Whowatch Part 12
Couple quick notes that might be of interest to some of you.
Since it was the latest 'big definitive text' on the character many first followed me for my thoughts on to drop and I even commented on its announcement here last year, probably worth noting Superman: Space Age #3 finished that series last week. Allred obviously slaughtered on the art, but while I'm still personally pretty amenable to Mark Russell going on a self-indulgent tear on occasion, I can't say this came together very well in the end with said self-indulgent attempts at profundity fully swallowing what character momentum had been developed, and the inexplicable choice to undercut the genuine bittersweetness of the conclusion at the last possible moment with a Mark Russell-brand yuk. Mostly I'll remember it for having the godawful misfortune of being an alt-history 20th century superhero comic that was coming out at the same time as 20th Century Men; I'm expecting far greater things from Priest and Pagulayan taking their big swing at the character with Superman: Lost in a couple weeks.
Meanwhile, regarding the big Marvel news of the week: fools will be delighted that Hickman is doing Ultimates again. Those with a morsel of wisdom will be gleeful at Hickman going back to the Illuminati bastards. But the precious few who like Terrax are truly enlightened will see Ultimate Reed and post-HoXPoX Xavier in the same comic and start chanting HICKMAN HELMET PERVERT FIGHT, HICKMAN HELMET PERVERT FIGHT
The Tomb of the Cybermen
Let’s Kill Hitler
Night Terrors
The Girl Who Waited
The God Complex
Closing Time
The Wedding of River Song
Veronica: [WHOOOP WHOOOP] the introduction!
David: The introduction! Another returning guest in Veronica as we head into the back half of both the Series and Smith's tenure.
Sean: Season 6B! Wherein Patrick Troughton is press ganged by the Time Lords into… No, wait, this is Series 6B. My bad.
Veronica: I am shook that Let’s Kill Hitler does not officially have an exclamation mark in the title.
David: Did it have quotation marks since it was quoting Mels? We gotta take the bad with the good first though, and this is another case where I don’t know the common consensus but for me? The Tomb of the Cybermen’s that baaaaaaaaaaaad old Who.
Veronica: Ok but how hard did you laugh when you saw the wire hook attached to the….slave(??????)
David: Pretty hard, you got me there. And the actual vintage Cybermen as opposed to the modern ones that are supposed to merely look vintage? Utterly delightful.
But even aside from the ‘oh this was RACIST-racist and SEXIST-sexist’ of it all, this thing? Just pretty damn boring, in spite of Troughton’s charming anchoring presence.
Veronica: I got to the end of 90 minutes and my main thought was “Ok what actually happened in this story that took 90 minutes?” That Cyber Controller though, what a knob head.
David: In the same way my first old Doctor Who - from considerably later than this, even though they did stuff I liked in-between - had me questioning whether they’d totally figured out yet how TV works, this seems to have been developed prior to the discovery of panicked narrative momentum, which is a hell of a thing to be lacking in a show that would go on to be largely built on that.
Sean: If I’m being completely honest, the reason I put this episode on the docket for us to watch is purely for historical reasons. I honestly can’t sit through the majority of the serial (and I love Patrick Troughten’s Doctor Who quite a bit) and the only really good scene is the one where Doctor Who talks to Victoria about being a time traveler and its relation to memory, which Troughten sells quite well.
But the main reason is that this is the one I picked is that, well, this is the one Moffat picked to demonstrate to Matt Smith what, exactly, Doctor Who is.
David: NO.
Sean: I’m afraid so. As with a lot of things, Doctor Who fandom can easily ignore pesky things like being extremely meandering or having a racist element if it means keeping a beloved classic (just don’t talk about the rat).
But I think what Smith got out of this was the way Troughton can allow his co-stars to carry the emotional weight. The way a relatively young man can convey so much angst and age that speaks to centuries.
That said, as I’ve brought up many times in public and private, there are only four good Cybermen stories, and this isn’t one of them.
(The World Shapers is not a Cybermen story. It’s a Vrood story.)
David: I’m not a classic Who-head but there must have been virtually infinite better samples for getting that across than this.
