Whowatch Part 5
Wanted to leave the last post clear of any misc. notes, but a few this time:
NYCC came and went, and while a few of the announcements were of the sleep-paralysis-demon-come-to-life variety, I'm excited for Lazarus Island as appearing to be an event comic made up entirely of the wild better-than-the-main-event spinoffs other event comics get, and while the designs have some thinking the new Hickman/Schiti Marvel book is a Doctor Strange relaunch it seems to me like something excitingly new. Some of the announcements also lent credence to my suspicion that Waid/Mora are doing a post-Dark Crisis Titans relaunch with Nightwing, Jon-Superman, probably Yara-Wonder Girl and Monkey Prince, and I'd bet Boy Thunder, so here's hoping they finally make something of that whole disaster of a franchise if I'm right.
I finished Luda, and while it's very disappointing Morrison noted on Xanaduum that sales aren't enough to suggest they should follow up on another novel idea they have, Luda is so definitively The Grant Morrison Novel that it's hard to imagine anything else not coming up a bit redundant by comparison. It's the logical next step after the Flex Mentallo/The Invisibles/The Filth triumvirate: the layers of autobio, the kitchen-sink inclusion of Morrison's pet interests, the piss and shit and cum and depression, all without the protective shield of elevated genre trappings; 'real life' as seen by Grant Morrison. Not my favorite Morrison, but the most Morrison, and I loved it. Also got Alan Moore's Illuminations, and while I won't be getting around to it for awhile (still have library books to get through, and then I think The Obelisk Gate as my next novel), I did read the opening 80s reprint The Hypothetical Lizard and thought it was an excellent little horror story.
Human Nature
The Family of Blood
Blink
Utopia
The Sound of Drums
The Last of the Time Lords
Sean: Hello David. Didn’t think we’d be back on this beat so soon. Thought we’d have to watch a five hour movie about trying to stop a loser from summoning space Logan Roy first. I do so have thoughts on that one!
David: Well ONE WHO SHALL REMAIN ANONYMOUS is stalling that out a bit - though it’ll be soon, oh patient ones - but it can keep, whereas I wanna keep the momentum going here. Having finished Series 3, some of my favorite episodes thus far, but probably my least favorite as a season all-in-all to date.
Sean: Oof.
David: There’s no big crapping-the-bed moment besides Shakespeare Code (in my eyes anyway, since apparently that asterisk needs to be added), but 1 and 2 had the core unifying thread of The Doctor and Rose, and the show fumbles the bag remarkably with The Doctor and Martha to an extent that leaves the whole thing feeling void by comparison.
Sean: Yeah, with the Martha era, there’s a sense of the show starting to second guess itself with its decisions. There are some moments of proper brilliance, but it’s very hard to be all that excited for the majority of the episodes. You can tell that Davies is starting to consider leaving the show, a prospect that almost canceled the show entirely because there was no one who could actually take over for Davies. (Until… well, I’ll explain later.)
This batch is, of course, the highlight of the series by virtue of doing a lot of brilliant things amazingly. And we start off with an adaptation of one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever: Human Nature. Human Nature is a book written for the Seventh Doctor Who wherein, feeling melancholy for various reasons, Doctor Who decides to spend some time as a human in the late-19th/early-20th century with his companion Bernice Summerfield.
The book is an absolute triumph on author Paul Cornell’s part with dazzling moments of character growth, tragic histories, and one of the single greatest moments in all of Doctor Who (which the adaptation sadly cut out). As an adaptation, Human Nature/Family of Blood is still quite good. But the book was better.
As someone who hasn’t read the book, what did you think?
David: If not for that Doctor Who is barely in this Doctor Who story, I’d call this basically the platonic ideal. Best other than The Girl in the Fireplace - over even The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, or The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit - and even manages to pull it off as one of the usually subpar period piece episodes. The romance, the terror, the majesty, the desperate unfullfillable longings, the ideals and the awful failings, everything that makes Who Who is at its best here. And the titular Family is the best set of villains in the series thus far and it isn’t even close, believably alien but so gut-churningly human in their gleeful, condescending sadism. Even just the end where a throwaway gag reveals The Doctor remembers everything, agonizingly reframing his last conversation with Joan…perfect. This is right alongside - well, the next episode - in stuff I wouldn’t really recommend as an introduction to Doctor Who but is a perfect, multifaceted expression of its ethos.
Sean: I don’t want to jump into the next episode quite yet, but that’s a funny way to describe Blink considering many Who fans consider it a great introduction to Doctor Who.
