Doctor Who - Review of the New Series Opener

Doctor Who is back on TV, with series 35 — or, as it's officially known, series 9¹. I've been a fan since the first episode, back in 1963. I still remember settling down as a nine-year-old to watch the new show with the exceedingly weird title sequence. It's changed almost beyond recognition in nearly 52 years since then, yet managed at the same time to remain exactly the same. It's a rare trick.

The new series (whatever you call it) started with a two-part story, so I thought I'd wait till I'd seen both parts to give a reaction. But, before we start, let's get an extremely subtle warning out of the way:

HERE BE SPOILERS

So, if you haven't had a chance to watch it yet, bookmark this page and come back when you have.

Last year was all about establishing Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor², and, while the standard of the stories was varied, from the excellent finale down the highly questionable Kill the Moon, Capaldi was extremely impressive in his simultaneously familiar and different interpretation of the character.

This year, he starts as Doctor-in-residence and needs great stories to continue making his mark. The first episode, The Magician's Apprentice³, started with a bang: a young boy caught in a minefield in a long, dirty war is offered help by the Doctor, who's landed by accident and has no idea which planet he's on. When the child gives his name, the Doctor realises this is Davros, who'll go on to create the Daleks.

Thus, before the titles we're plunged straight into the story's main theme, a continuation of a moral dialogue the Doctor's been having on and off since 1975. That year, one of the all-time-great Doctor Who stories, Genesis of the Daleks, chronicled how the Doctor failed to prevent Davros in his creation. Faced with the opportunity of destroying all the embryonic Daleks, he hesitates and asks:

Listen, if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?⁴

Now, with those words come back to haunt him, the Doctor has three options for the child Davros: save him, kill him, or leave him to his fate. It's not till the story's final scene that we find out the choice he'll ultimately makes.

The heart of the story is a series of scenes between the Doctor and the adult Davros, last seen in 2008, in which they continue their debate about the ethics of the Daleks. Davros's position has always been that compassion is weakness and only through strength and ruthlessness can the Daleks survive, while the Doctor continues to argue the case for compassion. Taunted by Davros that "[Compassion] will kill you in the end," he retorts, "I wouldn't die any other way."

Now, though, Davros is dying and seems not only to be questioning his position but even wanting the Doctor's approval. It's all a ruse, of course — this is Davros, after all — and the Doctor seems caught in the snare of his compassion. But this is the Doctor, too, and he's one step ahead.

It's great to see ethical debate at the heart of things, as it was in so many of the great Doctor Who stories of the past, but this is anything but a talky story. Missy is back (and yes, we do find out how she survived her death last year) forming an unlikely alliance with Clara to find and help the Doctor.

In her female form, Missy seems better able to express her very contradictory feelings about the Doctor — constantly trying to kill him, she insists, doesn't alter the fact that he's her best friend and always has been. She talks constantly about memories of their childhood (just as we also get a glimpse of Davros's childhood) although she hints that not everything she tells Clara is true. Certainly referring to when the Doctor was a little girl seems implausible, in the light of last year's Listen.

Of course, Missy too has her own agenda, and in the end she almost succeeds in tricking the Doctor into killing Clara. As in Logopolis, any apparent alliance with the Master/Missy isn't going to last a moment longer than s/he chooses.

There's a lot else packed into the story: planes stuck in the sky, UNIT headquarters, a space bar containing many familiar aliens, a strange mediaeval scene with Doctor playing an electric guitar (the one weak section of the story, in my opinion), Dalek "sewers" containing not-quite-dead Daleks that the Doctor brings to life (setting up my favourite line, when he tells the Supreme Dalek "Your sewers are revolting") and Clara pretending to be a Dalek.

This last is interesting, since the first time we met Clara, in Asylum of the Daleks, she actually was a Dalek, so this brings her full circle. The whole process of pretending to be a Dalek is radically different from when Ian did it in The Daleks or Rebec in Planet of the Daleks, but that makes sense. The Daleks have been upgraded, redesigned and re-bioengineered so often since then, both by Davros and the Emperor⁵, that I wouldn't expect their mechanisms to be the same.

