encyclops

They’re either going to love this one or hate it. I’m pretty sure I loved it.

At first, taken in parts, it really seems a bit naff. You’ve got two realities, at least one of which may be a dream, each appearing to reflect the fantasies of one of “Amy’s boys.” You’ve got the Dream Lord, a weaselly little impresario reminiscent of Q, the omnipotent plot device from Star Trek: The Next Generation who amuses himself putting the Enterprise crew into period costume and “unintentionally” helping them demonstrate the resourcefulness of humanity. And you’ve got the choice itself, which amounts to Amy choosing Rory or the Doctor. “Contrived” is too mild a word.

And yet, as a whole, it’s great fun, starting as always with the dialogue and delivery (“I’ve crushed your flowers.” / “Amy will kill you.”), but even the Doctor Who-in-miniature of the two realities is pretty terrific. The freezing TARDIS you saw in the trailer is the lesser of them, perhaps, but features an impressive spectacle on the scanner and a spooky Silent Hill: Frozen Memories mood when the console ices over. The monsters in Leadworth (excuse me, Upper Leadworth) seem like standard stuff at first — comfortable familiar objects/people who open their mouths to reveal what look like eyes (rather than teeth, as in “The Eleventh Hour,” “The Beast Below,” “The Time of Angels,” “Flesh and Stone,” and “Vampires of Venice” — but they’re deadly eyes, at least). But as the Dream Lord’s plot becomes clearer, the symbolism of these old people capable of turning young people into dust hits home.

Some fans will most likely find the symbolism obvious or familiar; the series began asking these kinds of questions about itself back in the Seventh Doctor’s era, possibly earlier, and I recall finding them a bit contrived even then. Not that I didn’t think it made sense for the Doctor to have a dark side, or that I minded a bit of mystery coming back, but I wanted it to feel natural and authentic. (The revelation of the mystery, in Marc Platt’s novel Lungbarrow, was just godawful nonsense as far as I was concerned.) Here the contrivance of the plot doesn’t matter so much because the dark side it explores feels perfectly natural and authentic. As does Amy’s actual choice.

The strength of a show like this, the freedom that allows it to feel fresher than ever 47 years after its birth in 1963, is that it can be anything it needs to be. Fending off menacing aliens might be its stock in trade, but in the back room you can always find the underrated gems: space/time riddles (“Castrovalva”), psychological/philosophical parables (“Kinda” and “Snakedance”), sociopolitical satire (“The Sun Makers,” “The Happiness Patrol,” “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” and more recently “The Long Game” and “Bad Wolf”), and even commentary on itself (“Love and Monsters,” a tough pill to swallow for many reasons). These are the episodes that really stand out and stick with me after they’re over. I’m happy to rank “Amy’s Choice” among them.

Oh, P.S.: what I’ve been saying about Amy and Rory being no Rose and Mickey? It’s true, they’re not, but I finally like them just about as much. They’re great here and it almost makes me sad to think they’ll be just fighting monsters in the next episode. Then again, considering who the monsters are, this could be fantastic.

I’d started to worry that the Moffat era wasn’t going to work unless Moffat himself wrote the scripts, but “Vampires of Venice” helped me breathe a little easier.

The history’s just for color, of course. There’s no reason this story couldn’t have happened in Victorian England, or at the height of the Roman Empire, or the far future of the Earth. Well, the canals might almost be necessary (though they raise other awkward questions), but the time period isn’t, except maybe to throw us off the scent for a while. I can’t really speak to its accuracy; a few moments made me go “huh?” but nothing I could criticize with any authority, and besides, the Cracks in Time could cause all sorts of problems with history at this point.

I quite liked the villains, though they didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. As you might predict, we do find that they’re not traditional vampires (more “The Curse of Fenric” (Seventh Doctor) than “State of Decay” (Fourth Doctor)) and yet the way they assimilate their victims into their ranks doesn’t make much sense otherwise. It’s on par with “Daleks in Manhattan” for plausibility. Also, I can see where a summer day might be uncomfortable for them, but the way they react to concentrated sunlight is pure Anne Rice (via Neil Jordan, with a hint of Lifeforce if you like). Granted, they don’t have much choice in the matter, but you’d think this might not be the best planet for them to colonize, what with all the sunlight around. Maybe it’s all the water that attracted them (a nice nod to “Fenric”‘s Haemovores). No matter: this is science fantasy, not science fiction. The vampires’ true form, by the way, is fantastic, one of the better effects so far this season in my opinion and all the more so for being used sparingly. Kind of a strange mashup of species, but they are aliens, after all, in case you hadn’t guessed.

