Whowatch Part 7
And we come to the end of the first year of Technicolor horizons as a project! Was it all I hoped it to be? Not yet; still very cape-centric in ways I hope to grow past in the future, though my library comics reading this year has definitely moved further beyond that crowd than ever before even if it hasn't been immediately reflected in my writing. I'm veeeery tentatively imagining a reoccurring Superman feature here for his 85th, and a bunch of features I plan to pitch to other sites this coming year are in the superhero sphere, but I want my sporadic standalone updates on here to lean in other directions.
Any New Year's resolutions are a few blessed days away though! So I can still ramble a bit about the glut of Superman announcements since last time without an ounce of hypocrisy.
I'm not sure why The Rock is so bummed; not only has the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe changed, but Black Adam has indeed defeated Superman, albeit Black Adam the movie over the character. What a whiplash with Henry Cavill over a few short days, but while I'm sure him vs. Brainiac would've been...fine? As much as I've come around on the Snyder films, virtually anything that would've been done with this Superman would've played as an apology tour starring the literal face of the last decade of WB's failures with DC, so I can't blame Gunn and Safran for choosing to cut the cord entirely rather than run a truly obscene scale of damage control on public perception.
Given Gunn's talking about joining a younger Superman in media res, and the guy's a friend of Morrison's and probably inclined against a totally vanilla take (especially since he passed up doing a Superman with Cavill before), I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is how we get a live-action t-shirt and jeans Clark Kent. It'd let him do a fun shittalking Superman, and do a 'here's how he gets from this more grounded sci-fi premise to Superman' ala what Snyder and Goyer tried in a way that doesn't rehash or riff on the Donner iconography again, but is still more surface-level fun and poppy in a way general audiences want out of Superman stuff. The Coates movie and My Adventures apparently persist in spite of all odds, so whatever's done with the 'mainline' is fine with me.
Elsewhere hot damn, Priest/Pagulayan spacefaring Superman mini! Impossible dream both for them getting that team and that team getting to do a Superman book, I've already seen certain types of Superheads complaining that this premise is redundant next to other stories but who cares, this'll be better. The cover I especially love, a reverse of my favorite Superman cover by Ryan Sook of him looking down on a loving world; here he turns back from the same position against an endless starfield, alone and realizing he's fucked. The regular ongoings look to be increasingly Not For Me, but between Superman: Lost and Superman: Testament by Waid/Hitch/Nolan apparently happening next year (I imagine Hitch leaving Venom is what cleared up that time) I'll still be kept fed. And tantalizing as it may be to hold onto the last soiled shred of my dignity, I cannot lie to you all and pretend I'm not kind of excited about Mark Millar coming back to do his big dumb Superman book after all these years.
(Given how much I rag on both him and the upcoming Super-slate however, I do have to give Joshua Williamson this: at time of writing I just read Action Comics #1050, and he does manage one very inspired bit of Lex characterization in there.)
Also I saw Avatar 2 the other day, it sucked real bad. I know we all wanted to believe in a big dumb blockbuster auteur coming back and showing the MCU how action is supposed to be done, but it did in fact suck real bad. By contrast, The Fabelmans? It'd be one of the year's best even if only for the final scene being the most DA MOVIES, BABEY sequences of all time.
David: Heading now into the home stretch, with:
The Unicorn and the Wasp
Silence in the Library
Forest of the Dead
Midnight
Turn Left
The Stolen Earth
Journey’s End
And introducing our guest this time, CBH’s Elizabeth Edwards! Elizabeth, leading off as we always do bringing someone into the fold: how were you introduced to Doctor Who?
Elizabeth: Sean! David! Delighted to be here! The first time I ever heard of Doctor Who was when Entertainment Weekly published a special edition marking the show’s 50th anniversary. I was a regular reader of the magazine, so I started to idly scan the cover story. I came across a picture of a scrawny, squirrel-eyed man named “David Tennant,” and the blurb claimed he was one of the most beloved incarnations of the Doctor. How? I asked myself. What kind of a show had someone like this Tennant guy as a lead? So, on a whim, I put on the first episode of the most recent series: Asylum of the Daleks, and then for whatever reason went back and watched The End of the World. I instantly fell in love with the show’s wit and imagination, and I went back and watched the whole Matt Smith era, before doubling back to Eccleston and Tennant. I’ve been hooked ever since.
David: You went back to the second episode of the series as the beginning of your look back?
Elizabeth: My best friend and I were twelve, and not really thinking through the decision beyond ‘that preview on Netflix looks cool’.
David: Fair.
Sean: Oh god, I forgot you were young.
Elizabeth: Hahaha. I can legally drink as of about three months ago!
David: Speaking of the past coming back around, the creator of easily my least-favorite episode to date returns with The Unicorn and The Wasp, and on the one hand, it is him straight-up redoing the aforementioned Shakespeare Code: a historical mystery solved by a famed writer being convinced to save the day through the power of art!
Sean: A trend that will continue throughout his time on telly Who.
