terrorise the nation; it’s much more about the people who work in that shop. The late, great Barry Letts (whose role Steven Moffat now occupies, albeit in the modern capacity of ‘showrunner’) told me that his mission was simply to produce entertaining sci-fi action adventure and, despite inheriting a setup he didn’t want – a time and space traveller stranded on contemporary Earth – succeeded, for the most part, in investing a succession of alien invasion and mad professor stories with respectable degree of variety and creativity. Back in his day, incumbent Doctor, Jon Pertwee, said that "there's nothing more scary than coming home and finding a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec", as opposed to in some alien environment. And there’s something to that. The contrast between the alien and the everyday and mundane makes for a potent mix.

New Who follows that recipe to a large extent, but the balance of ingredients has shifted. Character and emotion has been brought very much to the fore and this is a good thing. But I do wonder sometimes if this hasn’t been at the expense of the sf adventure side. A lot of these 45 minute episodes barely present scenarios, rather than fully fledged stories (at best, this week’s would have made for a poor if amusing short story in an anthology) and perhaps a greater deftness of touch is needed to give equal weight to both elements.

We live in a world where ‘getting away from it all’ is increasingly difficult. While on holiday, I’ll usually make a point of going offline as well as away somewhere. My mobile phone’s available for emergencies, of course, but escape – let alone actual isolation – is a challenge in this increasingly interconnected society of ours. Thus, we see this reflected in Doctor Who – at one time the ultimate in escapism – where we have companions, whisked away in the TARDIS, all of time and space opened before them, and a string of strong, independent female companions possessed with a need to frequently touch base with home and family. Once was okay as an exploration of that facet of the time travel experience, but to have the experiment repeated ad nauseam was a bit too much for my tastes.

Now at last we have the domestics packed up and travelling with us, with Rory and Amy’s relationship centre stage in the TARDIS, but – much as I love em, I really do – their love has been often been put under the microscope, pushed to the forefront and, coupled with the arc concerning their daughter, has often nudged the framing SF adventure story into peripheral vision territory. As I've noted here before, there's this too-frequent appearance of an "It'll do" attitude, as though the importance of a strong scenario has been comprehensively underestimated in terms of selling us on the emotional import at the heart of the presented situation.

At the same time, the tricky issue of Amy and Rory missing out on raising their own child has been conveniently swept under a carpet – sure, the temporal shenanigans have rendered it somewhat moot from a practical perspective, but I think it creates an odd disconnect with the powerful parental – and particularly maternal – bond. It’s something that was clearly in evidence after the birth, when Amy was pleading with her captors against the baby being taken and demanding that the Doctor get her back. And it’s an especial oversight in such an emo-centric incarnation of Doctor Who. It’s as though the (laudable) aim to lend these adventures extra depth goes hand in hand with a desire to keep things simple.

Roberts exemplifies this modus operandi. Hence we have this effective domestic sitcom married to a token hidden alien ship scenario and a resolution straight out of the appalling Doctor Who For Dummies handbook. It has its merits – yay, verily, it abounds with merits: the humour is consistently above most current BBC1 sitcoms (not fantastic praise, I know, but still), forget the BBC 3 ones; there are some nice guest characters (must mention Lynda Baron, much more successful than her panto pirate turn in Enlightenment); I loved the inclusion of Rory and Amy, and the nice little extra of Amy stopping to sign an autograph, as the face of the perfume. (Although it fills me with this niggling feeling that Amy and Rory have been given a future and a life together so, maybe – noooooo! - they won’t be returning, after all. Grounds for an upside down smiley at the very least!) And the Doctor’s little talk with Alfie at the end would have been thoroughly lovely if only not undermined by the sinking feeling that we’ve been there before. Oh dear god, it’s TennantDoc all over again, getting all maudlin and self-absorbed about his impending end. May I make this humble request: in the future, when or if the Doctor is actually about to meet his ultimate demise, can he please please not know about it in advance? All this prophesy and foreshadowing is getting a teensy bit lame and tiresome. Fair dues to Smith, he subtly underplays it to a welcome degree and there’s none of the self-referential “I don’t want to go” mopeathon to which we were subjected in Tennant’s final stages.

But viewed on its own with all the episode’s undoubted strengths in mind, I just can’t see where the harm could have been in framing all this in a smarter, more involved and – oh, what the hell, let’s go all out here – original story with a resolution that didn’t suck lemons.

Emotional feedback is a long way off destroying Doctor Who, but this isn’t the first tale this year that has suffered its effects. Emotional weight, like good CGI, should serve the story and ideally the story should serve that emotional weight. What would have been so wrong with embedding the good material in a decent Cyberman story? (Assuming such a thing could ever be written.) If you have something worthwhile to say, give it all the thought and attention – and the story - it deserves. Just a suggestion.

As it is, yeah, that was amusing. Next.

And talking of next, we can’t let this pass without touching on the promise of the impending season finale. The transition, through the young eye-witness accounts, to River Song and the lead-in to next week, was skilfully done – Moffat at work, maybe, tail-ending Roberts’ efforts? – even down to the minor detail of the Doctor liberating his ominous blue envelopes from Sophie’s stationery supplies. Nice.

Fair warning, Mr Moffat: we anticipate great things. Because there is at least one writer who has – apparently – crafted a complex and fiendishly clever story to the credit of all the themes and character relationships he is out to explore. At least, he’d better have. Since the arc has been so pervasive and all-important throughout this and the previous season, the longer term investment warrants a greater return.

The banks may have slashed interest rates, but in the closing stage of this patchy season (patchier than a one-eyed pirate dog named Patch) I’m trusting Doctor Who will not end up doing likewise.

SAF

Fawltless Towers

Pictured Above: Distant cousins.

Faith. You gotta have faith. For preference, mine comes in the form of Eliza Dushku, but whatever your personal brand, it pays with Doctor Who to always trust that, no matter how disappointing an episode – or even a run of episodes or a season - might have been, there will be better along soon enough.

This week’s, The God Complex, was my cup of tea. In many respects, everything that the preceding instalment, The Girl Who Waited, should have been. A strong emotive concept, this time brilliantly executed. For one thing, it doesn’t rely on people being stupid. In fairness, this one probably had as many inconsistencies of internal logic but it cleverly weighted all explanations towards the tail end so that I was properly hooked and engaged in the story from the get-go. The questions it raised were of the ‘Ooh, I wonder what the hell is going on?’ variety, rather than the ‘How utterly dumb and contrived is that?’ sort.

The Toby Whithouse experience has been a variable one. School Reunion was a tale of two halves – on the one hand a powerfully emotional exploration of the Doctor-Sarah Jane relationship and the impact on a companion’s life post-Doctor; on the other a fairly feeble story of aliens taking over a school, ultimately to be defeated by K9. The best of Who, the worst of Who, but ultimately still magical in the memory thanks to the Sarah Jane thread and a parting scene that tugs on the heartstrings in all the best ways. Vampires Of Venice, veering more towards ordinary, although definitely with merits (including but not limited to hot vampire babes). And now this, The God Complex, outstanding in every respect that counts.

Gorgeously creepy and ever so slightly insane, it opened with shots of empty corridors just waiting for people to run up and down them. The direction was superb throughout, painting this already bizarre scenario of the mock 1980s hotel in a singularly surreal light. Freaky montages, extreme eye close-ups, warped views of corridors stretching away forever, a consistently dark tone expertly interwoven with the chintzy decor,and a perfectly measured restraint in the reveal of the monster. Shadows, more ocular close-ups, ominous sounds and an exquisitely framed shot through glass when the Doctor first confronts it face to face. And it’s a monster which, quite frankly, you’d be seriously tempted to show off.

