encyclops

Proper Who is still dead, and now it thinks it’s The X-Files. I’ve never liked Greys, and with Paul and Roger from American Dad as their more recent portrayals in popular culture, their presence alone could have sunk this for me, but it didn’t. Here’s a story that basically says, “let’s have the Doctor travel back to Area 51 and find out what really went on with that whole Roswell thing.”

It shouldn’t work, it should in fact be horribly embarrassing, but it’s not. Even Nixon is underplayed, which is a relief given what happened with Churchill last year. Mark Sheppard (Romo Lampkin from Battlestar Galactica) is an FBI agent on the outs with his superiors, but his similarity to Fox Mulder thankfully ends there. And the Greys themselves aren’t short lumpy ETs with Paul Lynde voices and penchants for Pecan Sandies, but rather tall sinister beings reminiscent of a certain invented urban legend. Those who accuse Steven Moffat of endlessly plagiarizing himself will find some ammunition in that, like the Weeping Angels, these are creatures you’d be well advised to keep your eye on once you see them.

We start with some farce that cements this Doctor as the least responsible one ever. Despite all that stuff from Ten in “Waters of Mars,” this guy has even fewer compunctions about splashing around in history and behaving like a jackass. Not that I’m complaining. Still, the script acknowledges this without adequately explaining it, and it remains to be seen whether this will turn out to be a sensible part of the plot or just an excuse for some historical hijinks before settling down to what wants to be a heavy and scary season premiere.

“Heavy” because of another favorite Moffat move: killing off an important character. Even if we hadn’t seen this trick before, we’d know it’s not for real, even when they burn the body; instead of being worried or sad, we’re just sitting there trying to puzzle out how Moffat’s going to have the character turn up alive at the end. This is kind of a problem: unless you’re eight years old, you’ve realized by now that this is like a comic book and no one with a costume stays dead. If this ever happened, we wouldn’t know it until much later on, when we’d say, “well…I guess so-and-so really ISN’T coming back,” well past the moment when it would have had some impact. So this business isn’t really dramatic; it’s just a crossword puzzle, or a kids’ detective story (HOW DID ENCYCLOPEDIA KNOW BUGS MEANY WAS LYING?).

“Scary” because of the Greys (who don’t get a name in this episode, but if you’ve done a little poking around you know who they are), who are nice and creepy but lose a little of their scare factor in the bathroom scene where Amy first discovers what they can do. Let’s just say that one of their powers is scary, and the more violent power is more like something out of “Aliens In London.” Still, overall they work for me.

And then we get River Song’s most extended and eloquent description of her relationship with the Doctor yet, and it’s well worth it, and I really really like the character now. And then we get a revelation from Amy that hopefully has a point we’ll understand in the second half. And then we get a revelation from the titular astronaut, and a cliffhanger immediately undone by the “Next Time” trailer, and we see that all that spooky face-marking stuff (straight out of “The Impossible Planet” maybe?) is in the next episode, and we can’t wait for next week. When I say “we” I mean me, but probably I’ll also mean you too.

The theme tune’s still crap, unfortunately, but there’s some nice incidental music. Also, very good hair, Pond.

Proper Who is dead.

Which is rather like saying “the Third Doctor is dead” or “the Eighth Doctor is dead.” That is: both true and false. The man regenerates. He’s the same man; he’s eleven men. The show regenerates too, roughly once a decade.

I have trouble watching the 60s incarnation, partly because of small things like pacing and tone and aesthetics (I really do like color, and if that brands me a philistine so be it), and partly because there’s so little of it left to watch, but to my mind it’s probably the most fertile and diverse period of the show. With the regeneration to Pertwee for the 70s you got the first Earthbound stint, the refocus to “alien invasion” stories, and the Doctor-plus-female-sidekick formula everyone now thinks of as classic. Halfway through the decade, Tom Baker and the new production team flipped the balance to more outbound SF, but to my mind the period between 1973 and 1976 saw less drastic change than the one between 1978 and 1981. In the 80s, the show started aiming for more and more intensity and less humor; whether it achieved its aim is a matter for debate, and it was the first time since 1966 that the Doctor (and thus also the show) was allowed to be actively unpleasant. Then in the 90s you got quite a lot of novels of varying quality, and one utterly godawful TV movie with a lead actor who was decent in the role but oddly bland, a sort of mathematical average of the Doctor’s personalities and fashion sense. Eight was like the Valeyard, only rather than a distillation of the Doctor’s evil side he was a distillation of the Doctor’s boring side. It was a time when everyone was trying to keep the Doctor alive but hardly anyone quite nailed what he was really supposed to be like.

