TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY - EP 1: The New World

Torchwood goes international and … Wow.

When last we saw Torchwood it was … well, no more.  Their headquarters were destroyed, most of the team were dead and Capt. Jack had sacrificed his own grandson to save the rest of The Children of Earth.  Wracked with guilt, he became an interstellar hobo and the pregnant Gwen went off the grid with her fella, Rhys.

But, if you don’t know or don’t remember any of that, it’s okay, because this is a new beginning for Torchwood.  Relocating production to America gives creator Russell T. Davies the chance to start work on a whole new, much bigger, canvas!  Most of what you need to know will be told you as we go along.

And so we begin - with a celebrity.  Bill Pullman (who you probably last saw as the fighter-plane flying President in Independence Day) is, here, Oswald Deans, a convicted paedophile and murderer spending what are intended to be his last few moments on this Earth before receiving the death sentence.  Things do not go according to plan and this – 6am Kentucky time – is our introduction to Miracle Day, a day when nobody dies.

Pullman is creepy and twitchy and quite compelling as he argues he should be free because his sentence has been committed and he was executed.  It isn’t his fault nobody can die.  This is obviously a plot thread which will become increasingly central as Miracle Day’s ten episodes unfurl.

Bill Pullman auditioning for the remake of Birdy?  No, getting ready to be nasty in Torchwood!

Russell T. is very good at taking conventions and turning them on their heads and here he has hatched a brilliant variation on the old fable – what if something everybody wishes for actually came to pass.  The terms and conditions on such deals, of course, always read: “Be careful what you wish for!”

You know those films – like Firefox, The Hunted and Shooter - that begin with a grizzled, battle-weary veteran living the quiet life in the wilds, before a call to adventures comes a-knocking?  Here, the grizzled, battle-weary veteran is Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) living in a lovely little cottage with Rhys and their daughter, Anwen, in the arse-end of “God’s own” Wales.

Meanwhile, a curious CIA agent – Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins) - is worrying about ‘Torchwood’, inspired by an email which mysteriously appears out of nowhere.  When she begins to dig she is surprised to find there is no reference to ‘Torchwood’ anywhere.  Apart from this blog post, obviously.

Mekhi Phifer is Rex Matheson, another CIA agent, who was in an accident, should have died but, thanks to ‘The Miracle’, didn’t; giving doctors time to repair him.  Not unreasonably, he worries what will happen when ‘The Miracle’ ends and is determined to learn how it all ties in with the mysterious Torchwood.  

Mekhi Phifer, mistaking rural Wales for urban New Jersey.

But what of Captain Jack (John Barrowman)?  No Captain Jack, no Torchwood.  As always, he and his trusty greatcoat reappear with nary a glance backward at the misery he has left in his wake.  He has been drawn back to Earth by that mysterious email.

Of course, one of his USPs is that he is immortal.  On one occasion, I seem to recall, he spent a couple of thousand years buried in a hole; on another he was buried in liquid concrete. He’s one tough hombre.  Now everyone else is “undying” and he, curiously, isn’t as hard-wearing as he used to be.

This suggests that there is some connection between him and Miracle Day, and the email was his invitation back home.  By whom and why will, no doubt, become clearer as we proceed.

Say hello Captain Jack.  There's no talking in the library ... But shooting, that's fine.

It’s a shame we didn’t get to see him travelling the stars, but then, Torchwood has never been about the sexy, space-travelly bits of science fiction adventuring, it’s always been about the more grounded, grimy consequences.  Rhys is, in many ways, the most Torchwoodian character, because he’s the one who has both feet in the real world.  When Gwen decides she wants to break cover and help, his is the voice of common sense and reason, pointing out that people not dying is really not a problem.

If only that were true.  There are almost off-hand revelations that 300,000 people usually people die a day and another 500,000 are born and, if the not dying continues, it’ll be four months before the Earth is overwhelmed.  Can’t help but feel that’s going to become increasingly a problem!

I’m glad to confirm that Davies’ two years off have not blunted his pen.  There is some excellent writing here.  He can still turn out a deceptively simple but incredibly powerful line, such as one doctor’s assertion that “Miracles got easy”.

He is also good at creating memorable set-pieces.  There’s a really icky scene involving a burned victim which zombie movie fans will be talking about that for some time to come, I imagine!

The last ten minutes of the episode are the fulfilment of what every Torchwood and Doctor Who fan has been hoping for – the same old action/adventure but with a bigger budget and a more glamorous American twist.  Yet Davies still approaches his material with his tongue in his cheek – there being a lovely visual gag involving ear-muffs amidst the gunfire.

Introducing the new, improved Torchwood team.  I think they should ALL be wearing greatcoats!

But what of the tone?  Well, it’s certainly lighter than Children of Earth, but then so is your average Lars Von Trier film.  There was also a Biblical subtext to that series (pillars of fire, voices from the Heavens demanding we sacrifice our children) and I expect there to be a developing subtext here dealing with death and our troubling relationship to it. 