A beautifully realised creation. It must be said. Sure, yes, it’s ultimately ‘just’ a minotaur, but a fantastic bit of animatronic workmanship. Not quite Farscape's Pilot level, but fantastic all the same. When Amy says he’s beautiful, she’s not wrong. Kudos to the production team on that alone. The line about it being a ‘distant cousin of the Nimon’ is comedy gold.

Loved it, loved it, loved it.

And I understand now why The Girl Who Waited couldn’t have been set in a prison with lots of individually tailored nightmares. Unless these stories could have been combined somehow. Hmm.

Such speculative food for thought aside, this for me is the best standalone story of the season so far, up there with Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife, with perhaps a few extra trimmings on top. There’s a deftness of touch ranging from the simple facet of set-dressing – the pictures of previous victims on the walls, for instance – to the characterisation of the lovely Rita (not a meter maid). Actress Amara Karan and script conspired to invest her with a similar ‘instant companion’ quality to the likes of Sally Sparrow (sigh) and I for one would have welcomed her recruitment as a regular at the end. Of course, it’s all engineered so that we properly feel for her in that horrible, wrenching scene of her demise. A true shame, but the engineering is pure craftsmanship.

Memory cheats, but I do recall wondering, back in ye olde times during (the somewhat overrated) Curse Of Fenric, whether the Russian captain was intended as companion material, before he met is fate. There’s other Fenric common ground here as the Doctor endeavours to break his companion’s faith in him, only this time the scene involves actors instead of Sylvester McCoy.

The initial hypothesis that the creature is feeding on fear is the stuff of bulk-standard DW monsters, preparing us for a foray into familiar Orwellian Room 101 territory, but thought has gone into the range of hot and cold running fears on offer in the hotel rooms. Clowns and ventriloquist dummies are obvious ones, of course, but you would need the more common fears in amongst the quirkier ones. The conspiracy-theorist geek’s fear of girls and that single shot of the huddle of girls all talking and laughing about him was again deftly done and told the character’s whole story in as few seconds as possible. Naturally there’s a burning desire to know the greatest fears of the regulars – the Doctor most particularly - and the episode frustrates us with its restraint in this regard, but it’s pitch perfect. Any more would have been wrong, as would any less. As the story progresses, we know there has to be more to this than just fears and when the question of faith then rears its head, further fascination is folded in with the suspense.

And the range of faiths is as creative as the range of fears. Faith in conspiracy theories, faith in luck. And how fantastic to have a practising Muslim in the mix. In passing I did wonder whether the Doctor’s reference to pointless superstitions and faith was ill-judged, in the light of Rita’s religious beliefs, but it’s clear that he respects and admires her. It’s fitting that a Time Lord with a God Complex, eponymous or otherwise, would be something of an atheist, but I couldn’t imagine him being so glibly dismissive of the deeply held beliefs of a person so clearly valued and recently lost.

As dark and potentially heavy stuff as all this is, there is comedy aplenty. All that was missing in this hotel from hell was a guest appearance from John Cleese. We had David Walliams – not in the same league, all due respect – but he puts in a good turn as the cowardly alien from the most-invaded planet in the universe. The fact that this snivelling spineless Orc survives when better people have lost their lives is simultaneously galling and inspired.

Like all good things it comes to an end. But we have to hope that at least part of the end is temporary. When the illusion of the hotel is stripped away and all that’s left is a Tron-like virtuascape, bringing into sharp focus the isolation and loneliness of the minotaur’s death. His line about one so drenched in blood embracing the end was, for me, so clearly referring to the Doctor it didn’t necessarily need spelling out, but it’s at least not as bluntly hammered home as, say, the end note in Moffat’s The Beast Below. But that’s ultimately the extent of my quibbles with it, really, because as I said it managed to sell me on the scenario and fully hook me in, before any triggering of the internal critic could occur. Damn it, it even managed to have me feeling sorry for the beast, without any sense that anyone was ham-fistedly trying to push my buttons. Even the music was – gasp!! – understated for a (blimmin welcome) change.

So in the end not quite entirely faultless, but perhaps as close to it as Doctor Who ever comes.

Still, with all that praise heaped upon it, I must balance it out by adding that Toby Whithouse is a bastard. Sure, he can claim he was only following orders but that doesn’t alter the facts that responsibility lies with him – for being the man who wrote Amy and Rory out. You utter git, sir. Shame on you!

Of course, if this had occurred at season’s end, I would be more convinced – and horrified – at the prospect that this was indeed their actual final departure. But I can’t buy that this is really the last we’ll see of them. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe it’s because I’ve been fed on a diet of more recent companions who always return no matter how final their departure seems. Mostly though it’s because Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill have been for me the best Doctor-companion combo since Tom Baker, Lis Sladen and Ian Marter and that’s something real special. I have faith that they will be back.

In grudging deference to Mr Whithouse, he delivers a beautiful departure scene which does the relationships justice. The bastard writes terrific tear-jerking farewells. So, in case there’s any misunderstanding or in the remotest case Mr Whithouse is paying attention, ‘bastard’ is in this instance a term of respect and admiration. With the blame, sir, comes due credit.

That final closing scene of the Doctor’s isolation and loneliness inside the TARDIS is as perfectly judged as most of this episode and this is the first time in a few weeks now that the episode itself has honestly outdone anything in the NEXT TIME... trailer at the end.

NEXT TIME has a lot to live up to now and unfortunately it features Cybermen – and the modern clunky, trudge-dread ones - which puts it at a disadvantage before it’s begun. Let’s hope we finally get a story that realises their potential.

Looking further forward, I’ll be hoping for more Amy and Rory soon. And more from Toby Whithouse next year. He’s definitely earned his place as a regular guest at the Doctor Who hotel.

SAF

Blunderworld

You know how it goes. You press the wrong button and suddenly there you are fighting for survival for the next thirty-six years in a quarantine facility for sufferers of a rare disease that only affects dual-hearted races, chased by medical robots whose treatments will be toxic to you because their designers, despite being avid collectors of human cultural treasures, apparently neglected to program their nurses to make any distinction between their own species and other identical single-hearted races. (Robots who, by the way, see with their hands – which has to be the most dumb-as-a-stump sensory apparatus since the Dalek eyestalk.) Ah well, never mind, it’s not like you have any great story full of dramatic and emotional import to convey, so why not base it on such a foundation of layered absurdities?

Oh, wait.

The Girl Who Waited smacked of a missed opportunity. Like last week’s Night Terrors, there was a much stronger story dying to break free of its writer’s limitations. Too many dumb contrivances piled on top of one another managed to disengage me from proceedings long before the real substance of the story showed its weight.

Such a shame too, because the cast really gave it their all. The culmination was a brilliantly played Pyramus and Thisbe scenario to outdo the Rose/TennantDoc one from Doomsday. Arthur Darvill especially was acting his socks off and my only reservations about Gillan concerned her old age version, where I couldn’t quite determine whether the stiffness of features was down to the makeup or an acting choice.

