The Only Thing We Have to Fear

STORY 227: NIGHT TERRORS

All children are afraid of monsters, under the bed, in the closet.  It is common in children's stories for there to be something lurking in the dark, something menacing, dangerous, that will put a child's life in peril.  It is that fear that children have, of which they are conscious of, that shapes one: either to outgrow them (and slowly take up the burdens of adulthood) or to become overwhelmed by them (for some people, fear is a way of life).  Night Terrors capitalizes on the common fear factor in children to great success. 

In contemporary London, little boy George (Jamie Oram) is terrified of everything: the noise of the lift/elevator, the old lady neighbor, the landlord, old toys.  All the things George is scared of (minus the humans) are thrown into the cupboard in George's room.  George, however, is still afraid: so afraid that he calls out for help, for someone to "save me from the monsters".  Fortunately for him, this message crosses time and space, to reach The Doctor (Matt Smith), who whisks himself and his Companions, Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and her husband Rory Pond...I mean, Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) to George's estates home (what we in America would call the projects).

George's parents, Alex and Claire (Daniel Mays and Emma Cunniffe) are extremely worried about their son, and think that perhaps he should see a Doctor.  Miracle of miracles, there's one that makes house calls.  While Claire is at work (after having repeated George's ritual of turning the lights on and off five times), it's Alex that greets the Doctor.  The Doctor is his usual frenetic self, but who is able to comfort the boy at first.  When he wants to open the cupboard, the Doctor becomes alarmed, even terrified.  Alex has his own problems: dealing with landlord Jim Purcell (Andrew Tiernan), who not surprisingly scares George.

Meanwhile, Amy and Rory have taken a frightening ride in the lift, and find themselves in a dark empty house.  Rory at first believes he's dead again (even this guy knows it gets a bit silly) but we find that they are in a house with odd materials and dolls.  To their horror, they find that the dolls inside the house are very much alive, and that they turn any human there into dolls.  To Rory's horror, Amy herself is captured and becomes a doll (surprising in that it wasn't Rory who met a grim fate this time).

Eventually, the Doctor and Alex find the courage to open the cupboard...to find clothes and a doll house.  However, something is off, and the Doctor comes to find what it is: even while George is their son, the photos of Claire a month before his birth show she's not pregnant, and Alex remembers Claire can't have children.  How then, to explain George?  No time to think, since Alex and the Doctor are sucked into the cupboard and into the doll's house (I wonder if Henrik Ibsen was an influence). 

We then discover that George is a Tenza, an alien being who hatches and becomes whatever its adoptees want it to be (in this case, a son).  George's fears stem from a fear that he is going to be sent away by Alex and Claire, and Alex is a bit reluctant to embrace an alien as his child.  However, as the dolls (including Amy), begin to surround George, Alex's fatherly instinct kicks in, and promises George never to abandon him.  With that, the fears cease, and all is restored.

I think that what elevates Night Terrors is the fact that it is so obviously a parable about the fears all people have either as children or adults.  It's not just about monsters per se, but about fear of abandonment, about whether we are truly loved by the parents.  It also goes to the fears parents have: will I be able to protect my child, will I be able to embrace a child I know is not mine.  Mark Gatiss' script is very smart about keeping things moving and filling in the audience about things that are obvious.

It is obvious soon enough that Amy and Rory are INSIDE the cupboard.  It is obvious soon enough that George is at the heart of the goings-on.  It is obvious that only George will be able to resolve the situation by doing what all children (and some adults) will have to eventually do: face their fears.

The performances are far and above what we've seen in previous episodes.  Guest star Mays keeps an amazing balance between the caring father and the comic relief in his fears and frustrations over George along with his befuddlement over what is going on and exactly who and what the Doctor is.  It is one of the best performances of the series,

Darvill, in a rarity, takes a more active role in Night Terrors than he's done.  He isn't the comedic aspect of the story.  This is primarily because he, not Amy, is the one who is transformed.  Instead, being the one kept alive allowed him an urgency and a chance to take charge.

As a side note, it is a curious thing that Night Terrors is a remarkably male-centric story.  From George to Alex to Rory & the Doctor, women were relegated to almost nothing in Night Terrors.  Of course, given that the subtext was the story of fathers and sons, it is no surprise. 

Director Richard Clark kept a steady pace, building suspense upon suspense.  He never let up on how he kept withholding the revealing of the monsters, primarily by keeping the viewer officially out of the cupboard as long as possible.  This despite the fact that, again, it was obvious that Amy and Rory (along with the neighbors caught up in the mayhem) were inside the cupboard.  Again however, I would argue that Gatiss' script was suppose to be obvious.  Both Gatiss and Clark made a good old-fashioned horror story with Night Terrors, a Doctor Who that will have the children hiding behind the sofa but with the positive message that a parent (noticeable a father, a figure that sadly plays less and less of a role in children's lives) will in the end, protect them. 

It is a brilliant idea brilliantly executed.  Few Doctor Who stories are clear about positive messages to its youngest viewers and address things straight to them, even more rare in the revived series.  Night Terrors is an episode for them, to let them know that in the end, the Doctor, as good as he is, can't provide the protection they need as well as their Mum and Dad.  It also makes clear that they as children eventually have to face their fears, and that they can defeat them. 

If it has any faults it is, oddly enough, in its obviousness.  It also is reminiscent of both The Eleventh Hour (a child is afraid of something in their room only to have the Doctor show up and find that the scary thing was something alien) as well as the film Poltergeist (the scene where Alex and the Doctor are taken into the cupboard required only for George to say, "they're here").  The fact that George turns out to be an alien appears to be thrown in to give Night Terrors some sense: the reason the fears come alive is because he that has them causes them himself, and that's because he's not human.  To my mind it didn't quite fit, but if George were human, it would have come much closer in making Night Terrors more Poltergeist in nature. 

Night Terrors is scary without being too scary for the intended audience.  It has a positive message, and in a rare move, all ends well for everyone concerned (everyone is restored and George overcomes his fears).  Without the Eye-Patch Lady or River Song in the mix, we find that Doctor Who doesn't need gimmicks to make good stories.  Instead, by going back to the basics, Night Terrors show us that we will fear no evil. 

Rory Williams Death Count

In Episode: Zero (though he thought he was dead)

Overall: Four

8/10

Next Story: The Girl Who Waited

And Their Child Shall Lead Them

STORY 226: RIVER'S SECRET PARTS 1 & 2 (A Good Man Goes To War/Let's Kill Hitler)

It is truly difficult to write about River's Secret Parts 1 & 2 for me because of many reasons.  One: I simply have never warmed to River Song as a character the way I did with other Companions such as Romana, Ace, Rose Tyler, and Sarah Jane Smith (who, to my mind, is the Citizen Kane of Companions).  In the various episodes River was in, I always thought she was was the appendix: something that could be removed and not be missed.  Two: I always thought she was just a bit TOO clever, TOO smart, for her own good, as if she was given an almost divine quality to be, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.  Third: I am hampered by the fact that as of this writing, I have yet to see Forest of the Dead Parts 1 & 2 (Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead). 

It isn't because I knew River was going to be there, it's just that after the disaster that was/is Love & Monsters (and if anyone can defend that pile of shit, I'd like to meet them...so that I could whack him/her upside the head) I quit watching Doctor Who, not resuming viewing until The Waters of Mars (and that was only because I knew David Tennant was leaving).  Even worse, the Fifth Season was pretty good, but this one...oy vey have I found it "must-skip TV". 

In all her adventures with The Doctor, it just seems that River Song becomes the dominant character, reducing the Doctor to merely a supporting player in his own series.  To my mind, it's become such a problem that at times I (sometimes) in jest refer to the program AS River Song (formerly known as Doctor Who).  They might as well change the name of the show given how much build-up her creator Steven Moffat has done into pushing the idea that she's this gigantic ICON of Doctor Who, surpassing such characters as the Daleks, the Master, Romana or Sarah Jane, perhaps even The Doctor himself.

