Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2016 Edition, Part 2

This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows--Timeless and Frequency--and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series, good and bad, that I thought were interesting enough to write about, even if I'm not sure I'll be sticking with all of them.

• No Tomorrow - Over the last few years, I've come to trust the CW and its programming instincts.  Not only does it air some of my favorite shows--iZombie, the smartest superhero show on TV; Jane the Virgin, still going strong and finding real drama at the heart of cheesy soap opera plot twists; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, one of the funniest, most original, most heartbreaking shows in existence--but its DC superhero block is easily the most rock-solid, self-assured iteration on the genre on either the small or big screen (and I say that as someone who has given up on The Flash in disgust, and might let go of Arrow by the end of the year).  So I came to No Tomorrow with a lot of goodwill.  Yes, the premise is absurd--high-strung Evie (Tori Anderson) meets her dream guy, Xavier (Joshua Sasse), falling in love as much with his free spirit and determination to seize the day as with his rugged good looks, only to learn that he genuinely believes that the Earth is going to be destroyed by an asteroid in eight months.  But the CW has made meaty, emotionally resonant fare out of even sillier (not to mention potentially offensive) premises, so I was willing to let No Tomorrow win me over.  In the end, what I've found is both less ridiculous, and less promising, than I'd hoped.
  
  Sasse and Anderson are both extremely charming, and do a great job of selling their nascent relationship as something that is based not only on attraction and zaniness, but genuine connection.  No Tomorrow has the good sense not to hang its every plot twist on Xavier's belief in the coming apocalypse, and the challenges that he and Evie face in their relationship are often as much about their differing lifestyles, or her fluctuating comfort levels with his carpe diem worldview, as they are about this fundamental disagreement.  At its best moments, No Tomorrow is about building a relationship with someone who is very different from you, whose differences are sometimes intriguing but just as often concerning (to its credit, the show faces head-on the very real possibility that Xavier might be dangerous or unhinged, and has Evie and her friends investigate this possibility with all due seriousness).  But it lacks the core of emotion that has made Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend--both shows that are ultimately about very serious things, such as family, or dealing with mental illness--so compelling.  There doesn't seem to be as much beneath the surface of No Tomorrow's quirkiness as there is in those shows, and it's hard to imagine the show finding more than a few notes in its premise, or in Evie and Xavier's relationship.  For the time being, those notes are still quite enjoyable--especially since the show is wisely developing Evie and Xavier's worlds, introducing friends, coworkers, and family members for them to interact with--but I doubt that No Tomorrow will join the pantheon of weird-yet-oddly-wonderful CW shows.
  
  
• Pitch - In the first installment of this year's fall show reviews, I wrote about the dreadful This Is Us.  As several commenters on twitter pointed out, you can feel Aaron Sorkin's influence on that series, particularly its fondness for overheated speeches and general air of self-satisfaction.  Pitch feels like good quasi-Sorkin to This Is Us's bad quasi-Sorkin.  Like the earlier show (with whom it shares a creator, Dan Fogelman), it is fond of melodrama and speechifying.  But unlike This Is Us, Pitch has a premise that is semi-plausible and convincing, characters who are compelling rather than off-putting, and, most importantly, the ability to reach for something raw and real beneath its stylized, self-conscious surface.  The show begins with rookie Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury) taking her place as the first woman in major league baseball, and charts her journey in the clubhouse, and as a new national icon to women and girls.  Along for the ride are Ginny's agent Amelia Slater (Ali Larter), eager to push her charge to stardom, fading player Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), coach Al Luongo (Dan Lauria), and general manager Oscar Arguella (Mark Consuelos).
  
  My biggest issue with Pitch is that it veers unpromisingly between the most blatant sports-movie clichés--in the pilot episode, Ginny chokes during her first game, and is then inspired to make a comeback by an inspirational speech from Mike--and the most obsessive kind of inside baseball details that I have trouble parsing, much less caring about.  What keeps the show together despite these plotting issues are its characters, and even more than that, the relationships they forge--the growing friendship and mutual appreciation between Mike and Ginny, the surprisingly mature romance between Mike and Amelia, and the political machinations between Al, Oscar, and the team management.  But Pitch wants to be more than a workplace drama--it wants to comment about the intersection between entertainment, celebrity, gender, and race--and at this it is only intermittently successful.  An early episode in which Ginny must navigate an insensitive but ultimately innocuous comment from Al, a heavily-publicized case of locker-room sexual assault, and the needs of her own career, makes a powerful point about the constant pitfalls that lie before her as a trailblazer, a celebrity, and an athlete.  But there doesn't seem to be much life in these topics--four episodes into the series, it's already repeating points, about the weight of Ginny's celebrity, the difficulty of her relationship with her overbearing father, or Mike's ambivalence about his waning career.  There are a lot of great ingredients that go into Pitch, but the stew that they make up is already losing its flavor, struggling to justify itself as a story rather than an idea.
  
  
• Westworld - Easily the most-anticipated new series of the fall, the consensus that has already formed around HBO's latest foray into genre is that it represents the channel's attempts to grapple with its own reputation for prurient violence, particularly violence against women (see Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, and Aaron Bady in The Los Angeles Review of Books).  You can see how that consensus has formed--Westworld builds on the 1973 movie to imagine a lush and impeccably-detailed theme park in which customers pay lavishly to indulge their every fantasy, which almost inevitably seem to involve murder, mayhem, and of course rape.  The metaphor for how HBO's pretensions to highbrow entertainment ultimately rest on the sumptuously-filmed and -costumed violence of Game of Thrones, True Detective, and The Night Of pretty much writes itself.  For myself, I'd like to believe that there's more to Westworld than this glib reading, first because I simply do not believe that anyone at HBO possesses this level of self-awareness--this is, after all, the channel whose executives were genuinely taken aback, in the year 2016, by the idea that their shows had become synonymous with violence against women--and second because it's by far the least interesting avenue of story the show could take.
  
  If you want to read Westworld as a meta-commentary about storytelling (and to be clear, I agree that there's a thread of this running through the show, though to my mind it's far from the central one), you also have to face up to how tedious and unimaginative the stories-within-the-story are.  Leaving aside the questionable notion of anyone spending money to play cowboys and Indians anymore, the stories that take place within Westworld, in which the theme park's guests are invited to track down fugitives, go on treasure hunts, or just fool around with prostitutes, simply don't seem worth the price of admission.  They also take it as a given that the guests' fantasy life is thoroughly conventional (not to mention defaulting to the straight male gaze).  Everyone, we're told, wants to rape the comely, innocent rancher's daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)--this is literally the purpose of her existence in the park.  No one seems interested in raping her paramour, the stalwart Teddy (James Marsden), or, indeed, in having a consensual threesome.
  
  If Westworld is of any interest to me, it is because of the parallel story about the robot characters' (known as "hosts") growing awakening into sentience, and into an awareness of the brutality to which they've been repeatedly subjected.  That the show comes from Person of Interest creator Jonathan Nolan is the main reason I'm hopeful that it will tell such a story well and in interesting ways, but so far Westworld is being frustratingly slow in building up towards it.  Each of the four aired episodes advances multiple plotlines only fractionally, trusting the audience to follow along in hopes of an interesting resolution to some of the more opaque questions that the show has been teasing: what is the elaborate new storyline promised by park creator Ford (Anthony Hopkins), and why has he suddenly given the hosts the ability to remember their past lives (and deaths)?  Which, if any, of the park's administrators and technicians are robots themselves?  Who is the Man in Black (Ed Harris), a guest who believes that he is about to unlock the game's "deepest level"?  The result is frustrating, carried along by the show's magnificent production values and some fine performances (Wood is a standout as a being coming into self-awareness who is also, simultaneously, a woman starting to realize her own power in a world ruled by men, but pretty much everyone in the cast is very good), but not yet coalescing into an actual story.  I'm still watching Westworld because I have hope that it will become the story I want it to be--and faith that Nolan is both interested in that story, and capable of pulling it off--but it's not hard to see why so many reviewers are assuming that it amounts to little more than self-reflection.  At this point in its first season, the show still hasn't staked out a claim to being about anything but itself.
  
  
• Class - It's strange to find the BBC, in 2016, getting back in the Doctor Who spin-off business.  It's even stranger for that spin-off to be Class, whose Buffy-esque mixture of genre elements, teen drama, and snarky humor would have seemed derivative and predictable even in the heyday of the NuWho universes's expansion ten years ago.  It's particularly strange that Class comes from the pen of Patrick Ness, whose written novels--particularly the Chaos Walking trilogy--are so original and uncompromising.  In Class, he has instead plumped for the most familiar of tropes--a group of students discover that their school lies on a hellmouth, and must band together to defend the Earth from the alien menaces that emerge from it--and executed them with so little verve that the characters themselves sometimes seem bored with their own story.  There are some original plot points--one of the teenagers is an alien prince, and his slave-cum-bodyguard is masquerading as a teacher--and some nods towards inclusivity--the alien is also gay, and two of the other teenagers are the children of, respectively, Pakistani and Nigerian immigrants, who bond over their shared experience as people of color in a mostly-white environment.  But none of this feels sufficiently fresh to make up for Class's familiarity.  It could simply be that I've aged out of this kind of story, but even kids these days have so many other alternatives if they're looking for something Buffy-inspired--from Teen Wolf to The Vampire Diaries to Doctor Who itself--that it's hard to understand what sort of need Class thinks that it's fulfilling.

