Whowatch Part 11
Death of the Doctor
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Complete Year One
The Impossible Astronaut
Day of the Moon
The Curse of the Black Spot
The Doctor’s Wife
The Rebel Flesh
The Almost People
A Good Man Goes to War
David: Let’s get right into it with our first returning guest, Elizabeth Edwards!
Elizabeth: I’m as pleased as could be to be back! There’s so much to talk about in the episodes above, but before we delve into the discussion in earnest I do feel honor-bound to say one thing: Sean, David’s right about The Next Doctor, and referring to it as the Dan Jurgens of Doctor Who was underhanded, underhanded I say!
Sean: I meant in the 80s sense, not the modern sense. Also The Crimson Horror is better! It’s better I say!
Elizabeth: You’re not gonna get me to pit those two campy delights against each other.
Sean: No, I think that’s only going to be me and David on that one.
Elizabeth: Hehehe. Okay, having cleared my conscience: Series 6! Damn good Doctor Whoing, huh?
Sean: It sure is something here. But before we get into all that, we first have to discuss two things that aren’t Series 6: a two part Sarah Jane Adventure and some comics released during the Capaldi era!
David: The Death of the Doctor had people crawling around in air vents, so it was a favorite of mine by default. Otherwise: quite charming, and served the same purpose for Smith as School Reunion did for me with Tennant of finishing the process of orienting me to the new guy through framing him in terms of the old guys. Those continuity-of-consciousness stories are what tip me from 'it's such-and-such's take' to 'it's them, just a new them.'
Sean: More than just that, it marks the sole writing credit Davies has with the eleventh Doctor Who. And he does a pretty good job with the material.
Elizabeth: So I’ve got a massive long spiel about this episode’s secret brilliance, so before I delve into that I just want to make sure I’m not gonna be cutting off either of your guys’ thoughts?
David: Go right ahead!
Sean: I’ll save my long winded tangent for the other Non-Series 6 bit we’re talking about.
Elizabeth: Okay, gorgeous. First off, The Death of the Doctor is a fascinating coda to the Davies era, which was defined in large part by the Herculean achievement of pushing Doctor Who back to the forefront of the UK’s national consciousness & culture, and how deeply precarious its fame & reputation remained throughout his tenure. While his work in the first four series of the show is brilliant, Davies is frequently playing defensive, and is always rigorous about justifying his engagements with the classic series by making sure they’re integral to the character arcs of his leads. But now it’s 2010, Doctor Who is in the hands of one of the best television writers in Britain and looks to be well on its way to a swift renewal, and Davies has a little free time in-between the production of Miracle Day and his American attempt at Cucumber. And so he allows himself free reign to go all fannish.
While Sarah Jane is the nominal lead, and the cast of kids all get solid material, the real lead of this episode isn’t them, nor the Eleventh Doctor, but instead Jo Grant. Jo, who Davies introduces by bringing Katy Manning’s famously klutzy audition into the character’s canon, and who is allowed to build a robust & meaningful life on Earth while still retaining her melancholy over never seeing the Doctor again. When Sarah Jane is introduced in School Reunion, it’s as a chilling warning of what could happen to Rose; when Davies brings Jo back, it’s in service to her arc, her emotional needs. It’s something he never would have dared to attempt on Doctor Who proper, and Katy Manning lives up being given some meaty dramatic material for the first time with an extremely touching performance.
Sean: Of course, that fannish impulse can have some… problematic elements. But we’re not here to talk about what other writers did with certain ideas. I’ll explain later.
(That said, Katy Manning is a delight. As absolutely charming as she was in the 70s [or was it the 80s?] and brimming with a warmth and love that will always be missed when she’s not on screen. The scene with her and the Doctor talking about how he never visited her after she left is heartbreaking and you can see a light come into her eyes as he goes through all the brilliant things he just missed her doing. Gah, I love it so much!)
Elizabeth: And if it were just Davies indulging in his fannishness, it’d still be a fun piece of ephemera, but certainly wouldn’t be strong enough for me to request (cough) that we talk about it here. Because this lovely sweet little bit of redemption for Classic Who comes in a story that tackles death in a strikingly bitter way for a kid’s show. Through the first half, prior to Matt Smith’s entrance, Sarah Jane is written as though she’s in full trauma-based denial over the Doctor’s death, and Elisabeth Sladen plays her with grave seriousness. It’s a little hard to figure out exactly why he took this tack with the first part?
Until you remember that right around the time this episode went into production, Davies’ partner Andrew Smith was contracted with a brain tumor, causing Davies to effectively retire from television production for a period of years to become his boyfriend (and eventually husband)’s full-time nurse. And in light of that, the many little observations that Davies peppers through the script regarding how people whose way of processing horrible news is out-of-step with what’s considered “appropriate” become really heart-wrenching. The bitterness even seeps into the writing of the treacherous UNIT agent Tia Karem, whose sole stated motivation for helping the baddies is that Earth is just so fucking miserable that any alternative would be better.
David: Oh jeez, I had just assumed it was a matter of ‘this is a kids’ show, we can’t do a whole episode about thinking someone’s dead without talking at all about dealing with it healthily’. That certainly contextualizes the whole thing.
