I apologise for the title of this blog.
So. Doctor Who, eh? Last time I wrote something about Stephen Moffat creations being marmite entities but I eat my words (pun intended a little): if you hated that, we're done here. Okay, my one criticism (and Your Milage May Vary on this) is that maybe, maybe it was a little convoluted for the casual viewer. I did have much explaining to do to my mother and sister after the event and that was just to clarify the small handful of things that were certain. Personally, I followed it fine by assuming the persona of my alter-ego, the Shushing Nazi, so as not to miss a single line. The thing is with Moffat, you can't. It's one of his greatest strengths and hinderances – every single line holds some significance, either as a gag that shows how clever and funny he is (and will probably get echoed back in a serious emotional form at some point) and you won't want to miss it, or as a clue, in which case if you do miss it, you're screwed and good luck following anything for the rest of the series, let alone episode. And maybe there were a few too many clues. Maybe I'm struggling a little to keep a handle on every single question that was raised during the course of the forty-five minutes. But screw it. Because that was some of the best kids' TV I've ever seen. And I watch a lot.
It seems like the buzzword for this series is “scale”. Or “scope”. Everything is now bigger, grander, cinematic and sweeping, and it works. Ambition is a great thing for a show to have but it leaves the possibility of humiliating failure. RTD suffered from chronic Fisherman's Wife syndrome. For those of you not familiar with the story, a fisherman catches a fish who grants him a wish if he sets him free. The fisherman does so and wishes that the family shack was a sweet little cottage. Off he goes to the wife who, of course, demands to know why he didn't ask for a nice big town house. The man goes back to the fish. The fish gives him a town house. Then the wife wants a mansion. The fish gives them a mansion. Then the wife wants a palace. The fish gives them a palace. Are you starting to see a pattern? The point is, eventually the wife wishes something so stupidly huge (I think in one version she wishes to be Almighty God Him/Herself) and the fish goes, “fuck this shit, man” and sticks them back in the hovel.
Anyway, RTD was kind of like that fisherman's wife, never quite happy with the level of momentousness that the threat/companion/David Tennant's hair was at, so he always tried to go for one better and as a result the show nearly broke down under its own weight – Daleks and Cybermen? Bringing back all the cast members since the Reboot? Two David Tennants? Etcetera. And part of the reason it didn't work was because the show essentially stayed the same, it just told you it was harder/smarter/faster/stronger etc with OMG WORLD THREATENED LIKE NEVER BEFORE, WHATEVER SHALL WE DOOOOO? And then giving you some hugging, some rubber-suited aliens and some running along corridors. Moffat, I think, understands that if you want to up the scale of your show, the whole thing has to rise to the occasion. Pull out all the stops. You can be cynical all you want about the purpose of an American episode being to sell it to American markets but the cinematography was breathtaking. The art direction of the last series and that to come (if the trailers are anything to go by) was and will be stunning. Now, I'm a sucker for anything gothic and pretty so even clunky episodes like The Beast Below were made for me by the clever visual riffs on 'idyllic' 1950s Britain gone slightly sinister, mixed with all the red velvet/white mask fairytale imagery of Liz X and her court. Somebody give that art direction team a BAFTA or something. And The Impossible Astronaut didn't just look beautiful, sweeping from that glorious Utah sky and that golden lakeside to the gratifying visual shorthands for power of flag, eagle, rug in the Oval Office to the nightmare warrens underneath the cold, labyrinthine-wire-infested warehouse space of the NASA base, but it was beautifully scripted, acted and directed too.
Moffat was at his self-satisfied best with River's innuendos (that “screamer” line is going down in history but let's not forget the Doctor's opening line from under the skirts of a smirking seventeenth century paintress, “You know, this isn't nearly as bad as it looks”) and Amy and co's lightning banter (“Stalker” “Flirt”, “Hippy” “Archeologist”) and, of course, more twists and turns than the Amalfi Coast. And the next time someone says Moffat can't write/doesn't care about emotion/character development, I'm going to send them straight to that River Song monologue. It's a very interesting thing we've got here – usually we learn to love a character over the course of a few series and then the actor wants to leave/the execs make a decision/the writers need a big story and the character is killed off. Often a character death is quite rooted in the real world, and because nothing was leading up to it, it feels cheap and arbitrary. Not always but often (*cough*mayWashhauntyourdreamsJossWheedon*cough*). Here we have a character's death shown us and we go “oh ok” and feel a bit sad because she was kind of cool and a bit happy because she gets a nice afterlife and don't think about it much, just like with any guest character. But then the character comes back and she doesn't know what we know and we learn about her and how much she loves life and how she loves people we love and then we start to understand what exactly it means for her to die and how much we mourn her, both pro-and retroactively (wibbly wobbly, timey wimey). And for River, dying isn't even the worst bit.