Where's the Fun? Doctor Who Thoughts

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to put into words just why I've found the most recent and just-concluded season of Doctor Who so underwhelming.  What's standing in my way is the fact that somewhere around the second season I lost the ability to think or write critically about the show.  Oh, I've produced the occasional piece, but what they've all had in common was an emphasis on a single character or plot arc that I could get a handle on, while the show as a whole seemed to elude my grasp.  From the moment it exploded onto our screens in 2005, New Who's defining characteristic seemed to be its cheerful and relentless determination to ignore all the rules of good writing in favor of spectacle and, as Jackson Lake so accurately put it in "The Next Doctor," wonderful nonsense.  Russell T. Davies came out and said that he wasn't interested in coherent plots or nuanced characterization or subtle moments, that what he wanted was to elicit wonder by any means necessary, and that is exactly what he did in his five years at the show's helm, constantly cramming more gunpowder into his cannons in order to achieve ever-greater explosions (and compensate for the audience's growing desensitization).  To criticize Who in its third or fourth season for not making any sense and for substituting bombast for coherent writing seemed not only pointless but hypocritical, because that's what the show had been doing from day one, and whether you thought this was brilliant or horrible depended entirely on where your personal threshold between wonderful nonsense and just plain nonsense lay, and whether Davies had already crossed it.

So, when I come to assess my disappointment with Steven Moffat's first season at the series's helm, the first question that must be asked is, has the show actually gotten worse (worse, that is, from a series that wasn't trying to achieve, and was in fact actively avoiding, many of commonly accepted definitions of good TV) or have I simply had enough?  Has the switch to a new Doctor and a new companion simply been the shock I needed to lose all investment with a series that had long ago relinquished any claim on my interest, or has something actually gone wrong?  The answer, I think, is yes, in that Moffat has kept many of the series's most exasperating attributes, and jettisoned much of what allowed me to enjoy it regardless.  At some point, I stopped caring about Davies's stories except as delivery methods for the characters and some agreeably zany moments, and though Moffat and his writing room have delivered better writing, it's not so much better, or so different in its essence, from the kind of stories Davies delivered to make me care again.  Meanwhile the characters, main, recurring, and one-offs, which were often the show's saving grace under Davies's reign, have been allowed to fester.

These are both contentious points, so let's go through them one by one.  During most of Davies's run, Moffat was known as The One Who Could Plot.  Which I was on board with, because he'd written three of New Who's best stories, and even the Library two-parter had its moments.  Then I watched Jekyll, a miniseries that seems not to have been written so much as spewed onto the page, which changes the tenor, direction, and even genre of its story with each of its six episodes, and gestures at a dozen endings, none of which materialize.  It ought to be taught in screenwriting classes as an example of what not to do, and it made me take a closer look at Moffat's contributions to Who.  What I discovered was that Moffat actually wasn't very good at plotting, possibly because he didn't tend to do it very often.  "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" have only the barest hint of a plot, and it's the same one for both of them--the non-linear relationship between a human and the Doctor.  What makes them special is their structure (which was also one of strong points of Moffat's previous series, Coupling), and the fact that they use time travel as more than a means of delivering the Doctor into the story and taking him out again at its end.  "Silence in the Library"/"Forests of the Dead" is, plot-wise, a mess, piling nonsensical last-minute saves on fast-talking gobbledygook on utterly arbitrary rules and limitations ("Don't think you'll regenerate!" is, I still believe, one of the series's most risible lines) in the best Davies tradition, but with a bit of Moffat-ish flare.  The only really well-plotted story Moffat produced under Davies's reign was "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," which is an un-Moffat-like story in many other respects as well--it gives the companion something to do instead of sidelining her, the prominent guest star is a man and not fixated on the Doctor, there's no timey-wimey stuff--and is an achievement that he has yet to recreate.

So no, Moffat isn't a good writer.  He's a clever writer, and that cleverness is on display at certain points in the season--"The Eleventh Hour," River Song making sure that the Doctor will be where she needs him, when she needs him by leaving him messages on galactic landmarks he's sure to visit at one point or another, the time-traveling jumble that is the first half of "The Big Bang" (though personally I could have done without the explanatory recap halfway through the first act--honestly, if viewers haven't figured out the concept of time travel by this point, there's probably no hope for them).  But for the most part what we've been getting is the Russell T. Davies special--very loud, very bombastic nonsense.  I've seen a lot of references to this season as having taken Who into the realm of fairy tale and relying on fairy tale logic, and I just don't see it.  Fairy tale logic is still logic.  Martha using the Master's mind-controlling satellite network to beam a wave of rejuvenating faith into the Doctor is fairy tale logic (and I still maintain that that ending could have worked if its execution were not so sentimental and over-literal).  The resolution of season 5--the Doctor's enemies band together in an elaborate, galaxy- and time-spanning plan to imprison him all based on the false belief that he's the only person who knows how to fly the TARDIS, and to do so they create a trap from Amy's memories including Rory whom Amy doesn't remember because he was sucked into the crack and erased from existence, except that Amy has remembered other people who were sucked into the crack and erased from existence, and despite having been erased from existence and her memory Rory is able to make Amy remember him just in time to become an Auton and kill her, only then he's fine again and helping the Doctor, and it turns out the only way to save the universe is for the Doctor never to have existed, so he winds back his entire life but still manages to leave Amy with a memory of himself even though it never happened, which is enough of a germ for River Song, who shouldn't remember the Doctor either or have a TARDIS notebook because unlike Amy, she didn't grow up with a crack in her wall pouring the universe into her head, to prod so that Amy can bring the Doctor back into existence by the sheer force of her main-character-ness, which somehow causes Rory to not only remember the Doctor as well but also remember his life as an Auton, including the two thousand years he spent guarding a prison that shouldn't have needed any guarding because it was absolutely impervious to harm and also impregnable unless you happen to be the person who is already inside, which seems like quite a design flaw in a prison made for a time traveler--is not.  That's just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that the speed and sheer tonnage of your throwing will obscure the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.

None of this, of course, was unexpected.  It's one thing to write a single mind-bending, brilliantly structured episode to break the routine of a season of traditional Who-ish running-and-shouting stories, and quite another to be in charge of the whole season, and given that Davies served up this kind of overcooked mess on a regular basis for five years and only truly lost me in the last of them, there's no reason why Moffat taking the same approach should have been so alienating.  Except, of course, that there is.  The other thing that Moffat's Davies-era episodes were known for was their memorable and instantly beloved guest characters--Captain Jack made a great companion (if a significantly less great series lead) and Sally Sparrow's name was bandied about as a possible fifth season companion within seconds of the announcement that Moffat was taking over the show.  When I considered what kind of Who Moffat would create, I didn't seriously expect him to deliver a season of "Blink"s or "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances"s, but I trusted that he would write his Doctor, companion, and guest characters with the same wit and verve he had applied to the characters in these episodes, and that hasn't happened.  Or, to be more precise, the wit and verve are still there.  Moffat is still the best at writing characters that are instantly funny and appealing.  What he can't, or won't, do is develop them beyond that point.

You see this in the near-total lack of character continuity over the course of the season.  In "The Vampires of Venice" the Doctor happily sentences an alien race to extinction in order to preserve a single human city, while in the Silurian two-parter he's so invested in the notion of human-Silurian coexistence that he brushes aside the latter's genocidal tendencies and even the Dr. Mengele-like proclivities of one of their scientists, whom he embraces as a brother.  River Song was an Indiana Jones-like character in "Silence in the Library"/"Forests of the Dead," brash and secure in her own abilities, effortlessly in charge of her team.  In "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" she's more of a femme fatale, whose arrogance conceals insecurity and a deep fear that the Doctor will find out the truth about her past, but in "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" that fear and insecurity are gone, even though this episode is the earliest of the three in her personal chronology, and the event she doesn't want the Doctor to find out about has already occurred.  In "The Beast Below," which is only her first outing with the Doctor, Amy displays a deep and unearned insight into his character, just as Rory does in "Vampires of Venice" when, only hours after meeting the Doctor, he identifies the dangerous effect he has on his companions. 

It's even more blatant in the series's lack of interest in developing any of these characters--you could spin River's personality changes as character growth, but only if the series seemed to be interested in her as something other than a means of kickstarting the plot and moving it along.  Even worse is Amy, who actually grows flatter and less interesting as the season draws on.  There's a lot of potential in her introduction in "The Eleventh Hour"--both the courage and attention to detail that bring her to the Doctor's attention in the first place, and the horrible way in which he screws up her life over the course of the episode--but it's never explored.  Amy doesn't grow or change over the course of the season.  Like River, she's used to move the plot, and at the end of the season she's actually the McGuffin, not because of anything she chose or did, like Rose in "The Parting of the Ways," but simply by virtue of having slept in a particular bedroom.  The closest the season comes to developing Amy is strengthening her romance with Rory, which would be aggravating even if Rory were not such a non-entity in himself, who needs to be transformed into a millennia-old killer plastic robot to become even the least bit interesting, and actually ends up backfiring on Amy, because there's no groundwork laid to make me believe her when she tells me that she loves Rory in "Amy's Choice," and what actually shows up on screen is a woman who is dismissive to the point of cruelty to the man she's promised to spend the rest of her life with.