You could cynically boil down Rory’s choice to one between his beloved, youthful, spirited, chipper, sarcastic Amy and the old, wrinkly, selfish, deeply embittered one who kept a robot effigy of himself as a pet. Not exactly a dilemma to task Solomon. But given a much stronger setup, I would have totally bought into the situation.

She was, after all, his Amy, but one who had suffered, one he felt he had let down or betrayed. That’s bound to plague the conscience of a softy like Rory. And from Amy’s POV, well, of course she’s not going to want to ‘die’. It’s potent stuff.
But it suffers, I think, because it’s built like a house of straw.

As with his Cyberman two-parter which tried so hard to be a Hollywood action blockbuster and ended up just being a mechanical trudgeathon, MacRae’s inventiveness apparently fails to match his ambitions. There’s some creativity on display, with the fantastic imagery of the giant temporal magnifying glass, for instance, but there seems to be two streams of effort at work here: one where the writer has tried hard to make this scenario work, the other where he’s either been lazy or just not up to the task. I’m going to take the charitable view and assume these scripts are produced in a hurry to tight deadlines. But even then I can’t quite believe that nobody – say, a script editor or someone of that sort – looked at this and thought, hang on, Tom, don’t you think this is a bit weak? There's a worrying "It'll do" attitude that seems to creep into Doctor Who now and again. And again.

Never mind that we’ve already had alien medical AIs who haven’t a clue about human medicine (The Curse Of The Black Spot) in this same season. (Yawn.) But channeling one third of the TARDIS party into a separate time stream by virtue of an erroneous button press is pathetic. Disbelief is compounded by the way neither Rory or the Doctor recall that there are two *completely different buttons* when they shout instruction to Amy to “press the button”. Getting past that, we then have to buy the notion that Amy has survived for thirty six years against what must have been a vast army of robots before any programming kicked in to register that, what with all these robots getting knocked out and the ‘unidentified bacteria’ still present, perhaps some alternative approach was needed on the part of the administration.

Fair enough, Interface didn’t seem that bright. But for such a contrived and ‘advanced’ system for humanely dealing with this terrible disease, you might expect a few more complex protocols to have been built in to handle the occasional hiccup. Thousands of time streams all overlapping, we’re told, and yet the system is to all intents and purposes a one-trick pony, with absolutely no grasp of events outside the norm.

All the while, outside of Amy’s machine-room safehouse, we’re only shown one garden, a check-in area, a gallery and one stretch of corridor. We can assume she ranged a bit further afield in her thirty-six years, but the overall effect is to portray an extremely limited quarantine area and a consequently less convincing impression of the time that has supposedly passed.

And to top it all, the Doctor singularly fails to spell out to Rory that the rewriting (here we go again) of Amy’s timeline will actually spare her ever having suffered this ordeal. And nobody even mention that Rory waited two thousand years for Amy not all that long ago. And he still has memories of that.

In retrospect, I wonder if the tale would have worked better had the facility been a form of prison. The stretched time stream being some form of extending a sentence indefinitely, the different areas being different ordeals – a choice of hells, as it were, as opposed to gardens and theme parks etc, the robots being guards. And the Doctor and Rory are left in the time stream designed for visiting hours, as you’d have in a prison or public viewing – perhaps the victims’ families, who might wish to view the criminal’s suffering as some form of closure.

All decidedly nastier, but for my money simpler and more believable.

Obviously it’s just one idea I’ve come up with off the top of my head and it would need work, especially at the beginning when it came to how to separate Amy from the Doctor and Rory. But in that respect it’s no different to the episode we got.

All in all, another story that looked much better in the trailer. And ultimately one fine example of why actors are often more celebrated than writers.

Thankfully, there’s always next week.

SAF

The Nightmare, The Glitch And The Wardrobe

After the grandstanding antics of Let’s Kill Hitler, this week’s episode – Night Terrors – feels like a real back to basics Doctor Who episode for the modern era. It’s a welcome toning down and reining in of the usual extremes, relying instead on atmosphere and basic horror-flick ghost-story scares – and turns out to be all the more effective for it. At its core there’s a very simple idea, but like The Unquiet Dead (Gatiss’ contribution to the Eccleston season) it’s let down by an ending so pitiful you almost feel sorry for it. Sorry for the story that could have been.

And it doesn’t have the great period setting or the formidable Simon Callow going for it. What it does have is a well-realised Victorian dollhouse (pretty easily figured out where Rory and Amy had been deposited, some while before they worked it out themselves), uber-creepy wooden dolls and oodles of terrific direction, with all the shadow play and spooky shots you’d expect from a suspenseful tale designed to give kids nightmares.

Appealing to the audience’s inner child and inviting us into the world of little George, so chronically frightened of all the monsters under the bed, outside the window and most especially in the cupboard, is a worthy aim and seems all part of Gatiss’ ongoing mission to mine the quintessential ingredients of good Who. I always get the impression that Gatiss is trying hard to capture some elusive, perhaps mythical ideal of Whodom that, like a faulty TARDIS, never quite materialises. In many respects, Victory Of The Daleks smacked of more of a creative departure for him, while this represents a return to form. There’s a twisted imagination at work, but it’s never quite twisted enough – The Unquiet Dead, for example, would have been much more interesting and memorable if it had properly pursued its conceit that we humans have no further use for our dead, so why not let aliens make use of the corpses. Here, making little George the alien is a nice twist, but one that somehow fails to turn expectations on their head in the way it should have done. Maybe this should have gone further and made the child a fully-fledged monster. Have George as a proper 'cuckoo in the nest' perhaps, having displaced a previous child - a daughter, maybe, which would explain the presence of the dollhouse and possibly her banishment within it.

Maybe though it’s simply all a bit too familiar. In pushing traditional buttons, Gatiss seems to produce something that’s a little too pedestrian and average. Even tired - perception filter, for instance, seems to be the new reversed polarity of the neutron flow, trotted out as a throwaway explanation for everything. To be fair, it’s not all in the pen work – there’s doses of dark humour to go with all the shadows – and some of the fault here has to be with the cast. I don’t think anyone outside the regulars (and the dolls) managed to entirely convince and possibly better actors would have helped connect me more to the situation. But there’s also a distinctly unreal quality to the domestic setup that possibly stems in part from the direction, and just as probably is there in the script. It’s like kitchen sink drama from someone who’s only ever known automatic dishwashers. The dialogue frequently doesn’t ring true (the dad is too gormless and the landlord pure caricature) and although there’s a clear effort to paint the kind of surreal perspective you’d envisage through the eyes of a child, I think more realistic characters might have provided a more solid grounding and involved me more in the fantasy elements of the tale.

On top of which, it’s all unfortunately a bit close to the Tennant ‘adventure’, Fear Her. Not a Gatiss story, but basically instead of a frightened kid putting everyone into drawings, we have a frightened kid sticking everyone in the cupboard. Which, while a change from the Rusty era of every other character coming out of the closet, ultimately makes for nothing very new.

This is better than Fear Her in that the fear element is more present and there are some actual terrors to justify the title. Plus it doesn’t have the silly shenanigans with the Doctor and the magic (Olympic) torch.

Rory and Amy don't actually achieve much, reduced to sneaking about in corridors, but it’s here that the story delivers its best scenes. It is the stuff of suspense and the dolls, as I say, are supremely creepy – all the way up until the point when Amy is converted, when you realise that, oh dear, it’s all going to be undone with a horribly rushed and overly easy resolution.

Little George just needs to feel like he belongs. Quick, dad, run and give the boy a hug.

