Whowatch Part 4
Look there are only so many ways to say we’re watching more Doctor Who.
Survival
The Runaway Bride
Smith and Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks in Manhattan
Evolution of the Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
David: And joining us this time around is our first - and for now only planned - guest columnist, Justin Martin!
Sean: [Tents fingers] Yes, the only planned guest…
Justin: David would never debase himself enough to turn-to-camera Office-style and ask Grant Morrison to pop in, but I totally can and make it weird, so. Join them. Make mine the least-special appearance. Crush me.
Sean: I mean, I could always do it the next time they have a QnA…
David: Sean, they’re tormented enough in those. Justin, I’ll lead with the same question Sean and I had for each other at the beginning of the first Whowatch: how’d you first become aware of/start watching Who?
Justin: So…I was basted in Doctor Who fairly thoroughly and aggressively. My like, main social circle in high school was an improv troupe that met every Friday [already burning through any residual coolness I have here], and everyone was pretty enraptured by Smith at the time. I finally tried Eccelston and honesty bounced off pretty hard a few times–I loved that first Dalek episode, but the…I dunno, pace or tenor of everything felt different enough to the action shows I liked at the time to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I love it now, but it took me a few tries, and we’ll probably touch on how that love got cemented, because we’re about to talk about one episode in particular that rewired my whole approach to superhero-ish storytelling. Not just a favorite Who episode but full-stop one of my favorite examples of genre fiction.
David: So first off, I was very taken aback and impressed that Doctor Who made the bold narrative choice to skip over the cliffhanger bride ending of the previous season and go straight to the recruitment of the new companion, leaving the former as a dangling thread for the time being.
Then I realized that was because I’d skipped over the Christmas special.
Justin: Oh my god I literally did the same thing and was too embarrassed to say anything – and I’ve seen the show.
Sean: I mean, I just skip over a lot of the episodes that sound like crap. So for all I know, I’ve missed something people really like. Then again, the first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw was Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, which one of my friends said was what drove them away from Doctor Who.
Justin: I don’t wanna get too ahead of ourselves, but the whiplash between Gridlock and that Daleks two-parter is something else. I took probably six months between Gridlock and the Daleks two parter on one side, and the next episode on the other.
David: Preemptively grinding my teeth. I cannot believe this is going to be what tears us apart.
Justin: I don’t want to poison David’s expectations, but IMO the series has a huge range of quality until basically Capaldi, when one of its biggest innovations is it finally evens out.
Sean: But before we get into all of that, we have a bit of Classic Who to discuss. Mainly, the final story of the entire show Survival, wherein Doctor Who faces off against a planet of lesbian warrior cats!
Justin: (Now I’m wondering if the YA novel series Warrior Cats ever got around to queer representation.)
David: Fascinated to learn from you what the general consensus is on it Sean, because I bet it made people absolutely furious that this is how they handled The Final Doctor Who Story, but I loved it. Its quiet, somber beginnings, the totally off-the-wall ‘this? This is what you’re doing with this of all episodes?’ premise, and how in spite of that it really feels like it ties everything up in such a nice little thematic bow. Not being able to go home again, The Master counting on The Doctor to win for him (speaking of Morrison earlier, I could totally believe they were inspired by this when coming up with The Key two-parter in JLA), everyone choosing whether to fight and die like animals, the perfect closing monologue. At the end of the day Doctor Who is a deeply silly premise where he and his lady friend will go and deal with the planet of the teleporting cheetah people, but it finds a little solemnity and grace in that. Genuinely thought it was perfect for what it was, and it’s a bit of a shame there’s no possible way a series of this magnitude would be willing to go out in such an offbeat fashion now.