All of this, of course, comes down to the Doctor.  It was obvious even from his Davies-era episodes that Moffat envisions the Doctor not as a close personal friend who forms deep bonds with his companions, but as a distant trickster figure who upends their lives but doesn't really engage with them because he's too alien.  So far, so good, and if the season had focused on those upended lives I probably would have enjoyed it, but instead what happens is that the Doctor isn't distant.  He's in the center of the frame, constantly, relentlessly, and he simply will.  Not.  Shut.  Up.  Moffat's Doctor is a truckload of mannerisms piled on top of funny gags and witty catchphrases, and some of this is very enjoyable ("I wear a fez now.  Fezzes are cool." or the obvious-but-impeccably-done slow burn realization when Rory turns up in "The Pandorica Opens"), but it also sucks the oxygen from everyone else in the room.  One of the Davies's Doctors' most enduring traits was how easily they fell in love, not only with their companions but with guest characters, whom they would rush to praise and make much of.  They noticed people.  Moffat's Doctor has his hands full just processing the never-ending, deafening churn of his own thoughts, and his writers have their hands full trying to depict that churn.  That leaves very little space for other characters and is probably the reason why, though there have been some wonderful single-serving characters this season, there's been so little character development--because the moment another character becomes prominent enough to gain the Doctor's attention, Amy, and later Rory and River, get starved out.  The better episodes of the season have focused on the Doctor's intense, one-on-one relationship with a single character.  In "The Eleventh Hour" that character was Amy, which is why it's the most nuanced glimpse we get of her as a person rather than a plot device, but "The Lodger" needs to lock her away in the TARDIS in order to give Craig room to breathe, and "Vincent and the Doctor" tries to give both Amy and Vincent the room they need but doesn't have it to give, and ends up short-changing them both.

The problem is that the Doctor is not a person.  He's a mass of mannerisms.  Matt Smith is quite good at portraying them, and the sense that the Doctor is a very old creature in a very young body, but that's still not a character.  We have no idea what this Doctor wants or fears and the season seems entirely uninterested in telling us about these things--the closest it comes is "Amy's Choice," but if you really need to dredge up a psychic echo of the main character's darkest impulses to stand on the set and explain the character to the audience then something has clearly gone wrong.  This Doctor is, quite literally, the oncoming storm--a strange, uncontrollable, unpredictable event that changes everything--but that's not exactly an audience identification character.  Which leaves the season bereft.  There's no one to care about, and the most memorable moments are not the ones when Moffat and his writers brilliantly pull off a story or tug at our heartstrings, but the moments in which they are especially clever.  That's not enough for me.

I feel a little guilty coming off so negative about Moffat's first season because, again, there's not much that he's done wrong that's worse than anything Davies did, and in some technical respects he has written a better season than any of Davies's.  A lot of my complaints come down to taste and personal preference, and I can certainly understand fans (and especially Old Who fans, which I gather the season has come into closer alignment with than the Davies years did) who prefer the Doctor as someone distant rather than a potential boyfriend, and who have no need for weepy moments between the companion and her family.  It seems obvious that Moffat has successfully written the Who that he is interested in.  It's just not the Who I want to watch.  I kept on with Davies's Doctor Who despite the fact that it wasn't, and had no interest in being, any good because even very close to its end there were moments of enormous fun in it.  The last season of Doctor Who has not been a lot of fun for me, and I'm not sure whether I'll be back for more.

Second Verse, Same as the First: Doctor Who Thoughts

And thus, the Russell T. Davies era ends. Well, there are three more Davies-penned specials (the teaser for the 2008 Christmas special is already circulating) in the tube, but both the evidence of years past and the fact that in the fourth season finale Davies obviously worked hard to give Steven Moffat the closest thing possible, on a show with four decades of continuity, to a fresh start suggest that these will be largely self-contained regurgitations of past stories, and also not very good. So, really, the Davies era wraps up with Saturday's episode, "Journey's End," and like him or hate him, esteem his abilities as a writer and producer or despise them, there is no denying that this was an era, with its own tone and character, its own themes and focal points, its own recurring settings and characters, now brought to a resounding and definite close.

So really, there are three endings we could talk about: the episode, the season, and the four seasons that make up Davies's oeuvre. It presumably comes as no surprise to anyone that it's on the first count that the result is weakest, with Davies, as ever, substituting bombast, shouting, dark foreshadowing and impossible-to-live-up-to buildup, as well as, yes, some nice character moments, for anything resembling a decent plot. On the plus side, no giant reset button, which is almost impossible to credit given how inevitable it seemed last week (though admittedly the method by which the need for a reset button is avoided--the gobbledygook-driven proclamation that the Doctor can regenerate into himself--is unworthy), and though the plot device which has come to be known, lovingly and otherwise, as Total Bollocks Overdrive is used repeatedly, for once the excesses of the plot feel organic to it rather than something slammed into our heads in the hopes that we'll be too stunned to notice just how stupid the whole exercise is. Which is to say: nothing on the level of Floating Tinkerbell Jesus Doctor. The balance between ridiculousness, melodrama, and genuinely good writing (or genuinely good acting masking the flaws in indifferent writing) has, for once, been struck, making for a satisfying episode--at least while it's being watched.

On the season level, I'm still trying to decide where I'd rank the fourth season within Davies's offerings. Near the top, certainly, but I'm not sure whether I like it better or worse than the first season (the last two slots go: three, two). As with most of new Who, the season operates on two levels which seem almost incidental to one another: the plot, and specifically the overarching, season-long plot which begins with faint hints, advances into blatant foreshadowing, and finally explodes all over the screen in the season-ending three-parter; and the character interaction, mainly the relationship between the Doctor and his companion but also her relationship with her family and the world she's left behind. On the former count, season four is very much of a piece with season three--weak, forgettable standalone episodes (and a horrible two-parter) in its first half, and strong, inventive standalones (plus a much better two-parter) in its second half, culminating in a no holds barred three-part season finale. Though nothing in the fourth season had the power of the one-two-three punch that was "Human Nature," "The Family of Blood," and "Blink," I still found the latter half of the season impressive, and as a result the fourth season as a whole feels much stronger and more worthwhile than I would said just a few weeks ago, when all that was keeping me coming back to the show was the interaction between the Doctor and Donna.

It's on the character level that the fourth season shines. Donna is by far my favorite companion, but more importantly, her relationship with the Doctor--teasing, bickering, uncompromising, and deeply affectionate--is the most satisfying of any of the four (Rose/Nine and Rose/Ten being two different relationships) long-term Doctor-companion relationships we've seen. It avoids all the pitfalls previous seasons fell into. The Doctor and Donna aren't caught up in an all-consuming romance, thus leaving both of them open to other people while still grounding one another. Neither one of them is pining for the other in a way that can never be satisfied, and which becomes self-destructive. Perhaps most importantly, Donna clearly gets something out of the relationship. Of all of the new Who companions, she's the one who most noticeably grows and evolves under the Doctor's tutelage, the one who gets the most out of the experience of traveling with him--which of course makes it all the more gutting when she loses everything he's given her in "Journey's End." Rose could go on, having forgotten the Doctor, and live a perfectly happy, albeit ordinary, life. Martha would live a fabulous, exciting life even in his absence. Donna, in losing the Doctor, loses a part of herself, perhaps the best part.

What's missing from the fourth season is the integration between plot and character development that the first season managed handily (if not always subtly, in general resorting to foregrounding the Doctor's grief and damage). As in the second and third seasons, the season's big bad exists primarily as convenient prop, a catalyst for the show's soapier elements, and is rather forgettable in his own right. Even more importantly, the season is missing the sense of newness, of an approach to SFnal TV and TV in general that was, to me at least, entirely different to anything I'd seen before, which permeated Who in its early episodes. It was perhaps inevitable for later seasons to lose that freshness, as the show's trademark combination of absurdity and melodrama began to seem familiar, but Davies seems to have had a deliberate policy of recycling plot elements, character types, and emotional notes, which to my mind is his greatest failing during his tenure at Who's helm. "Smith and Jones," for example, and for all its superficial differences from "Rose," is so clearly trying to ape that episode, and specifically to highlight the same qualities in Martha that made Rose an ideal companion, that it comes to seem hectoring. "The Unicorn and the Wasp" is a retread of "The Shakespeare Code" which is a retread of "Tooth and Claw" which is a retread of "The Unquiet Dead." "The Voyage of the Damned" is a patchwork of bits of better episodes with no personality of its own.