Rory comes along this time, and as the end of last week’s episode indicated, this Doctor seems far more determined to keep the human couple together than his previous incarnations were regarding Mickey and Rose. This leads to a few clunky lines (there was no need to spell out the flashlight gag, for instance), and unfortunately Rory’s a damned nuisance, slapsticking around embarrassingly. It would have been far more interesting and watchable had he displayed a little competence in some area. Of course he’s terrified, and who wouldn’t be? But to make him so useless in relation to the Doctor just seems mean, and more importantly boring, and not really funny as it seems it was meant to be. Still, and this is probably the point, he does get in a few of the reproachful lines that serve to give the Doctor dimension these days, about blithely putting human lives in danger and such. Also I really liked the way Matt Smith delivered the line about how he likes it better when people just say “it’s bigger on the inside than the outside” — there’s enough threat in it that you can’t help wondering where it’s coming from. To me that’s a far more interesting dimension than the old “people all around you die” complaint.

The dialogue’s pretty crisp and fun, giving me even more confidence that “Victory of the Daleks” was atypical in its lameness. There’s another moral dilemma at the end, a real “well, wait a minute, she’s got a point” remark about saving a city versus saving a species. It’s not quite as tough to resolve as the one in “The Beast Below,” but it’s not trivial, either, and I hope these culminate in something larger during Moffat’s reign, instead of being throwaway angst.

Overall, it’s not terrible, but it’s not going to make anyone’s best-of-season list. It’s just a fun little outing with something of an old-school feel to it. The teaser for next week, on the other hand, couldn’t have less of an old-school feel, and I’m pretty excited for it. This one met my modest expectations, but next week will have a lot to live up to.

I’ve been time-delaying my Doctor Who commentary in deference to American fans, many of whom have to wait two weeks to catch up to what’s being aired in Britain, but I think I’m going to go ahead and start dropping them as I write them instead. So my reviews of “Vampires in/of/whatever Venice” and “Amy’s Choice” are coming up in about half an hour. As a rule I don’t care much about spoilers; I don’t feel you can really come to grips with a work of fiction if you can’t talk about what actually happens in it. But I err on the side of discretion if it doesn’t hamper me too much. You can always wait to read it until after you’ve watched the episode, assuming anyone’s reading at all!

In the midst of rushing to the scene of the Next Big Moment this season, a lot of people ask Doctor Eleven what his plan is, and he tells them he’ll figure it out when he gets there, or words to that effect. The first time was pretty funny, but the more he says it, the more I begin to suspect it’s actually Steven Moffat talking. Maybe I just didn’t pay close enough attention (lots of confusing timey-wimey stuff, not to mention some secrets and lies), but it didn’t seem to me as though this story had a plot, at least not one driven by characters. Instead it’s driven by a desperate dash to the next safe place, or rather the next Cool Set Piece. This is pretty slight criticism, however, considering that very few (if any) Doctor Who episodes have what you’d call a character-driven plot.

The Cool Set Pieces are, in fact, kinda cool. The shipboard forest is probably the coolest, making a nice deep dark wood for Little Red Riding Amy to be lost in. I really enjoyed Falling Up, Angels Attack the Tunnel, The Forgotten Soldiers, Angels Swarm The Doctor (a.k.a. That Old Daleks Computer Game), and of course Falling Sideways. These pretty much made up for the fact that the Angels mostly function here as very slow-moving and sinister Doctor Who monsters, and not much else, to be honest. There are no further revelations about their nature beyond what we learned in Blink.

They also don’t really cover their eyes that I noticed, and could easily be looking at each other. And they kill people by breaking their necks now, apparently. Again, maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention, but it seemed as though most of the rules that made them what they were in Blink were broken here. But I didn’t mind too much, and actually enjoyed their antics in this second part more than in the first. I didn’t even mind that they basically stole a Vashta Nerada bit with the whole Dead Man Talking routine.

So in general, good times…but here’s the thing. The day after I watched this, I continued my Ninth Doctor rewatch with “Aliens in London.” Now, there are a lot of embarrassing things about that episode, but one of the brilliant parts, the thing that RTD did so well and made Rose so terrific in the first season, is the reaction when Rose returns 12 months later than she left, instead of 12 hours. Flatulent aliens in human skins were as silly as Doctor Who has ever been (okay, ALMOST as silly, since the Adipose and the Abzorbaloff were still to come), and yet for once in the history of the series, the Doctor picked up someone whose family actually noticed and cared that they were gone. The seriousness, the humor, and the heart with which those sequences were carried off felt so fresh and yet so head-slappingly obvious. Why hadn’t this ever happened before? It made so much sense and gave the series a sense of reality amid the goofy science-fantasy of it all.