There is no mention (yet) of Jack’s rapacious and polymorphous sexuality.  I was wondering if that might be eliminated from the Americanised version but, since it’s co-produced with Starz and they make the absolutely-anything-goes Spartacus, I don’t think we need fear.

This episode is gently easing you in to Davies’ world and getting all the chess-pieces in place.  Next week is when, all being well, the game will begin in earnest.

Torchwood airs on Friday on Stars in the US and the following Thursday on BBC1.  But don't take my word for it, here's the Radio Times, for goodness sake:

So, what are you more excited about, Torchwood or Rich Stein's Taste of Spain.  Hm ... It's a close one ...

DOCTOR WHO: A Christmas Carol

.

Does Moffat’s first Christmas special have to be his version of A Christmas Carol?  Really?  Isn’t it enough that every other TV show ever has done that?  Apparently not. Although, to be fair, at least he puts a spin on it that makes good use of the TARDIS and, for that matter, good use of The Doctor’s familiarity with the works of one C. Dickens (he told him he was a big fan a few years ago, you may recall).

So, for a pre-title sequence we have the good ship HMS MacGuffin plunging towards certain death in the atmosphere of a planet at Christmas – jingle any bells?  Any sign of an Australian songstress?  No, but there is a Welsh one in a fridge.  More on that, later.

We have Amy and Rory doing a little role-play in the honeymoon suite and …. Well, that’s about it, really.  They serve no dramatic purpose after that, so this was them basically turning up to smile and wave and give fourteen year-olds of all ages something to snigger about.

The story proper begins with a gorgeous FX of the city, dominated by a St. Paul’s type building which is controlling the clouds like in Highlander II (1992), and a very wise use of Mr Gambon’s instantly recognisable dulcets to set the tone.  Moffat can still craft a killer line and “Halfway out of the dark” is one such,  Indeed, that would have been a better title for the episode in my not-so humble!

So, Doctor Eleven makes his entrance by falling down the chimney (deliberately, he would have us believe) and immediately resumes his annoying habit of talking until his brain starts working; of course, with no Amy to talk to, he has to talk to us, because there’s a lot of information to impart in a short space of time.  We need to learn that Gambon’s Sardick controls the clouds, we need to know that he keeps people cryogenically frozen as collateral on debts (hence the opera singer in the fridge) and we need to know that he was scared of his father.

Then the script takes a turn for what I am coming to realise is the trademark Moffat surrealism:  fish floating through the atmosphere, swimming through fog, which eventually leads to the wonderful visual of a shark fin slicing through low mist.

We have Amy kick-starting The Doctor’s brain with the triple repetition of “Christmas carol” (yes, we get it, we do, we really do!) followed by another Moffat trademark – interacting with video recordings.  But then the moment of inspiration I always hope for in a Doctor Who script: The Doctor travels back into Sardick’s own past to change the young him while the old him watches the whole process on video, growing new memories as the story unfolds before his eyes.

Matt Smith’s scenes with Laurence Belcher, the young Sardick, are delightful.  There is a real empathy between this Doctor and the children he behaves like.  Once Abigail (Katherine Jenkins) is thawed out and soothes the savage beast with her own instantly recognisable dulcets, the scene is set for a montage of moments, many, many Christmas Eves, with many adventures, including sleighing with Rudolph the Red Nose Great White and an unfortunate incident with fezzes.

So, the middle act rambles around, being all feel-goody, dropping lots of tempting throw-away ideas that other writers can flesh out in many other ways using any of the plethora of other Doctor Who media.  Of course, the mission here is to change Sardick, like Scrooge before him, into a better person and, not unreasonably, Moffat has calculated that a personality-altering epiphany such as the one in Dickens’ original is unlikely to come as a result of a single event, but rather an accretion of events over a whole life.

When Sardick realises that The Doctor is only spending so much time with him, putting all this effort into moulding him into a new person, simply to make him save the spaceship, he responds very much as anyone would.  But, Moffat’s dénouement, the rabbit he pulls out of this particular hat, is inspired.  Indeed, there is a real poetry to the crescendo as the various narrative threads are woven together like the different sections of a symphony … not much science but, y’know, it is Christmas. 

So, unlike The Next Doctor (which I maintain is the pinnacle of the Christmas episodes) this is fairly limited on spectacle but, appropriately, over-flowing with seasonal sentimentality and good will.  Moffat has taken what could have been a tedious and derivative idea and skilfully steered it around all the melodramatic traps into which it could have fallen to produce a delightful and heart-warming tale, perfect for that much-envied Christmas Night slot! Fair choked me up it did, but I’ll never admit that in public.

Of course, as has become the norm, this episode finished with a quick montage of some of the delights awaiting us in the upcoming series ... And contains several lines which the Whovers of my acquaintance have already taken to quoting.  See if you can figure out which ones:

.

DOCTOR WHO: Vampires in Venice

Well, we’ve had werewolves and mummies and Frankensteinian hand-made chimeras so, I suppose, vampires were inevitable.  Having them in such a gorgeous location was not.