Sean: With Troughton, there’s a tragedy to be found with just how little there actually is of his time on the show. A vast majority of his stories are lost to fire, what remains only salvaged through an act of sheer colonialism driven by a fanish need to have every hole filled. There are absolutely better stories with Troughton available at the time. The Mind Robber being the most obvious example. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of fans love that scene where Doctor Who talks to Victoria. They love the Cybermen bursting out of bubble wrap. And they love the Cybermen.
Veronica: But they hate the Cybermat? The one actual highlight of this slog?
Sean: Well of course they do. Cybermats are cute and cuddly. They take away from the menace of the Cybermen. (Perhaps most tellingly from the decades after the fact 90s retcon of them that revealed they were actually babies before being Cybermats. Because 90s.)
David: It’s kind of comforting to know the 90s were dumb everywhere.
Sean: We still have two parts before we start talking about an artifact from 90s Who. And also Paul McGann.
Veronica: At least I got to learn where the Outlander series comes from so it had that going for it I suppose.
The Cybermen in this were the audio equivalent of The Batman Who Laughs lettering. Just excruciating to sit through and barely intelligible.
Also: Fun Fact! The opening exchange of “Flight? Oh no no no, you musn’t laugh” is sampled in a song I can’t remember the name of, will never be able to find, and it drive me mad all week now as I try to figure that out.
Sean: So… Let’s Kill Hitler! Hot mess, but charmingly so.
David: An episode where Doctor Who accidentally tells Adolf Hitler that the fault was on both sides, though he at least feels bad about it once he realizes it’s Hitler.
Sean: It’s a very ‘released in 2011’ episode of Doctor Who, when the Nazis were considered by many to be, at most, a weird internet subgroup nobody took seriously because even the dregs of the New Atheist movement thought they were the worst.
Veronica: It’s a very The Producers approach to Hitler
David: I can virtually guarantee Moffat had a little laugh at his cleverness in having The Last Centurion sock the leader of The Third Reich.
Sean: Put Hitler in the cupboard is a very funny line. As is River’s one liner right before taking out a bunch of Nazis sons of bitches. But it never connects meaningfully. There are many reasons for this, most notably the frequently mentioned production issues that, essentially, caused both this story and the final story we’re talking about to be First Drafts. And there’s a lot of messiness visible in this. Most notably with the introduction of Mels.
To be perfectly blunt, I don’t care much for the opening montage explaining who Mels is. It feels a tad bit too forced to suddenly introduce someone who believes in Doctor Who more than Amy, who has never been mentioned before. On the one hand, I guess there’s a degree to which this is ‘Mels inserted herself into the past because she never existed before that.’ On the other, the script delivery (and scripting) feel forced and wrong in ways that don’t play to that aspect.
Veronica: She sure is a Very Important Character who we have seen before but was always there just off panel I guess.
David: Mels would be fun solely by virtue of being our gateway to seeing dumb Baby Rory, but while I found her enjoyable and the twist really did catch me off-guard, she points to what’ll quickly become a much weirder thing: Amy and Rory seem and will continue to seem weirdly very chill about how things worked out with their kid. In a show built around the emotional consequences of Time Bullshit this is virtually incomprehensible, and this is speaking as an adamant defender of that time Superman’s kid aged 7 years in 3 weeks.
Veronica, Well, you see David, she grew up with a crack in her wall so wibbly wobbly timey wimey she’s immune to emotional consequences.
Sean: Plus… there was a prequel to this episode that is absolutely necessary viewing to give this any emotional weight.
David: hahaha what. Sure, of course.
Veronica: You could be excused for missing it seeing as every other episode prequel was ‘here is an explanation of what the episode will be about that the ACTUAL episode will cover anyway in the first five minutes’
I’ll say this for Let’s Kill Hitler, as messy as it is it got me out of my Season Six Slump. Now I know you folks didn’t like The Rebel Flesh but I loathe it. As in “Oh god, do I even like this show or do I only like Steven Moffat?” loath it. “Oh no, that story is sucking the entire season down into a pit of misery like it’s Darkseid’s corpse” loathe it.
So it was good to be reminded that actually Doctor Who can be good and fun and weird and messy.