The Eleven era is trying for this, but as I noted in my comments on “The Eleventh Hour,” it feels a bit ersatz. It’s different, and that’s nice — Amy’s family knows all about “the raggedy Doctor,” because if they hadn’t it would be the “oh my heavens he’s from space? where are you going in that blue box?” all over again. But Amy Pond’s no Rose, and it really shows in the over-the-top ridiculousness of the very end of the episode. We know she WANTS to do what she does, but the scene in which she does it is unbelievably childish. It’s like she’s suddenly possessed (maybe she is, who knows). I’ve heard comments that this season seemed more firmly aimed at children than the RTD era, and I didn’t really buy it until that moment.

Still, it’s an interesting setup, smacking a bit of Back to the Future (in a good way, if that’s possible), and I like that we didn’t have to wait till the end of the season to see the crack addressed, however temporarily.

Nice guest stars, by the way, particularly the Colonel/Bishop/whatever he was, the grunty-looking soldiers, and…okay, just them. I’m still not a fan of River Song, and don’t find myself as intrigued as I’d hoped by her revelation. If the person she’s talking about is the Doctor, that’s kind of obnoxious; if it’s not, who else could it be? I don’t know which to hope for.

Still, I’d say the season is 4 for 5 right now, and that’s a damn good track record. I wish the Tennant era had had this kind of consistency.

Time was one of the reasons it took me a while to warm to New Who.

Classic Who, as you may know, typically ran stories in four installments of about 25 minutes each, so that a complete story would last 100 minutes. That’s somewhere between the length of your average contemporary Hollywood comedy and your average contemporary Hollywood science fiction movie, which seems entirely appropriate for this show. Prior to 1980 or so, it wasn’t unusual for some stories to take 6 episodes (150 minutes, a blockbuster epic fantasy by Rowling), 8 episodes (200 minutes, getting into director’s-cut Tolkien territory), or in a couple of cases 10 or 12 episodes (a full afternoon marathon or three months of Saturdays, depending on your approach). There were only a handful of stories that were told in 2 episodes (50 minutes — a generous episode of Star Trek), and few were satisfying.

New Who has just 42 minutes to tell a complete story every week. That’s nothing.

A lot of people will tell you that the old show had plenty of padding, which usually took the form of running through corridors for no good reason, or the Doctor and friends getting tied up and escaping. It was also a little slower-paced in general, because back in those days a lot of British directors still thought in terms of theater, and MTV wasn’t invented until the show was already close to 20 years old. Nowadays the show zips along like lightning and looks like it was edited by Edward Scissorhands.

This sounds like a good thing — it keeps the episodes dense with excitement, right? Well, sometimes. It can also mean that the show can either tell a good, interesting story, or maintain a cool, scary mood, or have still moments of genuine emotion, but not necessarily all three at once.

Thus I’m always a little pleased at the prospect of a two-parter. 84 minutes is still pretty scant, but it allows enough breathing room for the show to approximate the feel of its history.

That’s the first thing I noticed about this week’s part 1, “The Time of Angels”: it breathes. After last week’s incoherent “Victory of the Daleks,” it comes as a great relief.

New Who seems to be developing a fixation on objects stolen or liberated from museums (which for some reason never fails to remind me of The Great Muppet Caper), but it’s fun this time instead of stupid and obvious (Planet of the Dead). The Doctor and Amy are lively and fun now that Moffat’s writing them again, and the first half of the episode is chock full of the little moments that make this show worthwhile, many of them including River Song. Refreshingly, Amy’s relationship with River Song becomes conspiratorial rather than jealous when she discovers that Song and the Doctor have a prior/future relationship of some kind.

Amy, still trying to fit the Doctor into a typical human family scenario, seems convinced that Song is the Doctor’s future wife (or rather that the Doctor is Song’s future husband), but my money is on “con woman.” If so, though, she’s a con woman who does know how to fly the TARDIS, and seems to know a lot about the machine (though the joke that it makes that signature noise because the Doctor “leaves the brake on” is revisionist; if he does it, so does the Master in 70s Who story Terror of the Autons and probably more after that). We get a nice long shot of the console room. I’m warming to the new interior design, though I still think (e.g.) the early-20th-century bathtub fixtures on the console itself are too self-consciously cute.

So things are pretty lively up through the reasonably spooky Ring homage, but about halfway through, things start to bog down a bit for me. Part of the problem is that this part felt padded for me, ironically; instead of running through corridors we’re creeping through catacombs, but same difference. Plot points do appear but somehow it doesn’t feel like much is happening, and it climaxes in another of the action-hero bravado speeches Moffat likes to give his Doctor and which frankly diminish the character.

