Oh, let this be my year again, let me suddenly get what everyone else can see, and let this be my year. I've been enjoying Matt Smith's series, but only with my mind. Something of the feverish enthusiasm has died for me in the past two seasons, enthusiasm which The Pirate Planet or Mawdryn Undead can still rouse with no effort at all.
Season 6B-B has started promisingly - I'm cautiously pessimistic. What a great line, and what a great title! So great I've started wondering if I'd have loved it half as much under a different title. It's perky, conspiratorial and tickles the imagination alongside the funnybone.
The episode abandoned its cheeky premise fairly quickly - which might be for the best. Knockabout romp is perhaps the wrong medium to tackle the world's worst conflict, especially with Who's sister show doing it with so much sub
tltey and finesse on channel 2...Who has never touched Hitler, save through allegory, and the manner in which it was done here was divine - befitting the subject's gravity without being mawkish. Whether it's that weird aura, that charisma and the piercing eyes which Hitler (and many Notable Men of History) is said to have had, or the sheer historical momentousness, it seems everyone is a bit freaked out by being in the same room as him. From the director, who nervously characterised him as hands, the back of an ear, the corner of glasses, trying not to meet his gaze, to the cast, all unsure of what to say. Not quite awkwardness, not quite fear - an excellent moment all round.
As it stood, 30's Berlin was just wallpaper to a story in which everything seemed to be happening. Historical, character piece and sci-fi all at once - one of my notes reads "implausible everything". This is Doctor Who at its very best. Douglas Adams has been suggested as a source for the Tesselecta robot, but his most important influence is City of Death, which achieves a similar balance between the show's time and/or space mandate.
And so we have the childlike soft-science idea of a body that's a spaceship filled with tiny men; juxtaposed with the more adult sci-fi idea that time travel could be misused to wreak vengeance on unpunished criminals. We have a beautifully realised, desaturated, snowy Berlin, on the dawn of a great historical moment; and just as beautifully realised, we have the moment Amy discovered Rory was in love with her. Who can do all these things, but rarely tries it all at once. That it succeeds is a credit to Steve Moffat's bravurah skill for juggling ideas, like so many plates and firebrands, without once letting them touch the ground.
One of his notable failures in Series 5 was convincing emotion, those little human moments that could take a scene from the end of the Earth to fish and chips in under a double-beating-heartbeat. Series 6 was a little better, and now the story of Amelia's childhood rebuts my criticism entirely. I hope this continues. Picking on little Rory, playing some of those endless Doctor-centric games, and how very, very sweet that moment of realisation between the two of the was.
Mels, on the other hand, grated from her first instant on screen. Not just for being annoying, but for b
eing the latest in a long line of sassy, self-assured, dull dames, each about as plausible as Monarch's masterplan to prove he is god by going back in time to meet himself. I felt so much better when it turned out she was one I already hated. Freed from being the latest in a downhill trend, I retrospectively rather liked her. And it proved that unexpected little sequence of Amy's childhood was quite deliberately out of place: like Adam in Torchwood, one feels Mels has only ever always existed from the moment you see it happens.
You can see some of River's more insane qualities here at their genesis - later to mature and zen out, but still not entirely grown out of her bonkers teenage phase of 'jacking buses just 'cus. One can only assume that, like Susan, she must have been very bored and lonely at that school. While Susan's school days consisted of blurred close-ups and surreal, radiophonic interludes, Mels default response to historical tragedies is "because the Doctor didn't stop it". The idea was done with more finesse by Lawrence Miles in Interference, with the Eighth Doctor challenged by his companion to intervene in Bosnia, Kosovo or Northen Ireland; here it is effectively played for laughs.
And that relationship finally works for me. In fact, a lot of my previous River-related quibbles are no more. It still stands that she is a poorly concieved idea of what a Strong Female Character should be, and that personally she sets my teeth on edge. But for the first time, I'm responding to her positively - when previously, I'd hardly dignify her with "spack off out of my canon, you make no sense!"
Information is required to contextualise things we see. We are no longer suprised that the TARDIS is bigger inside than out, because we are familiar. When the Doctor says something like "great, more guilt!" we know exactly what he means, because we've been through Rose, Martha and Donna's stories with him; when he is so insistant that his murderer be saved, this makes sense because we've been with him since the 60s and we know he'll give anyone a break. The idea of the Doctor being married to a Time Traveller's Wife is genius, but smug, self-assured River has always seemed so wrong to me. The companions he seems closest to are the Jo Grants, Aces and Roses of this world - the not especially well-learned or inherently competant, but smart and brave, and willing to take chances and learn. What did he see in River, who is not only violent, but unimpressed by his showing off, and cocky about her own perfection? I was seeing her at the wrong time. "River needs me!", the Doctor said, and it suddenly all made sense. The River I'd misunderstood in Silence of the Library was not the River he'd fallen in love with. It's the broken Mels of Lets Kill Hitler, the Mels who needs guidance, the Mels whose screwed-up life is all the Doctor's fault, making it his self-imposed duty to save her.
