Whowatch Part 14
This edition's pregame notes:
Finally finished The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in its entirety, and I'm sure there'd be a lot here to pick at if I were more well-read, patient, or frankly, invested. Not to say there weren't enjoyable and fascinating bits, and I feel like it'd open up for me in a big way if I could see the thematic differentiator between The Blazing World and the final Nautilus articulated - I'll have to check if there's any critical writing of note on the subject - but as a whole it read to me as patchy, frequently dull, and self-indulgent even by my outrageous standards in that department. Hardly a waste of my time though, and I'll be glad to finally sit down with Illuminations.
It's nice to have a franchise in Star Wars that I like well enough but am nowhere near passionate enough to worry about. A pair of Jedi movies, one standalone and one using stuff we know, and one acting as an Avengers for the next rung down of franchise engagement that's still viable as a popular selling point, is probably about as smart a move as could be made at this point, though the Rey movie's in the unfortunate position of inevitably coming off as apologia for something no matter what it is. It did strike me though that this is my repeated refrain about the sequel trilogy - that they aren't really a trilogy so much as successive barely linked experiments in trying to figure out what Star Wars movies look like now - but for real.
The Book of the War
The Name of the Doctor
An Unearthly Child
The Night of the Doctor
The Day of the Doctor
The Time of the Doctor
Sean: So… The Time War.
David: More than one, for that matter. Sean, for those in the audience who didn’t learn about this courtesy of Andrew Hickey way before they actually started Who proper like me, can you explain Faction Paradox?
Sean: Oh Boy. As many of you reading this are probably familiar, Doctor Who came to an end in the late 80s for reasons that had a lot to do with Thatcherite politics, sexual assault, and genuinely terrible fiction. In the wake of this, Doctor Who did what many a science fiction franchise has done and became a book series. This was known as the Virgin New Adventures, so named because they were new adventures published by Virgin. These new adventures were considered a largely good thing.
However, in the mid 90s, someone tried to bring Doctor Who back as a crap American sci-fi show on Fox, and it was decided that the money would be better spent on another season of Sliders. However, because of this, the BBC decided that they were going to run the publishing of the books for now on. This was generally considered to be a bad move. Among the works from the early Eighth Doctor books, you had Terrence Dicks (the Carl Barks of Doctor Who) whiffing it with The Eight Doctors in ways that are truly indescribable in how bad of a job he did and John Peel following it up almost immediately with his first book since Timewyrm: Genesys (the first book of the Virgin line known for Doctor Who telling Ace to not be so uppity and anachronistic with her desire to fight off being sexually assaulted) with a book that cements him as the Joshua Williamson of Doctor Who, War of the Daleks, an extremely terrible book that has an entire chapter dedicated to explaining lore that no one really cares about and only serves to make everything under the control of Terry Nation.
To say the Eighth Doctor era is rather disliked would be an understatement, but among its triumphs was a book called Alien Bodies. Written by Lawrence Miles, Alien Bodies concerns Doctor Who ending up at an auction featuring the great intergalactic baddies trying to get ownership of one of the most horrific weapons in the universe: The Corpse of Doctor Who!
This was the beginnings of an arc within the EDAs known as the Time War, wherein Doctor Who found themself (among the more admirable traits of the EDAs was their inclination towards gender fluidity, though whether this was due to a desire to make Doctor Who more alien as the Virgin Era’s sterilization equating to asexuality is up for debate) on the cusp of a war in time that gets kickstarted around the time they die. It’s a mad, mad idea that is essentially 'What if the interesting Grant Morrison fans got to run Doctor Who for a bit?'
Unfortunately, as tends to happen with Grant Morrison ideas, the powers that be got frightened off (though, understandably in this case as there was a rather infamous spat between Paul Cornell and Lawrence Miles over the former not wanting to incorporate the latter’s plot point of one of Doctor Who’s companions being dragged off into a Time Lord Rape Camp. Remember, this was the 90s) and decided to scrap the whole thing in a rather terrible event that just made everything confusing and nobody cared.