And then in the 2000s we finally got a reinvention with the energy and inspiration and taste to get it mostly right. But what does “mostly right” mean anymore? Classic, austere 60s? Dashing, textured 70s? Glossy, violent 80s? Confused, unstable 90s? My gut says that the series that started in 2005 is more different from the series that ended in 1989 than the 1989 stories are from the 1963 stories, but I haven’t yet managed to articulate the reasons why.

But I think I’ve put my finger on one of them: between 1989 and 2005, the way fans relate to science fiction and fantasy television changed, or at least the writers of same began to really notice. I’m not sure if the term “fanservice” applies the way I want it to, but in this context I think of it as what you do as a writer if you start to assume that everyone watching your show is as much in love with your characters as you are, and wants to see them do cute things that don’t necessarily serve a convincing or realistic story. Example: I’m currently watching and, against my prejudices, beginning to enjoy Babylon 5, but there are definitely “fanservice” moments that stick out like sore thumbs, such as the way Ivanova “has sex” with that one creepy racist alien ambassador. There’s nothing remotely convincing about that sequence; it’s there so Ivanova can be cute and funny.

From 2005 to 2009 or so, Doctor Who seemed to be aiming for “moving,” which is understandable with a soap opera creator at the helm. Now, in 2010, it still looks for this, but is primarily concerned with being cute and funny. Other considerations, such as nerdy stuff like “being science fiction” (which, to be fair, was always a little loosely defined), are at best nice-to-haves and at worst window dressing.

I like cute and funny. I like moving, too. And although I watched the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy stories over and over as a 12-year-old, because that’s what I did at that age, and although I think there were probably more worthwhile satires and action-packed adventures in that era than in the entirety of this one, I have to confess that I don’t treasure any of them. And with the TV movie as an example of how wrong things could go, “Rose” couldn’t help but seem a relief.

After watching “A Christmas Carol,” I think I’m coming to terms with the latest regeneration. Not Matt Smith’s Eleven, whom I really do like a lot. But with the latest regeneration of the show, which is pure comic fantasy.

What is there really to say about this episode? It’s steampunk Harry Potter, and not just because Michael Gambon’s on board. We’re only really asked to believe in it on an emotional level, which is a challenge in itself: even if we believe the Doctor can’t manage to land on one single spaceship despite being able to take young Scrooge all over time and space with incredible precision, we’re also supposed to believe he’s willing and able to revise one person’s entire biography without finding a way to save another’s life. It’s thrilling to see the show finally stretching its “time travel” premise to the very limit, and this thrill is at the heart of what makes this enjoyable, for me anyway. It looks lovely, and the script is witty and tight, and these things alone are almost enough, especially considering that as much as I enjoyed the show’s previous incarnations, “lovely, witty, and tight” were all too rare qualities before 2005.

But it ends with two people in a sleigh pulled by a flying shark. The question isn’t whether you believe this; it’s whether you are enough in love with the show to find this so cute and funny that it’s satisfying to you.

To paraphrase Colin Baker’s Doctor after a change that seems far less radical now, by comparison, than it did then: “This is Doctor Who now — whether you like it or not.”

I never thought I could get tired of the color black. Thanks to Tron Legacy, I never want to see it again, which is unfortunate since my wardrobe is based on it.

This is one of those movies where it’s easier to talk about what went right. There’s a lot, actually.

1. Garrett Hedlund and Jeff Bridges give performances as realistic and convincing as the material allows. There’s one scene where they get to talk as father and son about real-world events, and it actually kind of works.
2. Michael Sheen has three things in common with Jeremy Irons: he’s a fine actor, he gives me the creeps, and he knows when to ham it up in a bad fantasy movie. I hate to say it but his fey bleached-out Ziggy Stardust act is as much fun as this movie gets.
3. Bruce Boxleitner doesn’t get much to do, but it’s always nice to see his face.
4. Olivia Wilde is pretty. So are the other women in the movie. So is Garrett Hedlund, but then I’ve known that since Troy.
5. Though the movie can’t seem to decide whether de-rezzing now means breaking into tiny hailstones like sugar glass or splattering translucently all over the floor, both effects are very nice to look at.
6. After the initial nonsense about how the new Encom OS should be released for free, the movie is rarely actively embarrassing, and insofar as it is logical at all, it’s a reasonably logical extension of the original.

Unfortunately these pieces don’t add up to anything worthwhile, or more importantly, enjoyable.

