Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #42 – The Romance Of Crime by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#6
The Romance Of Crime
By Gareth Roberts

At last!

I wouldn’t say that the Missing Adventures have been bad so far, but The Romance Of Crime is the first one you could slot where it’s supposed to go.  The characters, the setting and the style really go together.  No longer is there the feeling of a Doctor getting juggled at the last minute, or a baddie being dropped in by the editors, or another era peeking through the pages.  This is what the range was made for: it’s teatime, circa 1979.

And this isn’t my first visit.  Big Finish’s adaptation is sublime, and it came out before I decided to read the whole range, so I’ve already heard it two or three times.  The downside is that I already know the story, but after the initial déjà vu it was easy enough to imagine this was just a generously wordy Target novel.  The Romance Of Crime isn’t the first Doctor Who story I’ve rediscovered as a book, and it’s a lot of fun this way.

Right from the opening page, this feels like a lost TV story.  We begin on a miserable, bubbling world that could only be realised as a model shot; you can almost hear Dudley Simpson’s orchestra snoring sinisterly beneath.  After the startling discovery of a great many corpses, the action moves to the Rock Of Judgement, a travelling asteroid housing a prison – with, it must be said, not many inmates remaining.  Justice moves swiftly here, always in the general direction of a particle reversal chamber.  Their attitude to all this is summed up pretty well when a judge sentences a man to death and thinks inwardly, “It had been a long Thursday.”  Romance quickly fits into the sofa groove of 1979, with Douglas Adams as script editor and jolly comic dialogue under every rock.

Par for Gareth Roberts, you might say.  The Highest Science was full of blatant Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently devices, and Tragedy Day was just as interested in comedy (with, for my money, messier results).  The Romance Of Crime resists the temptation to indulge in a tissue of references, though I did clock an amusingly PG-rated spin on a famous K9-themed outtake.  After The Crystal Bucephalus, another book full of arch Adams nudge-winkery might have sent the range disappearing up its own orifice.  Instead we get on with a solid story, that happens to involve funny people and witty prose.

If you’re going to write a funny Doctor Who, you’ll probably be wanting Tom Baker.  One of the reasons this one feels so era-appropriate is that the wit comes organically from his character: his boggle-eyed irreverence is all there, as he bounces between amusingly blunt put-downs, bizarre observations and delightfully inane chatter.  Favourites include: “‘Well, that was interesting … in a tedious and incomprehensible sort of way.’”  /  “‘These belong to the usual occupant of this room, some judge person.  Probably away hanging people, somewhere.’”  /  “‘About to die?’ the Doctor said, indignant.  ‘I should hope not.  There are a number of interesting things I haven’t quite got round to yet.’”  After Evolution’s badly miscalculated psychopath, it’s good to have a recognisable Fourth Doctor.  Romance captures him so well, you’d think the notorious ad-libber himself had tinkered with it.  (And he would do so in the end.  For Big Finish, to pick one example, when he orders two glasses of water he specifies: “‘Neat!’”)

Romana is on glorious form as well, all haughty intelligence and withering tolerance of the Doctor.  “The Doctor fixed him with a manic stare.  ‘What, fade into the background, keep a low profile, listen out for vital clues, that sort of thing? … We do that sort of thing very well, don’t we, Romana?’  ‘Yes, I do, Doctor,’ she said and led the way out.”  Probably one of the reasons Season 17 was (at its best) funny is that these two in particular are so untouchable, nearly everything else might as well be farce to them.  You wouldn’t want Doctor Who to be like that all the time, but it makes a wonderful diversion.

Best of the rest is Menlove Stokes, the conceited, run-of-the-mill artist in residence, whose buffoonery is made delightful by his ridiculous verbiage.  “‘For no charge, I offer you, as I offer every wretched soul that finds his way to this, the darkest of all destinations, the opportunity to endure forever in my work … Your essence will endure long after your physical envelope has been snuffed from our miserable sphere.’”  /  “‘I have it, you’re from the arts committee, another of their wretched inspections.  Oddstock, isn’t it?  No, no, he’s dead, isn’t he, although how anybody could tell I don’t know.  You’re not that fool Mellenger, and you’re certainly not Sybilla Strang, as she’s a woman, just about…’”  /  “‘Ludicrous!  It’s my duty to warn you, I suppose.  Your talent stretches no further than your deluded imagination!’”

And the prose obligingly morphs to offer chuckles around him: “The fellow was frantically smoothing at his bald head with one hand, attending to hair that had disappeared long ago.”  /  “The butt of a standard issue blaster came down across the back of Stokes’s head.  All sixteen flabby stone of him slid heavily to the marble floor in much the same fashion as a badly designed building slips off a cliff.”  A few other characters raise a smile as well, particularly a condemned prisoner who responds to her imminent death with “‘Typical of you young people nowadays, it’s rush, rush, rush.’”  It all has that Season 17 air, with a whiff of Robert Holmes in its black humour.  A good vintage, despite The Horns Of Nimon.

As you can tell from glancing at the cover (and if you’ve somehow missed it, a chapter heading spoils them in advance), there are Ogrons as well.  What a treat – and just why didn’t the series make more of them, anyway?  Aggressive but loyal, dogged but utterly stupid, they tap into the same delightful vein of Aliens That Are A Pain But Aren’t Actually Evil that Douglas Adams would made his own.  Probably the best thing about Malcolm Hulke’s Frontier In Space novelisation was the stuff about their society, like how they worship monsters and pray for nothing more than them not eating Ogrons.  The Doctor’s attempt here to trick one into swapping a jelly baby for a rifle is a hoot; there’s a bit where one Ogron asks another, earnestly amid all this violence, if he had a nice journey down to a planet; and there’s this gem: “‘I will buy necklace for wife,’ said his mate.  ‘And a big stone.’  The first Ogron grunted his encouragement.  ‘Yes, it is good to have a big stone.’”  They might be mercenaries and they might not be good guys, but they’re people.  I love ’em.