Now that I've seen A Good Man Goes to War/Let's Kill Hitler (which I have retitled River's Secret), I can see that perhaps I am finally relieved of this "icon" once and for all.  That to my mind, would be a great service to a television program that functioned surprisingly well long before she first uttered, "Hello, Sweetie" and will live long after she slips out one last "Spoilers". 

Part I: A Good Man Goes To War

Having seen in The Gangers that Amy (Karen Gillan) is being held prisoner and about to give birth, we find that she is on the asteroid Demon's Run.  The Doctor (Matt Smith) recruits a series of aliens from the past (Silurians, Sontarans, Captain Henry from The Curse of the Black Spot, and Centurion Rory among others) to get Amy back.  Only the Legendary Legend of Legendness, Dr. River Song (Alex Kingston) declines, stating she can't see the Doctor until the very end. 

On Demon's Run, the Eye-Patch Lady, now known as Madame Kovarian (Frances Barber), takes the child, known as Melody Pond (we'll get to why she's not Melody Williams in good time), for her own nefarious scheme which involves getting rid of The Doctor.  Meanwhile,  the asteroid is being guarded by the Headless Monks and the Church Army, all awaiting the Doctor's attack.  The Doctor and his ragtag army quickly overtakes Demon's Run...too quickly and too easily in fact.  A sympathetic Cleric, Lorna (Christina Cheung), who once met the Doctor, tells him that this was all a major trap.  While Amy IS rescued, little Melody was secretly replaced with Folger's Crystals coffee...I mean, with a Flesh duplicate. 

After being tricked twice and having little Melody Pond taken, River FINALLY shows up and does what she does best: show up the Doctor.  She finally reveals her identity, first to a delighted Doctor (who flies off on his TARDIS), then to Amy and Rory (Arthur Darvill).  Where she was raised, there is no word for "pond", with the only water being "river", and since Melody is a type of Song, and both a Pond and a River have water...well, you get the idea.

Part II: Let's Kill Hitler

The Doctor gets back to Amy and Rory, now who contact him via crop circles.  Crashing the party is Amy and Rory's childhood friend Mels (Nina Toussant-White), a bad girl from the moment they met as children.  Running from the law, Mels pulls a gun and demands the Doctor take her into the past so, as she puts it, "let's kill Hitler".

As it so happens, this idea isn't a new one.  A janitor appears to be planning the same thing, only it's not a real janitor.  It is the Teselecta, an advanced ship that looks human which is populated by shrunken people.  They are there to kill Hitler, but they realize they are too early to merit out justice.  Fortunately for them (and for Hitler), the TARDIS crashes right at this time (something to do with Mels having shot the TARDIS).

Soon, the Teselecta finds that one of the people in that room is one of the greatest criminals of all time.  Obviously, it's not Hitler.  We find that Mels has been shot, but of course, that would be too easy, and to their shock they watch Mels being regenerated...as The Legendary Legend of Legendness, the Single Greatest Character in Television History, the Best Idea Ever to come from Doctor Who, the most important creation in all of science-fiction, ladies and gentlemen...Doctor----River-----Song!!!

Now, she must complete her mission...kill the Doctor.  They have their banter, they outwit each other, but River does manage to strike at the Doctor.  He has to flee to the TARDIS to find a way to survive, while Amy and Rory have to pursue their erstwhile daughter through the streets of Nazi Berlin.  They do find her, as does the Teselecta.  The Teselecta crew takes Amy and Rory aboard where a lot is explained: how the crew is there, what their purpose is, who and what River Song is.

Just when things are looking bleak (except for the torturing of River Song, which thrilled my heart), the Doctor shows up in top hat and tails, asking, "Doctor Who?"  The Teselecta tells them something about how the Silence (which is not a race but a religious order) believes that "Silence will fall" when the First Question is asked...said question unknown.  As the Doctor lays dying, River (who is unaware of who she is), is moved to go against her lifelong training and saves the Doctor...conveniently giving up all her remaining regenerations along the way.  Now, she is restored, and we end at what we see is River Song's beginning of her career as an archaeologist...where she is looking for a good man.

I feel overwhelmed with my feelings of sorry disappointment at River's Secret (and the whole of this season of River Song).  For me, River's Secret was a parody, a spoof of Doctor Who.  I know I fight a lonely battle, for River's Secret is highly praised.  I, however, can only offer up my own conclusions as to why River Song and River's Secret is a mess. 

As I watched Part 1, I thought that it was going to be a Doctor-lite episode, given how director Peter Hoar (Richard Senior directing Part 2) kept holding the Doctor's appearance back...and back...and back, until having his big reveal.  That aspect was one of the few good ones, but everything else in Part 1 was so jumbled that I felt that a lot was thrown in just for kicks.  It was a cavalcade of guest stars, guest characters, and guest events from previous episodes that one wondered if it was suppose to be a nostalgia trip, as I called it, The Doctor's Greatest Hits. 

That wasn't the worst aspect about having a Silurian or Sontaran or the intergalactic R.A.F. buzzing about Demon's Run.  The worst aspect is that this being the case, we see the Doctor didn't solve the situation of rescuing Amy on his own...all he did was call in some favors.  If one wants to go back to the past, I thought it was rather generous of the Doctor to go and get help from creatures that one year earlier had all conspired to lock him up in the Pandorica.  In fact, I couldn't help but think River's Secret Part 1 WAS similar to The Big Bang Parts 1 & 2 but with one twist: this time they were helping rather than incarcerating the Doctor. 

You have great villains introduced, these Headless Monks, and you really don't do anything with them.  They don't take a large role in the proceedings in Part 1 (and are nowhere in Part 2) so I wondered what point they had in the story.  Add to that, when they do appear to be menacing, they have what appear to be lightsabers.  Seriously, they looked like lightsabers (or am I again, the only one who thought that?), and with their robes, one couldn't help think Obi-Wan was hiding under there. 

When we're introduced to The Big Twist, it isn't either particularly original or shocking.  The names Melody=Song, Pond=River...it isn't too hard to work out.  However, and here's where I would argue Stephen Moffat got it wrong, it only works if you diminish Rory to a mere sperm donor.  River Song and Melody Pond being one and the same only works if the child is given the mother's name rather than the father's. 

Yes, it is probable that Amy never took on her husband's name (although sometimes I refer to her as Amy Pond-Williams), but how is it likely that their child would bear her mother's maiden name and not her husband's name?  It's almost amusing how quick Amy is to dismiss Rory's idea that his daughter should not bear his name.  I think Moffat, like most writers, has a set pattern, and he likes water-themed names (Pond, River).  He wrote Forest of the Dead Parts 1 & 2 (Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead), so when the chance came to put his creation River Song into his series of Doctor Who, he hit on the fact that his other creation had another body of water in her name. 

Stephen Moffat looks upon River Song for the first time.

Stephen Moffat had fallen in love with his own creation.  River Song was going to be beloved, the Icon of Icons, but some of us have built up stiff resistance to her.  My biggest beef with River Song is that whenever she's on screen, she dominates to where the show starts revolving around her.  I'm old-school in that Doctor Who should be about The Doctor, not about his Companions, and certainly not about a secondary character like River Song.  In Part 1, the Doctor waits for HER!  He can't do it without HER!  She, River Song, is at the center of everything, and I still won't accept that Doctor Who is not about the Doctor.  I could take an episode around Romana, or Sarah Jane, but River Song?

My second point of contention with River Song is the fact that she is now part-Time Lord.  It's not because she is the Doctor's daughter (been there, done that), but because she was conceived on the TARDIS.  I was, granted, unaware the machine had THAT much power, but am I the only one who thinks the whole idea absurd?  If that's the case, all the Doctor has to do is turn the TARDIS into a brothel and he can bring back the Time Lords back from extinction. 

It is amazingly difficult to embrace Part 1, but Part 2 (if thought of as a stand-alone episode) is not only a disaster, it's downright laughable.  The little people inside the big human-sized robot?  Didn't Eddie Murphy do that in Meet Dave?  While watching Part 2, I was dismayed to see Moffat decided to do a spoof of Doctor Who.  Why do I call it a spoof?  It has to do with the "witty banter" River and the Doctor have in Hitler's office.  When River finally comes out to kill the Doctor, they constantly up the other:

I knew you'd do XYZ, so I did ABC.