I won’t waste a lot of your time discussing the meaning of the film, though I should because it really asks for it. Kevin Flynn has become a sort of Zen hermit at the top of a mountain, playing Go with his apprentice and teaching her Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, and Verne. She’s apparently a spontaneously generated artificial life form and the future of humanity, a charming enough idea that’s only stated and never explored. She has less personality than many of the programs that users wrote, so that can’t be what’s special about her. Meanwhile Flynn’s software clone and former proxy, Clu, has become a dictator with a nebulous agenda of achieving “the perfect system,” which apparently means forcing programs to play games until they die, wiping out the a-life, and making bombastic speeches to a bunch of other programs before taking them into the real world. Flynn tells Clu he can’t achieve perfection because he doesn’t really understand what it is (because Flynn didn’t either at the time he wrote Clu — another interesting idea that doesn’t go anywhere else), and the problem is that neither do we; it just looks like any other cartoon dictatorship we’ve seen in a thousand movies, including this one’s superior antecedent.

The original Tron delivered solid entertainment. It had appealing characters with accessible personalities (both inside and outside the computer, often with the same faces in what I’m only realizing at this moment was totally a Wizard of Oz homage), a fabulous and memorable score, gorgeous luminescent visuals, a sense of humor (sorely lacking in the sequel save for a precious few moments), a sense of honor and decency and principle (remember when Flynn refuses to kill his opponent? Notice how his son never hesitates?), and a simple but effective plot. You didn’t have to look for meaning in the “throw the Christians to the lions” allegory to have fun.

With this one, I was hoping for fun, but would have settled for deep. Unfortunately I got neither. Hell, I would have settled for beautiful, but the soundtrack was largely dull (but then I think Daft Punk are overrated — they’re no Wendy Carlos, clearly) and so were the visuals. At one point Sam is supposed to marvel at what his dad’s created, but what’s worth marveling at? The programs with personalities were there the very first time Kevin Flynn entered this world, and as far as I can tell all he’s done is redecorate — exchanging bright for dim, imperial Rome for (maybe?) China & Tibet, and a pleasant well-designed adventure story for a gloomy poorly-told philosophical squib, as faceless as its interchangeable CGI adversaries.

It might be facile to say that Russell T. Davies wrote Doctor Who like a soap opera and Steven Moffat writes it like a sitcom. I’ve actually never seen any episodes of Queer as Folk or Coupling. Also, RTD was funny even when he was being serious, and Moffat is serious even when he is being funny. But bear with me a moment.

Consider the consequences of RTD’s finales (and let’s include The End of Time). We have two regenerations of the Doctor, two deaths of the Master, one companion lost in a parallel universe (twice), and one companion’s memory erased, not to mention numerous deaths of supporting characters and extras. Conventional wisdom holds that in soaps no one ever permanently dies, but they DO die.

As far as we know for certain, Steven Moffat’s first finale has had the consequence of…a wedding.

All of the finales have employed some form of “reset button” deus ex machina, and I’m coming to accept that this is just how the show will be in the 21st century. The stakes are so high that the writers have little choice but to put the whole universe in peril just to top last year, and unless you stop the disaster each time with two seconds to spare, you have to do a bit of rewinding. The difference is that even with RTD’s reset buttons, something still changed in the end. There were casualties. With Moffat, we get all but the freeze-frame over the credits, and next week (well, next year in this case) we start over with a new situation and new comedy.

That may not be a terrible thing. I’m just pointing it out.

“The Big Bang” is really great up to the opening credits. I love the bit where Amy remembers the stars but no one else knows they’re there (a nice callback to “Starry Night,” and love the shout-out to Richard Dawkins). I love seeing her hide in the museum. I love the surprise as the Pandorica opens and it’s not at all who or what you’re expecting.

Unfortunately, almost immediately after the opening credits, it quickly becomes clear that not only is the Doctor alive and well, he hasn’t really suffered at all. Not that we wanted him to, as such, but after fan speculations that he would have to spend 2000 years in the box, perhaps going mad, perhaps turning into the Dream Lord, it really bled out the tension. After that there’s a lot of zapping around “Blink”-style to figure out what has to happen in the future to fill in the holes in the past. It’s fun, and it’s funny, and it’s clever, but it’s not as dramatic as it could have been.

And what good is a prison any idiot with a sonic screwdriver can open from the outside? Even if the silly Monster Alliance figured they’d averted disaster and planned to post guards outside it to prevent this, it seems a bit weak (and why couldn’t he do it in the previous episode?).

Still, I did like Rory guarding the box for 2000 years. I liked him having an Auton gun. I liked Rory in general, and I must admit I like River Song now too. Companions with guns who aren’t afraid to use them make me happy. And I loved the fez bits. The Doctor’s rewind was great, and even though you knew it wasn’t forever, it was still pretty moving.

