Archive for Media

Doctor Who: Closing Time

2011.09.28 at 23:20 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , , ,

The Lodger was brilliant, easily Gareth Roberts’ best contribution to the series up to that point and one of my favorite episodes. So, when I heard about a “sequel” story involving Craig and written by Roberts, I was excited. When I learned it had Cybermen in it, well… Cybermen don’t have the best track record, but I trusted Roberts to deliver a pretty good Cybermen story.

And he did. In fact, ‘pretty good’ is a very appropriate adjectival phrase for the episode. It wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t risk dislodging The Lodger as Roberts’ best episode. But it was a fun, light-hearted romp involving Cybermen with some very interesting moments. I was particularly amused by the Doctor’s conversations with Stormageddon, and the return of the Cybermat.

But there’s not a whole lot more to say about the episode itself. Well, maybe a few things. What made The Lodger work so well was the way it thrust the Doctor into an ordinary life and watched his reaction to it; we see the Doctor trying to be (and thoroughly enjoying the idea of being) a regular bloke. He plays football, he has his own room in a flat, he interjects himself into the drama of Craig and Sophie. At times it feels like the Doctor has been dropped into the wrong show, and at other times it feels like he has fallen out of the Mediasphere altogether and landed in a day in someone’s life. And the Doctor in these situations creates a wonderful, postmodern story about a mythic figure interacting with the ordinary world, and which highlights the advantages and wonder that can be found in mundane life.

And Closing Time tries to replicate that feeling, with the Doctor emphasizing that he’s just there for a visit, and later with his getting a job at a department store. But it doesn’t pan out; I’m not certain if it is because his motives are too clearly otherwise, or simply because the tone of the story isn’t quite right, but the Doctor doesn’t feel convincingly a part of everyday life this time.

Aside from that, the pacing in this episode is interesting. At first it felt like the pacing was off – like the story was progressing too slowly. But by the end of the episode, I realized that the slow pacing was, if not intentional, then well-chosen; along with more classic-feeling Cybermen (see the Cybermat) we get a classic series sense of pacing condensed into 45 minutes. The result is quite enjoyable, and a nice bit of a breather after the intense episodes we’ve had so far since the series picked back up. It feels like the calm before the storm.

Speaking of the storm… it’s time for

The Wedding of River Song Speculation

I have to apologize to Night Terrors. I didn’t realize the creepy rhyme the dolls sing was actually tied into the overall arc, rather than shoehorned in as a last-minute arc connection. I definitely have to give the episode a bit more credit in retrospect for weaving that bit in.

So, let’s have a look at that rhyme. Kovarian has given us the end of the first stanza, so the dolls’ version goes something like this:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what now shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we see?
Tick tock until the day
That thou shalt marry me

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
You and I must die

Tick tock goes the clock
We laughed at fate and mourned her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

The first stanza is a little vague, although it’s easy enough to see a metaphor between summer and youth – neither the Doctor nor River are particularly young any more. After that, though, the parallels to the Doctor and River are pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t normally do this line by line, but I’m in the mood to be thorough. So…

‘Thou shalt marry me’ is an obvious reference to the finale, given its title.
‘You and I must die’ – well, we know that River dies in the library, while the Doctor (presumably) dies at Lake Silencio in, well, the series opener and probably again in the finale.
‘We laughed at fate and mourned her’ again calls to mind Silence in the Library, where the Doctor laughs at fate by saving River’s life (sort of) while still mourning her. Although, it could be a foreshadowing instead (see my budding theory/observation further down)
‘He cradled and he rocked her’… well, we know about the cradle. And while I may have an especially dirty mind, I think that ‘he rocked her’ might be exactly what it (euphemistically) sounds like.

Now, Madame Kovarian’s version (plus the sing-song stanza added at the very end of Closing Time) gives us a bit more:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
Your love will surely die

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
‘Till River kills the Doctor

Which gives us the new lines ‘Your love will surely die’ and ’till River kills the Doctor’. Now, one thing that I find interesting about these rhymes is that none of them preclude the possibility of ‘the Doctor’ being River Song. In fact, at the end of Closing Time Madame Kovarian even makes a big deal of pointing out that ‘they made [River] a doctor today’. Now, practically speaking we know River doesn’t die in the next episode (because she dies in the Library), but it’s a fun theory because it very nearly fits the poem. And River could very well die and be revived, much like the Doctor seems to have done in Let’s Kill Hitler.

I don’t in any way expect this theory to pan out. Also, I appear to have been wrong about River killing Rory, which is a shame, because I liked the misdirection that would have been at play if it were true. Oh well.

Oh, and finally, the prequel for the Wedding of River Song gives us:

Doctor, brave and good
He turned away from violence
When he understood
the fooling of the Silence

This rhyme is interesting. The combination of the Doctor ‘turning away from violence’ and the Silence being fooled implies that the Silence are pawns in someone else’s game (Madame Kovarian is certainly a good contender). So, we’ll see where that leads; I really like the idea of the Doctor working *with* the Silence; that image is striking and appropriately mythic, somehow.