Nowhere is this tendency towards repetition more apparent than as the fourth season approaches its ending and the climax of its central theme, which is actually the central theme of the entire new show, the one quality of the Doctor that Davies keeps returning to--his capacity to inspire and influence others, and make them, for better or worse, more like himself. There is arguably no episode in the new series's run that doesn't touch on this theme in one form or another, but it is especially prominent in the fourth season. "Partners in Crime" breaks with the format of both "Rose" and "Smith and Jones" by having a former companion seek the Doctor out. Donna has clearly been changed by her encounter with the Doctor in "The Runaway Bride," but she needs him around to keep effecting that change and inject wonder into her life--which he does, and as I've noted Donna's growth over the course of the season far outstrips Rose's or Martha's during their time with the Doctor. The Sontaran two-parter draws deliberate parallels between the Doctor and the twisted teenage genius Luke Rattigan, who is inspired by the Doctor to self-sacrifice. In that same story, the Doctor and Donna marvel and are somewhat put off by the effect he's had on Martha, turning her into a soldier. Both his genetic heritage and his parental influence help turn the Doctor's daughter Jenny into someone who rejects mindless soldiering and joyfully embraces a Doctor-ish lifestyle. "Midnight" explores a rare instance in which the Doctor fails to influence those around him. And then, of course, there are the three episodes which conclude the season, a veritable orgy of companions past and present joining forces with each other and the Doctor to save the universe.

Which is all very well and good, but long before the fourth season ends this all begins to seem rather samey and repetitive. Yes, it's affecting when Luke Rattigan sacrifices himself, but not as much as it would have been if Astrid hadn't done it before him in "Voyage of the Damned," and Jabe before her in "The End of the World," and probably others that I'm not remembering right now. And though I enjoyed the three-part finale, there is no denying that it keeps saying the same thing over and over again. "Turn Left" shows us the Doctor's former companions stepping up in his absence to save the world as he would have done. And then in "The Stolen Earth," the Doctor's former companions step up in his absence to save the world as he would have done. And then in "Journey's End," they... step up in his absence to save the world as he would have done.

Admittedly, there are nuances that distinguish the three stories. In "Turn Left" the companions work separately, and their victories are partial and often come at a high price. In "The Stolen Earth" the companions band together and work to contact the Doctor and bring him to Earth. In "Journey's End," a darker tone permeates the story as the companions threaten to take genocidal action, emulating the Doctor but also raising his ire and despair at the thought that he has created murderers. All of these variations, however, have shown up on the show before, and their louder and more insistent repetition here only cements my conviction that the season-ending three-parter has enough story in it for maybe two episodes. Though I like it the best of all three episodes (possibly because I like Donna much better than the Doctor) "Turn Left" contributes nothing to the season's overarching plot, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the storyline of "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End" was spread out over two episodes mainly because Davies wanted to break on a regeneration (which is a particular shame as, had he resisted the impulse to yank the viewers' chains, and introduced the botched regeneration and its consequences in the middle of an episode, the cop-out resolution he used might have been a great deal more palatable).

All of which is to say that the handover from Davies to Moffat comes not a moment too soon, not because Davies is a bad writer who has produced a bad show (he isn't and he hasn't, and I remain deeply impressed with some of his first season episodes, as well as "Midnight" and large parts of the fourth season three-part finale) or because Moffat is a flawless one (though I don't entirely agree with this article at io9--most particularly its claim that Sally Sparrow and River Song are bad characters--its core claim that Moffat has some definite and worrying issues, particularly when it comes to gender, is sound), but because Davies has clearly said what he wanted to say. Steven Moffat will take the Doctor in his own direction, good or bad--from his episodes it already seems clear that he is less interested in the Doctor as a buddy, as someone with whom companions have a deep, long-term relationship, and prefers to tell stories about people who see the Doctor from afar, for a moment, and who view him with awe, though this may very well change when he has to plot and people an entire season--and he will bring his own strengths and weaknesses to the show. But however the Moffat era turns out, it is plain that the show is ready for it. It's time for a new tune.

Many, Many Doctor Who Fans Just Punched the Air

The BBC press office reports:

Steven Moffat will succeed Russell T Davies as Lead Writer and Executive Producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who, which will broadcast on BBC One in 2010.

While this is obviously good news, I think it's a good idea not to let expectations run too high.  Though the plotting of all of Moffat's episodes thus far has been strong, I still haven't forgotten the spectacular implosion of Jekyll in its second half, in which Moffat's strong characters stood around spouting his incredibly clever and funny dialogue while nonsense of Torchwood levels happened to and around them.  It's also worth remembering that it's one thing to write a standout episode in a season, and quite another to oversee the entire season.  Though I'm sure that this is a step in the right direction for Who, we shouldn't expect the result to be thirteen weeks of "Blink."

And at any rate, there's the latter half of season four (in which I have been enjoying the Doctor-companion relationship almost as much as I did the one between Rose and Eccleston's Doctor, and all but ignoring the plots), and four Davies-penned specials to go.  It seems rather unkind to Davies--who is not a bad writer when he puts his mind to it, and who is ultimately responsible for bringing Who back to life--to make this announcement now.  As though it wasn't bad enough that so many fans have been actively wishing for Moffat to take his place for years, now he has to be a lame duck showrunner for another year, catering to a fandom which will, for the most part, be counting down the days until his term is over.

Flotsam & Jetsam

I watched three major SF-related shows this weekend, and I was hoping to get a blog post out of at least one of them, but instead I find myself with very little to say. So, I'm going to smoosh all three reactions into a single catch-all post, and hope that there's something more substantial for me to write about in the pipeline. (That said, I'm anticipating a bit of quiet around these parts during April.)

• Battlestar Galactica, "He That Believeth in Me" - That was surprisingly enjoyable. The first act plays to the show's greatest strength--cool and intense space battles--and wraps up in one hell of an interesting way which makes one of my favorite characters even more interesting, and might even get me over my dubiousness about the identities of the Cylons revealed in "Crossroads." The rest of the episode is also strong, as the show finally starts paying attention to an issue that should have started cropping up in discussions and conversations in the second season premiere--the question of what it means to be a Cylon, not physically or biologically (though some answers on that front might be nice), but emotionally and morally. I liked that this issue was being considered from both sides of the divide and from several perspectives, and that discussions of it called back earlier entries in the conversation such as Boomer's attempts to hold onto to her identity and Baltar's Cylon detector. In general, the characters feel more grounded, more like real, semi-rational people rather than the shouty, angsty messes they were last season--in fact, there's almost a sense that season 3 and its histrionics have been swept away, and that season 4 is picking up from season 2 and maybe moving in a direction that might make the show watchable again. Here's hoping.


• Southland Tales - oh, hell no. I've been very, very dubious about this film, not just because of its by-now infamous brutal reception at Cannes and the two-year delay in its release, but ever since I watched the Donnie Darko director's cut, and discovered that instead of reinstating some great character scenes, which would have fleshed out Donnie's family and Drew Barrimore's character (why doesn't anyone else get Barrimore to play bitchy and sarcastic? She's so great at it) Kelly tried to make his film comprehensible, and to foreground the dodgy SFnal plot device driving it. As if anyone fell in love with Donnie Darko for its plot. That same crucial failure of priorities is what drives Southland Tales into the ground, which is not to say that Kelly strove to make an easily understood movie. Quite the opposite--I doubt I've seen a messier, bittier, more non-linear and nonsensical film in my life.
  
  To even begin to understand the events of Southland Tales, I'd have to read the graphic novel prequel, trawl through the interactive website, and wait for the six-part mini-series version, of which the film is only the truncated latter half. For some reason, Richard Kelly thinks I'd be interested in doing this--in slowly puzzling out the details of his imaginary future--though he's given me no reason to do so. No interesting or appealing characters or relationships, no clever dialogue, no funny or touching set pieces. At its very best, Southland Tales is beautiful--several sequences towards its end recall the camera's dreamy dance around the characters during "Head Over Heels" or the powerful kinetic quality of the "Notorious" dance in Donnie Darko (it's pretty clear that what Richard Kelly really wants is to direct a musical--there's even a dream sequence in Southland Tales in which Justin Timberlake's characters lip-syncs to The Killers' "All These Things I've Done" while a bevy of chorus girls flit and flounce around him)--but this is hardly enough to sustain the film through 2.5 tedious and ultimately frustrating hours.


• Doctor Who, "Partners in Crime" - Pleasant, though not much more than that. Plot-wise, there's not much there there, but this is Doctor Who, and surely by now we've learned that unless Stephen Moffat or Paul Cornell's names are on the title page the plot will be something we've seen twelve times before, and an unbaked, unengaging thing at that. What's worth talking about in this episode is Donna, and here I see reason to be optimistic. The impression the episode gives off is that the writers have gotten as tired of the show's romantic subtext (and just plain text) as we have, and Donna is literally introduced as a character whose relationship with the Doctor is not in any way romantic. It remains to be seen whether the show will stick to its guns in this respect (and whether it will resurrect the romantic plotlines with either Martha or Rose--the latter, at least, seems almost certain), but I do like the dynamic that's developed between the Doctor and Donna. I like her acknowledgment that it's one thing to say that you're going to cast off mediocrity and live in an adventure, and quite another thing to make that adventure happen on your own--most especially because that adventurousness is something that Donna needs from the Doctor (as you may recall, my first inkling that something wasn't right about Martha was my realization that she had no need the Doctor could answer, and sure enough, that need soon appeared in the form of an unrequited love) but that is different than what Rose needed from him. I'm still waiting to see what Donna brings to the equation, other than companionship for the Doctor, but at least I have an understanding of the foundation of the relationship. This could turn out alright.