The problem is, after this “reboot” (the Doctor’s actual word for what happens) I have no idea what’s happened to the rest of the universe. I’ve watched it twice and I still don’t know. I could fill this entire post with questions. Here are a few examples:

1. Do people remember the Daleks now, as Amy didn’t in “Victory of the Daleks”?
2. Did the Cyberking still appear in Victorian London, something else the Doctor identified as a surprising lost memory?
3. Did the Saturnynes still invade Venice, since they fell through a crack in time that now is closed and has always been closed?
4. Does River still remember the Doctor? Presumably, since she brings the diary to the wedding (and how did she get there without the Vortex Manipulator?), but if so, why isn’t it enough for her to remember him?
5. Is Rory still an Auton? (I assume he isn’t, since we hear him say when the TARDIS reappears “I was plastic” rather than “I am plastic,” but…see next question.)
6. Did all Amy and the Doctor’s adventures still happen? Rory still remembers them, apparently (but see previous question). If so, how were they changed, since all the cracks are presumably erased, which (for example) took away the means by which the Doctor defeated the Angels? If not, what happened to the rest of the Doctor’s past — how far back is “just a dream” now?

These aren’t really trivial questions. I no longer know how much of the foregoing season is still “real” as far as the story is concerned. This is brilliant from a metafictional point of view, but I’m no longer sure how to take the series on a literal level.

Maybe these are Moffat’s consequences. Maybe lots of events in history, both in general and specific to the Doctor’s life, have been rewritten and the next season will involve discovering some of them. That would be pretty interesting, particularly since there are still some explicit unanswered questions to be dealt with. As the Doctor points out, we still don’t know who or what caused this disaster in the first place, and apparently the Silence wasn’t just the death of the universe but the name of the unseen “villain” of this piece. This is cool and suspenseful — this gives us a reason to watch the next episode of the “sitcom,” whereas otherwise we might have had a convenient place to quit. It’s also gutsy, because it’s really frustrating — we don’t even know who or what landed outside Amy’s house and left burn marks on her lawn.

Will it turn out to be the Dream Lord? Or some other extratemporal being (who presumably can’t have been part of the exploding universe)? My money’s on the former for now, since Moffat’s approach is more solipsistic (focused on the main characters, and without warning any external reality could be a dream) than RTD’s, but who knows?

In the end, this finale turned out to have all the most important “flaws” we criticized in RTD’s: overblown threat, too many monsters, deus ex machina, and worst of all, “wishing” the Doctor back to life, though at least this last wasn’t quite as cheesy as in “Last of the Time Lords.” But, as I’ve said before, the mark of a good Doctor Who story is that most of the “hang on a minute” and “oh come on, what?” questions don’t occur to me until after it’s over. By that standard…this one was pretty good.

So yeah, I think I’ll watch another year. Even if this one was all dreams, I’m more than happy to sleep a little longer.

Liked it. There really isn’t a whole lot else I can say yet.

For about 34 minutes it seems pretty silly — not “The End of Time” silly, fortunately, but still “New Who Season Finale” silly: big, fast, loose, very kitchen-sink with the monsters and the gratuitous CGI.

Then River Song makes an important discovery, and everything starts to flip-flop in rapid succession. One of the cheesiest moments in the episode turns out to have been a brilliant fake-out. And even though I guessed correctly about the contents of the Pandorica very early on, it was still a thrill to see the proof.

It’s a hell of a cliffhanger. And I get the feeling Moffat knew what each of the foreshadowing moments meant as he planted them during the season, as opposed to just tossing out breadcrumbs and then following them back to their origin. I greatly appreciate that.

I’m enjoying River Song more and more, I must admit. She has kind of a “Virgin New Adventures” feel to her, that sort of female commando/professor thing they were doing for a while.

I’m wary here, because I’m remembering how fabulous “The Sound of Drums” was and how wretched “Last of the Time Lords” was. But I really think this is going to work like crazy.

P.S. How many echoes of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series did you count?