Oh, and one more note: even Kovarian’s recited legend can be made to fit my River-kills-herself theory:

By Silencio Lake, on the plain of size
An impossible astronaut will rise from the deep
And strike the Time Lord dead

Since River is somewhat analogous to a ‘Time Lord’, as per both the Doctor’s comments and our observations of River.

Still, this is all admittedly and intentionally far-fetched, and I don’t care to do a lot of actual prediction for The Wedding of River Song. I want this one to just surprise me, and to sit back and enjoy the ride. And from the trailer, it looks like it will be a fairly light-hearted action-filled ride instead of a dark, scary, tense story like the opener was.

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Doctor Who: The God Complex

2011.09.19 at 17:15 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , ,

Spoiler Warning. You know the drill.

Jekyll is a very dark series. It possesses Moffat’s characteristic witty one-liners, and his characteristic brilliant building of dramatic tension. It even has a few moments that directly parallel some of the storytelling techniques Moffat has used in Doctor Who – in particular, the scene where Jekyll and Hyde talk to each other via video camera has echoes of the Doctor’s conversation with Sally Sparrow in Blink.

But it’s also very clearly not his best work – there are moments where the pacing lags significantly, and the story feels disjointed at times, especially in the early episodes. The latter portions of the series have their own problems, with enormous plot holes opening up beneath the narrative in a way that really gives it problems. For instance, Mrs. Utterson’s motivations are never really clear, especially in light of Jackman’s mother’s assertion that ‘Hyde is love’. And Tom’s children being able to ‘swap’ is never really explored in a meaningful way; I’m not normally an advocate for Chekhovian minimalism, but that just feels sloppy. However, by that point the pacing has picked up enough to gloss over a lot of the plot holes, and with characteristic Moffat lines (‘Trust me, I’m a psychopath’ was especially brilliant) to distract us, the story manages to just barely hold itself together.

The ending, though, and by that I mean the final frame before the show cuts to black, was utterly terrifying. It was a clever subversion of what we expect in narrative; after we thought we were safe in the denouement, we’re given a sudden jolt of adrenaline right as we cut to black. It takes away the feeling of satisfaction and leaves the audience with a slightly disappointed feeling. And it seems to do this very intentionally; I’m reminded of the similar subversive techniques I talked about in The Girl Who Waited. In fact,

Oh dear, I’ve reviewed the wrong series again, haven’t I? Terribly sorry about that.

The God Complex has a very interesting relationship with fear.

I didn’t expect Jekyll to be scary. So I urged my wife to watch it with me. And when it turned scary, I had to apologize to her, because she really dislikes scary television, and will be jumpy (and nightmare-prone) for days after a scary scene. It’s why she doesn’t watch Doctor Who. And she asked me why anyone would want to watch things that are meant to scare them.

And the answer to that question parallels some of the elements in this story. Basically: we watch scary things because it lets us master them. Television and film let us take our fears, reduce them to two dimensions – to a medium where we know they cannot touch us – and then face them. So what we’re left with (those of us who like scary stories, anyway) is the adrenaline rush without the real terror, and a sense of elation and power. We can practice being brave without any real danger. And when we’re done, we can leave the scary stuff behind, safe in the Land of Fiction. And we can laugh at it, and joke about it, and reduce it thereby. (Of course, it’s never really gone. The Dark is always scary, and always real, and stories are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel better)

In The God Complex, we have a creature that takes the thing we’re most afraid of, and confronts us with it. But unlike most stories that start out with that premise, this creature doesn’t feed on our fear, it feeds on our faith, on the things we fall back on to make ourselves feel brave. It takes the very reason we watch scary stories and perverts it, and devours us. This is what makes the jagged transitions between the linear narrative and scenes of the victims laughing and screaming so effective.

This link to television is echoed in the repeated use of black-and-white camera feeds throughout the story. This feels very much like the Second Doctor, with his penchant for staring out of cameras and right at the viewer. The feeling is especially strong in the scene where the Doctor is talking to Rita.

On the subject of past Doctors, this is very much another Seventh Doctor story. And it’s easy to see it coming, but it’s still played very well. Specifically, the climax of this story bears an uncanny, unmissable resemblance to the climax of The Curse of Fenric. Except, as a friend pointed out to me, it is crucial to note that in Fenric, the Doctor didn’t believe the things he said to Ace. But he very clearly does believe every word he tells Amy. It is one of the most emotionally powerful scenes in Moffat’s Doctor Who to date. (Well, obviously “I stole your childhood and now I’ve led you by the hand to your death” isn’t true in the present tense (since his goal was to destroy Amy’s faith in him), but it does reflect the fear that leads him to stop travelling with Amy and Rory.)