Anyway, Moffat's really settled into writing for these four characters now, as have the actors playing them, and all are able to exhibit a little more boldness, a little more sparkle, now we have established canon to play around with. I particularly liked that the whole Amy/Rory will-she-won't-she thing has been definitively wrapped up with a yes-she-will-and-she-has and we can enjoy a bit of flirting between Doctor and Companion (as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, amen) and Rory is now able to have a full, proper personality, rather than simply being not-the-Doctor. Rory is snarky. Rory is every time you watch a horror movie and you ask “Why don't people ever run away from the room where the scary noise is coming from?” personified. Rory is you, every time the Doctor says “I'll explain later” and you sing Amy Winehouse's timeless lyric, “What kind of fuckery is this?” Although that could just be me.
Rory is also now also on equal terms with Amy, meaning that the show has also shown us a couple with a relationship in crisis that has been saved through mutual appreciation and hard work. Well done, show. But this is only a small part of another astonishing trick Moffat pulled in opening ten minutes: he gave the secondary characters power over the Doctor. It feels sick and wrong, but it's there, and we are faced with an omniscient hero no longer omniscient and I loved loved loved everyone's reactions to it. I loved the way Amy threw a hissy fit and refused to accept she was no longer in a world where her fairytale Raggedy Doctor could come and save her. I loved the way Rory grew a pair and dealt with Amy's fragility while not losing sight of what needed to be done. I really loved the way River was outwardly The Sensible One and The Grown-Up One parroting the obligatory 'fixed points in time' shpiel and inwardly scheming like the fox she is to get her Doctor back in one piece. And most of all, I loved the way the Doctor sat in the middle of it all, unhappy and moody one minute, then breezy and pragmatic the next but all the time that extra bit capricious and eccentric just to make it all a little harder for them so he could find out what in the name of the Time Lord was going on. In the current situation, each of these character's actions is now important, each one of them has the potential to influence the way things turn out. It's the complete opposite of River's comment that the Doctor's friends do “as we're told”. The novelty of it is exciting and kind of charming, but I hope it's temporary – it doesn't need to continue like this for its repercussions to be felt in future 'normal' Doctor Who dynamics and scenarios (assuming our motley crew get out of this one unscathed).
I'll turn briefly (well, I'll try) to the actors now. I still can't quite get my head around Karen Gillan's performance and Amy is currently my least favourite of the four for that reason only. (NB Least favourite also means I still like her, I just love the others.) For me, the overriding mystery of Doctor Who is whether she can act or not: moments of excellence followed by moments of weird, stilted...not-anythingness. It could just be that she's great at the stuff that involves being chippy and feisty and smart-mouthed and not so good at the deeper stuff: great banter this episode, not so convinced by her Doctor-grief. A friend of mine put it quite nicely, saying that Gillan might well fail in other roles but she's perfect for Amy. I can kind of see that, except that in Amy we have quite a psychologically complex character, one who was actually very screwed up by her encounters with the Doctor as a child and is only just beginning to heal. Gillan has talked in interviews about how Amy's confidence is just a front but I don't really get this from her performance – maybe she's just no good at playing the levels. When she's being brash, she's brash, when she wants to be vulnerable, she looks down and mutters tersely. I will say that I enjoyed Amy much more in today's episode than I ever have before, mainly because she seemed to have calmed down and started listening to other people, going from 'bolshy' to just 'headstrong'; evidence of the healing I was talking about, but evidence I'm more inclined to say credits the writing than the acting. Ultimately, I like to think of Amy as part of the cinematography – she's beautiful and helps to gives the show its current unique flavour, but she's not the deepest thing about it.
Arthur Darvill's Rory has already been complimented here today so I'll just say that I admire the way he doesn't mind being the actor who isn't Matt Smith. This is better than it sounds. What I mean by this is that he never tries to make his part bigger than it is, never mugs or opts for the easy Loser Boyfriend role favoured in the past by both RTD and Moffat but brings in a comic, understated, recognisable portrait of a grumpy bugger who likes a quiet life married to an energetic, thrill-seeking woman. Four for you Arthur Darvill, you go, Arthur Darvill!