This episode uses its European locations very skilfully.  The Doctor Who trip to foreign climes has obviously become a bit of a tradition for the new show and, provided they continue to make such good use of the locations they find, I’m heartily in favour of it.  Licence fee concerns be damned; I’d rather they spent my £150 on a foreign holiday for the Doctor Who crew than putting it in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pocket!

Here the setting is “The Impossible City”: Venice in 1580 (although it was filmed in Eastern Europe, as most things set in the past seem to be these days).  There is a spot of in-jokery when The Doctor proclaims that he is keen not to run in to Casanova … although this line would have been funnier if delivered by David Tennant, of course.

Matt Smith is still all elbows, still seemingly uncomfortable in his own body.  This was the episode where I realised just how bow-legged he is … which does somewhat undermine the determined purposeful walk he is required to provide at significantly dramatic moments.

The premise of this episode is that The Doctor takes Amy and Rory to Venice as a wedding present – a thoughtful, generous, romantic gift and a great way of circumnavigating that snogging problem he had with her in the last episode.  Obviously, since he is being written and played as an eleven year old boy, his first instinct, when presented with the very real danger of being snogged by a girl, is very much what an eleven year old boy’s would be … grass her up to her boyfriend.  Ah well, no one expects profound emotional insight at 7pm on a Saturday.

The vampire plotline itself is dealt with very well, with the white ‘brides’ floating around like something from an early-70s semi-erotic Hammer horror film.   

The historical setting also allows for some wonderful costumes, particularly Madam Calvieri’s awesome dress.

Of course, there are a few inconsistencies in the presentation of these vampires:  They are destroyed by daylight, yet simply shield their eyes to protect themselves from it.  Surely, if daylight can make you explosively dehydrate … touching any part of your skin would have that effect, not just the eyes?  And why does daylight bother them anyway, when it soon becomes apparent that they aren’t actually vampires at all but rather “fish from space” hiding behind the increasingly versatile (and convenient) Perception Filter technology?  But these are small issues for which the confidence and quality of the presentation earns forgiveness.

One thread that seems to be over-hanging this series from Russell T’s shift, is the criticism of The Doctor’s methods.  At one point Rory tellingly informs him that he has no idea “ … how dangerous you make people to themselves!”  This is, of course, entirely correct and a necessary side-effect of the fact that every single place the Tardis takes him is a place on the cusp of crisis.  Self-destructive adrenaline junkies are either really, really well prepared, or they are short-lived.  The Doctor is very obviously NOT short-lived.  The same cannot be said for the characters around him who are typically disposable.

After a visit from The Doctor, the head-count in his locality is often noticeably lower than before, even though he will have carefully avoided having to kill anyone himself.  The balancing argument would remind you that these casualties are often a small price to pay to secure a greater good as the planet / system / universe is no longer under threat.  But we viewers know that the high-cost peace will be short-lived as the universe will be in danger all over again in seven short days.

It is almost refreshing, therefore, that it is only Venice that is endangered here.  Venice is always in peril.  Should be used to it by now!  Calvieri’s weather machine, seemingly built-into the fabric of her building (and introduced suddenly quite late in the proceedings) offers a chance for Matt Smith to do some stunts (sorry, ‘physical acting’) as he clambers up the outside of the building in the rain in a manner not dissimilar to the denouements of both The Idiot Lantern and The Daleks in Manhattan storyline.  Once up there, however, this rather clichéd sequence is redeemed entirely by the fact the Calvieri’s despotic Doomsday Weapon has a simple off switch.  Brilliant.

But there it is again – a criticism of The Doctor – as Calvieri taunts him over his determination to spoil her plans and save just one city:  “Hard to believe it’s the same man who let an entire civilisation turn to cinders and ash”.  Later, when he has won and her race faces extinction, before sacrificing herself, the tragic villainess enquires, accusingly: “Can your conscience carry the weight of another dead race?”  Oh yes, without doubt.  Just add another one to the ever-growing list.

Given that the target audience of this series is avowedly children – more so than under RTD’s stewardship – all this philosophising about the morality of The Doctor seems misplaced.  Kids don’t want debates on moral philosophy, they want fish custard, apparently.  So, come on guys, make your mind up, is this a simple kids’ show or isn’t it?  The failure to establish a consistent tone within these developing episodes – and a consistent characterisation for The Doctor himself - continues to annoy me and interfere with my enjoyment of the show.

This isn’t an overly-significant episode and I doubt if it’ll be anyone’s favourite, but it certainly fills its 45 minutes with clever, creative ideas, exotic images and a well-conceived developing relationship for Rory and Amy.  Never more so than in the way that it allows Amy a chance to swap her usual role as the one in need of rescue and gives her a chance to rescue the emasculated Rory.

The problems I have are, as in previous episodes, all to do with the Steven Moffat’s overall vision for the series and his version of The Doctor.  But those are the cards script-writer Toby Whithouse was dealt.  The game he plays with them is a very skilful one, successfully turning what could have been an embarrassing filler episode into a superior entertainment and, yes, my second favourite episode in the series so far.