Sean: So fun fact about this episode. This is the first one I watched live. I had gotten into Doctor Who shortly after the airing of A Good Man Goes To War and had bounced around the various stories that had come before. Mainly the ones everyone and their mother recommended like The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Earthshock, and Blink. So this was the first one I’d watch live. And I had a lot of fun with it. I didn’t gel with the opening montage even as a dumb high schooler, but I had a blast with the rest of it. From the dumb robot with the tiny people to Rory being able to ride a motorbike -
David: “Can you ride a motorbike?” “I expect so, it’s that sort of day.”
Sean: - to the scene where Doctor Who is dying in the TARDIS. It’s just a blast.
But at the time, I was also following a lot of people who didn’t much care for the Moffat era. Or, rather, they thought they’d like it, but it turned out to be much sillier than they’d expected. And one critic I followed in particular had some… choice opinions on things. And boy did he hate this story with a fiery passion. Made me not want to revisit the story for so long, even after I broke up with watching the fellow over him claiming that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sucked because the Death of Gwen Stacy wasn’t enough of Peter’s fault. I haven’t rewatched it until now, basically.
(I should note that the fellow in question is a really bad media critic who thinks telling someone to shut up while they think about what they’re going to say is a red flag and War of the Daleks is a good book, actually.)
(Veronica: Is there a weirder Millennial feeling than ‘Hang on, this pop culture critic I’ve been following almost religiously for years….sucks actually????’
Sean: Easy Criticism II: Coming Soon)
And revisiting it now, I’m quite charmed by it, in spite of its failings. In spite of it being messy, not working at all on an emotional level… It’s still a bit of fun. And I’m glad I experienced it.
Veronica: Speaking of not working on an emotional level…that sure is how River falls eternally in love with the Doctor I guess?
Sean: Hot messes aren’t always interesting ones.
David: Kingston and Smith, at least, put on a mini tour de force here. Both operating at peak Moffat Showy Intricate Cleverness and coming out smelling like roses, even as they both have to stretch to accommodate a much heavier set of emotions later on without breaking the overall momentum. Though not even our guy The Oncoming Storm can sell “Plus she’s a woman.”
Veronica: Moffat sure did write a sex rom com for three years.
Sean: Another sign that this is a first draft is that line. As we’ve discussed previously, Moffat comes out of the sex comedy scene where lines like that are distressingly typical (and also transphobia, but thankfully Moffat isn’t responsible for that bit we’ll talk about next time). As a result, sometimes the sex comedy mode becomes default and, well, crap lines like that.
Veronica: Cut that line in half and it turns into a real good line to end your season finale cold open on though.
Sean: And it’s what, half way through the episode?
David: Yeah, I dunno that I have a ton to say with this one. It’s fun, it’s clever, everybody’s doing great work, but there’s not much THERE there, especially for as important as what’s going on in it is.
Veronica: Shall we move on to Fear Her 2: The Pissening then?
Sean: Meh. The only thing interesting about this is the Historical Context, but even that’s skipping past talking about the episode to talk about how horrific the UK is.
David: Aw, Mark Gattiss. I really think you came pretty close to a B, maybe even a B+ on this one, but you really fumbled it at the end. Perfectly tightly-wound concept with solid presentation (I liked the sound design for the Amy and Rory segments, and lovely ‘oh DUH’ moments like the bigger on the inside comment and The Doctor needing to invent a setting for wood on the sonic screwdriver). But at the end it’s a ‘well, time for the story to end’ episode where it’s all wrapped up so cleanly as to stink of antiseptic, and if anything the unsettling unexplored implications of a child that’ll grow up to be whatever its parents want are more compelling than Night Terrors itself.
Veronica: This episode sent me right back in the Darkseid Corpse Hole.
At this point in the season I was feeling extremely sick of episodes about deconstructing what a terrible person the Doctor is and how he’s emotionally destroying his companions and just wanted some good old fashion Doctor Who adventures…and then this episode popped up to remind me what the ‘good old fashioned adventures’ almost always end up being like.
Also you could really feel that Gatiss had no idea what to do with Amy and Rory in this story so it’s off to Monster Land to get vaguely menaced by whatever this week's Monster is.
Sean: Alas. On the bright side The Girl Who Waited exists and is amazing!
