6.7 A Good Man Goes to War

I guess that’s no Valeyard then.

Let’s be honest: I think the best bit, the bit that excited me most was the moment three words popped up on the screen.

"Let’s Kill Hitler"

What a fantastic title. Instantly intriguing, catchy, and already a favourite. It makes me grin with Pegg’n’Frostish glee every time I think of it.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the episode, but I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. Possibly because I’m not into this whole hanging mystery thing – I watched Lost for its surrealism, and didn’t care to mull over hints at all. And so, yet again, we get an episode which constantly intrigues but never quite gets anywhere. While the juggling of information is a valid mode of drama, there should be a good reason for it. Homer starts the Odyssey not with Odysseus, but with his family wondering where he is. Tarantino sustains the paranoia and chaos of the strangers in Reservoir Dogs by giving us snippets of backstory only when we absolutely need them – most of the time, we know only what they can surmise from conversation. What’s strung out over the past two years is a series of episodes which feel unfinished, and plots that resolve themselves before they’ve actually started. I'm not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, smart, and still brilliant to use time travel like that. On the other...is this what is dampening my engagement? Once the puzzle is together, doubtless both seasons will earn a rewatch.

One of the things I loved most about this episode was it’s sense of scope. That’s scope, not scale. All the modern Who finales have suffered from a desperate need to be big, and important. But Good Man was wide. The Gamma Forests have a writing system, a cultural/ritual practice related to birth, and a linguistic quirk. They don’t have the word “pond” – “river” is their nearest approximation. As a student of linguistics and a collector of useless languages, that’s the type of thing that happens all the time, the type of thing that makes them a joy to learn. A later comment on a similar note – the word “Doctor” as a healer and wise man takes its origin from the Doctor himself. I can almost buy that – Gallifrey shares a lot of its culture with Greece (or presumably the other way around), and Greece with Rome, and it is from Latin that we get the word “doctus”, “learned”. We have a poem, presumably old and traditional. Two proverbs:

Demons Run... When a good man goes to war.

Anger is always the shortest way to death

This is what makes a world real – its proverbs, its imperfections, its knowledge. And for once it didn’t all feel invented for a purpose, much is just in the background. That’s what makes Middle Earth the indisputible greatest fantasy world of all time. Tolkien created the world first as a linguistic exercise, and wrote the stories as an afterthought. I’d love to start collecting proverbs from sci fi universes

The monks could have filled an episode - here they merely augment it. You could argue that they are wasted, but to be honest, they’d only have been chasing people down corridors in one of the insignificant, mid-season episodes. Here, their cameo adds colour, thought, and depth to the universe. Unless, of course, they’ll be featured and explored properly next season, but I doubt it – the Doctor can hardly fight an enemy he can’t spar words with. Even the Silence got chatty on demand. I enjoyed the troops passing times by playing with psychic paper and practicing their immunity.

Which isn’t to say it escaped all the finale problems. It was just a bit too Doctor-god-mode. Not in terms of how he behaved – Eleven is far easier to stomach than Ten on that front – but the worship of the characters around him, the “fetishisation” to borrow a word from Lawrence Miles. “He’s not famous”, says Amy – which is interesting, as that’s precicely what River argues he is. Her lengthy speech at the start subverted it by using those terms about Rory, but also reinforced it because for 90% of that time we’d filed those adjectives under “D”. Perhaps I should just get used to this. It’s cringy and awful, yet it makes sense that the Doctor would aquire such a reputation – so the development is an interesting one.

Indeed, a central theme of the episode could be said to be the Doctor’s influence on those around him – from those enemies, to his debtors, both spanning time and space. It’s interesting to note the parallel finale. In the no-longer-existant Pandorica universe, we saw races teaming up to destroy the Doctor; here, the Doctor creates his own uber-army from costumes they had lying around in the BBC cupboard. Not to fault that department which is, of course, peerless – I loved the blend of pirate costumes and a space setting, though it made no sense having not seen The One With The Pirates yet. I’m always a sucker for Victoriana, so well done 1888; and River’s best costume yet, filled with ruffles and parasols.