Elizabeth: Hey, at least he’ll find a better episode to redo… and redo…
Sean: Comic, not episode… We’ll get there though. Oh god, we’ll get there.
David: This time at least it’s Fine. It is perfectly, exactly, One Standard Unit Of Doctor Who. I can’t imagine loving it, but I can’t really imagine hating it either beyond the base-level ‘oh fuck this guy’. This episode is, I think, exactly the show as it exists in the minds of people who have never watched it. And that’s, again, Fine.
Elizabeth: I think it’s worth contextualizing Gareth Roberts’ work in this episode within the arc of his career, or relative lack thereof. Gareth Roberts did not start in television. He submitted a novel for a marginal line by a marginal publisher in the ‘90s based on a canceled sci-fi show around the time when he was still in uni, and after that one was published and generally well-regarded for its humor, he wrote a few more. His first ever TV credit was on a small and forgotten soap opera Springhill, which was co-created by Russell T. Davies, a Real Television Writer™ with a slightly immature fondness for Doctor Who.
Sean: Ah yes, the television show that, according to series writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, is basically ‘What if 2020 was a soap opera from the 90s?’ Complete with time travel, witches, and the literal Antichrist.
Elizabeth: After Davies revived Doctor Who, Gareth was desperate to get an episode, to the point of writing a tie-in novel for the first season. Davies gave him an audition piece, an interactive television special maybe 15 minutes long, and after spending a year in the trenches of ancillary promotional material, he was offered The Shakespeare Code. The only reason Gareth Roberts gets assigned a Doctor Who episode is to save Russell T Davies a month’s work on the first draft. Davies handed him the plots to his episodes, broke them down in exacting detail throughout a couple writing/tone meetings, then took it over for the final draft as he does with almost everyone’s. Looking at it this way, it’s clear what The Unicorn and the Wasp is: Doctor Who on autopilot. And it’s a credit to Season Four’s hot streak that the creative team can bring this much panache and charm to such a bog-standard assignment.
Sean: There are two fun facts that I feel need to be highlighted before we get the next episode. The one that doesn’t use the phrase “fun fact” as a threat is that The Unicorn and the Wasp is the episode that definitively establishes what, exactly, is Canon in Doctor Who. Prior to the episode, there was a vague gesturing at what is and isn’t canon. Is the one where Doctor Who fights Not!Fu-Manchu while cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes canon? Is the one where he meets Sherlock Holmes? Are the TV Comics where Doctor Who and his two grandchildren save Santa from the Demon Magician canon? Well, The Unicorn and the Wasp has the answer:
(Graphic by Richard Jones)
Elizabeth: Oh that’s a blast from the past.
David: Huh! I’d always thought Andrew Hickey came up with that for Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, guess he’d repurposed it and I missed the accreditation.
Sean: The second fun fact… As many of the readers of this series might have noticed, I will occasionally include lines and quotes in the Next Time section that aren’t actually from the story. Some might be from fan strips based around the episode(s) while others might be from the book the episode was based on.
For The Unicorn and the Wasp, I opted to go with a deleted line revealed by Russell T Davies in his book The Writer’s Tale.
Elizabeth: Oh god. I know where we’re going here…
Sean: YEP!
Elizabeth: Would it were otherwise.
Sean: So… the episode has a running gag where every single title of an Agatha Christie novel gets name dropped. One such novel is, of course, And Then There Were None. An engrossing study of the cruelty at the heart of humanity.
But that’s not what it’s original title was…
David: Real sharp breath through gritted teeth on that one.
Sean: Russell, to put it mildly, has a… problematic relationship with people of color.
Elizabeth: It’s worth noting, at the risk of stating the obvious, that this is only something that’s being inferred from his fiction. From all accounts, he’s lovely to work with and know and to my knowledge there haven’t been any complaints of racist behavior on his part. His track record with characters of color is ambivalent at best, you’d be hard-pressed not to concede that he’s frequently tone-deaf and lazy in how he deploys racial stereotypes, but that doesn’t mean we can confidently draw conclusions about how he interacts with people of color in the real world.
Sean: On the other hand… wow, this combined with another story this season have some truly dodgy race politics. To say nothing about the implications of how Martha was treated.
Elizabeth: Oh, to be clear, this sucks shit, and both he and Benjamin Cook should be extremely embarrassed that it remained in the book as a cute story without an apology (especially if they were already making edits for discretion, as Davies says in the introduction).
Sean: So many things that were treated as a cute story in the Davies era turned out to be… not. But we’ll get to that later.
Elizabeth: My turn to suck air through gritted teeth.
David: Okay look it’s telling we’re all just discussing production background on this one but we’re out of the hole, as it’s all killer no filler from here on, starting with what is from what I’ve seen thus far the closest there is to an All-Star Doctor Who.
Sean: I’d argue it’s more Animal Man than All Star. You see–
David: Neeeeeeerd
Elizabeth: (Alex Kingston voice) SPOILERS! Did you not even watch the episodes?
