True Romance: 'The Name of the Doctor' (Doctor Who) and 'Second Sons' (Game of Thrones) Reviews

Author's Note: As you can probably tell, I wrote my Doctor Who review immediately after seeing the episode (for the third time).  Game of Thrones, on the other hand, has taken me a week to get round to watching, hence the lateness of this review.

Doctor Who Series 7, Part 2, Episode 7: The Name of the Doctor

Oh Stephen.  I know I say this every year but I swear, I'll never doubt you again.  It was only when my brain had stopped playing the word "WHAT" on a loop and I'd drunk a substantial amount at a Eurovision party that I realised what a truly fantastic episode this was.

I'll admit, a large part of this conclusion came from the cessation of my hyperventilating-y thoughts of OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU TAKING MATT SMITH AWAY FROM ME because, rationally, let's look at the facts: a) We know he's in the 50th anniversary special and b) I don't really believe John Hurt is going to take over full-time as Doctor Number Twelve.  There was that mention of the Valeyard early on in the episode that seems like a great big honking clue: for those unaware, the Valeyard was (in Old Who) the Doctor's final regeneration gone all evil and introspective, basically.  Take that coupled with the closing dialogue about Hurt "not acting in the name of the Doctor", factor in the show's propensity for wordplay/riddles/literal language and it seems to me that, for all the talk of the 50th anniversary marking Matt Smith's regeneration, it could be just as much about resisting a regeneration.  For bonus evidence, the BBC released an interview of Tennant and Smith (together at last) in which Smith said that 10 and 11 seemed to get on pretty okay but there was Someone They Weren't Allowed To Talk About who was more bemused/annoyed by the two of them - given that Hurt was announced to be in the anniversary show months ago, I bet this is who they're talking about and he's sort of the Doctor but not.  Because he's the evil Valeyard guy.*

Although then again, I've just thought back to that "Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor" caption and have immediately doubted all of this. I mean, the Doctor lies though, right?  Let's move on before I devolve back into sobbing "please don't take away Matt Smith" again.**

Speaking of sobbing, I did.  I was all tarted up to dash off to the aforementioned Eurovision party the minute it finished and it was a good twenty minutes before I actually left the house because I was completely redoing my eye make-up.  River River River.  That was some pretty fucking glorious River.  Anyone who wants to disagree, let's take this outside, because that's my River - not clingy and dress size-y and smug, but brave and calm and brilliant.  The moment where the Doctor caught her hand and said "You're always here to me" literally made me drop my fork and neglect my delicious takeaway like a hilarious romcom moment.  We've had so much of the Doctor being superior to River, brushing her off, ignoring her etc etc that she was in danger of becoming just a running joke (Moffat thinks wives are annoying, no-one is surprised) - and it looked like that was how it was going for the first half of the episode too - so that whole dialogue ("I thought it would be too painful" "I think I could have coped" "For me") was possibly one of my favourite things this show has ever done.  All we wanted (me and my pal River) was some acknowledgement that she was in some way different to every other companion that heads through those doors, and we got it.  Sorry Amy, but I'm awarding the 'Girl Who Waited' badge to your daughter.  If that was River's final goodbye - and I suspect it was written so that Alex Kingston could or could not come back as the show demanded - it was a bloody good one.  Compliments all round.

Not least to the actors.  At least forty percent of my DON'T LEAVE ME MATT SMITH woe wasn't down to the frankly inexplicable level of attractiveness he manages to achieve on a weekly basis (this week's new Doctor-fetish: blindfolds) but to the fact that, unlike the rest of the show, he just gets better and better and better.  I mentioned a few weeks ago how he's undeniably a different Doctor to the one who shouted at baked beans that we started with; that came to beautiful fruition here with Smith skipping electrically along the spectrum from comedy to tragedy, and nailing it all the way.  He's so good I'm not even going to make a joke about wishing he would nail something else as well ifyouknowwhatImean.  There's not much I can say about his performance that I haven't said before, except that I am so so so looking forward to seeing how 10 and 11 interact, since 10's whole schtick was 'bouncy yuppy' and 11's whole schtick is kind of 'ancient old man fragility with the face of a twelve year old'.  I turn instead to the supporting cast: Vastra, Jenny and Strax once again prove themselves to be as able a TARDIS family as any ragtag bunch of misfits from the RTD era, and bring a substantial amount of human drama to the proceedings (which is impressive, considering that they're two-thirds cold-blooded). I even welled up a little when I thought Jenny was dead (which would have been a cruelly Whedon-esque move) and her "I'm so sorry, I think I've just been murdered" was chilling and heart-breaking in perfect measure.  Similarly, Strax and Vastra's "The heart is a simple thing", "I have not found it to be so"got me right in the feels - which only begs the question: if you can write like this, Moffat (see also above mention of Doctor/River dialogue), then why don't you, like, all the time?  It certainly silenced my inner Moffat-can't-do-characters demons.