DOCTOR WHO: Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone

The first two-parter of the new series begins with a couple of red herrings.  Firstly there’s the cameo from Mike Skinner (a.k.a The Streets) who doesn’t appear again.  He is hallucinating about trees and grass and the open air because of the hallucinogenic lipstick River Song has kissed him with.  Ordinarily, a smoking gun like that would be introduced good and early because it is going to come back at an important moment later on.  But this doesn’t re-appear later, either.  Although, to be fair, the story is book-ended with a different kiss, but we’ll get to that later.

What it does is proceed to a lovely science fiction idea, River Song (Alex Kingston) breaks into a safe, all Mission:Impossible stylie, and carves a message on the artefact she finds there, so The Doctor can find it thousands of years in the future and travel back and rescue her as she throws herself out of an airlock.  Ingenious stuff.  Bill and Ted sort-of did it first, but it’s still a lovely moment with a great idea behind it an a nice way to propel us into this story.

Of course, River Song herself is just really irritating.  She can write Gallifreyan, fly the Tardis better than its owner (apparently The Doctor has been flying it with the brakes on all these years) and has the previously-revealed close relationship with The Doctor in the future – all of which suggests she is a Time Lord.  But she can’t stop gloating about the fact that she’s knows “spoilers” about his future.  He, on the other hand, never once gives her the merest hint that he knows hers, yet, since the last time they met he watched her die, that’s a pretty big secret to keep.

Writing of being irritating, I find the way Moffat chooses to write The Doctor’s dialogue is particularly galling.  Yes, I understand that the show is meant to appeal to kids and kids don’t understand the laws of grammar so they just make words and sentence structures up.  That’s fine.  In kids.  It was even fine when Joss Whedon started doing it in Buffy because, y’know, they’re American.  One sympathises.  But here, The Doctor’s dialogue is deliberately infantile and that just annoys me:  “ … it’s a Boringer! … I’m Mr. Grumpy Face … They will be sorrier … I made him say comfy chair … That’s extremely not very good …” And so on.  Once in a while for comic effect, fine, but all the time?  No.

I think the cumulative effect of The Doctor being wrong when Amy was right a couple of weeks before, The Doctor being on the back-foot because of River Song, The Doctor losing his temper momentarily every episode now, which makes him seem panicky fallible and this, along with his dithery, graceless mumbling and ill-disciplined use of language is all, presumably, meant to humanise him.  But he’s a super-hero!  He’s an alien with super-powers, two hearts, an indeterminate life-span and something approaching omniscience!  He’s not meant to be human.  Making him human just undermines his authority, as if making him someone who has barely started shaving didn’t already severely dinted that!

Then there’s the inconsistency:  When he finds that he is up against The Weeping Angels, he tells Amy that they are “… the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent” of life forms.  Funny, but he had a different opinion of them last time, he seemed to feel their habit of propelling you somewhere else in space and time (Hull, in one case) was quite quaint.  What they didn’t do was kill people.  Well, make your bleedin’ mind up.

Right.  Got that off my chest.  Now then …

He also meets Bishop Octavian (Iain Glen) and his squad of battle priests who are, if you’ll forgive the image, going commando for God.  But, of course, there is no God in The Doctor’s universe, there’s only him … so they end up putting their faith in him.

They plunge into some caves, looking for stone monsters (!) and that affords some truly gorgeous scenery and photography, benefiting from some very moody lighting and clever use of matte paintings. 

The statues they find in there are all in a state of considerable disrepair, their faces melted away.  When, in a surprise turn of events that was only patently obvious from the very beginning, the faces start to slowly resolve and repair, that leads to some very disturbing imagery.

There’s no denying that this story is incident-packed, every new scene introduces a new element, a new problem, a new thread, but the highlight of the episode is undeniably Amy’s scene trapped in the locked room with the recording of the Angel.  This is a genuinely chilling moment and the solution (which, characteristically, she comes up with on her own) is ingenious.  It also employs a common thread that has run through several of Moffat’s scripts: The notion of the haunted recording device.  We had the ghostly child’s voice in the radiogram in The Empty Child (2005), the communicator data-ghosts in Silence in the Library (2008) and the conversation with the video-tape in Blink (2007).  Here we have both this video-recording of the Angel, which is interactive, but also the voice of dead characters cutting in on the walkie-talkies.

Then we get the first episode’s crescendo, the climax, the cliff-hanger … and you doubtless know all about the controversy when this happened:

Well, at least it took people’s attention away from the fact that The Doctor has gone to very great pains in the past to avoid using guns.  Here he picks one up without hesitation.  Is that another inconsistency or just me being picky?

Well, if that’s picky, how does the whole jumping up and getting grabbed by the artificial gravity thing work?  And, if it did work, how come it didn’t result in them crashing into the surface of the space-ship as though they’d just fallen thirty-odd feet to the ground?  Not sure I buy that at all.  But the reveal shot when the camera pulls away and rotates 180 degrees is an excellent visual with which to start episode two!

As with all-together too many elements from this year’s season – the lovely idea of having Amy counting down to her own demise, just fizzles out … she doesn’t even get to ‘one’.  It’s an event that doesn’t happen.  Once again, we have villains who don’t do anything, a Doctor who seems to have no sense of purpose and clever plot-points like this one that just dry up or get forgotten about.