I knew you knew, so while you did ABC I did DEF.

I knew you knew I knew, so while you did DEF I did GHI.

I knew you knew I knew you knew, so while you did GHI I did JKL.

You get the picture, but in case you don't, I have one for you:

The Comic Relief special The Curse of Fatal Death played hilariously with this one-upsmanship convention, but that was MEANT to be ridiculous (if endearing).  In Part 2, it doesn't have the same effect.  Upon learning that Moffat wrote The Curse of Fatal Death, was he merely recycling old jokes in order to be funny?  If he meant Part 2 to be a comedy,  I'll be the first to admit I didn't get the joke.

If we go over Let's Kill Hitler, I think that, in hindsight, nearly everything about it was meant to be one long joke.  From the poisoned lips of Poison Ivy...I mean, River Song, to the aliens inside the Teselecta being 'beamed up' a la Star Trek, the identity of 'Mels' (it has to be too obvious to not get it), and the killer's reluctance to complete her mission (which made me think of The Naked Gun), as a drama the thing is a disaster.  As a comedy, it does much better.

Still, was it all meant to be a comedy? 

If one thinks about it, the second part is worse than the first.  Hitler is irrelevant to Let's Kill Hitler.  Mels could easily have had us go kill the Kaiser or Torquemada or Genghis Khan or Augusto Pinochet.  It might be funny to have Hitler thrown into the cupboard, but somehow, again, the whole second act could have taken place anywhere in time and space.  There was no point to Hitler (a statement more true than anything here), so Let's Kill Hitler is really not a truthful title, merely a catchy one. 

That isn't to say that River's Secret does indeed have some good things.  As much as I deride River Song, that does not extend to Alex Kingston, who in her last moments, recovering in the hospital, almost moved me (although I confess to being thrilled to see such an obnoxious character being tortured).  I also thought Arthur Darvill as Rory has grown from being the bumbling idiot from The Eleventh Hour to someone Amy might possibly leave the Doctor for. 

Smith, on the other hand, has now almost completely annoyed me as The Doctor.  I was one of his champions, and while Part 1 showed the angrier side to the Doctor, Part 2 only reinforces two things about the Smith Era: 1.) the Doctor's a bit of a joke, and 2.) he isn't the most important character in Doctor Who.  Appearing in top hat and tails (and all but singing Puttin' On the Ritz) was already silly.  Having him say, "Doctor...Doctor Who?" is just groan-inducing. 

As a side note, if we find that the First Question is either "Who is The Doctor?" or "Doctor Who?" or any variation thereof, I might just never watch another Doctor Who episode post The Wedding of River Song. 

I won't object to the idea that River Song doesn't know who she is after her second regeneration, but I do wonder how the little girl who regenerates at the end of Day of the Moon Part 2 in New York City 1970 ended up in Scotland and in the early 00s.  Here's where things are getting a bit tricky:

IF Amy is seven in 1996 when The Eleventh Hour starts, that would put her birth year as 1989 (which is close to Gillan's year of 1987.  Rory could be a little older, and given Darvill's birth year is 1982, it can work).  HOWEVER, when the little girl regenerated (and it's established in Let's Kill Hitler that the little girl from Day of the Moon Part 2 IS indeed River Song), the year is 1970 (since it takes place six months after the lunar landing of July 20, 1969).

In order for us to believe any of this, we have to believe that River Song I would not only regenerate from American to British but that somehow River Song II would be able to suspend her aging process to where she could easily pass for someone nearly twenty years younger.  For all this to work, the little girl from Day of the Moon (as played by Sydney Wade, I peg somewhere between six to eight) would have to have remained somewhere around six to eight to have that lifelong relationship with Amy and Rory.

In a purely technical issue, if River Song I were, at the youngest, six, when she first regenerates in 1970, wouldn't it stand to reason that by the time Amy is born in 1989 River Song II would be about twenty-four?  That, therefore, would mean that River Song II (who is revealed to be Mels, Amy and Rory's lifelong friend), would be old enough to be Amy's mother!

Timey-wimey indeed.

Also, if I remember correctly, River Song I knows she'll be all right because she knows the process of regeneration.  When I first watched it, it made me think the little girl had perhaps regenerated before.  So we have a case where the final River Song could be River Song IV rather than III.

Timey-wimey double indeed.

I know this may all sound so idiotically nerdy, so maddenly super-specific to where I appear to forget that it's all a fiction (like those Trekkies obsessed over the number of horses on Kirk's ranch), but somehow I'm not buying any of this.  It may be that I may be the one mistaken by the time frame, that maybe I am getting myself hopelessly confused, and that the smarter set will put things right.  However, I'm going by what information I got from both Day of the Moon I & II and River's Secret I & II, and that makes me think that everything about River Song is illogical. 

For me, River Song is at the heart of what is wrong with River's Secret and with the first part of Doctor Who Series/Season Six.   SHE is the focus of the story (and perhaps the season), SHE is the center of attention, and somehow, despite Moffat's best efforts, I can't bring myself to watch a series about THAT WOMAN.   River's Secret, especially Part 2, almost appeared to play as parody.  Again, maybe it was the intention to make this two-parter into a comedy, something to laugh about. 

It's obvious then that I didn't get the joke. 
    

Rory Williams Death Count

In Episodes: Zero

Overall: Four

2/10

Next Episode: Night Terrors

Damn This River!

The Way Of All Flesh

STORY 224: THE GANGERS

PARTS 1 & 2 

(The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People)

For the longest time, I have looked upon the sixth series/season of Doctor Who with a great deal of trepidation mixed with a total lack of enthusiasm.  I find my love for the series as a whole waining terribly.  In fact, it was only the pressure of deleting items on my DVR that got me to watch the two-part story The Gangers after a very lengthy hiatus.   

It's not often I give an original title to a revived Doctor Who story, but with this one I feel that neither The Rebel Flesh or The Almost People makes for a good overall title.  Moreover, since the villains are the Gangers, I feel having the two-part story be called The Gangers makes more since. 

In any case, I saw The Gangers long after everyone else did.  After various disappointments for me this series/season (Day of the Moon Parts 1 & 2: 6/10, The Curse of the Black Spot: 2/10, and The Doctor's Wife pulling the highest score with 7/10), I somehow didn't want to watch The Gangers.  How could it be that I've gotten to a point where I, devoted Whovian, just DON'T want to watch a Doctor Who episode?  The Gangers, sadly, has not cured me of this terrible malady.

Part 1: The Rebel Flesh

A storm has forced the TARDIS to land at a monastery on Earth.  The Doctor (Matt Smith), and his Companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) soon find that the monastery is really a factory.  The workers there create plastic forms of themselves, which they call Gangers (short for doppelgangers).  The head of operations, Miranda Cleaves (Raquel Cassidy) isn't happy to see them, and doesn't believe that a stronger storm will cause problems.  Neither do the other workers: Jimmy Wicks (Mark Bonner), Buzzer Edwards (Marshall Lancaster), and Jennifer 'Jen' Lucas (Sarah Smart).  The Doctor takes a quick look at the Gangers production (where his hand comes ominously close to the vat), and the storm comes.

We quickly learn the storm has released the Gangers, who resent being so easily destroyed and discarded.  As far as they are concerned, they are real, they are alive, and thus worthy of staying around.  Because they not only look like the Humans and can think like them, fighting them will be difficult.  The Doctor sympathizes with the Gangers, but the Humans want them disintegrated.  "They're monsters, mistakes.  The have to be destroyed", Miranda says. Now the battle between the revolutionary Gangers and the Humans begins, but with a new ally: a Ganger version of the Doctor emerges.

Part 2: The Almost People

Rory has become attached to Jen (both the Human and Ganger version), and soon takes their side that the Gangers should be allowed to exist.  The Doctor is thrilled to find his double, while the Gangers in their acid suits are besieging the Humans, who are planning their escape.  Amy does not trust or like the Ganger Doctor, but at least is able to unburden herself by telling the Ganger Doctor about how she saw the Gallifreyan Doctor die. 