Clara's "training session" by Missy is fun and makes some intriguing suggestions about the Daleks (their guns are fired by emotion, and shouting exterminate is their way of "reloading) but what we learn from it also turns out to be crucial.

Perhaps the most arresting figure in the story, apart from Davros and Missy, is the wonderfully sinister Colony Sarff, Davros's messenger and bodyguard, whom the Doctor describes as "a nest of snakes in a dress". A scary-looking figure in its assembled form, it can collapse into a mass of individual snakes, each of which appear to have an equal part in the whole ("We are a democracy," it explains at one point). It's regrettable that Colony Sarff is destroyed at the end — but maybe there are more of its kind out there.

The whole story is a an old fan's delight, full of back-references. The ones relating to Davros are the most important, but there are others. When Clara, Missy and Kate Stewart of UNIT are trying to work out where/when the Doctor might be hiding, they identify a whole series of historical locations where he's been. These include San Martino (The Masque of Mandragora), Troy (The Myth Makers), "multiples for New York" (The Chase, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, The Angels Take Manhattan) and "three possible versions of Atlantis" — presumably those he visited in The Underwater Menace and The Time Monster, together with the Atlantis Azal claimed to have destroyed in The Dæmons.

There's been some criticism of recent Doctor Who that the Doctor has often taken second place in the stories to whoever his companion was at the time. Personally, I don't feel this has gone too far, and anyway it was by no means unknown in the classic series for stories to focus more on the companions. This was especially true in the early days, when we were seeing much more from Ian and Barbara's perspective than from the Doctor's. Still, it's good to have a high-class story where, although Clara has plenty to do, the focus is solidly on the Doctor. And on ethics, which have always been at the heart of Doctor Who.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of series 35.

¹ Series 9 of Doctor Who was broadcast in 1972, starting with Day of the Daleks and finishing with The Time Monster. This is the 35th series overall.

² Again, the numbering is questionable. What about the War Doctor? What about the Tenth Doctor Mark 2? For that matter, what about the Watcher, the Valyard, the Dream Lord…? Still, convention is convention.

³ Maybe it's just me being slow, but I still haven't worked out the rationale for either title in the two-parter. That doesn't spoil anything, though.

⁴ This and several other clips from past confrontations with Davros are played during the story. Personally, I'd prefer them to be left implicit, but I recognise not all viewers remember the classic stories as well as I do.

⁵ Assuming they're different, of course. The whole question of the identities of the various Dalek Emperors, of whom Davros was at least one, is rather complex.

Review of Doctor Who Series 8 (or 34)

It's a few weeks since series eight of Doctor Who finished. Or, to be more accurate, series thirty-four — the actual series eight aired in 1971 and first introduced us to the Master.

It was an important series, whatever its number, not only coming after all the hoo-ha of last year's anniversary, but also introducing us to a new Doctor, always a crucial time. So how did the series — and the Doctor — shape up?

As far as the series is concerned, I'd say it was variable, with both successes and failures, although there were no episodes I couldn't at least moderately enjoy rewatching. As for Peter Capaldi's Doctor, I think he's fantastic. Although I enjoyed Tennant and particularly Smith, I'm not sorry to say goodbye to the young, chummy Doctors we've had lately and go back to an older and utterly alien character.

In contrast to the Eleventh Doctor's extremely selective habit of occasionally forgetting all the human social customs he knows perfectly well the rest of the time, the Twelfth Doctor comes over as genuinely baffled by humans, and particularly by Clara. Superficially, their relationship is a little reminiscent of the Sixth Doctor's with Peri, or even the Fourth Doctor's with Sarah Jane (all three having first got to know a gentler, more considerate Doctor) but this character's arrogance seems to come less from over-confidence than from insecurity.