Sean: Well, production wise, it wasn’t supposed to be the final story. That was supposed to be either The Curse of Fenric, which can be best described as “Doctor Who vs Sea Vampires and also tie up the main plot of the McCoy era,” or Ghost Light, which can be best described as “So you know how Grant Morrison tends to infuriate comics fans by making them infer things instead of telling them every single detail…”
By and large, Survival is a classic of the Classic era, beloved in particular by the queer fandom due to it being the first story to intentionally give Ace a girlfriend instead of accidentally giving her one. It’s an absolute blast and it tells you something about the McCoy era that this isn’t in my top five stories from it.
(We will be talking about one of my favorite McCoy stories at the start of the JSA era of Doctor Who.)
Justin: I either have a perspective here that’s really illuminating or completely unhelpful, because this was actually my first Classic Who – prior to last weekend, I’d started with the modern stuff and probably couldn’t even name you the first eight doctors even now. The whole thing unsettled me, but in a charming way – I’d assumed that the overt social allegories were a modern Who thing, and so to see an old serial try to grapple with questions of austerity and sort of the wider social contagion of making life so hardened and cutthroat was really cool. I don’t know if the Master’s ever quite worked for me before–he always seemed like a Moriarty figure whereas I’d never seen the Doctor as primarily a detective - but I was surprised by his depth here.
Aesthetically, though, it was hard for me to tune out some things that felt off. For one, everything was shot either incredibly close or far away – there was almost a found-footage quality to even the stuff that wasn’t explicitly sci-fi. I was surprised as well that the Doctor and his companion shared so little rapport and screentime throughout the serial compared to what I’m used to in nuWho – watching Classic really made me see the bits of like modern prestige drama that RTD fused to the pre-existing skeleton to make the dynamics of nuWho.
Sean: Before diving into RTD, I’m curious: What did you make of my favorite Classic Series Doctor Who?
David: I liked him pretty well! I didn’t have much room to get a bead on him, but I think it speaks to how Eccleston and Tennant are handled that they both feel like older men in spite of this being The Doctor as your quaint old dad whereas they’re the sexy young update. There’s a melancholy here with the context that we’re seeing The Doctor for the last time before the worst thing that will ever happen to him happens to him (that movie I guess notwithstanding), and so there’s an unburdened quality to his guileless oddball charm that’d be pretty much unimaginable now.
I did also love his big stern godlike glare in the opening credits capped off with the smile and wink to let you know that hey, you don’t have to worry, he’s still your ‘ol pal Doctor Who no matter how serious things might get.
Justin: Riffing on that, an observation that a mentor of mine made who’s pretty steeped in both Classic and nuWho: I felt like this Doctor still had some residual carryover from the era where Who was more explicitly edutainment than it is in the refresh. Which maybe gets to the quaint tone David’s pointing to – I think you gain something but also lose something in making a figure that’s always maybe been a bit quaint and professorial into a modern spry protagonist. It’ll be interesting going forward to see how much of that slightly-more-academic persona survives or gets repurposed/rediscovered by future Doctors. [Capaldi hovers from just offscreen]
Sean: For my money, I just love the contrast between the clearly comedic McCoy and the cosmos shattering stories he appears in. He’s simultaneously what monsters have nightmares (a line taken from one of the novels) about and a guy who will play with the spoons. He will do terrible, unspeakable things, but he will also mop the floors of a hospice and talk to the people there. His contrasts, more than any Doctor Who before and some since, are what I love. He’s big and epic like a supernova, but he’s also small. We’ll talk a bit more about how he contrasts with the modern Doctor Whos another time though, as we’ve got the Tenant era to discuss.
Now do we want to go in chronological order or should Justin and I just gush about how great the episode where we learn that Rose loved drugs is?
David: I’ll say we stick to the script we’ve written thus far and go with The Runaway Bride, which I quite enjoyed, even as the big twist is basically a needle gently applied to a full-to-bursting balloon of insecurities for…well, probably plenty of folks, which is why it hits so hard. They really had me going with ‘Oh no, Lance sucks!’ ‘Wait, Lance is good after all!’ ‘WHAT’
Sean: Yeah… can’t say I haven’t been there before.