A Study in Contrasting Perspectives

Over at Strange Horizons, Adam Roberts reviews Doctor Who's third season. The first half of the review focuses on the season-ending three-parter, which Roberts criticizes for its myriad plotting malfunctions while ultimately concluding that

This question of puerility is, of course, the key one. As the Dobby-version of the Doctor was placed in a cage, I found myself wondering whether this was a deliberate allusion to the Sybil in Petronius's Satyricon, immortal but continually ageing, eventually so shrunken that she was kept in a bottle (this is the passage Eliot uses as the epigraph to The Waste Land: and when the boys come to ask her "what do you want?" she replies "I want to die"). But by the end of the episode it was clear that Davies was aiming at a lower age group. And that gave me pause. Had I so overwritten my experience of Who with pretentious adult expectations that any childishness in the show had become intolerable to me? Was I really criticising Who for being a kids' show?

When you put it like that of course it's obvious. Not only is Doctor Who a kids' show, its great glory inheres in that fact. In one sense the large adult fanbase it has accrued is an encumbrance to its proper functioning. My five-year old daughter watched "Last of the Time Lords" in a pleasurable agony of dramatic anticipation and excitement; only the fact that the sofa in our house is set against the wall prevented her from hiding behind it. She found the resolution thrilling and utterly satisfying. It ought to go without saying that fans—actual children or adults in touch with their childish hearts—will not be bothered by a Peter Pan ending, and are unlikely to mourn the fact that allusions to Petronius Arbiter and T. S. Eliot aren't more thoroughly worked through. Kids are not cynical jaded old hacks like me. There's a freshness to their spirits that the show captures precisely.

(While we're on the subject of Adam Roberts and Strange Horizons: if you haven't done so already, be sure to read Roberts's joint review of The Children of Húrin and Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. It's a very fine meditation on the differences between Tolkien-ian epic fantasy and the modern kind, as well as a heartfelt ode to Tolkien's frequently and unfairly maligned prose. Also, Strange Horizons's fund drive is ongoing.)

Even as Roberts chides himself for taking Doctor Who too seriously, Edward Champion is laying into Russell T. Davies for not taking the show seriously enough:

Russell T. Davies, you fucking wanker. How could you do this? How could you destroy a sizable chunk of the human population in the present day? How could you write scenes in which characters effortlessly infiltrate major executive scenarios? How could you write something so adverse to the show’s quirkiness, wit, intelligence, and charm?

I find myself, unsurprisingly, somewhere in the middle. I've always known that Ed judges Doctor Who more harshly than I do, and in spite of my problems with the third season--which, in my opinion, had a soporific beginning, an exceptionally strong middle, and a schizophrenic, yet ultimately enjoyable ending--I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it, as he does, 'flamboyant tripe.' On the other hand, I'm wary of the 'but it's for kids!' defense. It seems to me that Roberts is equating complexity with quality. Even at its finest, Doctor Who has never been complex, but then neither are many of the finest and best-written works of entertainment out there. Roberts is right to conclude that we need to judge the show on its own terms, which generally means not looking for T.S. Eliot references, but by the same token there are universal yardsticks that apply to all fiction. The issue isn't what Davies is trying to do--it's perfectly valid for him to aim for nothing more than entertainment--it's whether he does it well.

The scene in "Last of the Timelords," in which the Doctor is restored through the hopes and prayers of all humanity, is a perfect demonstration of this distinction. The core concept is actually quite strong. Having established the existence of a telepathic field surrounding the planet, through which the Master has manipulated humanity, it is, I think, internally consistent to argue that humanity can turn that link around. It ties into some of the show's core themes and some of the Doctor's most cherished beliefs--celebrating humanity's potential, embracing unity and rejecting violence. It's the execution that is flawed--the floating Tinker Bell Jesus Doctor, which fails on every level, denying the audience the catharsis they've been expecting, throwing us out of the story and leaving us frustrated. Rather than calling adult fans jaded, isn't it more accurate to say that with our greater experience comes greater discernment, the ability to tell good writing from bad?

That said, I don't think we should lose sight of the important point Roberts raises in his review. Davies and his staff are writing a show for kids, and as viewers and reviewers, we need to figure out what that means before we can try to enjoy or critique the show. We need to work out where to cut the writers slack and where to hold them to universal standards (just for the record: gigantic plot holes such as Jack shooting up the paradox machine when we had previously been told that to do so might destroy the universe fall in the second category). It might not be fair to watch Doctor Who as rigorously as Ed Champion seems to be, but neither is it fair to dismiss the show--its accomplishments as well as its failures--as nothing more than kids' stuff.

Everybody Dies!: Doctor Who Thoughts

There are some good reasons to draw comparisons between the recently completed Doctor Who two-parter, "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", and Steven Moffat's first season story "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," and not simply because the latter is the last time Who was as good as it's been these last two weeks. As Iain Clark points out in this entry on "The Family of Blood", "this two-parter does for World War One what 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' did for World War 2: make an abstract historical event into a real and relevant thing for a young generation of viewers."

The comparison seems particularly apt when one notes the two stories' emotional arcs. "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is a story that emerges from the bleakest despair into the most miraculous, unexpected hope and redemption. "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" tells an opposite, and extremely grim, story. It describes ordinariness giving way to horror, a simple, pleasant way of life--village dances, the schoolteacher courting the matron, and also of course casual racial and class prejudice--about to be devoured whole. John Smith's fantasy of a bucolic family life with Joan Redfern is impossible not only because he's merely a story with a three month shelf-life, but because their entire world is about to be overturned. "The children are safe," an aged Smith is assured at the end of his life, but of course they aren't--neither the boys at the school, nor the children of his and Redfern's imagination, who would have been born in the shadow of an unspeakable war, and come of age in time to fight in an even more terrible one. The Doctor's last encounter with Joan, in which she bitterly accuses him of bringing death to her world "on a whim", is the anti-"everybody lives!"

In a way, Joan Redfern gets the rawest deal of any New Who companion or potential companion. Especially in the Tennant era, the show's writers have made much of the parallel between the Doctor/companion relationship and a romantic one--the most successful episodes of Tennant's tenure have dealt with the similarities, and tragically great differences, between the two kinds of relationship. It makes sense, therefore, for John Smith, who may not be the Doctor but is certainly of the Doctor, to respond to Joan's companion-ish qualities with the human equivalent of the Doctor's 'come travel the galaxy with me'--a romantic overture. Turned back into the Doctor, he offers Joan the closest analogue he's capable of, but she's already been poisoned against him by getting to know John Smith. She doesn't get the chance to fall in love with the Doctor on his own terms the way Martha and Latimer do, or to see how travelling with him changes a person and makes them more Doctor-ish (I didn't catch this while watching the episode, but Latimer's characterization of himself as a coward, every time, is of course a direct quote from "The Parting of the Ways"). All she sees is what he's taken away from her and her community, and her reaction is appropriately venomous and disdainful. The Doctor leaves her to what we know is going to be a pretty harsh fate--the endless, thankless task of a nurse during wartime. As, in fact, he does to the rest of the episode's guest characters, while he and Martha walk away largely unscathed--Martha has got, if not what she wanted, then at least what she can get, and if the Doctor even comprehends what he's lost in Joan, he's certainly not unwilling to leave it behind.

I find myself wishing that the episode had cut off after that last, horrible encounter between Joan and the Doctor, or at least after the Doctor's ambivalent reunion with Martha (which, of course, includes the requisite takeback of any unambiguous romantic feelings expressed throughout the story). The cheerful farewell to Latimer, as well as the almost hopeful scene of him and Hutchinson in the trenches, undercut, perhaps deliberately, the horror of what the main story seems to be saying, the equivalence it draws between the Doctor and the first world war. The episode's final coda, in which an aged Latimer catches a glimpse of Martha and the Doctor at a memorial ceremony, all but demolishes the episode's horrific effect, just as time and distance tend to smooth the horror of war into a comfortable, and even slightly pleasant, melancholy. There's a part of me that wishes the episode had retained the courage of its premise, and not sought to console its viewers.

