Whowatch Part 2
Finished The Three-Body Problem! I think I'll tackle some lighter fare next in the form of the now Eisner-award winning All of the Marvels by Douglas Wolk, before finally moving on after having read The Fifth Season awhile back to The Obelisk Gate. I also finished my big non-X Hickman Marvel reread, and I think I'll be sticking to shorter endeavors for awhile before embarking on the journey back through Al Ewing's work.
Don't know that I'll have a ton to say at the start of these, so let's just list this round's viewing and get going:
The Empty Child
The Doctor Dances
Boom Town
Bad Wolf
The Parting of the Ways
David: We kick off with future controversial showrunner Steven Moffat’s first pair of episodes, and this is 80% ‘wow, this is excellent, the platonic ideal of the series as I’ve seen it thus far, of course they’d go on to give this guy the reigns’ and 20% ‘you gotta be careful or this is what can happen if you give all the power to the superfan’.
Sean: It might just be because I got in through his era, but I had a ton of fun throughout. Of the Ninth Doctor stories, this two parter is the one I revisit the most. So much of what Moffat’s take on the material is set up here while still remaining within the confines of the era. But I’m curious about that 20%.
David: On the one hand, stuff like ‘the phone on the police box rings’ and him going to see ‘The Doctor’ are ideas he’s definitely held on to since he was a small child in case he ever got to write Doctor Who one day, and they’re perfect. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Jack Harkness was too.
‘Rascally American time rogue’ feels like a back pocket pitch, and one delivered with the successively less interesting ideas of ‘he’s part of a counter-agency to the Time Lords’ -> ‘he’s a puckish outlaw’ -> ‘he’s just some chump’. All of which would probably still be serviceable if not for John Barrowman having all the theoretical components of a charming person, but most definitely not being one; like Tom Cruise was run back and forth a few times through Google translate. It’s unsurprising in that regard he would later become an Arrowverse mainstay.
Sean: Ah. Jack Harkness. You have no idea how happy I am at that description of Barrowman. Just… he is quite possibly one of the worst people to work on modern Doctor Who. A sex pest and a snake (I’ll explain later) whose antics rivaled Jarred Leto in their sheer dickishness. Alongside an incident involving a flaming couch, he was a major factor in Christopher Eccelston departing from the series. Among the many, many things he’s done, one that was treated as a “Oh that wacky Johnny” at the time was his tendency to wave his dick around on set.
As for the character himself, you’re right about him being a back pocket pitch. However, where you’re off is who the pitch was made by. See, prior to Doctor Who, Steven Moffat had a long standing career as a sitcom writer, most notably the series Coupling, a sex comedy about how Steven fell in love with his wife, Susan. From this (alongside being mates with a lot of people involved with the New Series and having experience writing a bit of Doctor Who television [I’ll explain later]), Moffat was asked by Davies to introduce Jack to the audience on the grounds that he’s a sex comedy writer and Jack, as conceived, was very sexually forward.
David: Damn, that makes a lot of sense. It definitely contextualizes why they thought…anything about him was an especially good idea, even if only so much of it can be chalked up to only being obvious in hindsight. If that’s not on Moffat though, I can pretty unreservedly say this rules. A perfect mix of horror, humor, and high concept, and if it’s a little more enamored with The Doctor than Davies tends to get (aside from the weird gag that he gets space-racist when he’s mad?), ‘just this once’ is a killer denouement after a season of seeing The Doctor at his sketchiest. This is the story that sells portraying The Doctor as a borderline-messianic figure as a fair play part of the show’s modern repertoire in spite of what a thoughtless dick he can be.
Sean: The Doctor contains multitudes. Many of which I can’t talk about… yet. Suffice it to say, the messianic aspects of the character will be problematized throughout the show, even in the Moffat era itself. In many regards, the sketchy aspects of the Doctor are the ones you see when you first meet the bloke. They’re still there as the show goes on, but they’re not all that’s there.
David: I’m looking forward to seeing that delved into! Also, do have to note that even as I’ve gotten used quickly to how dark this show can get, I wasn’t expecting a teen pregnancy plot, though that’s not a complaint given how powerful a payoff that results in. Regardless of what I think of Moffat in the future - I expect I’ll continue to enjoy him thoroughly for the most part - I certainly see why even critics of him down the road frequently concede the guy’s good as gold at writing standalone Who adventures.
Also, props to the Doctor for talking up the welfare state and bananas and insulting cops, though him discussing America as the singlehanded saviors of the Earth in World War II is a bit odd.
Sean: Keep in mind that this was 2005 England, when things were a bit more politically geared in favor of the Iraq war. While Davies himself was critical of the government that supported the war in Aliens of London/World War III, writers like Paul Cornell had a more sympathetic view of things.
David: Very true. Will also note that Billie Piper is the spitting image of Jenny Sparks in here, that this was the first episode I really noticed how great the series is at casting one-offs and background extras who ineffably feel like they belong to the given eras with the ‘types’ of faces you’d picture, and I loved the screwdriver/canon contrast.
Sean: Doctor Who is notable for casting interesting people to play bit and/or one story characters. Some familiar faces will be popping up in minor roles who you will recognize from some of the biggest pieces of pop culture.
David: Approaching the finish line we arrive at Boom Town, and I don’t know if this is controversial, and it may also be because I was distracted that day with the start of SDCC: this had some of the best individual scenes of the season, but it was the first episode I was kind of eh on as a whole.
Sean: That’s probably fair. If I’m honest, this is one of the Eccelston episodes I’ve not seen for the simple reason that it was literally a last minute script done on the cheap after another script by Paul Abbott fell through.