Jen has basically gone mad: determined to wipe out the Humans and take their lives.  She pushes the other Gangers to follow her lead.  Miranda, who has a clot in her head, has already in her fear and anger killed the Ganger Jimmy, to the Doctor's intense anger.  However, Rory still thinks well of Jen, unaware of her duplicitous plan.   She shows him a pile of discarded Gangers melting together into one blob, suffering.

The Doctor manages to contact Buzzer's toddler, who is celebrating his birthday.  The Ganger Buzzer, having the same memories as the Human Buzzer, realizes that as much as he may feel he is Buzzer, he is not the child's father.  The child's real father is in danger, changing Ganger Buzzer and rescues the Humans trapped by Jen.  However, the Human Buzzer dies in the fracas, so Ganger Buzzer is given the blessing to take his place. 

As Ganger Jen goes on a rampage (having already killed Human Jen), the Gangers and Humans join forces to flee to the TARDIS.  Amy discovers that Ganger Doctor and Gallifreyan Doctor switched places, and now Ganger Doctor and Ganger Miranda stay behind to destroy Jen (which means destroying themselves).  The Doctor drops Ganger Buzzer home, takes Human Miranda and Human Jimmy to the factory headquarters to tell all, then exposes a shocking secret.

Amy is herself a Ganger, and the Doctor is forced to melt her.  The real Amy is in a white room, where the Eye Patch Lady (Frances Barber) that has been popping up left right and center tells her to push.  Amy finds that she is about to give birth..

I think that this Eye Patch Lady is this year's version of the Time Crack from last season: something that has been popping up, almost always near the end, to tie all the stories together into one epic one.  I have never warmed up to the idea that all the stories have to tie together: from Bad Wolf to the Crack in Time to the Eye Patch Lady, I sense a sense of repetition.  I didn't mind the Bad Wolf thing because there the stories can appear to act independently of each other, but during Steven Moffat's reign he has a madness of putting things into the stories in an obvious manner.  One almost waited to see the Crack come out in the end, and now the Eye Patch Lady is almost required to pop in and out real quick. 

The Gangers is that it was eerily reminiscent of Cold Blood Parts 1 & 2 (The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood).  You had two lifeforms which don't trust each other and have members in each who want to destroy the other.  You had the Doctor attempting a truce between them that would help them coexist.  You had one member of Group A killing a member of Group B out of fear.  You had the Doctor get angry.  You had that action be the spark of a full-fledged war.

I'm not saying Matthew Graham was using Cold Blood Parts 1 & 2 as a template for his script of The Gangers Parts 1 & 2.  I'm just saying that while I was watching The Gangers, I noticed it followed a similar pattern.  I could even make a case that The Gangers tackled a similar theme to Cold Blood: the idea of the right of the Other to live.  With Cold Blood, it was the Silurians.  With The Gangers, it was the Gangers themselves. 

There are some good moments in The Gangers and some good ideas.  The plea for tolerance within the story is not subtle, but it is introduced cleverly to where it doesn't overwhelm the story.  It also is nice to see Rory take a role apart from being The Doctor and Amy's stooge, the comic relief who is easily disposable (see The Many Deaths of Rory Williams in Amy's Choice, Cold Blood Part 2, The Curse of the Black Spot, and The Doctor's Wife).  Also, it was a clever idea to have the Gangers wear the acid suits, making it easier to distinguish the Gangers from the Humans.

I also thought Balazs Bolygo's cinematography was excellent: all grays to capture the night or the morning in this unforgiving terrain.  Murray Gold's score still is consistently good, and special credit should go to Barbara Southcott and her staff's make-up (given the make-up is a driving force in the story).  Director Julian Simpson evoked good scenes, in particular when we come across the sight of discarded Gangers.  That was unexpected and frightening (perhaps too frightening for children, but that's a judgment call).

However, the things I disliked about The Gangers outweigh the things I though were good.  Even though this was a two-part story, I thought Part 1 (The Rebel Flesh) was extremely rushed to get to the outbreak of chaos.  I couldn't help think about how if The Gangers were made during the classic era, we would have had more of a build-up to the eventual Ganger Spring.  We certainly would have met the characters and seen how the Doctor became to be remade as a Ganger. 

To my mind, there were no real surprises except for the end.  I knew there was going to be a Ganger Doctor (since Part 1 took pains to hint at it), I knew Ganger Jen was not alone (as big a hint as I can give without giving away something I though pretty obvious).  When Amy reveals to the Ganger Doctor she saw him die, I knew...oops, she shouldn't have done that.  A lot of the story, again despite it having two hours, felt hurried, almost like the story was stretched out to make it two episodes long, in particular Part 2 (The Almost People).  I would have though making Part 1 the Rise of the Gangers and Part 2 the Siege of the Humans would have made The Gangers far better.

Also, I was not amused by the Doctor's obvious delight at seeing himself.  The comedy between Doctor and Doctor didn't make me laugh.  Instead, they irritated me.   As for the big twist in the end, I though it was inconsistent.  The Doctor has spent the two episodes pleading for the right of the Gangers to exist, yet he at the end destroys the Ganger Amy.  What about her?  Granted, it had to be done, but still...Besides, I couldn't get how or when Amy was replaced with her doppelganger, and both the Eye Patch Lady and Amy's labor pains just appeared to come out of nowhere.  Add to that, this last scene basically overwhelmed The Gangers, making look like the entire two stories were nothing more but filler for this Big Twist. 

As a side note, I was confused by something in Part 2.  I thought I heard the Doctor call Rory "Rory Pond".  I don't know if that was accidental on the part of the character or it was written that way, but I think it captures better than anything I could write or say just how redundant Rory is...has he been reduced to being Mr. Pond rather than Amy being Mrs. Williams?  Perhaps somewhere along the way he changed his name and I just missed it.

One thing that is obvious is that now that we learned that the Ganger Doctor and the Gallifreyan Doctor switched places, the Real Doctor now knows of his upcoming death, so we know that he knows and thus we know that the Doctor will not die, at least not on Lake Silencio.  Maybe another Ganger will take his place by the lake.  If it was thought that all would be revealed, then they did their job.  Basically, Season/Series Six is now a Long Game if you will, a wait to see where the season will go even though we already know where it's headed.

The Gangers Parts 1 & 2 isn't a bad story, but I felt it was rushed, followed a similar pattern to others, and was just filler for the really BIG moment: that damn Eye Patch Lady waiting for Amy to give birth...to I wonder whom...

Rory Williams Death Count

In Episode: (Zero)

Overall: (Four)

4/10

Next Story: River's Secret Parts 1 & 2 (A Good Man Goes to War/Let's Kill Hitler)

Yes, Spouses Can Be A Little Ood

STORY 220: THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

Although the Doctor (Matt Smith) has had children and grandchildren (or at least a daughter and granddaugther), he's never had a wife...until now.   However, trust the good folks at Doctor Who to make even the simplest of things extremely complicated.  The Doctor's Wife comes from comic book/science-fiction icon Neil Gaiman, so it is bound to be good, and it is.  However, there are some things that this series simply can't get away from. 

The Doctor (Matt Smith) receives a distress signal...from a Time Lord.  He is not surprisingly thrilled...perhaps there WERE some survivors of the Time War and he is not the Last of the Time Lords.  With that, he flies the TARDIS outside the universe, to what appears to be a junkyard.  There, he encounters four beings: Auntie (Elizabeth Barrington), Uncle (Adrian Schiller), an Ood called Nephew (Paul Kasey), and a disheveled woman named Idris (Suranne Jones).  The Doctor misleads his Companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and her husband Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) into going back to the TARDIS while he seeks out The Consair, his old Gallifreyan friend.

Bad move on two points.  The Consair is truly dead, as are other Time Lords who survive only in messages within boxes.  Second, the asteroid they are on is really a living thing, called House (voiced by Michael Sheen), who lives off the energy of TARDISes (or would it be TARDI?).  With The Doctor yet again the last of the Time Lords, guess who is after the TARDIS?  As it stands, Idris is not like Auntie, Uncle, or Nephew (all who are made up of various parts, including pieces of Time Lords--lo, how the mighty have fallen), isn't like all the others.  She in truth is the TARDIS  in human form.