Veronica: One of those episodes where I go into it thinking “Oh, this one, yeah, it’s ok” and come out going “Oh shit that ruled, how do I keep forgetting how much this rules?”
Sean: I think a huge part in that is director Nick Hurran, who basically becomes the definitive Eleventh Doctor Who director. Prior to this, he was most known for doing The Prisoner reboot with Ian McKellen that missed the whole point of that show, but this is his defining work. His visuals are just a show stopper unlike a lot of what we’ve seen up to this point. The way in which the two Amys talk, the crossfades. The slow motion fight at the end. AMY AND RORY ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE TARDIS! It’s so beautiful.
David: I know I’m speaking wildly prematurely but this HAS to be the most fucked up episode of Doctor Who, right?
Sean: Oh, absolutely. Doctor Who is in pure bastard mode here.
Veronica: “Rory, choose which wife you want jk I’m choosing for you scrub get rekt” has to be up there on the BuzzFeed Top Ten Worst Things the Doctor Did list.
Sean: Number 6, I believe. Right behind strangling Peri, but in front of what they do at the end of Spyfall. (What they do in the middle of Spyfall is number 3.)
David: Amy at the end begging not to give her a chance to be let in because if she does she’ll absolutely kill the other Amy out of a base animal need to save her own miserable life! Jesus Christ!!! God this episode is so good. The whole thing happening without a shred of malice or even really intent on anyone’s part and that alone selling the ‘alien’ in all of this way beyond what Who tends to go for. Rory not at all wrongly blaming The Doctor even though the episode quietly lets you remember for yourself he’s the one who didn’t tell Amy what button to push. The heart-to-heart between the Amys that gets…gets so incredibly fucked up in light again of that ending. The Doctor throwing in that bit about jettisoning the karaoke bar because even when he’s lying about sending someone to their doom he needs to be lol zany about it because that’s the only way he can stop himself from screaming. This is a perfect Doctor Who downer episode.
Veronica: This is one of those episodes that really sells you on the “Lois Lane, I’ll love you til the end of time”ness (hey did I just fuck up the All-Star quote in front of the smart comic mutuals???)
(Sean: David, you’re the one who did the annotations, you tell us.)
(David: Only slightly.)
Veronica: of Amy and Rorys relationship. Of course Rory doesn’t care how old his wife gets or how traumatized she is now, he waited for her for 2,000 years! He is the ultimate bottom and he will stand by her no matter what. Absolutely love it.
Sean: What I also love about this one is something that’s paid off quite decently in the finale: Amy’s morality regarding memory. For a character who has lived her whole life next to a memory sucking crack in the wall, Amy holds memories quite dearly. She refuses to be consigned to a dead reality because of the memories she held. She wants to remember herself, regardless of how horrible, awful, and cruel her life has been. Indeed, if she was in Donna’s place at the end of Journey’s End, wiping her memories would have been antithetical to everything she believes in. It would be a betrayal to who she was and how she lived.
Veronica: Oh if Amy had been there then the second the Doctor grabbed the side of her face she wouldn’t have headbutted him and cracked his nose open like an egg. Probably would have asked him if his mammy could sew first and everything.
Sean: She’d also ask Doctor Who why he was pretending not to have a Scottish accent. What, does he sound like Scrooge McDuck or something?
Veronica: Related: Surely the funniest part of Let’s Kill Hitler is Rory’s “Clooos? Wot kind a clooos?”
David: The memory stuff is also set up way back in The Beast Below, where she tries to beg off one of her actions as being one she can’t remember and The Doctor reads her the riot act for it. Guess she took it personally!
Unless we have more to discuss on that horror show we’re onto another one entirely, in the form of the mini-stretch of two episodes that are my very own Darkseid hole.
Sean: Believe it or not, people actually like The God Complex. I refuse to watch it on the grounds that Whithouse sucks and has always sucked. Bastard is the Brad Meltzer of Doctor Who, complete with flagrantly nicking bits from old Alan Moore stories without any idea whatsoever about what makes them work. (Though that might be a bit mean to Brad Meltzer.)
Veronica: I don’t love it but I do enjoy it. That’s my hot take this week everybody!