But keeping things with this two-parter, one of the things the episode had to adapt for was the fact that Bernice Summerfield was a white woman based on Emma Thompson while Martha Jones is played by Freema Agyeman. And the story is set around the turn of the century. As such, her race becomes a major player in the story.
For example, Bernice was never John Smith’s maid. She was a free-spirited woman living in the town while Doctor Who did his thing. Martha, meanwhile, was subjected to a lot of the worst children’s telly can give in depicting racism. Rather than the bollocks The Shakespeare Code tried to sell us about just walking around like you owned the place, Human Nature/The Family of Blood holds no punches when it comes to the racial dynamic of the story.
And it led to one of those moments everyone on tumblr reblogged where Martha explains the bone structure of her hand.
David: That never would have occurred to me as an easy Tumblr moment but of course it was. Of course it was. Anyway yeah I’m not qualified to judge how good this was in terms of handling the period racism but I pretty much have to assume it’s better than Shakespeare Code going ‘lol, we ain’t dealing with that’.
You thought we should skip it Sean, but see, so useful as a barometer.
Sean: David. David, no. There are things to come that will serve that purpose much better.
David: And that’s the end of Whowatch everybody!
Sean: Get back here!
David: VWORP VWORP vworp vworp vworp vworp…
Sean: Sigh. Well, I guess there’s nothing I can do but ask Grant Morrison to replace David.
David: …vworp vworp vworp vworp VWORP VWORP
They’ve suffered enough. I shall steady on.
Sean: Anyways, another thing the episode changed was how it treated World War I. In the episode, it’s treated the way many a British Television Program would treat the war: with silent dignity. A story of brave men forced into an unseemly conflict. The book, while not rejecting the bravery, treats it as an act of horrific brutality. That children were thrown into the conflict that was–all told–quite senseless.
Perhaps the best example of the contrast is the fate of Tim Latimer. In Human Nature/The Family of Blood, he joins the war as a soldier. In Human Nature, his counterpart Timothy Dean joined the Red Cross.
David: Even ‘The Doctor would never send children into battle’ is an interesting expression of the stories’ covering of both the great and terrible aspects of the character and idea. Yes, they’re a stubborn idealist who is, or at least wants to be, someone who’d rather be a coward than a killer, and they’d never ask that of those in their trust.
At the same time: won’t let kids fight. Will cart around a string of bubbly, barely-legal blondes and brunettes to assuage their issues to the far reaches of the cosmos into the clutches of unfathomable danger that’ll often end with a bunch of monsters dead, albeit not via The Doctor shooting or stabbing or punching them but rather some charming come-from-behind trickery. The Doctor contains multitudes, and as we see far more catastrophically elsewhere in the two-parter, those depths can be nightmarish.
Sean: But before we get to that, we must first engage with everyone’s favorite Doctor Who story: Blink. There are a lot of things we could talk about with this episode, but for the purposes of history, we must engage with why it exists. When Series 3 was being planned out, Davies had Moffat tagged for the Dalek two-parter, which would’ve opened the series.
David: WILD you’d open after the Dalek two-parter with a Dalek two-parter. But whatever some’s opinion on the result there, I think it’s easy to agree it worked out for the best given we got a classic one-off rather than Moffat doing a legacy story when he’d get plenty of space to paint on that canvas in years to come. Anyway, do go on.
Sean: Unfortunately, Steven was far too busy working on a television series of his own. An adaptation of a 19th century figure beloved by many. One whose very legacy is still felt to this very day. I am, of course, talking about Jekyll.
Jekyll is a rather under discussed show and only slightly deservedly so. It’s a messy show about problematic men trying to be better, a terrain Moffat would return to again later. And it had some truly inspired set pieces and moments (including one line that would be nicked for a Neil Gaiman project). But it fell apart towards the end for a number of reasons, only some of which were because of the plot. And yet, it did well enough that the BBC trusted Moffat to be the one to take over Doctor Who from Davies rather than let the show get canceled entirely.
We’ll discuss the nature of that era of the show at another time, but for now we have Moffat’s inability to do the big Dalek Two-Parter. He was extremely apologetic to Russell for his failings and asked to make it up to him by taking on the cheap one where Doctor Who couldn’t show up.
And so, we have Blink. Easily the second best of Moffat’s Weeping Angel stories and the least interesting of the ones he’s written.
