Mark

Well, that was fairly marvelous.

That ending with the flaming hands

I'm curious...what did you object to in that scene? I loved it, probably the most overtly Hellblazer-y scene in the whole thing. He's not actually conjuring up magical fireballs in an iconic TV-action sort of way, he's just surreptitiously dousing his hands in gasoline/lighter fluid and setting fire to it creating the illusion of scary magic fireballs to intimidate people into thinking he's far more powerful than he actually is. It's a rather neat idea, 100% in character, and a smart, funny summation of who and what the character is (ie., a skilled and cocky con-artist) to end the pilot on.

A number of people seem to have misinterpreted the scene, which suggests to me that there might have been a problem with the direction.

Eenh, I've been unofficially overthinking it for years anyway. Good to be formally recognised.

Also also (nobody else has said what they thought of it yet, so I'm just going to keep going on my own);

Clara's ongoing journey of personal growth into a genuinely terrible human being continues apace this week, adding gross professional negligence to the tally. Seriously, she and Danny completely fail to notice, not once but twice, when the most vulnerable member of the group of kids for whom they're responsible has wandered off? One of the other students needs to remind the teacher that said vulnerable child should have been given her medication by now? It's hard to reconcile that with the character who was angrily reminding the Doctor about her duty of care towards Courtney a couple of weeks ago, and that's without even mentioning the scene in which she tells the Doctor not to save a group of children from fiery destruction because they'll miss their parents if they survive(!)

Perhaps more troublingly, the "for goodness' sake, don't let this clearly mentally disturbed child take her medication!" scene was very poorly handled. I can see what they were going for, I think, and it wasn't an intrinsically terrible idea, but the way it actually played out was problematic at best. The more I look at the episode the more of a mess it seems, actually - like 'Nightmare in Silver' and the aforementioned 'Rings of Akhaten', it feels like something substantial was lost in a flurry of rewrites and/or production decisions at some point between conception and completion. There were hints of abandoned/curtailed story and character beats all over the place (the most obvious one being Maebh's missing sister and the implied link between her disappearance, Maebh's "voices" and her reappearance at the end - there was clearly a good deal more to that subplot than made it into the finished episode), and the structure and pacing were distinctly iffy in places.

But I still really, really liked it. It's a hot mess and ultimately a bit of a failure, I fear, but a far more interesting one than most. I'd take a season full of 'failed' experiments like this over one filled with boringly competent 'successes' such as, say, 'Cold War' any day.

Also, it was at least the third story this year without anything even resembling an antagonist, and at least the second without any monsters. Moffat's finally taken his obvious disinterest in/distaste for/inability to write* "the villain" and successfully woven it into the fabric of the show. So far as I'm concerned this is an unequivocally Good Thing, although it does leave me even more worried than I already was that Missy is going to fall into the Madame Kovarian school of villains whose motivations and character remain utterly opaque and who give every impression of just being there for the sake of "Oh, I suppose we're going to need some sort of baddy...".

Moffat has so consistently nailed the overall shape and tone of the season this year, though, that I have a moderate amount of hope that he's going to do something a bit more interesting with the finale. If nothing else, we know less about what's actually going to be going on in the finale than we have at any point since the show came back - it's been made clear what sort of thematic and character-driven elements we can expect, but almost nothing about the narrative content. Is it going to be aiming for dramatic, scary, funny, contemplative, straightforward, complex, smart, silly...? In previous years the finales have spanned all of those and more, and in each case we've been given at least some idea of what to expect from previous episodes, teasers, press reports etc. This time I honestly don't have a clue, which is about as refreshing as almost everything else about Doctor Who has been this year. This has been one hell of a season so far, and I really, really hope they stick the landing.

*Delete as appropriate according to the degree of fondness/ambivalence/animosity you feel towards Moffat as writer and showrunner.

'In the Forest of the Night' - Doctor Who as Magical Realism for kids. A fairy tale - not the ersatz Tim Burton kind of fairytale, but a proper folkloric faerie story with all the eeriness, ambiguity and weirdness that entails. I don't think all of it worked, by any means - some of the child actors were significantly better than others, and the whole bit about Maebh's missing sister felt badly undercooked (leading to a very weak closing scene). But on the whole I'm pretty sure I loved it, warts and all. A similar sort of dreamy, whimsical lyricism to last year's 'Rings of Akhaten' with some similar flaws - the sort of thing I'm always glad to see the show attempt even if it doesn't always come off. I thought this one did a much better job than '...Akhaten' of nailing the tone, though, mainly by going a lot lighter on the bombast.