David Tennant does his best work thus far as John Smith, but the episode's standout scenes are the ones in which the Doctor peeks through from beneath Smith's human surface. The cricket ball scene in "Human Nature" is jubilant; the one in which Smith momentarily slides into the Doctor's arrogant mode of speaking is heartbreaking. Both of them, along with Tennant's performance as an initially oblivious, ultimately terrified, and always entirely human Smith finally manage the job of crystallizing the Doctor's otherness. In the past, I've said that what's been missing from Tennant's performance as an incomprehensible alien is a core of humanity, along the lines of the prickly vulnerability Christopher Eccleston brought to the role, and that absent that humanity, the Doctor will never amount to more than a mass of mannerisms. "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" is making me wonder whether my problem with Tennant's Doctor isn't a great deal simpler--maybe I just don't like him. What's human about Tennant's Doctor, I'm beginning to believe, is his immaturity and his selfishness, and while the show has in the past featured characters who have criticized or disliked the Doctor for these traits, they have mostly been villainous or unlikable themselves. "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" is the first instance in which viewers are allowed, or even encouraged, to dislike the Doctor, and it's probably as a result of that shift in perspective that I'm seeing Tennant's Doctor as a fully-fledged character for the first time.

Another character placed in a new light by this story is Martha, whose appeal had, up until "Human Nature," managed to escape me. When I wrote about Martha at the beginning of the third season, I said that I felt "Smith and Jones" was bullying me into liking her. That impression has persisted into the season, mostly because I don't feel Martha is being allowed to develop her own personality and her own reasons for traveling in the TARDIS. Yes, she's smart and resourceful, but last time I checked these were companion prerequisites, and I've yet to see anything about Martha that sets her out from the crowd. Why does she love the Doctor? Because she's the companion. Why has she walked away from her life for an indeterminate amount of time (not that the scene of her showing Joan up by reciting the bones of the hand wasn't fabulous, but did anyone else wonder how long she's going to keep calling herself a medical student when there's no indication that she intends to resume her training?) to travel the galaxy with him? Because that's what anyone would do. These answers aren't specific to Martha. Nothing seems to be specific to Martha except her infatuation with the Doctor, which increasingly seems to be her only motivation. For most of the third season, Martha has focused herself completely on a person who barely even notices she's there, while letting the wonders of the universe, for the most part, pass her by (which, by the way, is more or less the reason that Adam got chucked off the TARDIS with a hole in his head).

What "Human Nature"/"The Fellowship of Blood" does is turn Martha into the point of view character. The minute that happens--the minute we start seeing the story through her eyes instead of seeing her through the Doctor's eyes--she becomes about a thousand times more interesting, regardless of the fact that her actions are still Doctor-oriented. Instead of constantly telling us that she is fabulous--through a character who most of the time doesn't even seem to notice her presence--the episode finally gets around to showing us that she is. In her interactions with Joan, Jenny, and even John Smith, the focus is on Martha the person who happens to be in love with the Doctor, not Martha the smitten companion who has a family and a budding medical career on hold somewhere. The Doctor's obliviousness to Martha ceases to matter because she's become a character in her own right.

In the end, my only real complaint against "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" is that it is unlikely that any of these interesting character developments--or, for that matter, the more sophisticated storytelling--are likely to stick. Like Steven Moffat, Paul Cornell is an outsider to the writing staff, and he doesn't have a significant influence on the show's overall tone and overarching plotlines. Next week (or the week after next, if Moffat meets his previous high standards), the Doctor will be an arrogant prick again (and the viewers will be expected not to notice), and Martha will go back to being a doormat (I'm really starting to wonder where her storyline can possibly go at this point. Given that the Doctor is never going to give her what she wants, what's left for her but to leave in a huff?). I don't think it's even entirely fair to say that "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" is an example of what Doctor Who can do when it tries hard enough--it might be more accurate to say that it shows us that the show's premise, characters, and actors are capable of great things, but that the people in charge on a day-to-day basis are either incapable or unwilling to strive for those heights.

See, I told you this episode was grim.

Martha: A Few Thoughts

In general, I like. I do, however, wish that the episode had been a little more subtle in its attempts to make us like the character, or at least not recruited the Doctor for the job. I preferred the approach taken in "Rose," in which the Doctor is almost entirely dismissive of Rose even as we learn to appreciate her. With Martha, there was a palpable sense of the writers checking items off a list of good companion attributes--observant, inquisitive, smart, cool under pressure, willing to step up in a time of crisis--and making sure we noted each one by having the Doctor comment or at least react to them. Towards the end, it felt a little as though Martha's wonderfulness was being rammed down our throats, which is something that Rose managed to avoid for most of the first season.

I am, however, surprised at the reactions calling Martha a beacon of calm and rationality, specifically in contrast to Rose. I'm not sure I know which Rose most of these commenters are talking about. From her first introduction, Rose is singled out for being level-headed in a time of crisis, and all the way to the end of her run she deals with problems in a methodical, rational manner. She is also, by the way, the center of stability at the heart of her family group, although that group is smaller than Martha's. In fact, I'd say that most of the differences between Rose and Martha are differences of degree, not kind. Rose was rational; Martha is more so. Rose was the caretaker in her small family group; Martha is the peacemaker for an entire clan. The only immediately apparent and meaningful differences I can detect between the two women are that Martha is not, as of this point, in love with the Doctor (for whatever value of 'in love' you want to give to the relationship between the two characters at the end of the second season), and that she is educated and middle class. I'm rather hoping that it's the former, not the latter, that is at the root of the many effusive reactions to the new character--which usually end up disparaging Rose either implicitly or explicitly.

Much as I enjoy the character, I am a little concerned about the nature of her fledgling relationship with the Doctor. With Rose, there was a sense that both characters got something meaningful out of the relationship. The Doctor needed companionship, someone to help him overcome the trauma of the Time War (as others have noted, the corresponding trauma of losing Rose has given Ten a much needed sense of depth). Rose needed a sense of purpose, some direction in a life that had previously been stagnating. At the end of "Smith and Jones", I couldn't tell what, beyond the fact that no one in their right mind would say no to the offer, would compel Martha to join the Doctor--what does she need that he can give her?

After a second viewing, however, I'm starting to wonder whether, in this respect, Martha isn't Rose's exact opposite. If Rose's life lacked direction, Martha's has it to spare. She's overwhelmed with responsibilities - she has to pay the rent, pass her exams, smooth her family's ruffled feathers, become a successful doctor, marry a suitably educated and wealthy man and have smart, beautiful children. If Rose was expected to know her place and be satisfied with it, Martha is expected to strive. It's easy to imagine how the chance to step away from these responsibilities might be very appealing.

The problem with this character arc is that however much the Doctor and his companions would like to pretend otherwise, Doctor Who isn't actually a show about the time-and-space travel equivalent of taking a year off to bum on a beach in Phuket. Being around the Doctor is practically a master class in taking responsibility. I'm not sure how Martha and the Doctor's insistence that she can hop on for a quick jaunt on the TARDIS and then step back into her life, completely unchanged, fits into this ethos, although obviously it won't be long before their arrangement becomes open-ended. It just seems a bit strange to me to start with a character who had already accepted the responsibility of saving her own small corner of the world long before the Doctor came into her life, and for whom the opportunity to travel with the Doctor is a chance to put that responsibility aside.

Holy Crap

Scroll down to the bottom of the interview for some Doctor Who casting news almost as exciting as Christopher Eccleston's guest role on Heroes.

(Via.)

And Now, the Torchwood Parodies Begin

Under Torch Wood: A Parody for Voices

Separate from the government,
outside the police,
beyond the United Nations,
independent of the judiciary,
not voting in council elections,
distinct from the Brownies,
non-members of the AA,
think iPods are rubbish,
cancelled the milk,
no TV licence.

The conclusion seems spot-on, too.

(Via)

One Tiny Observation About Russell T. Davies' Casanova

When I wrote about Russell T. Davies' 2003 miniseries, The Second Coming, I remarked that Davies and star Christopher Eccleston carried over a great many of the lead character's mannerisms and attitudes when they created the character of the ninth Doctor. Which, at the time, was rather amusing. Now that I've seen Davies' 2005 mini, Casanova (pretty good. Very funny. Not nearly as smart or as moving as The Second Coming, but then, what is?), starring David Tennant, I'm starting to worry. You see, Tennant's Casanova is the tenth Doctor.

It's not just a matter of the actor repeating some physical tics (and anyway, I've seen Tennant in one or two other things and, while he many not have the greatest range in recorded history, he's certainly got more than one character in him). When Tennant reads his lines, you can see him wearing a pin-striped suit instead of gaudy, quasi-period dress. And those lines are thoroughly Doctor-ish:

Casanova: I'm a spy.
Grimani: A spy?
Casanova: Yes, that's right, a spy. Of course, being a spy I shouldn't say I'm a spy or I could get spied by a spy.
Grimani: I suppose you can prove it?
Casanova: What? You want me to spy on something? Look, there's a canal, I spied it. Look, it's still there. Look, and again.

In Davies' hands, Casanova is a thoroughly good man whose default mental state is an almost overwhelming selfishness. A man with the attention span of a hummingbird who is capable of a terrifying single-mindedness ("Are you a magician?" Casanova is asked by a fellow prisoner when an unjust accusation lands him in prison. He thinks for a beat. "I can be"). A seductive innocent. Sound familiar? (Honestly, just see for yourselves.)