But wait, this all came about because of Alien George’s insecurities that he was going to be ‘taken away’. And yet, mummy and daddy (not altogether believably) only discussed packing him off into care because of his chronic fear syndrome. There’s an internal logic failure in there somewhere. And if you’re going to have those, you really need to follow Moffat’s example and make your tales so complicated it’s easier to trust that they’ll all hold together come the end than attempt to unravel the tangled threads. Internal logic has perhaps rarely been Who's strongpoint, but here it's freely abandoned, both in Amy's absurd conclusion that the only way to take control of the situation is to let the dolls in - d'uh? - and I can't say I saw any reason for little George to enter the wardrobe - and the dollhouse - based on the Doctor's pleas. It would have made much more sense - and the situation much more difficult for the Doctor and friends - if he'd just gone ahead and locked the wardrobe at that point and waited for mummy to come home.

Anyway, what it all adds up to and balances out as is an average Doctor Who story. Right alongside Gatiss’ The Idiot's Lantern. Make no mistake, average is better than bad, but it’s also unfortunately more forgettable. Indistinctly average, I suppose. So I suspect that by season’s end, this one will have faded in the mix and we will be left with the usual bipolar episodes characterising this year’s (so far uneven) memories.

It’s always a less than encouraging sign when you’re left more excited by the Next Week trailer than the preceding episode and sadly – despite all of Hitler’s comedy clout - that’s been the case for the past two weeks now. White robots, white backdrops, sword-wielding Amy, fantastical setting – are we due a revisit to the Land Of Fiction?

At this stage, a straightforward remake of The Mind Robber would feel like the series upping its game. It could use some magic about now.

SAF

Back To The Fuhrer

Ah, that old time travel dilemma: whether or not you would kill Hitler, given the chance. It’s a wonder that Doctor Who hasn’t explored this previously. Then you watch the brilliantly titled Let’s Kill Hitler and realise that it still hasn’t. (Except, of course, where it really kind of did in Genesis Of The Daleks.) But it doesn’t entirely matter, because although there is a small measure of disappointment to discover that the eponymous dictator spends most of the episode locked in a cupboard, the whole affair is every bit as spectacularly madcap and entertaining as the title promised.

There’s an old Pertwee episode where the Doctor claims to have met Hitler and glibly describes him as a ‘bounder’. Which trivialises the man’s more monstrous deeds a tad. And it’s a similar sort of deal here, played for comedy rather like Indiana Jones' detour to Berlin in The Last Crusade which culminates in the acquiring of Hitler’s autograph. But that tone is well and truly telegraphed and the more serious emotional/moral core of the story centres around the Let’s Kill The Doctor thread as, lest we forget, young River Song (nee Melody Pond) was abducted by agents of The Silence and reprogrammed as a weapon to be used against the Doctor.

Alex Kingston is on top form here, playing River with a twist. And by twist, I don’t mean that Mels turns out to be Melody/River. I mean, thank gawd she regenerated into Alex Kingston because the young actress who appears at the beginning isn’t very good, but her grandstanding arrival in the flash sports car cutting across the excellent crop calligraphy is so River as to be unmistakable. The pointing of a gun at the Doctor is a surprise and the subsequent line – “I have a gun. You have a time machine. Let’s kill Hitler” – nothing short of immortal.

It’s a sure sign that we’re in for a ride with all of Moffat’s characteristic chutzpah, wit and joyful inventiveness. The notion of a shape-changing robot driven from the inside by a miniaturised crew is bold and daft (and reminiscent of a chapter from Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid To Ask) and works a treat in context of the story’s irresistible tone. It’s a shame the tissue-compressed crew are so po-faced and dull and their mission raises the most interesting moral question to my mind.

The Doctor scorns the idea of using time travel to mete out punishments on history’s war criminals, fair enough. It would seem a bit of a waste of such a miraculous technology. But the crew’s moral high ground is rendered even more shaky by the fact that they (apparently) don’t execute said war criminals (preferring instead to keep them alive in their own personal hell), while it’s perfectly acceptable to condemn culpable subordinates (such as the officer whose shape their robot assumes) to death at the hands (or tentacles) of the jellyfish-like antibodies. But I guess it’s fair to say that deeper questions are not part of this story’s turf.

Indeed, when it does slip into something more serious, it tends to over-egg the pudding somewhat. There’s some serious over-labouring for the hard-of-understanding on the point that Mels is Melody is River Song and I didn’t think the situation needed quite so much spelling out, but in contrast to the manic goings on for most of the episode, scenes involving the Doctor’s slowly dying – like the one in the TARDIS with Amelia Voice Interface seem to drag on a tiny bit too long. It’s funny and touching, but it would have been just as funny and touching – perhaps even more so – with a few iterations of “I’m not Amelia Pond” trimmed. Still the idea of fish fingers and custard giving the Doctor a second wind – so to speak – is inspired. And the scene does feature the best modern past companions cameos ever – Rose, Martha *and* Donna – and none of them speak! Yay!

Additionally as programmed assassinesses go, River’s change of heart is, I’m afraid to say, utterly unconvincing. The basis for that turnaround strikes as flimsy at best and the master-weaver that is the Grand Moff could have come up with something better, I’m sure.

This is much more about the magic laugh out loud moments – Rory punching Hitler, River making the Nazi uniform look good and riding off on a motorcycle, a pair of Schmeissers on her back, to go ‘shopping’ for a new outfit, her own manic Doctorish post-regeneration seizure (“I have to go and weigh”), the Doctor dressing up as Fred Astaire for his impending death – complete with sonic cane. Etc etc. Chock full of sharp lines, as you’d expect, and – for Doctor Who anyway – a reasonably tidy resolution. Which also happens to fill in most of the remaining blanks about River. Actually a few too many, for my liking, because I feel like her tale has essentially been told. River comes full circle and is there anything to add? I fear the most we can expect in future will be in the form of The Untold Adventures Of River Song from Big Finish Productions.

There’s still the mystery of The Silence to maintain our interest through the rest of the series. And this new question of the Oldest Question, the asking of which will mean the end of everything. Or something. Whatever the implications it seemed a bit stupid of the Doctor to ask the Amybot what the Question was. Hidden in plain sight, sure, but probably not just residing on the future equivalent of Ask Jeeves. If I was in the mood to quibble, I’d also be sceptical about the whole “Time can be re-written except for the Doctor’s death by Lake Silencio, which is absolutely set and unalterable” issue. It smacks a little of time can be re-written except for the bits Steven Moffat wrote. It’s a too-blatant message that this is ultimately an arc instalment rather than a story in its own right and there’s precious little of any actual substance.

But this is one Nazi parade I’m not inclined to rain on. Ultimately it’s an episode that’s not quite everything it could have been (and falls short in comparison to A Good Man Goes To War), but I think it was almost everything it promised in the title. The implicit statement of intent is that this will be fun. And it is, no less and little more. Viewed as pure larks, it works. Laugh a minute plus that one nicely pitched counterpoint to the Hitler comedy: where in response to Adolph’s gratitude for saving his life, Matt Smith delivers the perfect response. “Believe me, it was purely by accident.”

Next week’s episode looks terrifying, so I will take temporary comfort in the fact that there’s a spare Riverbot left back in 1938. That or the Doctor took her on board the TARDIS. I wonder if he does next day delivery.