And speaking of characters, this leads us, of course, to Clara, who deserves a special paragraph all of her own.  I was very satisfied with the resolution to the Clara mystery: the whole 'Impossible Girl' thing always seemed like a bit of a red herring.  Far more interesting were the moments when she was confirmed to be 'ordinary' - because that's really what companions are for, in the end, is to celebrate the capacity of the ordinary and everyday for heroism. My prediction was something along the lines of "Clara is just a normal girl being copied across space and time and ultimately the evidence will be all there in the TARDIS" and you know what? It kind of was.  Just, y'know, the burnt out shell of the future TARDIS.  But they were in it.  Oh shut up, I'm going to take that one, and there's nothing you can do about it.  The episode also seemed to clear up the hazy Clara-Doctor dynamic somewhat (maybe it was all that River in the air) with him saving her in a desperately parental way.  Hopefully now Jenna Louise Coleman can get her teeth into something with a bit more in the way of defined personality, because she bloody deserves to.

If I had to have a complaint it would be the villains, such as they were.  The Whispermen were very reminiscent of one of my favourite Buffy episodes/villains, the Gentlemen from 'Hush', complete with creepy nursery rhyme - so much so that it strikes me that writers of this show really need to stop presuming that the Atlantic Ocean magically stops the fans from being aware of Joss Whedon.  I felt like they didn't really get much of an outing, being an obvious red herring to deflect marketing attention away from THAT ENDING but maybe they'll pop up again in future with some extra creepy powers?  Let's hope so, it has been a while since we've had a vintage Moffat take-a-standard-fear-make-it-so-you'll-never-sleep-again villain.  The Great Intelligence was ultimately a bit of a letdown, really.  Contrary to my usual opinion about Doctor Who doing over-laboured story arcs (unfavourable, for those in doubt) I sort of felt he hadn't been signposted enough throughout the series, at least not enough for a Big Bad.  Still, ultimately none of it was really about that, was it? The greatest villain on the show, as always, is the Doctor himself.  Oh I am excite, please to make it November soonest.

So I'm calling it: best series finale of the Moffat era.  It didn't quite have the razzle-dazzle/ preposterousness self-regard of Series 6 mid-series finisher A Good Man Goes to War, but it didn't need it: I'm enjoying this quieter, more self-contained mode, and it gives the show a gravitas (if not a dignity) that allows it to strike exactly the right balance between silly and serious.

In conclusion, kids, it's going to be a very long summer.


Game of Thrones Series 3, Episode 7: Second Sons

The obvious centrepiece of this week was the hilarious and tragic Lannister-Stark wedding.  Lannister family events are understandably awkward occasions (all that inbreeding) but this was more so than usual, given that the nuptials were taking place between sensitive hedonist Tyrion and trembling sorority girl Sansa.

I do so enjoy it when the show takes the opportunity to play with its form a bit, especially Cersei and Loras's little moment under the stars.  In a show that excels in putting together unlikely characters and watching the magic, they set up a potential watercooler let-me-show-you-my-hidden-vulnerability moment, only to have Cersei snap "Nobody cares what your father says." Speaking for us all there, Cersei - I still haven't forgiven Loras for not being nearly as good-looking as the books say he is.  Cersei and Margaery's conversation was, similarly, fantasy's equivalent of Sex in the City, or maybe Hollyoaks.  "If you ever call me sister again, I'll have you strangled in your sleep," hisses Cersei at Margaery's perky breasts after the queen-to-be goes a step too far in advancing the Tyrell domestic policy of winning hearts and minds.  Indeed, Margaery was in danger of slipping more than just a nipple this week as Joffrey seems to be not quite so entirely under her spell as we've been led to believe, ignoring his mother's half-hearted attempt at parenting to go and deliver a casual rape threat to the newly wed Sansa Stark-Lannister.  My hatred of Joffrey has reached something like fascination - I'm too saturated with loathing to hate him more so I just wait in a state of something like awe to see what he'll do next.  He's like the Usain Bolt of sadism.  Just when you think he can't top leading Sansa up the aisle in lieu of headless Ned, he offers to come and help her out with her wifely duties later that night, only it's not an offer and I wanted to reach through the TV screen and make him drink his own spinal fluid.