Completing the main list of Comedy Stuff is Spiggot, who’s a bit like the flipside of Stokes.  Here is a 100% comedy character who, sadly, just doesn’t work.  Or he works too well, depending on your point of view.  A self-aggrandising, cliché-spewing caricature of a cop, always going on about how he plays by his own rules and gets results and “Angie and the kids” left him because of it, the text leaves us in zero doubt about whether we should be impressed.  “To emphasise his point, Spiggot attempted to click his fingers but failed.  Undaunted he continued.”  /  “Spiggot crushed another plastic cup.  Unfortunately, he had forgotten to drink all of the coffee that had been inside it and the scalding liquid splashed over his sweater.”  Naturally enough, everybody else hates Spiggot, either because he’s haphazardly interfering with their plans or just because he’s a bore.  Even K9 switches off his audio sensors.

And, well, I get it, but nevertheless Spiggot falls into that inevitable trap: irritating characters are irritating.  At least Stokes’s fustery demeanour leads to some amusing reactions, like his cringing infatuation with Romana, or his combustible hatred of his more talented protégé.  Spiggot is just one joke walking endlessly into a wall.  We get it, nobody likes you.  So sod off.  (Apparently he’s based on a TV character called Spender, played by Jimmy Nail.  I wouldn’t even have caught the reference at the time, let alone now, so I can’t comment on how good a spoof this is.  But as a creature in his own right, as many readers would view him, Spiggot’s just naff.)

The villains are a mixed bunch.  Xais is a disembodied human-hating mutant who can kill people with a glance (but is also, rather needlessly, super-strong).  She has an affecting back-story, largely missing from the Big Finish version, but even so she’s not the most complex of characters.  Kill all humans, huh?  So what else do you want to – oh right, that’s it.  And her accomplices, the Nisbett Brothers, are about as successful as Spiggot.  A very straightforward East End crime duo (in space), all their well-spoken thuggery and references to dear old mum feel completely old hat.  They’re a weak beer spoof of a spoof of the Kray Brothers.  Sure enough, Spiggot and the Nisbetts are rather flat in the audio version as well, as the actors flail inside these broad and boring caricatures.  Xais at least lends herself to a bit of scenery-chewing.  On the whole, you’ll be very grateful for the Ogrons.

If you’ve seen the Season 17 Rosetta Stone that is City Of Death, which obviously Gareth Roberts has (I’m guessing a few dozen times), you’ll know not everything can be hilarious: you need a straight man and some things at stake.  The Romance Of Crime has plenty of time for a solid plot involving a murderous psychopath, a shadowy crime-lord, two unstable criminal brothers and… actually almost everyone in this is some kind of appalling criminal, regardless of the Rock Of Judgement’s inmate population.  As the story wears on it’s mostly a series of double-crosses between shady characters.  It’s satisfyingly action-packed and it ticks along, but it’s rather apparent that there are no innocent people at stake, or not for very long.  Margo, a troubled prison guard, ends up being a host for Xais, and while that’s very sad the story ultimately leaves her behind without much fuss.  Meanwhile the criminal mastermind working with Xais – oh why not, I’ll keep it a secret – is the requisite straight man, but he’s so surrounded by villains that he doesn’t have much impact.  They’re all diminished (especially Xais) for having the share the limelight.

There’s hardly an epilogue when the show’s over, besides a cursory “this is how it all turned out” courtesy of the history books and a return to the Doctor and Romana’s Monopoly game.  A good time is had, but it’s not a particularly thoughtful experience.  And that’s… fine, I guess.  This is meant to recreate an era, and I could well believe this story, with its delightful comedic moments and its occasionally duff ones, could have been made in 1979.  I can see why some have dismissed it as bringing nothing new to the series.  I’d contend that it’s nice to at least try to get the series right once in a while.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #41 – Warlock by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#34
Warlock
By Andrew Cartmel

Certain authors have reputations among fandom, perhaps for their use of continuity (Gary Russell), their mostly comic work (Gareth Roberts), or for advancing the range and what it can do (Paul Cornell).  If I had to pin something on Andrew Cartmel’s work, besides his obvious depth of interest in the Doctor and Ace (based on his years of experience with the TV show), it would be a kind of vivid unpleasantness.  Warhead was the first New Adventure to really embrace the darker aspects of Doctor Who, pushing the show away from kids and towards the forward-thinking, rebellious young adults Cartmel wanted to encourage to begin with.  It embraced cyberpunk and environmental issues in a well-plotted, exciting story, and I wasn’t really sure why some people had a problem with it; Cartmel’s prose was evocative, his world was engrossing, he understood his characters and the thing moved at a pace.  Yes, there was the odd disturbing dream sequence, certainly a few deaths, and the world he had constructed was utterly downbeat, but it was never excessive.  There was hope and there was victory.

But now I’ve read Warlock, which is presumably the one they were talking about.  You thought Warhead was unpleasant?  Bless.  Warhead is Cartmel delivering Christmas presents in full Santa outfit compared to this.  Warlock is a novel so determined to push boundaries of taste that at one point (if you’ve read it, perhaps you can guess) I wanted to throw the thing across the room.

On some level, it’s my fault.  I’ve decided to read all the New and Missing Adventures, the good, the bad and that other one, to get the full experience. And I will, but that means I will come across books which, in the ordinary run of things, I’d simply stop reading.  I’ve come close a few times due to sheer incomprehensible prose (Time’s Crucible, Strange England), and goodness knows these books can be boring and/or pointless, but – and I accept this is sheer personal taste – Warlock was too miserable for me.  I’m pretty sure some of it was utterly gratuitous as well.

Like Warhead, Warlock is ostensibly a soapbox.  That’s not to say it doesn’t have a plot, or that you should roll your eyes at its message, but it is about the message.  We’ve done the environment; now we’re onto the war on drugs, and clinical trials on animals.  These issues aren’t unrelated, since pharmaceuticals are a major reason for animal testing, but it still felt like Warlock was fighting two slightly random battles at once.

The title refers to a new drug on the market which causes some forms of telepathy.  (It does a few other things as the plot requires.)  You can probably guess why the Doctor is investigating it – and you will have to, as he doesn’t say so until the last 20 pages.  He dispatches Bernice to infiltrate IDEA, an American anti-drugs organisation.  Meanwhile Ace has fallen in with a couple of animal rights activists, Jack and Shell, both habitual warlock users, who are intent on taking down a local animal testing facility.  Some of the tests involve warlock.