Before we slide into the finale, I thought it worthwhile to recap where we’ve been up to now. Here, in three buckets but otherwise no particular order, are the 11 season 5 episodes we’ve had so far.

cream of the crop

the eleventh hour
Finest debut story since “Castrovalva.” (Granted, that’s not saying much, but I did like “Rose”. And “Castrovalva.”)

the beast below
The payoff was weak (and a little disturbing), but the setup was worth it all by itself as far as I was concerned. New-Who future Earth is always encouragingly weird, except maybe for the cat nuns, and this one posed the most meaningful allegorical dilemma of the season.

time of the angels / flesh and stone
Overrated, but not unjustly. I still don’t really buy the Angels as the Best Who Monster Ever or even as a convincing lifeform full stop. But the episodes that feature them are really excellent entertainment.

amy’s choice
I never would have predicted that this would be any good, but it was brilliant. Entertaining on a surface level, and surprisingly deep, skewering our Hero with a directness we’ve never seen before even in the supposedly dark McCoy days. The monsters seem lazy, but in fact they’re the pointy end of the skewer if you think about it.

the lodger
The most flat-out enjoyable episode of the season, if you’re not hung up on Doctor Who being Scary and Serious all the time. Best part for me was Amy making way for a temporary “companion” who had much more chemistry with the Doctor than she’s ever had.

mixed bags

vampires of venice
Underrated, but not unjustly. Not a patch on “City of Death” (sorry, Paul Kirkley) and not the spooky “State of Decay” sequel it could (maybe should) have been, but good clean fun nevertheless. Critics who fixate on the “climb the tower” ending are really just trying to brag about noticing it.

the hungry earth / cold blood
As much as I love these monsters and as important as I consider the themes they always come prepackaged with, I have to concede this was largely a waste of time.

vincent and the doctor
Its heart was in the right place…sort of…but its head wasn’t. Massively overrated by people who think that mentioning depression and art is the same as weaving a compelling drama about them.

bottom of the barrel

victory of the daleks
Worst of the season and perhaps of the whole series. There is no moment at which something enjoyable is happening that is not spoiled by something incredibly stupid. I realize Gatiss started with hopeless requirements but surely it could have been better than this.

I’m wondering if maybe I’m not a Doctor Who fan anymore. Because this was probably Doctor Who at its least like itself, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’s a standard television plot: two best friends are in love, they can’t quite figure out how to tell each other, dangerously cool new friend appears and threatens the budding relationship, and in the ultimate crisis, they blurt it out and live happily ever after. Then the dangerously cool new friend destroys a predatory alien spaceship and zips off in his time machine. You know, standard.

This is not a writer known for his great work on New Who either, of course. “The Shakespeare Code” was pretty embarrassing. I’ll probably lose all credibility for saying that “The Unicorn and the Wasp” and “Planet of the Dead” were not the absolute worst the series has offered; as goofy as “Unicorn” was, for instance, I enjoyed it a lot more than “The Doctor’s Daughter” and that awful Sontaran two-parter. Roberts has a light touch, and if you like your Who portentous and conscientiously plausible he’s not your guy.

But “The Lodger” is really funny, standing out even in a season of witty scripts. I loved the cold open so much I almost stopped watching right there, afraid the episode would let me down. But it kept right on with what you might at a stretch call “Human Nature”-lite: the Doctor masquerading as an average bloke. I know, it sounds stupid, and the more I think about his reasons for doing this and all the silly stuff he’s doing and building in his rented room (putting off saving people’s lives for no discernible reason), the less sense it makes. But the biggest difference these days (and maybe it was ever thus) between a good Who script and a bad one is that the former keeps me distracted from the stuff that doesn’t make sense until after it’s over, and the latter can’t hide it for an instant.

I loved jumping right in with the Doctor and Amy, how much was left implied, how well paced it all was as a result. I loved the Doctor’s trouble remembering the customs of the era he’s in — how to greet people, how much money is “a lot,” and so on (yeah, he was stuck on “present-day” Earth for years in the seventies, but that was eight hims ago). I loved the self-referential stuff, about how normal it is for him to have “girl friends with nothing going on,” and making fun of those corny melodramatic speeches about being “the Oncoming Storm.” I loved that he talks to cats again after supposedly going off them for a while (after the “Cheetah People” and those cat nuns). I loved Craig, who was utterly adorable and had more chemistry with the Doctor than Amy does. In some ways this is the gayest episode of the season, which is great because I’d just been thinking how I’d miss that aspect of the RTD era.

In the end there were only two things I really didn’t like. (Well, three, if you count the terrible incidental music.) One was that the threat turned out to be a little too innocent, and maybe a little too reminiscent of “The Girl in the Fireplace.” The other was the football sequence, which was just going too far. Maybe it was just the incidental music, but this was far more nauseating than the similar sequence in “Black Orchid.” Everyone cheers for the Doctor and I think he even says “I own this game!” but I really hope not. Ugggghhhhh. Though it wouldn’t have fit the plot, I frankly wish he’d been rubbish at it.