Sean: It certainly explains his desire to follow up this with an entire series of Torchwood dedicated to examining the fucked up nature of not wanting people to die. Of wanting a world where everybody survived. It fell apart towards the end due to the inevitable end of all things coming around, leading Davies to step away entirely until 2015.
Elizabeth: The fannishness and the focus on death are two of the three big conceptual pillars of the episode. The third is, interestingly enough, Davies riffing on some of Moffat’s big conceptual territory. Because this episode is all about storytelling. The Shansheeth’s evil scheme is literally to manipulate Sarah & Jo’s nostalgia for their time with the Doctor to conjure up access to the TARDIS, and the story ends with Sarah, Jo, their kids/grandkids.etc., and the Doctor coming together to tell a better story that defeats the bad guys. The conversation between the Doctor & Jo even hinges on this idea, with Jo having told herself a self-defeating story about having been left behind with the Doctor, and the Doctor countering by proffering the idea that she lived a better life than he ever could have given her.
So, in a period of time when Davies was dealing with both obscene professional turmoil and one of the worst personal developments of his entire life, he wrote a lovely hour of television in which the harmonious joining of the elder generation and the youth is able to stave off the relentless march of Death and bring back the hero — both to save the day, and to make right the mistakes he made in his past.
It’s a story that has to happen in The Sarah Jane Adventures, a strange liminal space wherein the protagonists of Doctor Who in 2010 and 1972-3 can work together, in an episode that’s shot, edited, and presented like Doctor Who from 2005-2009. By not being part of any particular era of the show, it’s able to reconcile all of them together. Matt Smith gets to sit down with Katy Manning and help heal Jo’s emotional scars left over from her time with the Doctor. It’s amazing that we got that.
Sean: It’s also worth noting this story (and, indeed, the driving arc of Series 6) is happening within a specific context. On February 22, 2011, Nicholas Courtney died. In the classic era, Nicholas Courtney played the role of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart during the Jon Pertwee era of the show and would periodically return for every Doctor Who in the classic era except for Colin Baker. He would even return for Big Finish and an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Equally, just four days before the premier of Series 6, Elizabeth Sladen herself would pass away. Both Sladen and Courtney were beloved among the Doctor Who fan community and were delightful people to be around. The stories of death that permeate both Series 6’s Doctor Who is Dead arc and, to a lesser extent, Death of the Doctor (which aired a few months before Courtney’s passing, though his ill health was known). They are the lingering presence that can not be escaped when considering this era.
But first, Al Ewing and Rob Williams take a crack at the age old Doctor Who spin-off move and tell an entire eras worth of stories in-between episodes!
David: So I knew this technically slotted between series 5 and 6 (though it takes place in 2014 - not that that particularly matters when it comes to someone with a TARDIS) and thus fit here, but this was always going to come up because this was my real introduction to Doctor Who. Long before signing onto this project, I saw one of my favorite contemporary comics writers in Al Ewing had handled this thing no one I knew ever shut up about, so I tried his crack at it along with the generally solid Rob Williams and primarily artist Simon Frasier. It didn’t go much into the big ‘myth’ aspects of the franchise, but it gave me a grounding as to how these types of things tend to work that I carried into the show proper.
Sean: That said, the delightful back up strips by the extremely charming Marc Ellerby exploring various comedic bits with Doctor Who and the Ponds does contain a massive spoiler for things to come.
David: It’s interesting looking back at it now, not only having now actually seen the 11th Doctor portrayal they’re riffing on (and I think they do a fine job of it, though to be honest I think some of it would’ve been more suited to 10, like the bit of him promising not to kill someone and asking them to think that through), but getting how Doctor Who works in general, and moreover the difference in how the ‘real’ thing handles it vs. how a spinoff can work. This doesn’t have the conceptual latitude to shake things up in the same way, but the ‘budget’ is on an entirely different scale as it’s able to for instance bring in a non-humanoid companion. Alice Obiebune is a perfect example of turning the former limitation into an advantage, in that as an older and wiser figure than the average companion she’s able to speedrun through the kinds of realizations about her traveling partner that would normally take her ‘peers’ multiple seasons, which would be a problem for the main show but is perfect for a bounded comics arc.
Elizabeth: The Eleventh Doctor: Year One’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: Al Ewing isn’t just good relative to other Doctor Who tie-in writers; his work on the series can absolutely go toe-to-toe with the episodes aired in Series 5. Rob Williams, on the other hand, is just that: good relative to other Doctor Who tie-in writers. His issues are passable entertainment, but lack the je nais se quois that Ewing brings.
Comparing issues #2 and #3 is telling, I think — Ewing’s able to efficiently set up a damn good Doctor Who premise & location, puts together a neat little emotional arc for Alice & the Doctor culminating in him finally referring to her as “library assistant” out of respect, and he ties it into the series arc in a dynamic, intriguing way. Williams, on the other hand, makes some crap jokes about a Bowie stand-in (there are many gags about him coming up with first drafts of his famous songs; they’re universally groaners), completely ignores Alice & the Doctor’s character development — he’s right back to calling her “clever librarian” — and also casually suggests that Robert Johnson didn’t write his own music (whereas the Bowie stand-in learns by the end to play & sing properly), he just copied it off his future self due to the Doctor’s shenanigans, which sucks real bad.