The novel hops between the two stories, but only for a short time between Bernice and Ace.  Benny witnesses a drug bust gone awry, carried out in spectacular, if slightly protracted style by Cartmel.  (There’s a moment where the “spirit of warlock”, i.e. a sort of wind that is generated by its users, travels around the room searching for a narc.  If you can forgive me being mindful of the book’s length, this goes on a bit.)  Afterwards she’s only there to gather information on warlock, but IDEA suss her out almost immediately, rendering her useless.  Luckily she escapes back to the Doctor’s HQ, the infamous House On Allen Road.  Incredibly, this no doubt exciting sequence occurs between chapters.  And that’s basically it for Bernice.  Cartmel writes her well, but plot-wise, she’s phoning it in.  After her contribution the IDEA portion of Warlock follows Creed, a burnt-out cop working for them.

Ace has more to do, or at least a higher page-count.  Unwittingly captured by the people running the tests, Ace and her new friends find themselves victims of a warlock drug trial.  Their pets – notably Chick, a cat the Doctor delivered – are swept up as well, so they can be experimented on.  And it’s around here that you can probably guess why I had a hard time with it.  Am I against animal testing?  You bet.  So is Cartmel, or he wouldn’t devote so much energy to the suffering of animals, and the deliberate cruelty of their torturers.  (One of them, Tommy, is inevitably a psychopath.  There are probably a fair few in the trade.)  I’m 100% with the message he’s sending out here, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit through pages and pages of unspeakable things happening to animals.  If anything, I didn’t need it to be spelled out.

Animal cruelty was used as a random, clumsy signifier in St. Anthony’s Fire, whereas at least it’s making a point here, but wading through it is no easier for that.  It’s just morbid to linger on it, but it ought to at least warrant some poetic justice for the bad guys.  And yet, while Tommy and his equally awful sister do get offed, it’s curiously quick and/or off-screen.  Like Bernice’s escape from New York, it’s odd that the book chooses to skip its heroism and (however violent) closure, leaving its misery largely untouched.

To redress the balance, Cartmel’s prose is once again excellent and evocative.  He even shifts to the animals’ perspective, firstly to heighten the emotion of murdering them, and secondly to lay a bit of groundwork for one of warlock’s unexpected side-effects: Ace and co. escape their confines by transferring their minds to the animals.  Which would be a great, if somewhat twee way for the novel to go, if the animals then escaped.  Surprise, it’s no help at all.  One by one, it’s torture time, just the same as if they were being vivisected themselves.  Offing Tommy only makes it worse.

This is one of the reasons I got so mad at the book: it is utterly miserable, mixed with a sense of complete hopelessness.  It’s everywhere.  Bernice is off to investigate warlock with the Americans?  They will suss her out and assume she’s a traitor.  Ace is nipping off to help some new friends?  They will all be captured, including the pets, and quite possibly all of the above will die.  Vincent and Justine, characters from Warhead, come looking for the Doctor for help?  They’ll be captured by IDEA.  Justine goes on the run afterwards?  Oh, she’ll get randomly scooped up by a prostitution ring.  Why not?  And hey, since she’s pregnant, let’s have a crime boss immediately try to kill her baby.  Creed rescues her, so naturally, cherry on the top, she’ll be so grateful that she’ll chuck her marriage away on the spur of the moment and shag him.  Any more for any more?  (Since you ask, there’s a rape back-story in there, and yep, Chick gets killed.  That one seems inevitable given the book’s subject matter and the fact that they introduce Chick at all, but even so, god damn it.)

I read Warlock pretty quickly, and Andrew Cartmel’s rich writing is largely the reason for that, painting the emotions and back-stories of everyone here in a way that adds to the story.  But the main thrust of it for me was just trying to power through the really horrible stuff.  Since there is no let up, I read more than half of it in a day.  I just wanted it done.

Cartmel does have some interesting and worthwhile things to say.  I’m not convinced the War On Drugs stuff is exactly subtle: the drug dealers are violent psychopaths, whereas IDEA make no bones about their moral greyness and/or hiring of violent nutters.  Even the police hate them, and there’s a moment near the end where one of their key figures owns up to the whole thing just being a smokescreen to keep drugs illegal; it’s as close as the novel gets to just being a blog post, if it weren’t for said villain having his own Machiavellian reasons for IDEA.  (The drug itself is thoughtfully likened to a tree or a stream – alive, but not culpable.)  Similarly, the characters take down the invalidity of animal testing with aplomb: since an animal’s reactions can only ever give a suggestion of human behaviour, you’re basically torturing and killing them for a bunch of guesswork.  But whereas Warhead tied its ideas about the environment, and mankind’s complicity in its decline to a tight story, Warlock is a lot woollier in its plot work, progressing the story of Ace inches at a time, and keeping important stuff (like what warlock is, or who the shadowy Mrs Woodcott is) to the last minute.  Generous helpings of peril keep it moving, but when you stand back from it there isn't much actual progression in there.

Another obvious comparison to Warhead is the Doctor.  Once again he’s a shadowy figure that causes (sometimes bad) things to happen to achieve results.  The difference is that he’s barely in Warlock.  You might say similar of Warhead, but he was pulling the strings in the previous novel, with all of Ace’s actions coming from him.  His absence suggested influence, whereas he spends fully half of Warlock tinkering with computers at the house on Allen Road, instead of actively helping anybody.  If he’d bothered to help Shell and Jack, well, their story might have gone differently, and he’s got no idea where Ace has gone, just a sinking feeling when she’s been gone for a while.  I won’t know until the next novel, but perhaps this is all character development: his negligence leads her and others to a horrific ordeal, and it’s not her first.  But there’s no evidence of any ill feeling here, what with the time allotted, and he’s simply not in the book enough for it to feel like a big deal is being made.  The Doctor just ducks out of the narrative until it finds a use for him.  It’s a bit disappointing coming from Cartmel, who is justly thought to have a good understanding of these characters and their relationship.