Okay, I have one last observation to make about The Unicorn and the Wasp before we move on. Most of the elements of the story genuinely work: the ensemble is full of charming performers, Graeme Harper is dependably fun, and Tennant and Tate make a meal of their repartee. What sinks this episode, watching it in 2022, is something that can be said of very little New Who: it doesn’t trust the audience’s genre savviness remotely enough.
The characters keep restating, “It’s Agatha Christie! In an Agatha Christie story! Surely Agatha Christie (Who’s here! Solving an Agatha Christie mystery!) will be uniquely equipped to find the murderer!” And while that’s a bit of an eye-roll by itself, the episode could easily sell it by just… showing Agatha solving the mystery by observing the cast, using her keen eye for human behavior to suss out what they were hiding. Instead, the show opts to keep pointing out its single idea in the full expectation that the audience will clap its hands together at how clever and charming the whole affair is. It reduces what should be an easy genre pastiche to knock out the park into dull hagiography with too little meat on its bones.
Sean: Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, it’s time for Steven Moffat to announce to the world that he’s the next showrunner via writing what might be his best Davies era script (and a pretty damn good story at that) with A River Song Ending!
Elizabeth: Don’t you mean Cal’s Untimely Node Transmission?
Sean: Donna’s Internet Children Killed.
Elizabeth: We could explain this to David, or we could just let them stare at the previous few lines in bewilderment.
Sean: It’s Doctor Who, let David be bewildered. Anyways, this two-parter’s great.
David: No question to me: best Who we’ve seen thus far, the perfect condensation of everything that makes this show this show executed at the highest possible level. There’s a weird lovingly-rendered setting, a bunch of elements that don’t belong together, absurd mysteries that domino together perfectly logically, it does jarring brilliant storytelling with the visual language while still being cornball enough to do a dramatic zoom-in, The Doctor is an asshole and promises someone they’ll be alright immediately before they die horrifically but you still think of him as transcendently wonderful at the end, a companion is traumatized beyond all comprehension. This one’s got it ALL.
Also, regarding what Elizabeth said before, this one’s a perfect contrast - it doesn’t have to SAY it’s all about narratives and ghosts and relative experience in the story set in a big library, it just assumes you aren’t an idiot.
Sean: An approach that Moffat will take in his time as showrunner that will, ultimately, prove futile in the wake of 95% of tumblr criticism.
David: Ain’t that always the way.
Elizabeth: Knowing what Sean and I know, it’s going to be hard to avoid allowing all the focus to fall on the show’s most notable guest star to date, so I want to highlight the direction for a moment: nearly every episode of this stretch of Season Four is handled by Graeme Harper, who we’ll surely talk about later on, but this story is arguably Euros Lyn’s triumph over his tenure directing Doctor Who.
Lyn’s direction was well-liked by audiences from Season One onward, but he wasn’t the ‘best’ so much as he was the archetypical Davies era director: extremely fast, ruthless edits; extremely wide establishing shots opening a scene before launching into the mid-shots; hiding budget constraints behind sheer energy. Behind the scenes, however, he was one of the show’s secret saviors, rescuing disastrous production blocks such as Christopher Eccleston’s first and Matt Smith’s second. He was great with actors, efficient, and well-loved by everyone in production.
Here, he gets to luxuriate in the evocative location he’s been given, making it appear grandiose and threatening, and making the most of his limited CGI plates. He gets extraordinary performances from everyone in the cast, manages the frequent tonal shifts with ease, and puts together some of the best shots in the whole Davies era. In particular, the death of Miss Evangalista, handled in a slow pan that stops as soon as the camera is in a position where she’s blocked from the audience’s view by the armchair, is properly chilling.
Sean: Lyn would go on to direct the worst episode of Sherlock, the best part of Torchwood, and Heartstopper.
Elizabeth: Not that his Sherlock script gave him much to work with.
David: The tonal balance here is remarkable and so much of that comes down to Lyn; this is The Funnest episode, The Scariest episode, the Cleverest episode, and none of those constituent elements feel like they’re crashing into each other. Tennant and Kingston’s chemistry is dead-on from word go, Tate gets to play with a different kind of constantly freaking out from Donna Noble’s usual constant freaking out and does gangbusters with it, and by the end it’s the most properly all-encompassing adventure to date. I’m throwing out generic superlatives, but the alternative is pulling on individual threads and then that becomes this entire Whowatch.
Elizabeth: Forgive me if I’m stepping on your toes here, Sean–
Sean: You’re fine.
Elizabeth: –but now that he’s mentioned her, I have to pose the question to David: what are your first impressions of River Song?
David: Way back (already way back!) when Sarah Jane appeared, I talked about one of the great necessary challenges of the regeneration conceit: that sometimes one actor who’s kind of playing the same character as another but also kind of not is going to have to pay off another's emotional thread.
Alex Kingston as River Song has to do that in reverse. It’s a move that could only be pulled when written by someone who knows he’s about to be showrunner, but by god does she go above and beyond in selling an emotional conceit that could so easily come across as shamelessly forced.
