Not With A Bang

Some assumptions 'Closing Time' relies upon: a man being rubbish at looking after a baby is richly hilarious; James Corden has talent of some kind; it's still amusing when someone wrongly thinks two men are a couple.  All very questionable.

And, as ever, (heteronormative) love conquers all.  It kills Cybermen because emotions 'n' stuff, yeah?  Okay, they did something like that in 'The Invasion', but at least there it was any emotion, and it made the Cybermen go bonkers instead of just conveniently dying of endoftheepisodeitis.  Notice the utterly pedestrian, idea-free logic here.  You kill the loveless things with love.  That's like saying you kill poor people with money.  I know the gold thing was stupid, but at least that suggested the logic of using a magical metallic talisman against the zombies.  And at least, when the Cybermen got killed by gold or gravity or radiation, they were simply defeated and chased off rather than being negated or solved.  Kill a Cyberman with radiation and you simply defeat his physical presence.  Kill him with love and you solve him.  You explain him away.  You fill the empty space that he once was... with syrup.  The Cybermen are worthless now.  They have been emptied out of all threat because their hollowness has been stuffed with candyfloss.  Thus is the rump gothic ritually defeated by the power of comforting banalities.

By the way... remember when Gareth Roberts scathingly wrote about how silly 'The Green Death' was because nobody in the audience needed to be told that pollution was bad?  Well... does 'Closing Time' mean that he now believes people need to be reminded that loving your baby son is good?  Are we to understand that banal statements about political issues are a Bad Thing while banal statements about personal feelings are Inspirational Drama?  I guess so, since the former is about boring stuff like public health and business ethics, while the latter is about interesting stuff like oooo i wuv my pwetty ickle baby.  Why are the British public assumed to need weekly reminders that love is a good thing?  Why, furthermore, must love always be reduced to a simple and unambiguously positive thing, as though it's a kind of neurological Angel Delight?  And why is it thought that they need to be constantly reassured that it can conquer absolutely anything just by being felt?  What right to these fucking hacks have to inform us how we are obliged to feel in order to be normal and earn the Doctor's gormless yawp of excited approval?  And isn't this constant emphasis on love as something overpowering and perfect just an emotional version of the media peddling of body images?  Just as we are constantly told how we should look, are we not also being told that our feelings should be just as glossy and perfect and swaggeringly healthy?  There is a catwalk for the feelings, and yours must be capable of poseurising their way down it, looking just right.  Fuck off.

There is something repellently wholesome and healthy about garbage like 'Closing Time'.  If it were a person, it would be the jogger with a muesli bar who sneers down his nose at you as you eat your Twix.  (Yes, yes, I know James Corden is fat.  It's a metaphor.  Give me a fucking break.)  Babies and fatherhood and duty and love, love, love... and all that stuff that, if left alone, is just normal life for most people, but which gets turned into a kind of public school P.E. lesson for the brain when turned into saturday night ideology by people like Gareth Roberts and the BBC.

On top of all this, the Doctor is allowed to notice the revolting sentimentality of saying that James Corden defeated the Cybermen with love... and instead he briefly falls back on reductionist biological determinism.  Before relenting and going back to the sentimentality.  These are the two permitted poles.

Still, at least it has lots of emotional beats in it.  In the same way that a Barbie house has architecture, I suppose.

This is the way the show ends, not with a bang but a simper.

Welcome Matt

Timelash II.  Series 5.  You know the drill.  Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.


The Eleventh Hour

How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn't realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.


I'll post seperately on The Beast Below.  I've looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here.  The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys. 


The Angels Two-Parter

I like the bit with the angel on the screen.  Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.

Otherwise... well, I'll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:

Just what 'Who' needed - another straight-to-video style 'Aliens' rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can't bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It's hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun...Yawn

One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps... will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So... Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.


Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about.  Here is my (positive) look at Amy's Choice.


The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens... and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of 'common descent', etc. It comes to something when Who can't even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.

The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it's in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal... all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.

Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans... but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist... sorry, I mean a Silurian... for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity. It's the televisual equivalent of Sam Harris and Alan Dershowitz advocating torture.

The Doctor's moral compass is symptomatically skewiff too. He declares his love for a Silurian liberal scientist... who was until just then conducting scientific experiments on living human subjects.

Also, as Charles Daniels has pointed out, the story suggests that the way to tackle problems like racial prejudice is to do nothing, sit back and wait for the human race to 'progress' all by itself.