So, it is a shame that it is marred by an obvious flaw. And that flaw is the phrase “Amy Williams”. I have no idea how that line of dialogue got out of the gate. I mean, it is clear what Whithouse is trying to say here: that it is time, basically, for Amy to grow up and stop having adventures with the Madman in a Box. It is meant to contrast with Amelia Pond, the little girl who wasted her childhood waiting for the Doctor.

But that’s not how it comes across, for a couple of reasons. First, the changing of surnames for women is culturally loaded. What we get instead is a paternal figure performing the ancient ritual of ‘giving away’ his daughter. It reeks of a transfer of possession, and objectifies Amy in a very direct way.

On a more significant, personal level, it is a reversal of an established story device that seems to have been unceremoniously dropped at some point in series 6. Amy’s role as a fairly dominant force in her relationship with Rory (in a way that very nearly has D/s overtones) is well established in series 5, and there are even references to Rory taking Amy’s name (so, Rory Pond, not Amy Williams). It is, in fact, the Doctor who establishes Rory as Rory Pond in the first place:

The Doctor: Amelia, from now on, I shall be leaving the… kissing duties to the brand new… Mr. Pond!
Rory: No! I’m not Mr. Pond. That’s not how it works.
The Doctor: Yeah it is.
Rory: … Yeah, it is.

This is further referenced in the Christmas Special, with the Doctor’s missive ‘Come Along Ponds’. But, at some point, Rory started being Rory Williams again. I suspect this might be related to Amy becoming pregnant/captured/a mother, in which case it is doubly troubling, because it echoes a cultural narrative that tells us that motherhood is the defining line where women have to ‘grow up and settle down’, which is equated in this narrative to ‘stop being assertive’.

So, here the Doctor seems to invert an observation he himself made about Amy. I think the intent may have been to demonstrate that he is trying to undo (some of) the changes he made in her life, but it comes across as a statement that she should be less assertive. And why not? That’s what we expect of women who have grown up, after all.

In short, they really missed the mark they were trying to hit with that line, and subverted an established aspect of Amy’s role as a strong female character.

And while we’re talking about criticisms, at first I felt that the character development from The Girl Who Waited was completely dropped. It felt like everything from that episode was suddenly water under the bridge for the three companions. There are a couple of points where this is not true: certainly the Doctor’s anguish about not wanting to kill his companions was influenced by the death of old Amy. And, and a friend pointed out to me, Rory’s use of the past tense when talking about travelling with the Doctor makes it clear that he is done with the Doctor and is just waiting for Amy to agree. But Amy, whose ‘Where is she?’ was the last thing we heard in the previous episode, seems to be relatively unaffected by those events. It’s an unfortunate tonal mismatch with the previous episode, given how well this episode works otherwise.

And the episode really does work. The visual storytelling here is fantastic, playing with techniques that aren’t seen much (if at all) in Doctor Who. We have the psychological scenes that break from the narrative to cut-up clips of text and disjointed images of the victims. There’s the use of cameras and camera feeds to structure the narrative and emphasize the nature of the danger. Throughout the episode we get a distinct downplaying of the monsters in the rooms and even the Minotaur; instead, the fear is purely psychological, with the lingering shots focusing on the victims as they are driven mad. Whithouse really knows how to write a Doctor Who script, and Moffat’s production team is doing unparalleled work here.

Praise Them.

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Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

2011.09.13 at 17:45 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , ,

As always, Spoiler Warning.

I didn’t have high hopes for this episode. From the previews, I got the impression that the story was going to go something like this: Amy gets trapped in an accelerated time stream. The Boys™ repeatedly try (and fail) to save her, while she repeatedly grows older, until finally they use techno-magic to undo the ageing and fly off into the Time Vortex toward their next adventure. In the middle, we would get some action sequences and some Rory-and-Amy-love-each-other-so-much-and-isn’t-that-just-so-fucking-sweet sequences.

And I felt justified in this impression. After all, Tom MacRae’s previous effort for Doctor Who was The Rise of the Age of Steel Cybermen, a disappointing romp to a parallel universe that re-introduced the Cybermen to New Who. This didn’t bode well for a story in which the central premise appeared to be ‘Amy needs to be rescued’.

But, look… Mr. MacRae, I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m sorry I judged you on Rise of the Cybermen. Because you most certainly can write a good episode of Doctor Who.

This episode is good. On a lot of levels. The dialogue is unrelentingly dark, tense, urgent; the only comedy we get is in the first act. After that it is a downright brutal story. Because MacRae took a story that looked like (and could have been) “Amy needs to be rescued” and he turned it into “Amy doesn’t get rescued”. The result is what feels, to me, like an attempt at a Feminist critique of the Damsel in Distress story. And it does a pretty good job.