But yeah, sorry, apart from that I loved “The Lodger.” I almost want to avoid reading the reviews and listening to the podcasts because I know they’re going to trash this episode like bullies picking on the fat kid. In a season that was supposed to be about getting back to monsters and the apocryphal hiding behind sofas, it’s funny that my two favorite episodes might end up being this and “Amy’s Choice.”

Of course it’s what we’d all do if we had a time machine: slip back in time and see history being made. The future’s a dicier proposition. On the one hand, what you don’t know is always a little more exciting than what you think you do know. On the other hand, what you don’t know could turn out to be a nuclear holocaust or a biological disaster that dooms you the second you step out the door. If you steer clear of plague years and battlefields, history’s a safer bet. 19th century France seems as safe as anything.

Unfortunately, if your time machine’s a TARDIS, there’s no such thing as a safe place or time. It turns out Earth history is riddled with alien monsters, which frankly is a bit of a bore. I’m trying to guess whether I would have needed a monster to make an episode about Vincent van Gogh exciting when I was 11 years old. It’s hard to tell; I loved Black Orchid when I was 11, so maybe not. Then again, nobody else I know loved Black Orchid. So maybe Richard Curtis was right to make sure Vincent and the Doctor centered around scenes of one of the greatest painters in history using hayforks and wooden chairs to fend off a giant invisible space turkey.

For me, though, it was bloody embarrassing. As a Doctor Who fan I can cope with embarrassment. This is a show in which one of the best monsters, a clear inspiration for (and 3 years ahead of) Alien in form, behavior, and plot, featured a larval form literally made of bubble wrap painted green. But what’s harder to cope with is the emotion anyone but an utter philistine should experience when seeing a painter’s easel used as a bayonet. I don’t know what to call that emotion, but it seems strange that none of the art-appreciating characters in the story display any of it. Nor do I understand why, when the alien monster’s last words are revealed, no one’s day really seems ruined. There’s a moment of mild regret and then it’s just “hooray us, we must do this again sometime!” I imagine we’re supposed to regard it as van Gogh’s inner demon, slain through the power of art, but during the episode all I could see was a big crude ugly distraction from the purely human story we could have had.

Richard Curtis gets all kind of slack from me thanks to Blackadder, though I can understand why people deride his movies. I didn’t see a huge difference in the quality of the writing in this episode, though, at least not on the level of dialogue. If anything it was less witty than usual, the nadirs being the running jokes of the “isn’t it a starry night?” or “hey, I brought you a bunch of sunflowers, don’t you feel like painting them?” variety. If you think of Curtis as a sentimentalist these days rather than a wit, well, check out the time-bending ending. It’s so cloying as to be nearly unbearable, making it hard to appreciate that even though it seems a spectacularly bad idea, it’s exactly what you’d want to do for van Gogh if you could.

I may have to start a regular feature of Questions I Couldn’t Answer. Here’s this week’s list, in part:

1. Is this the first time the Doctor has met van Gogh?
2. If so, why? The man is nearly 1000 years old, his favorite planet is Earth, and he has a time machine.
3. Why didn’t they just throw paint onto the thing? (van Gogh could have bitched about how much it cost.)

In general, the episode was pretty flat for me, largely devoid of the passion or depth it seemed to be miming. On the plus side, I don’t know much about van Gogh’s life, so at least I didn’t have to spend the whole thing wincing at how inaccurate it was.

There were some bits I liked. It was interesting to contrast Eleven’s awkwardness and helplessness at van Gogh’s “mad” moment with the empathetic and comforting speech you know Ten would have made. I also enjoyed the “rear view mirror” (the two-headed “godmother” I’d prefer not to ponder too deeply), and the “starry night” special effect was pretty special, even if the scene that prompted it wasn’t. Best line of the episode, in my book: the Doctor is waiting hours for van Gogh to finish a painting, and he says “Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly…in the right order?”

“Cold Blood” is more fun than “The Hungry Earth,” if only because we finally get down into the Silurian city and spend most of our time there. It doesn’t look entirely real, but then again it isn’t; it’s a hollowed-out environment as artificial as anything we’ve built for ourselves aboveground. It’s also pretty sumptuous in parts; turns out the Silurians are good with hydroponics and almost-Art-Deco interior design. Even the makeup doesn’t bother me at all now that I’m used to it. I love the masks, the guns, the clothes, the head crests — major props to the designers. With the sound down, this could be my favorite episode this season.

However, once you click off Mute, you’ve got problems. I guess they’re the sort of problems you could ignore if your expectations were low enough. For example, my expectations for “Vampires In/Of/Around Venice” were very low, so they were easy to meet. I expected silly and corny and that’s pretty much what I got; it’s not an episode I’ll go back and watch over and over. The return of the Silurians, though, had me hoping for a classic.