Vincent and the Doctor

I'd been very disappointed with most of the celeb historicals up to this point. I think there's something inherently flawed in the notion of gawping at historical figures like modern celebrities. And I'm not - to put this mildly - a fan of Richard Curtis. So I approached 'Vincent and the Doctor' with a high degree of wariness.

I ended up gushing about it. I might be a bit less ardent now that I've calmed down, gotten over the sheer relief of seeing something watchable after the Chibnall/Silurians atrocity and rewatched 'Vincent' a couple of times in a more balanced frame of mind... but I still like this a lot.

Mind you, I have some whinges (you'll all be stunned to learn). Even as the episode tries to stress the artistic value of his work, it skirts close to 'Unicorn and Wasp' territory by repeatedly contrasting the billions that the paintings are worth today with their original neglect. It's hard not to detect an obsession with the posthumous monetary value of the paintings in all the scenes where people refuse to trade a glass of wine for a self-portrait, or in the bits where the Doctor flinches as Vincent leaves mug rings on a canvas.

Gallibase forum regular Affirmation almost immediately reminded me of some Curtisian tweeisms in the script... but he agreed with me that the story was absolutely beautiful to look at. The recreations of Vincent's pictures were done with just the right degree of similarity to the famous images that we knew what we were looking at, but were not so slavishly similar as to detract from the great leaps of visual imagination that Vincent put into his representations of these scenes. After all, if the real scenes had looked exactly like the paintings, wherein lies the interpretive genius of the artist?

The skeletal plotette about the monster was just substantial enough to provide a framework. The idea of making the monster visible only to Vincent was a simple and direct way of expressing both his talent and his isolation. The nature of the beast - as a blind, lonely figure abandoned by a "brutal race" that leaves the weak behind - chimed with Vincent's isolation in terms that skirted pretty close to being sledgehammer obvious... but just got away with it. All in all, I appreciate the willingness of the story to allow in some poetic metaphors... particularly in the discussion of the simultaneous beauty and morbidity of sunflowers. Sadly, there is also a tendency for the characters to explain the metaphors to us...

For once we get a depiction of the historical celeb as a weak individual. He is also shown being obsessive, sullen, violent in his passions, irritable, sentimental, lustful... perhaps more of his dark sides should and could have been looked at, but it isn't the same as giving Churchill a free ride. Van Gogh, after all, never bombed anyone. He was not powerful... except as an artist. This may be the single biggest plus point in the episode's favour... for once, the celeb in the historical isn't an icon of the establishment, isn't powerful or rich, isn't a success or a star in his own lifetime, isn't a swanky well-to-do type... And, although the Doctor is horrified by the idea of getting Vincent prematurely killed, the episode also remembers that non-artistic-heroes have valuable lives that deserve respect, hence the scene with the village girl's funeral procession.

Van Gogh is a painter who is sometimes downplayed nowadays, ironically enough because of his immense popularity... but he was undoubtedly a great painter and a fitting subject for a fulsome tribute. Actually, the tribute probably is too fulsome. I think it's going too far to state, as though it's an objective fact, that Vincent was "the greatest artist who ever lived". Apart from anything else, it's not a contest.

It's also a bit of a shame that the episode feels the need to validate Vincent to us (and himself) by relying on the (admittedly sincere and nicely acted) praise of an art expert... especially since the episode captures Vincent's enormous posthumous popularity with the people, but fails to capture one of the most powerful essences of his work: the sheer, empathic democracy of it. He was a great painter of ordinary people... one of the greatest, arguably. From The Potato Eaters, through his paintings of his postman, of prisoners circling in a jailhouse yard, of sowers of seeds... Vincent was an artist who had immense respect for ordinary people and their labour, expressing their individuality and dignity. I'm far from an expert, but I suspect overstatement in the scenes where he is all but pursued by as-good-as pitchfork-wielding villagers who think he's a sort-of walking curse.

The story perhaps overstates the effect of the depression on Vincent's work. Lots of critics will say that the late, great paintings are so superbly wrought on a technical level that they can only be the work of a man in control of himself.

Still, points must go out for showing museums and art to the viewing kids without snobbery or psuedo-populist sneering. I loved that Amy should turn out to be a fan of Vincent, should view a trip to the gallery as a treat. Amy is at her sweetest in this episode. She's a character I have serious issues with, but here I can like her. Karen Gillan (who has never been the problem) excels... even, at times, stealing the show from the superb Tony Curran.