House has taken the TARDIS, threatening Rory and Amy.  To extend the story...I mean, to keep themselves alive, Rory and Amy challenge House to toy with them before killing them, leading to an old Doctor Who standard: running down corridors.  During the chase, Amy and Rory are continuously separated, and at one point Amy comes across what appears to be Rory's bones (this will be important later).  The Doctor and Idris, meanwhile, build a TARDIS console made up of pieces from other TARDI/TARDISes to rescue his Companions.  The Doctor and House 'meet' in the old console, and it takes Idris' sacrifice to save them.  In the coda, Rory tells the Doctor Idris' last words: "the only water in the forest is the River"...foreshadowing.  Da-da-DUM!

The Doctor's Wife has a great inventiveness to it with great nods to the whole Doctor Who mythos.  By setting the entire thing in a junkyard, it is highly reminiscent of the very first Doctor Who story An Unearthly Child.  Whether Gaiman also threw in a nod to the Doctor Who cliche of having people running down the same corridors I do not know, but seeing Rory and Amy doing just that evokes memories of that. 

The story is also highly creative in giving a Doctor Who icon a voice for a very first time.  In all the years of Doctor Who, we've never considered the TARDIS (with a few exceptions) as anything more than a mode of transportation.  With The Doctor's Wife, we now see the breath of the TARDIS' power.  Gaiman's script also has a great deal of humor that never comes at the expense of the tragedy or horror of the story.  The Doctor tells Idris, for example, to send a telepathic message to "the pretty one".  Not surprisingly, she would pick Rory as "the pretty one" (Idris being a woman, she WOULD pick Rory to be the 'pretty one').   There is even a quick joke about Smith's chin.

Part of the success of The Doctor's Wife comes from the performances, in particular Jones' as the manic, almost looney Idris (side note: Gaiman's script has great wit in the names.  Idris, TARDIS--how close they are, right?).  In her quirky, somewhat nutty interpretation of Idris, she appears to be mimicking Smith's Doctor in his oddity, rapid movements, and generally quirky behavior.  I keep flipping on Matt Smith: sometimes I love his interpretation of the Doctor, sometimes he annoys me in his twittering mannerism.  It depends I suppose on the story.  In The Doctor's Wife, Smith balances his usual wild take on the Doctor with a genuine heartbreak at how the Time Lords yet again have disappeared from his world. 

Another strong performance comes from Sheen (whom I generally love as an actor except in the Twilight films, where I found he made his 'vamp' camp).  To his immense credit, he has only his voice to work with as House, and he could evoke menace with the proper inflection without making House a raging lunatic.

There are many great things in The Doctor's Wife, but some things I objected to greatly.  Chief among them is a throwaway line.  When the Doctor was telling them about the tattoo the Consair always had at every regeneration, he said the Consair had it whenever himself, 'or herself, a couple of times', regenerated.  That would appear to establish that Time Lords can change genders, and this kind of dialogue is dangerous business.  Recall The Deadly Assassin: a simple line established that Time Lords regenerate only twelve times, and now we have that as established mythology.  With this, we now have a situation that might appeal to fans (oh, the Doctor can be a woman, Romana can be a man), but we have something I don't think people think out: Time Lords, apparently, are now hermaphrodites. 

I have long argued that Time Lords are single sex beings: a male Time Lord will always be a male Time Lord, a female Time Lord will always be a female Time Lord.  By having Time Lords be either, we have this situation where the control of their regeneration is completely in their hands.  That being the case, if the Doctor regenerates as a man, it's because he wants to.  Therefore, why hasn't he simply regenerated with ginger hair, seeing he wants it so much?  Furthermore, we can't have things thrown at us and quickly forgotten.  The TARDIS still makes the 'whoosing' sound, even though the Legendary Legend of Legendness, DOCTOR RIVER SONG (who mercifully isn't in this episode), already established that the sound is only made because the Doctor parks the TARDIS without taking out the brake.  It wasn't funny then, it isn't funny now (and I would have thought Idris would have told him how much that hurts her...if it were a real thing and not just a cheap joke).

Granted, this may all be a bit nitpicky, but why shouldn't I take writers and producers to task for such things?

I also thought House wasn't all that powerful of an adversary.  He devoured TARDI for his own power beyond the universe (side note: it did make me think of E-Space, but I digress) but he didn't really have as strong an impact as other monsters (though having the asteroid as the living thing was a stroke of genius).  The presence of the Ood wasn't all that important: Nephew could have been any creature if one thinks on it.

Finally, I'm instituting the Official Rory Williams Death Count.  This simple service will keep track of the number of times Mr. Amelia Pond has died on screen, both in the individual episode and the series as a whole.  Here is where we have a question: did Rory Die Again?  This could go either way: we didn't see him die (unlike all the other times) but Amy did come across a corpse that we took to be Rory.  It was all done so quickly I'm almost tempted to not count it as an official Rory Williams Death because this was the first time he didn't actually die on screen.  However, given how we're suppose to believe that the bones Amy comes across are suppose to be Rory, I'll have to count it as yet another example of how poor Rory never seems to complete a series/season without kicking the bucket. 

Side note: I'd love to see a scene where Rory literally kicks a bucket.  Might as well have more jokes on his perpensity to drop dead every few episodes. 

The Doctor's Wife is one of the best episodes of Series/Season Six, one with a good mix of horror and humor.  However, I can't overlook a few things, especially how it gave me hope there were still some Time Lords only to rip that from me almost as quickly.  "You gave me hope and then you took it away.  That's enought to make anyone dangerous," the Doctor tells Auntie and Uncle on discovering that his fellow Time Lords were being used for spare parts.  I couldn't have found a better way of describing the revived series myself.

Rory Williams Death Count



In episode (ONE)

Overall (FOUR)

7/10

NEXT STORY: The Gangers Parts 1 & 2 (The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People)

Doctor Who Story 033: The Moonbase

STORY 033: THE MOONBASE

Half-Moon...

The Moonbase is the earliest Second Doctor story that can be reconstructed.  His first two adventures, The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders, have no surviving episodes and only some clips.  The third Second Doctor story, The Underwater Menace, has only one complete episode.  The Moonbase, a four-part story, has two complete episodes, and with the audio of Episodes One and Three you can build the entire story around the surviving material.  Just like The Crusade, we therefore can reconstruct The Moonbase and review it as a complete story rather than as bits and pieces.  While I hope that we will one day get an official reconstruction of The Moonbase, and while this story has the bonus of being the return of the Cybermen, The Moonbase itself falls a little short of expectations. 

The Doctor (Patrick Troughton), his Companions Ben (Michael Craze) and Polly (Annek Wills) and the Highlander Jamie McCrimmon (Fraser Hines), have landed on the Moon.  The Companions want to explore the Moon, and the Doctor reluctantly agrees.  Jamie is injured, but fortunately there is a base on the moon.  Here, a group of scientists are controlling the Gravitron, which controls the weather on Earth.  The moonbase is run by Hobson (Patrick Barr), who is highly suspicious of the new arrivals, but accepts them thinking that the Doctor is the doctor Earth is sending to try and find why so many of his crew are starting to fall ill.

Jamie is placed in sick bay and while there, continues to mutter about The Piper, threatening to take him to that big Highland in the sky.  However, it's no Phantom Piper that menaces the moonbase; it's the Cybermen.  Believed destroyed in The Tenth Planet, they have somehow survived and now are attempting to take over the moonbase.  One by one they are taking the crew: they have released a virus that makes them ill, then the Cybermen take a sick crewman one by one to "remake" him.  Soon, the Doctor discovers what is making them ill and how the Cybermen have been entering the moonbase surreptitiously.  Now, the Cybermen attack, determined to take the moonbase and kill all life on Earth (since the Gravitron on the moonbase controls the weather, it can create chaos on the surface).  The Doctor defeats the Cybermen by manipulating the Gravitron, and the metal villains (along with their ships) literally float away.  With that, the Doctor and his Companions quietly leave, and The Moonbase ends with our heroes seeing a gigantic claw on the monitor.