David: ‘Earth was a long-term booby trap prepared by alien spider-people, but it’s not a big deal in the mythology of the series or anything’ is my kind of Who, and Donna Noble while not the new companion (though my understanding is that’ll eventually change) is a perfect counterpoint to Rose as physically incapable of putting up with The Doctor’s bullshit, either in the goofy or horrifying senses. “I think you need someone to stop you” is gonna stick with me. And the kids cheering at the daring rescue? Perfect.
Sean: Donna Noble (played by Catherine Tate) was meant to be only in this story. A one off companion played by a notable comedy actress who has her own show. But things have a way of turning around for the better.
For me, this is a charming romp, though not one I find myself going back to the way I do other charming Christmas special romps involving marriages and complicated plots casually brushed aside in the name of a good farce. And then the final reel happens, and you remember that Tennant’s Doctor Who is commonly referred to as The Oncoming Storm.
Justin: I would like to offer one maybe-grouchy thing and two joyous ones. Watching this in September rather than on December 25th means it drags quite a bit – you feel every extra minute of that runtime here, or at least I did. But we have to remember that this is a Christmas Who – the rough-around-the-edges, you-have-nothing-else-to-do-today, in-your-PJs-with-your-family nature of them has always really appealed to me when I actually watch them the day of. You’re supposed to kind of settle in this cozy dumb sci-fi nest.
And knowing that that’s the vibe, god is Donna the perfect master of ceremonies here. It’s almost more her show than Tennant’s, and there’s immediately a snap here that we’ve never seen in nuWho to this point–you’re a little afraid to watch it with your stuffier grandma, and you desperately want to watch it with your boozier grandma who speaks out of turn. Bringing her back later was among the best decisions the show ever made. I also wanna point out how easy it would’ve been to make this either a whiz-bang parade that totally ignores the devastation of Rose or a maudlin glum dirge that makes us wallow in it – part of that excellent balance comes down to the script, but a much bigger share is directly on the shoulders of Catherine Tate, who I totally buy as both deliverer of sick burns that knock the Doctor out of that suave pretty-boy mode and as a kind of reluctant profound therapist. It only seems effortless because she’s so good at selling it.
David: The writers stumbling on the perfect conceit of just this once having a newcomer be able to go “It’s smaller on the outside!” is intentionally or otherwise a perfect shorthand of how Tate flips the dynamic up to this point around and throws everything just slightly off-kilter enough to give the show a jolt when it could have easily lost momentum, and it’s pretty much all on her. After two seasons and at least one more upcoming of the companion essentially being there to illustrate The Doctor’s foibles and fantastical accomplishments by contrast - however well they come across doing it - this is the first character who can go toe-to-toe with the old weirdo off sheer stubbornness.
Justin: But okay like, can we get to the real praise, which is: how fucking good are those spider-prosthettics? I am obsessed with those spider-prosthetics. They are everything. Like, that’s what a young Tim Burton had both nightmares and wet dreams about and you can’t convince me otherwise.
David: It’s always the wildest swings between the series being so impressive and the absolute cheapest-looking show you’ve ever seen in your life, and this one came right-side up.
Sean: Doctor Who: We Have No Money!
David: Then it’s a sharp turn back to more familiar waters with the introduction of Martha Jones, who’s charming right away but whose deceptively brutal real utility I think takes a bit to start to reveal itself, really becoming apparent in the episode Justin came aboard for. Still, the new season kickoff proper is a charmer, a perfectly Doctor Who instance of wildly high concept and perilous stakes as solved by crawling around and hopping on one foot, that would have made an ideal reintroduction for any lapsed or first-time viewers. Plus The Doctor’s imitation of a dumb human is word-for-word a Tom Taylor/MCU superhero talking about something vaguely strange happening, so that whole scene’s a lot funnier in hindsight.