River Song. I fear I may gush now. I understand that River Song is dividing opinion. I understand that many people dislike the way she shows up out of nowhere, talks technobabble at high speed, acts superior and flirts with anything that moves (which does not at all sound like any other much-loved character on the show, not at all, and definitely not the one whose name is in the title) but I think she is awesome and I hope she sticks around because things are a million times more fun when River's around. The Doctor knows it and you should know it too. Alex Kingston plays the part with such evident relish that it's surely impossible not to enjoy her performance. In many ways, River Song embodies the kind of female character I usually hate: cool name, mysterious past, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better attitude, impossibly sexually confidant. Too perfect. Matt Smith out and out said somewhere that Moffat is basically enacting a fantasy with River. So why do I love her? Because I do. No – because she's older. That's my theory anyway: Alex Kingston's age gives that little edge. She looks like a woman (a very attractive woman, let us be in no doubt about that) who has had time to become all those things I usually hate. She's earned the right to have a cool name and a mysterious past and a cleverer-than-thou attitude and it's heavily implied that she suffered and lived in order to become what she is. Imagine, for a moment, a woman in her early twenties, beautiful, slender and dressed in form-fitting army gear, turning up out of the blue and flying the TARDIS while shooting daleks and sexily blowing the smoke off her pistol. Ugh, what an obnoxious bitch. What's she doing here? She's worse than Jenny, the Doctor's Hopefully Never To Be Seen Again Daughter. Yikes. No, Alex Kingston/River Song – you rock. If I am half as badass when I am in my forties, I will be a happy woman. (And if you don't get it on with the Doctor sometime soon, I will pitch a strop the likes of which Amy can only dream of.)
And finally, the Doctor. Matt Smith is a very good actor. We know this already. We've seen him in things. But oh em literal gee, what a performance. Come on now, that was good. That was really very good. For the first ten minutes, I was sat there wondering what exactly I was seeing. “I guess he's just settled into the role,” I thought to myself (for the Shushing Nazi must observe the terms of her own demands), “but he's...really settled into the role.” He was sort of wiser and calmer and tireder, even when he was being manic. And then he said he was 1106. And then he died. And then he came back and he was 909 and he was younger. Even for the Doctor, an ancient being who has witnessed several lifetimes of despair and misery, he was younger and more immature and less tolerant and kindly and amused and yet exactly the same old Doctor we know and love and my mind was blown. To pitch it exactly right both times for both incarnations – kudos to you, Mr Smith. But really, as I've said many times, the best thing about Matt Smith is something entirely undefinable. Whatever it is that you need to convince audiences that a gangly twenty-six-year-old with indie hair and a smile like a Wallace and Gromit character is an infinitely wise, ancient creature who has witnessed glorious and terrible things and travelled to the ends of the galaxy and back, he's got it. I guess you do or you don't.
So all in all, an entirely satisfactory start to the new season, and by satisfactory, I mean bloody great. Too many questions and not enough answers to be a classic episode but the strongest series opener they've had since the reboot. Gorgeous, frustrating, scary, sexy, dark and poignant in equal measures, my Saturday nights for the next six weeks are booked up. It'll be me, the Doctor and a bottle of corner-shop plonk. Bliss.
Now comes the nerdy part. For my own edification, I decided to re-watch pretty much immediately after the episode aired, this time with the subtitles on because, like I said, gotta catch every single word. And here's some theorising and things that came up on a second viewing:
All sorts of clever things going on at the start. He said "I thought I'd never get done saving you" in the past tense (as I'd suspected but wasn't sure) so he definitely knew he was going to die. Also River implies that the numbers on the envelopes were in order of how much he trusts those people, hence himself being number 1. She had number 2, so 200yearsinthefutureDoctor trusts River more than Amy/Rory, in stark contrast to presentdayDoctor who refuses to trust River but trusts Amy (ref. scene in the TARDIS, custard with fish fingers, etc).
The Silent (as the credits call the monster) says to Amy "You must tell the Doctor what he must know and what he must never know." And Amy says "How do you know about that?" And then he just says "Tell him". So Amy's “that” could mean either the Doctor's impending doom or her pregnancy. Both are implied but the question is, which is the thing he must know and which is the thing he must not know? Leading onto...
...which is Amy trying to tell the Doctor? She leaves the bathroom saying she needs to tell him something but then says “I don't know why I said that”. At first I thought it was implying that the Silent is forcing her (presumably through some kind of mind manipulation) to tell him something and she's resisting in some kind of Battle of Wills but I think it's actually simpler than that. The whole Silence schtick is that you forget them when not looking at them (nice variation on the Don't Blink riff there and I'll be sad if isn't referenced in the next episode as Moffat is usually so good at being smug and self-referential) so Amy really doesn't know why she's gripped with the desire to tell the Doctor...something. BUT WHAT? Is she really trying to tell him about her pregnancy all that time? Or is it a last minute switch for The Whole Death Thing?