So, Amy doesn’t get rescued. Instead, she spends 36 years stuck in a Tower, not being rescued. And this Tower has an endless supply of faceless robots that want to kill her. So she does the only thing that anyone who could survive for 36 years alone in a Tower of Death could do: she gets tough. She may still be trapped, but she saves herself.

And the Amy we get to see here gives us a lot to admire. She can fight, she can hack (I’m using that term very charitably here. After all, computers are bound to be a bit wibbly-wobbly in Doctor Who), build a sonic probe, and she seems to be a genuinely strong female character. The fact that she is filled with bitterness and hatred towards Rory and the Doctor comes across as a realistic consequence of spending three decades in isolation. The venom with which Karen Gillan utters the phrase ‘Raggedy Man’ really sells Amy’s hatred of the doctor, and her later conversation with him really illustrates her character:

And there he is, the voice of God. Survive, ’cause no one’s gonna come for you. You taught me that… Don’t you lecture me, Blue Box man flying through time and space on a whimsy. All I’ve got, all I’ve had for thirty-six years, is cold, hard reality.

Then we have Rory’s reactions. The narrative makes it clear that he is torn between the young and old Amys. The line “Leave her and take you?” is voiced with outright contempt, but shortly after that, he appears more sympathetic, and by the end of the episode is heartbroken at the prospect of leaving her behind.

But, crucially, he does leave her behind. And this brings us to the Feminist overtones that this episode takes on. A core message that you can extrapolate from this story is this: If you trust men, they will lie to you and betray you. Especially if there’s a younger, prettier option nearby. They may feel bad about doing it, they may have so many justifications they’ve sold themselves, but in the end, they betray you. The men here don’t just fail to save Amy, they actively refuse. And why? Why does Rory choose young Amy? Because an Amy with decades of resentment and anger is less compatible with him. Because it isn’t his Amy. The implication is clear: a woman’s personhood is worth less than a woman’s utility to her man.

Another thing to consider is why it is Rory’s choice in the first place. The Doctor emphasizes that Rory has the choice. He could choose his young, perky, conventionally pretty wife, or his old, disillusioned, angry, bitter wife. And the Amys have no agency in the decision. This is Rory’s choice, because it’s Rory’s wife we’re talking about. Despite all the talk of Amy Pond as a fierce, independent, and wilful character, here she is conveniently scripted out so that the men in her life can decide which version of her gets to be saved.

The thing is, the story manages to pull all of this off. Yes, this has strongly sexist underpinnings in a way that makes all the other Feminist complaints about Moffat’s Who seem to pale in comparison. But MacRae doesn’t shy away from them. Rory knows he’s being a selfish ass. Darvill delivers a superb performance here, and Amy’s final line in the episode (and the way we cut away from it abruptly) underlines it. We are not supposed to feel like Rory and the Doctor are the good guys here. This is a bold statement, and it is complex and morally ambiguous storytelling in a way we haven’t really seen in Doctor Who since Sylvester McCoy.

And speaking of Sylvester McCoy, well. This whole episode has a very strong Seventh Doctor underpinning, the same way The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was a modern Second Doctor story. Matt Smith is playing a much darker, harder Doctor here. I was reminded of this line in the New Adventures novel Conundrum:

“But that’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” said Ace. “To the Doctor, it did mean nothing. Just another of his games, another upset in the universe to be dealt with and then chucked.”

That quote summarizes the Seventh Doctor better than any description I could possibly muster. Notably, that isn’t the totality of the Doctor, but it is an accurate description of his practical relation to, and effect on, other people.

And here, Eleven acts in much the same way. Rory’s accusatory “You’re turning me into you” validates this reading; in the same novel, Ace explains that the reason she stays with the Doctor is that she’s gotten a taste for the same manipulative games the Doctor plays.

In this story, there is notably an entire scene that happens off-screen: when old Amy has the glasses, she has a conversation with the Doctor (in which she cries) that we are not privy to. I suspect this is the tie-in to the ongoing story arc for this episode: the Doctor tells old Amy something, and I suspect it is about the events prior to the tuxedo scene in Let’s Kill Hitler. Whatever it is, it makes her cry, and I have a suspicion that it is the thing that convinces her to accept death at the end of the episode.

Because that’s the one strange beat to this episode; old Amy eventually accepting her betrayal seems outright unlikely to me. So either that’s a weak character beat, or she has learned something about young Amy’s (potential) future that makes her change her mind. I’m hoping for the latter, because it will make this story feel that much stronger once the ongoing arc plays out. And there are no other ongoing arc references in this story, which was good after the heavy-handed, tacked-on reference at the end of the previous episode.

So, in the final analysis, I think this story is good on every level. The things I haven’t talked about – pacing, dialogue, camerawork – have only been omitted because they all functioned well for the story. There’s nothing there to criticize. There’s actually quite a bit to praise, especially regarding the cinematography and visual aesthetics in this episode, but this review is already feeling a bit hefty, so I’ll leave off here. See you next week!