Sean: Technically speaking, this was an idea nicked from the Colin Baker era, wherein Bonnie Langford played a companion from the future. But the Colin Baker era, especially the story where that came from, was such a hot mess, only insane Doctor Who fans obsessed with arguing that the Colin Baker era was actually a good era of Doctor Who would make such a claim seriously.
Elizabeth: Moffat may be as absurd a fanboy as the rest of us, but I don’t think he was actually thinking of Trial of a Time Lord when coming up with River. That being said, I think the way he did come up with her is very revealing: originally, he was just trying to figure out why his cast of archeologists would trust the Doctor enough to let him save their lives, because he’d suffered through enough scenes of the guest cast idiotically fighting the Doctor to last a lifetime. So he decided one of the archeologists would already know him. How to explain that she’s a character we’ve never met? Easy: she’s a time traveler who the Doctor has never met before.
Sean: Which is to say Moffat once again nicked from The Time Traveler’s Wife. (Though he might have also been thinking about Bernice Summerfield, a time traveling archeologist created by his mate Paul Cornell. Different dynamic though. Bernice is plausibly closer to Donna than River, albeit slightly more spiky because it was the 90s.)
Elizabeth: Having found the germ of an idea in those banal plot considerations, Moffat started writing his sparkly sitcom dialogue and noticed that watching The Doctor and River interact was by far the most exciting and dynamic thing this episode has to offer, even though the plot’s working extremely hard to be scary and complicated and surprising.
You can see River start to commandeer the episode from Donna in real-time over the course of the second half of Silence in the Library, literally stealing the Doctor away from some standard Doctor/companion banter to have an extremely disorientating and emotionally charged conversation about syncing timelines with diaries. By the time Donna gets around to demanding that River reveal who she is, she’s already been supplanted as the co-protagonist of the story.
It speaks to one of the very telling differences between how Moffat and Davies approach writing for the show: Moffat starts from the high concept and works his way into the character, whereas Davies starts with the tiny suggestive details of a character’s life and trusts his themes to sort themselves out.
Sean: That isn’t to say that Donna gets nothing to do in the episode. But rather, she gets sequestered into a subplot about being trapped in a simulation of reality that rewrites your memory and makes things feel longer than they actually are via jump cuts. It’s a fantastic sub-plot, but a subplot nevertheless.
Meanwhile, we have Doctor Who, River, and one half of the Inside No. 9 guys running around a library trying very hard not to be eaten by their own shadows.
Elizabeth: Steve Pemberton! Who does a great job with a character that needs to be convincingly loathsome as the entitled rich prick endangering his employees, but then turn on a dime and win back the audience as a sympathetic relative attempting to keep a child safe. By the end, as he delightedly hugged the saved patrons of the Library, tears glistening in his eyes, laughter bellowing, I was genuinely moved by his triumph.
Sean: Pemberton is one of those character actors you wish had the recognition and career trajectory of Mark Gatiss. He can play the Devil, Father Christmas, and Joe Average with a simple shift of an eyebrow.
Elizabeth: They were fun as a pair of Nazi book collectors in Good Omens!
David: Moreover: the Vashta Nerada! Between the Weeping Angels and these bastards, Moffat understands a very simple conceit: the best Doctor Who monsters are ones that operate by rules so deeply simple and silly they not only work for kids, but root right into the adult hindbrain just looking for something mundane to be irrationality terrorized by. I half expect him to create a group of baddies with the power to turn the floor into lava down the line.
Elizabeth: “Usually they just hunt roadkill, but sometimes people go missing. Not everyone comes back out of the dark.” He knows what he’s doing, the bastard.
Sean: We also see the return of Moffat’s favorite source for comedy and/or horror: Glitchy technology. The suits speak the last words of those who were eaten by their own shadows over and over again like a skipping, skipping, skipping record.
David: LIKE A BOOK REPEATING THE SAME THOUGHTS FOR ETERNITY, YOU SEE
My own ‘one last thought’: the degree of hubris to have a character from the future say Doctor Who’s been pretty great so far, but he’s about to become the REAL Doctor Who who’s so much cooler, in the last pair of episodes you do before taking over as showrunner? Incredible, cannot help but respect it.
Sean: Speaking of repeating words… MIDNIGHT! Everyone’s favorite script from Russell T Davies. The one made on the cheap because the finale had fifty guest stars.
Elizabeth: And because production had about a week to assemble all the sets and shooting locations, because Davies threw out a completed script written by Tom MacRae for Season Four because he decided the story wasn’t up to his standards and his rewrites couldn’t bring it up to broadcast standard. So he quickly decided upon a confined cabin so that they’d only need one primary location, killed MacRae’s story on Friday, and after a few packs of cigarettes, Davies turned in the first draft (which was barely rewritten prior to filming) that Monday.
David: A real Jack Kirby putting together Cap #112 over a weekend, that one.