At the same time, he develops further the Eleventh Doctor's ambivalent moral stance. A couple of series back, in response to the comment that good men have too many rules, the Doctor pointed out, "Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many."

Capaldi's Doctor goes further into trying to answer the question Am I a good man? In the second episode, trying to explain his relationship with Clara, he comes up with my carer, adding, "She cares so I don't have to." And that seems important to the Doctor, yet one of the overarching threads of the series is that he's gradually destroying what he values in her, making her more like him.

Clara has had perhaps the strangest arc of any Doctor Who companion. It isn't entirely clear how much of her fragmented existence she actually remembers now, but she appears to settle into the same precarious juggling act as Amy and Rory did, trying to balance her normal life and her Doctor life. It isn't made easier by her now having a boyfriend (Danny) who she first has to lie to because he knows nothing of the Doctor; then, when he finds out, she has to lie to both him and the Doctor because they disapprove of one another.

"Rule One: the Doctor lies," River once said, and lying seems to be at the heart of this series, as the Doctor, Clara and Danny skirt around one another, withholding information, right to the final scene where the Doctor and Clara are each lying to make the other feel better. Clara, in fact, grows more and more like the Doctor as the series goes on, up to the point where, in the final episode, she's claiming to be the Doctor. Lying, of course.

Danny has an interesting back-story and is a good character, but much of the time he seems to be consigned to the "useless boyfriend" role pioneered by Mickey Smith. It isn't really until the two-part finale (in which he dies) that he becomes a seriously interesting character. Pity they left it so long.

The ongoing "tease" through the series is the enigmatic character Missy, who seems to live in some kind of afterlife and is gathering people who've died close to the Doctor. I admit I never saw the reveal about her coming. My original theory was that she was the TARDIS, for some reason uploading the consciousnesses of the dead to her matrix. Well, the second part was more or less right, but it was revealed as the cliff-hanger in the two-part finale that she's actually the Master, regenerated into a female form. Considering the rumours that have been floating around for thirty-five years or so about the Doctor becoming female, I loved that twist.

So what of the individual episodes?

Deep Breath — A long, somewhat sprawling introduction to the new Doctor, featuring the Paternoster gang (Vastra, Jenny and Strax) who seem to have replaced River as the standard occasional extra companions. As with most "new Doctor" stories, we see him acting bizarrely and out of character, but gradually finding his new identity. At least he doesn't try to strangle his companion. For the plot, there were some good things, but other elements (like the dinosaur in the Thames) that just seemed to have been slung in because they seemed like a good idea. An interesting episode, but I wouldn't put it with Spearhead From Space or The Eleventh Hour as a great new Doctor story.

Into the Dalek — A little reminiscent of the 2005 story Dalek, this delved into Dalek psychology, asking if Daleks are fundamentally evil, as well as giving us a Fantastic Voyage style journey inside a Dalek (a trope used before by Doctor Who in 1977, though not with a Dalek). I thought it was well done. It also introduced us to Danny, and returned to Clara's briefly-glimpsed new life as a teacher at Coal Hill School, the place where Doctor Who started back in 1963.

Robot of Sherwood — Nonsensical fun. We're presented with a thoroughly Hollywood image of Robin Hood, except that the Sheriff's "men" happen to be robots. It's strongly suggested all the way through that this scenario has been created by the robots, based on the legend, but then at the end we're left with the idea that this really is how it was — raising the question of why the "original" legend is nothing like the earlier retellings and entirely like the later ones. If you can get past that, though, it's huge fun, especially the alpha-male sparring between the Doctor and Robin.

Listen — An intriguing and chilling episode, in which the Doctor becomes obsessed that there are unseen beings shadowing us all the time. On the trail through time of attempting to prove it, he and Clara encounter both Danny as a child and what appears to be Danny's grandson, and, in a first, the Doctor himself as a child. The plot leaves a lot of events unexplained, but maybe it has to be that way.

