Over the new series of Doctor Who, there's been a habit of generally having a nice, simple, low key story before the big and amazing series finale. Stories like Boom Town or The Lodger have been like the calm before the storm, one last chance to have fun with the characters before the traumatic events of the next week will take hold. And Closing Time fits squarely into that mould, providing something that's a basic comedy with Cybermen, a baby, and the return of Craig from last series' The Lodger. On the whole, I don't mind it. Gareth Roberts' script, whilst not as amazingly funny and heart-warming as The Lodger, still provides some very nice moments such as the Doctor's monologue to Alfie, or the scene where Craig discovers the Doctor in a toy shop, which is excellently played by both Matt Smith and James Corden.
But there's one moment that sticks out for me in this whole piece. Just after the Doctor explains to Craig that aliens attacking when they met again was a coincidence, out of nowhere we get a cameo from Amy and Rory. Amy and Rory left the TARDIS in The God Complex, and it's pretty much stated in this episode that it's been 200 years since the Doctor last saw them. But he sees them again and sees how their life turned out, before he goes off to face the astronaut at the bottom of Lake Silencio. I actually love this moment because of two very big reasons. One is that Matt Smith chooses to underplay the scene, quietly standing back as we look from afar at his two old friends. It gives the scene a sense of quiet dignity, as if the Doctor is recognising all the time that they spent together and he's recognising that they need to stay apart. Similarly, the story chooses to underplay the moment as well. Aside from the fact that the Doctor doesn't interact with Amy and Rory, he also never refers to the moment throughout the rest of the story. It reinforces the quiet dignity of the moment, representing that the Doctor has recognised that he needed to move on and that he did so, even if for a fleeting moment he was attracted towards them again.
That sense of moving on is also what drives the Doctor to the TARDIS at the end of the episode. He's a man who's ready to face his fate, as we'll find out in The Wedding of River Song.
I'm Mitch. For those of you that don't know me, check out my not so subtle assault on the phantom menace (its not worthy of capital letters) from around 18 months ago. Anyway, tonight I have a post for you on one of my personal favorite episodes. Whilst what I wrote in the end isn't where I was going to go, it's a crucial piece social commentary. Without further ado, I present The God Complex.
Humanity is fundamentally flawed (yes it’s going to be one
of those articles) and nothing informs us of this more than science fiction.
The God Complex to me is not necessarily my favourite episode, nor the most
technically brilliant or interesting. What it is however is the most important
episode of Doctor Who as it directly addresses what is the most elementary issue
we face both individually and as a species. Weakness at its base. What is this
weakness? What is its cause? Let’s investigate.
We begin with the dogmatic undertones in the establishing
flashback. Swirling into the prison of a stereotypical 80s hotel which in its
ambiguity could easily be conceived to be hell or something very close.
Immediately we are positioned in the centre of the salient dichotomy of fear
vs. belief and salvation. Fear is positioned front and centre as the power that
overcomes us all. When faced with situations that grasp at the fringe of our
sanity we will fall back on what makes us strong.
This is where belief and faith enter the picture. When fear
is exploited everyone relies on something. Gibbis shows that our entire
strength and identity can be drawn from what we are taught as well as what we
see. When the only thing you know is that you are going to be invaded and enslaved,
you rely on that, it is your salvation. The motif of the spiral staircase
serves that in our hour of debilitating need we look up and climb towards that
which lies above.
Here we begin to see the beast implanting itself at the top
of the stairs and as everyone utters “Praise him” (the verbal equivalent to the
searing on a steak) we surrender wholly. And this is the true downfall of man,
the surrender and reliance. When the
inhabitants are forced into their faith entirely, they are met with death. This
portrays the danger of unlimited reliance and belief that someone/thing will
help; which we all experience.
Faith does bolster us, it can pull together the many piece
of an otherwise bewildering existence. However when you let it consume you,
when you surrender, it will drive you to destruction.
All this is summed up by Eleven with “It’s time to stop
waiting”, recognising that it is necessary to stand up on your own legs.
