Doctor Who series 5 episodes 12-13

In his final review, Tom Steward dons a fez and faces his greatest enemies…

The Pandorica Opens

I’d grown weary of the ongoing storyline about a crack in time and space and was hardly looking forward to this arc-heavy two-part finale. As far as I was concerned, the serial storyline was an unwelcome afterthought to the best and tightest one-off episodes (Vampires of Venice, The Lodger).

Inevitably, I found the plot developments fairly uninteresting in this opener. The viewer was bombarded with story information designed to assert a coherent narrative behind the season. In fact, it was increasingly obvious that Moffat was clutching at straws narratively, dazzling the viewer with plot points to disguise gaping holes in plausibility and logic. In particular, the intergalactic rogue’s gallery of villains and re-imagining of the living plastic Autons as intelligent androids raised more questions than answers.

What alleviated this unbalanced storytelling in The Pandorica Opens was the sheer sense of adventure. Bare-back horse riding, archaeological excavations of Stonehenge, torch-lit underground labyrinths – it was like a much improved Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In particular, Amy’s tussle with the various body parts of a Cyberman was breathlessly exciting and frightening. Light costume drama moments concerning the Romans and River Song’s alliance helped a lot.

It was pleasing to see that Moffat had avoided many of the pitfalls of the Davies-era season finales. There were no Doctor-companion reunions or looming threats to the Earth. The danger was far more conceptual and universal and the episode only went as far as stockpiling former Dr. Who adversaries. Moffat also managed to rectify the off-key writing of River Song in the Weeping Angels two-parter, turning her into a more straightforwardly compelling action heroine, a shift in persona that Alex Kingston clearly relished.

Karen Gillan showed herself to be the equal of Smith’s melodrama with her extraordinary facial performance during the Cyberman fight, the programme clearly now trusting in the actors much more to carry action sequences, rather than special effects. Smith’s performance, despite another unnecessary speech utterly unsuited to his vocal style, was magnificent – statuesque and operatically tragic in his futile struggles against his inevitable fate and the concomitant end of time and space.

The Big Bang

The real pleasures of this final episode lay in its time-hopping first half-hour. The breathless opening section of The Big Bang in which the Doctor and his companions jumped around time and space creating a number of mini-paradoxes was warm, witty, brainteasing and done with a refreshing lightness of touch.

These vignettes nicely undercut the portentousness that was a hangover from the tragic ending of the opener, drawing a line under the solemnity and self-pity introduced into the finales of Davies’ seasons. Moving from elegiac tour-de-force to adorable slapstick, Smith’s performance catalysed this tonal shift, recalling the way that Patrick Troughton’s tomfoolery would temper some of his darkest serials (e.g. The Invasion).

This was followed by an equally wonderful mid-section in which the Doctor and his companions were chased around the National Museum by a Dalek. Thrilling yet understated, the sequence introduced peril into stark yet familiar locations, just as the programme used to draw maximum excitement out of its mundane settings. My first memory of Dr. Who was of Daleks pursuing Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred through a secondary school (Remembrance of the Daleks), and it is burned into my brain to this day. Were I a young viewer now, I think the museum sequences would have the same effect on me.

For my money, the episode started to fall apart in the denouement, as major plot developments and resolutions started to take place in characters’ imaginations. This made for an insubstantial end to the season, Moffat using memory and subjectivity to give him carte blanche to do what he wanted with characters and solutions to narrative dilemmas. Despite these reservations about Moffat’s storytelling abilities, what makes him superior to Davies as a writer is his comprehension of how to do long-form narrative arcs. Rather than building and building to an explosive season climax and then resetting the clock the following year as before, Moffat kept back a number of key story points (the origins of the crack, the identity of River Song) for future episodes, suggesting that his tenure may have a single story arc running through it.

Thanks to Tom for his brilliant blog posts! For those coming late to the party, here is his series rundown, and parts one, two, three and four of his episode reviews!