This episode starts with a voiceover by someone we haven’t met yet, in exactly the same way that “The End of Time” did, and the result is almost as cheesy. The voiceover comes back later on at exactly the wrong moment, ripping us out of the story so that Chibnall can deliver information he couldn’t figure out how to present dramatically. Maybe he just didn’t have time — to its credit, the story doesn’t drag a whole lot, though some of the action scenes seem to repeat themselves with diminishing effect.

Then we begin to meet some other Silurians, though not as many as you might expect, and it’s a little puzzling that a dire threat to the survival of their race didn’t result in waking up a lot more of them from hibernation. We also find that the females are without exception the aggressors, while the males are without exception pacifists. I hope this is based on some sex-linked behavior traits in reptiles (I don’t know offhand), because otherwise I have to assume it’s just a glib “role reversal” gimmick to avoid appearing sexist. Is it more sexist to portray women as weak and conciliatory, or to portray them as rabid killers? Maybe Chibnall should just have avoided the problem altogether by mixing it up a little.

The Doctor says “I (rather) love you” for the first time in this episode, as far as I know. He says it not to Amy or Rory or his sonic screwdriver (and can I tell you how sick I am of seeing him wave that thing EVERYWHERE? my Doctor is cricket balls and yo-yos, not omnipotent magic wands) but to a Silurian scientist. As far as I could tell, the reason for this effusiveness was that the scientist had just explained that although he kidnaps humans against their will and holds them captive and dissects them and causes them intense pain, he doesn’t actually HURT them. He just wants to help, in some vague way I’m not sure I understood. This is an example of the way this episode addresses moral issues.

Then there’s the way Alaya, the captive Silurian on the surface, is treated. What happens to her is (clumsily) presented as an accident, presumably because we’re too immature to deal with the moral complexity of understanding and forgiving (or not) someone with a tragic flaw. Unfortunately, this doesn’t allow the accident, and by extension the entire story, to mean much of anything. This moment, and the decisions and actions leading to it, should be the moral and dramatic center of the story, but instead it’s just an engine to drive us to an action-packed climax. In fact, this accident is almost the smartest thing to do, because it really does postpone a probably-fatal encounter between humans and Silurians, and doesn’t seem to ignite the all-out war Alaya was hoping for (since the pacifists barely seem to care).

After you’ve seen the episode, you can join me in wondering why the Silurians didn’t just go up to the surface and stop the drill themselves? And why they would have a tongue that stings people and causes “genetic contamination” as opposed to just poisoning them? And how “Homo reptilia” can be considered more proper than “Silurian,” since Reptilia is a class name, not a species name? “Homo reptilia” would only make sense if the Silurians and humans had a common primate ancestor. (It’s an interesting, overcomplicated idea, perhaps related to the aforementioned “genetic contamination,” but almost certainly not what the Doctor or the author were trying to suggest.)

The Doctor’s “probably worth mentioning” line was very funny and perfectly delivered. Amy’s comedy lines, though, just about all of them: not funny, not especially well delivered. She’s becoming Rose circa “Tooth and Claw,” laughing at stuff we have to take seriously for the drama to work, and that’s not good. Unfortunately even the ending can’t sober her up because she won’t remember it.

At least I can say I’m glad I was mistaken about Elliott’s role in the story, though a little disappointed that he really has none. That moment with Amy and Rory waving from the hill, though not explained, is at least significant in terms of advancing the season arc, and the discovery the Doctor makes about the Time Cracks at the very end is intriguing (maybe you saw it coming, but I didn’t).

And to be honest, as hamfisted as this was in terms of themes, characters, and plot, I’d still happily rewatch it. Perhaps I just love lizard people too much. And given how much they must have spent on the sets, costumes, props, and makeup, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a followup next season.

Maybe it’s a classic monster thing. This was easily the most frustratingly patchy Eleventh Doctor episode for me since “Victory of the Daleks.” In some respects it’s almost worse, since it’s given the luxury of a two-parter’s pace and squanders it.

The first problem we have is once again summed up nicely in a throwaway quip. When the Doctor sees the giant drill he gets this faraway expression like a boy who’s just set eyes on an awesome fire truck, and says, “Oh look, a big mining thing!” This IS funny, but it’s also revealing. If they explained what this rig was for, I missed it. As far as I know, it’s just a big drill that’s somehow gotten 21 km into the earth, and they’re drilling because they can, for pure scientific research or something.