Nothing, ultimately is eternal or infallible. Eventually, even gods die.
In writing this I was reminded of many other fascinating talking
points and reason I love The God Complex (I think there is a certain serenity
in the futility the episode presents) however first and foremost this is the
message that needs to be delivered. I say this at time when religious zealotry
(in both traditional and contemporary forms) continues to destroy lives and the
world in which we live. It’s a simple tenet, that when we use our faith to support
and guide and recognise the flaws we move away from such extremes and move away
from weakness.
To lighten the mood after tonight’s article I’ll leave you all
with a question that I think deserves a little more though than you may have
given it. What’s behind door 11?
I mentioned yesterday about how thrilling I found it to be surprised by the plot of a Doctor Who episode. Equally thrilling, in my opinion, is the ability to be surprised by the quality of a Doctor Who episode. When I sat down to watch The Girl Who Waited, for instance, way back on a Sunday morning in 2011, I wasn't expecting too much. It was being billed as just another episode, nothing particularly special. After all, it was being written by Tom MacRae, who had previously delivered the underwhelming Cyberman two part story in Tennant's first series, and it was being directed by Nick Hurran, a newcomer to the worlds of Doctor Who so expectations were not particularly high. What we ended up getting, however, was something very special indeed.
At its heart, The Girl Who Waited has a basic concept. The Doctor makes a small collection of errors in the first half of the story, and tries to rewrite them whilst attempting to overlook the consequences. The error in question is that Amy has been left to age for 36 years on an alien planet where she has nobody else for company and she is being forced to fight for her life every single day of her existence. This ends up leaving her deeply cynical, with a strong hatred for the Doctor as he has managed to completely ruin her life. And the story structures itself around the four main characters, with the older Amy being angry at what has happened and steadfast in how she wants to leave as she is, content with the fact that her past is still intact whilst Rory tries to mediate her reaction to events and search for the solution where everybody can be content. In order to pull the older Amy on side, he shows her a window into the younger Amy's life, still bright and full of hope, with the two Amy Ponds bonding over their mutual love of Rory. It's this desire to see that the younger Amy should be allowed to grow old with Rory that drives the three of them to the decision to opt for the solution where the younger Amy is allowed to be with Rory, whilst the older Amy goes off travelling on her own.
And then it all comes crashing down with the fourth element, hidden away in the background of the story. The Doctor has known all along that the hope of having two Amy's would be impossible and so he lies to the older Amy, before beginning the process of abandoning her once the younger Amy is aboard the TARDIS. It's a dark moment for the Doctor, one of the clearest examples of him sacrificing one life so that someone else might live. There's also hints of his decision being made up because he refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the older Amy, seeing her as just a mistake that he needs to rewrite and not as a human being in her own right. It's perhaps the darkest that this Doctor has ever gone, made only darker by his next moment.
"This isn't fair. You're turning me into you".
Rory Williams is a character that has always been defined as someone who isn't the Doctor. As far back as The Eleventh Hour, he was the man who was questioning the Doctor's actions whilst everyone blindly went along with his plan. As a companion he's been presented as a man who seeks for a happy and peaceful ending. Whilst Amy goes off and fights her way out of trouble, he'll talk and search for the best possible solution. In The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, he was the one with whom the Ganger Jennifer found an ally in, someone who would advocate for her life and freedom. Rory is, in short, the lightest character aboard the TARDIS. And the Doctor makes him choose between the older Amy and the younger Amy. As Rory says, "You're turning me into you". So Rory does what the Doctor didn't do. He sits down and has a conversation with the older Amy. He shares the weight of the decision between the two of them, so that she has a say in what happens. And they decide to leave the older Amy behind, writing her out of history altogether. A heartbreaking end. An inevitable end, but heartbreaking nonetheless.
And that's what makes me think of this story as something perfect. It's a complex and tragic character drama as we're forced to come face to face with, not so much the dangers of travelling with the Doctor, as the darker and more malevolent side of the Doctor. It's looking at the characters of Amy and Rory as fundamentally good people who are sometimes placed in impossible situations. And there's an argument to be made that this episode lays the foundation for the entirety of the Capaldi era. But that, as they say, is another story.