Then there is the whole issue of Amy having to fool the Angels in to thinking she can see.  But it has already been established that they communicate with each other somehow, so they must surely know that she is possessed and might well even be in contact with the Angel that has possessed her.  So how, then, can she walk gingerly past them without them realising there’s a problem until she, inevitably, falls over?

The moment where, finally, we see them move comes far, far, far too late.  We have seen too many of them and we have seen them too clearly for them to keep holding the dread that they had at the beginning, the visual cue of actually seeing them move was, I think, needed to inject another level of horror into them.  It’s skin-crawling the one time they do move but, again, comes to nothing.

However, shot through this are some very powerful, very clever lines:  “Yes, if we lie to her she’ll suddenly get all better … If I always told the truth I wouldn’t need you to trust me” These are beautifully enigmatic concepts that Smith delivers well and which prove that Moffat absolutely knows what he’s doing!  The moment when The Doctor faces up to the inevitability of Octavian’s sacrifice is cunningly written and beautifully performed by both actors.  Smith giving long, meaningful looks that betray the depths of character that his off-the-cuff dialogue goes so far to hide, Glen being stoically determined and making a line like “I think you’ve seen me at my best” truly tug at the heart.

Finally, the show-down, where the Doctor uses gravity to dispose of both of his problems in one go, is very neatly constructed and, again, proves what a great writer Moffat can be when he lets himself be.

The coda is very interesting, with Amy being the first companion ever to openly demonstrate a desire to explore the sexual possibilities that The Tardis offers.  Of course, since she is due to get married the following day, one has to wonder about her sense of commitment.  Maybe her claim in episode one that she was “a kissagram” really did mean what we thought it meant.

But no.  She’s a good, clean, honest girl really, who is just having the most galactic case of pre-wedding jitters.

So, over-all, whilst I clearly found much to criticise in these episodes, I do feel they constitute a marked improvement on the first two that Moffat wrote.  It’s as-though he had more time to work on them, and more confidence about where his vision of The Doctor is going.  It’s still not a vision I whole-heartedly buy into, though.

I imagine a more confident, more consistent depiction of the central character (such as that presented by either Eccleston or Tennant) would have carried me past a lot of these problems I have and made for an altogether more satisfying viewing experience.

I am still not enjoying Smith’s depiction of The Doctor, despite the very obvious acting skill he demonstrates which, as I noted with episode one, demonstrates a greater range and subtlety than Tennant managed.  But, and it’s a huge, big but: The character as written by Moffat is just not convincing or endearing or consistent enough for me.  Karen Gillan’s Amy is beat perfect, she is an excellent companion and it is gratifying to see her being allowed to play against the type that young, attractive women in mini-skirts usually are stereotyped into playing.  But The Doctor … sorry, I still don’t trust him.  

DOCTOR WHO: Victory of the Daleks

Now, this is what I’ve been waiting for.  A barn-storming classic Doctor Who episode with moments that I’ll remember and talk about for years to come: Spitfires in space, man.  It don’t get much better than that.

As you would expect from Mark Gatiss, a man steeped in British heritage, this is a terribly stiff-upper-lipped story with a brilliant central conceit.  Churchill, during Britain’s ‘darkest hour’, supervising the war from the dark and dingy depths of his bunker, is presented with a solution, a weapon he can’t possibly resist: A camouflaged Dalek, or an “Ironside” as their supposed inventor, Dr. Bracewell, terms them.  There is something so right about that description yet so curiously wrong about their behaviour: The early scenes with the Daleks as servants, bringing cups of tea or trundling down a corridor carrying a box file, are delicious. 

Obviously, there are a few quibbles with this episode, not least:  Why is no one shocked that Amy is wearing a mini-skirt in 1941?  Where the Hell did the Daleks come from?  I thought The Doctor had destroyed them all.  Again.  Isn’t it convenient that that they just happened to stumble across a Progenitor Device floating in space!  Quite how - and why - would these pepper-pots with sink-plunger hands manage to fashion a cyborg – then make it middle-aged and Scottish?

However, these worries simply dissipate as the episode barrels along.  There’s enough going on here to fill a two-parter (with the “Testimony is accepted” bit clearly the cliff-hanger ending of the first part) but they have packed it all into one episode.  The down-side of that is that none of the lovely ideas contained in this episode really get enough screen-time or chance to develop.  The up-side is that none of them outstay their welcome.  This is the archetypal British war-movie rendered down to its essentials and packed into 42 electrifying minutes.

Little throwaway lines like “Broadsword calling Danny-Boy” (which had me laughing so much I fell off the sofa) are all part of a very rich mix.  The bright sixties colours and sound effects on the Dalek ship are lifted straight from the sixties Dr. Who movies, plus they contribute to Moffat’s apparent desire to channel the spirit of the very earliest Doctors and, in this case, are all the more welcome for it.

Yes, the multi-coloured Daleks are a marketing manager’s wet dream.  Yes, they will spawn a huge line of all-new expensive toys and, yes, they’ll probably be back again at the end of the series.  Again.  But all of that is fine.