What with keeping the truth about warlock (let me guess, it’s alien?) to a last-minute minimum, and keeping the Doctor and his companions apart, and putting quite a lot of the story on Creed and latterly Justine, I wondered if Warlock was a little too divorced from Doctor Who altogether.  Even with direct (and I admit, pretty neat) ties to a previous novel, and with the Doctor ultimately doing what he’s doing to right a wrong, it feels more like Andrew Cartmel’s Misery Soapbox Drama than actual Doctor Who.  There are still things to like about it, such as those Cartmellian action sequences that really put you in the middle of them, the depth of justifiable rage and argument in his views, and the way he subverts things like pace, so that the Doctor and co. have been staying at Allen Road for a year when we meet them, and Bernice’s drug bust is in full swing before we even know about her joining IDEA.  I’m still not sure the pace works, what with something having to give and that often being the bit I wanted to see.  On the whole, I don’t know why the book is this long.

I’m a bit torn over it.  Warlock is a well-written novel and it makes some good points.  It also tries much too hard to rub the reader’s face in it, and I have to object to that.  It’s not automatically a bad thing if your story is bleak and downbeat, or if bad things happen in it.  Certainly it adds pathos.  Nonetheless, I reserve the right to feel that when investing this much effort in a book, I shouldn’t feel like crap afterwards.

6/10

So I Married An Axe Murderer

Doctor Who

The Husbands Of River Song

2015 Christmas Special

It’s Chriiiiistmaaaaaaas!  (2015.)  A time to relax, and where Doctor Who is concerned, pretend the finale didn’t happen.

Put your feet up and forget about Clara, for starters.  No longer must the Doctor contend with a plucky Mary Sue, with her convoluted past and weird universal importance, her (apparent) obsession with him marked by that I-could-take-or-leave-you lack of any genuine interest.  No longer will he have someone running rings around him, doing everything he can only better, showing little respect for her supposed best friend and suggesting a writer that thinks the Doctor is some sort of runner-up prize.

So obviously the thing to do next is an episode about River Song.

This week, Peter Capaldi is me.

What’s left to say about her?  (Well, indeed.  But here we are anyway.)  A time traveling relationship could have been fascinating for the Doctor, but just putting things in the wrong order isn’t enough: you need someone the Doctor would actually want to spend time with, who would mean even more to him than a companion.  And River isn’t that.  With all her Doctory bells and whistles (now including a “sonic trowel”, an “augmented lifespan” and a secret drinks locker in the TARDIS), she’s just another Mary Sue.  If time itself weren’t constantly sticking them together, he’d have very little reason to make her acquaintance.  Alex Kingston has always played it how it’s written, and fair enough.  Sadly she’s written as monumentally full-of-herself and clawingly desperate to be a fan-favourite.  Oh, and she’s a psychopath: a word Steven Moffat uses with all the wisdom and moderation of a toddler discovering a bag of poo, though thankfully he keeps the bag sealed this time.  (The Doctor is a psychopath too, remember?  Psychopaths are cool!)

So, having killed her in her second episode, then revealed her entire torturous back-story, and later said goodbye to her again as a hologram, all that’s left is ticking off more of the things she’s talked about over the years.  Like her trip to the Singing Towers: last stop before the Library, last time the Doctor will ever see her.  And we already know how it’ll go down – Doctor in a new suit, sad look on his face, unspoken sandwich board that says YOU DIE SOON, SOZ – so rather like Clara’s spin-off ending, this victory lap is for the die-hard River fans only.  (As for putting one directly after the other, I can’t think of anything more redundant the show could have done.)

As for the scene itself, new suit, sad expression, Singing Towers… yep, it sure is that thing they said it was.  What does it add?  There’s drama to be had, with River realising her time has come and the Doctor having to accept it too, even going so far as to say that Happy Ever After is just a lie we tell ourselves.  The trouble is this is Doctor Who, and anyone who saw the last episode knows what they’re like for this sort of thing, i.e. Steven Moffat is completely obsessed with killing his characters and simultaneously obsessed with not.  So of course River’s “last night” can actually go on for 24 years.  Here we go again, refusing to face consequences, pretending that a long and comfortable retirement with plenty of wiggle room is anything remotely bittersweet.  Boo ruddy hoo, enjoy your quarter of a decade with your feet up.  At this rate, we’ll probably return to find her in the Library, lightly snoring.  But oh well, a portion of fandom can tick off the Singing Towers now.  Worth it.

The journey to this moment is ostensibly one of River’s wacky adventures (set at Christmas) with the Doctor tagging along.  She somehow doesn’t spot that it’s him, as she’s only aware of the Doctors up to Matt Smith and apparently she can’t take a hint.  There is fun to be had, especially when the Doctor gets to “have a go” at reacting to the TARDIS for the first time – his theatrical amazement is an easy episode highlight.  But this is also a scene where River casually admits she steals the TARDIS whenever she wants: “I can take it, do whatever I want for as long as I like, pop it back a second later and he’ll never know.  He’s never noticed before.”  Oh, how I hate this, obviously.  Yet again we’re putting River above the Doctor, or rather putting the Doctor in a dunce cap.  It’s taking a character of unknowable mystique and catching him asleep on the lav.  And it’s really hard not to suspect that the reason for this superiority isn’t, deep down, just the laddish sitcom trope that River is a magical woman and the Doctor is one of us loveable, clumsy, haven’t-got-a-clue men.  That’s certainly how it’s written and played.  “Are you thinking?  Stop it, you’re a man, it looks weird.”  For Christ’s sake, Steven, if you want to write more Coupling then go away and do it.  Doctor Who isn’t Coupling.

There’s not much to say about the story itself leading up to that.  It’s all Christmas froth, aka stuff he’d probably turn down the rest of the year.  So we’ve got River being “married” to a warlord that’s just a human head in a robot suit; the head has a diamond in it, which is what River’s really after so she can return it to its real owners.  Ha, not really!  She’s stealing it to sell to some criminals, something she’s evidently excited about and proud of.  Lovely.  The criminals are the Shoal, those hollow-headed dudes who appeared a year later in The Return Of Dr Mysterio.  I had absolutely no memory of them when I saw that, which kind of makes sense after their less than scintillating one scene in this.