SAF
(Credit to iCowboy for this post's title!)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Faction's Got Talent

They’re here. They’re not here. Get used to it.

So we’re told at the back of the Faction Paradox anthology, A Romance In Twelve Parts, from Obverse Books. And I wonder if Obverse are aware just how apposite that tag line is, when all is said and done and the stories have all been read. Sometimes the Faction feature prominently, sometimes they don’t appear to feature at all.

Now, I’m a Faction novice. I’d read of some of their exploits in the BBC Books Doctor Who range and all I really knew about them was that they were a time-travelling voodoo cult who took a contrary view to the Time Lords’ official policy of non-intervention. They were all blood and TARDISes and animal skull masks. There endeth the sum of my knowledge.

Post-anthology, I can’t swear to being any further informed, but the journey through these twelve different takes on the Faction universe made for an interesting exploration. Not a rollercoaster, because these tales are almost universally thoughtful, deserving of a more measured and attentive pace, and while story length varies widely only one drags its wheels like a repeatedly delayed train.

But let’s accord a few words to each, since one of the great disappointments when reading reviews of anthologies to which I’d contributed was finding I’d failed to get so much as a mention. (Declaration of interest: I know some of these authors, at least their internet personae, and I can only hope any brutal honesty from here on in may compensate for any accusations of bias aimed my way. It also may lose me some friends!) So, here we are, in no particular order but saving the best until last:

Daniel O’Mahony, I’ve long suspected, operates on a different intellectual plane to me and unfortunately his tale, Print The Legend, stands as Exhibit B in this respect. It’s probably incredibly clever and some of the writing is exquisite, but I found the story bordering on impenetrable and taxing on the patience, with no real reward come the end. A sort of value subtracted tax. It’s a grander, more ambitious exploration of the theme of the opening story – The Storyteller by Matt Kimpton - and, for my money, ultimately less successful. For his part, Kimpton really captures the spirit of a campfire storyteller and the doomladen mood of a Viking saga, and even if the voice isn’t especially reader-friendly, it’s convincing and consistent and delivers a simple and effective twist.

Gramps by Jonathan Dennis is something of a curiosity – and yes, it does kill the cat. It’s an engaging piece right up to the end when it ultimately leaves you shrugging and moving on to the next story.

Blair Bidmead (Now Or Thereabouts), Scott Harrison (Holding Pattern) and David N Smith & Violet Addison (Nothing Lasts Forever) do a better job of serving up well-written tales that leave a more lasting mark. Bidmead’s offering suffered a little for me in that it parodies The Apprentice and I’m about as familiar with the show as I was with the Faction, but I could appreciate the humour in a detached sort of fashion. Harrison kicks off with what feels like a very traditional SF story, which becomes a sort of Tomb Of The Faction and ultimately illustrates just the kind of bloody temporal shenanigans I’d imagined the Faction got up to – the slitting of throats and timelines. Meanwhile it’d be easy to dismiss Smith & Addison’s contribution as a sort of Doctor’s Wife without the humour – and I’m still half-tempted to do so – but it has just enough going for it to mark it out as something different.

Alchemy by James Milton falls into a similar above-average bracket, but has a more interesting concept at heart – a conflict between magic and science, and the inevitable hollowness of vengeance. There’s more of an imaginative vision at work too.

Less visionary, perhaps, but better still is Mightier Than The Sword by Jay Eales. It surely owes a lot to Quills, but it has a novel feel to it and what really sells it is the voice, giving us one of the few central characters in the book who we can properly connect with. Makes for a refreshing and accessible read, while still being as intelligent as the O’Mahony tale, for example.

Stuart Douglas’ Library Pictures is similarly entertaining and accessible and, unlike a lot of the stories on show, remembers to bring the fun. By throwing Iris Wildthyme into the mix, he gives us the Faction tale that has most in common with Doctor Who and even though I’m not especially familiar with Iris – and know nothing of her companion, Panda – this was the story I felt most at home with.

The top stars of the anthology though were Dave Hoskin, Ian Potter and Phillip Purser-Hallard.

Tonton Macoute by Dave Hoskin is freakishly imaginative and the eponymous creation is a truly fearsome figure, highly memorable, and the twist is ingeniously cruel. The Story Of The Peace is a tale that – like Library Pictures – remembers to bring the fun and when it comes to razor wit, Ian Potter’s is the Gillette Mach Fusion Supersonic Turbo model. The best a reader can get. Very sharp stuff.

And finally, A Hundred Words From A Civil War by Phillip Purser-Hallard is – as well as supremely witty – a truly epic tale of wonderful impossibilities, each constituent piece in the jigsaw a masterpiece thumbnail sketch on imagination overdrive. Ambitious, smart and entertaining. It’s the longest story in the collection in terms of pages, but doesn’t feel like it at all.

Overall, it’s a beautifully packaged and presented volume and Messrs Miles and Douglas have done a professional job of editing. Yes, there’re a few typos that slipped through the net, but pick any commercially produced hardback or paperback and hand it to my wife and she will find you errors. It happens. In any case, the technical nitty gritty aside, the job of editing an anthology hinges on gathering together a suitably engrossing set of tales around a central theme and on that front they score major points. The collected talent is impressive, albeit that the writing sometimes impresses more than the story.

And did I need to know about the Faction prior to reading? Well, there are a few references to 'the Enemy' and so on that might leave you with questions about the ins and outs of the background, but nothing too distracting. And a good percentage of the tales can be considered in the ‘They’re not here’ category, so the Faction aren’t really a factor.

One thing I will say though, Obverse Books are here. Get used to it. And. more than that, do give their range a try. They’re producing some very worthwhile reads and they definitely have an eye for talent.

Do check out their site for this and other titles:

Obverse Books

SAF

Creative Consulting

Continuing our semi-irregular highlighting of the works of other authors, we're privileged this week to play host to Justin Richards, who really should need no introduction.

Not only was he the editor, presiding over BBC Books' Doctor Who range 'back in my day' - and continues in his role as Creative Consultant for the range - if you want some idea of just how prolific he has been as an author, you need only check out this list on Amazon and prepare to be impressed. Even setting aside the mountain of Doctor Who books and audio dramas, he's written a host of other original series, collaborated - creatively! - with Jack Higgins, and has recently ventured into the Kindle arena with another creation of his own, The Skeleton Clock. So it's even more of an honour that he took time out of his scribely schedule to answer a few questions.



Now, for openers, I already have my copy of The Skeleton Clock on my Kindle, so technically you don't have to sell me on the book, but give us an elevator pitch for the novel. What does the story have going for it?

The main thing – I hope! – is that it’s a good, exciting story. It’s set in the City, which is London some time in the future when the sea level has risen and the Thames has flooded out across the city. The ground has fractured and moved, so there are areas that are completely under water, and others where just the tops of the buildings stick out of the flood. So it’s sort of recognisable, but very different – St Pauls Cathedral is just the dome above the water and called ‘Whispers’. If you look out from there you can see the twisted, broken remains of the Gherkin, with the glass shattered and the rusting skeleton of the structure just about intact and that’s The Twisting. But to get there you’d have to take a boat – maybe from Nelson’s Mooring, which is this statue on a short plinth sticking out of the water. Or maybe you can find a way through the old tunnel network under the city – though that can be dangerous as the tunnels are liable to flood without warning...