Sean: Martha Jones is a… complicated companion to talk about. Not because she does anything wrong per-say. She’s perfectly good as a companion. It’s just… the show–and, subsequently, the fandom–treats her like a… rebound for Rose. She’s extremely competent, likable, and interesting. But Doctor Who spends the entire run with her basically pining for Rose. So many episodes are spent with him wondering what Rose would’ve done. How Rose would’ve reacted. Intentionally so, as Tennant is very much the ‘Cries in the Rain when he’s feeling sad’ Doctor Who. But the result was basically damaging for Martha. Mainly, a lot of fans despise her for existing. (A story that will recur time and time again throughout Doctor Who.)
That said, Smith and Jones is a lot of fun. Not memorable, if I’m being honest, but the kind of fun you’d get from reading a tumblr post about a wacky hijinks involving two characters having to lie while in a hospital. It introduces the Judoon, who are basically space cops but also Bastard Rhinos. And I just love that.
Justin: Martha’s unambiguously my favorite companion in the entirety of Who, full-stop no qualifiers. Yes, the show stumbles way too frequently when it comes to talking about her identity – women of color were sorely needed on this show for a long time, and still are. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves and miss the brilliant kernel at the core of her character: he’s The Doctor, she’s a doctor. To me, at least, this quietly and repeatedly introduces a welcome question into what can oftentimes be a rather hagiographic show: are you actually helping? Are you, all-knowing-heroic-alien-genius, actually adding something meaningful to this situation that someone with decent bedside manner who can set a broken leg isn’t already doing? Does the show ever actually play with that to the extent it could? No. But is there absolutely a gentle and compelling critique there, one that the show desperately needed both at the time and in the future as it became, even at its best, a bit of a Doctor shrine? Oh god yes.
I struggle – and I know y’all have touched on this – with how the show approaches romance/shipping/teasing in text. It’s always seemed, like Rick and Morty to want to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, as the show goes on, we’re supposed to be quite skeptical of this cycle wherein the Doctor pisses someone off and then wins her back by showing her a quasar or whatever. But on the other hand, like, we are supposed to kind of gasp with girlish delight when we see The Doctor and Martha go out to the hospital balcony and breathe lunar air for the first time.
And like, to be honest, I do. That moment still gets me. What Who has over most superhero comics for me – save something like Morrison/Quitely’s All-Star or Lee/Kirby F4 – is romance in the Shakespearean genre sense of the world. Huge magic vistas. Breathtaking wonder. At its best, it sweeps me away–not even in terms of plot, just in terms of we’re on the Moon, and it’s wonderful. I’ve never cared about the romance of Who as far as are they fucking and should they be, but there’s definitely romance in the A Whole New World from Aladdin sense that I usually can’t find in Batman or Superman; my eyes are being courted as Martha’s are.
Part of my affection for Martha too is that in my mind, she’s the last companion that feels like a true audience surrogate like Rose did. Without getting too much into it, from here on out the show changes around the companion rather than the reverse–I feel like I’m observing everyone post-Martha, but I feel like I’m right there with Martha.
Sean: It’s telling that, for me, the best Romance in Doctor Who is the one that’s largely subtextual and arguably aromantic.
David: Guess we’re talking about her upfront, in which case: I can’t speak yet to her long-term purpose, but as-is there’s an absolutely delicious tension to Martha’s presence where she’s too much like Rose for The Doctor not to cart her all over creation (she’s wearing the same jacket if I’m not mistaken!), she’s too different not to grate on him in that capacity, and she’s too clever to not start picking up on what’s going on here, and it’s all building towards…something. I don’t know what yet, but she’s the engine of The Companion as a storytelling device stripped bare in all its sketchiness and I’m excited to watch this train go off the tracks. In that regard, what she really illustrated to me is how much the show does a better job with the Batman and Robin dynamic than any actual non-Morrison Batman story in decades; the aristocrat driven by righteous indignation and an inability to face his pain, up against a series of bizarre ideologues and cackling freaks with his wits, his gadgetry, and a series of sidekicks he has weird relationships with who he uplifts but in turn gradually realize this dude is not okay. Martha is every Robin gradually realizing just how badly the last Robin leaving or dying screwed Batman up and that they’re there as some kind of fucked up stand-in, except Doctor Who is allowed to decide whether or not it all goes down in flames rather than there still needing to be a solo comic with that character still being Robin on the stands next month.
