Whowatch Part 17
ACHEWOOD'S BACK. And Onstad...seems to have bought into some chump AI nonsense, but he at least appears to be keeping that a separate stream and restraining it to his own material. Finally signed up to Patreon for keeping up with that, and while I was there subscribed to Elizabeth Sandifer, Cam Marshall, Michael Kupperman, and Gretchen Felker-Martin. Further recommendations would be welcome, though not too many since I do have to pay real money that I make at my job for these.
hahaha so real shitshow with the Eisners, huh
At time of writing, I'm less than 24 hours out from catching Shin Kamen Rider - unlike Ultraman I have some past experience here, so hopes are high.
The Deadly Assassin
The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar
Under the Lake/Before the Flood
The Girl Who Waited
The Woman Who Lived
The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion
Sleep No More
David: As we reach the back third of Moffat’s tenure, Sean and I are rejoined by Elizabeth Edwards to help us answer: IS THE DOCTOR A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO SAVE THE PRESIDENT?
Sean: Sadly, no. Only get framed for his assassination.
Elizabeth: Sean! David! Delighted to be back to talk about my second presidential conspiracy episode of Doctor Who with you all (and also some more recent stuff I guess)! Shall we dive in?
Sean: Certainly. The Deadly Assassin is, in many regards, one of the most controversial stories in the entirety of Classic Doctor Who, arguably the catalyst from which the whole dang show got canceled. It’s also an absolute blast. As some of you know, I have a love for Paranoid Thrillers about people being hunted down by the government for things they don’t have the full context of until it’s too late. In this case, Doctor Who has a Dead Zone vision of the President of Gallifrey being assassinated by… Doctor Who.
Elizabeth: Everyone talks about the third episode of The Deadly Assassin — for good reason! — but I think it’s also worth noting that it has an all-timer opening episode for a Classic Who serial. Director David Maloney keeps the pace utterly frenetic, with the camera in near-constant motion, and the editing building to a chaotic flurry, intercutting the Doctor’s path through Gallifrey with newscasts, menacing teases of the Master’s presence, the introduction of Castellan (who’s the best btw), and the Doctor’s premonitions of the assassination. The whole episode manages to maintain a remarkable degree of tension for a political thriller set in a lime-green low-budget version of Richard Donner’s Fortress of Solitude (which, in fairness, Maloney makes the most of, shooting predominately from either low angles to convey the guards’ power or from extreme high-angles, such as when he pulls back to reveal the sniper rifle).
David: Timeline-wise, Richard Donner’s Fortress of Solitude was the high-budget version of this (and you can absolutely tell that’s what it is - direct inspiration of not, something was in the air)! And I loved this introduction as a means of casual worldbuilding for the Time Lords - the obvious stuff sure, but also gleefully telling details like the lot of them slowly, leisurely stepping up in the wake of an assassination to double-check that their president who they just watched get shot is actually dead. You immediately understand perfectly how this is where The Doctor came from, and why they spend 2000 years running screaming in the other direction.
Of course, I know the subject of the Time Lords in this episode is at least some of that controversy Sean alluded to, specifically in the form of an infamous essay by Jan Vincent Rudzki asking What Has Happened To The Magic of Doctor Who?, I’m told bemoaning that the Time Lords are in actuality a bunch of stuffy boring assholes.
Elizabeth: The Time Lords being stuffy assholes is the best part of the whole thing, direction aside! The constant jockeying for status, and the seemingly endless contest of who can be more condescending to whom, gets some fantastic laughs throughout — I particularly loved the math tutor-turned-politician scolding his former-pupil-turned-newscaster: “You had plenty of time to pepper me with questions at the Academy, good day!”
David: I would argue the Time Lords seeming cool at first and then turning out to be loser assholes effectively parallels the experience of getting to know The Doctor themselves. But I suspect that’s a degree of engagement with the text that wasn’t going on in there, if only because I refuse to believe an episode in which Tom Baker says “Who is the Master? He's my sworn arch-enemy. A fiend who glories in chaos and destruction” can be defined as a moment where Doctor Who stops being sufficiently arch.
Sean: Oh cool, I don’t have to explain that bonkers essay. So I guess that leaves me with the moment that arguably led to Doctor Who starting its path towards cancellation. Which means I have to talk about… Mary Whitehouse.
(I have no idea who photoshopped this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Lawrence Miles.)
Mary Whitehouse is someone who can best be described as ‘What if Helen Lovejoy, but worse.’ She was one of those people who had no media literacy, hated anything that didn’t support the government or the Christian Faith, and generally was too boring to be anything other than a bully. In short, Mary was a useful idiot the Thatcher government used to attack the BBC for being anything other than a propaganda machine for Thatcherism.