So it’s a fascinating environment, society breaking down and everything sort of skewed. Into that, let’s add a mysterious antique bookshop, and some nasty villains, some secret experiments, a talking statue and of course sea monsters!
Sorry – I think our elevator travelled through a lot of floors there, didn’t it?!

You are a prolific author with a host of published material to your credit. Why on earth would you choose to add to your workload by venturing into the independent publishing arena?

It’s an experiment and an adventure. I wasn’t really sure what to do with The Skeleton Clock once I’d written it, so I thought it would be a good novel to try as an eBook. Seeing the royalty rates publishers are offering, and watching some ‘independent’ novels doing so well as eBooks, I thought I’d better find out what it’s all about. I read almost everything on my iPad now, and while I don’t think eBooks will replace the physical printed editions the market is going to be huge. So I wanted to know what’s involved – the formatting, submitting, publishing... And I’m getting into pricing and promotion as well. That’s where it gets trickier as I want to be an author not a publicist or marketeer. But even in print-publishing the author these days has to be more involved in the non-writing side of things...

Has it been a successful experiment? Too soon to know – but I don’t think I’ve lost anything by trying and who knows, maybe Spielberg will find the book...

As an author, I'm a fan of having two or three different projects on the go at any given time - in case inspiration runs temporarily dry on one, I always have something else I can turn to. But with so many different series and individual titles to your name, how do you juggle the various projects?

Panic usually. Well, actually it’s a complex algorithm that combines: (a) what do I want to do today? (b) which deadline is the soonest and (c) what was I working on yesterday as that’s likely to be easiest to pick up on again.

I tend to have things at different stages. So I’ll have several projects that I’m working on proposals or outlines for, some that are coming back to haunt me in the form of rewrites or proof reading or whatever, and I’ll have one that I’m actually working on the main writing part of. So I don’t actually write several things at once. Well, not really.

Also of all the creations and series to your name, which would you consider your favourite and why? (Setting aside Doctor Who!)

Ooh, that’s tricky. In fact, impossible. I love them all as much I think. I’m very proud of my standalone novels like The Chaos Code and The Skeleton Clock. But as series go The Invisible Detective was a great breakthrough for me – and such fun to do. The I sort of moved on with the books about the Department of Unclassified Artefacts. That was never really devised as a series, but there are three of them now (The Death Collector, The Parliament of Blood, and The Chamber of Shadows) – all of which have been great fun and very exciting to write...

Then I’m also proud of the work I’ve done with Jack Higgins – which was such a privilege, working with a literary hero of mine. And for sheer enjoyment, my younger children’s spy series Agent Alfie made me laugh the whole way though – even though writing funny is very very difficult!

I remember a favourite quote, from Sol Stein, that you used to cite to me: "A writer is someone who can't not write." Obviously with contracts and commissions come deadlines and demands, but is that creative impulse still very much a part of what drives you or is making time to write purely a discipline and/or part of the job?

I’m glad you remember that – it’s a good and apt quote isn’t it? And it applies to me just as much now as ever, I think. ‘Driven’ sounds a bit pompous, but if I go for a few days without actually writing anything then I do get itchy fingers – I need a keyboard. I need to write... something.

Doctor Who formed a large part of your writing - and editorial! - career for a long while and that was clearly a labour of love. How much of that influences your writing outside of the Doctor Who universe?

I suspect it’s a huge influence. I write the sorts of things I would love to read – or see or hear. And my absolute favourite series in any format is Doctor Who. So whatever I write will be to an extent tinged with that, I think. I don’t mean I’m writing Doctor Who without the Doctor, but I love that style of story – which may be quite realistic in so many ways, but underlying it is a huge fantasy or SF or horror conceit. There is something – in the true sense of the word – extra-ordinary going on. Maybe it’s ghosts, or the supernatural, maybe it’s monsters, maybe it’s extrapolating science, or maybe it’s flooding London and filling it with sea monsters and animated toys...



Back to the Skeleton Clock. It's a great title, but where and how was the idea for that story born?

I started with the setting – which I think is probably unusual for me. Usually I have an idea for a plot or a character. The Chaos Code came from the character of Julius Venture, for example. The Parliament of Blood came from a new take on Victorian Vampires... The Skeleton Clock started to tick (as it were) when I was watching an Alan Titchmarsh series on the BBC about the making of Britain in geological terms. There was sequence where they took London back to Jurassic times, or whenever, and they used CGI to flood Trafalgar Square I think – showed the water rising to where it would have been. I watched that short sequence and first I thought it was a terrific image. Then I thought that it could happen again in the future – just like they showed. Then I started to wonder what sort of stories you could tell set in that environment.

Finally, what's your take on the age of the Kindle and ebooks? And are there plans for a paperback edition of the Skeleton Clock?

To take the second question first, I’m not sure. I don’t want to become a print-publisher. But I might well take The Skeleton Clock round and try to sell the print rights. We’ll see – for the moment it’s ticking over (ha-ha) as an eBook.
As for the future of publishing, well now you’re asking. I think eBooks will become hugely important. More than that is difficult to predict. There’s the whole democratisation of publishing as well – anyone can publish a book. So how do Publishers fit into that? Will they be gatekeepers in the sense that readers will look to see if a ‘real’ publisher is behind a book as a guarantee of quality? How will Publishers persuade authors that they can add value to their work? Because I’ve seen both sides, I know that a publisher brings editorial advice and judgement as well as marketing clout and ‘branding’. But will that continue to be important?

There was a point, I remember as I was in the computer industry, when it was obvious that the whole video-game revolution would be driven by the film studios. They had the visual authors, they had the technology and expertise to produce what would be basically interactive films the user could control somehow. But it didn’t happen. The film industry stepped away from that – or rather, never realised it was there. A whole new industry grew up instead and for a while we talked about how the film industry would die as a result. We’re at a similar turning point now – or soon will be. Print books will survive, no question. But for the new, exploding eBook industry – will the existing publishers step up and bring their expertise to that, will they reinvent themselves and learn how to add value and stay in the game? Or will a new industry develop – like the teenagers and young entrepreneurs who jumped into the video-game vacuum? So far, eBooks are just print books put online. Will that continue to be the case, or will the eBook branch off and mutate into something very different?

We live – and write – in exciting times!


You can find The Skeleton Clock for your Kindle on Amazon or for other e-readers on Smashwords.

Further information on The Skeleton Clock, including a free sample, can be found on Justin's site along with details of many of Justin's other works.


SAF

Dancing With Dinosaurs

There are some rules they don’t tell you about going to concerts. Like when the doors open on a Shakira gig, there’s no hurry because she won’t be on until much later. (She’ll be well worth the wait, mind you.) But for a Rush concert, well, rush. The clue was there in the name, I’ll grant you, but I was, for the first time in my life, late for a show.

Admittedly I took a laid back attitude to the schedule – courtesy of the lessons learned at the Shakira concert in December. Doors open at 6:30pm, show starts 7:30pm, I figured the latter time was more than good enough to aim for. But on Wednesday 25th May I should still have been at the O2 in fine time for the Canadian trio’s Time Machine Tour.

But: (adopts Reggie Perrin voice) 10 minutes late, delays on the Jubilee line. Followed by a hold-up at the doors as, thanks to having my ticket displayed prominently on the side of my fridge for the last few months, the print had faded somewhat so they had to print a fresh ticket for me so that their machine could read the bar code. Then I foolishly attempted to grab some fast food before taking my seat, and suffice to say it wasn’t. Fast, that is. It was food, of sorts.