David: I did read that and go ‘Are…are you really doing a Back To The Future?’
Sean: It’s also worth contrasting the two in the series’ experimental issues. With Williams, we get #6, a rather charming story where the Nimon (NIMON BE PRAISED) attempts to conquer an entire planet that also causes the TARDIS to collapse in on itself somehow and there’s also a space caterpillar. But the elements never coalesce with one another into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s clever and witty, but it never becomes more than that. Indeed, the idea of having a comic run backwards is a bit obvious and the need to include the page numbers is a bit like opening an episode of Doctor Who this far in with an explanation of the Bootstrap Paradox.
By contrast, Ewing’s experimental issue utilizes the format of a four panel grid that, over the course of the story, combines into less and less panels. The issue also uses its space to explore the various character relationships with who they were prior to the start of the series and how they’ve grown and changed as a result (with Doctor Who being relegated to the ‘and that’s what the baddie’s deal is’ section because we have an entire tv show to deal with his inner turmoil). And it has Not-David Bowie (a phrase that should be read with the exact same intonation as Martin Billany’s Kakashi Hatake) in the Pierrot phase deal with temptation from the Devil in the form of the Goblin King. What’s not to love?
Elizabeth: I adore Alice & the Doctor’s relationship. The Doctor having to approach Alice on her own terms and gently coax her out of her depressive malaise is a total inversion of the way he smashed into Amy’s life and completely rearranged it around his presence, and it creates a strikingly different dynamic. Compared to how he treats Amy in Series 5, it really stands out how much less snippy the Doctor gets with Alice. The Doctor clearly has enormous affection for Amy, but he also allows his guilt over how he treated her to seep into their interactions; when he’s reminded of how he let her down and how he might do so in the future, he frequently takes it out on her: see for instance his raging at the Angel in Amy’s eye — “What’s wrong with me?”/“Everything, you’re dying, shut up,” and the like.
Alice, on the other hand, he has to sit down and be patient with. And beyond how lovely it is by itself to see the Doctor gently support someone dealing with real emotional trauma, it means that the Doctor and Alice have to consciously negotiate the boundaries of their relationship to ensure she isn’t made uncomfortable on an issue-by-issue basis, instead of allowing the toxicity undergirding the candy-colored adventure to fester underneath the surface. Going back to #2, which gosh I just love so much, Alice calling the Doctor out on using her as a prop to justify his anger at the theme park is a fantastically incisive character beat, a touch you can almost imagine coming from Davies’ pen.
David: Eleven going back to 2014 solely to let Alice take care of some day-to-day business by itself speaks volumes compared to Nine telling Rose to bail on a family dinner or he’ll leave her forever. Alice is An Adult™ in a way basically none of the companions are - even Donna’s a mess in a way she isn’t - and The Doctor has to engage with her as a mature individual who can naturally see through most of his bullshit rather than the litany of college students learning how life works via seeing him screw up. It forces him to grow up a bit himself in response, and thus shows where he’s lacking in that regard in different ways than usual.
Sean: Perhaps my favorite bit with Alice and her relation with Doctor Who comes when both of them are at extreme low points and need the other to pull them out. In some regards, it reminds me of my favorite TARDIS team – Bernice, Ace, 7 – in that they’re all messes, but they’re also adults about being a mess. They pull each other out of their respective pits of melancholy, angst, and bitterness and become better people as a result of it. I’m thinking of the end of No Future, where the ultimate conflict of the book and, subsequently, the arc is resolved by Ace having an adult conversation with Doctor Who about their relationship.
Here, we see Alice, Not-David Bowie, and Arc all converse with Doctor Who on their own terms. There’s never the gap that some companion teams might have, never a need to prove themselves to Doctor Who or the galaxy. They just are there for one another and help each other grow.
At the same time, it’s extremely charming to read a comic in 2023 about the Disney corporation attempting to consume Doctor Who and all its IP, and indeed all IP forever and always. I mean, wouldn’t that be crazy?
David: Hahahahaha so wild. Anyway this stretch was nice to come back to; it shows now that this is a comic by two writers, however skilled, having to churn something out on a monthly basis instead of a whole staff dedicated to putting a series together over the course of a year or more with episodes delegated among a raft of writers given that time, so it simply can’t hit the same kind of highs. Still, I’ve got a lot of affection for it.
Sean: Nowadays, Titan seems to be in a bind because they thought hiring Dan Slott to do a Tennant comic was a good idea.
David: Him not getting to do Spider-Man/Doctor Who is one of the most genuinely important and beneficial acts of creative curation Disney has been behind in its entire century-plus history.
Sean: Besides, his pitch was complete ass. Just absolutely the single worst pitch for Doctor Who/Spider-Man I’ve ever seen.