I could've lived without the bloody pop song, but the sentimentality was kept at a just-about-bearable level. Maybe it seems less aggravating in this story because the obligatory attempt to make us mist-up actually has an emotionally meaningful referent, for once. Perhaps the fact that the episode had to have an unhappy (or at least complicatedly happy) ending acted as a vital disciplining factor upon the evil rom-com writer that has taken over Curtis' brain since he co-wrote Blackadder II.

The final image of the sunflowers with "for Amy" added was gooey sentiment, sure... but it also expresses the way the Doctor and his friends seem to leave their mark on time. It was a little bit of time graffiti, left by Amy through her friend Vincent, through the brief but sweet connection she made with him. Amy showed her childlike side with her expectation that they'd saved Vincent from his demons. I dreaded seeing loads of fake "new" Van Gogh's in the gallery (in the end, we get one in the season finale... and proper ghastly it is too). But they had the basic guts to leave the ending of the episode bittersweet, to not trivialise Vincent's problems by magicking them away after one adventure with the Doctor.

The Doctor plainly never expects that his 'gift' to Vincent will change anything, precisely because he realises something that Amy hasn't quite caught: that Vincent's deepest problems remain unsolved, that he is still on course to his self-imposed quietus.

The Doctor's act is charity and is just as unsatisfactory as all charity. But the episode doesn't dodge this (oddly enough, considering who wrote it). That's the brutal truth about depression: sometimes all you can do is try your best to palliate. It's better than simply abandoning people to their lonely fate, the way those nomadic turkey aliens do.

This is a serious issue, treated fairly well... with even witty moments that mock the possibility of a more earnest approach, especially in the lovely little bit when the Doctor starts talking solemnly and awkwardly about the complexity of depression, only to be shushed by an uninterested Vincent who is trying to work.


The Lodger

An attempt to redo 'Love & Monsters' with just the cute bits... all the sharp edges sand-papered smooth, all the dark corners brightly lit and all the creepy, mordant undercurrents drowned in gallons of puréed rom-com.

Even Gareth Roberts can usually do better than just reworking the usual will-they-or-wont-they? (yes, of course they will) subplot from a thousand tedious sitcoms. It doesn't make the cliché any less clichéd if you cast people who are overweight or have slightly-less-than-model-looks in the roles: it's still those same shiny, happy, cutesy tedium-engines from Friends, just in self-consciously unglamorous Brit disguises.

Meanwhile, call centres look like quite nice places to work.

The sci-fi subplot is pure Moffat, oddly enough. Malfunctioning runaway tech, little girl, etc. And, naturally, the day can only be saved by Craig declaring his love for Sophie. Funny how these things turn out, ain't it?

Mind you, this isn't actively offensive... which is relatively good going for an episode of Series 5.

It starts quite well, with the Doctor's lovely self-description: "not a young professional... more an ancient amateur". Sadly, the Doctor's eccentricity and quirky wisdom are overplayed and overstated to the point where he becomes a totally characterless blur on the screen.

Oh, and it's nice to see James Corden (a man of no discernible talent whatever)... because, y'know, that guy really wasn't on TV enough in 2010.


I've whinged about the closing two-parter, here.


A Christmas Carol

This is beyond bad. This is borderline sinister.

If anything bit the Doctor on the bum in the last story, it failed to bring him down a peg. On the contrary, his hubris, high-handedness, offhand self-appointed puppetmastery and unaccountable meddling know no bounds here.

He actually goes back into a man's life and fiddles with it - as the man watches!

Ebeneezer Scrooge was made to think. He was asked to contemplate his past, present and future. He was persuaded.

Sardick, by contrast, is simply rewritten. His past is invaded. Essentially, his innermost self is violated.

Yes, he was a bastard... but that isn't the issue.  The issue is one of choice.  Offer a person your influence or even opposition and you open up future choices.  Meddle in a person's past (against their wishes!) and you not only ignore their free will in the present but also obviate their self-creation in their own past!

Aside from real ethical considerations, this is the exact opposite of the Doctor's often-stated creed. From 'The Mind Robber' to 'Masque of Mandragora' to 'New Earth', he has championed the freedom to choose and self-create. One cannot alter one's past but one can always choose one's future, within external limitations... and one's past is the history of one's previous acts of self-creation.