And, perhaps as punishment for my joking on twitter about who might be supporting Rush – Hans Zimmer? – there was no support act and the main act had kicked off at or near 7:30. Ouch.

So I missed the first twenty minutes. I’m guessing about four songs. Although with Rush, that could just as easily have been two songs. Depends on which era they started out on in their Time Machine.

Ah well, all these things are part of the adventure and, like the winter wonderland outside at the Shakira concert, certainly serve to characterise a given occasion in the memory.

The fact is, I’m glad to say, missed songs aside, the band pretty much scotched all my jokes about dinosaurs and the chance to see them again before fossilisation set in. They have been around for aaaaaaaaaaaaages. I grew up with my Dad playing their albums (loud) (in amongst Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and others) on Saturdays when my Mum went out shopping. Fair to say, I didn’t actually get into them myself until early to mid teens, maybe, but that still makes for thirty years I’ve been following their progress. I saw them live back in the days of yore of their Roll The Bones Tour. The memory cheats, I know, but to me they didn’t seem any less live this time out.

More so, I would say, since Roll The Bones – along with Hold Your Fire, which featured prominently on that tour - was heavier on the synthesisers and lighter on the heavier stuff. Whereas, what with Time Machine intended as a tour through their own history, this packed enough punch to defibrillate a dinosaur. Such hammering bass you could feel the vibrations in your chest. In a good way.

The set – as in physical set – was relatively simple but had a beautiful Jules Verne steampunk aesthetic going for it, backed up with fireworks (loud enough to nearly give the guy next to me a heart attack) and spurting pillars of flame, with Peart installed at its heart like a cross between Captain Nemo and Animal from the Muppets – and delivering a sensational drum solo midway through the second half.

That’s right. Second half. For all their age, Lee, Lifeson and Peart gave us a *three-hour* stormathon of recent tracks, a smattering of new material and of course the classics. Lifeson doesn’t move a whole lot but he gives his all on the guitars, while Lee bounds around the stage like a kid. One section of the show is devoted to a live performance of the Moving Pictures album in its entirety. Yay! Because I love that album. From Tom Sawyer to Vital Signs, (even if I can’t always hear Red Barchetta these days without being reminded of that damn Milky Way ad – “The red car and the blue car had a race!”) it’s something of a bridge between their purer metal years and their flirtation with more commercial leanings (like Hold Your Fire) – but at least they never did a full Genesis. It’s something of a miracle in rock genealogy terms that the three of them have remained together for so long. Whatever chemistry they have between them, it works.



On first impressions, the new songs were what I’d call dependable Rush, not blow you away stuff. But in fairness to the band, when you go to see a show like theirs, there’s a sense of an unspoken trade agreement – sure, fellas, you can play your new material as long as you give us a healthy slew of the oldies. And they held up their end of the bargain.

The one and only area I feel a bit cheated on (apart from what the O2 vendor charged me for a burger and a few chips!) is that there was no Xanadu. I have this horrible niggling feeling that maybe they opened with that track and I am going to have to put it on the CD player when I get home just to remind myself of its awesomeness. We did get the exquisite Closer To The Heart from the same era, but part of me always (and when I say always, bear in mind I’ve only seen the band live twice) feels a Rush concert is incomplete without Xanadu. I’d rather hoped it would be one of the encore numbers, but instead we were treated to the powerhouse Villa Strangiato and (oddly reggaed up to initially disguise it) Working Man. For my money, the latter was a curious choice of closing number, but on the other hand it hails from their very earliest album and I guess it’s fitting that the Time Machine ends up back at what was essentially the beginning.

It’s like if Doctor Who was a rock band, they might play out with An Unearthly Child. And that would by no means be a bad thing.

It’s an oldie but a goodie. Just like Rush. Thanks for that guys.

Not sure what kind of dinosaurs they are, but I’m sure the word ‘bronto’ is in there somewhere.

SAF

Extraordinary League

Before I get stuck into a review of Saturday’s Doctor Who episode, let me just get something out of my system:

I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!

It’s tough to be entirely objective when buoyed up by the satisfaction of having been right all along, but on the other hand it’s one helluva neat trick to deliver an episode that gives the answer you expect while also magically avoiding the trap of predictability. The Grand Moff is quite the conjurer.

A Good Man Goes To War was everything it needed to be and more. I was concerned that the mid-season break might damage the show, with too large a chunk of the audience losing interest during the summer interval. Autumn may prove me wrong, but now I’m pretty confident that anyone who watched it will be back for more. Hopefully along with a lot of others who just heard about how bloody good it was.

It was big, bold, gutsy, brave and tugged at the heart-strings. This is the first episode in ages I’ve rewatched the following morning and I shed genuine tears. In amongst the genuine out-loud laughter and woo-hoos of delight. My main grumble is that we should have had two episodes of this, instead of the dreary Flesh runaround of the preceding couple of weeks. Plainly, the Flesh plays a significant part in this season’s arc, but there was more life and excitement and suspense and emotion in any randomly selected five minutes of this than there was in the entire Almost story.

The opening scene was enough to confirm for me the identity of Amy’s daughter – the name Melody Pond on the side of the crib – so it kicked off with a little Yay! From me from the get-go. The destruction of the 12th Cyberfleet was a bit of unnecessary grandstanding and further undermined a Who monster reduced to a bit of a joke by too many rubbish stories... *but* it served to underline a key point which comes up later *and* finally gave us a Rory full of authority and maturity, one we could believe had stood guard over his beloved Amy for millennia. “Don’t give me those blank looks.” Brilliant. And then the punch: “Shall I repeat the question?” to a backdrop of a fleet breaking apart in fireballs.

Grabbed my attention.

Then we’re treated to a look-in on Demon’s Run and its residents: the creepy order of Headless Monks and the Anglican army (previously seen as good guys in Time Of Angels) - both of which have an irresistably (Robert) Holmesian flavour – and some elaborate, extensive trap laid for the Doctor by Mrs Eyepatch. Amy’s declaration to her captors is highly-charged and the subtle introduction of Lorna, watching on as Amy’s baby is taken is superbly done. I will say the gay Anglican couple were amusing, if not great in the acting department – but the horror of the fat one’s conversion is expertly dished up – without the need to show us anything but an empty – waiting – box.

Then we’re off on a whirlwind tour of time and space as the Doctor and Rory recruit their Magnificent Several for their own battle beyond the stars. And they’re a fantastically colourful collection of characters too. Sword-wielding Victorian lesbian Silurian and her maid sidekick (Tipping The Scales, anyone?); Sontaran nurse (I can just picture him in Casualty); and wheeler-dealer Dorium (“What do you need me for? I’m old. I’m fat. I’m blue!”). Storming little scenes that deftly paint the characters and backgrounds (and doubtless spawn several thousand works of fan fiction, but these scenes are honestly all we need!) And, of course, Rory the Roman turning up to enlist River.

Oh my god, I loved that scene. River: “Turn it off. I’m breaking in, not out.” The whole thing is beautifully laced with emotion and razor-wit, both of which cut deep. Is Rory the ‘Good Man’ that River kills? I ask this because although we have seen the Impossible Astronaut shoot the Doctor, I’m not sure we can be sure the young River was in the suit at the time or indeed how or by whom she would be arrested for the crime. I foresee a certain future ahead and how this all might play out, but I’m reserving speculation for the moment – partly because of the spoiler potential, I suppose, but mainly I think because I doubt the chances of my being right twice. ;-)

Anyway, what’s true of that scene holds true for most of the rest of the episode. Moffat writes rollercoasters that spiral around themselves and take you on topsy-turvy heart-wrenching rides in the best possible way. The triumphalism of the Doctor’s battle on Demon’s Run is very RTD-like, but it has the advantage of occurring early on and we know it’s all just been too easy and that there is a bitter downfall to come. We’d know it even without River’s prophesy.