Elizabeth: Oh god this entitled manbaby genuinely tried to pitch Marvel on doing an intercompany crossover just so he could play with all his childhood toys at once despite being under an exclusive contract.
David: I love that none of the things we just said are especially meaner than the documentary on him Disney released itself.
Elizabeth: Before we leave the comic behind, I want to at least touch upon Simon Frasier’s fantastic work on the series. He has a fantastically cartoony style that uses modern coloring to add a ton of vibrancy & texture; it reminded me in places of Gene Ha or John Cassaday. The Doctor looks perfectly mercurial, the alien locations detailed & whimsical, and the action is always thrilling without verging into genuine danger. He’s perfect for the property.
Sean: The panel in the first issue where it drops that cartoony style in favor of realism just breaks my heart every time.
So… Richard Nixon.
Elizabeth: One of the great comedic supporting characters of this stretch of the show! He’s just so clearly uncomfortable with all the business of being an ‘Inspiring Man of the People’, with his deer-in-the-headlights smile, and it’s so fun watching the Doctor decide fuck it, I’m going to psychologically torture this man. “Safe? No, you’re never safe, there’s about a trillion other things waiting up in the stars to come and destroy you, but if it makes you feel any better: yes, you’re safe.”
Sean: I believe Steven’s pitch for having Doctor Who meet Nixon was “What if Doctor Who met someone they just did not like. All these historical figures are mates with Doctor Who (some even mated with them). Why not just have someone Doctor Who despises.” I love this opening two-parter. “Say hi to David Frost for me.”
David: “Oh, Dicky. Tricky Dicky. They're never going to forget you.”
The Impossible Astronaut is a terrific episode that, shockingly but I suppose somewhat fittingly given the subject, I barely remember besides the startling core premise - somewhat reused to greater effect from a Moffat plan where Tennant still would’ve been in Series 5 and the season would’ve been a ticking clock to a regeneration young Amy sees in the first episode - and the perfect bit of The Doctor having to violently reassess the likelihood of guns being fired in a given situation when reminded these are Americans. It’s a very good episode for certain, but maybe I looked at The Silence for too long?
Day of the Moon on the other hand? BANGER.
Elizabeth: The Impossible Astronaut is fascinating, because aside from the roughly ten-minute section in the White House, there are five named characters: The Doctor, Amy, Rory, River, and Canton Everett Delaware. And while the latter is a fun guest character elevated by Mark Sheppard’s natural charm, he’s not an emotional center of the episode. Which means that, in effect, what we’ve got is a 45-minute chamber piece that luxuriates in the emotional dynamics of by far most complicated and fucked-up TARDIS crew to date. Everyone’s lying to each other, running manipulation on top of manipulation, constantly re-evaluating their positions relative to one another at each new bit of information. The plot pyrotechnics are obviously exhilarating, but the character drama is what really sings.
Sean: A common trope with the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who: When in doubt, make it a chamber piece with the by far most complicated and fucked-up TARDIS crew to date. We’ve already seen this in The Big Bang, where the story cuts out every single element that isn’t Doctor Who, The Ponds, River Song, and an easily dispatched Dalek. We will see this again. Multiple times in the next batch.
Elizabeth: Our four leads handle their material with aplomb. Alex Kingston is as effortlessly superheroic as she ever is as River, and Arthur Darvill does an incredible job playing a hapless millennial malewife and a haunted immortal warrior, but the true MVPS here are Karen Gillan and Matt Smith. After the Doctor’s death on the beach, Gillan’s performance shifts into a register that we haven’t seen before, either from her as an actress or from a character in this show — that of a PTSD victim. As someone with CPTSD myself, and as someone in a relationship with someone who struggles with similar traumas, Amy’s affectless, “He’s dead. You’re still talking like it matters, but it doesn’t.” is a hauntingly familiar evocation of severe emotional repression. When her voice tips into a sing-song register as she repeats, “He’s de-ad,” and a faint manic smile starts to dance across her lips, it’s almost Ophelia-esque.
And by god is this a showcase for Smith’s enormous range. His talents with body language are on full display in the scene with the astronaut — the shifts from his usual waving his arms about as he wheedles/negotiates/schemes, to him bracing himself for the blow, to the sheer stillness immediately prior to the blast, say so much with so little — but for all that he’s given opportunity after opportunity to showboat and strut his stuff (the confrontation with the Silence perhaps being the most prominent example of this), it’s the subtleties that really elevate it. From the exhausted demeanor that distinguishes the Doctor at age 1100 from him at age 900, from his attempts in the diner & the TARDIS to figure out what’s going on with his friends, to the utterly electric confrontation with them ending in “Fish fingers and custard,” the Doctor spends the episode oscillating between exhaustion, anger, fear, smugness, and concern, and Smith flawlessly executes every rapid reversal.
Sean: Well, that’s our lunch summarily eaten.
David: True, but if we’re heading into Day of the Moon, wanna note the absolute emotional gymnastics Darvill puts on - his concern, his ageless exhaustion, his absolute defeat hearing Amy, learning what she meant, then that split-second where it seems like she’s talking about The Doctor being the one with the stupid face before realizing she’s speaking to him. So much with so little going on there.