David: Veronica, you know how you talk about episodes of Doctor Who that people only think are good because they end strong and it gets them to overlook everything up to that point? I don’t often feel that applies, but this episode is the peak of that.
Sean: Earthshock.
Veronica: Personally I think the ending is some real disconnected ‘Oh we need to set up this emotional beat for the next story uh uh uh just shove it in here LOOK AT RORY’S NEW CAR!!!’.
David: The ending ain’t great but it’s at least it’s some decent Doctor Whoey Doctor Who stuff. Everything up to there is so deeply enamored with ooooo what a clever twist on its conceit it never actually bothers to do said conceit particularly well, such that even I as a horror weenie found this a stone-cold snooze. I’d say it wastes a solid crop of guest stars, but even that soured for me when I realized this episode’s approach to them is the outlet store, everything-must-go sale take on Voyage of the Damned’s emotional arc.
Sean: It couldn’t even be arsed to have an actual Nimon (NIMON BE PRAISED!) in it.
Veronica: Is it just me or do the Surrender Moles feel like they’re being recycled from unpublished Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fanfic?
Also it’s possible that I mainly like this episode because, unlike all my most hated episodes, it at least has the good sense to stay a one-parter.
Sean: Singing Fuck you Gareth Roberts! We only have one more left! stops singing and realizes something horrible Oh fuck, I’m going to have to talk about the last one, aren’t I?
Veronica: Did you enjoy The Lodger? Because here it is again with the exact same one joke!
David: It’s crap. It’s just total crap. Aside from the Stormageddon bit (and more importantly Smith’s little speech to the kid), my most authentic joy here was that of course an episode this nothing was a Cyberman one.
Veronica: Two points
1) Who would have guessed that Cybermen, whose whole deal is they eliminate emotions, can be defeated by just having a strong emotion?
2) Can you believe we got TWO episodes this season about the power of Dad Love?
David: Gareth you twit you’re not supposed to SAY the power of love saved the day. This feeling like the weaksauce version of RTD’s farewell specials (“I’m not helping them anymore”, where’d that come from???) right after another phoned-in redux episode really got me to that point of wondering just how much I could be in the tank for more of this going forward if these diminishing value reruns were what was to look forward to. But finally, after this most agonizing of journeys: back to the good stuff.
Sean: And now, The Wedding of River Song, wherein Moffat’s first draft attempts to get away with it by going full Grant Morrison and hoping that having a bunch of ideas jumbled together like a twenty five car pile up will allow it to get away with being extremely messy and not fully working. Better than Let’s Kill Hitler in my book, if only for Amy Pond’s most fucked up moment: Killing Madame Kovarian.
Veronica: Amy did nothing wrong!
Sean: True, but it’s still fucked up
David: Not mutually exclusive! I don’t care enough to check how close together they were, but funny the same years’ debut comics darling in Hawkeye does basically the same bit in its opening issue, just with him and Captain America instead of Amy and The Doctor.
Sean: It’s apparently different when it’s dudes.
Veronica: Amy showing up at the last minute to save Rory’s life by gunning down a dozen Silence? That’s my idea of a Perfect Couple, baby!
Sean: Amy and Rory have long past ride or die and have ascended towards destroying the cosmos for one another.
Veronica: Speaking of that. “More than the entire universe?” “Yes”. chefs kiss
David: Look this episode is a mess. I’m not a ‘but the plot holes!’ person but the reason for The Doctor doing ANY of this - beyond I suppose trying to keep his plan from a handful of people for maximum security, one of whom he tells anyway and then she tells the other two - is pretty glaringly bonkers if you think about it for more than a couple moments.
Sean: Plus the emotional beats aren’t in the right place. It feels like all the pieces are absolutely there, ready to be a brilliant finale. If only there was another draft.
Veronica: Oh he clearly does it that way purely so he can pull off another ‘Look how clever I am’ and the others knowing that would ruin it
David: That being said I don’t really care, this episode’s a treat and I appreciated it so very deeply after the trudge to get to it. This is the version of Doctor Who going ‘hey, it’s us, Doctor Who! You love us, right?!’ that makes me go ‘Yeah, you got me: I do love you Doctor Who.’ And in the form of a finale that’s confident enough to be a one-off with marginally less apocalyptic stakes than usual to boot! Plus the perfect exchange:
“So, you and me, we should get a drink sometime.”