Across the sea, Danaerys is still on a high as she wins a company of mercenaries over to her side (the Second Sons of the episode title).  Another deviation from the books here, with Daario coming in the guise of a character from an 80s-era children's fantasy film rather than the gold-toothed, purple-mustachioed swashbuckler of the books.  Given that Dany clearly has the hots for him (it's amazing what a gift of the severed heads of your enemies will do, I keep telling my dates that but they insist on getting me chocolate) it's probably for the best.  No reaction from Jorah as yet, but given how much I love Iain Glen's petulant little face as he intones "Khaleesi"in manner that is simultaneously bored and longing, I'm looking forward to it.  Quite a lot of nudity in Dany's storyline this week too - not only is there a requisite concubine getting pawed around, we get full on khaleesi-tits-and-arse too.  I don't know what I expected, to be honest - it is Game of Boners, after all - but the nudity count has been surprisingly light in recent weeks and setting that scene in her bath seemed particularly unnecessary.

The third main strand of the episode was probably just there to balance out the genders on the nudity front, to be honest, as Melisandre gets jiggy with Gendry, if your definition of getting jiggy is tying someone up and attaching leaches to their unmentionables.  I know it's mine.  The most interesting aspect of this strand, however, was the conversation between Stannis and Davos in the dungeons, as Stannis attempts awkward make-up sex with his bf (or just says he'll set him free, whatever).  Mainly this is because Stephen Dillane and Liam Cunningham are putting in such fucking good, understated performances.  The way Dillane plays Stannis, he's the guy at the party that there's nothing technically wrong with but no-one wants to hang out with and you just know he really, really wants to be your friend.  The tacit acknowledgment that Davos was right about maybe not murdering innocent boys was a thing of beauty, and Stannis' attempts to make everything ok again were painfully reminiscent of his stilted interactions with his wife and child a few weeks ago.

The episode was bookended by two more odd couples (alas, no Brienne and Jaime this week, though after last week's BE STILL MY BEATING HEART rescue, they deserve a breather). Firstly, Arya and the Hound reach a tentative detente after one little attempted rock-murder, as it transpires he may be her best hope of getting back to her family.  The show seems to be set on presenting Sandor Clegane in more and more of a sympathetic light of late - no complaints, I'm just intrigued as to what exactly do they know because he sort of disappears from the books at some point.  (Not much Littlefinger of late either - after delivering that stonking monologue about chaos, maybe he's gone out on a high? Ah well, the plot requires him back soon, I believe.)  Our other couple was Sam and Gilly, who have a beautiful - if not terribly exciting - equilibrium to their scenes, with Gilly building a fire while Sam thinks about baby names.  One White Walker attack later - heralded by some frankly much scarier crows - and the mysterious dragonglass seems to be coming in handy.  When you get to Westeros, Dany, you could make a packet on that alone.

All in all, an entertaining episode that had an enjoyably gossipy feel to it - lightweight in comparison to recent weeks, though tightly focused nonetheless.  Sadly there is no episode next week, which means I'll have to wait a full fortnight for my next Jon Snow/Brienne and Jaime fix.  It's a hard life.

This Week's Winner: Doctor Who in spades.  I keep just remembering bits and smiling a beatific smile. And then crying.