With regards to Doctor Who, she took umbrage at the cliffhanger for the third episode. Specifically, the fact that Doctor Who ended the episode by being drowned. Mary claimed this would result in children deciding it would be fun to drown each other. And, well…
WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!
This resulted in producer Philip Hinchcliff getting sacked and replaced by Gareth Roberts’ favorite producer Graham Williams (not that should be held against Williams, as his era has a lot of charm to it). And just when they had aired what is commonly considered to be the greatest episode of Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang, wherein Doctor Who must do battle with the alien race known as the Chinese, led by a Chinese man played by a white guy doing a Fu Manchu bit.
Elizabeth: So here’s the thing about The Deadly Assassin and Mary Whithouse: this is an extremely provocative piece of television, to the point where it practically invites a moral panic, but the BBC’s reaction to having pissed her off should have been a round of champagne, not a clumsy restructuring of its television drama showrunners.
Robert Holmes, on the bicentennial of the United States, writes a story where the Doctor takes the place of Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination, having been framed by a group of high-ranking government conspirators; a story in which he has to fight for his life in a jungle environment whilst pursued by a hunter using guerilla tactics; and a story in which it’s revealed that the Presidential incumbent plans to tamper with an election to keep himself in power and then change the constitution to prevent any threat to said power.
This is a script that’s salivating at the idea of picking a fight; a script with a thematic preoccupation with clinging desperately to life & power past the point when that life & power should be gracefully let go of, the Master’s rotting corpse implicitly paralleling both Gallifrey’s tangled bureaucracy and the rotting American empire. And, having gotten the hysterical reaction it clearly invites from a typical moral-panic peddler — the BBC fires the showrunner, slashes the budget, and imposes a kid-friendly mandate???
Sean: Holmes, it should also be noted, was a massive Tory and probably voted for Thatcher. Still, he was the sort to respond to wanting to pay less taxes by arguing that the solution was to overthrow the government while quoting Karl Marx.
That’s literally the plot of the first story Holmes wrote upon being given that kid-friendly mandate. There’s an entire bit where a man is informed that his dad’s corpse is worth more than his life savings.
David: Doctor Who: It truly can be anything! From a pulse-pounding, mostly-silent thriller in which The Doctor must survive a psychic clown attack, to…that thing you just described.
Sean: What a terrible curse to have.
Elizabeth: The nearly dialogue-free Dead Zone sequence is excellent, with Holmes investing a tremendous amount of trust into Maloney’s visual storytelling and being rewarded with a series of sharply-choreographed, dynamically-staged fights that feel far more real than the typical quarter-minute fights the show provides. And for all that modern Doctor Who looks slicker and higher-budget than the classic series, there isn’t a single visual effect in the 2005 show as impressive as a World War I biplane doing a fucking midair flip before raining fire down on Tom Baker.
David: I suspect a perfect example of the old-school mode of “everything dangerous looked cooler and more real in TV and movies once upon a time, and this is because they were taking a chance on actually killing someone.”
Elizabeth: They sure dropped some guy dressed in Tom Baker’s clothes 15 feet off a tree branch!
Sean: Not to mention drowning the poor bastard for an entire week. (Seriously, that was the fucking argument.)
Elizabeth: Poor media literacy is like death and taxes.
Sean: One could argue there’s a relationship between a culture with poor media literacy skills and one on the dangerous edge of fascism. But that’s for another time, because we’ve got The Return of Davros!
David: One minor question first: was Assassin where they settled on 12 regenerations, and was there a reason why that was the number they picked besides ‘lol, surely we’ll never get there’.
Sean: Yes, because they wanted to have the Master come back, but actor Roger Delgado had a sudden and tragic case of the not alives.
David: I like the implication that The Master gets killed all the time by Time Lord standards. They suck at this!
Elizabeth: Only The Master can match The Doctor’s sheer failson energy.
Sean: Baring accidents often refers to forgetting to unplug something. And, well, accidents happen.
Elizabeth: The reason for every big change Robert Holmes made to the canon was “fuck it, right now it’ll make my life easier.”
Sean: Also, if you pay attention to The Brain of Morbius, the implication is that Doctor Who is currently in the midst of their penultimate regeneration with Tom Baker. But only continuity obsessed nerds would think about those implications, and they were too busy being prissy that the Time Lords weren’t omnipotent gods who control the universe. Hell, a few of them are still prissy about that.
Elizabeth: Why would you want the Doctor’s native people to be a bunch of uncomplicated hero types? The first thing they did after being introduced was kill Patrick Troughton! The only reason they show up after that episode is because they’re a bunch of fuck-ups who can’t handle their own messes! They’re the bad guys!!