Time Heist — A story which should have been great, but turned out only as quite good. For reasons that aren't explained till the end, the Doctor, Clara and two random companions have to break into the most secure vault in the universe, facing a terrible fate if they fail. The explanation at the end is a typically tortuous "timey-wimey" solution, and the whole thing just didn't excite me as much as I'd have expected from the synopsis.

The Caretaker — To counter an alien threat, the Doctor takes the position of caretaker at Coal Hill School, where Clara and Danny both teach — a position he declined to apply for in 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks. Like The Power of Three from last series, this is really a character/relationship story with a perfunctory adventure plot bolted on. The interactions between the three characters are well done, but I could have hoped for a better, more integrated alien threat.

Kill the Moon — As in last series, we have a story where the Doctor gives a trip in the TARDIS to a random child in Clara's care, the rather annoying fifteen-year-old Courtney, who also plays a substantial part in the previous story. The story, focusing on a future threat from the moon, is bizarre and suffers from a degree of scientific absurdity far beyond the odd pass we usually give Doctor Who. The weakest episode in the series, in my opinion.

Mummy on the Orient Express — A surprisingly effective episode, set on a replica of the Orient Express* travelling through space (shades of the spaceship Titanic) whose passengers start dying in mysterious circumstances. The whole thing turns out to be a gruesome experiment by an unknown enemy, with the Doctor finally finding the solution in a way that's a little unconvincing, but doesn't really spoil the fun. I was a little disappointed, in retrospect, that this wasn't tied in with the Missy arc. Perhaps we still have to discover someone else trying to manipulate the Doctor.

Flatline — Another great story, with Clara investigating an invasion of Earth by two-dimensional beings, while the Doctor is trapped inside a shrunken TARDIS (as in the 1981 story Logopolis). We still actually see a lot of the Doctor, but Clara takes the lead, gradually adopting his modus operandi to defeat the menace. The only real negative here is that the 2-D monsters become a lot less scary when they turn 3-D, but it's still a fine story.

In the Forest of the Night — Now, this seems to be a real Marmite episode, with some fans seriously detesting it. I loved it. A party of schoolchildren, supervised by Clara and Danny, get caught up in trying to find out why a forest has covered the entire earth overnight. The answer suggests a sentient-earth ecological message, though without ramming the message home too hard. The only real negative for me was that the children (who all acted decently, though not outstandingly) were ridiculously too young for their supposed age — the lead girl looked as if she should still be at primary school.

Dark Water/Death in Heaven — The finale, and I was glad to finally get another two-parter, where the story could stretch a little, since one of my objections to a lot of the more recent stories is that they tend to be rushing to fit into 45 minutes. The successive reveals at the end of part one (the Cybermen, and that the mysterious "Missy" is the Master) make it one of the best cliff-hangers in the revived show, and the return of UNIT in part two was very welcome, as was the classic image of the Cybermen in front of St Pauls Cathedral. Michelle Gomez is wonderful as Missy — charming and psychopathic at the same time, just as the Master should be, not to mention coming up with a characteristic mind-bogglingly complicated trap for the Doctor — though one or two aspects of the story were unexplained, such as how people can physically move between the material world and a virtual reality. A great finale.

So where now? The final scene of Death in Heaven suggests that Clara wouldn't be returning, but she appeared in the Children in Need clip from the Christmas special. Although I've enjoyed her stint as companion, I think it's about time we moved on. I've been saying for some time that I'd like to see a companion who isn't a twenty-something contemporary woman — someone from history, or from the future, or even an alien, all three of which we had a number of times in the classic show — but with Capaldi's Doctor being so alien, perhaps this isn't the best time for it.

Whoever the new companion might be, the important thing is that she (or he?) provides a foil for this intriguing new Doctor to develop his character further. I look forward to the next few years of Doctor Who.

 

* Definitely the classic Orient Express that Poirot travelled on. I made a three-day journey on the Orient Express in the 1970s, when it was just an ordinary train. Now that was murder.