Justin: I’ve said before and will say again that if DC ever wants a healthy approach to using sidekicks to refresh a franchise and teach fans to let go, rather than as chips in an increasingly-depressing multi-decade hostage situation, they have a beautiful model right here. Imagine if Who had the DC model of companion-necromancy.
David: If RTD pulled what he did with Rose at DC and stuck by it, five square miles around his neighborhood would be left a sheet of glass by the end of the week. The concepts of regeneration and actual supporting cast turnover are directly antithetical to the mast Who’s most direct genre cousin has lashed itself too, and it’ll lecture you about how it’s respecting the rich history of the franchise and the fandom’s favorites until that ship hits the very bottom of the ocean beneath the weight it’s foisted on itself.
Justin: Foisted is a fantastic word. Also, just because I’d die if I didn’t get this in at the buzzer: the Judoon fucking rule, visually and in concept, and I love that there’s a villain and then a group of sub-villains who aren’t particularly mean, they’re just really single-minded and ill-prepared for nuance. If superhero comics let themselves ‘overstuff the narrative burrito’ a little bit each month and every few issues we just ran into some needlessly-detailed but narratively-unimportant extra species making a totally unrelated situation compellingly worse, I’d read a lot more of them.
David: The Judoon rule and I’m so glad to hear we’ll keep seeing more of these bozos - that Who would let bozos like these become a part of the world’s enduring texture at all - but look, we have to at least acknowledge the episode Sean initially left off the list it was so goddamn cursed, before I foolishly decided to go for the full experience.
Sean: I’m not talking about it. Fuck that racist, transphobic piece of shit!
Justin: So I’m forced here to choose between two deeply held beliefs. I don’t want to give additional oxygen to someone who’s turned out to be a reactionary provocateur. But I do want to argue with David about arbitrary shit he’s obviously wrong about, the single activity which has formed the solid bedrock of our friendship for years now.
David: All I really have to say here is that there were four ‘oh jesus no’ moments in the first six minutes here alone - or was it six ‘oh jesus no’ moments in the first four minutes? - and that the episode ultimately plays as if someone was doing a shitty low-effort parody of the idea of Neil Gaiman doing a Doctor Who.
Justin: So like. Doctor Who has always been uniquely positioned to have Special Guest: Historical Figure episodes in a way that you really can’t do unless you’re Scooby-Doo or Time Squad. And you do pretty much have to do Shakespeare. And if you’re going to do Shakespeare, it’s in fairness ridiculously clever to do an episode that’s both about witches – the politics of which would repeatedly hound the actual Shakespeare – and to peg it to Love’s Labour's Won, which every Shakespeare nerd has a conspiracy theory about. On purely a conceptual level–pitching this in the writer’s room–of course you greenlight this.
But yeahhhh: not commenting on Martha’s race and gender at all during her run would’ve been rough, but doing it by making Shakespeare Dane Cook and then playing the lines for smug laughs is horrid; there needed to be different voices in production on this one. One of my favorite Who episodes is superficially like this one, trying to craft a take on Van Gogh–but that take brings out sides of both Vincent and the Doctor that feel honest and revelatory. This is a ‘can you believe we went there?’ South Park exercises in its worst moments.
Sean: Ok, you’re done? Cool. Now let’s talk about my favorite Davies era story: Gridlock!
Justin: An episode I adore so much that I watched several hours I mostly didn’t just so I could flesh it out with you two. I want to hear David’s first impressions first, though.