Sean: They’re the space police and they’ve press ganged Doctor Who into joining the CIA. What, do they need to kill a companion in order to be considered a genuine baddie? They literally have exactly one person there who isn’t a complete fuck up, and that’s only by virtue of Doctor Who deciding to fuck off and do literally anything else other than mill about being crap.
David: “They’re the space police” unfortunately I think you all have kinda answered your own question there. Omega’s cool though. An asshole, but he’s still cool.
Sean: I’ve heard interesting things about this chap called the Other, though I think he goes by Merlin these days…
Elizabeth: The lower-ranked you are on Gallifrey, the likelier you are to have redeeming qualities. Castellan (who, again, is the best) gets ribbed by his colleagues for his area of expertise being the “plebians'' of Gallifrey; it seems like he’s generally on Shabogan clean-up duty and has only found himself in a crisis of this scale by accident. He’s low enough in the government to find the CIA’s interference in the historical record extremely irritating, while the President and the like freely rewrite the historical narrative to suit their pleasure on a moment’s notice.
Sean: Castellan’s Space Columbo. What’s not to love?
Anyways, The only other chair on Skaro.
David: “Where is The Doctor?”
“Right where he always is. Right behind you and one step ahead.”
What a cool episode of this sci-fi show meant to be enjoyable by children opening on an audience surrogate kid being abandoned to die out of spite by our hero. Not sarcastic! That rules! Perfect opening!
Elizabeth: The Magician’s Apprentice is Moffat tapping into a time-honored tradition for the premiere of the current lead’s second season (see also: The Impossible Astronaut, Spyfall), of ostentatiously throwing money at the screen as a big ‘We’re back!’ party. But while in Series Six, that high-budget was going towards a story that genuinely aspired to a season finale-type scale, here it’s being tossed around to bring back The Shadow Proclamation for forty seconds and to have Peter Capaldi do some guitar riffs on a tank. It’s… kind of weird? Why is this much money being thrown at the screen for this little?
This is one where the story’s a little odd outside of the historical context. Back in 2015 when this aired, everyone’s impression of Capaldi’s Doctor was still frozen on ‘cranky, austere authority figure’ after the whole marketing campaign for Series 8 revolved around the idea of going “into darkness” — while Death in Heaven had the great “I’m an idiot!” bit, that was more of a reaffirmation of his general Doctor-ness than it was a clear definition of what Capaldi’s Doctor would look like going forward. So Moffat decides to hide his reboot of the character in plain sight. After an opening scene where Capaldi gets to be charming opposite a kid before the situation turns, he builds an entire episode around Capaldi’s absence, leading to Capaldi’s grand entrance, so out-of-character for 12 as we know him that Clara exclaims, “This isn’t you!”
Moffat allows us to believe that this is because the Doctor’s overwhelmed with guilt over abandoning a child Davros, hard overreacting to his previous grave demeanor. But as it turns out? As the Doctor says, “I didn’t come here because I was ashamed. A little shame never hurt anyone.” But by the time it’s revealed that the Doctor came out of the kindness of his heart, the audience has forgotten that the Doctor’s newly relaxed demeanor was theoretically a weird divergence from the standard, and Capaldi is able to smoothly settle into his new standard performance register.
Sean: And at its heart is a pair of two handers between some of the best actors Doctor Who has ever got. On the one hand, you have Missy and Clara exploring the sewers of Skaro, whose screams can be heard for eternity. On the other hand, Davros and Doctor Who discussing their worldviews, beliefs, and motivations. And, being me, I love that “The Doctor” is a role Doctor Who plays. “The Doctor” is, ultimately, what Doctor Who wants to be. And sometimes, he’s lucky enough to get to play that part well.
David: The guitar riffs of it all are in my opinion a perfectly logical character outgrowth from the aforementioned “I’m an idiot!” breakthrough and renewed bond with Clara/us pitiful humans. But I personally adore the implication that this latest round of Prophesied Inescapable Doom simply reawakened his indefatigable boner for all things perilous and now that he’s had a jump-start he’s Doctor Who again.
The comedy of it - and the perfection of the Missy & Clara double act, the control freak and the one freak too twisty and malicious for its own sake to tamp down as they journey through Dalek Tartarus - aside, the Davros setup is wonderful to me because it’s basically playing a game with viewership expectations of how a modern Doctor Who reboot is going to work. Yes, yes, he’s a cartoon monster who feels passionately that it’s time to detonate the reality bomb, and also his original move was playing on liberal sympathies to his advantage so anything remotely conciliatory or understanding he says is inherently suspect. But this is the sexy, nuanced modern revamp, so even if he’s hardly gonna make a face turn, maybe he’s not entirely screwing with The Doctor? Maybe there’s a layer of complication and humanity to be unearthed, a melancholy connection between foes to lend this rivalry a fresh modern dimension of empathy?