Fifty Years of Doctor Who: A Personal Journey

Fifty years ago last Saturday, I was settling down to watch the first episode of a new Sci-Fi series on BBC.  Just the day before, we'd been stunned by the news of Kennedy's assassination.  Strangely, I've always had vivid memories of both events (I fit the cliché — I even remember what programme we'd turned on for when we saw the newsflash) but it was only about a decade ago I discovered they'd been on consecutive days.  Twenty-four hours is a long time for a child.

I'd been vaguely miffed that a cartoon show I liked had been taken off for this new programme, but I was looking forward to it all the same.  I'd loved the Pathfinders series ITV had put on over the previous couple of years (Pathfinders into Space, Pathfinders to Mars, Pathfinders to Venus) and was hoping it would be as good.  I was pretty much hooked by the time the unearthly title music had faded away.

Doctor Who quickly became my favourite programme, though I can't actually claim to have watched every single episode from the Sixties.  There was no recording in those days, no iPlayer, no endless repeats on BBC3 (no BBC3, or even BBC2 at first) and sometimes I had to be out at Saturday teatime — usually for a treat, though it tended to be a close-run thing whether the treat was worth it. 

Still, I saw probably 95% of the episodes, many now lost: the first sight of the Dalek and the Cybermen (not to mention the recently returned Great Intelligence and Ice-Warriors), the comings and goings of companions, and the Doctor's first regeneration.  It's difficult to pick out a high point, but I think it might be the amazing (and largely lost) twelve-parter The Daleks Master Plan, memorable among other things for killing off two companions.

Not that I knew it as The Daleks Master Plan at the time.  For the first three years, only episode titles were ever given, and the stories were, Friends-style, The One With the Daleks Invading Earth or The One With the Voords.  This was The One With the Time Destructor.  Whatever it was called, though, I loved it.  I've seen the surviving episodes and reconstructions of the lost ones since, and as far as it's possible to tell it still holds up well.

Not all the stories from the Sixties have survived as well in reputation, but my experience of them was a bit different from people discovering them now.  Back then, they were slick and beautifully made, with totally convincing sets and effects.  I'm sure they've been tampered with since — the same as the way that, when puppet shows like Thunderbirds were shown back then, the strings were totally invisible and have only been added on modern copies.

Of course, nothing's really good or bad except in reference to its own time and context.  One story that has a poor reputation among fans is The Web Planet (aka The One With the Zarbi) but my experience of it was very different.  To an eleven-year-old watching it in the Sixties, it was absolutely awesome, and the story was one I remembered as a high point.  Even from a twenty-first-century perspective, I think it's a much better story than it's given credit for, although it does have serious holes in it.  Mainly to do with the Optera.

Another reason for negative views of some of these stories today is that most people now experience them by getting the DVD and watching straight through, or at most in two chunks for the longer stories.  They were never designed to be seen that way, and watching them in twenty-five-minute doses a week apart played up the excitement and tension.

What Doctor Who mostly did in the 60s was to play to its strengths.  An excellent example of the this is The Dead Planet, episode one of The Daleks.  It finishes with the iconic shot of the view down the Dalek eyestalk of Barbara cowering away in terror, but the episode as a whole consists of the four regular characters wandering around cardboard sets, handling awful props and talking a lot.  And it's an absolute master-class in how to build up tension with few resources.  I'm certainly not advocating making programmes exactly like that now, but I think it might not be a bad thing, in the days of effects-led storytelling, for the makers to take a step back and relearn some of the basics.

The Sixties version of Doctor Who was my childhood, and nothing can compete with childhood memories, but I continued to watch through the Seventies.  The images and the feelings they generated didn't stick so firmly in my memory in this era (I was busy growing up, going to university, getting a job and all the things associated with those processes) and when I started rewatching them I often found I'd totally forgotten excellent stories, but I watched faithfully throughout the Pertwee and Baker eras.