I also think it's going to be incredibly divisive, and that a lot of the people who didn't like it are really going to hate it. I'm going to need at least a second or third rewatch to fully decide what I thought, but even if my initial delight wears off a bit I'm still extremely glad an episode like this can exist in 2014. This season has been many things, but it's certainly not been playing it safe or predictable.

The 'next time' trailer has me worried - it smacked a bit too much of the sort of overtly Cult SciFi TV stuff that I frequently find horribly off-putting in Moffat's Doctor Who - but the show hasn't let me down yet this year, so I'm crossing my fingers. I just hope it's a lot less reminiscent of 'The Wedding of River Song' than the trailer makes it look.

I loved the little scene at the start of 'Mummy on the Orient Express' where Clara's trying to talk through her feelings with the Doctor, whose visible discomfort and attempts to steer the conversation back into safer territory become more and more charmingly desperate. His final, pleading "can I talk about the planets now?" is about as perfect a moment of Doctorishness as you could possibly hope to find.

Nine episodes in, and there's still not been anything close to a total dud. 'Robot of Sherwood' probably the weakest, but even that was a perfectly serviceable romp, and the role it played in setting out the more complex nature of this Doctor seems stronger in hindsight than it did at the time, when I was somewhat taken aback by his overt dickishness.

'Flatline' was another one that could easily have been just another monster of the week runaround, but turned into something a bit more special by virtue of what it had to say about this Doctor, Clara, and the impact they're having on one another. I've been bothered by how unsympathetic they've been making Clara at several points this year, but this week did a lot to reassure me that it's not unintentional, and that it is actually going somewhere deliberate. As Moffat pointed out in the Doctor Who Extra fluff, the Doctor has frequently defined himself as "the man who makes people better"...and this year, he's being confronted by the fact that he's actually making Clara worse. It's an interesting dynamic, and it's playing out significantly more satisfyingly than most of Moffat's more emotional/character-driven arcs have been before now.

If I had to pick one thing that has really let me down about Moffat's Doctor Who, it would be how consistently he's dropped the ball when it comes to exploring the emotional consequences of his characters' actions and experiences. The entire first season revolved around the way in which Amy's life had been rewritten by the cracks in time, culminating in the restoration of her parents into existence...whereupon they're never so much as mentioned again. Amy and Rory's daughter is kidnapped and turns out to be River Song...and their entire period of mourning and coming to terms with this takes place offscreen, between episodes, and is never really brought up again. Amy and Rory's marriage disintegrates to the point of near-divorce...between episodes, and is resolved in the space of a single scene. Rory's father is introduced, showing the many ways in which he's a significant figure in Rory's life...four episodes before the characters leave the series. Clara's family play a significant role in 'Time of the Doctor'...despite never having been so much as mentioned before or since. Clara develops an entire teaching career, into which she's apparently well-established...between stories. It's horribly disjointed, emotionally unsatisfying stuff, which has made it extremely difficult to actually give much of a toss about the narrative tricks and twists we've been handed along the way. To his enormous credit, this year seems to have seen a concerted effort to fix a lot of that. As a result thus far it's probably my favourite post-revival season, and unless the last three episodes are seriously terrible it's in with a chance of being one of the best seasons of Doctor Who ever. Well-played, Mr. Moffat.

The reason that's one of my go-to examples is that Gaiman said straight-out that he wouldn't have written those scenes for any Doctor other than Matt. Which, you know...way to make my point for me, Neil.

I certainly didn't feel that Smith ever 'lost sight of the character'.

It was around about the time he shouted "Take it all, baby!" - a line that I'm close to 100% certain wasn't in the original script - at the end of an otherwise harmlessly by-the-numbers bit of grandiose speechifying in 'Rings of Akhaten' that I finally moved from having the occasional reservation to thinking "OK, party's over. Time to go home, Matt". See also: whatever the hell he, Neil Gaiman and Steven Moffat thought any of them were doing at any point along the chain of regrettable creative and stylistic decisions that led to the talking-to-himself bits of 'Nightmare in Silver'.