The whole episode is a mosaic, a collection of small, perfectly formed ideas stuck together to form a whole and, if some of the ideas don’t work on their own, that’s okay, because they are an important part of the big picture.

Spitfires in space.  Epic.  Iconic.  Perfect!

Ian McNeice’s performance as Churchill is note perfect, every sentence a statement of eloquent defiance delivered in that jowly rumble which we all know so well.  If you’ll forgive me for pinching the best line: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to The Devil …” That’s exactly the kind of dialogue I’ve been waiting for, made all the richer because it is, of  course, a paraphrase of a genuine Churchill quote from the period.

Bill Paterson has fun with a fairly undignified role, spending much of his screen-time lying on the floor being psycho-analysed.  However, this scene, like the previous week’s Starwhale dilemma, allows Amy to shine, managing to talk her Paisley Boy down when The Doctor, once again, fails.  Then, afterwards, when he’s despondent, she perks him up by reminding him that he saved the Earth, which is patently untrue:  She did!

As for The Doctor, well, what seems to be turning into a weekly temper-tantrum at least has an understandable cause this week, because he’s terrified of the damn Daleks.  As with Eccleston’s Doctor, the presence of his nemesis makes him betray vulnerabilities he ordinarily wouldn’t.

This third episode has saved the series, for me.  Now there is at least one episode this year that is up there with my favourites, and that fact buoys-up my flagging faith for the rest of the series.

Well done, Mr. Gatiss.  Keep buggerin’ on!

DOCTOR WHO: THE Beast Below

 

So, I think it's fair to say that no one counts any of the second episodes among their favourites (although I remember re-watching The End of The World (2005), the second Christopher Eccleston episode, over and over because it was such a beautifully constructed statement of intent for the new show).  Second episodes are not the ones to showcase the big badguys and, compared to first episodes, no one really has that high an expectation.  So, pressure's off.

We are re-introduced to our shiny-new characters in their shiny new TARDIS as The Doctor is proving to Amy that it really is a spaceship.  She is out in space, flying, while he is fast hold of her ankle and ... looking up her nightdress.  Hm. Okay. 

Well, this shows that she is a spirited companion, as we have come to expect in these modern, enlightened times.  Her idealised analysis of his behaviour as being that of a documentary film-maker who has to observe dispassionately without getting involved is very succinctly put, and shows why The Doctor has no right to feel superior to her ... because, just like her, he can't help but tamper.

Matt Smith does pathos well, particularly when he, like Eccleston before him, struggles with the notion of being the last of his kind (again).  At least he succeeds in keeping this just the right side of maudlin.  He also does zany quite well, flapping his arms around in a childish, ungainly way like Basil Fawlty (an analogy which is, no doubt, aided greatly by his ill-fitting tweed and that ridiculous dickie-bow). To be fair to him, he does petulant and troubled well too and gets the chance to try on all those guises in this episode.  But I wish they'd stop giving him an acting work-out and settle on just one sort of Doctor for him to be, rather than an amalgam of all that came before.

Moffat has followed a couple of second episode traditions so, like Tooth and Claw (2006) and The Shakespeare Code (2007), this episode features the Queen of England and, like The End of The World it considers the diaspora of the human race.  Where that story had echoes of Douglas Adams'  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in that its location was an observation platform set up to watch the Earth consumed by The Sun, this tale looks at what happened to the humans who fled.

Tom Baker's second story The Ark in Space (1975) featured a not-dissimilar idea and there is a very noble tradition in science fiction of generation starships (even Pixar's Wall E had one).  Here, the ship is Starship UK, a floating island of enclosed skyscrapers (as t'were) each named after a different county.  Nice touch that, pity nothing is done with the idea.

The population is under the thumb of an all-seeing authority represented by automated Smilers, who sit there in booths, remind one of eerie, haunted ventriloquist dummies and ... don't do anything.

As with The Eleventh Hour's jellied eel bad-guy, everyone is scared witless of them, yet they don't actually do anything.  They frown, they grimace and, when goaded, they stand up then ... fall over.  Oooh, scary.

The pre-title sequence involving the isolation and punishment of a child is not explained.  I get that people who protest get eaten.  I get that the titular Beast Below doesn't eat children ... but why are under-performing children fed to it then?

Of course, there is a real child-centric feel to the new show (so far).  RTD was determined to make it a family show, to not pander to children but rather to motivate them to aspire, to think, to work at understanding it.  He brought prime-time adult television standards to his scripts and to the production as a whole.  Sadly, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of that retained here; instead, I'm seeing a children's show.

Having his protagonists slip and slide around in the whale's mouth was, I imagine, originally intended to have some mythical or fairy-tale overtone but, as presented, it is simply Star Wars' Garbage Compactor scene with added gunk.  It is the sort of messy humour that patronising, non-aspirational children's TV is all-too replete with.  That's two weeks on the trot, Steven.  Enough now, please.