Oh, and whilst I finish this entry, I should make a quick mention that I'm taking tomorrow off. An old friend requested that I relinquish this blog so that he could cover one of his favourite stories, and I'm more than happy to oblige. So, just for one brief moment, I'm allowed to relax as I eagerly await something wonderful tomorrow with The God Complex.
One Saturday evening in 2011, I decided that I was fed up. After five years of reading spoilers for Doctor Who episodes before I would have a chance to watch them myself; five years of having every little surprise ruined for me before I got a chance to watch it, I decided to take a stand. So instead of reading a synopsis of Night Terrors the next morning, I decided to go with the slightly less than legal method of streaming it. This all meant that Night Terrors was the first Doctor Who episode that I went into relatively unspoiled in a very long time*.
Now, whilst Night Terrors may not be the strongest episode in the world, it'll always be an episode that I'll look upon fondly because I was allowed to be surprised by it. Moments like Purcell and Amy turning into Peg Dolls, as well as the revelation of George as an alien all felt like gob-smacking moments, just because I found them to be genuine surprises. And being able to be surprised for those moments helped the overall tone of the story - taking the peg doll transformation as an example, I was far more struck by the overall creepiness of the stop motion transformation on first viewing than on my most recent viewing a couple of hours ago where I knew that it was just another quirk of the episode.
But that's sometimes the magic of watching a Doctor Who episode for the first time. Unlike almost any other programme on television, you're allowed to try and figure out what sort of story it's going to be. It could be a creepy story about transforming dolls hidden as a simple tale about a young boy afraid of monsters. It could be a beautiful piece about a woman realising who she really is beneath an adventure where you punch Hitler. Or, as we'll look at tomorrow, it could be something truly heartbreaking masquerading as just another story.
*Just putting a small footnote to say that I also watched A Christmas Carol without reading an episode synopsis beforehand, but I'm not going to count it because I seem to recall reading some fairly big spoilers regarding the end of the episode and Abigail's fate a couple of days before I watched it, which slightly damped that supposedly spoiler-free experience for me.
I think that I like Let's Kill Hitler. It's a very funny episode, filled with fantastic one liners (I'm still giggling at "You will feel a slight tingling sensation, then death") and it provides an excellent continuation to the saga of River Song. There's something incredibly satisfying about seeing the Doctor put in the situation where he is ahead of River, a stark contrast to their earlier adventures (except for the brief moment at the start of The Impossible Astronaut where they compare diaries, which was also similarly satisfying). The direction from first time director Richard Senior (Let's Kill Hitler was the first television episode that Senior had ever directed) is also surprisingly strong for a first time, with some nice touches that stand this episode out (the moment where the Mels throws the TARDIS model in the air, only for it to transition into the real TARDIS is quite visually impressive). The only problem with this episode, though, is that it lacks resolution.
The previous episode, A Good Man Goes to War, ended with the dual revelations that Amy and Rory's baby daughter had been kidnapped by some evil collection of people as well as River Song revealing that she was in fact that baby, i.e. she is Amy and Rory's daughter. And coming into Let's Kill Hitler, we see that the Doctor has made no headway into finding young River, but all of that gets thrown out of the window when it turns out young River was secretly the school friend of Amy and Rory, and the story becomes about the young version of River trying to kill the Doctor. Which, I suppose, acts as a bit of a resolution to those two plot lines. We find out that the young version of River grew up safely and we see that she got to spend some valuable time with her parents throughout her life. The only problem, however, is that we don't really spend enough time on that particular part of the story. It's all there, lurking away in the undercurrents of the adventure, but there's no moment of stillness for the four characters to sit and talk about what's happened to them. It turns what could have been a great series return, into something that's easy to like, but begins to fall apart when you try to examine it more closely.
But still, what other episode of Doctor Who could nonchalantly put Hitler in a cupboard and then forget about him for the rest of the episode?