David: I was kind of blasé on watching Blink for this, but only because Blink is one of the only episodes I’d already seen and I think I’d in fact done so twice. It’s watertight aside from I’d say an overplayed soundtrack that undercuts the tension a bit much (though I don’t know how much I can really criticize that when at this end of the day this is still supposed to be a kid’s show), and also that I in no way buy that couple getting together at the end. It’s deservedly a classic, I totally get how the Weeping Angels would keep coming back after it, but I have mixed feelings about it as a prospective entry point.
I certainly get why: it’s a sideways entrance that skirts right past what a lot of people would find silly and off-putting about the premise, and that has its place. But while it hits on the Who themes well, it’s SO far afield of a traditional story, so much as it’d likely be discussed if it came out now the ‘elevated’ version of the premise, that I’m not sure how well it would really give a lay of the land for how the average episode of Doctor Who actually plays. If nothing else, I can’t sign off on it as a gateway because I watched it years ago and didn’t proceed to watch more. Still like it a lot though!
Sean: In many regards, this is Moffat playing to what a lot of people would see as his strengths: the man who designs puzzle boxes. In this case, the puzzle box is about what’s causing all these strange occurrences. And, to give the episode credit (because it is one of the best Doctor Who stories ever), it is an extremely clever puzzle box with pieces being laid out throughout the episode piecemeal before the story reaches its conclusion.
At the same time though, there’s a sense that… I don’t think ‘the episode feels proud of itself for being so clever’ is the right phrasing for it, but it feels less oriented in the characters. It’s very much someone stretching their skills as a writer and coming up with some clever ideas. And the Weeping Angels are clever, especially in how director Hettie Macdonald opts to have the Angels never move when the viewer can see them. But it’s also light on characters, which would be the main aspect of Moffat’s future puzzle boxes. Sure, Sparrow and Nightingale are well written, the dialogue is clever, and an early performance by Carry Mulligan is always a delight, but… well, you’ll see when we get there.
But first… S I G H. He’s back.
VWORP VWORP vworp vworp vworp vworp…
David: I have to grit my teeth and acknowledge that the episode with John Barrowman’s return as Jack Harkness not only opening with him showing up causing everything to immediately go to hell, but leading to the reveal that he has the power of NEVER GOING AWAY NO MATTER HOW HARD ANYONE TRIES, is genius.
Sean: …vworp vworp vworp vworp VWORP VWORP
God damnit, I need to explain Torchwood. Fuck, I hate this sometimes. Ok, so. Shortly after Series 2 ended, Russell T Davies started two spin offs of Doctor Who. One was The Sarah Jane Adventures, a rather charming kids show that focused on fun adventures involving aliens invading Earth that was mostly run by Gareth Roberts’ partner, Clayton Hickman. The other… was Torchwood.
Torchwood is… Adult. By which I mean there’s a lot of sex, violence, and sex violence. This ranges from ‘Isn’t it funny that one of our main characters date rapes people for fun and pleasure’ to ‘What the Cybermen would look like if they were horny on main’ to ‘Captain Jack is a transphobic piece of shit.’ It’s not very good. Indeed, the only good part of Torchwood is the third series which cuts out the ‘Adult’ shit and tells an extremely bleak story that Grant Morrison would nick for one of their Klaus comics.
His return here would be an act of synergy with the other show going on at the same time. And, of course, they end up at THE END OF TIME! Here, humanity is on the brink of madness where the only hope lies in escaping to the Utopia in the stars. And who should be there to help than a kindly old scientist played by Rejoiced Kab! Erm, I mean Derek Jacobi.
David: Pausing to point out ‘What the Cybermen would look like if they were horny on main’ sounds like the first interesting idea for the Cybermen at least post-revival besides having the Daleks dunk on them, but I’m sure they found a way to make it awful. Anyway, Utopia is fine for what it is, which is a filler as heck episode there to put the pieces into place for the finale. The Doctor does Doctor stuff, Martha is bummed out about the show treating her lousily and so am I, the big reveal at the end is enjoyable.
I will however pause a second time in rapid succession to note that there were too dang many episodes this season that opened up on The Doctor and the companion prior to the credits. So much of the character of Who to me is in those first scenes establishing a tone and grounded view of a problem before the first notes float in to remind us the TARDIS is coming to bring a solution to the horror at hand - you can even read the title sequence as what’s happening right before the heroes show up! Opening on them in the first place feels to me like it should be, if not an uncommon occurrence, infrequent enough to let us know that this is probably an episode where shit’s gonna get real.
Sean: And well, things are bleak for humanity. I’m just going to be blunt about this. He’s dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave. Those who are alive are either crazed cannibals out to eat the survivors of humanity or crazed humans trying to find UTOPIA!