That episode is really where it clicks past ‘this is a good Doctor Who!’ into ‘oh this is that GOOD Doctor Who’ for me, the genuinely really unsettling horror of the abandoned orphanage trading back-and-forth with the giddy high-concept maneuverings of beating The Silence at their own game, culminating in…The Doctor ‘ah-ha!’ing a species into accidentally setting into motion their own genocide, with the enactors of said violence not even knowing they’re doing it. It’s so incredibly fucked up in a way that dances the line between ‘this is really too much for the character’ and ‘this is perfect’, especially alongside him low-key vibing with River’s unapologetic ruthlessness. Ten would’ve still done it mind you, but he’d have made a big show about how bummed he was.
Sean: If I’m being honest, Series 6 isn’t the era I revisit the most often. Things get a bit rough towards the end in terms of quality, and when given a choice to revisit an episode, there’s always something from a different era I want to watch instead. That being said, yes this is a properly brilliant two-parter. There is some controversy with that choice to end on Doctor Who bringing about an entire species’ extermination (both from the crowd that hates it when Doctor Who kills people because he’s ‘The Man Who Never Would’ to the crowd who hates it when Doctor Who doesn’t kill people because ‘he’s a wimp.’ The latter crowd is mad Moffat didn’t have him do that stuff all the time. The latter crowd will never be happy as long as Doctor Who is silly), but it doesn’t really matter because the episode’s a delight.
Elizabeth: To anyone who can’t reconcile the episode’s ending with their personal conception of the Doctor’s morality, I offer you this: when Delaware sent him the video of the Silence in which it says “You should kill us all on sight,” the Doctor watches the clip in full before editing it into the moon landing broadcast. So, if you like, you can headcanon it as the Doctor being under the influence of the Silence’s post-hypnotic suggestion.
David: Counterpoint: nah, The Doctor just does that sometimes. Sometimes he’s the guy who never would! Sometimes? Nah.
Sean: Yeah, that sounds very ‘Reverse Flash whispering all the Flash’s personal problems into being his fault.’
Elizabeth: ‘The Man Who Never Would’? lmfao. He is the man who frequently would, so long as he gets to spend the whole time monologuing about how much he hates that he has to do this. I don’t think the show should frequently deploy endings where the Doctor is both this ruthless and this proud of himself for it, but also: guys, it is extremely thematically important to the rest of the season that the Doctor’s ego has bloated to the extent that his interventions with alien schemes have become these big showboating confrontations that foster a terrifying reputation for him across the rest of the universe. It’s a triumphant moment, but it shouldn’t be read as unequivocal. It should feel a bit icky.
The last thing I’d feel really guilty if I didn’t talk about is the direction, because holy hell, Toby Haynes can do a good Doctor Who when he feels like it. Without intending any shade towards the series’ many previous talented directors, this two-parter is easily the best-directed piece of Doctor Who up until this point in the series’ history. The cinematography is gorgeous, getting the absolute most out of their Utah location shoot, and beyond the lovely scenery, Haynes is just better at choreographing the actors’ blocking relative to the camera. There are tons of scenes where the basic positioning of the camera adds an enormous amount to the storytelling, and even in the many shots in which Haynes chooses to use a more mobile camera, he pays careful attention to the individual compositions within the shot. The editing is obviously marvelous, simultaneously calling attention to itself while still managing to disorient on the ninth or tenth viewing. I’ve talked about the amazing performances he gets out of his actors earlier, so the last touch that’s worth highlighting is the sound design. The reason The Silence are an instantly iconic foe has just as much to do with the terrifying vocal cue they get every time they show up on-screen as it does with their men-in-black look.
David: Speaking of showboating, and really boating in general, we have The Curse of The Black Spot, a fine if unremarkable episode I’d guess going by gut feeling that Who fandom despised.
Sean: Not really, no. It’s just fine. Karren Gillen likes it enough to reference it a lot. It’s just that… I mean, when sandwiched between the opening and the episode that follows, it kinda gets lost in the dust.
Elizabeth, do you have any thoughts about it, or can we move on to what everyone wants a bunch of comics people to talk about?
Elizabeth: Here’s what I’ll say: David started to type out a transition to talk about this episode, and it immediately motivated me to go back and say more about Day of the Moon. That is probably the nicest thing I have to say about this episode, other than that Karen Gillan should swing sword around more often pls.
David: Actual genuine lol.
Sean: That James Gunn never did that in a Guardians film shows how much he needs to grow as a filmmaker.
But anyways, onwards! To NEIL GAIMAN!!!!
David: This sure was an episode by a special guest writer. By which I mean it was very Gaiman obvs (the Aunt and Uncle stuff? Extremely Neil), but also that it felt like the rules bent a bit in terms of how much focus could go where for how long in order to service the preferences of The Big Name in the room. There’s good Amy and Rory material here for instance, but as much as Gaiman gets to flex his horror muscles with them, you get the feeling he wasn’t writing Amy and Rory so much as The Doctor’s Latest Companions. That’s not a complaint, the era-specific context just wasn’t as important as him getting to do his version of broad Doctor Who with his (at that point) one time up at bat.