We've probably been a bit harsh on Smith in the last few posts here - when he was good he was absolutely superb, and that was a lot more often than he wasn't. And I can forgive him just about anything for his performance in that final scene of 'Time of the Doctor'. But I stand by my claim that his last year or two felt like a slight letdown when compared to how near-perfect he was throughout Season 31 (yes, I'm still doing that).

'Midnight' is a favourite of mine, too. Unlike Dogpoet I quite enjoy the "kid's breakfast tv presenter in the throes of a sugar rush" side of the Tenth Doctor as well, but I wouldn't deny that, at least for a lot of us adult viewers, it's the flashes of darkness that really make Tennant's performance compelling.

I think that's one of Davies' most interesting achievements, actually - creating a Doctor with so many ugly, potentially dislikable qualities and making him so insanely popular anyway. His charm, warmth, giddy and infectious enthusiasm and unabashed joy at the sheer thrill of the universe...it's easy to see why seemingly everyone in Britain fell in love with him. But right from the very beginning there were undercurrents of arrogance, selfishness, and hubris woven into the character, and the way that played out over the entirety of Tennant's era is probably the best-realised piece of longterm storytelling the show has ever attempted.

That's also why I don't quite agree with Pål that 'Midnight' is unimportant to the wider story, actually. It doesn't play any role in the narrative arc, but thematically I think it's tremendously important in the way it lays bare all of this Doctor's worst qualities and shows exactly why he more than any other incarnation really needs a companion, which is pretty central to everything that happens from this point right through to 'End of Time'. The dead silence after Tennant petulantly shouts "...because I'm clever!" is one of the most chilling and significant moments in modern Doctor Who.

Fair point re. Hurt. Sod it, I'm bumping him up next to Tennant, 'cos I really can't decide between them. The rest of my list is pretty fixed, though.

Favourite new-series Doctor? Thus far Capaldi is edging ahead for me, but it's very early days and I'm wary about declaring him my favourite. He's absolutely killing it so far, though - he's doing a great job of selling a far more difficult, challenging take on the character than anything we've seen since Tom Baker's first season (hindsight has reduced Baker to "the charismatically crazy one", but following the cosiness of Pertwee's last season his performances in his first year are remarkable. The Doctor in stories like 'The Ark in Space' is edgy, unpredictable and genuinely alien in a way that really hasn't been seen since).

Eccleston was a superb choice to front the revival, but in hindsight his Doctor feels very much like a transitional one, and I think he benefitted from only being in the role for a year. Bloody good year, though.

Tennant grated on me on occasion, but looking back I think his performance, and much of his era, stands up extremely well. A far more 'human' Doctor than any of his predecessors, but in a way that felt like it was expanding on the history of the character rather than contradicting it. Of all the modern Doctors, I think he did the best job of elevating the weaker episodes - even in the worst stories of his era, Tennant himself was never less than a magnetic screen presence.

After his first season Matt Smith would have been in with a shot of being my favourite Doctor ever, but his charm wore off badly from that point on. Every Doctor faces a similar problem, in that their earliest stories are by necessity written without any performances for reference, so tend towards 'default Doctor' - a sort of generic version of the character onto which the actor gets to stamp his own interpretation. Smith did a phenomenal job with that at first - his early performances are inspired, a wonderfully fresh and exciting take on the character. Unfortunately, his Doctor was immediately so distinctive that later stories were too frequently written with "Matt Smith's Doctor" clearly in mind, and I don't think he coped well with it. In far too many episodes it felt like I was watching Matt Smith Being All Wacky And Stuff rather than just watching the Doctor. Tennant had various affectations and tics that crept into the writing as well, of course ("allons-y!" "Weeeeellll..." "I'm sorry. I am so, so, sorry"), but in his case that's all they remained - affectations, underpinned by a firm and consistent grasp on the actual character. Smith, though, occasionally seemed to lose sight of the character entirely, and I don't think posterity is going to be especially kind to his last couple of years in the role.