A few things stick in my memory.  I recall, in late 1975, while Pyramids of Mars was on, I was taking a course in Greek philosophy at university.  The lecturer was explaining one philosopher's attempt to "Platonise" Egyptian mythology and gave a brief account of the murder of Osiris by Set, or Sutekh — then gave a slight laugh and added, "Currently appearing on Doctor Who."

The Eighties were when I lost touch with the show.  There were a number of reasons for this, not least that I didn't have a TV for part of the decade.  Anyway, when they messed around with the schedules and put it on during a weekday evening, I wasn't usually in at the time.

In any case, I felt less motivated to make an effort.  I felt Tom Baker's last couple of series were noticeably slipping (a view I still hold, with certain honourable exceptions like City of Death and Logopolis); at the time, I didn't much like Peter Davison's Doctor (though I've revised my opinion there); and I wasn't very impressed with the current crop of companions.

In any case, I stopped watching, apart from an occasional catch-up that wasn't enough to get back into it.  I've now acquainted myself with Eighties Doctor Who, and my feeling now is that it was a very uneven period, but with plenty well worth watching and occasionally as good as any era.  I personally think that the very last classic series, in 1989, was probably the best since the high days of Tom Baker.

That was later, though.  I still had fond memories of the old stories, and I watched them on the rare occasions they were reshown, but nothing much more.  As I discussed in a previous piece, I'm not actually very good at "being a fan", and I've never really been into tie-ins, conventions or merchandise for anything, so I didn't have anything much to keep up with.  I watched the 1996 movie and felt (as I still do) that McGann and McCoy were brilliant, but overall it was a disappointment.

Then the channel UK Gold started running the classics (or maybe they'd been running them and that was when I got the channel — I can't remember).  Anyway, I watched loads of stories and taped quite a few, and for a while I just watched those ones over and over, before I eventually discovered the joys of cheap DVDs being sold online.  As of now, I have most of the stories and can vary my Who-watching a good deal more.

In the meantime, of course, the show was rebooted in 2005.  I wasn't sure what to expect, after the experience of the movie, but I loved it.  I have some quibbles, but they're more to do with how TV is generally made today rather than specific to Doctor Who — the tendency to be led by effects and action, as against the intelligent storytelling of the past (though Doctor Who's better than most at blending them), overuse (for me) of music, and an over-reliance on story arcs.

Nevertheless, I think Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffett and the rest have done a wonderful job of updating the show without losing what always made it special — the way it balances fun and gravitas, action and intellect, scary monsters and social relevance.  Saturday's Fiftieth Anniversary Special, which had a really hard job living up to its hype, blew me away, managing to be at the same time a brilliant story and a fan's wet-dream of reappearances, in-references and in-jokes (they even got a reference in to the notorious UNIT dating controversy).  And the ending opened up a whole new vista of possibilities for the next fifty years.

So where now?  Although I'll be sorry to see the end of Matt Smith, who's become one of my favourite Doctors, I'll be fascinated to see what Peter Capaldi makes of the role.  For companions, I love Clara, but I hope when she does go they'll be more adventurous.  Although the string of primary companions we've had since 2005 have all been distinct and interesting characters, they've essentially all (or mostly) been twenty-something contemporary women.  I'd like to see an occasional one who isn't — someone from the past or future, or from another planet.  Maybe an alien.

Similarly, I'd love to see more variation in destinations for the TARDIS, particularly more historical settings that aren't nineteenth or twentieth century (seriously, the 1980s as historical?) and more well-realised planets.  Not just desolate planets with crashed spaceships, or barren rocks that aren't being pulled into black holes (much as I loved those stories) but living, complexly populated planets.  The twenty-first-century equivalents of Skaro, Marinus, Peladon, Tara or Androzani.

Whether or not they take my advice (and why wouldn't they? I keep telling myself till I believe it) I'll keep watching.  Maybe, if medical science keeps the pace it promises to, I'll just about still be around to watch the hundredth anniversary on the care home TV.