In the wake of this, Lawrence and a bunch of the other good writers for the EDAs decided to take the Faction Paradox, the War in Heaven, the rather unfortunate overuse of Voodoo by predominantly white people, the shift, and the unknown Enemy and start their own franchise: Faction Paradox! The first book of which we will be talking about today.
(As with you, David, my intro to the Faction was via Andrew Hickey. In particular, his quite charming novel Head of State, which dances around an election for the US president via the 1002 Arabian night, the translation of said night, conspiracy theories, something at the center of the Earth, and other interesting things.)
David: What we’re mentioning today is the I believe first Faction Paradox novel proper, The Book of the War, an encyclopedic account of the major events and powers in play of the first 50 relative years of the war between ‘The Great Houses’ - a stand-in for the Time Lords - and their unknown Enemy. It’s possible to poke at it and make reasoned assumptions about which stands in for what, two characters in particular really seeming to be this narrative’s equivalent to The Doctor and The Master. But it’s far more interesting as a piece of oddball sci-fi entirely in its own right, that I was lucky enough as I mentioned in a previous Whowatch to get access to around the beginning of the pandemic.
Sean: Lucky bastard. The thing’s currently over a thousand dollars on Amazon. In many regards, what this reminds me of is Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. A riff on the world in such a way as to be both monstrous and fascinating. (For example: Conservative (n.) A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.) But where that twisted notions of language upon their head to highlight double meanings and cruel realities, this utilizes the encyclopedia approach many a Doctor Who fan obsessively approaches the show with to an extremely fascinating degree, even poking fun at its own nature with the Shift infecting sections of the book that are simply too boring to read.
David: An actually pretty comprehensible narrative given the format and that it’s a number of creators working under Miles’ editorship, these aren’t all winners, with a lot of the ways the assorted figures in play interact with human culture over the centuries playing as…uncomfortable at best. But when focused on the larger war you get beautiful madcap notions like the Intercreationals and Leviathans, the Celestis, the City of the Saved, the Anarchitects. And it’s hardly only functional when on that kind of cosmic scale, the likes of the Eleven-Day Empire and the (unpleasantly prophetic in hindsight) GCI processors are a hoot to read about as well. To call this ‘Doctor Who for grownups’ would be dozens of kinds of wrong, but even without the reams of work I understand spun out of it it’s a wonderful treat to see brilliant creators run totally free with the basic materials at hand in a way a low-budget TV series for children never can. As a distant historical drama about bastards without limits making each other worse so they can crush an innocent universe in their conflict, it’s monstrous. As conceptual brain-candy, it’s as good as it gets.
Sean: Which makes its turn into children’s television ultimately fascinating. The Time War as you know was what ultimately caused Doctor Who to be sidelined for a good twenty years or so. A wilderness of untold possibilities hammered down into a mere war with Daleks. And we see the aftershocks of that war to this very day with The Name of The Doctor! At the time, Lawrence Miles, who despite his Morrison fandom is very much closer to the Alan Moore of Doctor Who (if only because calling him the John Byrne of Doctor Who would be disingenuous [besides, Garry Russell exists]), called the show out for blatantly nicking his then ten year old ideas. In particular, many a Doctor Who fan has noted the similarities between Moffat era Who and the ideas of Miles Who.
David: It’s a rare instance where I’m somewhat sympathetic to the big bosses, both in the executional sense that you can’t really have the regular version of Doctor Who deal with even the implications of the Chaotic Limiters as a means of warfare strategy nevermind the other ways ‘conflict’ as we know it becomes something obtuse and bizarre in that setup, and the narrative sense that if you’re doing a star-spanning mythology-driven time travel show for decades you’re inevitably going to have something called a Time War, that’s just a given. But…yeah, no, you can’t have it be the biggest thing that happened while you’re gone and then have it be the most important thing that happened when you come back and not fess up to drawing the A to B.
Sean: There are certainly some ideas that work better in novels rather than on television, especially television that has to frequently reuse sets, actors, and occasional costumes. Sometimes, it’s so cheap, they have to settle for bubble wrap. But at the same time, there’s a temptation to see the thing in all its horrific glory. Such is the case with the “...of the Doctor” Trilogy (or, I suppose, quadrilogy, but Night’s really just the opening of Day.)