Answer: lol fuck you he’s the reality bomb guy. So great.
Sean: Davros is an absolute space nazi about the whole affair, right down to his appreciation of Doctor Who saving Galifrey. And Doctor Who responds to the sudden, but inevitable betrayal with “So while you thought you won, I just started a revolution among the literal shit of Skaro and now your creations are drowning. In shit. Your sewers are revolting, is what I’m saying.” Amazing.
David: And Missy being so happy to meet him! Delightful, Missy and Clara carry the bulk of Moffat’s beloved narrative loop-de-loops and triple-subversions this round while The Doctor and Davros have a nice long chat, but it’s at every turn the most playfully charming version of that and every thread comes together totally organically with the final showdown with the ‘Dalek’. This isn’t all-timer Moffat, but it’s REAL good Moffat starting as the ultimate ‘The Doctor sucks’ story and ending as a perfect ‘actually The Doctor is the best.’
Sean: If I’m being honest, that’s kind of how I feel about the vast majority of what we watched for this entry of the WhoWatch. It’s not the best the people here have done, but it’s still some truly fantastic stuff.
Elizabeth: After Moffat more-or-less nailed the RTD season formula with Series 8, it definitely feels like he came into Series 9 with an attitude of “go for broke! Experiment! We’re good enough at this that even if we slightly screw up it’ll still be solid!” While he exerted really careful editorial control over Series 8, micromanaging 12 & Clara’s character development in each episode, here he extends the writing staff a lot more freedom. Peter Harness gets 90 minutes for a spiky political thriller! Gatiss gets to do a formalist Statement episode! A two-parter with two distinct writers for each half! I like all these experiments, I’m glad they exist, but it does mean that as a whole Series 9 feels a lot less like a single, coherent story (even if the themes of doubling, duality, masks, and identity are present throughout).
Sean: So anyways, Under the Lake/Before the Flood is the worst story of the Moffat era.
David: I wouldn’t go that far, but I can only be 100% certain I watched it because I took a few notes, which are headlined by the fact that the best part is the way Capaldi purrs “Orion’s”. Not bad enough to fail imo but it doesn’t even reach my ‘one standard unit of Doctor Who’ standby judgment. The bit with the sound cutting in and out was great though, at least until the near-victim suddenly turned into Daredevil, what the hell
Sean: It’s an episode that’s crap, both in narrative and in the way it makes you feel while watching it. It insults its audience by explaining things they were assumed to have known about not even one episode ago, has a truly mean spirited tone to it that is just unpleasant to watch, and I hate everything about it.
Like, many people think the pre-credits opening where Doctor Who explains the Bootstrap Paradox is one of the great moments of the Capaldi era, as if that hasn’t been a core factor in multiple recent Doctor Who stories. That the show hasn’t assumed its audience smart enough to figure that out for close to a decade. Fuck off!
David: It did make me think of Justin describing this era as ‘educational’, but I don’t quite imagine that’s how he meant it.
Elizabeth: This episode. This. Episode. When I first saw this in 2015, I despised it. Utterly, utterly loathed it. Series 8 had been the first season of Doctor Who that I watched as it was coming out weekly, and it had been incredible. After a solid-but-somewhat-poorly-weighted premiere, having to sit through two hours of Whithouse’s hot air felt genuinely insulting. (Thank god for the rest of the season.) When showing my partner Doctor Who for the first time, we watched every episode except for this two-parter, which I chose to spare them. On rewatch? Still terrible! That being said, I’m not nearly as offended by its terribleness — my tastes have thankfully expanded since I was in middle school, and I therefore find myself significantly less emotionally invested in the question of whether a given episode of Doctor Who sucks or doesn’t.
That being said, damn does this thing suck. This is a Season 7B story stretched to 90 minutes with a severely miscast lead. You’ve got the Doctor obsessing over the idea that once you’ve seen something it’s permanently enshrined in history, Clara talking about the Doctor whisking her away from her boring life as if she’s Rose and not the person who killed her boyfriend with a sonic, and the main moral quandary of the story is, “Is the Doctor too cavalier with the lives of civilians?”, a question that was boring the last two times Whithouse asked it.