Oh, you lot again.  (Timey wimey.)
Once again: POCKETS.  You're getting goo on everything, FFS.

Various other bits of flotsam include Matt Lucas as Nardole, who also showed up in the next special (after 2016’s slight lack of episodes) and he’s coming back for Series Ten.  So what’s he like?  Er, he’s like Matt Lucas doing a squeaky voice as if he’s on CBeebies.  Sorry, is there more?  He’s a talented and versatile comic performer, and probably an excellent actor since that seems like a transferable skill, but you wouldn’t know it here.  Squeaking and hamming, and at one point being decapitated but in a silly sci-fi way that’s played for laughs (imagine that, a death scene with no consequences), the character’s main distinction is being slightly too annoying to forget.  I have no idea why they’re making him a regular.  Greg Davies plays the evil disembodied head, and he’s mildly amusing as he screams revenge threats, but then that’s all there is for him to do.  There’s an entire ship full of people at one point, apparently all utterly awful – so much so that the Doctor and River leave them to die in a spaceship crash.  They’re “not worth it,” he pronounces afterwards.  Except why not?  He’s happy enough with River, who delights in telling everyone she’s a psychopath.

The meat of the story is the Doctor for once seeming to be one step ahead of River.  (You’d think all this not-recognising-him business would go somewhere, but no, she’s just pointlessly thick this week.)  It allows him to observe her with some detachment, since he is basically a guest in an episode of River Who.  And apart from a wry smile at the novelty of being in this position, he doesn’t like what he sees, with her cavorting with genocidal maniacs, planning to off people for the jewellery in their heads, and wiping her partners’ memories (of things like marriage) because they’re “annoying”.  Even so, by the end of the episode he’s taking her to the Towers for 24 years of marital fun.  In a rare moment of sense, River announces that although she loves the Doctor, she knows he couldn’t possibly reciprocate.  Damn right, but then here we still are at the end, pretty much acknowledging that he does after half a dozen years insisting that it’s a two-way street.  I’d be grateful for that re-examination of her character if it worked at all in context.  Either she’s his obsessive follower or his wife; they’ve left it too late to throw in that other possibility.

This doesn’t make me mad like Hell Bent.  It’s poor, obviously – a bit of “ehh” Christmas flim-flam, it tries to do something interesting with River Song which may be categorically impossible, and otherwise just floats along under a snow machine.  Peter Capaldi sells the length of time they’ve known each other and lets the Doctor have a good time, and Alex Kingston does her thing, but to a non-River fan, all of that’s futile.  River is beyond done now, and the one thing I know for sure about her relationship with the Doctor is that it tends to be the worse for him, so let’s just count our blessings and wave her off.  Again.  And cross our fingers this time.

Death Becomes Her (So Die, Already)

Doctor Who

Hell Bent

Series Nine, Episode Twelve

Welcome back to Finale Town.  It’s been a while since I looked forward to one of these.  Doctor Who has had an awful lot of practice, but it’s stuck in a downward spiral where they’re concerned.

Russell T Davies used to make them bigger and… well, bigger every single year, chucking in armies and other armies and universes and kitchen sinks until even he didn’t sound like he knew what was at stake any more.  Steven Moffat’s finales are (mercifully) on a smaller scale, though they still do the “all of time and space are dying” stuff, albeit with the vim and excitement of a court order.  Since he took over in 2010, Moffat’s end-of-year focus has been on the characters, which I would absolutely applaud... only he insists on asking bloody stupid questions about his characters and then not answering them.

No doubt you’re familiar with his greatest hits.  “Will the Doctor die?”  “What is the Doctor’s name?”  “Is he a good man?”  (That’s “duh, no”, “duh, we don’t know” and “duh, yes.”)  Series Nine seems eager to keep up the tradition, only the mystery bag is dangerously near empty.  The Doctor has a “confession dial” on his person, which a Time Lord has when they’re about to die.  So maybe he’s going to…?  Okay so obviously he isn’t, and you all know that, so what else?  There’s the mystery of his face looking a bit familiar… only we got that out of the way in Episode Five, and it was pretty obvious anyway.  There’s the story of Clara, The Increasingly Risk-Taking, which is also sort of done and dusted now, unless you’re the kind of unscrupulous cynic who thinks it’s impossible for a main character to die two episodes before the series ends.  And may I say, shame on you.

Oh hi Clara.  You're looking well.  Gasp etc.

I guess that leaves The Hybrid: an age-old myth that apparently scares the Time Lords (in a “we conveniently didn’t mention it until Series Nine” sort of way), that inspires… nothing, actually.  This must be some new kind of threat that doesn’t do any actual threatening until you know what it is, and right up to the last twenty minutes of Hell Bent (the Series Nine closer) the Doctor still doesn’t know what the bloody thing is.  Oh, there’s some talk of time or space being ripped apart because of it, but we don’t actually see any of that; we rarely do in Moffat’s finales, which are always so sure they’re solving mysteries that’ll redefine the show as you know it that they forget to blow anything up, or really say anything of note.

The Time Lords seem desperate to know about the Hybrid, anyway, which is apparently the reason they trapped the Doctor in his confession dial for billions of years.  Except hang on – what was it for again?  Surprise, it’s typical old Moffat mission creep: this was the Doctor’s personal confession dial, a portent of his death, until it became a Time Lord prison designed to wheedle secrets out of him.  And how is all that personal-hell mind-buggery supposed to work, since the Doctor doesn’t have the answers?  Didn’t the Time Lords wonder, say after the first billion years, if they were wasting their time and ought to try something else?  Like asking him?  Why, besides giving us something to cliff-hang about, were they going on the offensive in the first place?  If he kept dying and starting over, why does he seem to remember all of it?  If he doesn’t, what’s he moaning about, considering the Doctor who escaped didn’t have to die like the rest?  And if he’s in a tiny prison that’s presumably in a different dimension, like the TARDIS, how can he literally punch his way out of it?