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Doctor Who: Night Terrors

2011.09.06 at 16:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged

As usual with these posts, Spoiler Warning.

Oh, Mark Gatiss, you’ve done it again. You got my hopes up, and then dashed them against the rocky shore of poor plotting.

Let’s start with a recap of Gatiss’ contributions to (televised) Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks, and now Night Terrors. So, out of his previous contributions we have one very, very good (and fairly creepy) episode, one that is, for my money, an absolute dud, and one that is a fairly clever idea with a weak execution. Although, to be fair, a Dalek asking “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?” might be one of the greatest single moments in Doctor Who history, and if Victory of the Daleks was conceived around that image, then I forgive it for everything else.

Looking at his track record, I get the impression that Gatiss is at his best when he tries to write creepy stories. The problem is that, with Night Terrors, he is trying to write a creepy story. But try as it might, this story absolutely fails to be creepy. The wooden dolls just aren’t compellingly scary, and the dollhouse doesn’t have the atmosphere of ‘creepy haunted house’ that it needs to make them so. The only time the dolls are ever creepy is the first time we see one – that is, when it is inanimate and standing alone in a closet. The monster is less scary when we can look it in the face, and the longer we hear creepy noises and get suggestions of scary things, the more suspense and tension is built. Here, though, Gatiss fails to build suspense for the monster, so its reveal feels about as frightening as the Slitheen in Aliens of London. Even the build-up to the Silurian reveal in The Hungry Earth was creepier than this episode.

With scary out the window, let’s look at the rest of the episode. This is the first episode since The Doctor’s Wife that isn’t heavily invested in the story arc (even if we didn’t know how tied to the story The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was, in retrospect we have to count them as fundamentally ‘part of the ongoing arc’ episodes), so I had high hopes for a nice, self-contained, Doctor-to-the-rescue story.

And the opening let me keep hoping. Gatiss writes the Doctor brilliantly. The sequence in which the Doctor and company wander about the tenement has some fantastic dialogue. And every scene with the Doctor interacting with George and Alex is brilliant as well.

But these scenes are interspersed with the dollhouse. And the way the dollhouse is used destroys the pacing and tension of the episode. At the end of the episode, it felt like not very much had happened, and what had happened was inconsequential. The big runaround gets resolved, essentially, by actors coming on stage at the last minute. It’s trying to be a clever twist, but it ends up being an anticlimax.

And the story arc tie-in at the end felt a bit weak, too. I mean, we get some creepy child-like singing that is, presumably, supposed to evoke the monsters that were just defeated. But even if we set aside the fact that they are, y’know, defeated, they have absolutely no apparent reason to know or care about the Doctor’s death. They’re figments of an alien child’s imagination. It felt like that was added just for the sake of having some reminder of the overall story arc. Whether that was added by Moffat or Gatiss, it is a weak bit of storytelling.

One thing it does do is tell us that the storyline surrounding the Doctor’s death will probably be dealt with in series 6, and not carried over to series 7. At least, assuming Moffat is following the contemporary format of series-spanning story arcs; dropping repeated hints about the same plot element almost always means that element will be dealt with in the series finale. Unless, of course, the series finale ends on a cliffhanger. But Doctor Who is uniquely ill-suited to the Dallas-style inter-series cliffhanger, because the Christmas Specials interrupt the dramatic tension period.

There is one other thing I do want to praise about the episode, though: George has a dollhouse, and no one thinks this is odd, or makes disparaging remarks about it. That struck me as a nice nod to gender-neutral parenting.

Next week, we have The Girl Who Waited, which I will admit now I’m not looking forward to, given that the plot appears to be ‘Amy is captured and’. After A Good Man Goes To War, I had really hoped we would be able to stop putting the girl in the fridge quite so often. But it looks like the writers still can’t seem to work that out of their system, so here we go again…

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Doctor Who: Let’s Kill Hitler

2011.08.28 at 15:50 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , , ,

We interrupt our month-long, unannounced, unplanned hiatus to bring you: another post on Doctor Who. That’s right! Because Doctor Who can motivate me to write when nothing else can. So, here we go!

Oh, and Spoiler Warning!. I’ll be discussing the details of Let’s Kill Hitler in this post, as well as speculating on the next plot reveals / bits of continuity that have only been hinted at / etc. So, if you haven’t seen Let’s Kill Hitler and you hate spoilers, or if you prefer to speculate without letting other people’s ideas influence you, then don’t read this post. Otherwise, read on! It’s sure to be fun…

Review

I’ll lead with the most obvious point: this episode was good. Really good. But that’s just what I’ve come to expect from Moffat, so let’s talk about what makes this episode really shine: Moffat repeatedly uses juxtaposition and playing with the audience’s expectations in order to heighten the emotional impact of the story.