The other problem that causes this second quarter to bog down for me is that I never much liked the Weeping Angels. Great image, sure, and those look-back-and-they’ve-moved shots are still pretty cool. But the concept of the creatures themselves seems really far-fetched even for this program, and it doesn’t help that the Doctor specifically mentions in passing that they’ve “evolved.” Really now, check out what happens with the first angel Amy sees and tell me something like that evolved. I’m good at suspending my disbelief for Doctor Who but the Angels really push it.

Nevertheless, this story’s really working for me so far. I’m looking forward to the conclusion more than I’ve looked forward to any episode this season so far, including the opener.

I’d list everything I hated about this episode but I would basically be quoting the script, word for word.

The concept we saw in the trailer — Daleks apparently helping the Allies in WWII — felt fresh and interesting, and there were so many ways it could have been explored meaningfully. That would have been quite a treat considering almost every Dalek story in the new series has been thoroughly embarrassing (the exception is “Dalek”). I’m not sure, but I think this might be the worst Dalek story ever.

Seriously, almost every minute is a fresh letdown. Dismal storyline, dismal dialogue, unconvincing emotion, ghastly Churchill impression (at least I hope so). The whole episode is centered around an unintentionally hilarious Dalek redesign; they’re painted in candy colors now and they have a vocal filter they stole from the Strokes. There’s even a totally gratuitous Star Wars ripoff sequence, complete with “I can’t shake him” moment and “shields down on the Death Star for one pilot to get through” moment, which is even worse when you find out it’s happened because a Dalek android has, in about 40 seconds’ time, retrofitted WWII fighter planes to fly through space.

There are exactly two bits I kind of liked. One is the moment when Amy teaches the Doctor that humanity is better defined by love than by pain, supported by admittedly excellent acting by the Dalek android (the only decent performance in the whole episode, unfortunately including Matt Smith and Karen Gillan). The other, though I saw it coming, is when the Doctor eats the cookie he’s been pretending is a TARDIS self-destruct device.

No one on the new show has any idea how to write a worthwhile Dalek story. It was inevitable that they’d come back, and now I hate them just as much as the Doctor does. If the price of scripts as good as “The Ark in Space” is more monsters made from green bubble wrap, I’ll pay it. Anything’s better than seeing these Fiestaware salt shakers at the end of every season, but it seems we’ll never be rid of the bastards. KBO, indeed.

What makes Amy Pond’s rich history with the Doctor so interesting is that she has every reason to hate him. Consider: when she first meets him, he eats one bite of probably everything she has in her fridge or cupboards, making her slave over a hot stove at the age of what, eight? Then he inspects the crack in her wall, opens it to reveal a huge scary creature, and then skips off at the first toll of the Cloister Bell to disappear for her entire adolescence. So basically, he’s the plumber who comes around, drinks all the lemonade, then takes one look at the leak and says “let me get some tools from my van,” then drives off in the van and leaves her pipes dripping. For twelve years.

Would you spend that time worshipping a man who ate all your fish fingers and then ran away leaving you to cope with the knowledge that there’s a monster in your wall (eyeball or anglerfish, either one’s terrifying) that he failed to remove?

Probably you hate him to a degree that whacking him with a cricket bat and handcuffing him to the radiator isn’t quite going to resolve. Even if he does finally come back with the number 6 pipe wrench and stop the drip, it could easily take a whole season to work out that distrust and resentment. That’s why the cop-out resolution of “The Beast Below” doesn’t quite feel earned: when Amy says that the Doctor is someone very old and very kind who would make any sacrifice to stop a child crying, she has no reason to think any of these things are true of him and every reason to think that they’re not.

But let’s assume, along with her four psychiatrists, that she’s a bit mental on the subject of this Time Lord. Logical or not, we know she, like everyone else in the new series, thinks the Doctor is a two-hearted Jesus. We’re still left with the uncomfortable fact that a moral dilemma as difficult and compelling as any this series has ever presented has been resolved via the never-proven assumption that the slave enjoys his work.

Up to that point, though, this is a pretty awesome episode. It’s full of sexy imagery, from the floating city and its steampunk trappings to Liz Ten and her porcelain mask. Yes, Moffat’s still mining “The Girl in the Fireplace,” trading French marionettes for seaside fortune-teller dummies (love their third faces) and a historical polymath noblewoman for a futuristic swashbuckling monarch (love her real face). But this time it’s in the service of an allegory with real gravity about the choices we make as a society and the people and natural wonders we step on in order to reach for the stars. The impossible choice this leads to is the same one we face in real life, and that’s why the Doctor’s resolution is so much more shocking and interesting and honest than Amy’s. That’s why Amy’s is actually downright horrible, if you replace the Beast with any of its possible analogs in real life.