Sean: A thing I might not have made clear in this series of conversations is that Davies rewrote practically every script for Doctor Who. Not just ‘added some bits here and there,’ but actively rewrote full episodes. With the exception of people who had run their own shows, all the scripts of a season could’ve had a final draft by Davies. To put it mildly, that’s not a healthy approach to script writing, and Moffat would feel the full brunt of that two years into his time as showrunner.
Elizabeth: There’s a degree to which the problem is extremely self-imposed, and a degree to which it actually reflects fairly well on Davies. The practice started with The Unquiet Dead, because they were trying to get Simon Callow for the part of Charles Dickens and Gatiss’s draft wasn’t good enough yet, so Davies took it away and finished/rewrote it in a weekend, not putting his name on the final product because it wasn’t Gatiss’s fault that the production timeline didn’t leave adequate time for him to polish it. And then he just… never stopped.
And the problem is that no matter how hideously egocentric it is to admit, Davies is right: an episode that’s had two months’ work by someone like Gareth Roberts or even Paul Cornell followed by two weeks of his attention will turn out better than an episode that got three months from them, and will provide better value for the British taxpayers’ money. But it resulted in serious obstacles for the production, such as ‘Davies was a habitual procrastinator driving himself to near-collapse from exhaustion.’
David: Dang, relatable king. Here he offers up the episode where for once The Doctor can’t run, and where is visited upon us the greatest horror of all: learning our hero is a ‘let’s put aside our gadgets and doo-dads and talk like real people!’ guy. Also there’s a monster I guess. Also-also I was embarrassingly near-convinced that the one kid (in actuality Merlin’s Colin Morgan) was an impossibly young Benedict Cumberbatch.
Sean: Sherlock was two years after that episode, he wouldn’t be that young.
Elizabeth: Colin Morgan is fantastic in this episode; it’s immediately clear why someone would look at him and see a star. His sullen, black-witted Jethro never becomes a stock ‘ungrateful teen’, retaining a genuine sense of decency, thoughtfulness, and compassion through the end. When he turns on The Doctor, it hurts, and his paralysis in the face of his mother’s verbal abuse, knowing that what he’s seeing is wrong but unable to take a stand on the Doctor’s behalf, is heartbreaking.
David: He’s such a little turd! “666!” It’s great, and you can see in miniature here what he’s gotten from his parents, where he’s rebelling for the sake of rebelling, and where he’s got the little kernel of a possible better person in him, without ever actually becoming the center of the episode. When he lets The Doctor down and Tennant’s so saddened, you believe it.
Elizabeth: But he’s right to turn on him! “But that’s the thing, Doctor; you’ve been loving this. From the moment it started.” That is an entirely reasonable thing to find disturbing about an extremely talkative man who’s assumed the authority position in the room without any particular proof of expertise and who isn’t actually helping — and has actively set himself in opposition to the only sane plan on display.
We as the audience know that The Doctor “has priors,” as he himself handwaves away, but even knowing that it’s clear that he doesn’t have a damn clue how to ‘contain’ whatever’s possessing Sky. In the end, the only reason anyone survives is because the stewardess has the courage to throw Sky out, and she first suggests that course of action like halfway into the episode!
Sean: (It’s worth noting that another actor familiar to the Doctor Who space was in this episode and that's the son of the Second Doctor Who, David Troughton as Professor Hobbes.)
Anyways, what we have here is a chamber piece about eight people locked in a room with the knowledge that one of them is a killer. It’s an old television prompt where the hero has to figure out how to beat the baddie. Only here, as to be expected with Davies’ love of subverting older television, the baddie’s revealed in the first act and Doctor Who is unable to convince the cast of guest stars that he’s to be trusted and, as a result, almost gets thrown into the hellscape.
It’s a spectacular showcase of the failures of humanity, something that’s a theme throughout the larger Davies era, but especially here in the climactic parts of the fourth Series.
David: Not that this doesn’t work here, but in my head this is specifically the kind of adventure that Eccleston would’ve been going on prior to meeting Rose, the sort of thing that left him that twitchy cynical raw nerve wandering in the wake of the Time War. But whichever incarnation it wouldn’t be The Doctor if it couldn’t all go straight to hell, and here it goes so awfully that you have to say by the end of this the worst thing you possibly can: less people probably would have died if he’d never been there. The anti-Doctor Who story in the best way (look I’m not exactly breaking new ground here but c’mon, the whole gimmick is I’m the one watching these for the first time), and great setup in that regard for where the finale goes.
Elizabeth: While this is an episode that would work thematically with any incarnation of the Doctor, from a television production standpoint it’s tailor-made for the show’s current lead actor. This is an episode that requires something like twenty-five minutes of usable footage with the lead guest actor speaking in perfect sync with the entire ensemble. The beats need to be worked out rigorously, and executed flawlessly over and over and over again. Christopher Eccleston’s performance was phenomenal, but relied on slightly off-kilter emotional deliveries and unpredictable rhythms. Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi are both genius actors, but neither the former’s manic spontaneity nor the latter’s naturalistic weariness would play to the episode’s strengths.