A Good Man Goes to War is the epitome of Steven Moffat's experiment for Series 6, which he ended up partially continuing in Series 7, before abandoning altogether after that. His idea was that a way to structure Doctor Who would be to stagger it throughout the year, with the first half of the series being broadcast in the UK Spring, and the second half in the UK Autumn. Amongst the many reasons that he put forward for this being a worthwhile venture, he stated that this would provide the opportunity for Doctor Who to have two big series openers, and two big series finales, all within the one year. Hence why I refer to this section of Moffat's tenure as the BIG section - there's a clear want to make a lot of Doctor Who episodes feel massive.
And this is mainly achieved in A Good Man Goes to War, where the episode feels appropriately epic. I love the notion that the Doctor is able to win a battle with no blood shed at all (not entirely true, of course, as there's a bit of friendly fire between the Church and the Headless Monks). I also think that the final battle, where it's revealed that the Doctor has managed to lead everyone into a trap, is actually quite well directed, with the camera never remaining entirely fixed and always dashing between two or three settings, giving the impression of chaos in clear contrast to the controlled attack from the Doctor earlier in the episode. There is, at the end of the day, a lot to really enjoy in this episode, but the problem is that it doesn't quite work as a series finale; it's just too Big.
I can't help but feel that the story doesn't give appropriate time to the characters, to how they cope with these big moments. There's a few moments at the end of the story where the Doctor goes and wraps everything up whilst still leaving things open to be covered in the Autumn half of the series, but other than that it all feels like the story just lacks enough of those moments to give a well-rounded episode. And that's kind of my problem with A Good Man Goes to War. As a series finale, it succeeds massively, being appropriately epic and exciting. But as episode 7 of Series 6, it doesn't quite work, and just needs a bit more space to breathe.
I can't remember whether it was an interview with Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat (I'm slightly inclined towards thinking that it might have been Moffat talking about the work of Davies), but one of the writers was talking about the structure of two part episodes in the news series. The method that they have both come around to using is kind of interesting: to remove any decay in having a two part story drag for so long by making the second episode feel completely different to the first. You can see this in a variety of two part stories throughout the revived series: a story like Army of Ghosts/Doomsday has a quiet opening half where the focus is on learning about the situation with the second half is more focussed on action and character development for the main cast. This approach of having two distinct halves can also be found in The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. The only problem is that they're almost too distinct.
The first half leads to a fairly interesting concept: having duplicates of yourself (Gangers) that aren't evil clones, but are instead exactly like you in every way, shape and form, and it promises to look at the fallout from dealing with this development in the plot. Our point of focus character is Jennifer's Ganger, who is trying to come to terms with her life and advocates for acceptance within society. The only problem is that, after one of the Gangers is killed in the heat of the moment, Jennifer suddenly gains a new found blood-lust and turns into a psychopathic leader with no redeemable traits. In the second half, we see her take advantage of Rory, lead her fellow Gangers into situations that they begin to feel a bit uncomfortable in, and in a moment of hypocrisy, kill a Ganger of herself in order to prove a point. And to be honest, I actually wouldn't mind about this characterisation, it's just that it's so at odds with what we saw in the first half that I can't honestly believe that they are the same character. It makes what could otherwise be an interesting story into something that just leaves the viewer feeling a little bit uneasy about the rapid change in tone.
And, as I say, there are plenty of things that I can like about this episode. I honestly love the fact that the Doctor's Ganger duplicate is never even once thought of as an evil twin, and instead is just used to expose the audience's hypocrisy about whether to trust the Gangers or not. I also like the fact that the director makes the clear decision to tend to shoot the Doctor whilst hiding his lower half, hiding whether he's a Ganger or not and further showing to the audience that it really doesn't make a difference which is which. And, aside from the characterisation of Jennifer, I feel that the rest of the story is still similar enough to The Rebel Flesh that they could conceivably be continuations of each other. It's just that it doesn't end up quite working as a full two part story for me, which is a bit of a shame.