The Doctor’s characterization, however, is what tips it from ‘normal Doctor Who bad’ to ‘don’t rewatch this, seriously, don’t,’ bad. Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor is all rapidly-delivered off-handed comments following a circuitous, almost ADHD-ish logic, allowing him to toss off small one-liners in the middle of dramatic monologues without it affecting the pace. Peter Capaldi, however, belongs to the David Tennant school of rigorously communicating every shift in thought through your performance, which leads him to over-egg material like the Beethoven’s Fifth monologue, making the whole thing seem stupidly self-impressed as opposed to tongue-in-cheek.
David: You’re both right but also this just isn’t pronouncedly or excitingly bad enough for me to rank it as nearly among the worst of the worst. I just think it’s in that In The Forest of the Night ‘so this one’s sorta crap, huh?’ zone.
Elizabeth: I will happily grant that this two-parter is better than roughly 90% of the Chibnall era. This story doesn’t have a better reason to exist than “Moffat needed a shooting block free to go make The Abominable Bride at the same time that Whithouse needed a paycheck,” but nor do Doctor Who Series 11-13.
Sean: It’s not hard to be better than roughly 90% of the Chibnall era. That’s the Late Stage Dan Jurgens Era of Doctor Who.
Anywho, Arya Stark is delightful.
David: I don’t have a single comment on The Girl Who Died, but that’s not to say it’s bad. It’s totally effective “Doctor Who’s gotta inspire a town to fight Space Odin, and also Capaldi gets to give a really good speech the way he does” material that I for sure enjoyed. The Woman Who Lived on the other hand…that’s the good stuff.
Elizabeth: In a season less concerned with delivering high-quality meat-and-potatoes Doctor Who than any of its predecessors, favoring the experimental over the formulaic, this episode stands out as an immaculate execution of the classic base-under-siege formula. It’s pleasantly light on its feet, Mathieson’s efficient writing complimented by Ed Bazalgette’s sprightly direction, the poignant moments play well, and Ashildr is rendered distinctive in a short enough timeframe to function as a solid baseline against which the audience can compare Me. Maybe the easiest episode of the Capaldi era to throw on for a fun hour of TV aside from Mummy on the Orient Express.
Sean: I also quite like The Girl Who Died without having much to say about it. I did like the bit where Doctor Who talks about the baby’s view of the world and the inherent moral terror of a cruel cosmos from a baby’s point of view. Also, Benny Hill makes everything better.
The Woman Who Lived is very much a decent riff on The Man From Earth, but with a Lion Man and fart jokes involved.
David: The easy in is ‘oh she’s like a Bad Doctor Who, she’s this adventurer with companions who’d burn it all to run away!’, and that’s well and good. But the killer bit to me is she’s set up in Girl as essentially The Doctor’s ideal of humanity - brave, clever, caring, a teller of stories - and once she gets a pinch of The Doctor in her, she becomes a monster who betrays every single one of those virtues.
Sean: But enough about Clara, what do you think of Me?
David: The comparison didn’t escape me! Though if anything I think that description might’ve applied a little better to Rose; she was waiting for the opportunity to suck, Clara was I get the sense always gonna in her own way. Me’s so brutal a puncturing of the series’ often-threadbare but still inherent idealism - she didn’t share the other patch with her great love or her kids! That’s so fucked up! - and in the end all that saves the world is that as time marches forward, even apathy eventually has to give way. Also A+ on never saying what was in the torn-out pages, their mere existence was disturbing enough.
Elizabeth: When I first saw the Woman Who Lived, I thought it was an episode with a great first half that was let down by a mediocre second half. On this watch, however, I found the perfunctory nature in which the plot’s wrapped up to be part of the story’s fun; Capaldi’s Doctor spends the whole episode entirely uninterested in going through the motions of a “normal” Doctor Who adventure, following Me along mainly as an opportunity to pester her with moral quandaries, so the bathetic introduction of Lion Man plays as a comedic intrusion on the meat of the story (the Doctor skipping straight to “Kill me!”, followed by rushing through a summary of the usual Doctor/villain debates so he can get back to being disappointed at Me, was hilarious). And absent the disappointment of a rushed finish, I wholeheartedly loved it; maybe my favorite non-Moffat episode we saw for today.
It feels like Moffat left Catherine Tregenna’s work alone for the most part, and I think it was a wise call — this doesn’t feel like a conventional Doctor Who story, and it’s the better for it. Tregenna is writing a speculative-fiction two-hander with a cursory sci-fi plot wrapped around it, and Capaldi and Maisie Williams rise to the occasion; Capaldi flits effortlessly between being funny in the background while Me acts as the standard Heroic Protagonist and taking hold of the dramatic reigns to castigate Me for her callousness, while Williams manages to pull off both ‘swashbuckling rogue’ and ‘broken, emotionally hollowed-out figure of tragedy’ with aplomb: I was genuinely moved by her tears and her cracking voice as she pleads, “I want to fly now!”. Their dialogues together are electric. And while the whole episode is very funny, it’s frequently in a far different manner to the usual ‘Moffat-sharpened quip’ mode of things. Sam Swift’s sequences verge on cringe comedy, and the greedy guards who Me summons to incarcerate the Doctor feel arch in an old-school way.