David: Very philosophical, Sean.
First up is the prelude disguised as a finale in The Name of The Doctor, which is Fine. It’s Fine. I liked it pretty well. From most other writers, it would have been one of their better Doctor Whos. From Moffat, it’s Fine.
Sean: That’s the general reputation it has these days… But back in the day, it was extremely controversial for making Clara Oswald the most important, Mary Sue Companion of them all who retcons everything to be about her because she’s oh, so brilliant. How dare Stephen Moffat do such a thing! That hack! That monster! And so-forth.
There’s certainly a case to be made that Moffat at this time was short changing Clara as a character due to the nature of her arc being about how treating people as mysteries is wrong and a bad thing to do. But at the same time, a lot of the approach was to frame Clara as a mystery while continuously highlighting that she’s a person. The reason why she was 'born to save Doctor Who' was because she was the sort of person who would jump into a rip in time and space to save Doctor Who. She isn’t a weapon designed, she’s a human being.
Of course, that doesn’t change that this isn’t really all that great. There’s not a lot to get out of this one other than the delightful Strax returning and discovering Glasgow. Even the return of River Song feels more like an epilogue to her story rather than its ending.
David: If The Name of the Doctor has one thing going for it, it is indeed that this is PEAK Strax content. As for Clara, I have severely mixed feelings.
I would have been shocked almost beyond belief if she HADN’T been called a Mary Sue, because dipshit term for dipshits though it may be, she’s a pretty uncomplicatedly decent and affable person who takes over the companion role halfway through a series, after three of Amy and Rory and in their Doctor’s final run, to turn out to be the most important of all who saves all of creation as the climax of her first big adventure. I get it, I get thematically what Moffat was doing there - even if it ultimately turns out to be yet another red herring as to what’s really going on with The Silence and alla that - but I can’t get around that it’s incredibly unsatisfying.
However, Jenna Coleman herself has really grown on me such that none of this has translated to antipathy towards Clara as a character, and I’m very curious where she goes from here when she’s done what would seem in theory the most important thing she could possibly do right upfront. I’d be frankly skeptical of the answer being ‘much interesting’ after how badly my expectations were dashed with Martha, and Donna being another ending that works thematically but is far sketchier still in execution. But a lot of my biggest Whohead friends and acquaintances LOVE whatever it is that goes on to happen with Clara so I’ll trust the best is yet to come.
Sean:
David: Just look how happy he is! And I also have to give credit that the answer of what of The Doctor is actually buried is an inspired one. But ultimately Name just feels like it was so interested in being a fakeout that it didn’t entirely bother to set up being a satisfying thing outside of said fakeout.
Sean: That said, I do have ideas for an entire book of short stories about various Clara echoes dealing with Doctor Who’s bullshit.
David: What immediately followed WAS enormously satisfying to me though, and shockingly so given my lack of reference for it…but we have something else to discuss first.
Sean: Yes, because as we approach the end of the first fifty years of Doctor Who, we must venture onwards to its beginnings with An Unearthly Child!
David: I’ve been hit-or-miss at best when it comes to Classic Who, but An Unearthly Child is great. Pure introduction and exposition, but a chilling atmosphere anchored by William Hartnell’s so very old, so very young Doctor as the sketchiest motherfucker who ever did live. Nearly doubled over when we heard the TARDIS for the first time btw, I’m not going to say figuring out that sound design day one was the main reason above all others it made it to 50 years but it couldn’t have hurt.
Sean: Oh David, you have no idea. While I only had David watch the first serial of the Classic era, the following serial, Doctor Who and the Cave of Skulls, features our titular character almost bash a man’s head in with a rock. And that’s not even getting into The Edge of Destruction. While many later eras would frame the first Doctor Who as the wise sage who knows what he’s doing and gets the others in line (sometimes with sexism as demonstrated by the rather crap 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors [which had to use footage from fucking Shada because they couldn’t get Tom Baker to show up]), he is perhaps one of the shadiest mother fuckers around. (And don’t get me started on the racist aspects of his incarnation.)