I have a note here reading “Oh matt SMITH”. Not sure which moment exactly it was, could have been any of them really. Could it have been:

“Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

I got this Who-circa-‘84 tingle up my spine at that. All the moral crossroads throughout the show, but particularly the ones I’ve studied closest with 5, 6 and 7. Indeed, Seven is the order of the day – dabbling around like a mad magician, setting Masterplans off like clockwork chessmen – but retaining 10’s flair for drama and gloating. Seems, like 7, this is a Doctor it’s always good to ask "is there anything you haven't told us?"; seems, like 7, that even the answer to that question is not to be trusted. I was cheering/gasping along to the screen as he took control of Demon’s Run.

Step one – use your enemies against each other. Classic, but also nasty. I’m not sure that’s what I’d call “victory with no blood shed”, unless they are literally referring to what can be shown at 7 in the evening. Also classic: heroes disguising themselves as hooded characters, though the twist was in working out who it would be (n.b. I’d pitched for the Doc and Rory, so 50% right)

Step two – rely on you enemies being smart enough to not fall for it entirely and to instead disarm.

Step three – invisible soldiers everywhere. Haha!

Step four – stand around waiting for double-triple-cross-trap about ten minutes after everyone starts saying “this feels like a trap to me”

As I’d hoped, this plot involves the Doctor and his emotional development - not all that successfully, I’ll add, but at least they try. Any “development” which requires a supporting character to appear out of nowhere in order to impart the necessary exposition + moral we should be taking deserves those quotation marks. Still, full points for effort eh lads?

So I’ll can development for now, but the emotion was intense. Every time he opened his mouth, classic dialogue came out. And not just because of the % spent offscreen. "Oh look I'm angry, that's new. I'm really not sure what's going to happen now." It’s not entirely new, but I admire the sentiment – we’ve never truly seen him whip out the whupass, not this vindictively. Unless, y’know, you count those Mondosians. Does the Doctor now get cross, and blow up Cybermen on a whim? Do they have a connection to the baddies, or was he seriously just making a point? I liked it as a comment on a Doctor in some ways still in flux. Certainly I feel he’s far from the one-word definitions that we’ve established for his predecessors.

Lorna: "You don't remember me..."
The Doctor: "Hey, course I remember. I remember everyone.

...I didn’t quite believe it, but when he said it, it was true for just that moment...

Hey, we ran, you and me, didn't we run Lorna. [Lorna dies] Who was she?"

It was a lie. We knew, of course. But I didn’t want to, in that moment I believed he remembered everyone. In that moment, so did he. “They're always brave” breaks my little heart.


Running up, but running pretty fast, was the excellent Mr Pond. Not just for his airpunch badassery, but the little moments too. "Oh God I was going to be cool, I wanted to be cool, look at me" offset it charmingly. Indeed, the most interesting moment of counterpoint came with the dying Strax. Rory is a nurse dressed up as a warrior, and Strax is a warrior forced to become a nurse. Whole essay on masculinity just in that scene! Indeed, with the comments on the doctor, whole essay on the nature of a warrior could be plentifully packed. Amy was mainly a Mcguffin this week, with lots of good running and screaming. River was meh, and I even suspected she was playing up annoying on her first appearance.

The revelation of her human parentage? Meh. It had occured to me before, it’s not especially interesting and it doesn’t add much to our understanding of the character. Except, maybe, that River and Amy share the same obnoxious gene. The Timelord parentage? More interesting. That she has been manipulated for some purpose-unknown? Now this information is good. I’d long been waiting for something on River which might help justify those qualities about her that annoy me. If she’s been raised as a weapon, it might explain a lot about her all-purpose badassery and gun-toting.