It is a shame that The Moonbase doesn't exist complete.  However, Kip Pedler's script starts out great and then slowly goes downhill, particularly in Episode Three.  Some things are beyond his fault.  During The Highlanders, it was decided that the character of Jamie would be part of the TARDIS crew, so he had to be written into the story.  The way to include Mr. McCrimmon was to put him in sickbay for two episodes, which perhaps was the only way to work him in, but his constantly protests about the Phantom Piper started wearing a bit thin and were becoming almost funny. 

There were also some rather bizarre choices director Morris Barry made.  For example, on the moonbase itself, the crew wore t-shirts with their respective country's flags on them.  Perhaps this was a way to denote they were from various countries (although from the footage we only saw British, French, Norwegian, and Australian crew--not exactly a worldwide effort), but the effect is a little curious.  One couldn't help think this was a cost-cutting effort.  If that aspect of the costumes wasn't already strange, it was the caps the crew had to wear inside the central control of the Gravitron that was just silly: it looked like they were wearing shower caps made of foam. 

There was also some pretty awful acting in The Moonbase.  Episode Four has what is suppose to be a terrifying assault by the Cybermen where the oxygen supply is cut off.  The way everyone is 'gasping for air' is so totally fake and highly exaggerated.  In Episode Two, when another crewman is taken ill, the acting is pretty lousy (if not laughable), but when the virus is seen to spread through his veins, that is a particularly effective, even frightening scene.  This I think more than anything else shows the good and bad of The Moonbase: a good story ruined by some bad choices.  One bad choice was in the voices of the Cybermen, not the actual voicework by Peter Hawkins, but in its use.  At times, it was hard to fully understand what they were saying.  This is more a growing pain for the Cybermen I imagine: their robotic voices would improve over time to where by their final appearance in the classic series (Silver Nemesis), they were intelligible. 

Side note: is it me, or are the Cybermen a lot like the Daleks?  They are at least similar in this way: both have no emotions.  Just a thought.

In a more historic sense, The Moonbase shows the casual sexism of the 1960s.  While Jamie and Ben are going around stopping the infected crew (controlled by the Cybermen) and the Cybermen themselves from taking the base, Polly is relegated to making the coffee and serving it to the crew.  She also gets attacked by a Cyberman in Episode Two, but the next time we see her in the same episode she is perfectly fine.  Watching The Moonbase now, it is hard to imagine someone like Sarah Jane Smith, let alone Rose Tyler or Amy Pond, doing nothing more than bringing coffee.  Admittedly, times have changed, so it is unfair to judge The Moonbase by today's standards.  However, it doesn't take away from seeing how a character is relegated to near-irrelevance.

Finally, the actual resolution to the Cybermen assault appears so quickly and almost comic.  A change in gravity has the Cybermen (along with their ships, which sadly you can see the strings on), just float away.  Literally, just float off into space.  To my mind, it appears a remarkably cheap and easy way to eliminate a threat that has been building for three episodes. 

There are good things within The Moonbase.  The story itself is quite clever, and the actual Cybermen attack in Episode Four creates a strong sense of menace and danger.  Troughton creates a great balance between serious drama and light comedy; he is trying to find the source of the virus but has had no luck.  Hobson is continuously threatening to kick them out of the moonbase, and the Doctor bluffs his way to get Hobson to leave the sickbay where he's conducting his experiments.  Here, Troughton shows his talent: he manages to sound serious to Hobson while quickly switching to slightly bumbling as soon as he leaves.

There is still a strong rapport between Wills and Craze, an affection mixed with a mild dislike, somewhat like a brother and sister.  Ben still refers to Polly as "Duchess" (mocking her more posh background to his Cockney roots) whenever he gets irritated with her questions, but it never appears to be said to spite her.  Hines starts out very slow (because he has to wait for that Phantom Piper), but by the end he takes the action role of Jamie and makes it his own.  It is unfortunate that with Hines' addition to the crew, the Companions often appeared to be secondary to the action rather than part of the story itself.  This isn't any of their faults: Wills, Craze, and Hines work well together, but having so many people in such a small space makes it hard to give them individual moments. 

It has a inventive story that with a bigger budget and some changes could have made it stronger (like getting rid of the national t-shirts).  Perhaps if the actual assault on the moonbase had been carried on longer, and we had more use of the unwitting Cybermen Fifth Column via the sick crewmen, The Moonbase could have been a real exercise in terror.   Despite its incomplete status,  The Moonbase is not one of the better Cyberman stories because of too many exterior aspects.  It does have the benefit of bringing back one of the best Doctor Who villains, one that have become iconic and rival the Daleks in terms of popularity.  However, the resolution doesn't work, the Companions are relegated to almost background players, and The Moonbase suffers from that.  In the end, The Moonbase ends up a trifle cheesy.

4/10

Next Story: The Macra Terror*

Have A Nice Ninth

THE NINTH DOCTOR: CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON

A RETROSPECTIVE

With the exception of The Eight Doctor (in terms of televised episodes, which are the ones I go by), The Ninth Doctor has the shortest tenure of any Doctor on Doctor Who.  Allow me to state how I got to this conclusion.

If you go by number of stories, The Ninth Doctor has a total of ten.  The Sixth Doctor has a total of eleven stories IF you (like me) count The Trial of A Time Lord as four separate stories (The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, Terror of the Vervoid, and The Ultimate Foe).   IF you count The Trial of a Time Lord as ONE story, then you bring the Sixth's count to eight.  HOWEVER, if you go by number of episodes the Ninth Doctor has a total of thirteen (thanks to three two-episode stories).  Even by that standard, the Sixth Doctor still beats him because The Trial of a Time Lord has fourteen episodes ALONE (and that's if you count Trial of A Time Lord as ONE story.  If you went by the FOUR story cataloging...)  Tricky thing this accounting business. 

In any case, I count ten stories from Christopher Eccleston era:

Rose
The End of the World
The Unquiet Dead
Aliens of London Parts 1 & 2 (Aliens of London/World War Three)
Dalek
The Long Game
Father's Day
The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2 (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances)
Boom Town
Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2 (Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways)

Now that we have come to a parting of the ways with our friend from the North, it's time to pause and look over his tenure. 

On the whole, I think Eccleston was 'fantastic' as the Doctor.  He could be funny, he could be deadly serious, he could be difficult, he even, at least once, could show genuine fear.  There were a variety of reasons why Eccleston decided to leave, and I wonder if Bad Wolf Part 2 would have been different if he did not have to regenerate.  Eccleston is in retrospect, the moodiest, dare I say, the angriest of Doctors, and it's not without blame: he saw all Gallifrey destroyed (something I have always felt was a mistake from the get-go).  Still, given he was there for just one season, I think he will rank on the higher end of the Doctor scale (even though I think all the Doctors have been good).

Now, it's on to our selections for the Best of Doctor Who: Series/Season One (Revived Edition).

BEST FEMALE GUEST STAR

Zoe Wanamaker (The End of the World)
Yasmin Bannerman (The End of the World)
Christine Adams (The Long Game)
Florence Hoath (The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2)
Jo Joyner (Bad Wolf Part 2)

Tough call since all were wonderful, but as I look at things, I give the edge to Wanamaker only because unlike the others, she had to use only her voice to create her character.  The fact that she could only be heard and still create a magnificent character (a bitchy trampoline, if memory serves correct), only adds to the strength of her performance. 

BEST MALE GUEST STAR

Simon Callow (The Unquiet Dead)
Corey Johnson (Dalek)
John Barrowman (The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2)
Simon Pegg (The Long Game)
Shaun Dingwall (Father's Day)

Now, is it fair to put a Companion here while not in the female category?  Well, I think it's because Captain Jack, as beloved as he is in certain circles (though not in this one), I felt worked best as just a guest star on The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2.  Note how he was redundant in Boom Town to where we almost forgot he was there.  He was the requisite action hero in Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2, and would it have killed Davies to have left him for dead?