David: Oh even his limited role in The Three Doctors was enough to make clear to me he’s no patient patrician; if he speaks with certain clarity, it’s the timeless wisdom of the enfant terrible. He’s the little bastard who came first, that may give him a spiritual seniority position of sorts but he’s this weirdo back when they were even worse.
Sean: There’s this imagined era of Doctor Who before they got the TARDIS and started calling themselves “The Doctor” where they’re an absolute shitbag who goes around doing shitty things like any other college dropout from a society of bureaucrats. Admittedly, the Hartnell era rarely lives up to the promise of this episode. It has stories that are as atmospheric, as dark, but never quite like this. (Susan especially gets bogged down into screaming, not helped by this going into her later incarnations.) There are some that surpass it, but a lot of the time the show is, well, crap.
But then, such is the case with all of Doctor Who. But before we get into that, we have a new Doctor Who for David to talk about.
David: I haven’t seen Paul McGann’s Doctor before, I don’t know much of anything about the movie, I don’t know his subsequent personal relationship with the franchise. But y’know what? It was cool as hell of him to come back to do this little thing in The Night of the Doctor and he does a great job with it. I feel for this last bastion of Old Who trying one more time to be the kids’ show character, failing, and surrendering in the face of horrors to become a horror himself for what slim greater good he can still accomplish. Lovely to give this forsaken take that tragic dignity of a proper ending.
Sean: The thing about Paul McGann is that he’s technically been playing Doctor Who non-stop since the late 90s. As mentioned a lot in this series, there’s a company that does audio adventures known as Big Finish. The company is known for getting basically every single former cast member back to do some work for them (even roping in Christopher Eccleston, John Hurt, and Richard Franklin). And, if I’m being completely blunt, having the same three to seven writers write everything for the past twenty some odd years at a pace akin to most Superhero writers (for work that’s often longer than an average superhero comic) has resulted in a rather bad line of audio dramas that occasionally muster being of quality. It’s largely resulted in work that has been of a lesser quality than a short ten minute bit by Steven Moffat. Hell, a lot of it’s worse than the Chris Chibnall you’ve seen so far.
David: Well that sounds like a perfect monkeys paw doesn’t it, the adventures of your favorites never end but they all gotta be crap by the same few chumps forever. The ‘big two at its worst’ of Who, I suppose it not only had to exist but in a way transcending the scope of any given era. Do you have anything to say about Night itself, or is it onwards to the main attraction?
Sean: The first thing we must note about The Day of the Doctor is that a lot of fans don’t care for it because it was an actual story rather than a museum piece that highlighted all the previous eras of Doctor Who.
David: The irony there in particular. I messaged Eliza and Ritesh right after seeing it, and I said roughly the same thing to both of them:
‘I can feel right in my guts that people were weird about this one.’
Sean: Doctor Who fans are always weird about the show. In this case, they couldn’t quite make out that this was a chamber piece about the most fucked up TARDIS crew having a conversation about why they hate each other. In this case, it’s Doctor Who talking to Doctor Who about why they both hate Doctor Who for killing the Time Lords.
David: It’s a funny way you’ve 100% accurately described it, because more than the movie(s?) of the past, I’m sure? This plays as Doctor Who: The Movie, despite that most of it is 'just' about Doctors Who, Who, and War having a smarm-off with the Zygons, who I’m informed were Tennant’s personal condition for returning.
Sean: Yeah, that’s going to happen again in… [checks watch] three series time.