But, of course, I suppose the focus should be on children.  After all, as is made clear by the end, The Doctor sees all humans as children.  But then, in asserting his superiority ("You look Time Lord.  We came first!") he simply comes across as childish and petulant.  Later, when he feels that Amy has taken some power away from him he really throws his teddy out, bellowing like a spoiled brat "No human has anything to say to me today!" In fact, he loses his temper so much that he misses the all-important detail that'll save the day.

Thing is, all this "I'm mightier than thou" routine should have been kicked out of him ... The Tenth Doctor's arrogance burned him and that, in the show's continuity, happened only a few days before, yet The Eleventh Doctor seems to have forgotten all he recently learned about hubris.  Well, memory loss has gone hand-in-hand with regeneration in the past, but not this conveniently.

So, however well performed it is by Smith, that just rings wrong for me.  But, however much he hates it, I do like the way Amy thinks for herself, took his advice to see and understand the world around her and acts without consulting him - even after he did get all pissy at her.

What worked brilliantly was the character of Liz Ten: "I'm the bladdy Queen, mate!" Wonderful.  The process that has kept her on the throne for so long, the Forget / Protest buttons is a lovely philosophical commentary on the General Election we are now immersed in ... even if the idea does bear a family resemblance to The Matrix's red and blue pills. 

As with The Eleventh Hour, this script felt almost finished, but there were some continuity, motivation and narrative beats that needed more work.  Moffat's fascination with bio-mechanics (seen in the gas-mask faces of The Empty Child - 2005 - as well as the clockwork robots and cannibalised crew of The Girl in the Fireplace - 2006) is here in the spaceship / alien hybrid and in the half human / half Smiler crew.  But the culture of The Smilers and The Winders suggests at masses of fascinating back-story, but there is no time to fully develop or explain that.  That's a problem.  That suggests a script that still needed work.

One final (small) example.  The realisation that "very old ... and the very last of its kind" things can be very kind is a lovely idea.  But did we really need to have it explained to us three times?  Once, of course, twice, fair enough ... but thrice?  That, again, feels to me like a script that needed one final polish.

And (cue tenuous link here) while we're on the subject of polish ... The new TARDIS.  Same as the old TARDIS.  Not being a hardcore Whovian I didn't realise that the sudden appearance of the St. John's Ambulance logo on the shiny new door is a reboot to William Hartnell's TARDIS way back when.

So I did a (little) bit of research and I didn't realise there had been so many TARDISes over the years.  Here is an exhaustively researched and well-written analysis of the evolution of the TARDIS.  Enjoy.

DOCTOR WHO - The Eleventh Hour

 

My immediate knee-jerk reaction to the extremely-long-awaited debut of the eleventh Doctor:

My first thought, during the first few moments of the new much-heralded Doctor Who, was: For a show which now features an actor with the most precipitously high forehead in all British telly, the level of humour in the new Doctor Who is ironically low-brow.  Firstly we have him almost being castrated by the minaret atop Big Ben (as previously featured in several episodes) and then, in a matter of moments, he is spitting out food.  Again and again and again.

This left a bad taste in my mouth ... Because my big fear for the new series has been that the BBC will use the departure of the three people who brought the show back to life (Russell T, Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner) as an opportunity to make the show safe and predictable and just like every other bland, compromised, lowest-common-denominator show they pump out at a mass audience.

Spitting food and dipping disgusting things in custard is exactly the sort of 'humour' to which Saturday morning children's TV has been reduced.  Please, not Doctor Who too ...

Well, okay, people's opinions on what is and isn't funny are as divisive as their opinions on religion and politics, so I'll just have to let that slide.  But humour there is here, more than I expected.  New show-runner Moffat has, of course, worked very successfully in comedy in the past and has hired a lot of comedy writers for the new series so, maybe, we should expect a show with a lighter, less funereal tone than of late.

Moffat has, at least, retained the child's sense of wonder which, of course, is the show's stock-in-trade.  Little Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) is a delightful creation, praying to Santa and treating the new-born Doctor with a willing exasperation.  The moment when she dashes out of the house in her nightie, duffel-coat and woolly-hat to sit on her suitcase and wait for the Doctor's return is delicious.  A great testament to children's willingness to accept.

Much as Smith and Moffat must be hoping the children watching will accept them.

So, Matt Smith ... Well, his youth certainly gives him an energy and athleticism greater even that David Tennant's.  It's a logical progression to have him act even more wildly than Tennant did; always before Doctors have had to be pointedly different than their predecessor (Baker was wackier than Pertwee, Baker 2 was more solemn than Davidson) but, as Moffat points out in the Confidential documentary that followed on BBC Three, there is no Eleventh Doctor, just the eleventh face of the same Doctor.  He's the same person, therefore he should carry a lot of the same traits.  Maybe this is why Smith delivers many of his lines exactly as Tennant would and also why Moffat will have (one assumes) deliberately written them to make that happen.  Hopefully, this will fade away as Smith and Moffat establish their own character.

The "Geronimo" catchphrase is already annoying me, but at least they got "Trust me I'm a Doctor" and "The Doctor will see you now" out of the way early.