“Okay.”
“And married.”
“Fine.”
Sean: Amy Pond will step on you.
Veronica: The one part I actually dislike is the Brigadier bit. Smith sells it enough for me to get it but [extremely Gamora voice] I don’t know who the Brigadier is!
Sean: Again, first draft for this finale, especially since Nicholas Courtney, the actor who played the Brig, died before airing. So they couldn’t really get it to gel as well as they should have.
But like David, I don’t care when it’s an episode with all of Time overlapping the earth, complete with Pterodactyls attacking children, Charles Dickens writing BBC Christmas Specials, and the Holy Emperor Winston Churchill. Absolutely madcap, bonkers ideas that could themselves fill whole episodes. I mean, imagine Dinosaurs, but in a Spaceship. Surely that would be a lot of fun, right?
Veronica: How very 'A Pirates movie that’s just about Jack Sparrow having adventures? That’ll be great, surely?' of you
David: I already know Hell is coming you two, let me enjoy the fields of paradise while they last.
Sean: Oh, it’s coming. Sooner than you think…
Veronica: Big shout out to Live Chess from me. And the skulls. There’s no time to think about if ideas make sense because there’s another two coming along in a minute.
David: Ideas making sense is for the weak, those cars won’t hot air balloon themselves to work.
Sean: Mark Gatiss is having fun playing a Space Viking.
But, of course, there’s the question. The first question. Hidden in plain sight!
Veronica: The most Geoff Johns moment in all of Doctor Who?
Sean: So how did you react to the final line of the episode, David?
David: I pretty much guessed way back in Let’s Kill Hitler, though possibly that’s because I vaguely remembered a friend who’d been trying to get me into Doctor Who years ago being very excited that we were gonna learn The Doctor’s name, and then being very disappointed when we actually didn’t. So that there’s a big important question coming up? Didn’t take either a rocket scientist or a quantum physicist, though I like to think I’d have pieced it together regardless in terms of “Well, what’s the big overarching question they’ve been poking fun at since forever they could be alluding to here?”
Sean: A lot of people were actually surprised by that at the time.
Veronica: Besides, we already know his name. It’s Doctor Who.
I have seen this episode maybe four times and that final line still makes me grin like an idiot.
David: Oh like a total loon, dumbest thing in the world and simply perfect.
Sean: Absolutely mad line to set up the series that will act as the celebration for the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who.
Veronica: It sure does suck that the ‘how is the Doctor going to get out of this one???’ of the episode is totally ruined by the ‘Previously on Doctor Who: hey, remember these tiny people with a shape shifting robot? Well, remember they exist. Don’t think about why you need to know that, just know it’ but that’s tv for you
David: Series Six didn’t really hold together for me; it’s clear the kinds of differences that are emerging when someone can’t hold Davies’ kind of unhealthily tight grip to keep everything running smoothly. Still, Moffat’s got four more to get better at this, and what worked here put a smile on my face, so I remain optimistic for the near future.
Sean: It’s a hot mess, but charmingly so.
Veronica: This season feels like the messier parts of the Morrison Batman run but if there was a Grotesk between every arc. There’s great stuff here but also some real toilet times.
Join us next time for: The single worst thing Moffat ever wrote on Doctor Who!
Sean: I mean, it’s not as bad as two of his three Murder Most Horrids. Though, most things aren’t. It is better than Chalk, which is actually kind of underrated. Not as good as Jekyll or Dracula though.
Next Time: The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later. Where'd you get the milk? One of two Chibnall Doctor Who stories Ritesh Babu would’ve been asked to the point of madness were they as popular then as they are now. I speak horse. On the Wii again. I always rip out the last page of a book. Do you want me to get the memory worm? No one loves cattle more than Burger King. I've seen things you wouldn't believe. You're going to let this madman give the orders? We're all ghosts to you. She died and it was my fault, and she was you. The wrong hands. Now, if you don't mind, I have a chess game to finish, and you have to die, pointlessly and very far from home.
Veronica: Oh no! We forgot to do [WHOOOP WHOOOP]
Sean: You have a time machine. It’s easily fixed.