My point is, Two Doctors doesn't do any of this very well. The plot's smartly drawn - no hand of god teaming them up against an apocalyptic power - but it fails on every other level. Aside from the sweet fade from black and white, you get no sense of a different approach between Two and Six. They're separated for most of the story, cutting down on quarrelling time, and bringing back a former Doctor is pointless, really, if you're not going to let them him be the Doctor - 2 is great when he's allowed to be, but reduced to victim status for most of the time (its a curious turnaround from Five Doctors, when it's the younger incarnations who band together to rescue 5). When they are together, it's priceless - but that can only be a sum total of five minutes. 2 has nout to do, and looking for Cold Fusionly undercurrents, all I took away was "how can people still criticise Colin Baker's Doctor, when he holds his own so grandly and well against his former self?". An unfair assessment, as I said 2 wasn't treated well by the script, but the impression remains.
And I did get a proper sense that the two characters were written differently - just count the number of times 2 says the word "Jamie" in the episode. Enough to make me think that LiveJournal might have a point on some issues. 2 as a Gallifreyan toady was an interesting character development; but being a ravening Trial fan, loving the Valeyard as much as any proper incarnation, I found Six's innocent protests that the Timelords would never ever engineer a massacre to protect their secrets completely adorable. I'm getting a great sense of 6's character too - forward planning in a way 5 never bothered with. How many times do companions ask him, both here and in Trial "But how did you know that?", as he reveals a stunning insight and cunning resolution. It's 7 on the way, I tell you; but 6's larger ego means he's always happy to explain.
I'd actually forgotten it was a Sontaran story until a flick through pagefillers refreshed my memory - they're not the dominant image you come away with. Dastari and Chessene are forgettable too - it's Shockeye who holds my attention above any other of the villains. Pity that Ches and Das don't give them any respect - they're playing second fiddle, like the sidelining of the Daleks to Lytton and co. in Ressurrection. A show should never undermine its own bad guys, they're hard enough to take seriously as it is.
Poor Peri. She can't go anywhere without people slathering over her - she even gets jumped on by Jamie, presumably platonically, but I do have my doubts. He certainly makes up for it by the ohsocute kiss at the end. Jamie seemingly hasn't aged a day, and still comes across as adorable as ever. It's a six parter apparently - I watched it edited together into one, and I must say I didn't notice the time pass, assuming it was only four. This puts it one up on Planet of the Spiders automatically.
What I did take away from this episode (aside from the blistering awesomeness of the Sixth Doctor) is the individual setpieces. The Doctor collapsing in the TARDIS (complete with Peri's irresistably sweet "would you like me to get you some celery?"; "I never faint" also amused me greatly), his reaction to meeting Jamie again, Peri's gorgeous reaction to the news that the universe has mere centuries to live. It's a lovely twist on the countdown being in hours, and man does the Sixth Doctor have a way with the poetry when writers give him beautiful lines.
"That is the smell of death, Peri. Ancient must, heavy in the air. Fruit-soft flesh, peeling from white bones. The unholy, unburiable smell of Armageddon. Nothing quite so evocative as one's sense of smell, is there?"
"She can't comprehend. The scale of it all. Eternal blackness. No more sunsets. No more gumblejacks. Never more a butterfly."
"Planets come and go, stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces into other patterns. Other worlds. Nothing can be eternal."
Oh I could go on, and on.
The scene with the wheelchair is now one of my favourites ever - it reminded me of 5 escaping from the cuffs in Androzani. The Doc gets out of imprisonment all the time, so why not give the scene ten minutes of tension instead of brushing it off with the screwdriver? I like it when the Doctor has to think on his heels, take refuge in practicality, instead of standing on the sidelines and talking his way out. Same goes for the wandering around the spaceship vs the computer - yes, pointless to the main plot, but its a great little sequence, with hundreds of tiny challenges to overcome.