I imagine, for a bleeding heart like the Doc, that quality is irresisteable in a gal. The learning and guiding and showing off all comes in the bits we haven't seen.
i09 has accurately identified that enjoyment of the series is now directly related to how much one is interested in River Song, which is rather unfortunate for Team Traken - to greater and lesser extents, we've never been able to stand her. I still can't, and I'd be happier if she never showed up again. But she gets a pass into canon now, at least, and makes sense, and I admit to being more interested in her now than I ever before have been. I have a horrible suspicion that when the story is done, and the mind can reassemble it into order, I will at last become most fond. How embarassing.
No comment on the fact she has regenerations. I think the Doctor's reasons that Jenny can not, and never will be a Timelord speak for themselves.
All the other usual comments stand. Mr Smith is perfection. Rory's really good. Amy remains a frustrating character with fine legs. Someone dies again, of course, and it would have been a beautiful regeneration if, of course, that is what it had been. Loving Rory's right hook, and every single time the word "Hitler" was used as a throwaway moment of absurdist comedy - "Shut up, Hitler!"; "Put Hitler in the cupboard!" Eleven's standout moment was proposing marriage to the dying Mels.
The Teselecta was a great new addition to canon - both as a robot concept, and as a mission. Hunting down historical rotters - what a piece of sadistic genius! The Doctor's incredulous sarcasm is just right for expressing what an absurdly wasteful, but kinda enthralling, idea it is. Bridge-based drama is a specialty of mine - so hands up who else wondered how well Blake'n'co would do at piloting a Tesselecta...? The Doctor should definitely count as a bigger war criminal than River, though, as should Hitler - unless there's something we've really not been told about her. Conflating the three characters under the same banner skirts the edge of taste, especially if River's only crime is indeed to kill the Doc. Not sure how I feel about them being put on an explicitly real-life spectrum of morality.
That's more than I can say for the TARDIS interface, though. Bit of a weird scene. It could have ben heartbreaking with someone else - like Sharaz-Jek finding no one but his robots to hold him - but as it stands, its a bloody TARDIS interface, the Doctor knows she's just an interface, and even if he didn't, it tells him. Multiple times. With your future wife being chased by a robot and your best chums trapped in said robot's head, can't you find enough hope on your own?
The Doctor's standards are interesting here. Young Amelia doesn't make him feel bad because he hasn't screwed her up. Is this his alien understanding of time or Moff's alien understanding of character? Because the Doctor is right - Amelia exists, and always will exist at a point where he he "hasn't screwed up yet". There was a point where Rose, Martha and Donna were equally guilt-free. Because Amelia only exists at a point before they know he has. Actually, she's has been screwed from the start - her parents have vanished down a crack the exploding TARDIS created, just as her best friend is actually her daughter in another regeneration. Given how her timey-wimey lifeline is garotted around that of the Doctor and River she is, in a sense, doomed from birth in a way no other companion has been.
So do we blame Moff? Earlier series focused quite heavily on the companion's emotional state, so it is hard to ignore the guilt the Doctor might feel at how Rose, Martha and Donna turned out. I've st
opped trying to pretend that Amy is a consistent character who develops from episode to episode - she only makes sense with a crack in her mind which wipes her experience every time the credits roll.
Now we are to believe that Amy and Rory can cope with, not just losing their child or missing her formative years entirely, but knowing she's been engineered as a psychopathic war machine. It's a great way to keep the characters in the TARDIS, instead of changing nappies in Leadworth; it's also totally implausible. They're not devastated, they're not pissed, they're not even overly concerned that their tearaway best friend is their little girl all grown up. They're just Amy and Rory, as usual.
Plus ca change. 8/10 from me!
Some other great lines:
Doctor: Then why don't I know you? I danced with everyone at their wedding... The women were all brilliant. The men... were a bit... shy.
Rory: "Anybody else find this day just a bit difficult?"
Amy: "Can you ride a motorbike?"
Rory: "I expect so, it's that sort of day."
"I was on my way to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled, and then I thought ‘Gosh, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish’”
Other thoughts:
- Some great clothing in this one - not yet sure about the Doc's new coat, but lovin' River's hat and the sonic cane.
- that sequence with the banana is straight from Curse of Fatal Death. Who'da thought?
- The episode I watched just before this was Mawdryn Undead. At the time, comparisons between the two episodes were so clear in my mind I merely wrote "Like Mawdryn". I wonder what I meant...?
- Who thinks that River's sacrifice of c.10 lives to bring the Doc back to life will come in handy five years down the line? We know Timelords can extend their number of regenerations - the Master made a hobby of it.
- At the same time - the Doctor's death at the lake is a fixed point? That is a scary thought. Mind you, Torchwood seems to be cheerily ignoring what the "fixed" in "fixed point" really means. And time can be rewritten. A maxim just like "wibbly wobbly, timey wimey" which simply means: "I can do whatever the spack I want".
- Why does the Doc change clothes? I hardly believe it's because he always dresses for the occasion. Besides, the confrontation in the restaurant at the end hardly lasts for 32 minutes. So where has he been? Fellow comrade Team Traken comrade Koschei noted: "any time the Doctor is off screen nowadays, it is potentially suspect."
No comments:
Post a Comment