Sean: I have a theory. The thing you have to note about this episode was that Neil Gaiman started his career by doing a book on Douglas Adams. And as such, he took extreme influence on Adams’ approach to writing. Mainly, he was extremely late on getting the episode done. This was supposed to be an episode that came out during Series 5. But Neil needed to have a lot of drafts. In particular, he was constantly writing over budget because his main experience writing for modern moving images was a Dave McKean film that could have McKean just do whatever with any idea Neil gave him. Conversely, Doctor Who is notoriously a low budget show.
As a result, Neil wrote several things in the first draft that Moffat had to give him notes on to fix. Because, and I need to say this for a certain type of Doctor Who fan who has opinions on Steven ‘Not Spelled With a Ph’ Moffat: Steven Moffat’s editing style was more akin to book editing than what Russell T Davies did. According to Neil Gaiman, Moffat would send him copious amounts of notes to make the episode work. And, to his credit, Steven’s a brilliant script editor, bringing about a late era resurgence in Gaiman who, at the time, was easily willing to half ass his work.
Of course, the episode still needed one last draft to move over the finish line, so I firmly believe Steven Moffat himself wrote the last draft. I base this solely on the fact that there’s a line from Jekyll in here (rewritten for family television from the original like “[Killing] is like sex, only there’s a winner.”), and another notable Moffat trope is accidentally nicking stuff from previous scripts of his.
Elizabeth: Okay, the Gaiman stan in the room has to chime in and say that the books he wrote immediately prior to and after this episode are both incredible. In particular, there’s a strong argument to be made that The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the best thing Gaiman’s written to-date.
Sean: Well, yes, Ocean is obviously brilliant. But there’s a bit of a fallow period right about here where Neil is not doing his best work and has just accepted being an author who can’t be challenged by an editor. This was the period where he wrote the snooze fest Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
Elizabeth: That being said, yeah, Moffat deserves huge plaudits for this episode coming out as well as it did. Also, Sean, I desperately wish I could track it down, but I believe in an interview around the time of the episode’s transmission, Gaiman noted that Moffat did indeed pen the shooting script, adding lines such as, “Biting’s excellent! It’s like kissing only there’s a winner!” and “The TARDIS, and she’s a woman!”/”Did you wish really hard?”
David: ‘The humanoid version of the TARDIS is a Tim Burton version of a manic pixie dream girl’ is…
…
…I mean, it’s perfect, right? Of course. Of course that’s what that would be.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER FUN BTW, EVERYBODY’S GOT A STICK UP THEIR ASS ABOUT THAT ONE
Sean: It’s Basic, David! Basic!
David: throws a Batarang at Sean
Sean: ducks BASIC!
Elizabeth: As to David’s point about the normal rules being thrown out the window somewhat, Gaiman manages to pull off a lovely inversion of the typical operating procedure of the show. Everyone remembers the line, “Borrowing implies the intention on the part of the borrower to return that which they stole; what makes you think I would ever let you go?” and yes, that line’s perfect, but I don’t think people appreciate how well that idea’s developed throughout the episode.
During the wonderful set piece in the junkyard where the Doctor and Idris jerry-rig a TARDIS, the Doctor structurally adopts the role of the companion relative to Idris’ Doctor: Idris has an alien worldview and operates at a level of complex thinking he can’t even fathom, leaving him trailing behind her in a mix of stupefied enamorment and utter aggravation. And by the time Idris has to shed her human form, we get to see the Doctor engaged in his own mini-Doomsday with the immortal time-traveling genius love of his life. Which makes the Doctor the worst-case scenario for The Companion; he’s the one who got sucked away so thoroughly that he lost the chance of ever returning to a normal life.
David: Oh DANG. You’re spot-on; the ending where ‘she’ ‘speaks’ to him is touching, but also basically a version of Rose getting exactly what she wanted after everything.
Sean: Equally, there’s the extremely fucked up chamber piece with Amy and Rory where House (voiced by future Good Omens star Michael Sheen) spends the entire time murdering Rory and fucking with their perception of reality. Because holy shit, Neil Gaiman is really good at fucked up horror, a move he really doesn’t want people to think about as demonstrated by the Netflix version of 24 Hours.
Elizabeth: God, what a fucking terrible season of television that was. I love Sandman, so picking at that show over the course of a few weeks was a genuinely upsetting experience. (Also, half the season was directed by the primary director of the Chibnall era, and boy can you tell.)
David: I feel like some of the details were a bit find-and-insert in service of making it more companion-specific than really concerned him personally, but who cares, fucked up is what the man’s good at! Also I believe the Death of Rory count is at 5 now.
Sean: Let’s see… Old Lady, Silurian, The FBI, Merwoman, House… Yep, five. Five Deaths! Ah-Ah-Ah! (Lightning Clap!)
David: If you wanted you could count Merwoman twice between the disintegration and the CPR seeming to fail, but the point’s already well-made.