David: I thought Sam Swift was quite a wit tbh.
Elizabeth: You know what they say, David: Big nose, big…
Sean: I don’t think I have much to add to this. I think I should rewatch it again because The Woman Who Lived is one of those Capaldi era stories I don’t often rewatch. Not because I dislike it, but rather because there are other stories–even and especially in this Series–that I want to watch more than this one. But it sounds like a good time.
On that note, Doctor Who vs Zygon ISIS.
David: The Zygon Invasion is fucking trash. Good bits like the two little girls as the high command, The Doctor on the plane again, and panning over to the other trash cans? Sure. But 95% of this is soulless brainless cardboard crap that absolutely ranks among the worst of the worst of Who for me in a way Lake/Flood didn’t come close to. The platonic ideal of what your grandma thinks the show is. That Moffat manages to turn it back around as hard as he does with The Zygon Inversion is one of the most potent testaments to his talents I’ve seen in this entire Whowatch exercise.
Elizabeth: I liked the first half better than the second half this time around.
David: Sean, smile and nod but she may have been replaced by a Zygon, unless you’re about to turn on me too.
Sean: I actually like both parts of this one.
David, regenerating after this moral blow
Elizabeth: I’m BELLOWING with laughter rn.
Can I go last? I wanna hear what you two’ve got to say before I chime in.
David: Well, at least now I can attest to having some freak picks for most-hated along with most-beloved. The whole UNIT troops/friends-and-family sequence though? Felt straight out of Darkplace, and this is the one time I’ll ever say that without meaning it as a compliment.
Sean: The thing most people have opinions about with regards to this two-parter is the speech. It’s a well acted speech about the inherent goodness of Liberalism in the face of radical idealism. But there are so many other bits that are better than this. The way Bonnie fixes her hair to indicate she’s the baddie and no one notices because that’s something Clara absolutely would do. The scene where the drone pilot is forced to bomb her own family and decides she can’t do a war crime. And then having the Murray Gold ‘BE SYMPATHETIC’ music bellowing as the Zygons lead an army of soldiers to their deaths. TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES! Just an absolute delight of a two parter.
And Jenna Coleman is having a ball with this. Bonnie is a truly delightful baddie playing with several levels of expectations of what kind of baddie she is while always remaining somewhat sympathetic, even as she does truly heinous things (oh god, that poor guy in the supermarket). Clara is faced with the only opponent she could never defeat: herself. And Bonnie ultimately loses because she let Clara Oswald into her head. And she never leaves.
Can’t wait for the upcoming novelization!
David: I was wrong before when I said there was only one time I would ever compare something to Darkplace and not mean it as a compliment, the drone pilot scene absolutely also falls in that bucket. Scene after scene of actors struggling mightily with this schlock and failing with equal force until Moffat comes in to do the salvage work of giving everybody real dialogue and clever gimmicks to wrestle with. Loved the speech though! I see what Sean means but it felt to me a more abstract “this is how the entirety of human history and conflict looks like from The Doctor’s elevated alien perspective, dumbed down for their convenience”, a rare moment of them as a self-righteous patrician where they get to get away with it and it feels reasonable.
Elizabeth: See, David, the interesting thing here is that I think Darkplace is actually a really solid reference for the Church scene. All throughout the first half of this story, director Daniel Nettheim is establishing a contrast between the ‘gritty’ handheld scenes with their alarmingly-realistic violence & their visual quotations of Afghanistan/Iraq War imagery and scenes such as the opening address-to-audience and the cutaways to Clara’s apartment, where he adopts an exaggerated style full of Dutch angles and clean camera moves. The invocation of Day of the Doctor in the opening feels like a statement of purpose: this is the sentimental, fairytale logic of the 50th unraveling as it comes into contact with ‘realist’ espionage fiction, where the ceasefire built on a perfect, objective harmony between humans and Zygons comes apart because the bigots in a small American town committed effectively a Zygon pogrom as soon as one of them failed to keep up the pretense of being human. The episode’s playing with fire and it knows it — drawing on the ISIL flag for the Zygon extremist faction is a statement of intent if ever there was one.