There is some really impressive cinematography here. My favourite is that the recap is actively used to set the tone. We start the episode with a pretty intense recap, and then drop into the first shot: a dramatic, colourful, and completely still row of wheat. It flips from reminding you how exciting the show can be to giving you an image that, while visually striking, is also very sedate. It’s effective – it gives the viewer an adrenaline rush, then asks them to reconcile that with wheat. It makes the wheat somehow exciting, all on its own. It takes the image from striking and cranks it up to breathtaking. But we can’t get away from that for long, so we switch to high-speed crop circle off-roading, so the excitement stays in place.

Another trick Moffat uses is turning the episode into a completely different story halfway through. They build this framework: a fun-loving early River incarnation wants to take the TARDIS on a past-wrecking joy ride. Even if you spot that Mels is River, it looks like the rest of the episode is going to involve the Doctor dealing with Mels, and the robot filled with tiny people, and trying not to change the past too much. Instead, the show turns into River Song (the one we know and love) actively trying to kill the Doctor. And succeeding. What starts out feeling like a fun-filled romp of an episode becomes very heavy, and dramatic, and suspenseful. It’s brilliant, and the emotions are, again, heightened by using the audience’s expectations against them.

One more interesting technique: Mels’ introduction. Here we have a new character that Amy and Rory have known all their lives, tossed into the story mid-stream. This is a very interesting sudden interjection, and it feels jarring. As a bit of backstory, it is perfectly reasonable; after all, there are plenty of good friends in my past that don’t really come up in conversation, and I imagine this would be more true if my conversations tended to revolve around temporal paradoxes and saving the world from Daleks. But still, from the viewer’s perspective this seems to come out of nowhere, and I suspect that’s intentional; it has the effect of unbalancing the viewer, giving you a vague sense that something is just slightly out of place, which pays off when Mels is revealed to be Melody.

Reveals / Plot Analysis

So, let’s talk about the reveals, and what they could mean in terms of the ongoing story. First, the Timehead (i.e., the little girl in the spacesuit) is River Song. That’s pretty clearly established at this point: Mels stated that her previous regeneration had been in an alleyway in New York, and had involved becoming a toddler. This lets us establish a loose chronology of events for the life of River Song, which I’ll elaborate on in a bit.

Another thing is the sudden introduction of Mels – as I mentioned above, this seems to be a narrative technique to off-balance us as viewers. However, it could also (simultaneously) be a hint that someone is Meddling with Time*.

On the subject of The Eventual Untimely Death of Rory Williams, this episode gives us another misdirection, “I’m looking for a good man”. I still think that Rory is doomed, however, and my newest bit of evidence is from outside the show itself: the title of the series finale has been announced, and it is “The Wedding of River Song”. Recall that in Flesh and Stone, River said that she killed “A good man, the best man I’ve ever known”. If Rory ends up being best man at River’s wedding (after all, Rory isn’t just her father, he’s also a dear friend she’s known for years. They grew up together!), well, wouldn’t that be interesting?**

Also, we have some very interesting unanswered questions at this point, both new and old. A few that occur to me, and some possible thoughts on them:

  • The most obvious one: What is the question (that will cause silence to fall)? The first thing that popped into my head here was The Question, i.e. “Will you Marry Me?” (or, alternately, “Do you take this man…”). Just like the above theory, it’s a little far-fetched, perhaps. But it would fit interestingly with the wedding theme we’ve had throughout Moffat’s run. I mean, he used “Something old, Something new” as a crucial plot element, so I think it’s a fair possibility here.
  • What is the relationship between the Silence (that is, the creepy faceless aliens) and Kovarian’s alliance? They seem to be working toward the same goal, and it’s easy to assume the Silence (the organization as opposed to the species, unless they are more tightly coupled than we know, a la the Headless Monks) are manipulating Kovarian, but does she know that? Is she working with them intentionally?
  • Why did the Silence kidnap FleshAmy in Day of the Moon? I would have plenty of good theories if it had been the real Amy, but they presumably knew that the Amy they kidnapped was flesh, so why do it? What did they stand to gain from that?
  • Who was in the spacesuit on the beach? It seems less and less sensible that it should be River. Everyone believes the Doctor dies on that beach. It’s even a fixed point in time according to the tiny men inside the time-travelling robot. However, Mels clearly thinks she still needs to kill the Doctor – surely she would remember doing it on the beach, and assume his death was inevitable, right? So why does she try to kill him in Let’s Kill Hitler? Is that an adult River, her kill-the-Doctor programming becoming impossible to resist? Or is it someone else entirely?
  • How long does it take Alex Kingston to get her hair looking that fantastic? I’m cursed with the unmanageable nightmare that is curly hair, and I really wish I could make it look half that good.