I understand writers have an affinity for their characters, but for some reason Steven Moffat has done his best to build up the characters he's created (Captain Jack Sparrow...I mean, Harkness, and later on DOCTOR River Song) to being these Doctor Who Icons without whom the show simply could not go on.  In both their cases, I've never been particularly overwhelmed with either Harkness or Song (however, I digress...Spoilers, Sweetie).  This is why I consider him a Guest Star (although I begrudgingly have to recognize he IS a Companion).  However, I can't get into the Captain Jack mythos both Doctor Who and Torchwood build up.   

As for why Dingwall over Callow (a close vote)?  Well, I think Dingwall brought a great tenderness and tragedy to Pete, someone we end up liking but know must die.  Though both Callow and Dingwall were beautiful performances, I was more moved by the latter emotionally.

BEST VILLAIN

The Lady Cassandra (The End of the World)
Dalek (Dalek)
Henry Van Statten (Dalek)
Adam Mitchell (The Long Game)
The Dalek Emperor (Bad Wolf Part 2)

There's something sleazy in how Van Statten disposes of everyone, and worse, how he even does what was once inconceivable: make us feel sympathy for a Dalek.  If only that Dalek hadn't yearned for the 'human touch', if you will, we might have had another winner altogether.

Again, another curiosity: a Companion as a villain?  Well, first, he had no problem leaving Rose behind in Dalek, and then his greed for knowledge (which would grant him wealth and power in his own time) caused so many problems for everyone on Satellite Five.  In so many ways, Adam Mitchell was a major problem, so he is in a strong sense, a villain.

BEST INDIVIDUAL MOMENT

The Doctor realizes just who is calling for help (Dalek)
The Doctor and Rose face off over the Dalek's fate (Dalek)
Rose saying goodbye to her father Pete (Father's Day)
The Doctor pledging to rescue Rose (Bad Wolf Part 1)

I had to think between three emotional moments in Doctor Who: Season/Series One, and it's so interesting that for a science-fiction show, we have many tender moments.  This moment, when Rose gets to say goodbye to the father she's never known (at least until now), knowing that her face will be the last thing Pete will see, is extremely heartbreaking.  With all the power of time travel, Rose still cannot alter the future to where she and her father will be together.  They had this brief moment, and if one extends things, all children eventually have to let their parents go.  It was a beautiful moment. 

MOST FRIGHTENING MOMENT

Jackie Tyler besieged by the Slitheen (Aliens of London Part 1)
The Doctor confronts his ultimate nemesis (Dalek)
The Dalek Rising (Dalek)
The Doctor, Jack, and Rose besieged by empty patients (The Empty Child Part 1)
Lynda getting blow away...literally (Bad Wolf Part 2)

A good Doctor Who frightening moment should make you curl up in your sofa, wondering what will happen next, fearing for your heroes.  The cliffhanger in The Empty Child Part 1 did exactly that.  When Lynda gets killed off, it is an especially effective moment of terror, made especially more so due to the silence (not to be confused with The Silence, another Moffat-ramming-pseudo-icons-down-our-throats business).  I think, however, having all these people, particular the titular child him, menacing an action hero (Captain Jack), the intellectual hero (The Doctor), and our fighting beauty (Rose Tyler), with seemingly no way out, made that moment far more frightening.

BEST ART DIRECTION
The End of the World
The Unquiet Dead
The Long Game
The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2

The cold of the Editor's room, the chaos of the floor the TARDIS landed in, all contributed to making The Long Game a set that could not benefit from being a period piece (which both The Unquiet Dead and The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2 were).  Instead, we had to imagine a place that could exist, and one that was both familiar and alien. 

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

The End of the World
The Unquiet Dead
Father's Day
The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2

Here, there can be no contest.  As much as I like the 80s (though my memories of them are vague), it is almost for certain that period pieces win out, and from the shrouds of the undead to Rose's gowns and Dickens' frocks, The Unquiet Dead gains an edge. 

BEST DIRECTING

Keith Boak (Rose)
Euros Lyn (The Unquiet Dead)
Joe Ahearne (Dalek)
Joe Ahearne (Father's Day)
Joe Ahearne (The Empty Child Part 1)

I can't help that Ahearne earned three nominations: he is the director of three of the best Doctor Who: Season/Series One stories.  When considering directing, it isn't just the story, but the performances.  All the performances in Father's Day, from Camille Couduri's Jackie Tyler and Shaun Dingwall's Pete Tyler right on down to Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston, were all so beautiful: going from comedy to tragedy so effortlessly. 

BEST SCREENPLAY

Russell T Davies (Rose)
Mark Gatiss (The Unquiet Dead)
Robert Shearman (Dalek)
Paul Cornell (Father's Day)
Steven Moffat (The Empty Child Part 1)

It takes a great deal of talent and ability to introduce a historic figure without making it a gimmick.  Gatiss' screenplay for The Unquiet Dead kept a balance between being a fright-fest and being a great man, a true genius, contemplating his past.  I could talk about either The Doctor or Charles Dickens, and maybe I am talking about both.  Here, Dickens is an integral part, and the clever moments ("What the Shakespeare?") mixed in with the fantastical (the specters haunting Dickens' reading), and even the sad moments (Gwyneth's end) made The Unquiet Dead a brilliant story. 

BEST STORY

Rose
The End of the World
The Unquiet Dead
Father's Day
Dalek

It was really a matter of going over which earned a Perfect Ten.  Only two stories did.  One blew me away, one moved me almost to tears.  So close, so close.  However, after some thought, I still can't help being impressed by The Unquiet Dead's wit mixed with sadness. 

Yes, as with all things Doctor Who, we've had some simply ghastly moments.  I would be remiss to skip over them.  Therefore, with that in mind...

WORST INDIVIDUAL MOMENT

Rose telling the Doctor he's so "gay" (Aliens of London Part 1)
The Slitheen make a BIG NOISE (Aliens of London Parts 1 & 2)
The revelation of the Editor (The Long Game)
"Don't forget the welfare state" (The Empty Child Part 2)
Captain Jack reveals all (Bad Wolf Part 1)

I had narrowed down to two, and both involve Russell T Davies.  First, for an openly gay man like Davies allowing one of his characters to use the word 'gay' as a slur is to my mind simply inexcusable and highly distasteful.  However, at least a defense can be made that this would be true to the character: Rose is a working-class girl with no great education, so one could argue she doesn't see it as offensive.

What I DON'T like, and have never liked, is to have the person's political views enter into the show so nakedly.  When trying to inject politics into science-fiction, it should be subtle and clever (District 9, the original The Day the Earth Stood Still).  Davies doesn't have that subtlety: Aliens of London Parts 1 & 2 were nothing but his thinly-veiled hatred for George W. Bush and Tony Blair involving us in the Iraq Intervention.  Even that I could overlook, but having the Doctor take a direct  position (the joys of perpetual Labour governments providing womb to tomb services) is something I don't understand, believe, or accept. 

WORST MONSTER

The Slitheen (Aliens of London Parts 1 & 2)
The Mighty Jagrofess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfroe (The Long Game)
Adam Mitchell (The Long Game)
The Reapers (Father's Day)
Margaret Blaine (Boom Town)
Beyond useless, The Mighty...has the silliest name of any monster, and he has such a long name just to show off how long his name can be.  One can't take such a monster seriously, and frankly, since he doesn't look like he is the brains behind this operation, I can't believe the menace is real.  Yes, in the long term, The Mighty...was just a front for another villain, but then it makes me think The Long Game really just wasted my time. 

WORST STORY

Aliens of London Parts 1 & 2
The Long Game
The Empty Child Parts 1 & 2
Boom Town
Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2

The unfortunate thing about having only ten stories to deal with is that if you nominate five for your best, by default the remaining five will be the lumped with the worst.  Granted, I wasn't a fan of any of these, but out of all our nominees The Long Game is the most inconsequential.  Minus the fact that it got rid of one our worst Companions (though that is for another time), The Long Game had points of logic that werent' answered (how does Suki go from dim girl to super-rebel at a turn of a dime?) and a monster who was neither terrifying or interesting. 