It’s all an excuse to get the Doctor back to Gallifrey (hold that thought), as well as make him sufficiently mad that he won’t want to come back, thus keeping the show away from the place deemed so boring Russell T Davies had to blow it up.  Which works if you bear that in mind (although I dunno, you could maybe write Gallifrey as interesting?), but it also means all that excitement and jubilation we should feel now that Gallifrey’s returning is AWOL.  (And, release that thought.)  It’s Gallifrey!  This time last year, the Doctor was smashing the TARDIS with his fist because the Master lied about where he could find it.  Hooray and stuff!  But no, we’re sticking with one of the Doctor’s least appealing qualities, his I Am The Doctor And I Always Win-ness, so we’re glowering instead of celebrating.  On arrival he stands up to authority (so far, so Doctor), uses words instead of weapons (ditto, up to a point), and tells Rassilon to “get off my planet”, and the rest of the planet’s High Council that they’re “on the next shuttle”.  That bit’s… maybe not so in character.

He’s angry, which is understandable what with Clara dying, plus that billions-of-years-smacking-a-wall thing.  But Rassilon?  Bear in mind this is the top brass on Gallifrey, until he became Timothy Dalton and tried to blow up the universe.  How do we square that one with this one?  Why is he back in charge and not in Time Lord jail, or dead?  (Eh, I guess the Master survived.)  And how could you possibly talk that blow-up-the-universe nutbag into buggering off on a space scooter?  Yes, yes, The Doctor Is That Awesome, you don’t need to keep telling us, but considering they successfully trapped him for blah-blah-many years, isn’t it rather pathetic that a heated exchange is all it takes for them to give up and roll over?  I mean, are we absolutely sure they’re antagonists?  Or was Rassilon the only one to worry about?

Hey ho, the Doctor’s got an ulterior motive for all of that anyway: this Hybrid stuff is a handy excuse to go and see Clara, pluck her out of her timeline moments before her death, bluff the Time Lords and voila, off they go adventuring!  Just as soon as he shoots his friend, the General, so they can get away.  Because “Regeneration is Time Lord man flu,” apparently.  Yeah, hell no it ain’t.  Coming one episode after a script that brilliantly evoked the psychological and physical horror of going through regeneration over and over again, and in a series that regularly makes a song and dance about how devastating it is to change bodies, this is an utter slap in the face, for starters.  Say what you like about the Doctor being angry or pushed to the brink, but tossing away another guy’s regeneration is not something he’d have countenanced before.  He doesn’t dwell on it here, big surprise, and neither does anyone else.  Death, in the Moffatverse, just sanded off another one of its edges.  And the Doctor’s stance on violence continues to wobble all over the place.  (Of course, you could say this is the Doctor showing his resentment for regeneration, because after all, Clara didn’t get to regenerate.  He does say of Clara that when she dies, she stays dead.  But Heaven Sent makes it pretty clear it’s not as simple as saying the Time Lords don’t suffer and die, the bunch of jessies.  So no, sorry.  It’s just shit.)

Can't tell if representation or trolling.

Not optimistic.

And yeah, Clara’s back.  Big duh.  Now, to be fair – oh, I am trying – this is almost a good way to end her story.  I’d be happier if it ended in Face The Raven, of course, since that was the point of Face The Raven.  (And I can’t believe we were still trying to end the story then, after she gave her life for the Doctor, considered leaving, left in a huff, left out of heartbreak and died but-it-was-just-a-dream.  Just be frigging gone already.)  But if we absolutely must dig her up and carry on, fine: have the Doctor “rescue” Clara and attempt, futilely, to convince her to carry on living.  Convince himself, almost, that she isn’t on borrowed time.  And gradually she realises that’s exactly what’s happening and that this is an illusion; she realises that death is something that happened to her because of her actions, she’s ready to accept that and in time he will be too.  Then she’ll go back to (literally) Face The Raven, die just like we already saw, and the Doctor will go off into time and space having learned that everything has its time.  You could have the Doctor come to terms with his grief in person, literally talking to his dead friend, and then they could end it with a big audience cry, if you like that sort of thing.  None of this is even a stretch: it’s clearly where the story is going for the most part, with Clara saying she “doesn’t want this”.  But then again, she could also change her mind, grab a TARDIS and go off on adventures, having learned nothing.

Guess which one he picks.

Zipping to the end of the universe to shake off the Time Lords, who want Clara dead almost as much as I do, the Doctor meets Ashildr again.  (She remembers him and Clara perfectly, which is odd as two episodes ago she relied entirely on diary entries to remember past centuries, and now she’s millions of years older.)  With little else to do, she’s got a theory about the Hybrid (who hasn’t?): it was the Doctor and Clara all along!  If the Doctor keeps her out of her timeline, time and space will go phooey!  So the Doctor decides on a memory wipe.  Even he points out that the show has done this before, but this time there’s a twist, sort of: Clara fiddles with the memory-eraser so it’s the Doctor who forgets her.  Then she gets to zoom off with Ashildr – having apparently forgiven the immortal’s part in her own demise – going back to Gallifrey (and her death) “the long way round”.  Which means she can take as long as she bloody well likes, living (on death-pause) presumably forever until she decides otherwise.  Which is a pretty gigantic advantage over most of the other people in the universe, innit?  Incredibly, there are people who consider this a sad ending for Clara.  Jackpot, more like.

Face The Raven was, tediously, all about the Doctor, but via Clara: you can live by his example but you can’t be him, or you’ll get yourself killed.  Except for Clara, though, because she’s awesome?  So what was that episode about, now that the rug has been pulled out?  What are we saying about Clara, other than here is yet another Moffaty woman in the Doctor’s life who can get one over on him?  She doesn’t seem remotely bothered about the universe tearing itself apart.  Neither does he, to be fair, but what does that mean?  Hooray, they’re both a dick?  Does Clara’s super-fan-dabby-dozy spin-offy ending come at the expense of all life in the universe?  Not so spiffy now, is it?