David Tennant, on the other hand, got his start as a player for the Royal Shakespeare Company, landing his first television roles right around the time he got his first starring role with the company as Romeo. Gregory Doran, the RSC’s artistic director and his director in Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Richard II, told a story about their production of Hamlet where Tennant showed up to the first rehearsal having already memorized the entire play. He sits down with his scripts and minutely breaks down the beats and arcs, and this episode reaps astonishing dividends from that thoroughness.
Tennant’s two great strengths as an actor are his incredible expressiveness (through his body language, facial expressions, and vocal work) and the precision of his timing. His talents are on full display in Midnight.
And he’s equaled in every way by Sky’s actor, an incredible Leslie Sharp. Sharp is a frequent collaborator of Davies, having starred in both Bob & Rose four years before Billie Piper had claim to that name and The Second Coming opposite Eccleston, and also comes with substantial theatre priors (she recently gave a barnstorming lead performance as Philoctetes in Kae Tempest’s Paradise).
Sharp is able to quickly sketch a brittle woman who’s still capable of warmth in Sky, then turns in one of the best Doctor Who villain performances of all time, deftly charting the creature’s evolution from emerging consciousness to detached observation to stunning, chilling cruelty.
David: The way she becomes the voice of madness by the end has the soaring compelling horror of a cult leader, reaching a point when even when your logical mind says ‘well she’s probably exerting some kind of weird influence to make them all this tunnel-vision-ey even given how scared they are’, on a certain level you can just…believe it.
Elizabeth: And isn’t it so telling that it’s explicitly The Doctor’s voice she’s using to urge them on? It’s a broken-glass mirror of what he does every episode, bypassing the rational minds of the people around him through careful emotional manipulation and sheer charismatic verve.
Sean: The episode is just one of those chilling, brilliant things that can’t be replicated without those specific factors. The sort Doctor Who wouldn’t see again for another seven years.
Up next, we have ‘What if everything over the past four series went horribly wrong.’ That’s perhaps a reductive reading of Turn Left, but not an inaccurate one. (Though, sadly, it does have the framing device of Planet Orientalism.) It’s a downright terrifying story about the rise of fascism in the context of a science fiction setting. Something Davies would do better in the series Years & Years (though It’s a Sin is vastly superior to it in every way).
Elizabeth: It’s hard to deny It’s A Sin is superior, but I feel like I’ve gotta momentarily defend Years & Years as one of the most exciting experiments of Davies’ television career, which is absolutely imperious through the first five episodes before fumbling the bag with a bizarrely saccharine and naively optimistic finale. “What if the British public voted Boris Johnson out?”
Sean: Davies could never escape optimism, even at his bleakest. He has to have a win in even his most tragic of tales. Whether the audience agrees with him is another matter entirely.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Turn Left has a bleak vision for the world of Doctor Who. One where, without Doctor Who, the people would barely succeed, with many lives lost (I’m surprised Wilfred survived to see his neighbors go to the camps given where he was in Voyage of the Damned) and humans choosing to do the most horrific things possible. Because aliens from the stars are coming to kill us. They have killed countless numbers of us. We have to hunker down and eliminate those who might be sympathetic to them. To make space for more of us. A truly bleak vision of things.
David: Even though it ropes back in every biggest Doctor Who moment of the last couple years, most of Turn Left is functionally only ‘genre’ in the most classic sci-fi ‘if-this-then-this’ sense of exploring a totally mundane family’s experience against a backdrop of disaster that could have just as easily been anything else; a world where everything’s a little worse because someone didn’t believe in themselves, but at the same time a world that’s simultaneously about how screwed we are without The Doctor and about how we manage by the skin of our teeth to save ourselves over and over without him. It’s just a question of if it’s a life worth living. At least Jack Harkness exploded.
A few minor points:
Wow, this really went point of no return with Sylvia, huh. “Yes.”
Joseph Long’s performance as the Noble’s neighbor is maybe my favorite walk-on minor role in the entire series. Absolutely charming, absolutely engrossing, absolutely crushing.
Holy shit they did indeed do Orientalism: The Planet. Not much other way of putting that one.
Elizabeth: Worth noting that, while Davies definitely deserves flack for the orientalism, between the three of them, neither Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, nor Phil Collinson saw anything objectionable in what they were putting on screen. Seeing as all four of them will be returning to their prior positions for Season 14 on, we should wonder whether or not anyone in the core production team has someone to point out their substantial blind spots.
On a more pleasant note, Graeme Harper continues to be really good at his job. You can see why he was the only director to work on Classic Who to be invited back: he’s an excellent visual storyteller, convincingly conjuring scale & excitement from meager resources.
He has two trademark shots that I noticed across this block of episodes. The first is the grand establishing shot, where he likes to have a crane sweep that moves into either a mid-shot or a close up on the two leads, which lends a very cinematic — dare I say Spielberg-ian — grandeur to a relatively cheap sci-fi show. When Donna is first led into the UNIT facility with the guts of the TARDIS stripped and repurposed into a bastardized time machine, the shot perfectly captures her awe and terror.