Elizabeth: When no one was looking, Steven Moffat killed forty Rorys. He killed 40 Rorys. That’s as many as four 10s. And that’s terrible.
David: You could tell me that was a real spoiler and I’d probably believe you.
Sean: Uhm…
So anyways, The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, which asks “Is it really slavery if they’re clones?” and answers “Yes, but it’s still wrong for there to be a slave revolt because some of the humans are nice.”
Elizabeth: One thing an American high-school education will truly hammer home for you is how many people, when presented with the question of whether it would have been okay for slaves in the antebellum period to kill their masters while attempting to escape, will fall back on “all violence is wrong, they should have waited for the issue to be handled legislatively”.
David: “Who are the real monsters?” Oh, Doctor Who character who looks kinda like Grant Morrison.
Sean: That tends to happen a lot in sci-fi. John Carter, from next year, would also have a baddie who looks kinda like Grant Morrison.
Elizabeth: So this two-parter is a bit crap, but as far as ‘a bit crap’ Doctor Who goes, I’d say this is in the upper echelons. The guest ensemble is refreshingly strong (other than Sarah Smart, which is really unfortunate considering that she’s got a thinly-sketched character who goes all Comic Book Villain at the end who’s in desperate need of enlivening via a solid guest actor), Michael Pickwood’s production design is excellent, and Matt Smith has unbelievable chemistry with perhaps my favorite guest star to date, Also Matt Smith.
David: The episode has two saving graces:
The Doctor’s ‘you silly humans are so barbaric and unadvanced, I’M above all that nonsense’ finally getting a moment to be proven true by Doctors #1 and #2 being totally fine with one another and their respective standings.
“I wouldn’t.” “Nor would I. What can you do, eh?” Amy finally getting that moment to show she’s as absurdly ride-or-die as Rory.
Otherwise, ehhhhh premise is executed tepidly until the last few minutes where it goes completely nuts.
Elizabeth: That’s the problem; up until that moment, it isn’t interestingly bad. Which parts of the episode don’t work are transparently obvious: Jennifer’s a crap character and a worse antagonist, The Doctor yells at Amy while pretending to be the GangerDoc for no reason other than to set up Plot Angst, and while I am all in favor of Rory getting a more substantial role to play in the plot, dear God is he thick in this episode.
Sean: Of course, there’s the final moment of the episode, which might be the single most fucked up thing Doctor Who has ever done.
Because… to put it bluntly, Amy Pond is sexually assaulted.
Elizabeth: To those in the audience inclined to quibble with whether or not this ‘counts’ as sexual assault, might I kindly request you shut the fuck up. Whovians love to delve into the sci-fi semantics of what actually occurs, as if to prove that technically the show didn’t explicitly say it was about the thing it’s obviously about. Amy undergoes indisputable trauma relating to her sexual agency being taken from her. If you’re the sort of person who finds it necessary to opine that that’s not how rape is technically defined, I suspect you’re someone whom I wouldn’t feel terribly safe around in-person.
Sean: From this, A Good Man Goes to War is a massive two finger salute to the kind of television that thinks MANPAIN! is the most interesting thing imaginable. The sort that views the story of a woman being sexually assaulted as being about her male friends as utterly despicable. A mean, angry story about how vile and cruel stories can be.
It’s about how great epics where Men go to their highest highs and sink down to their lowest lows are complete and utter shite. It’s about how glorifying war and combat is a pretty good way of getting you and people you care about killed. That the solution to someone being sexually assaulted isn’t to raise hell with fire and fury, but rather something as simple and easy as telling the survivor “I know you're not alright. But hold tight, Amy, because you're going to be.”
Elizabeth: And going back to how the Doctor handles the Silence, the issue isn’t that the Doctor is trying to save his friend; it’s that he’s an egotistical showboat about it. His team’s seizure of Demon’s Run is an astonishing five-minute sequence of giddy triumphant joy, but it’s also a heinously self-aggrandizing paean to the Doctor’s personal greatness. It may have started as a rescue mission, but in the end the Doctor gets too caught up in his righteous fury in tearing down his enemies to do something as basic as give the kidnapped infant a quick scan on the Sonic he just trained to identify the Gangers.
Sean: Perhaps the most telling on this front is Colonel Run Away. It’s extremely petty. There’s no reason for Doctor Who to be doing this other than to show that he’s better than the baddies. He gets to decide the fate of those who cross him and those he cares about. Because it’s not about Amy. Doctor Who didn’t need to enlist Strax, the space pirates, the space fighter pilots, or the best double act the Matt Smith era ever gave us. That’s just showboating.
David: There’s an argument to be made trying to scare off the assorted monsters of the universe from thinking they can kidnap a woman and her baby on his watch merits overkill to make an example...but when he drops with the big dramatic emphasis that this is all about the people HE cares about, yeah, there’s no question this is essentially an extended cosmic tantrum.
Elizabeth: He’s taking vengeance on the Silence for harming him via kidnapping & assaulting Amy. It’s an understandable failure on the Doctor’s part, and one that clearly comes from a genuine desire to help and out of real love for Amy, but he’s too tunnel-visioned to see the effect he’s actually having.