After an entirely expected change of scenery in the opening seconds, there is admittedly some intrigue about an apparently amnesiac Doctor stumbling into a diner to meet an apparently amnesiac Clara; as the episode progresses, we wonder which one of them is playing dumb, and it’s well played by Capaldi and Coleman.  The Doctor sits there and relates his story (i.e. the episode), seemingly unable to recall Clara.  Except we’re seeing the episode as it unfolded – with Clara in it.  We can only assume he doesn’t specifically remember what she looks like, and you can’t really show that unless she’s got a bag on her head in all the flashbacks.  But is not being able to doodle her really that big a deal?  How is it even a memory wipe if, apart from that, he remembers everything they’ve done together?  What’s to stop him searching for her and causing the whole damn universe-in-peril problem anyway?  At the end, when the diner (which is actually Clara’s TARDIS) noisily dematerialises around him, why doesn’t he twig?  When he sees his own TARDIS at last, which has a whacking great mural of Clara on it, aka the woman he’s been talking to all afternoon… well, “tada” then, surely?  Ultimately, if him remembering her is so bad, why is Clara getting him to run through these events at all?  Sure, she wants to say goodbye and all that, but she’s running a mighty risk.  But then, is the universe in trouble now or not?

THIS.

Come back, all is forgiven.

This all hinges on what you want from Clara, and what you consider a good ending.  If you want her zooming around Doctor Who land potentially having her own spin-off, no matter what, it’s probably a punch-the-air moment.  If you’re desperately sick of the show sticking its fingers in its ears whenever something warrants a consequence, worse luck.  Net result, Clara hasn’t learned anything and neither has Doctor Who.  Quite the opposite, with all that bollocks about Time Lord man flu, and the rest.

I’ve gone almost the entire review without discussing the other bits, like actors and action scenes, I guess because the episode’s focus is on all that character stuff (and throwing it in the bin).  So: it’s cool to have Gallifrey back, or it would be if they didn’t make it a huge anti-climax.  (Remember when the search for Gallifrey was a big deal?  I guess you can add Where The Smeg Is It Then to the list of big questions not worth waiting for.)  The “Cloisters”, an underground part of Gallifrey surrounding a database full of dead Time Lords, are suitably creepy at least.  In there are all the famous Who monsters, because um, but at least that’ll please the kids.  The best bit is the spooky soundscape.  (The “Wraiths”, aka faceless Time Lords zooming around on tracks, hover between eerie and hilarious.  Wheeeee!)

The guest cast seem pretty good on paper, with Clare Higgins returning as Ohila (one of the ladies on Karn in the first episode this series), pretty much just to scowl and tut.  Donald Sumpter makes a half-hearted Rassilon, now a daft old man shouting ineffectually, but he’s off to a bad start as the character doesn’t add up.  Peter Capaldi works his usual magic, only hampered by the bum notes in the script.  It’s much harder to separate Jenna Coleman from the absolute dog’s dinner they make of Clara’s departure.  And poor old Maisie Williams is handed yet another version of Ashildr, now with a decent memory.  Perhaps her personality changes as often as the Doctor’s face?  That hypothetical Clara/Ashildr spin-off is off to a rocky start; its heroes have had multiple episodes devoted to them but, through the magic of Moffat, still aren’t recognisably people.

And that’s the final irony of Clara.  For all the effort of telling us over and over that she’s the Doctor's equal, if not his superior, they’ve never once made her someone I can relate to or like on anything more than a superficial level, so she’s never been worth the effort.  So long. 

What else, er...  I’m glad Capaldi got his own screwdriver at last.  (And with a whole one year to show it off!)  He also gets to muck about with a guitar again, although having him play Clara’s “song” as literally the tune Murray Gold came up with is, though undeniably economical, also undeniably wank.  The Ye Olde TARDIS set is a beautiful treat, obviously.  But come on: if you want something substantially good to think about, go and watch the previous episode again.

Hell Bent mostly makes me tired.  It does the same old “big and small at the same time” combo as all of Moffat’s finales, and despite flashes of hope, it bungles them both; it delivers a bogus happy ending and in doing so, flushes away any hope of a point to this story.  Worst of all, that really comes as no surprise.  Something certainly needs to regenerate, and it’s not the Doctor.

Groundhog Doc

Doctor Who

Heaven Sent

Series Nine, Episode Eleven

Writing is hard.  It is the creation of something from nothing.  Of all the ideas and images swirling around your head, you’ve somehow got to pluck a precise sequence that complement each other and build, that go somewhere and hold together, that are entertaining.  Ideally this isn’t something you’ll aim to do just once, and every time you’re diving back into that maelstrom, making sense of white noise, returning with music.  Oh, and it can be quite fun sometimes.

Now imagine you’re a TV writer, and you’ve got to do this over and over again, yearly.  (Well, on a good year.)  And now imagine the thing you’re writing over and over again has been written over and over again by countless other people already.  Having trouble coming up with something new?  Boo hoo, do it anyway.  No one-off guest writer spot for you.  Oh, you wrote Blink, did you?  Brilliant.  Now do better than that, and often.

Similarly, I've got to come up with a funny caption every time,

even with episodes I like.  #TheStruggleIsReal.

Anyway, the whole "Doctor's personal hell" thing is a bit irrelevant, isn't it?

(No?  Well, I tried.)

It’s perhaps kind to bear this in mind on some of Steven Moffat’s bad days, when things frustratingly don’t come together, such as his often barrel-scraping Specials and finales.  But the TV writer’s journey, particularly the Doctor Who When It’s Past Fifty writer, muttering “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” as the shoot approaches and the cursor blinks on a still-empty page and for god’s sake we’re on Series Nine already, has never been quite as apparent as in Heaven Sent, which metaphorically puts it on the screen for you.

The Doctor materialises in a castle.  He is alone, apart from a slowly approaching spectre that symbolises death, probably literally.  He’ll have to run around evading the creature, and the only way to find answers (and escape) is to rearrange the castle, which occurs only when he confesses something.  Each time he’s in peril, he has to retreat into his mind and frantically figure out how he’ll get out of this one.  And he’ll have to do this again and again and again to escape.

Well, I mean, there it is.  Practically a blank page to start with, nothing but hero and threat chasing each other, almost writing itself as it goes until it’s something clever, and the only way to succeed is to keep doing it.  Making Doctor Who in a nutshell.