Even though 2Androgum creeped me out - I preferred Six playing it for laughs - I did love the image of the two little tramps wandering into the distance. I always like it when Who gets surreal. I'm also amused that somewhere in the timeline, Doctors 3-5 were experiencing a sudden bizzare craving for food, and then absent mindedly returning to what they were doing non the wiser. I loved the image of Ches bending down to the doctor's blood tooo - it may just have been the creepiest scene in the episode.
Which brings me onto episode 6. Why did Oscar have to die? Why?! I had him pegged as cannon fodder from the start, but then he survived, and survived, and survived. He was harmless, completely harmless, and killed by accident - ironic, yes, but still mean.
And the rest of the violence. Now then. Screen violence is something of a personal obsession - I'm fascinated in what factors make scenes tame or nasty, and how much it affects the audience, and what the Brit Board of Film Classification has to say about it. And the BBFC have things to say about knives.
Because when you die in DW, usually you die clean. Daleks, Cybermen, anything else with laser guns - beam of light, you fall over, and that's it. When people get shot with proper guns, they also have the decency to fall down quietly. Proper death agony is quite rightly avoided - we're still in kids TV, although I maintain Miss Evangelista's ghosting is as close as we'll ever get to it.
But a knife. The BBFC don't like it because its a household object - that much closer and copyable. But they're also scarier to watch - because imagining a gunshot is abstract, most of us don't have a comparable experience; but we all know what it is to catch our finger on a knife, the flesh, the blood, the moment before the pain hits. Now imagine that, but bigger, and you have some very graphic detail running through the minds of the kiddies at home. Watching him prowl around Peri and Jamie with a massive shiny blade was terribly unsettling. Stabbing Oscar may just be the most violent piece of violence in the show ever.
Actually injuring the Doctor isn't something that happens all that often too. I'm still not entirely over the gunshot wound in Deadly Assassin - look, blood, actual Gallifreyan blood! They get the intergalactic space ketchup out for Androzani too, and its similarly unnerving. And yet here we go, Dastari threatening to go Mr Blonde on Two with a pocket chainsaw, and Shockeye smashing Six in the leg with a meat cleaver. Even if the watershed prevented the medically accurate fountain of blood at this point, I could still see it in my mind, and I was crunched up with sympathy for the rest of the episode (kudos to Colin Baker for remembering to limp)
And that's not to mention the very violent Sontaran death, complete with green slime and disembodied legs, or all the gross-out moments of savagery, or Two also participating in some death, or thinking too hard about what's in what we eat. And then there's Shockeye. It's calculating, it's direct, and it's actually physically picking someone up and holding them struggling till they're dead. And yes it's different from shooting the Cyberleader, in a desperate passion, or cunningly dispatching Solon from a distance where he can't see his face. I wouldn't go so far to call it out of character, but it is scary. Death follows the Doctor everywhere, but this is murder plain and simple. I'm not sure Shockeye deserves it either - the Doc's dismissal of the Androgums goes so far that at times I'd almost call it racism, which is a very nasty word for TV's cleanest hero to wear. The Doctor has often let calculatingly evil creatures off the hook, so killing Shockeye for doing what he claims is his unchangeable nature seems grossly unfair. I suppose you can call "self defence". That knife is, as we have already noted, very big indeed.
I'd heard that Mary Whitehouse had chased after 80s Doctor Who - at the time I thought "shame", because I like a good bit of violence, and everyone prefers Doctor Who when it gets dark. And individually, these incidents are almost within the bounds of what is decent. But the cumulative effect of all these things makes me think "this really is all a bit too far". It's the opposite of Caves - which is almost as dark and nasty, but in a very subtle and ironic way that would be mostly missed by the kiddies at home (I'm sure some of the things that Jek said were played on by my own twisted imagination, because he couldn't possibly have meant the things I thought he did...!). Here, the nastiness is obvious - it's everywhere, it's garish and grim, and not really all that much fun to sit through.
But maybe in a good way. Disturbing can be good. It's very unusual. I like the way it becomes several different things, I like the practical way the characters move from incident to incident - it feels real. And that's about the highest accolade you can give any sci-fi.
1 comment:
'what's the point of a multi doctor story?'
fanfic orgy potential?
loz x
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