The second is establishing prominent foreground/background distinctions between the actors. His closeups tend towards the extremely close, which pays fantastic dividends during scenes such as Sylvia’s exhausted “yes” to Donna; keeping Catherine Tate blurry in the background through the whole shot conveys the melancholy of the scene perfectly.
Sean: I actually did a short presentation for one of his Classic Who scenes for a high school film class. The focus of which was how power dynamics were demonstrated through angles and blocking. He’s gotten better with it over the years.
So… Davros.
David: Hahahaha I love that dude. So great I barely even sighed about it all coming back down to the Daleks, though to be fair this is such an everything-coming-back finale it’d have been weird to have just about any other threat.
Sean: As has been hammered in time and time again, it will always come down to the Daleks. It will be the final day of Doctor Who’s life, when all their enemies have been defeated, given up, or redeemed. And there, at the precipice of death, as Doctor Who is about to meet the final curtain call, there will be the Daleks waiting eagerly to exterminate the universe.
David:
Elizabeth: This meme actually captures something important about Davros’s appearance in this episode: it kind of… sucks? Not Julian Bleach’s performance, dear me — that’s utterly delicious. But Davies profoundly phones-in the Doctor/Davros confrontation in Journey’s End, to the point you can imagine Moffat feeling obligated to bring him back to give him some proper dramatic material.
Fair goes it, Davies is juggling a ton of plates, and managing to deliver on 80% of the episode’s promises is still pretty impressive, but the condemnations of the Doctor’s use of others are so bathetic. It’s obvious that Davros doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, he clearly thinks turning people into weapons rocks and he’s just trying to get a rise out of the Doctor, and it absolutely fails to justify the montage of four seasons’ worth of dead guest stars. Tennant plays despondent guilt, and it’s really unclear over what exactly. (This is the same reason why the Doctor being furious at his half-human clone for killing all the Daleks sucks.)
Sean: Yeah, Davros basically spends the entire time gloating about how he’s won and Doctor Who sucks because he turns everyone into a soldier. But the argument never lands. I mean, Davros is literally about to DETONATE THE REALITY BOMB and here he is making moralistic arguments about killing. How “We’re not so different, you and I. I’m kind of a scientist myself.” and all that jazz. It’s oddly played out in genre media. Especially give Tennant’s Doctor Who never makes any of the obvious arguments he could about Davros being full of shit and instead has to sit there and take it.
David: Admittedly making facile moralistic arguments to put a fig leaf on his own monstrosity is the oldest trick in his book, and being bummed about all the times he was a failure and/or piece of shit is The Doctor’s. It worked for me, I’d never argue it couldn’t have worked better. Look: they were between the rock and the hard place of ‘it’s gotta be the Daleks for this particular story’ and ‘Jesus Christ not the Daleks again’; they HAD to bring Davros back to give this an anchor, and it was NEVER gonna work perfectly when this is also his New Who introduction. Still, this was probably my favorite of the finales to date, even if it can’t quite hit the highs of some of the others it lacks their conspicuous weaknesses and luxuriates in its operatic nonsense. DETONATE…THE REALITY BOMB!!!! AH HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA will be scratching at the back of my head for the rest of my life.
Sean: It’s an extremely fun story much in the same vein of an event Comic Book. (Indeed, Grant Morrison noted at the time (in a deleted blog post) the superficial similarities between Final Crisis and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.)
Elizabeth: Starting off with a complaint makes it seem like I’m a sourpuss on the episode, but no, I’m as much a sucker for the giddy joy of watching Wilf paintball a Dalek in the eyestalk or Sarah Jane meeting Captain “Cheesecake” Jack and Mickey “Mouse” Smith as anyone. There are so many scenes in this episode that leave you with no other choice than to grin, cackle, and pump your fist (“Harriet Jones, signing off”).
David: “YES, WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE”
Elizabeth: The Daleks shouting “EXTERMINICHTEN!!!” in Germany had me howling.
Sean: Doctor Who just bailing on the Shadow Proclamation the moment they asked him to lead them into battle. The whole cast piloting the TARDIS (bar Jackie because Tennant’s Doctor Who is a prick) while the robot Dog who couldn’t appear in the Sarah Jane spin off due to con artistry helps pull the Earth into its right place in the cosmos.
Elizabeth: Do we honestly think Eccleston would’ve let Jackie have a crack at the TARDIS controls?
Sean: Unsure. Probably not, but he’d have been less of a prick about it.
David: EVERY PHONE IN THE WORLD CALLING THE PHONEBOX
Loved everybody from the spinoff shows being in this! I swear Harper framed different locations differently in order to get across ‘this is the one from the Mature show, this is the one from the kid’s show’, the latter I’m pretty sure having a few dutch angles in there. Really made this feel like a proper crossover. Even Barrowman was at his least-worst. Martha still got the shaft though, dammit.