Things don’t end well, especially with the shocking reveal that YANA is, in fact, an old friend of Doctor Who. I am of course talking about The Master! Now, at the beginning of this series, I had David watch Survival, which likewise featured the Master. How does Anthony Ainley compare to Derek Jacobi and, subsequently, Mim Johns… Sorry, I meant to type John Simms.
David: Anthony Ainley put on a masterclass in smug villainy, but had the easy edge of the brilliant ‘I’m gonna make sure The Doctor wins…FOR ME’ conceit in what I saw going for him. Derek Jacobi was terrific but similarly as far as ‘The Master’ of it all went I think mostly just had to evoke the idea of the old classic style of menace at the end, plus again he has the edge of his noble human shell coming undone. Simms is the new take, and I have a lot to say here.
The Master as an arch-villain here is amazing. The bit you made sure I saw cut from streaming where he puts on a full musical number about defeating Doctor Who? A+, all-timer, could watch it on a loop for hours. The nature and scope of his plan? Ingenious, both on his part and that of Davies and company for putting all those threads together. The beautifully grotesque implicit touch of turning the last of humanity into essentially Daleks in the Toclafanes just to stick it to The Doctor that extra inch further? Magnificent.
Sean: So the thing about the Toclafane is that they were a replacement for the Daleks. You see, the rights for characters in English Television works differently than in America. Essentially, the creator (i.e. the Writer) owns the character. So if someone wanted to use the robot dog or the pepper pots, then they’d have to get permission from the writer or their estate. And Terry Nation, who created the Daleks, is… how do I put this delicately?
Terry Nation is the Bob Kane of Doctor Who.
David: Sean that is the opposite of delicate. You might as well have kidney-punched his corpse.
Sean: Trust me David, that was me being delicate. For starters, I didn’t talk about the Bill Finger of Doctor Who. Or his Joshua Williamson.
Regardless, his estate had some concerns over the Daleks being featured on the show for, frankly, stupid reasons. So Russell had to come up with a potential replacement to appear in the story The Absence of the Daleks (to be written by Robert Shearman) about how the Daleks were all killed in the Time War by the true Enemy, the Toclafane! Fortunately (with the aid of Steven Moffat’s mother in law), cooler heads prevailed and we got the Daleks we know and fear today.
David: Gonna be very real with you: Toclafanes are better. Not to say the Daleks being there wasn’t an overall plus, but these freaky little dudes are way scarier and a way more potent ideological threat by their very existence.
Sean: In this form–that of a decayed humanity forced to eek out life in a perverse reversal of Davies’ hedonism–that might well be. Nation, as I mentioned, is the Bob Kane and his work is very… I paid a man to paint my clown portraits. As such, his creatures of great evil are… Nazis in the most generic sense possible. Other writers would do interesting things with them (Douglas Adams has some fun mucking up Nation’s last script for Doctor Who and Aaronavich is truly delightful. To say nothing about Davies and–Yes, I will fight you on this–Moffat).
As for the Master, John Simm is an utter delight. He brings a mad cap energy to the role one wouldn’t expect from the straight man on Life on Mars. Indeed, that’s an apt phrasing considering this dynamic between Doctor Who and the Master is Queer as Fuck! It’s the story of a lovers spat that spans eons and crushes lives in its wake. The Master took over the world. All so he could get Doctor Who to notice him. And kneel.
And it’s that last part that’s key. For all Doctor Who clearly loves the Master, for all he wants to travel the cosmos with his old friend, his childhood man crush, the Master wants Doctor Who to suffer. He is a cold hearted bastard who will do unspeakable things for shits and giggles. Yes, there are those drums in his head (and we’ll get to them later). But at his core, Harold is a piece of shit.
David: The thing is though: as a nemesis to The Doctor, I love The Master in here. As The Nemesis…eh. The Doctor is so rife with failings and flaws crying out to be illuminated by contrast with a figure bent a couple crucial inches the wrong way if you’re going the Evil Doctor route the way this does. This ain’t that. I get now why Justin compared him to Moriarity since this was blatantly the prototype for Andrew Scott’s performance as Jim Moriarity on Sherlock. But that guy fit so perfectly because whereas Cumberbatch’s Holmes used aloof coldness to avoid revealing his compassion and deeply repressed desire to connect, his nemesis’s exuberance belied an utter indifference to human life as he essentially believed himself to be of a different species. But that approach to a baddie, charming as it remains, doesn’t tell me much about The Doctor? It feels like the thought largely topped out at ‘The Doctor is good, so The Master, well, he’s baddie bad bad. And if The Doctor is le wacky, you better bet your bottom dollar The Master shall be le wackier,’ complete with an Evil sonic screwdriver and Gallifrey.