And why is Amy feeling sick? Could be the pregnancy but probably not because River does a similar queasy thing after her own encounter with the Silence – Silence Sickness? Unless River's pregnant too, of course...
River/Doctor timelines. I am confused. We've seen River time travelling of her own volition (acquiring the vortex manipulator with some well-executed blackmail last series), turning up at the oldest cliff face in the universe, in Roman Britain and now present day Utah amongst others, leading me to believe her and the Doctor's timelines were a big old tangly ball of timey wimey stuff with shared experiences coinciding at random moments for both of them, hence the twin diaries we saw in The Impossible Astronaut. But now we're being told that it's a straight up Benjamin Button scenario and their timelines are parallel and oppositional – hence the first time she meets him, she doesn't know him, and the first time he meets her, he doesn't know her. Or are the two actually compatible? I may need a diagram. (Also, this messes up her reaction to meeting TennantDoctor, right? Because she expected him to recognise her, but as far as we know, she only met the 10th Doctor once and could tell he was younger than 'her doctor', so therefore should have known he'd never met her before. Oh, my head.)
Hold up, I've just done some scribbling with pen and paper and it does seem like River's personal timeline is broadly running opposite to the Doctor's personal timeline. BUT it can't be a straightforward case of 'meeting in the middle', because we haven't seen all sorts of stuff that we know goes on in between, like the Doctor and River's last 'real' date before she dies, the one in which he gives her his screwdriver to 'save' her to the computer in the Library and in which (it is heavily implied) he knows her very well (they go to the Singing Towers of Sci-Fi Name Here and he gets emo, apparently). So not Crash of the Byzantium/Weeping Angels, then. Also, in order for this to be the case, she would have to be travelling steadily backwards through general time, which sort of seems impossible. So the whole 'travelling in different directions' thing must be a generalisation, unless there's all sorts of cool Doctor/River stuff we haven't been shown. Which would be sad.
The makeshift TARDIS from The Lodger! In the tunnels! And the tunnels are “centuries old” apparently and running under the surface of the entire planet (love how River's little gizmo is essentially an Exposition Device, while the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is more a Plot Resolving Gadget – what a team). Hmmm. This definitely ties in with the hints in the 'Next Time' trailer that The Silence aren't new to earth but have always been here, maybe right from the beginning, we just keep forgetting their existence. Brrr. It would also, perhaps, retroactively explain what the hell was going on in The Lodger anyway (which I'll now have to re-watch, obviously) because that was never really resolved. The Silence were living upstairs to James Corden?
Back to the Important Thing that Amy wanted to divulge – later on she has a line that there's something she wanted to tell him “but stuff always gets in the way”. Then she doubles over in pain and says to the Doctor “there's something important I need to tell you”. Could quite plausibly all be the pregnancy, right? a) “stuff gets in the way” and she can't find the right moment to tell him something as important as that. Simple enough. b) She doesn't realise she's in pain because of the Silence (because she doesn't remember them/hasn't seen River doing the same thing) and thinks the pregnancy is causing it, hence her urgent need to tell the Doctor about the pregnancy and the (melo)dramatic moment at which she reveals it – she thinks she or the baby might need help.
...then again, her big significant “It has to be now” suggests that there's some pressing external reason why he needs to know at That Precise Moment. And that suggests that she's trying to tell him about his Impending Doom, because the astronaut is coming and she wants them to try and kill it to prevent the future from happening. So back to Square One. Damn you, Moffat.
And we're left on the twin cliffhangers of whether Rory is dead and whether Amy has shot a little girl. Well, clearly Rory isn't dead because he's in the rest of series and clearly Amy has shot but not killed the little girl. Unless she's already dead, which is my bet – hence being able to move in a full size space suit and contact the President wherever he goes. Plus the Next Time trailer showed Amy looking at writing on the wall of a room full of institutional looking beds that said “Leave me alone”, which sounds very child-like to me (more echoes of Moffat Past here with a bit of an Empty Child buzz to it). How about the little girl as some kind of pet for the Silence, kept in the room with all the beds? Or their envoy to the human race? Or even a hologram/their creation in some other way? She's standing shoulder to shoulder with two of them in the trailer and having them be on the same side might be a plausible Moffat twist.
Plus, what's with the Impossible Planet-esque scribbling on the faces? My bet is it's something to do with each time they see a Silent – either they are marking themselves so they don't forget or the Silent do it to them and, like the Silence themselves, you can't see it once you've forgotten.
And finally, the most pressing questions of all: what is with the Doctor's Beard of Sorrow, why is River Song in an evening gown, and how the hell does she manage to look so fierce?
Only time (or breaking into the BBC to steal the press tapes of the next episode) will tell.
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