Oh, and John Hurt was absolutely magnificent, but he played the part so briefly that it seems a bit unfair to compare. A sublime performance, though, and I think the show benefits massively from having him added to the roster. As one-off Doctors go, he's light years ahead of Paul McGann*.

Anyway...

(Capaldi?)

Tennant/Hurt

Eccleston

...bit of a gap...

Smith

*Yes, yes, "of course he's a lot better in the audios..."

'Mummy on the Orient Express' - another one that worked well for me. The first episode this year to serve primarily as a straightforward "here's a situation, the Doctor arrives in it, defeats the monster, leaves" adventure, and if this is the baseline for a bog-standard Doctor Who episode in 2014 we're doing extremely well. Not a classic for the ages, but a decently creepy monster, a reasonably satisfying resolution that tied in neatly with the themes of the season as a whole, yet another splendid performance by Capaldi. I agree with some people that the personality of his Doctor has been a little variable, but I don't think that's down to inconsistent writing or acting...for me, at least, he's doing an exceptionally good job of selling the mercurial nature of the character. This Doctor is genuinely unpredictable, a quality that's been largely absent from both character and show for a long, long time. Clara's development into a real, well-rounded person is welcome on a number of levels, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how unpleasant a person she's turning out to be (her behavior in that final scene is just awful, drama-queeny bullshit, especially given that we've been clearly shown that she doesn't actually need to lie to either Danny or the Doctor at all). Given such a spiky, alien Doctor I could really have done with a somewhat more sympathetic companion. It's not a serious problem, though.

Well, maybe you shouldn't have nosed around in someone else's stolen private property*, then.

*That's the polite way of saying "made yourself party, albeit passively, to a fairly disgusting act of public sexual violation". You can sub that one in if it helps you to figure out exactly how appropriate and necessary I think it was for you to mention that.

Anyway, 'Kill the Moon'. Terrible, terrible science aside (and the physics of this one really were egregiously, almost aggressively nonsensical, even by the standards of a show which within its first year featured the Daleks attempting to hollow out the earth to replace its core with an engine so they could pootle around the cosmos in it like a big planet-shaped space car), I really liked that one a lot. Like, a lot a lot. A moral dilemma that actually *was* one for a change, a non-unbearable guest child actor, Clara's continuing journey into a genuinely interesting character, and a truly surprising, never-seen-him-do-that-before act by the Doctor which remains completely in character. I'm fascinated by what they're doing with Capaldi's Doctor this year - it's a lot bolder than I'd have given Moffat credit for, and while I think there've been some tonal missteps along the way I think it's largely paying off. He's still very recognizably the Doctor, but not in the way we've come to expect since 'The Christmas Invasion', which is a very good thing. I liked Tennant a lot, and enjoyed Smith, but in hindsight I stand by my initial feeling that the 11th Doctor was a bit *too* similar to the 10th. It's good to have some unpredictability back in the character - for the first time in a long while I really don't know exactly what this Doctor is going to do when faced with a new situation. That's tremendously refreshing.

Bugger.

Heh. I do hope not.

My best guess is that Missy will turn out to be yet another vaguely dominatrix-y older woman we've never met before with an overly convoluted plan about which we'll be given a series of repetitive and inscrutable "clues", leading up to a twist which will come along a few episodes after it's become painfully obvious to just about everyone. Failing that she'll be a hitherto unknown ally of the Doctor working against an as-yet-unseen enemy with an overly convoluted etc etc etc.

I mentioned this over on the Book of Faces in a conversation with James and Rogan (both late of this parish, for the sake of any forum newcomers), but it probably bears repeating here - I have one potential reservation about this episode, and it's a big one.

Steven Moffat has repeatedly demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to take plot elements which were initially (and deliberately) vague or ambiguous and revisit them later, usually in a way that diminishes the strength of the original concept (see also: River Song, the Weeping Angels, the Silence, the cracks in time, the multiple Claras, the clockwork droids...even arguably the Time War, and that wasn't even one of his own). If it turns out that the monsters/not-monsters in this story not only actually exist but are central to some as-yet-unrevealed plot to bring down the Doctor, I shall be (a) deeply disappointed, and (b) not entirely surprised.

Oh, don't worry - I wasn't accusing you of anything of the sort, it's just that there've been at least a few people calling the character "the new Mickey" since the very first photo of the actor was released, long before we knew anything at all about the role he'd be playing. It's hard to read that in any other way, really.