Timeline of a Timehead

There’s decent evidence that River only regenerates twice, i.e. has three incarnations. The evidence is as follows: We can surmise that the little girl in the spacesuit is Melody (the first body of River Song), because, well, she seems really childish. She is clearly very scared and confused; she doesn’t seem to be any older than she actually appears here. I’m taking this as evidence that this is her first incarnation. We know that incarnation turns into Mels, because of the line “last time I did this, I ended up a toddler in the middle of New York”. And, well, in Let’s Kill Hitler she regenerates into the River we know and love, and we know that is her last incarnation, because we’ve seen her die.

So, with that evidence in hand, here’s an outline of the Timehead’s life in chronological order. There may easily be gaps where all sorts of interesting and story-relevant things happen in between many of these points, and some of the ordering and events are admittedly speculative:

  1. Melody Pond is born on Demon’s Run.
  2. Madame Kovarian secrets Melody away to an unknown location.
  3. Melody comes to live in Graystark Hall Orphanage, which is infested with Silence.
  4. Melody is put into a spacesuit in which she may or may not kill the Doctor. She definitely has the encounter in the warehouse though.
  5. Melody sneaks away from the orphanage, going to New York (somehow) at this point.
  6. Melody regenerates into Mels, possibly as the result of a bullet wound inflicted by Amy.
  7. Mels comes to live near Amy and Rory, grows up with them, gets into lots trouble, and is obsessed with the Doctor.
  8. Mels meets the Doctor, and the events of Let’s Kill Hitler occur. She regenerates into River, and gives the Doctor the rest of her life essence.
  9. River becomes a doctor of archaeology.
  10. River and the Doctor get married.
  11. River Song kills her father, Rory Williams.
  12. River is imprisoned at the Stormcage Containment Facility.
  13. At the end of the battle of Demon’s Run, River shows up and reveals her identity to the Doctor, Rory, and Amy.
  14. The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon.
  15. The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang.
  16. The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone.
  17. The Doctor takes River to the Singing Towers of of Darillium, gives her the sonic screwdriver.
  18. River Song dies on the library planet.

If anyone sees any obvious, provable errors, please let me know, and I’ll edit the post!

* note that I am not claiming The Monk is involved in this story arc. It simply amused me to link to that story when using that phrase.

** This theory is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; as evidence goes, I realize it’s pretty weak. But that quote came back to me when I read the title of the final episode, and I couldn’t help but speculate.

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I know what’s going to happen in Doctor Who series 6

2011.06.29 at 12:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Doctor Who is off the air until September, and a number of questions remain unanswered. But just because we don’t get any new Who for three months doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about it! So here is my chance to answer all of your burning questions. Because I know everything that’s going to happen in the second half of series 6. All the reveals.

Spoiler Warning for everything, up to and including A Good Man Goes to War, and for the rest of the series too, if I’m right!

Okay, so I don’t really know all the reveals. I don’t have access to the scripts, and I certainly don’t have a retro-futuristic thought recorder pointed at Steven Moffat’s head (not that you can prove, anyway). But I do have a pretty good idea where the story is going, and I think I’ve got at least one reveal pegged.

To start, let’s review the two biggest questions that the show left unanswered after A Good Man Goes to War:

  • Who kills the Doctor (i.e., Who is in the Astronaut suit on the lake in 2011)?
  • How does the doctor survive being killed? Because, let’s face it, he does.
  • Who did River Song kill?

I think I know the answer to the last one. Here’s your big spoiler: River Song kills her father, Rory Williams.

How do I know this? Moffat has left us a lot of evidence hinting in this direction. The evidence comes down to a theme in Moffat’s work: misdirection, specifically repeated misdirection.

Let’s start with the misdirection. By misdirection, I mean that there is a tendency in Moffat’s writing to tell us something in such a way that we assume something else. The easiest example to spot is in Amy’s monologues about Rory in series 6. The first one is in Day of the Moon, when she is captured by the Silence, and is talking to herself (but directing the words to Rory). She says:

I love you. I know you think it’s him. I know you think it ought to be him. But it’s not. It’s you. And when I see you again I’m gonna tell you properly. Just to see your stupid face. My life was so boring before you just dropped out of the sky. Just get your stupid face where I could see it, okay?

So, this is designed to make you assume she’s confessing her love for the Doctor – especially the phrase ‘just dropped out of the sky’. This is even lampshaded later, when she tells Rory it was just a figure of speech. That lampshade is, of course, Moffat gently mocking the audience for falling for his misdirection. He likes mocking us for falling for it, too: he does the same thing with FleshAmy and FleshMelody. Kovarian tells the Doctor, “Oh, Doctor, fooling you once was a joy. But fooling you twice, the same way, it’s a privilege.” These are both moments where the fourth wall is broken while still maintaining diegetic cohesion (Russel T Davies did the same thing with the 10th Doctor’s last line, “I don’t want to go”, which is clearly meant to be spoken by Davies, Tennant, and the Doctor simultaneously).