That’s why it’s best to punch the “FORGET” button and soak up all the other pleasures on display. At 42 minutes, it’s too short for all the imagery to really pay off (I would have traded the vomit scene for three more minutes sketching in a few more details of this future society), but in concept and execution (if not resolution) it’s exactly what I hoped for from Moffat’s tenure. Let’s hope that next time round neither he nor Amy lets the Doctor off so easily.

This was a LOT of fun. Let’s start with the reasons it shouldn’t have been.

First there’s the new title sequence and the slightly different theme tune. They’re both shite. Though it could be worse: look at Caprica.

Then there are the overly familiar Moffat tropes: the girl visited by the Doctor at different, capricious times in her life, who falls in love with him immediately and is troubled by deadly creatures lurking in her home.

Then there are the overly familiar new Who tropes: giant space fleets, casual chats with world leaders, ominous foreshadowing catchphrases (“Silence will fall”), and of course goofy personal catchphrases. “Geronimo!” is no worse than “fantastic!” or “allons-y!” but it’s no better, either, and the self-conscious bit where the new Doctor tries out “Who da man?” is only narrowly saved by his reaction to it.

Then there are the usual confusing questions: what was the monster doing for 12 years? Why does Amelia live alone in that house? And why do 20 minutes matter if you’ve got a time machine?

Then there’s the new ersatz Tyler family: Amy’s aunt, the uncharismatic smart Rory, the hot dumb Jeff (if you average the two you get Mickey). Then there’s the corny new TARDIS interior like some steampunk nerd’s bad high school art project for the Mixed Media / Collage unit.

Finally, and worst of all, there’s the “I am the Doctor and you don’t wanna mess with me” bluff that resolves the final conflict, which makes the writer’s mistake of thinking you need to stack the deck in favor of your new actor and assert his authority. I don’t particularly like a Doctor who has to bully people with his reputation. I like the one who solves problems with his wits, which is how he got his reputation, the one (to be fair) we see for all of the rest of the episode.

None of that really matters while the episode is on, because the script is terrific and well-paced, the dialogue is crackling, the direction is spot-on and tight as it’s ever been, the new companion’s great fun (sexy too, natch) with an already-established rich history with the Doctor, and the new Doctor is practically perfect.

I’d really been worried about Matt Smith, not because there was anything obviously wrong with him as an actor, but because he’s following one of the best-loved Doctors in the show’s forty-seven year history, and I didn’t think he had a hope of distinguishing himself. And it’s true that there’s some Tennant in his performance — the comedy, the glibness, the glee, the “no no no no,” the “what what what what,” perhaps other elements I’ve stopped noticing because they’ve become part of the character’s personality as it’s been developed over the past 5 years. But he’s unmistakably his own man, and to be honest, I already like him just as much as the last two, if not more.

Hate the bow tie, of course. But I did say practically perfect.

Goodbye, David Tennant. Hello, everything!

I’ve seen the first two episodes of season 5 of the new Doctor Who, and I’m so excited about them that I’m actually going to start writing in this blog again.

In fact, I’m seriously thinking about cleaning this one out and/or making a separate blog JUST to talk about Doctor Who. That’s how hard I’m nerding out over this show, again, finally.

I’ll write about the season opener, “The Eleventh Hour,” sometime this week (since it finally airs on American TV this Saturday). If I don’t do it here, I’ll point you to the new blog.

At least as good as Azkaban, perhaps better depending on what you like. Me, I like dark wizardry and Tom Riddle, walking the line with Snape, and Dumbledore Gandalfing it up. This one was finally restrained in all the right ways; for once the music was minimal enough that I could hear sound from adjacent theaters, and the frenetic “action” actually stopped for, you know, scenes. Where people act.

Jim Broadbent acts the SHIT out of this movie and is the unsung backbone of the whole thing. Dan Radcliffe’s come a long way, too, and in the sequence where he’s high on Felix he’s actually FUN for a while instead of being a dour little messiah. Sorry to say Emma Watson’s still a weak link; better, but never quite properly cast to my mind.

A lot was still glossed over from the book, but here the movie hung together instead of seeming like a hasty montage. One scene sticks out like a sore thumb and I hear it was added; bad move. The climax of the most harrowing scene also proves once again that CGI zombies don’t cut it.