…surely they explained it and I just missed it. But this tells you something about what role the drill actually plays in the story, which is just to stir up a nest of ants, or in this case, Silurians. Because that’s how you bug Silurians, you know — do a little drilling and they come up from the apparently hollow Earth and decide to carpe terra.

Which brings us to the next problem. If you never watched the classic series, I didn’t spoil anything for you (yet). You have no idea what a Silurian is. Even if you know what period in prehistory that word refers to, that still won’t help because the Silurians were misnamed. But if you’re a fan of classic Who you know exactly what’s going on because you saw the trailer. So this episode is largely an exercise in frustration and impatience as you watch everyone try to figure out what’s pulling people through fake-looking soft holes in the soil. You already know.

You also know that the people being pulled under are alive, first because, well really, and second because the Doctor apparently see Rory and Amy’s 10-years-later selves waving to him from a distance. This sort of thing doesn’t seem unlikely — could you resist the temptation, in their shoes? — but it also implies that the two of them survive not only this adventure but all future adventures as well. Not that we expect our leads to die (though remember poor Adric), but now the characters in the story shouldn’t expect it either. Why don’t future Rory and Amy try to warn themselves? Any number of explanations are possible (e.g. the Doctor told them not to), and surely we’ll get one next episode. Maybe this relates to the speech the Doctor gives in the teaser for next week, where he talks about this moment in history being changeable.

Speaking of the characters in the story: they’re all the type that do whatever’s convenient for the plot, regardless of the sense it makes. The attempts to give them depth — a secret affection, for example, or the clumsy, patronizing “dyslexia be damned!” moment — fell flat for me. I guess I care about the kid — you gotta love an 11-year-old who quotes Conan Doyle in the year 2020 — but I know this will be milked cynically in the second part. Either he’s going to be put in mortal danger or he’s going to befriend a young Silurian, or both. I Believe The Children Are Our Future.

Which brings us to the moment where the Doctor spoon-feeds us the Story Theme, which is that the way we treat the former owners of the Earth (who look distractingly and implausibly apelike apart from the scales and head crests) reveals our character as a species. Well, specifically it refers to how we treat our prisoners, which at least is topical. But in a proper script this would have been shown to us, not just spelled out in audible italics.

There’s a cartoonish tongue-lash (how long IS that thing?) which I can forgive, and a hand coming through the earth from above into what appears to be a hollow space which I can’t, since what’s going on here? How are they holding the ground up, a force field of some kind? Probably, but it’s not so much mysterious as just plain confusing. There’s a magic Sunblocker dome which seems to have no purpose apart from making things spooky (why not just have the attack come at night? why trap these people at all if your goal is to conquer the earth?). There’s a hilarious montage where maybe 5 people cobble together a complete surveillance (?) system covering the dig site and the nearby buildings within the space of about 5 minutes, which is perhaps the most far-fetched element of the whole episode, and that’s saying a lot.

Though there’s a funny-ish moment here about the sonic screwdriver’s limitations, there’s also a telling moment where he points it at the ground in a futile attempt to save someone who’s just been pulled under. This thing was always a blatant magic wand, even in the classic series (one of the best decisions John Nathan-Turner ever made was to destroy the thing in 1982), and this is one of those episodes where it’s really overused and overpraised. It’s nicely symbolic that it’s a scientific tool instead of some Gallifreyan mystical artifact, but when it’s used this casually, is there really a difference? Not to mention that whenever he whips it out I can’t get away from how oversized the thing is now. Did the TARDIS figure he needed to overcompensate for something?

I really liked Chris Chibnall’s “42,” and it’s nice to see how that story’s biggest flaw (the deification of the nigh-indestructible Tenth Doctor) is turned on its head here. Eleven, like Five, is allowed to make mistakes, and even if some of them seem a bit contrived, this is far better than the alternative. I certainly love the texture of this story, and the themes, and maybe my high expectations (it SHOULD have been my favorite of the season) are to blame here. I just really didn’t care for the script.

Unlike the Dalek episode, this story doesn’t even spring from a clever premise — it’s basically just “the Silurians are back and after literally millions of years they are finally REALLY pissed off.” Like the Dalek episode, this story could have brought these (really very respectable) monsters back in so many different dramatic ways and from so many different angles. Their strength was always that they weren’t evil or mercilessly hostile, but intelligent, civilized creatures with a legitimate land grievance to work out. You can see how this would be relevant today, and you can even see how Chibnall is groping toward this relevance as a man being pulled under the soil might grope toward the light. I’m really hoping he reaches it in the next episode, but for now he hasn’t given me much to hold on to.