There is a second example of the Doctor-Rory misdirection; at the beginning of A Good Man Goes to War:

I wish I could tell you that you’ll be loved. That you’ll be safe and cared for and protected. But this isn’t the time for lies. What you are going to be, Melody, is very, very brave. But not as brave as they’ll have to be. Because there’s someone coming. I don’t know where he is, or what he’s doing. Trust me, he’s on his way. There’s the man who’s never going to let us down. And not even an army can get in the way. He’s the last of his kind. He looks young, but he’s lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. And wherever they take you, Melody, however scared you are, I promise you, you will never be alone.

Now, this one drops a really big hint, because both the phrases ‘there’s someone coming’ and ‘you will never be alone’ parallels what Rory said in Day of the Moon: “She can always hear me, Doctor. Always. Wherever she is and she always knows that I am coming for her, do you understand me? Always.” And, of course, we get the reveal immediately:

Because this man is your father. He has a name, but the people of our world know him better as the Last Centurion.

So, where does this tie in with River’s story? In Flesh and Stone; when the Doctor asks River about the man she killed, she says he was “A very good man. The best man I’ve ever known.” It’s easy to assume this refers to the Doctor, but we’ve seen evidence that River has no illusions about the Doctor being a good man, particularly the line “This is cold. Even by your standards, this is cold” from The Impossible Astronaut, and her rant that begins “This was exactly you. All this. All of it. You make them so afraid” in A Good Man Goes to War. No, River wouldn’t call the Doctor the best man she’s ever known; she knows him too well. But she might say that about her father, who shows, time and again, limitless dedication to his wife.

There’s more evidence, too. In Flesh and Stone, Father Octavian says that “She killed a man. A good man. A hero to many.” Again, this could refer to the Doctor, and that’s the obvious choice. But it could also refer to Rory, in light of Amy’s line that “the people of our world know him better as the Last Centurion.” (which is interesting, because as far as we know Rory is not widely known as a hero on Earth. We appear to be missing a little bit of story there)

Ultimately, the reason I think this is more than just a lot of circumstantial evidence and idle speculation is that Moffat has already done the Doctor-Rory misdirection twice, and has blatantly lampshaded how much he likes fooling us with misdirection. A third misdirection is, at this point, a logical way to finish the series.

There is at least one problem with my theory, though I think it fits in with the same misdirection again. The episode title of A Good Man Goes to War has every indication of being about the Doctor. River’s poem certainly seems to talk about him:

Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man goes to war

Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and the dark will rise
When a good man goes to war

Demons run, but count the cost
The battle’s won, but the child is lost

On the other hand, nothing in the poem (or the episode) explicitly says that the Doctor is the good man in question. In fact, River’s “This was exactly you…” monologue happens at the end of this episode, which leads me to believe the misdirection is complete – every reference to ‘a good man’ has been a reference to Rory, without exception.

So, how and why does River kill Rory? A friend of mine suggested that Madame Kovarian is River Song. This is plausible – River was raised as a weapon against the Doctor. There are certain physical similarities (Alex Kingston and Frances Barber have similar facial structures and hair, at least), although those aren’t even necessary given that River can regenerate. The River we know has always seemed more than a little haunted by her past, and raising an army against the Doctor, killing Rory, and being generally heartless and cruel might certainly explain those demons.

So, this is what I think we’ll see in the remainder of series 6: River is not rescued (or if she is, it is not for long). She grows up to be Kovarian, her mind being twisted by the Silence to hate the Doctor. Subsequently, she kills Rory (while trying to kill the Doctor). Somehow, she has a change of heart eventually, and becomes the River we are familiar with.

The biggest mystery left, for me, is why Kovarian and the Silence seem to be at odds with one another. The Silence went out of their way to kidnap Amy (did they know she was Flesh at the time?), and to try to make Amy tell the Doctor she is pregnant. These things don’t make a lot of sense if Kovarian and the Silence are allies, but we know River was raised, at least for some of her life, in the Silence-infested Graystark Hall Orphanage. So, either the theory about Kovarian being River is wrong, or Kovarian and the Silence have a falling out, and/or she manages to keep secrets from them.

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Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War

2011.06.05 at 03:11 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , ,

Well. That was certainly an intense hour of television.

Absurdly Huge Spoilers Ahead!

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Obligatory River Song speculation thread

2011.06.03 at 15:36 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , ,

Since the previews for A Good Man Goes to War have promised that the Doctor will learn “who River Song really is”, this may be my last chance to go on the record with some wild speculation about what the reveal will be.

Spoilers!

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Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

2011.05.30 at 00:11 · Filed under Media ·Tagged

Spoiler Warning: If you haven’t seen these episodes yet, River Song would disapprove of your reading any further. I’m pretty much going to spoil every spoilable part of the story.

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