Where a two-parter might have enhanced that would be in elaborating on that battle, making it a little less obviously too easy. What we get is something of a shorthand version and the bad guys’ trap might have seemed a touch cleverer – and we would have gotten to see the Extraordinary League in action some more. As it is, within the time allotted, it works – even if I did fully expect the Doctor to be revealed under one of those Monk hoods and when he says, “Surprise!”, I wasn’t really. But I still enjoyed it all the same and the story had further surprises to come.

The Anglicans chanting “We’re not fools” went on a bit too long for my tastes. That’s an incidental though and the magic carries on around it, culminating in the Doctor’s 3 mins 42 seconds victory (NB not without bloodshed as the Sapphic Silurian – thanks, iCowboy! – later claims) and is not even sullied by the pirate captain and the space spitfires turning up to remind us of two of the poorer stories in the last couple of years. The great truth is that there’s almost too much fantastic stuff going on *after the battle is over* to properly cover in the space of this review.

You know me, I never like to harp on too long. But I have to cite just a few of the special moments.

The Doctor’s anger and his breaking of Colonel Runaway. That’s the vengeance of a Good Man. Amy’s tearful reunion with Rory and her baby – and the Doctor joining them and speaking baby. The Doctor and the Silurian discussing when the baby ‘began’. The Monks and their attack prayer. River's voice-over 'Demon's Run, When A Good Man Goes To War...' recital while everything is coming undone. Dorium’s wasteful death. The Magnificent Several’s heroic stand. The ‘fool you twice with the same trick’ flesh-baby. Hands up, I did not see that coming. I feel like I should have done, but hats off to Moffat. And Amy’s reaction. I get a chill now just thinking about it, the way she screams out Rory’s name.

The Sontaran’s death and his connection with Rory: “Rory, I’m a nurse.” Lorna’s death and the Doctor’s lie: “Who was she?” “I don’t know but she was very brave.” “They always are.”




The cot. Not only a wonderfully quirky example of Gallifreyan meets Gipetto carpentry, but it raises so many fascinating questions. Some of which Amy and Rory put to the Doctor, of course: “Have you ever had children?” To which there’s clear evasion going on and surely the Doctor’s lying when he tells them the cot is his. Thank goodness he’s not a suspect in LA Noire, because I’d never have been able to read the lie. Later, River is asking him if he’s forgotten how to read and there’s a close-up of the Gallifreyan script. So it’s her cot. Sure it could have been his as well at some point in the distant past, but I don’t mind admitting I have trouble getting my head entirely around the River-Doctor timeline. Moffat cooks a mean pasta dish but I can’t wait for him to properly untangle all the spaghetti.

River’s arrival on the scene is, in any case, the crowning moment. The speech she gives the Doctor is a rude awakening for him, a home truth. It happens to echo something I’ve wondered for a while now and harkens back to that scene with the destruction of the cyberfleet: has the Doctor become too powerful? The man who can turn armies around at the mention of his name. And, as River puts it, if he carries on this way, what will his name become? What will he become?



It’s inspired, to explore the consequences of that. I wonder if it will lead to a sort of reining in of the Doctor, something of a return to his older ways where he wasn’t quite so in command all the time. At the same time, it’s difficult to see how he could take a step back from what he is now, without some kind of regeneration or otherwise cataclysmic trauma. (And who knows, with the teaser shot that followed this week’s episode, that could well be what’s coming...!)

That is ultimately part of the beauty of what Moffat has left us with. This has all the spectacle and grandeur and epicness of a season finale, with all the advantage of also feeling like part one of a however-many-parter. The ending strikes a kind of Empire Strikes Back note, with the Doctor heading off to recover Amy’s daughter while the others remain behind with, er, Amy’s daughter.

On the subject of which revelation (I knew it!), it just bears out how superbly it’s been played all along. I sensed a bond between Amy and River, a similarity even – to an extent they’ve been played like female Doctors and that has to have contributed to the chemistry that’s evident whenever we’ve seen the Amy-River-Doctor team in action. (That and you get the sense the actors have a whale of a time.) And I totally buy it, as long as River never actually calls Amy ‘mum’. That would just look/sound really odd. Temporal shenanigans will do that, I guess.

There are questions. Umpty-gazillion, I’m sure. For one, exactly who is it that the Doctor has scared so much that they’ve gone to these lengths? The Daleks? The Silence? Silent Daleks? Whoever or whatever, the season has a real villain, a real enemy at its core - no matter how long we have to wait before we see them. But what Moffat pulls off with this halfway finale is to ice this cake with a major major answer and sprinkle all those other questions on top like hundreds and thousands. And as if that wasn’t enough to make us sit up and eagerly await Doctor Who’s return in the autumn, they then promise that he’ll be back in an episode entitled:

Let’s Kill Hitler.

That alone was worth a laugh out loud and a huge round of applause.

Genius.

SAF

Death Is A Lonely Business

So said Ray Bradbury in one of his titles. And far be it from me to argue with the great Mr Bradbury, but of course that's only one reason why we might choose to explore the topic in our creative writings.

And it's a recurring theme for children's writer and illustrator, Janie Bill, who guests here today as part of our occasional mission to highlight other authors.

Over to you, Janie.




Janie's Fantastical Floridian Tales

Dying is serious business. Growing up with strong family ties, much of my childhood involved attending funerals for extended family and elderly relatives. I wasn’t allowed to wear black because back then it wasn’t a proper color for a child even when in mourning. I saw open caskets and closed ones, flamboyant floral arrangements and coffins inside homes.

Despite all the support I gave to my extended family and friends of my parents, most of whom I saw once a year at Christmas if that often, death didn’t strike me as a monumental occasion until it visited my immediate family. Although my novels intend to uplift readers, death consistently makes an appearance.

In Lochness, a boy named Lochlan drowns while saving his dog during from a Floridian hurricane. His guardian angel in the form of a dragon fairy helps him find his way through the passage between life and death. As Lochlan struggles to survive underwater, he searches for the path back to his home before being devoured by a lochness monster.




In Halo Light, a boating accident at the moment an enchanted island disappears takes the life of Ivy’s dad. Determined to bring her father back, Ivy develops her ability to understand the miracle of Halo Light. When Ivy learns fate intends to take her mother’s life also, she embarks on a quest into the Everglades where she confronts paranormal demons and discovers the secret to everlasting life.

In Mystery Under a Full Moon, while snorkeling, teenager Anatolia finds a Spanish treasure that possesses supernatural powers when placed under a full moon. An hour later her dinghy overturns and she lands on a waterlogged body floating in the lagoon. She sails through the Caribbean, hiding from the killer who hunts for her treasure, and collecting clues to reveal his identity before he attacks.

Simon, I deeply appreciate the opportunity to visit your website. Please stay in touch and discover the inspiration behind my Floridian tales at

www.janiebill.com.
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You'll also find a range of Janie's illustrations and thoughts on writing and her unique world view over on her site.

SAF