Even allowing for what you point out, though, I don't think Danny has much in common with Mickey in terms of either his character or his role in the ongoing narrative of the show. He's another in the long line of supporting-character-to-the-companion roles since 2005, but if anything his role seems more similar to Rory's than Mickey's (and he's not especially similar to Rory either).

Is Danny becoming the new "tin dog?" Some have called him the new Mickey. I hope not

I've seen a few people refer to him as the new Mickey, too. Saying this as politely as possible, I strongly suspect that the comparison wouldn't arise if the actor playing Danny was Caucasian.

I should probably have some thoughts about this, really.

It was good. It was very, very good. Aside from 'Day of the Doctor' it was my favourite Moffat script since at least 'Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon', possibly longer (I think that two-parter, while excellent in itself, suffers badly in hindsight - it sets up a lot of tremendously interesting ideas, but most of them are later resolved in profoundly unsatisfying ways).

Sure, it's almost entirely composed of (overly?) familiar Moffat ideas, but I'm aware of how daft it is to spend as much time as I do obsessively analysing every last detail of a writer's work only to then complain when things start to feel overly familiar. For 99% of the audience that familiarity will have amounted to no more than "oh, it's one of the clever scary ones, like that David Tennant thing with the Weeping Angels. I like those", and quite rightly so.

I can understand why some people found it a bit disjointed, in that it spends quite a lot of its runtime meandering around being atmospheric while not very much actually happens. But that atmosphere is sufficiently interesting, and well-enough directed and acted (it was basically a three-hander, and all three actors performed brilliantly), to sustain at least half an hour's television. Then there's the bit at the end, which brings everything else into focus and ties the episode together as a rather more coherent whole. It does so in a way that I'd usually dislike, but for whatever reason I didn't especially mind it this time.

A lot of Moffat's scripts have been concerned with the Doctor himself, particularly with revealing or hinting at Big Important Secrets from his past. That's a perfectly legitimate take on the show - a fairly inevitable continuation of the direction taken during the final season or two of the original run and throughout the wilderness years, in fact - but it's miles removed from what I really want from my Doctor Who, and following the '...of the Doctor' tryptich I was very much ready for the show to be done with that sort of thing. It's hard to object when it's handled as well as it was here, though. Unlike Demon Chas I think the idea of the War Doctor is brilliant, one of Moffat's best additions to the mythos, so I was very happy to see him in flashback. I'd hate for him to become just another Past Doctor to be referenced alongside the rest - that's not how the character was conceived, and it would feel slightly 'wrong' to me - but it's good to see that he hasn't been completely consigned to the dustbin of history, either.

If nothing else, this was the first story since the reboot with no monsters and no real antagonist (in fact, off the top of my head I can only think of one other televised story in the entire run of the series to have done the same thing, and that was 'Edge of Destruction' way back in the very first season). Capaldi's Doctor is working extremely well for me here - remaining deeply alien even as the story goes out of its way to humanise him. Way back in Smith's first year, there was a DVD-only mini-episode in which Amy made the observation that, despite his protestations that he was more like "Space Gandalf", the 11th Doctor was totally "a bloke". Capaldi is much more of a Space Gandalf type, and I prefer the Doctor as a wizard to an action hero.

There should totally be an episode called "Who farted". In fact, I'm sort of surprised Moffat hasn't already gotten round to it*

"Whatever you do, don't fart. Not even for a second. Don't even queef. Fart and you're dead..."

*Actually scratch that - there's always 'Curse of the Fatal Death'...

Oh shit. Hadn't seen the latest trailer before, but things doesn't look good for SPOILER there, do they?

...I didn't see what you meant at a first glance, but now I do and II can't unsee it :-)

Also, what the hell happened to Pertwee's neck? And what exactly is Hartnell looking at?

There's some creepy uncanny-valley stuff going on there - I'm not always down on art using heavy photoreferancing, but it needs to be done carefully to avoid looking stilted and awkward in the way quite a lot of that does. It doesn't help that I can instantly spot which specific photos have been "referenced" for several of the faces, but even without that I don't think it's especially well put together. Shame, cos I usually quite like Maguire.