David: An episode I liked a whole lot, don’t think I loved nearly as much as you two, but 100% understand watching at a certain moment in one’s life and it changing the shape of your brain forever. Structurally this is a reasonably standard Who adventure: they’re somewhere odd, the Doctor and companion go off and do their own things as they encounter a bunch of oddities and meet some new folks until it all circles back around in time for the finale. Which isn’t a complaint, I’ve liked that approach a whole lot and this is a well-executed instance of it, plus I’ve tended to prefer the future/space episodes over the jaunts back in time so it has that going for it too. But the simple, small efforts taken here in fleshing out the idea of this culture, the radically individual styles and mindsets that form in this deeply atomized society and how the few points of connection in turn take on deep nigh-religious import, absolutely put this a cut above the vast majority of its contemporaries. Again, if I’d seen this at a formative age and especially if it was some of the first Who I’d seen, I absolutely see it landing for me on a whole other scale.
Sean: For me, I just love everything about this episode. I love that it’s a story set in the ruins of utopia and how people try to crawl their way out of the wreckage. I love the various strangers we meet who all show a different personality. I love the fact that it’s clearly the same set redressed over and over again. I love the religious aspect being at once a yolk around the people’s necks and a thing that unites them through tough times. I love the Emotion Patches. I love Brannigan and the Face of Boe. I love that the Macra are a Classic series villain brought back for no reason other than because they wanted crab monsters. I love Doctor Who’s speeches about the beauty and destruction of Gallifrey and Martha believing in Doctor Who and– GAH! It’s just so many weird, interesting ideas put together in a fantastic setting.
Justin: Superhero comics are inherently a small-c conservative genre. I don’t mean that in a ‘do you think this A stands for France’ way. Rather, the traditional superhero story opens on a sunny day in a world that’s more good than bad, in a world worth preserving. Then, a meteor hurtles through the sky, or fear toxin seeps into the water main. The story becomes whole when an outside force – a man with a cape - removes that element of change and brings the community back to where it was. In the context of one or two stories, this isn’t anything damaging – but tell that story again and again, and a lifetime of the average superhero story leaves you with two whispered conclusions: the world is mostly perfect as it is, and anything new or different is likely to make it significantly less perfect.
Superhero comics then also tend to force the hero into some sort of patriarchal and aggressive role–punch the thing hard. Our model of heroism is a cop, a soldier, etc.
The space that Gridlock opened in my brain–which has never shut, and which now craves this in every comic it reads–is a new model: superhero-as-anthropologist. A hero arrives in a world which is already broken, which indeed everyone can tell you and yet no one can see past. The superhero arrives in a nightmare that is no longer active and new, that has curdled and comforted: a planetary traffic jam. And then the superhero listens: he drops from car to car, sliding into the unheard stratas of society and setting his own safety and pride aside not to prescribe a solution, but to learn what he can learn–to see where and how the small-scale seeds of the just world have already taken root. Having seen that – having seen a moment of solidarity like the Old Rugged Cross scene, which gets me every time – the hero’s job is simply to give the last push to a society that is already becoming the best version of itself, if it can only admit that it’s living in a nightmare that it has the power to end. But that revelation has to come at a cost, right; by knocking something loose in a lost-but-hypocritical-but-fundamentally-good society, the hero knocks something loose in himself (and the audience). By turning a society’s whispered it could be different into a shout, the hero eventually turns that echo on himself and sees what happens: for my money, Tennant’s never been better than that last scene with Martha.
Years later, I’d discover One Piece, which also embodies this story structure where instead of preventing simple nightmares, the hero arrives in detailed ones and then gives voice to the revolutionary dreams within them. But those two examples have honestly ruined the vast majority of hero comics for me: for whatever reason, once I saw this skeleton, I kind of became a little repulsed by the other conservative day-is-saved one. Like, part of it’s just a basic human impulse: we all go to bed and have nightmares, and even as a little kid I had this fear and sense of obligation that every time I had one, I was seeing into some terrible alternate reality that I was fortunate not to be a part of and had no way to fix. The idea that like, a hero exists as a kind of anthropologist-terraformer, to turn nightmares into dreams rather than preserve what’s there…I dunno, it’s changed the kind of writing I want to do and the kind of person I want to be.