*The good people on the Guardian comments section seem to think he's not the Valeyard since he's already appeared in Old Who but instead maybe the very first incarnation who wasn't yet "the Doctor" (i.e. Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor but not the 11th regeneration) or the missing Time War Doctor who ended it by killing everyone and therefore acted for "peace" and "sanity" but not "in the name of the Doctor" - which would put an interesting spin on Christopher Ecclestone's tenure as he always seemed to take personal responsibility for the whole shebang but hey ho (actually thinking about it, this makes the most sense).  Either way, we're all agreed that Hurt is only along for the 50th anniversary ride and MATT SMITH IS NOT LEAVING, OK? OK.
**Right, well, I've just read that the Beeb have officially announced that Series 8 will air next year in split-series format with Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman and Stephen Moffat all returning BUT it will mark Moff's last tenure as head writer and possibly contain a mid-series regeneration. So now I just don't know what to feel.  I mean, on the one hand, more Smith/Moffat in the foreseeable future, on the other...all things must pass.  Fuck you, Doctor Who, I'm pretty sure I'm not meant to feel this existentialist about a children's show.

Robin Hood, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Really Bad TV Shows

Warning: contains heavy spoilers. But look at this like this, if you haven't seen the show, you're not going to watch it now. If you have seen the show, you already know what happens and you're definitely not going to watch it again. Also, I'll get back to Doctor Who soon. Promise.

In a state of the boredom/nostalgia/procrastination mash-up that I call Netflix Ennui, I wound up watching a few episodes of the BBC's 2006-2009 Saturday evening action adventure fare, Robin Hood. Or rather, re-watching. Y'see, I was a rather ardent fan of Robin Hood back in the day, until the third and final season when everything took a resounding nosedive from 'so bad it's good' to 'so bad it's oh god get it away my eyes my eyes'. Like, I really hope nobody from HBO ever watched this show, because I'm getting second-hand embarrassment just thinking about it. I was surprised to discover that there were quite a few things I'd forgotten about it, my memory consumed by the reckless shark-jumpitude of the final series. And it strikes me that the show had quite a lot of potential at the beginning, if it weren't for a few, damning things:

Things I Had Forgotten About Robin Hood That Fucked Up an Otherwise Solid Show:

• Robin strolls casually in and out of Nottingham, lounging around the town square and infiltrating the castle, week in, week out, with precisely zero effort to disguise himself. Nary a hood in sight. At one point, he rocks up in the Sheriff's bedchamber after dark for some light flirting and doesn't even tie him up or anything when he leaves. I mean – not like that – oh forget it. The point is, this is marginally plausible only because the Sheriff is clearly an unpredictable psychopath and one suspects he quite likes having Robin Hood around in his anachronistically tight trousers, but still doesn't explain why the eponymous hero made no effort to come up with a getaway plan beyond “Walk out of the castle, maybe wink at someone”.
• The attempts to make the setting 'relevant' and 'modern', despite the slight snag of being England in the 1100s. One of the things I do remember about the show is the clothes, which were a) bafflingly anachronistic (Marion in trousers, Marion's camouflage-print dress, Robin Hood being more Robin Hoodie ohIseewhattheydidthere, Guy of Gisbourne's leather daddy get-up, more on which later) and b) laughably cheap. I recognised jewellery from Primark and Accessorize more times than I could count. There's a kid in one episode who they just didn't seem to be able to find a costume for at all, I swear you can see the zip on his hoodie.
• The clothes were part of a wider problem, though, which was that the first series clearly just had no budget. It was filmed in Hungary for cheaps, which is all fine until you realise that the thing nagging away at you every time they cut to the forest is the awkwardly obvious lack of oak trees, i.e. the one thing that English forests are pretty pro at. It also means that 1100s England is full of clearly Hungarian extras who don't speak English, just nod with a look of polite confusion in their eyes. This reaches its nadir in the second episode when Allan a Dale's brother pitches up with two of his own men who have, we are told, had their tongues cut out. Why the script even called for the ill-fated Tom to have his own bros in the first place, I'm not sure, but the production damn well wasn't going to pay for them to have lines. Out with their tongues, cue baffled Eastern European locals looking uneasily from actor to actor, wondering who they're supposed to be agreeing with.
• The modernisation aspect also manifested itself through the camerawork. Each episode ends with a triumphant black and white freeze frame like an 80s brat pack movie. It's a bold move, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't jar with the decision to film the rest of the show on shaky handycam, with a baffling over-reliance on dramatic zooms when a character is about to saying something profound. It feels slightly like the producers were trying to make it an actual mockumentary, before someone suggested that maybe that was a little too anachronistic, even for this show, and they hastily recut all the footage.