The strange parentage situation is, perhaps, perfect for the strange threeway relationship in the TARDIS. It’s transformed from an awkward love triangle into something far more profound – a very closeknit family where there is love between all parties. So, between them they now have a child. Mind you, it tangles shippers into knots. I had a guilty giggle at Amy/River shippers; but I confess I’m still trying to wrap my head around Doctor/River as a pairing. He’s not the father in any physical sense (or is he?), and it’s more that vortexy-things have affected Melody’s development. All the same...does no one else find it a little creepy? She’s not physically related, and it seems he won’t be there to raise her either – and yet something makes me ew about it.

But you see the Doctor break out in a grin – he seems to instantly accept the idea of a relationship because she’s genetically compatible. It may explain that attraction to her he hasn’t been able to justify to himself yet. It’s still a bit odd. That said, this isn’t a new development for the Doctor – I always feel the moment Romana tells him she’s 140, a switch goes in his head. “140? Ooh, she’s legal...”


Indeed interesting relationships all around. A fantastic, knowing moment of character development which somehow wasn’t fourth-wall-shattering simultaneously introduced the cannon fodder and the agenda of the week:

'We're the thin fat gay married Anglican marines. Why would we need names?'

Classic. There’s still not enough investment in them to make one really care, but perhaps that’s for the best in an episode packed with people. “Care to make a donation?” was a scream. The ostensibly “male” Sontaran – in any case, played by a male actor and with male warrior qualities – asking to nurse the baby. And all before one can ask "would you care for a side order of gay with that agenda?", a lesbian housemaid and a stranded Victorian Silurian. Give them a spinoff! VICTORIAN TORCHWOOD PLS. Lorna was dull, but sweet, and it was interesting to see her performing almost companion-role to Amy – being all “I empathise with you across generations of difference”.

Some other great lines:
• 'Rory, no offence to the other but, you let them all die first, okay?'
• Strax: Captain Harcourt, I hope someday to meet you in the glory of battle where I shall crush the life from your worthless human form. Try and get some rest.

Other thoughts:

• Melody Pond, but River Song. I like to think the name switching around is a result of the Asian expansion into space, as so epically portrayed in Firefly, and perhaps the adoption of Japanese surname customs in some area she grows up in.
• Gallifreyan doesn't translate. Interesting.
  
• I've got a complicated piece of paper which works out, assuming Blake's 7 happens in the Doctor Who universe, when does it happen? This required a specialised future-timeline of DW, based purely around B7. I place this one closely pre the Federation era begins (but a long time pre-Blake, or in any case, Pressure Point, when the death of religion is discussed)
• I saw 1888, I thought "oh no". Only one thing happens in 1888, and I'm sensitive. I've read books, written essays about use of Ripper imagery, and the way it is treated as trivial and fictional nowadays makes me feel queasy. Then again, my interest in Jack the Ripper - and the ultimate adoption of the opinion that exploitative genre fiction should leave well alone, originated in Doctor Who to begin with. So perhaps I shouldn't complain too loudly.
• The TARDIS cradle is gorgeous! I wondered, for a moment, if we'd hear something about Susan's mum. Elsewhere, the internet is freaking out about looms...
  

Speculation:

• Have we already seen the conclusion of this plot? We still don’t know why the TARDIS exploded in Pandorica Opens - but River was there when it happened. Is this the true manner in which she has been “weaponised”. Did she explode? Or was she hypnotised to do so? Or does none of that happen any more, so it doesn't matter?
• Eyepatch Lady still looks like an Evil River Song to me.
• Is the "Best Man" going to be Rory the dad after all?
  

Unanswered questions:

• Do the following things fit into this plot, then, and if so how:

o The Silence
o The Astronaut (probably yes)
o The Doctor’s death (again, yes)
o The cracks
o The Pandorica (probably not?)
o The anti-Doctor league
o The Rani

• Are we getting Victorian Sword-Wielding Lesbian Silurians: The Spin Off, and if not, why not?
• What's all this about the Doctor dying? Does he still die, or is that the rebel flesh, or what?
• Assuming the little girl is Melody, and that she can regenerate, then what implications does this have for Silence In The Library?
  

Notes I didn't understand right now, but might one day
so many
enjoying it as I hoped