In many ways, this actually clears up a lot of the issues with Tennant's performance as the tenth Doctor (while, obviously, raising other issues with Davies' writing of said character). No wonder the two best episodes in Doctor Who's second season were "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "School Reunion," which both repositioned the Doctor as an interstellar lothario, engaged in an endless sequence of deeply meaningful romances with women whom he eventually abandons. Unfortunately, this characterization isn't a perfect fit, and whereas Casanova can be summed up as a pleasure-seeker who always wants more than he can get, the Doctor is--or should be--a little more complicated. The result, as I've noted elsewhere, is a character without a heart. Now we know why.

Self-Promotion 9 - Special Doctor Who Edition

It's Doctor Who week at Strange Horizons! The reviews section is dedicated to contemplations of the show's second season, kicking off today with Iain Clark's Doctor Who and the Nostalgia Factor, which discusses "School Reunion" and companions past and present. Tomorrow, Tim Phipps will be chiming in with his take on "Love & Monsters" and the fannish mindset, and on Wednesday it'll my turn to offer some observations on the season finale. Graham Sleight will review the season as a whole on Thursday. New reviews will go live every day at SH's reviews page--enjoy.

Miracle of Miracles

With impeccable timing, Television Without Pity has decided to recap The Second Coming (part 1 is up, part 2 is presumably upcoming). The bad news is that they gave the job to Jacob; the good news, that for something by Jacob the recap is actually quite readable. There's none of the fawning adoration that made me drop his Battlestar Galactica recaps, and because The Second Coming wasn't primarily intended to be funny, he can't wring all the fun out of it the way he does with Doctor Who and Farscape. He's also being relatively succinct (20 pages for a 90 minute show, when he usually does more for 45-minute episodes), which means that instances of using as many words as possible to make the fucking obvious seem profound are kept to a bare minimum.

Still not funny, though.

The Second Coming

"You should see Russell T. Davies' The Second Coming," Niall Harrison told me. "It's about a man who thinks he's the second coming of Christ, and he really is. It's good."

"Erm." I said.

My reservations had something to do with the obvious ridiculousness of the premise, but also with my general distaste for the way mainstream, secular fiction tends to treat religion and the idea of God. At the far ends of the spectrum are those whose work is primarily intended to preach and convert--the Tim LaHayes and Philip Pullmans--and they are easily dismissed. At the center, however, one more of than not discovers a wishy-washy, feelgood approach that I, for one, find more dispiriting than any amount of religious or anti-religious fanaticism. Joan of Arcadia is a good example--it posited a God so benign, so pleasant, that he or she seriously had nothing better to do than help a teenage girl forge better relationships with her parents and teach her Valuable Lessons, and who reveals themselves to a chosen person--a prophet--in order to perform random kindnesses and minor improvements. A paltry god, bereft of wonder and grandeur. Especially given Davies' well-advertised atheism, I expected The Second Coming to, at best, offer an easily-digested New Age peace-and-love message. At worst, I expected it to present a mean parody of the story of Christ.

What I got, instead, was one of the kindest, most affectionate, and cleverest examinations of the question of faith in the modern world I've ever seen (which, admittedly, is damning with faint praise given how limited the field is). Steve Baxter (Christopher Eccleston) is an amiable but aimless slob who has spent the better part of twenty years working the same dead-end job and hanging out at the same pub with the same people. He's also the son of God, and when a two AM kiss from his best friend awakens that knowledge within him, he starts a planet-wide revolution. Announcing himself by turning night into day within a crowded Manchester football stadium, Steve informs the people of the world that the time has come for a third Testament. "It's finally happened," he tells them. "Heaven is empty, and hell is bursting at the seams." If the Testament isn't produced and delivered with a set number of days, Steve promises, the world will come to an end.

What's most impressive about The Second Coming is that given a premise so rife with avenues of discussion, it deftly and intelligently comments on so many of them. When Steve flippantly points out to an excited Catholic priest that while some members of the Church have been trying to get people to listen, others have been "shagging choir-boys," the priest angrily retorts "every day someone is laughing at us, every day someone tears us down, and you're doing the same." It's a two-minute conversation that both distills and offers a starting point for an hours-long discussion, but the story itself keeps going. Shouting over his shoulder to that same priest (a character who sadly disappears soon after), Steve points out that the Church has no more authority than any other religion on the planet--in the wake of his arrival, they have all been rendered defunct. But Davies also recognizes that religion is as much a matter of culture and history as it is of faith--more so, in fact. It'll take a great deal more than irrefutable proof of one religion's correctness to wipe away millennia of religious persecution, holy wars, discrimination, prejudice, and injustices, and Davies understands this. In an essay about Davies' writing for Doctor Who, Paul Cornell recently pointed out the benevolence and the harshness with which Davies examines closed, obsessive groups. He was speaking of fannish obsessions, specifically in the recent Who episode "Love & Monsters", but Davies first extended that keen yet affectionate insight to religious obsession in The Second Coming. His people remain human even in the face of the divine, and their reactions to it are humanly diverse and irrational (compare that diversity with Philip Pullman's approach in the His Dark Materials novels, in which everyone who believes in God is evil in exactly the same way). Davies manages this without dragging God down to our level--his divinity, even clothed in the flesh of an ordinary Joe, is still divine.

Ultimately, The Second Coming isn't Steve's story. Christopher Eccleston's performance is winning and convincingly numinous, both when addressing the multitudes and in his private moments (Eccleston and Davies seem to have carried over a great deal of Steve's humanist attitudes and frenetic mannerisms when creating the ninth Doctor, which just kills me), but the story doesn't linger long on the dilemma of a god in man's body--the situation is what it is, and Steve accepts it unquestioningly. In fact, 'unquestioning' is a good general description of Steve's attitude, and at around the halfway point, the narrative recedes from him and starts paying closer attention to his aforementioned best friend, Judith (an excellent Lesley Sharp), the significance of whose name, I am mortified to admit, completely escaped me until about 20 minutes before the miniseries' end.

Judith is determinedly atheistic, not only in the face of undeniable miracles performed by Steve, but in spite of being repeatedly accosted by demons--humans who have given in to fear and despair and been possessed by Steve's opposite numbers. Judith is a doubter and a questioner--she starts out trying to find a rational, scientific explanation for Steve's miracles (only to be confronted by the fact that at the core of any scientific explanation she will eventually discover something not of this world), and later attempts to bargain Steve down from godhood. "I believe that something's happening. I believe that you're psychic or Martian but I don't believe you're the son of God," she tells him. Once she accepts that Steve is divine, Judith still asks questions: what happens if Steve doesn't find the third Testament? Why won't he perform miracles indiscriminately? And, most importantly, is the measurable, provable existence of God in our lives really a good thing? Ultimately, Judith's atheism is a question of ideology, not faith. She is brought to believe in the existence of God, but not in the wisdom of bowing down to him.

It's Judith who finally realizes what the third Testament is, and what Steve has to do in order to save humanity, but Davies puts his own heartbreaking yet fantastic twist on the story. Steve has to die, of course, but instead of establishing it, his death will mean the end of the whole system. Heaven and hell will stop. The angels and the demons will go away. Humanity will be left to its own devices. Davies isn't the first to write such a story, and it's not at all uncommon for anti-religious fiction to posit the existence of God, if for no other reason than that there are only a limited number of narratives that can be wrung out of 'but really, there's nothing there.' For the most part, however, such stories presume that God is malevolent, or at the very least ineffectual. The Second Coming is the only atheistic story I'm aware of in which God is both benevolent and wise. Recognizing that his system is irreparably broken, that the loss of faith that is leaving humanity vulnerable to the predation of demons is incurable, God sends his only (well, second) son to us to die in order to free us from a cosmology that we have outgrown. In the end, we are told by a character being interviewed in the story's epilogue, at the moment of Steve's death, we were all believers. It's a curiously joyous ending, in that it offers us the best of both worlds--we know that we were created by a loving being, but we also don't have to live up to its rules and demands--while at the same time describing the death of something wonderful.

To a fantasy reader, the story of The Second Coming is recognizable in another guise, as a tale about the departure of wonder (and to take a harshly atheistic approach, there really shouldn't be a difference in the way we perceive stories about magic and stories about divine miracles). In modern fantasy, it's more common to see fiction about its return--Crowley's Little, Big, Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell--or fiction that denies that wonder ever existed--Miéville's Bas-Lag novels--but intelligent authors of all stripes recognize that wonder comes at a price, and that its removal is also costly (unintelligent authors pretend that wonder and reason can coexist peacefully). The Second Coming is the only work of modern fantasy I'm aware of (and I'm sure there will be plenty of readers ready to offer their own examples) that ends with the removal of wonder.

In the miniseries' final scene, six years after the events it describes, Judith runs into Johnny, a sad and lonely man who had been possessed. Johnny is still sad and still lonely, but at least entirely human, and he comments to Judith that for months after Steve's death he expected some return, a miracle or a sign that the son of God wasn't entirely gone. So did I, Judith responds, but there never was one, and she now believes there never will be--"That's exactly the thing I got rid of. Do you think I was right?" Johnny leaves without answering. For all that it respects the opposing view, The Second Coming is unabashedly biased--as much in its premise as in its conclusion. There are plenty of people in the world--perhaps the majority--who feel God in their lives, who don't see themselves in Davies' middle-class, modern Westerners, and who would be horrified at the thought of all humans being stripped of their immortal souls. So it is to Davies' credit that he at least invites us to ponder what we lose with Steve's death and that, in spite of agreeing with it, he gives us the option of arguing with Judith and Steve's decision.