What's the other thing we know about Moffat?  Well, he does creepy really well.  Here we have an alien which shapeshifts into a man and his dog, which then mirror each other’s actions (which oddly reminded me of Philip Kaufmann’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers).  We then have a mysterious mother and her haunted children in a room-full of comatose people (all of which reminded me just a little of Moffat's first foray into Doctor Who - The Empty Child).  That's creepy enough and the big shiny eyeballs in the sky are also just icky; but the main monster, Multiform Prisoner Zero, a big jellied eel, really isn't that scary.  It has no motivation and, to be frank, doesn't actually do anything except make the sonic screwdriver sticky and turn into a barking man.

But then he (she?) isn't the real threat, The Atraxi are, because they are going to destroy Prisoner Zero and the planet on which he hides.  But why are they?   To make way for a hyperspace bypass? Why are they so threatened by the Multiform?   The script doesn’t find time to explain this during its 65 minutes (which is feature-length by TV standards) run-time.

What it does give us is a sexual charge between full-grown Amelia (Karen Gillan), now abbreviated to Amy, and the newborn Doctor, which begins with her revelation that she's a "kissagram" (but we all know what that really means) in her tight mini-skirt, and continues through her watching him get undressed to her positively flirting with him inside the new Tardis.  Maybe this is the result of a heterosexual in the show-runner's seat?  We'll see if it develops into something interesting or, given the fact that she leaves behind her fiancé, (either Rory [Arthur Darvill] or Jeff, presumably, we’ll find out soon enough, I imagine), is it simply a retread of the Doctor/Rose/Micky triangle from series one?  The face-off on the roof in the latter moments certainly reminded me of David Tennant's "That's the sort of man I am" exchange in The Christmas Invasion.  The Atraxi crystal star-ship is itself very similar to The Runaway Bride's Racnoss starship (and let's not even think about how that ties in with the shot of the wedding dress at the end).

The new, improved Tardis looks shiny an more solid and the interior is suitably impressive, with touches of many of the previous control rooms hidden in the details, just as the script reminds one of many elements from previous episodes.

The music, during the dramatic sequences is just as bombastic as we've come to expect from Murray Gold, yet the new arrangement of the main theme is oddly cheery and almost whimsical.  I've listened to it a few times now and I think I'll get used to it.

So, overall, how is Smith; do I think he has the energy and gravitas to pull off the role since it has been layered with so much God-like significance?  Hard to say yet.  I think he may have a greater acting range than Tennant who tended to act through his teeth, but I also fear that his age will continue to preclude me from taking him entirely seriously.  But then, maybe that is why they have made the theme chirpier and added more humour, to get away from the weight of consequence that Russell T. brought to the show and which, ultimately, began to hang around its throat like an albatross.

As for Ms Gillan, she'll certainly give dads a motive to watch the show again; although, as a character, I confess I preferred her as a child.

So, the show was certainly not a failure, it rattled along like all the more popular Davies shows, had a good mix of clever ideas and one-liners, introduced some potentially interesting supporting characters, dropped one or two hints of what is to come but, ultimately, didn't quite hang together for me.  The villains were not fully-drawn, they had no clear motivation.  The script didn't feel as polished as we've come to expect from Moffat and, since this will have been the first he wrote and, therefore, the one he had the most chance to re-work, that troubles me a little.

Various elements will, presumably, become clearer as they return in later episodes, such as an explanation of the knowing looks that pass between Gran (Annette Crosbie) and Jeff (Tom Hopper) while The Doctor is hacking into the world wide web.  The 'Myth' brand on the laptop will, one presumes, be a hint of this season's Big Bad.  Both suggest that we'll be back in this quaint little village later in the series. 

Then, of course, we get  the Multiform fulfilling its only significant role (that of dramatic foreshadowing) when it explains to The Doctor that, as with Amy's wall, The Universe is cracked, The Pandoric (?) will open and "silence will fall".  Since neither we not he know what any of that means, it'll obviously come back to bite him later.  I hope Moffat deals with it better than Russell T. did with all that tedious "He'll knock four times" twaddle that dragged through last year.

But we shall see if he can assuage my concerns as well as if he can answer some of the questions the show left me with, such as ...

Why is it called The Eleventh Hour when the countdown lasts twenty minutes (even if it is twenty TV minutes that last nearer forty) and the show itself lasts 65? (Yes, I know he's the eleventh Doctor but that's not sufficient justification for a punning title).

What's the whole duck-pond exchange about?  Was it leading to a pun about Amy's surname, that then doesn't happen.

What about Amelia's aunt?  Where is she?  Why is the child alone in the house?

Exactly how does Jeff make the world's scientists believe him and help him save the world?

What happens to Doctor Ramsden (Nina Wadia), why was she even in the script, she served no purpose?

And finally ... the montage of coming attractions at the end left me untroubled and unexcited ... it even starts like the prologue of Ashes To Ashes, which doesn't bode well, but there's one image ... a brilliant, striking, perfect Doctor Who image: of Spitfires fighting a Dalek Warship in orbit.  Spitfires in Space! Oh yes.  Roll-on episode three: Victory of the Daleks!  Meanwhile ... see for yourself (Click twice to get it fullscreen):