And the meaning goes deeper than that.  Here be spoilers, but this is a popular episode so you’ve probably seen it: to get out of here the Doctor must literally punch his way through a wall that’s harder than diamond, and that would take an eternity, so when he’s exhausted or dead the only possibility is another Doctor.  So he returns to the teleporter that brought him here, which still houses a handy Doctor pattern from when he arrived, and beams him up.  But he needs energy, so he uses his own expiring body as fuel.  Thinking aloud to a non-existent Clara, he says: “How long can I keep doing this?  Burning the old me, to make a new one?”

Well, I mean, there it is.  The ongoing story of the Doctor, living and dying and living again.  It’s tempting to view the Doctor’s regenerations as a handy get-out-of-death-free card – you might as well, that’s what they are – but if you think about how that would affect an actual person over centuries, and certainly how David Tennant’s Doctor referred to it (as “some new man sauntering away”), it does involve actually dying in order to start again.  Time Lords: they don’t live forever, they just die and get born more often.  And whereas The End Of Time focussed on the toll this takes by making the Doctor sulk and drag his feet (which, to be fair, could be pretty compelling), Heaven Sent shows the determination he needs to keep doing this.  Quite often he wants to roll over and rest, or let’s face it, finally properly die, but that’s just not who he is.  There’s a mystery to solve, a villain to vanquish, and – in the long run – a death to avenge, so he doesn’t have the option to stop.  In character terms, as well as a possible window to the writer’s process, Heaven Sent is absolutely bloody wow.  Who knew he still had something like this in the tank?

And that’s just the writing.  Here is an episode, peeking indulgently over 45 minutes to about 53, of just Peter Capaldi.  Okay, there’s the thankless dude in the monster costume shuffling down corridors, and there’s an inevitable Jenna Coleman cameo (although she’s totally still dead, you guys), but it’s ultimately just him.  Many, many, many hims, but that’s not the point, and he held my attention absolutely from Minute #1 to the end.  Talking to himself like Spider-Man after too much coffee, this could easily run the risk of “Describe everything that’s happening” syndrome, but instead it naturally feeds the Doctor’s impulse to investigate (and his need to have someone to relate it to), as well as adding to all that natty meta writer stuff.  As the Doctor ruminates on how to cope with a death, tries to figure out why the stars don’t look right, and ultimately relates the whole situation using a certain Grimm’s fairytale, it becomes yet another performance full of light and shade.

We’re losing Peter Capaldi’s Doctor soon, and gaining goodness knows what instead, and looking back now, Heaven Sent almost rubs it in.  Series Nine reshaped the excessively crotchety Twelfth Doctor, sometimes poorly, adding cuddly nonsense like electric guitars and hoodies and trying too hard to sand off his edges.  But Capaldi also unearthed a real warmth, and held onto that vicious streak that made him interesting.  It’s all there in Heaven Sent as he longs for an absent friend and rages against an invisible foe, but this stuff is peppered through Series Nine as well, quality of the episodes be damned.  I’ll probably cling to each episode of the next series, good or otherwise, just for this guy.

Why does frying yourself leave the skull behind?

Isn't that the one bit you'd probably have less of?

There are nitpicks, of course, or it wouldn’t be Doctor Who.  He says the wall is made of something 20 times harder than diamond; well, your fist wouldn’t make a dent however many times you punch it, then.  Duh.  What kind of diamond isn’t immune to fists?  (And not that it would help, but shouldn’t he at least use the shovel he’s got lying around?)  Then there’s the question of how every room eventually resets to how it was when he arrived, except for the diamond wall (which is diminishing) and the painting of Clara (which is ageing), and quite possibly those chalky and scratchy messages left by, presumably, previous hims.  (And if he can leave messages, why is he buggering about with riddles?)

Rather more ominously, there’s this ongoing nonsense about the hybrid.  Not only is it very hard to believe that Steven’s got another really good arc story in the tank, even after a slam-dunk episode like Heaven Sent, but this episode makes it apparent that the hybrid is something that will change the Doctor’s past as we know it.  And that’s always disappointing.

Did the Doctor’s life story become richer from knowing that he needed Clara Oswald popping up over and over to help him out?  No, and we didn’t believe it because we’ve never seen her before.  Did we really believe the Doctor’s name was going to be revealed?  No, because we know they’d just be making it up 50 years later and it couldn’t live up to the hype, and in any case he’s been called the Doctor for about 95% of his life so who cares; it would be like revealing that his birth certificate had a typo.  And now we’ve got the hybrid, a “prophecy” (those are always terrible) which is apparently the real reason he left Gallifrey.  Dun-dun-DUN?  Moffat loves re-establishing the fundamentals, or at least dicking around with them, as it proves this was really his show all along.  The moment the Doctor starts talking about the real reason he left Gallifrey, a sinking feeling ensues.  Oh yeah, Doc?  Bit odd that it hasn’t come up in fifty-plus years, innit?  Ditto this prophecy in general, which apparently has the Time Lords shit-scared, but not so much that anyone has ever actually talked about it or been remotely troubled by it.  When it comes to ideas in a long-running show, you just can’t cheat mileage.

But frankly, most of that hybrid stuff – including the continued and depressing hints that the Doctor is so awesome that everyone ought to be terrified of him, which is an ongoing hubris kind of like Clara’s, only they probably won’t address it – falls on the next episode, which has the unenviable task of resolving everything.  And as for the niggles about how this world works, well, they’re not important enough to get in the way of what’s good about the episode.

Moffat finds time to come up with another “elemental” monster, this one representing the slow, inexorable march of death.  Bloody hell, that’s not for kids!  And he comes up with a way to genuinely threaten the Doctor, more so than just threatening to off him: this prison, much like the earlier Pandorica (which was great until they threw it away minutes later), is far more of a nightmare for a long-lived person than just death.  Deep down he must know he’ll always find a way out of that, and that in itself is something to regret (as sometimes, a long rest sounds pretty nice compared to the alternative).  Trapping the Doctor for good, though, in a way that regeneration won’t help, rings very true as his absolute nightmare.

There’s tons here to unpack, and yet Heaven Sent still feels like an economical bottle show.  Not every note of it is perfect, but it’s a pretty obvious step up for the show, and evidently it’s bigger on the inside.