Whoville

I was pointed in the direction of Andrew Rilstone's blog during a discussion about the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. If Rilstone's keen wit and crisp prose weren't enough to keep me coming back for more, there was the fact that, while his reactions to the individual films were largely the same as mine, his ultimate feelings about them were the complete opposite. I've made a rather thorough review of Andrew's blog (and his older website) since then, and have discovered in him a rare treasure--a person with whom it a genuine joy to disagree. Although Andrew's perspective is frequently more harshly fannish than my own (how, for example, can you damn Peter Jackson's films and praise The Phantom Menace?), he is such a perceptive and insightful writer that I always walk away from his posts with something new to think about.

Andrew is also largely the reason I ended up watching the new incarnation of Doctor Who. You may have heard, from various media sources, that the SciFi Channel's reimagination of Battlestar Galactica is the best new science fiction on TV, but this is simply not the case. With its overpowering exuberance, compelling performances, and infectious humor, Who leaves Galactica struggling for second place. For most of the first season (and before it), Andrew provided a running commentary at the level of excellence I'd grown accustomed to expect from him, but just at the season finale, he decided to become succinct. My hopes that this entry was merely meant to provide Andrew with an interlude to gather his thoughts in preparation for a marvelously detailed critique of the episode and the season in general, hopefully on the scale of his six- (or possibly eight-) part series about Revenge of the Sith have thus far proved unfounded. Happily, I now have a forum of my own (it's probably not overstating the case to say that I started this blog in order to have a place from which to discuss Andrew's thoughts about DW).

So, without knowing Andrew's fully-formed opinion (which, at the time of the entry's posting, he may not have known himself) and with the understanding that everything I know about Doctor Who I learned from Andrew himself and this extremely helpful Wikipedia entry, let's answer Andrew's question.

Is the resolution of "The Parting of the Ways" a deus ex machina?

Andrew's accused DW of taking the deus ex machina route before. In his blog entry of May 11th, he writes:

Another problem is the show's embarrassing fondness for deus ex machina. ... it is getting wearisome that each week, there is a magic button that the Doctor or one of his companions can push to end the story. (Week 1: The Doctor happens to have a cannister of "alien destroying chemical" in his pocket. Week 2: There happens to be a "defeat the baddies" button hidden on the ship. Week 3: The guest star realises that the aliens go away if your turn the gas on. Week 4/5 The Doctor has a secret code word to call in an airstrike Week 7: The alien goes away if you turn the heating up.)

Which seems to me a rather drastic interpretation of what a deus ex machina is. Yes, in the first episode of the season, the Doctor had a vial of alien-killing chemical on him. However, as Andrew himself pointed out in his review of the episode, the story starts in media res and is told from Rose's perspective. For all we know, the Doctor came up with the formula for the alien-killing chemical after years of careful study, gathered the ingredients at great personal risk (making his way through the slave-pits of Ur, the icy slopes of Mount Eee, and the Jaxen-beast infested wastelands of Makek), and combined them in a chemical reaction so dangerous and volatile that it has been declared illegal and punishable by death on three different planets. Or he picked it up at the supermarket on his way home from the movies. The point of the story isn't how the Doctor saved the world from the Nestene consciousness but how he met Rose, and how, when he very nearly failed to save the world from the Nestene consciousness, she risked her own life to help him.

It's a theme that recurs throughout the season. Yes, there's a Stop Platform One From Exploding button in "The End of the World", but the Doctor only reaches it because Jabe sacrifices her life so that he can do so (and because he walks through a series of giant swinging blades, but the only proper reaction to this kind of obstacle is a Gwen Demarco shriek of "This episode was badly written!" Let us never speak of it again). Yes, Dickens figures out that turning up the gas weakens the aliens in "The Unquiet Dead" (and really, is a solution still a deus ex machina if it has to be figured out?), but without Gwyneth's sacrifice, the rift still would have opened. The "Aliens of London"/"World War Three" two-parter isn't about how the Doctor bravely defeats the aliens but about how he struggles with the question of saving the world but risking Rose and Harriet Jones' life, and how Rose, Harriet, Jackie and Mickey accept that this is a reasonable trade.

What Andrew might be trying to say, for which deus ex machina might be a misleading catch-phrase, is that the resolutions of most of the episodes in this season of Doctor Who have been simple. Most of them are arrived at with great ease. Quite a few rely on technobabble.* "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is a good example of both, and do you know what? It's still my favorite story of the season. Because it's eerie and really quite frightening. Because the guest characters are interesting and well-acted. Because Jack has instant chemistry with Rose and the Doctor. Because there are some wonderful lines and great character moments. And, of course, because of the Doctor's sheer infectious joy at the end.

In almost every episode this season, the parts have been greater than the whole. The minute the crisis is introduced, you know exactly how "Father's Day" is going to end. In fact, from the moment the Doctor stupidly agrees to take Rose back to the day of her father's death, you know exactly how the episode will play out, from beginning to end. Nevertheless, "Father's Day" is a grueling, heart-wrenching 45 minutes of television (my own opinion is probably biased--I lost my father at a young age before I could really get to know him--but I know other people reacted similarly). In an ideal world, would the DW writers be able to wrap their excellent character development, good lines, and great humor inside good stories with interesting and exciting resolutions? Yes. But if forced to choose between the former and the latter, I know which I prefer. In the long run, I'd like to see better stories on this show, but it's the strength of the characters that convinces me they are worth waiting for.

But I've veered away from the question. Is the resolution of "The Parting of the Ways" a deus ex machina?

On the one hand, yes, of course. There is literally a god nestled in the machine of the TARDIS. It emerges at the end of the episode and saves the world, taking the entire Dalek fleet apart with a wave of its hand. If our characters are playing pieces on a chess board, the ending of "The Parting of the Ways" is the player's hand, sweeping away the entire opposing side and even bringing back the knight we lost in the previous turn.

And yet. A deus ex machina ending is unsatisfying not because the god emerging from the machine is so powerful but because we don't know why it has done so. For some reason, this all-powerful creature has allied itself with our hero and against our villain. For some reason, it has taken time out of its busy schedule to meddle in the affairs of creatures as insignificant to itself as ants are to us. Why? Why now? If the god in the TARDIS cares about the Doctor so much, couldn't it simply have prevented the Dalek Emperor from escaping in the first place?

The answer to these questions is the reason that the resolution to "The Parting of the Ways" isn't a deus ex machina. The god in the TARDIS doesn't emerge of its own volition. It has to be forced. It has to be carried, at great personal risk, by Rose, who very nearly loses her life in the process.

It isn't another easy ending. In order for the Dalek army to be defeated, the following things have to happen:

• The Doctor has to choose to preserve Rose's life and send her and the TARDIS out of harm's way.
  
• Rose has to reject The Doctor's request that she live a normal life and choose to return to help him.
• Rose has to realize that Bad Wolf is a message for her, and what it means, and how she can force the TARDIS to return to Satellite 5.
  
• Mickey and Jackie have to choose to help Rose to accomplish this.
  
• Rose has to risk her life by not only returning to a losing battle but also by looking into the heart of the TARDIS**.
  

It is through all of these decisions, and through Rose's sacrifice, that the world is saved. Nothing could be further from a deus ex machina.

Sacrifice, as previously mentioned, shows up again and again throughout the season. It is the question at the core of the ninth Doctor's character. Most of us would agree that sacrificing ourselves to save many others is justified and right. It's a decision that requires 'merely' courage and selflessness. But what happens when you're asked to sacrifice not your own life but the lives of others? Is it right to risk the world in order to save a loved one? Is it right to sacrifice an entire planet to stop a deadly menace? The first season of the new Doctor Who started with a character who had answered that last question with an affirmative, and was suffering from the crippling doubt that naturally resulted from that decision. At the end of the season, the Doctor refused to make the choice again; instead, both he and Rose chose to sacrifice their own lives for someone they loved. Taken as one continuous narrative, the season is not only a good character exploration or a collection of funny lines, but a damn fine story with a completely satisfying ending. In the end, the new Doctor Who is greater than the sum of its parts.

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* I suspect that for Andrew, a DW fan from way back who is used to multi-episode storylines, the quick and dirty resolution of so many of the stories in the first season rankles far more than it does for someone like myself. Endings are famously a problem for shows like DW, in which potential menaces are limited only by the writers' imagination--just look at Buffy (no weapon forged can defeat this demon, so let's attack him with a bazooka!)--but if you're already reeling from what appears to be a truncated format, the rush to solve the problem in the episode's final act must seem particularly inorganic.

** One of the great things about "The Parting of the Ways" is that it retroactively justifies the existence of "Boom Town", one of the season's weakest entries. That episode did have a deus ex machina ending, but it served to teach Rose about the heart of the TARDIS and its dangers.