David: Speaking of which, holy crap so this was apparently pretty much all improvised by Moffat in a rush? I get this couldn’t have been a childhood fantasy story for him cooking in the background of his entire life sonic screwdriver subroutine-style when this is playing off of and moving forward from RTD’s themes and plots, but this isn’t just fanservice bombast, this is a really really REALLY damn taut adventure story and character drama that feels like his most labored-over in some time. Mind-blowing he had to throw this together once he could pin down who was going to be available for what, even as much of it in the strictest sense comes out of left field this feels like where it’s always been going. The perfect thematic mirroring by the B-tier baddies, the dozen throwaway big ideas, the inversion of the typical ‘look at your scary future’ story by having Hurt, the “terrible old man” inside the Doctor, mortified and horrified by his dorky upcoming incarnations and what they say about how he’s processed the trauma he’s about to visit upon himself. This isn’t a miracle episode because where it’s all your old favorites coming back together to do the stuff they like, it’s a miracle episode because it succeeds so wildly with all your old favorites when this had every excuse to be a braindead cash-in with the circumstances at hand.
(Additionally, I respected that 10 is brushed off as 'just another hero' to put over 11 as the extra-real Doctor, because hey, he's your current guy you're supposed to be rooting for the further adventures, or at least singular remaining adventure, of.)
(But as My Doctor I'm glad Tennant got the last word in edgewise over Smith.)
Sean: I’m pretty sure they spent most of the budget on John Hurt and convinced the BBC to give them more money by promising to make it a 3-D film.
Among the more controversial decisions on the part of fans who want all the Doctor Whos to show up (even the dead ones) was the decision to limit it to just Tom Baker at the end as the mysterious Caretaker. An absolutely charming handshake between the two eras of the show, where things can move forward into strange and fascinating directions.
David: Baker showing up was actually where it didn’t quite lose me, but maybe knocked me out of it a little bit. The last few minutes are still very good, but it was the one part where the lines blurred so heavily between this as an episode and this as an anniversary special that I felt discombobulated. It’d probably work better for me on rewatch.
Sean: But first, one last bit of house cleaning with The Time of the Doctor.
David: Time I suppose also suffers alongside Name for being on either side of Day, but not anywhere near as much, this one was a winner. Admittedly, Doctor Who’s final epic adventure happening in parallel to the totally mundane day of a companion and their melancholy intersections is necessarily gonna be at least a tiny bit of a letdown as a straight-laced finale when it is not, in fact, Doctor Who’s final epic adventure, and I might’ve appreciated a little more time spent with him having to have a real community for once…
…wait, am I talking myself out of liking this episode as much? I don’t THINK I am, I definitely liked it a lot as I was watching it, and Smith gets to exit with grace and panache even if I preferred Tennant to the last. It handles the resolution of the stuff with The Silence about as well as this show ever has that kind of extended plot. But as I really spell it all out, it feels like there’s something missing? If Name was simply Fine, Time was Good but feels lacking for not being Great when something in me says it could have been.
Sean: In many regards, the Matt Smith era as a whole has felt this way for me.
David: Damn, Sean. Damn. You are dead on the money here. I enjoyed 11, I enjoyed a lot of this period, but for all the 10 era’s own weaknesses were clear it hung together to me in a way this simply didn’t all-in-all. Its peaks illuminate the brutal depths of its valleys, and as high it shoots it rarely reaches true joyous transcendence the way RTD as showrunner managed to occasionally grab by the skin of his teeth.
Sean: It might be because I know what’s about to happen, what the Capaldi era of the show is going to do and how far it’s going to go with these concepts in strange, fascinating ways. Even at the very first episode, the sea change is going to be apparent. Time of the Doctor is very much like that in microcosm. The problem is, I can’t talk about the sheer number of ways that it’s lacking. The future consumes the past, as they say.
But, at the end of the day, having revisited the show’s past both through your eyes as well as Christa’s more sympathetic gaze, I still quite like the Matt Smith era more than the David Tennant one. I like the atmosphere it projects, how it moves ever closer to aesthetics I enjoy. You can see why Grant liked this era quite a bit at the time, but when the next one comes a knocking…
Things are about to change.
David: All fair! And so they shall - times change, and so must we. But we’ll never forget when The Doctor was him: the one in a bowtie. Bowties are cool.
Sean: Hey…
Next Time: Temporary lapse of memory. And we will not melt him with acid. Ever microwaved a lasagne without pricking the film on top? And this is my spoon. What about your coffee? Robbing a whole bank. I lived among otters once for a month. My granny used to put things on Tumblr.