There’s also just, on a smaller level, so many fantastic little ‘of course it works that way!’ worldbuilding details that make this one feel like a whole movie: the fresh oxygen on tap, the box of kittens, the lesbian car-birdwatcher. I love it to pieces.
Sean: I don’t think I have much to add to that. I’d say the newsletter should end there. But someone had to have opinions about the next two-parter. David, please, explain to us: Why in the name of sanity do you like Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks?
David: This is the moment I was dreading from the moment I signed up and why I never wanted to watch this stupid fucking nerd show in the first place. I goddamn knew that sooner or later I’d have some totally innocuous opinion and the freaks would come at me with the knives out.
Sean: To be fair, everyone has a marmite episode.
David: Look, is Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks top-tier? By no means. But it’s perfectly good Who and learning that it’s among the most despised of the revival strikes me as, I’m sorry, silly self-serious nerd bullshit. It’s an enjoyable adventure romp with a dash of tragic romance where the fate of the world revolves around mad science and the ability to pull some playground jungle gym-level acrobatics a hundred stories higher than usual, with a solid thematic core of the Daleks as arch-capitalists chewing up the workforce and making them literal disposable livestock, until a class traitor makes his way to the head of the table, starts having second thoughts when he realizes the system is devouring itself, and the rest of them decide they would rather die than admit the way they do things doesn't work. It’s the Great Depression episode, it ain’t deep. First thing since their debut in nuWho to do anything interesting with the Daleks as a concept.
Sean: Yes, but David. The episode sucks. The direction is pants (look at the lighting, it’s so goddamn bright that I can’t see any shadows), the editing stinks (watch the scene where the showgirl confronts Doctor Who, Martha, and fucking Solomon), the writing’s crap (Solomon resolves a conflict in the camp by splitting the bread in half, which is the most hack thing possible), the acting is terrible (Andrew Garfield isn’t even preparing for Spider-Man with this one since they inexplicably saddled him with a character for Tennessee and he sounds like he’s from Texas), the musical cue for New York is the literal theme from The Critic, and it makes a guy getting shoved head first into a Dalek’s anus boring! That said, I did like the design of the Human Dalek being a guy with dicks for hair.
Justin: I want to know what sort of charisma-sapping de-magnetization chamber lurks in the basement of the BBC and how long they locked poor Andrew Garfield in there. I want to know why on Earth you’d set a two-parter in New York if you knew you only had the budget for what amounts to an extended video-game sewer level. I want to know how many more drafts it would’ve taken before the character tasked with leading the episode had a personality beyond Marilyn Monroe crossed with Arleen Sorkin. I want to know why you needed the auxiliary layer of the underdeveloped Pig Men if not to hide the presence of the Daleks, who we know are coming when we see the title. I can almost grab onto what the episodes are trying to do in terms of the core hypocrisy of a xenophobic species needing to intermix to stay alive – and the human-Dalek visuals are really cool - but all the authenticity and story-enhancement of Empty Child’s Blitz-era England is replaced here with a Hooverville caricature that’s constantly at cross-purposes with the other elements of the episode. Shakespeare Code is a few dialogue passes and a more diverse writing staff away from being a classic; this one wobbles at the foundational level and coheres as well as spaghetti and chocolate sauce. A complete misfire.
David: Fie. Fie on you both. This is exactly as good as any dozen ‘hey, that one was nifty!’ Doctor Whos, zero idea what was in the water here.
Justin: Send all complaints to @davidmann95 that’s at-sign d a v i d m a n n 9 5.