And then this fascinating conflict between the competing logics of Moffat-ian fairytales and the Grim, Harsh Geopolitical Realities of 2015 culminates in The Speech, the reconciliation of grim reality and fairytale sentimentality, which I loved when I first watched it and loathed with an unmitigated passion this time around. It’s a staggering piece of sophistry wrapped in rhetorical cleverness; the Doctor’s casual response of “so’s everyone” to Bonnie’s claim that her race was left to fend for themselves is an infuriating false equivalence of the kind absolutely typical to 2015 liberals (to make the point obvious: no, not everyone, the Zygons sure are left to fend for themselves, but the humans have The Doctor on their side to make everything better!) The Doctor bulldozes the idea that there could be any more nuance to political violence than “cruel people creating more cruel people” with astonishing speed only to fall back on the standard plea of ‘forgiveness,’ just one step away from ‘civility.’
Is this all that surprising from Steven Moffat? No, he’s a centre-left reader of The Guardian UK who continues to employ transphobes and once posted a Jordan Peterson quote on Instagram. He doesn’t think that he’s writing a story that callously dismisses the ongoing subjugation of 20 million beings as the cost of peace, he thinks that he’s skewering UNIT just as harshly as he is the Zygons. But in the end, he has Kate back away from the buttons first, which I don’t buy for a second after she spends the prior hour dismissing the Zygon faction as “those idiots” and happily mowing them down (not to mention the willingness to destroy London in Day of the Doctor!).
In his newsletter, Alec Karakatsanis talks about ‘The Big Deception’: namely, the “assumption that punishment policies are pursued for good faith safety reasons”. This is an episode that fully buys into the Big Deception, depicting Rebecca Front’s UNIT officer as a jingoistic thug who fantasizes about indiscriminately bombing the town in which the Zygons have established a command centre and who begins bombing the church with the Doctor and Osgood inside it while somehow still advancing the idea that she and officers like her are pursuing these violent policies as a result of substantiated concerns for public safety, not because the idea of harming defenseless civilians gives them a war-boner.
Sean: In short, it’s a well crafted piece of Labour Propaganda and anti-revolutionary screed written and produced in 2015, right around the time Donald Trump was still considered a joke.
David: Put like that, you’re both absolutely right and I feel embarrassed for having bought into the ‘elevated genre trappings’ argument I put up earlier as easily as I did, even with Capaldi selling it.
Elizabeth: In fairness, so did I when I first watched it, and it’s not like nobody was voicing these complaints — Eruditorum Press’s Jack Graham eviscerated this episode within days of it airing. I read the piece, attempted to listen to its points in good faith, and ultimately concluded, “he’s overreacting, it’s drama! And it’s good!” Eight years later… hoo, boy, egg on my face.
Sean: We were all young once.
David: Still the best part in both episodes though by sheer virtue of ‘I can tell a human person wrote and cared about this’. Wait though, there was that scene with the two Claras and the ‘lie detector’, that was so great and didn’t also carry skeevy political implications, nevermind that was overall the best bit.
Elizabeth: And hey, that Peter Capaldi can give a pretty decent performance when he wants to.
David: I’ve got a chance to redeem myself though, because next up in the Robot of Sherwood ‘so of all episodes, THIS is the one David’s got some thoughts on’ category is Sleep No More. Which I thought was fine if not stellar until the last couple minutes, and now think is if not one of the best episodes of Doctor Who, one of the most layered and interesting.
Sean: ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
Elizabeth: Hell yeah all three of us are Sleep No More sickos, you gotta love it. Gatiss was really trying for A Statement, with this one — if you hadn’t already clocked it halfway into the episode, he drops a Macbeth quote. This is Gatiss talking about Society, The Media, Bigotry, all those heavy and portentous topics, all wrapped in a 21st-century spin on Tales of the Crypt.
(Question for both of you — is this episode canonical? I vote ‘no’; I think everyone fully dies at the end of this one)
Sean: Canon is sheep shit!
David: Agreed, though I vote ‘yes’ on the assumption humanity simply continued to have a real lousy time of it in the 38th century.
Elizabeth: “The Great Catastrophe.” Shudders.
Sean: Yeah, the ‘India and Japan are now the same thing’ bit (aside from it being completely illogical on any level) is one of the foibles of this delightful story.
Elizabeth: The bit that really gets me is that Gatiss has Chopra refer to their mission as “colonizing” the station, only for Nagata to chasten him not to bring his politics into things, implying that Gatiss has thought this Indo-Japanese history through in enough detail to decide that Japan presumably conquered India after tectonic shifts slammed them into one another, but did not at any time during this brainstorm think “hmm… does this seem a little… simplistic? Shallow? Reductive? Absolutely goddamn bonkers?”