And Some Things It Did Ok:

• Women. Ok, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test by a country mile, seeing as there are only two women in the whole of Nottingham, apparently, and I think they stand in a room together, like, once. Djaq, the Token Girl Outlaw, is pretty boss – all dressing up as her dead brother and doing Advanced Saracen Science and stuff – but I could have done without her horribly mangled love triangle that just sort of faded into a love...duangle in the second series, at the end of which she announces that she's staying in the Holy Land to take advantage of be-cheekboned jailbait Will Scarlett. And Marion is all kinds of smart and self-reliant – they actually make a pretty decent stab at a spy narrative for her, trying to work the system from the inside to protect her father, compromised loyalties, etc etc – of course, if the show had been made by HBO for grown-ups, instead of the BBC for families, it would have been much more sophisticated and also much more naked. C'est la vie. I also remember hating Marion with a passion when I was sixteen; watching now, I'm not entirely sure why. She's not a great actress, sure, but she's not offensively bad – about the same level of charisma vacuum as Robin himself, which fortunately means you can just ignore the romantic leads and get on with the business of the fine supporting cast.
• And I do mean fine. This is something the show did gloriously right – I swear to god, the burgeoning knowledge of my sexuality that was triggered in my youth by Johnny Depp diving off a cliff in Pirates of the Caribbean was completed here by Richard Armitage swaggering around in black leather and guy-liner*, pinning Marion against castle walls** saying things like “Do you not understand? You mean everything to me”, all accompanied by a gaze so smouldering that you could see the stone melting behind her head. Normally when you have a dastardly villain trying to run off with a blushing damsel, you applaud the hero swooping in on a rope to save her. Richard Armitage, on the other hand, would go around casually stabbing peasants and you'd just think, “Oh, well, he probably had a really difficult childhood.” Maybe that was why Marian was such a terrible actress. Could you keep your sang-froid convincingly in the face of all that?
• And it wasn't just Guy either. Long before I was making jokes about Merlin's Knights of the Round Table being a kind of Medieval Boy Band, the Outlaws were hanging around the forest posing for passing paparazzi (“Just a quick woodcut, be a darling”). Robin is ok in a Justin-Bieber-wishes-he-was-more-grunge sort of way but the show kept insisting that Robin was the most bodacious bachelor Sherwood had ever seen by having women throw themselves at him every two seconds, when this was clearly nonsensical because dude, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlett are right there. Actually, Will Scarlett was my favourite before I saw the light glinting off Guy's black leathers, and then his “What is this thing you call a girl, let me turn my head so you can see the way the shadows fall against my cheekbones, no I don't think my eyes can get any more big or green, I didn't realise my bottom lip was trembling” schtick got a bit wearisome. Alan had to become my favourite in the third series because everyone else good had gone and Guy's hair had taken a drastic turn for the worst, but his twinkly-eyed nonsensically-cockney conman routine was really very diverting – besides, he briefly dumps Will for Guy in the second series and starts wearing black so we're very much on the same page for a variety of reasons.

So thinking about it, maybe the best thing the show did was to arrange a buffet of attractive actors. But hey, that's not be sniffed at – there was clearly something that kept us watching through the bad times and the very bad. I'm inclined to pin it on the accidental sexual tension that seemed to emerge between every single character at some point (I'm talking a Sherlock level of possible permutations), but especially the Guy-and-Marion thing which, by the way, isn't really in the script at all but when you cast Richard Armitage, you cast a tsunami of hormones too. That's probably the area of the script that had most potential: a woman torn between her childhood love that she still carries a torch for, an outlaw on the run, any day could be his last, and a dangerous new man, brooding, cruel, but with a fascinating spark of good in him, a desire for redemption that only she holds the key to, complicated by the fact that he could be the only man truly capable of protecting her. Fuck, that sounds like a good show. I think I might write it. Sadly, the Guy/Marian/Robin triangle came to a rather undignified end when Guy ran her through with a sword that was in no way phallic at the end of Series 2.

The thing is though, I wouldn't want it to be any different. The reality is that if the bad things had been fixed, it still wouldn't have been a great show. It just would have been a much, much more boring one.

*This is actually a really good joke as his character's name was Guy of Gisbourne.

**Oh, maybe that's why I hated her.

No Contest: 'Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS' (Doctor Who) and 'Kissed By Fire' (Game of Thrones) Reviews

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