Now, eventually, once the goal of seeing every Doctor Who story made is complete, we will be in a better position to judge where the Ninth Doctor stories fit into the Great Ranking.  I'm still debating whether to have a separate Ranking for the Revived Series.  Certainly there are great things in Eccleston's tenure, and some things I didn't care for. 

Well, there it is for now.  We close out our Christopher Eccleston aka The Ninth Doctor Retrospective.  We now move on to the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, knowing that some of his stories will be brilliant, some I have no desire to revisit, and some that are a complete mystery. 

That, however, is another story. 

THE NINTH DOCTOR STORIES

Next Story: The Christmas Invasion

A Wolf In Daleks' Clothing

STORY 170 : BAD WOLF PARTS 1 & 2

(BAD WOLF/THE PARTING OF THE WAYS)

In the new Doctor Who, the phrase "Bad Wolf" has been the dominant theme, the mystery of why this phrase appears through all of the Doctor's adventures with Rose teasing us throughout the series/season.  Now, in the appropriately-named Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2 (Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways), we at last get the source of our mystery.  Truth be told, it all been a build-up to something a little disappointing.

We find that The Long Game is the present-day version of what Mission to the Unknown was to The Daleks' Master Plan: a prequel to the larger story (in this case that of Bad Wolf 1 & 2).   After a recap of The Long Game, we're thrown into a cavalcade of confusion: the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Rose (Billie Piper), and Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) have all been separated and land on various television shows, respectively Big Brother, The Weakest Link, and What Not To Wear.  Each react to their situation in their typical manner: the Doctor is irritated and annoyed, Rose thinks the whole thing is funny, and Jack is just delighted to show off his "amazing" body.  Of course, not everything is as it seems.  Each show has a twist: eviction means extermination, being voted 'the weakest link' means extermination, and altering your looks means literally altering the way you look.

The Doctor realizes that the Game Station he's in is really the former Satellite Five from The Long Game.  He escapes the Big Brother house, along with housemate Lynda (Jo Jayner), and while Jack manages to escape himself, they arrive too late for Rose, who in her attempt to escape the Anne-Droid, gets vaporized.  But lo!--this is not the end of Rose (side note: could it ever truly be?).  Rather than get exterminated, she finds herself surrounded, and soon the Doctor, Jack, Lynda, and the Programmers aboard (Jo Stone-Fewings and Nisha Nayer) discover who is holding them and the population of Earth hostage...THE DALEKS!

This group, ruled by the Dalek Emperor, managed to fall through space at the end of the Great Time War, and His Majesty has been harvesting humans to create his new Dalek Army, ready to invade and destroy Earth.  The Doctor, however, will have none of that: he tells them he's going to rescue Rose and destroy the Daleks, all without a plan, or weapons of any kind.

The Doctor and Jack land on the Dalek mother ship and rescue Rose, and the Doctor has come up with a way to destroy the Daleks once and for all via a Delta wave, destroying every mind in its path (though that could include the humans too).  However, the Doctor is far too loving to truly threaten the Daleks, until Rose inspires an idea for him...or so we think.  Keeping his pledge to protect Rose, he sends her off to safety, much to her agony, and she returns to London to be greeted by her erstwhile boyfriend Mickey (Noel Clarke) and her mom Jackie (Camille Coduri).  As the Doctor and Jack continue to fight off the Dalek Army, Rose is frustrated about remaining at home, until she hits on the idea of looking into the TARDIS.  Once she manages to do that, she absorbs the energy from the TARDIS, allowing her to go back to the Dalek mother ship.  It should be too late: both Lynda and Jack have been killed by the Daleks, and the Doctor is just out of time.

Once there, she has god-like powers: with a wave of her hands she evaporates the Army and brings Jack back to life, but the intensity of the TARDIS energy is destroying her mind.  With a kiss, the Doctor absorbs the energy for himself, and once back on the TARDIS, the Doctor tells Rose he is changing.  To her horror, the Doctor regenerates into a whole new man (David Tennant).

Right from the get-go Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2 has a major problem.  Part 1 is dependent on the audience knowing certain things, primarily the three shows being spoofed: Big Brother, The Weakest Link, and What Not to Wear.  If you (like me) haven't seen one or any of those shows, you really have no idea what is going on.  Until Bad Wolf, I hadn't even HEARD of What Not to Wear, so while I understood the gist of the show (and could even guess that the two hosts voiced their robotic doppelgangers), anyone else who wasn't a viewer would feel a bit lost. 

Another issue I had was a bad habit of current Doctor Who that should be called the Rory Syndrome: killing off a character just to find that he/she really isn't dead.  Here, we witness what we think are the deaths of both Rose and Jack, only to find that they aren't really dead or conversely, have been granted immortality.  You can't really build sadness for a character's end if said character doesn't really end.  If I remember correctly, for a moment we thought Rose was dead in Dalek, and while it worked that time I think it didn't go over that well in Bad Wolf Part 1.  What I wondered was if Rose, in her god-like state, can bring life, did she bring back only Jack or everyone else on board?  It would have been possible to have restored all the humans slaughtered by the Daleks (except Lynda, whose death was both tragic and extremely well-done cinematically). 

Finally on the minus side, I kept wondering about how it was possible for the Daleks to survive the Time War but there being absolutely no chance whatsoever of the Time Lords themselves being exterminated.  If Russell T Davies allowed the Daleks to survive, what precludes a small group of Time Lord exiles to have escaped?  Even Aeneas survived the fall of Troy. 

Now, placing our eyes on the positive, some of the acting in Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2 is among the best of the first series.  Once you get over a lot of the comedy from the warped versions of the various shows, I found Jayner's Lynda to be a sweet, almost naive girl.  If Rose hadn't lived (which would have given the story more depth), Lynda would have made a wonderful Companion.  As stated earlier, her death at the plungers of the Daleks was extremely chilling and brought a real moment of terror and sadness, given she was a very nice person.  Eccleston was, to quote him, fantastic, both when playing grumpy at the Big Brother House and when as a hologram he appears to Rose as part of Emergency Programme One and when at the end of Part 1 he declares his intentions to the Daleks. 

Piper has earned her place as one of the best Doctor Who Companions with Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2.  In this two-part story watch her transform from the girl who isn't taking The Weakest Link seriously to the terrified girl held captive by the Daleks to the determined woman moving TARDIS and Earth to rescue the Doctor.  Piper has an evolution to her character, and I believe put to rest once and for all the idea that she is just a 'pop star' who was given the gig to get ratings.  Rather, she projects an entire catalogue of emotions: fear, love, courage, all within a very young character.

It truly is hard to determine if Barrowman was playing a character or just being himself as the egotistic Jack.  I know a whole mythos has been built around our Captain Jack, but for my part I've never warmed up to our intergalactic nymphomaniac, so I would make him the weakest link (pun definitely intended).

Joe Ahearne creates some beautiful moments along with getting good performances out of his actors.  When Rose is believed dead, he surrounds the Doctor in black, enhancing the poignancy of the moment.  Visually, when Rose is obliterating all enemies is also a beautiful moment.  The best moment in Bad Wolf is in Part 2 when Lynda is killed (I keep going back to that, but in the silence of the moment, seeing the Daleks outside the Satellite with their lights blinking out what we already know they are saying makes it more chilling). 

I do question whether it was important for Rose to reveal the truth about her and her father to Jackie, figuring that maybe this could have remained between her and Pete, but there it is.  I also never figured out why that particular phrase, "bad wolf", was so important.  If Rose just got it from when she destroyed the Dalek Emperor and spread it across time and space, then it didn't originate from her mind, did it.  Right?  Am I missing something?

Well, now we've reached the end of the 9th Doctor's tenure, and we will have a retrospective on him: the best and the worst (yes, there were bad things in Series/Season 1).  However, that's for another time.

Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2 has some wonderful performances and in a perverse way give me hope that the Time Lords are actually still around: what's good for the Daleks... I had some problems with Part 1, less so with Part 2, which is a switch: normally the first episode is brilliant while the second one falls apart.  It gets point knocked off for suffering from the Rory Syndrome, but on the whole, we can say they cried us a good wolf.

6/10

A 9th Doctor Retrospective

Next Story: The Christmas Invasion