Sean: The fact of the matter is Mark Gatiss is someone who is… very fond of Hammer Horror. In the sense that he was a writer who was partially responsible for The League of Gentlemen character “Mr. Blackface Monster Man What Kidnaps Women For His Sick Pleasure.” And, also, The Blind Banker. As a result, you have an episode that continues the long and rather troublesome trend of science fiction fetishizing Asian cultures. From the manga/anime references in Star Trek: The Next Generation to the various aesthetic choices of the Cyberpunk movement all the way to, well, all of Firefly, you have several stories that aren’t so much engaged with cultures as using them for fetishism. India and Japan aren’t actual cultures here anymore than they were in Turn Left or Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. They’re just set dressing for the science fiction mucus men to happen.
And, credit where it’s due, the science fiction mucus men are a delight. My god, what a horrific, monstrous design on them. And Reece Shearsmith (of League of Gentlemen and Inside No. 9 fame [as an aside, can I just say the Bus episode might just be one of the most unsettling pieces of television I’ve ever seen]) making his proper Doctor Who debut is an absolute delight. Jumping from manic to monstrous with the simply twitch of an eye.
Elizabeth: Reece Shearsmith joins the venerable ranks of Simon Pegg, Helen McCrory, and indeed Mark Gatiss in relishing the opportunity to play a Classic Doctor Who Baddie, each line delivered more quiveringly and pathetically than the last. I bet he had a blast getting shot to death by Elaine Tan.
David: So this doesn’t fully have the kick of the best of Who - it’s often spooky but rarely scary, and a lot of what I think works about it is in the category of ‘this seemed a bit half-baked ON PURPOSE’ which is always a gamble. That being said…
Elizabeth you mentioned the Shakespeare quotes, which struck me given that’s…not quite how The Doctor talks? They’re pretentious, sure, but it felt a bit out of his normal wheelhouse in terms of proving what a smarty-pants they are, they’re not that type of referential. And the found-footage conceit was interesting but a lot of the shots were so ‘clean’ and normal-looking it felt like it undermined the joy of it all. But that ending twist? Reframes it all. We got a Doctor Who adventure with some monsters, some lessons learned about not being an asshole, a few pertinent historical lines so we know this is all Very Smart, the expected if not quite usual. Until it turns out the whole thing - a grotesque product of our most horrific excesses, space-age technology utilized to add nothing but another layer of dehumanization even two thousand years on - is capitalism successfully defeating Doctor Who by making him ignorant of the narrative he’s trapped in. The very eyes consuming these stories turned against us twice over, the seemingly organic and ‘objective’ presentation of facts with the found footage being one big slickly-presented Hollywood long con to let the big moneymaking scheme flourish at the expense of literally everything. Our hero exits stage left screaming his defeated bafflement as the world prepares to burn. The longer you sit with the episode through the lens of ‘this is textually being sold to you by a company man’, the better almost every aspect of it gets.
Elizabeth: The Shakespeare quote definitely sticks out, in part because it’s the Doctor invoking “the ancients, the poets” — he’s not usually one to venerate the past. But in this episode, I think it fits as part of the whole ‘morality tale’ vibe it has going on — it feels like a dark fable, or as I mentioned above an issue of Tales from the Crypt, and that means that Gatiss is aiming for a dark twist that also works as an indictment of the characters/the audience, requiring him to engage with the world on a more immediate, specific level. It’s unfamiliar territory for Gatiss, and I think — Indo-Japan aside — he acquits himself quite well at the task of writing Modern, Experimental Who. And the direction, while occasionally tending toward the too-subtle, is impishly fun — you can tell everyone was having a blast making a found-footage horror film together.
Sean: There’s a part of me that often forgets how great the capitalistic excess aspect of the episode is given an upcoming episode is going to explore the same territory a lot better. But dear god, how it’s about the elimination of dreams to make the money flow smoother is a horrific prospect. The destruction of an engine of narrative results in an entire cosmos being consumed by monstrosity and horror for the sake of a dollar that, ultimately, doesn’t mean squat when we’re all a bunch of mucus men. Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.
David: The episode where our hero finally unambiguously loses because they’re still a TV hero who exists to make us watch TV. So good.
Next Time: Let me be brave. It’s just Heaven for bad people. I’m half human on my mother’s side. Hello, sweetie.
Sean: Personally, I always thought Doctor Who won the story by hijacking the signal and sending it to early 21st century Earth, highlighting the general metafictional themes of the era with Doctor Who winning the day by nicking a bit from 1987 Max Headroom impersonators.
Elizabeth: Wouldn’t that kill the 21st century audience? The signal’s still included in the broadcast.
Sean: Um, actually it’s access to the Lazarus Technology that allows the signal to have any pow– [is eaten by a mucus man]