Doctor Who series 5 episodes 7-9

Tom Steward has happy dreams but finds something unpleasant underground…

Amy’s Choice

A fantastic episode in every sense of the word. Stories set predominantly in fantasy spaces have a long history in the show. The third Dr. Who serial, a two parter called Edge of Destruction, had the Doctor and his companions psychically induced by the TARDIS into paranoid fantasies. Over the decades we’ve had The Mind Robber set in a parallel universe of fiction and several stories which explore the Freudian dream world of ‘The Matrix’ on the Doctor’s home planet Gallifrey such as The Deadly Assassin or The Ultimate Foe.

Stories such as these have been thin on the ground for a long time now, but Amy’s Choice made a case for commissioning more in the future. Sitcom writer Simon Nye (Men Behaving Badly) seemed an unusual choice for this episode but his ornate and surreal dialogue enlivened the ponderous aspects of the episode: ‘If you had any more tawdry quirks, you’d have to open a tawdry quirk shop’.

Smith reached a new level of brilliance with his facility for absurd comedy and sublime moments of acting weirdness. Toby Jones is one of Britain’s finest screen actors and as the Dream Lord he provided one of the most compelling, entertaining and exquisitely devised villains in the show’s history. This was also an extremely challenging episode that showed violence towards old people as part of its fantasy plotting, something I found very brave and consonant with the new series’ proclivities towards adult horror fiction.

The Hungry Earth

This was a promising start to a much-anticipated two-parter heralding the return of some long-neglected Dr. Who monsters: underground-dwelling, prehistoric reptiles The Silurians. The Silurians appeared twice during the Pertwee/Letts era in Doctor Who and The Silurians and The Sea Devils, which raised moral quandaries about genocide and colonialism. A hotchpotch of references to the Pertwee serials of the early 1970s (the drill from Inferno, the rural Welsh factory town of The Green Death), this was entertaining enough for one episode, however gratuitous and jumbled the homage often seemed.

The tendency towards smaller casts and settings (another village community) seen throughout the season made this serial a lot more enjoyable and dramatically successful than Russell T. Davies’ many attempts to create the TV equivalents of bloated Hollywood blockbuster disaster movies, like the 2009 Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned. This trip down seventies lane whet the appetite for the comeback of the Silurians but it was clear from the little we saw of them in this opener that they were to be a let-down. They were visually unexciting, confusingly written, and far too humanised even in this instalment. This was, however, a prime example of the show addressing the nation’s children and their issues by making good use of Smith’s chemistry with younger actors. The scenes involving the Doctor and his burgeoning friendship with the dyslexic son of the man kidnapped by the Silurians are amongst the best in this season.

Cold Blood

Cold bloody awful! This was a shocking conclusion to the two parter. The Silurians made an ill-advised return in the Peter Davison serial Warriors of the Deep in 1984 and had become dull and repetitive. Here they were even worse.

Ensnared by stodgy, dialogue-heavy scenes, the actors playing the Silurians – resembling characters from early 90s anthromorphic cartoons such as Dinosaurs or Fraggle Rock - never had a chance. No story of any interest emerged once the characters had entered the Silurians’ underground society. Moreover, the opportunity to discuss moral dilemmas surrounding indigenous populations, arguably the original motive behind these monsters, was completely missed. Environmentalism and coalition governments were on the agenda, but completely scuffed by pretensions of epic science-fiction and abrupt shifts between political debate and action.

Other causes for concern were the deeply misogynistic subplots suggesting women’s inability to make clear moral choices and their inferiority to benevolent patriarchs. The use of voiceover, which leadened many of the stories in the Davies/Tennant years, especially finale The End of Time, was similarly pointless here. Cold Blood was partially redeemed by a final ten minutes which gave an emotional clout to the ongoing ‘crack in time’ arc. Smith also deserves credit for still being able to provide several moments of classic Dr. Who overacting. His hammy writhing on the Silurians’ medical examination board was worthy of the finest pantomime of Pertwee and Troughton while his look of horror at the close of the episode fondly recalled Hartnell’s spine-tingling stares into the distance.