The one really potent dichotomy to me is that in contrast to Tennant’s almost aggressive asexuality even in the stories about him falling in some kind of love, Simms is MAD HORNY, in general and as you point out specifically for The Doctor. But even that kind of just underscored for me that they went so far as to give him a companion, addressed as such, and not really do anything with it.
I love The Master as a Doctor Who villain. I just wish this villain…wasn’t The Master? If that makes sense? I think there are better, more fine-tuned and unique things you could do with that idea.
Sean: Yeah. Elizabeth Sandifer actually did a thread about this (which I can’t link due to spoilers) talking about the kind of baddie the Master is: a mustache twirler. Which works well for one off villains played by established actors having a ball being manically evil. But, as she notes, “The Master works best if you write them as a Loki figure—twisted by resentment, but always leaving you with hope of redemption.”
He’s a lot of fun, but you can only do so much with the guy as a recurring baddie. This is a problem that has flummoxed many a Doctor Who writer with probably only one person actually succeeding in making it work.
That said, I love that The Master dances to Scissor Sisters and I hate that HBO Max (and, indeed, all US streaming services) refuse to pay the fucking royalties!
David: So glad you sent me the correct version, and if we’re noting smaller details regarding the finale, I love the cartoonishly American viewers of the President’s assassination, and while I’ve been more than forewarned to expect pretty much every English actor under the sun here, oh my gosh! That was Lucifer! From Lucifer! Hilarious, but also the first time I couldn’t even slightly turn off my brain from going ‘It’s him! It’s that guy!’ with an actor in here despite not even watching that show. Anyway, I mentioned earlier being impressed with the structure of The Master’s plan writing-wise, but the way the details of it fold out into the solution and a blisteringly perfect clap-your-hands-if-you-believe-in-Doctor-Who climax of the kind I understand this show will do far too many of in the future?
Sean: Yes, but most of those other times, it doesn’t involve Doctor Who’s companion going around the world telling people how great Doctor Who is so they can all clap their hands and turn Dobby Who into SPARKLE JESUS DOCTOR WHO!
David: I think you can get away with that exactly once. Anyway, it all plays out so simply and organically, but I would love to know the step-by-step of the order in which the ideas came and were grown and stapled together to make it, because it’s note-perfect if-this-then-this adventure storytelling that breaks my brain a bit trying to understand how somebody would come up with it and put it all together this neatly. From a pure visceral action climax sense, this was easily the best finale thus far.
Then there’s the other sense after that business is taken care of.
So while Justin’s description of her as a living question mark to The Doctor as a necessary heroic figure is something I would have loved to see the show realize and explore even once, I was still excited to see where things with Martha were going. The show wasn’t interested in her virtues and vices the way it was with Rose. It didn’t care about her family the way it cared about Jackie and Mickey.
Sean: Equally, it continues a trend within Davies’ work of having nothing but contempt for older women. Sometimes, this results in interesting drama about the pain homophobic mothers can bring to their children. Other times, rather crap jokes about how, when one is past a certain age, it’s funny when they act sexilly or sexually assault young folks.
David: Across the board, a terrible waste of Freema Agyeman. But in a vacuum, I could accept the idea that she as a one-season companion was acting as a walking, talking epilogue to Rose’s tenure, and just because of that I figured it had to be building to a showstopper emotional explosion tying this whole thing together into a tidy arc that would be satisfactory in that capacity.
And then she and The Doctor talk it out like mature adults and part ways amicably. As people: good for them! As a narrative: that’s it? That’s ALL you had in the tank? They realize calmly this isn’t going so great and cut it out with no scars or baggage or lessons learned or closure or introspection? And not in a solemn, understated, heartbreaking parting of the ways, or a moment of growth and catharsis, but a frank ‘y’know what, let’s get out while the getting’s good, I’ll make sure to keep in touch though’? The overall batting average of the season was pretty damn high after 2. As a 13-episode story, this all but killed it stone dead.
Sean: Yeah, it’s a real shame. Fortunately, next time, we have something truly special. The beginning of the Time War itself. One could almost say that we are to bear witness to its… Genesis.
Next Time: That power would set me up above the gods. Not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable. Happy Christmas! No one's unemployed these days except you. What'd he buy a big blue wooden box for? The Ood are coming home. You're a proper doctor. Well, she's, well, she's my daughter. Niggles aside, we'd better look in the library.