Sean: Now then… Do we have anything to say about ‘Mark Gatiss plays the hell out of a crap special effect’ and ‘Chris Chibnall’s first script?’ They’re completely forgettable in my book.
David: Tennant and Gatiss doing ACTING at each other until the tension can only be broken by one of them turning into a cartoon monster. I guess other stuff happened too - this was the episode where I came to that Batman & Robin realization I mentioned earlier - and I’m reasonably sure the secretive folks whispering in Martha’s mom’s ear are setting up The Master’s modern debut, but how can I care about any of that in the face of “I came here before - a lifetime ago. I thought I was going to die then. In fact, I was sure of it. I sat here - just a child - the sound of planes and bombs outside.” “The Blitz.” “You read about it.” “I was there.” “You’re too young.” “So are you.”
Justin: I’ll keep it brief-ish because this one also has never hit me right. I think doing an episode about Martha’s siblings was exactly the right call at this stage, especially to differentiate her from Rose, but I guess I question if this angle, which felt stale even as I watched it at the time. The special effect reminds me of the weirdly-phallic spider thing in that one Black Mirror episode. Plus, I’ve got a personal and deep-seated pet peeve re: stories that premise it’s a bad thing to live forever. Humans are durable – yes people get widowed or lose jobs, but they also remarry and find new communities and passions, and I really think we could do so infinitely. A species that can’t live forever and desperately wants to is absolutely going to make fake-ass monkey’s-paw reasons why they don’t want it and actually it would suck. It wouldn’t, and even if it did, we’ve seen the story where it does a hundred thousand times.
David: It goes right alongside destiny necessarily overriding time travel as sour grapes on an existential scale, hence instances like this where there Mark Gatiss has to start eating people because he’s too much of a bastard for even the standard ‘well you’d be lonely’ excuses to meaningfully apply. Again though, can’t be too grumpy with that showstopper showdown anchoring it.
Then there’s 42, and given all I’d heard about Chibnall, I guess it was a triumph in that it didn’t kick me in the balls and rustle through my pockets?
Sean: That’s probably due to Russel T Davies basically rewriting the script. For the majority of writers on the RTD era of Who, he would rewrite their scripts completely. The exceptions were writers who had previously had the showrunner television shows like Steven Moffat and Matthew Graham. The end result is basically one of the world’s biggest workaholics doing herculean labor for Doctor Who. At the time, Chibnall had none. Davies would also pitch them their stories with a single element. Be it ‘Madame de Pompadour’ or ‘Dalek two parter.’ Based on what I can find, the pitch was ‘Do an episode in real time.’ Hence 42.
David: That probably would go a long way! But even if that weren’t the case, that the man’s first big swing at Who is a blatant basic bitch remake of The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit from the dang year before bodes…poorly.
Justin: Also, and I try to be a forgiving person, but you don’t write this and then get to be showrunner ever. It’s certainly not bad enough to like, ban you from being a solid staff workhorse, but it’s formulaic enough that I could’ve told you his era’s going nowhere ambitious. What strikes me is that there’s not one but two mechanisms built in here specifically to add suspense – the ticking clock, the riddles – and the whole thing just bores. The core idea of a star possessing the company thoughtlessly mining it is cool as hell, but this is another instance where Doctor Who does a crew-locked-in-a-basement-set story and then shoots itself directly in the foot by not bothering to really differentiate the crew members in any meaningful way. The call between Martha and her mom is wonderfully wrenching in a missed-connections talking past one another way, but I had to watch this one in chunks. Not enough quick hits of visual or plot distinctiveness to carry the day.
Thanks for having me, by the way. Would love to be back for some Smith and especially Capaldi!
David: By all means any time, and thanks for raising the bar to an extent that’ll make us have to work all the harder to not look like chumps in the future!
Justin: Bitch you’re the bar, I just know how to write run-on sentences.
David: Dawwww
Sean: Don’t blink.
Next Time: Throw away your guns. It’s going to take you a while. Hermits United. My heart is dead inside.