Who Dares Wins

I’m thrilled to introduce a new feature today, the Squeezegut Alley guest blog. We’re starting off with an absolute corker, as well. Here’s Tom Steward, with the first in a series considering the latest run of Doctor Who.

Who’s got the best show on television? Dunno. The Sopranos, probably. But only a matter of weeks after producer Steven Moffat and actor Matt Smith took over the programme, Dr Who is now eminently watchable again and could be a thing of greatness once more.

I’d become completely disenchanted with the direction the series had taken with Russell T Davies and David Tennant at the helm. It wasn’t simply enough to enjoy the Doctor’s adventures, you now had to worship the character and lead actor, whether you cared to or not. That combined with a limited range of storytelling and a stasis in characterisation brought the programme to the brink of credibility, almost as severely as producer John Nathan-Turner did with the series in the mid-1980s.

It’s a testament to the endlessly malleable format of Who that these worrying trends were reversed so quickly, and to Moffat and Smith that this was done without losing audience figures or denting the popularity of the central character. Moffat drastically improved the quality of drama, comedy and, in particular, horror of the programme over the last five years when he was an occasional writer. Though not a faultless producer (as some would have it!), since he took that role the series has regained many competencies. The pacing of episodes and series is now much more skilful, with a proper grasp of what it means to do long form storytelling, and not just cosmetically as a branding device as it was wielded under Davies.

The increase in the level of wit and successful comic writing since Moffat took over is undeniable (though writers Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Simon Nye need to take some credit here too), the show no longer relying on embarrassing slapstick to fill its funny quota. Moffat’s teleplays are, however, too densely plotted and overcomplicated on the whole, typically mistaking elaborate writing for complexity. Though this occasionally works well, with scenes involving the threat of the unknown and the horror that comes from it, it can often swamp the actors’ fine work and fog up the storytelling. Moffat has done an amazing job, however, in unwriting the mistakes of the Davies/Tennant era; letting characters be critical of the Doctor rather than standing around and admiring him, not trying to force the Doctor to be self-consciously fashionable or zeitgeist, disproving the necessity of a Doctor-companion love interest, and making the Doctor mysterious in motives and character again.

Undoubtedly the best decision Moffat made (or will ever make) as a producer was in casting Matt Smith. He’s the best thing to happen to the show in literally decades and could be the best character actor of his generation. He ranks amongst the finest portrayals of the role (and has probably already surpassed Tom Baker – most people’s default ‘favourite’ Doctor) and has re-invested the part with a genuine oddness that it has lacked at least since the re-launch in 2005.

The great Doctors have always known, seemingly instinctively, where to pitch their performance; when to overact, when to be measured etc. and Smith has that impulse. He can ham it up when being electrocuted by alien weaponry but knows when to brood or play the role (in the immortal words of Jon Pertwee) ‘straight down the middle’ – a quality sadly lacking in Tennant’s portrayal of the role, which was permanently wide-eyed and breathless. Not only is Smith’s performance a touching tribute to previous Doctors (especially Patrick Troughton – at one time the most lovable man on television!), it’s also a completely original interpretation of the role. Smith plays the Doctor as a socially awkward fish-out-of-water, something that (surprisingly) the show has only ever really hinted at before. Smith’s Doctor is a gangly twine ball of bad manners and inappropriate behaviours, rude or naive social conduct, completely unsettled when talking to the average human adult.

One of the delights of the new series is the introduction of more child actors into the main cast. Smith’s rapport with children is fantastic and we get a genuine sense of the show wanting to speak directly to children, something it did only intermittently in the previous five years despite concessions to kids’ TV (Barrowman, Piper et al.). It’s no coincidence that Smith’s Doctor talks to children like adults and adults like children. Once again, Dr Who shows that nothing about it is irrevocable and that new producers, actors and writers can thankfully turn the screws on old ones.