David: Will note: good episode, but the “You’ve never flown higher!” or whatever it was did get a little cringe out of me. Moffat, I promise we already got what was going on here.
Elizabeth: Also Steven you have personally written episode after episode in which this man flew higher. Disarming a military base without casualties is cool & all, but not The Greatest Triumph of The Oncoming Storm.
Sean: Another dark mirror of the companion comes in the form of one of the ‘baddies’: Lorna Bucket. She, like Amy, met Doctor Who as a child. She saw him as a great warrior who did battle against the monsters who came to destroy her world. And then he left. As a result, she wanted to see him again, so she did the only sensible thing she could: Joined the military. Certainly worked wonders for a lot of companions. (Martha joined UNIT, Rose had her paramilitary shit going on.)
Because that’s what this showboating frames Doctor Who as: a fighter. Someone who destroys monsters at the thousands. Who can burn the Cyberfleet without a second thought.
And when the dust settles, all you’re left with is a bunch of dead bodies.
Full poem by Steven Moffat (DWM #457)
Elizabeth: So uh David quick question…
RiverRiverRiverRiverRiverRiverRiverRiver???
David: I totally thought for a minute it was Lorna, lol. Hey, met The Doctor as a kid, combat experience, stuff to feel guilty about, why not! But of course this is so much better. Was this always fully what was in mind, or did he go ‘River’/’Pond’ and his head blew up then and there? And of course this now leads me to theories I can’t very well ask you two to comment on just yet.
Elizabeth: I think that when he created Amy, he knew that she’d be River’s mother (I believe her surname is Pond specifically to set up the River/Pond thing), but that he wrote Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead without having worked out River’s past. Alex Kingston has said in interviews that she knew who River was for ages before Matt, Karen, and Arthur, and that she spent a lot of time during filming fending off their attempts to get her to spill the details.
David: Perfect.
Sean: Before we move on to my Fun Fact for this edition of the WhoWatch, David, Elizabeth…
VastraandJennyVastraandJennyVastraandJennyVastraandJennyVastraandJennyVastraandJenny?
Elizabeth: My sweet sexy murder girls!!
David: I’m evidently not as much one to read queer interpretations into text as many of my generation, but: c’mon. C’mon.
Sean: So… Fun Fact: In the production of Series Six, two episodes got swapped for a variety of reasons. The one that ended up in the front half was the episode The Curse of the Black Spot.
David: Not surprised, that feels like a very ‘find the spot to plug it in’ one.
Elizabeth: (sighs) I think I remember where this is going…
Sean: In many ways, this was a boon for the production team, as there was supposed to be a guest star appearing in A Good Man Goes to War who couldn’t due to being a part of a completely different production.
That character, of course, being Captain Jack Harkness.
Elizabeth: I’ll admit that I’m slightly bummed that we missed out on Jack getting beheaded by the Headless Monks, if only because of course Moffat would conjure an original alien menace for the sole purpose of explaining why the Face of Boe doesn’t have appendages.
Sean: This is an important detail to note because John Barrowman would years later claim that Steven Moffat actively blocked any opportunity he had of returning to Doctor Who and, in particular, Torchwood ever returning to television. Because John Barrowman is a lying snake who will do whatever it takes to appear popular among the people. He will actively lie, cheat, and be genuinely awful in order to get fame and glory.
Elizabeth: And put his cock on your shoulder because gosh darn it, it’d be a missed opportunity for a funny gag if he left your shoulder un-cocked.
Sean: Yes, he truly is a bastard who I’m glad never returned to Doctor Who after his American incursion.
Elizabeth: Ha…haha….ha… ha…
(I watched four seasons of Arrow, so unfortunately Barrowman would not leave my viewing diet for another few years yet.)
Sean: You willingly watched Arrow, you brought that upon yourself
Elizabeth: Can’t say I’ve grounds to disagree. (John Barrowman spotlight episode written by Geoff Johns: a phrase that is the English-language equivalent to a sleep paralysis demon.)
David: YESSSSSSSSSSSS, god that’s so perfect
Elizabeth: The AV Club gave that episode an ‘A’.
David: I think we’re running down the clock a little here; I enjoyed this stretch decently enough but can’t say it’s been a highlight for me and I imagine it showed, even as I’ve enjoyed discussing it with you two. Though however the remainder goes? Most exciting next episode title in what I gotta imagine is the history of the franchise.
Sean: Oh boy. It sure was something to have as the first episode of Doctor Who I watched live.
Elizabeth: Oh Ho Ho Ho, you’re so very right in ways that cannot be discussed at the moment.
Thank you both so much for having me on to talk about my formative era of Who! While the show has infinite potential, on a deep, foundational level, the Eleventh Doctor will always define who the character of the Doctor is for me.
David: As always, happy to have you back any time!
Next Time: It's that sort of day. Have you come to take me away? Remember that summer when he came back to school with that ridiculous haircut? Amy Williams, it's time to stop waiting. Yes, he likes that, Alfie, though personally he prefers to be called Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All. But do you know what else he is, Madame Kovarian? So remember, our lives are different to anybody else's.