Sean: Of course, as with most crossover event comics from the late 20th and early 21st century, someone has to die.
Elizabeth: And, in the tradition of those crossovers, there’s an utterly bullshit cop-out on that particular narrative promise.
Sean: Let’s not beat around the bush, Fuck Donna’s ending. Fuck Doctor Who for doing that. Fuck Doctor Who for doing that.
(Image from @WhoGiants by Sean Dillon)
Elizabeth: You can almost construe Catherine Tate’s little nods and evasive glances as Tennant places his hands on her temple as her coming to terms with what she knows has to happen, only to falter at the last second before it happens, the way many people do prior to a high-risk surgery. Almost. Instead, it’s just an ugly, nauseating, profoundly awful thing to watch, but not in the way Davies meant it to be.
Davies intended to write solemn, noble, tragedy: instead, what the audience is presented with is the Doctor violating his friend’s consent in the most intimate terms possible, all with those wide gentle eyes saying “I love you and this is for your own good.” It’s wrong. I absolutely understand why this worked for audiences on broadcast and why it’s many people’s favorite companion departure, but it’s aged like milk.
David: It’s dramatically captivating, I very much get it, but laid out bluntly: yeah.
Elizabeth: The scenes afterwards, however, work like gangbusters. The Doctor’s suppressed fury as he sneers at Sylvia, “Maybe you should tell her that once in a while!” Wilf’s… everything, goddammit, Bernard Cribbens’ eyes are so kind and vulnerable yet there’s such strength behind declarations like “she was, though! She was better!” The final exchange in the rain hurts like hell, and it was genuinely bold of Davies (on Benjamin Cook’s advice) to end an episode that coasts on euphoric joy on such an unrelentingly bleak note.
Sean: The problem isn’t that it’s bad drama. The problem is that it’s evil.
Also the Next Time trailer really wants to believe people give a shit about the Cybermen.
David: I outright groaned. I’m fine with the Daleks as a thing we’re just gonna have forever, but the Cybermen? Lord.
Wanna note before we go my satisfaction with the final Rose material, and that yes it goes back and gives a ‘happy ending’, but not a clean one. In that I saw her narrative as basically an addiction metaphor, this is her and a verison of The Doctor forced physically and emotionally to grapple with all the shit he usually refuses to basically detoxing from Doctor Who together. While the other guy? Never can, never will.
Sean: Rose is extremely terrible in ways that I love. Just absolutely selfish about her love for Doctor Who. And yet it’s heart wrenching to see her have to watch Doctor Who get EXTERMINATED by a Dalek.
Elizabeth: I loved Rose in this story, because she’s the same entitled brat she always was (said with love! Rose rocks!) but the story doesn’t tacitly validate her ego by focusing on her, because there’s way too much else going on. Her mounting frustration on the Subwave Network’s call was perfect and hilarious.
David: Everyone gets such great material here!
EXCEPT MARTHA, OF COURSE.
Sean: Martha gets the genocide route. Whereas Jack, Mickey, Jackie, and Sarah Jane only get the suicide route.
David: And it doesn’t have the guts or commitment with her to truly go with ‘she’s the companion who broke bad/chose an irreconcilably different path’.
Sean: In many regards, this ties back to Davies’ ultimate sentimentality. His inability to go all the way with the cruelty he so desperately desires. He can’t end things on a bad note. There has to be a triumphant note to even tragedy. Doctor Who moves on to the next adventure. The memory of the lad who killed people with AIDS and his repression of brighter days. Years & Years. No tragic endings will be allowed. He talks a big game of “Everything has its time and everything dies.” But the story never reaches that point. There has to be a way out, no matter how monstrous or cruel it might be. Everything Lives is a threat.
Elizabeth: In fairness, there’s an emotional honesty to how It’s A Sin ends that isn’t present here or in Years & Years. Ritchie is dead. He died alone and afraid with his abusive mother, and his friends will never get to say goodbye. He tried his best to be good while struggling with deep stigmas, but his mistakes killed people, and there’s no one around to forgive him for that. The only solace, the ‘victory’, isn’t in some last-minute turn or even in scraping some minor success from the jaws of defeat. Instead, it’s simply that there were good days. They had been happy together, once, before it all went wrong. And it doesn’t matter whether or not that’s good enough, because it’ll have to be. There’s nothing else.
Sean: It also ends with “Everybody Hurts,” which is a crime that will never be forgiven, no matter how good the show is.
David: I guess that’s something of an answer right there for how it’ll go, but we’re on the precipice of another, even more profound ending compared to this one as RTD’s tenure wraps up over the next Whowatch in a series of specials. Elizabeth, thanks so much for swinging by our time and relative dimension in space!
Elizabeth: It’s been a pleasure and a joy, and I’m excited to go back to being an eager reader with the next edition of the column!
Sean: Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!
Next Time: And we are all together, goo, goo, ga joob? Can I have my money now? Which means no idea. I mean, it’s bigger on the inside. 2005, January the first.