David: Huh! That’s wild but I can sort of see it; there’s a very ‘thrown-together’ quality to it of everybody messing around for 40-odd minutes in a more casual way than the series at least for now feels built to support, and trying to layer on a more concrete season arc after the fact. But the emotional payoff to Rose and Mickey here is enormous, and have you at least seen The Doctor and returning Slitheen baddie Margaret Blaine’s dinner together, which is easily the most brutal scene in the series to date?
Sean: Yes, I’ve seen the dinner sequence. It’s extremely charming and bitter towards the nature of what’s happening with the episode. The one on one banter with Doctor Who and Margaret is superb, even before you get to the jaw dropping confrontation of the Doctor’s history with genocide, which the Classic Era doesn’t lend them any favors. And then the next two episodes happen, and things get more brutal, albeit in a different way.
I don’t want to get into that quite yet, because the first half of the two part finale, Bad Wolf, is very funny to someone like me who basically grew up on the American versions of a lot of the reality shows having the piss taken out of them.
David: The Hunger Games may not have exactly pioneered the deadly-TV genre, but boy if this doesn’t anticipate the zeitgeist. If you told me we’d get there in 50 years, I’d probably believe you.
Sean: Davies is very much a writer who is cynical enough to get the future right in all the worst ways possible. Note, for example, the usage of manufactured news in The Long Game.
David: I will say it’s a little dopey of The Doctor to assume they’re all being ridiculous about the consequences of the game. Your life is going from 0 to 60 on a nonstop basis, why would you not figure there was a fair chance this would turn out to be some kind of murderous societal metaphor when that’s always half of your dayjob?! I will say though, given there’s built-in turnover with the companions, I was half willing to believe Rose had actually died.
Sean: It’s often the case that the companions face certain peril and are about to die horrible, ungodly deaths. Oftentimes when this is played straight, you get stories that don’t fully sell the deaths as well as they think they do, believing they can get away with being tedious slogs by virtue of the one companion no one likes biting the dust. Other times, something much stranger is afoot.
David: Especially since - even if I was pretty sure she wasn’t a real deal since I hadn’t heard of her before - we got a fakeout new companion in the form of Lynda with a Y; I suspect she would have broken the formula since she can’t reasonably act as a viewer stand-in, but it would have been interesting to see The Doctor and his adventures through such a defamiliarizing set of eyes. When she’s facing her doom though, and you can’t hear her killers through the vacuum of space but their lights still flash in rhythm such that you know exactly what they’re saying? Chef kiss.
Sean: To be fair, prior to the new series, Doctor Who frequently had companions who were not from the normal world. Ranging from Scottish Highlander from the 1800s to fellow Time Lords to whatever John Nathan Turner thought he was doing to America with Peri Brown. But by and large, the show is at its healthiest when there’s some connection to modern earth.
Of course, her death brings us to the sheer brutality of the second part: Everybody dies. And they die in the most brutal and unromanticized ways possible. From the relatively sympathetic collaborators to the dickish Weakest Link winner, they all die at the laser beams of the Daleks. Even Jack Harkness. He's dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.
David: I was pretty shocked they went for that ‘aw, they’re in love!’ bit for the producers after basically comparing them to guards at Nuremberg, but the death of the living broadcaster at the end of the previous episode was truly horrific, and yeah, this is the series at its simultaneously most ludicrous and vicious. And the payoff feels like an earned one, from the guy who kills Cassandra out of spite in the second episode to the guy who - in a move that I found myself thinking Garth Ennis would NOT approve of, given the comparison to the climax of Judge Dredd’s Apocalypse War which he often cites as why he can’t take superhero-types seriously - will choose to be a coward every time, just by virtue of spending his life around other people again.
Sean: On the other hand, as many people have noted after the fact, Doctor Who’s choice to not exterminate all the Daleks is more of an aesthetic choice rather than an ethical one. The Earth is dead, the survivors are being rounded up to being sent to have their parts ripped asunder and turned into Dalek bits, and the only one alive is the Doctor.
Still, as often happens, the universe finds a way.
David: Well, it’s the thought that counts, at least when it comes to metaphor-driven genre fare. And at least the miracle third way still comes at a recognizable cost, pretty much annihilating any chance of Rose ever reconciling with her loved ones back in the 21st century on a long-term basis and costing The Doctor a regeneration. And arguably worst of all also resulting in Jack Harkness coming back, though at least he’s stranded in the 2000th century for a minute.
Sean: The son of a bitch ends up on a spin-off of Doctor Who that I can’t talk about yet due to spoilers. Suffice it to say, it’s much worse than the main show and opens with one of its main characters doing a comedy date rape.
David: Uggg. I’ve heard about Torchwood being a thing, and I’m more than happy to skip right past that if you are.
Sean: David. There are other areas in which we will be suffering. As much as I’d love to rewatch Children of Earth, no one should be made to suffer through Cyberwoman, Greeks Bearing Gifts, or John Barrowman’s smug little face. And The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is where he’s actually decent!
David: UNFATHOMABLE. Still, in spite of that twerp as we round out the first season I’m very much in the tank for the continuing adventures of The Doctor, as we go into the first one where I can go ‘oh yeah, it’s Doctor Who, from the internet!’ On the whole? This has been fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what? So were you!
Sean: Aw, bless. But before we get into that stuff, we have to have our first trip into the classic era.
David: !
Sean: And to start out with, I have one question: What time is it?
David: 11:28 my time.
Sean: No David. It’s Morbin time!
David: what
Next Time: EVEN A SPONGE HAS MORE LIFE THAN I! Sorry, that’s The Lion King. A great secret. A werewolf? I hope one of you is getting all this down. What do monsters have nightmares about? This is not your world. Delete! We’re going shopping. Some may call him Satan or Lucifer. Which devil are you? Because you can’t beat a bit of ELO. A storm’s approaching. This is the story of how I died. You are better at dying.