You could argue, I suppose, that young Sardick has as much freedom with the Doctor as he had without. He's free to accept or reject the influence of the time traveller. But, at the risk of sounding tautological, the issue of time travel itself (specifically: foreknowledge) is what makes the Doctor's meddling different to, say, the contemporary influence of a parent or teacher. It puts the Doctor in the god spot. He gets to know the possible objectives and results, like someone peeking at the answers page in a quiz book as they do the crossword. He has a 'desired version' of Sardick that he can aim at as he shapes the man's life. The Doctor has become the controller of Sardick's existence and identity. "Hey Kazran", he effectively says, "you are free to choose... to be who and what I design you to be!"

I realise that the story lends support to the idea that we're products of our upbringing and experiences, so there's no intimation that people can be 'born bad' in any simple way.  Which is good.  But the script substitutes its own determinism in the form of the Doctor's enforced moral hegemony.

And as for Abigail... her freedom of choice doesn't appear to occur to anybody as worth considering!  As Gallibase poster LucasS put it:

What offends me here - and I am rarely offended by Who - is the treatment of Abigail. She is given no real character of her own but is treated like a glorified sex doll, dragged out of her cupboard whenever the boys want some fun. She has no say in which of her remaining days she would like to spend. She is used, if not abused, throughout. And this is apparently a heartwarming triumph.

Sardick gets to have an angry moment where he bitterly condemns the Doctor for changing his life and thus breaking his heart.  But the interesting thing about the ending - which shows Sardick flying off into the sky next to his blondcicle plaything, gloriously happy despite the fact that she's got a day to live - completely proves the Doctor's point about "better a broken heart than no heart at all", thus explicitly undercutting Sardick's objections and criticisms, vindicating the Doctor's actions and endorsing his manipulation of the man's life.

And then there's the question of all the other frozen people. I suppose the New Improved Sardick Mk II (© The Doctor) will free them. But maybe he wont, for all the Doctor knows or appears to care.  It never even occurs to the Doctor that it might be a priority to free loads of people who are being held captive as literal collateral in the vault of a rich bastard.  Who is this man?  I don't recognise him, even with his two-faced little speech about never having met an unimportant person. It's clear that the important people are the rich or the pretty. As in 'Voyage of the Damned', there is an attempt to cover this up by making the special little buttercup at the centre of the story into someone lowly... which is undermined by casting a glamorous star.

Aside from the dubious ethics and hypocrisy, what about the level of hubris on display? And we're meant to find it cute, funny and inspiring?

Moreover, this is a demonstration of how Moffat views plot. Just rewrite it as you go along. As long as you can dress it up in a time paradox and garnish it with a vulnerable child...

Lets ignore the fact that the Doctor's actions create a paradox (because if we go down that road we'll end up arguing about how Scaroth could possibly expect his plan to work)... the problem here is that they undermine the whole notion of story itself. In 'Smith and Jones', the Doctor's tie trick ties the story in a bow, illustrates a concept, allows the episode to do something unexpected and makes a character point. In 'A Christmas Carol', the Doctor obviates narrative itself.  And not in the constructive way that narrative is interrogated and deconstructed by, say, modernist literature or surrealist film.

And the episode inherits and exacerbates a problem within its source book. Reform the nasty rich bastard and everything will be okay. Mind you, in just about every other way, this libels Dickens. In Dickens, Scrooge gets reformed partly by seeing the parties of his youth when he was an apprentice at Mr Fezziwig's. They were great social occasions, levelling occasions even. Everyone was invited and everyone had fun. In Moffat, the parties that help to reform Sardick are debauched celeb bashes where the Doctor flirts with Marilyn Monroe (who is, incidentally, talked about as though she actually was nothing but the man-crazy bimbo she sometimes played).

And then we have Amy and Rory indulging in oddly clashing cosplay, for no reason but to titilate the audience.

And flying sharks? How lazy and dull is that? We're supposed to thrill to the imagination on display, yet its meagreness would be demonstrated by just about any of the kids watching as soon as they get given a piece of paper, some felt tips and the freedom to draw anything that comes into their heads.

Worthless, verging on nasty.

Sound and Fury

The comedian Ed Byrne says that the only ironic thing about the Alanis Morrisette song ‘Ironic’ is that it contains no irony. Well, one of the many ironic things about ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is that it contains no code, and little that meaningfully refers to Shakespeare… and yet its title is rather apt. Really, the episode might just as well have been called ‘Billy Shakespeare and the Goblet of Fire’, yet the very arbitrariness of the title, and the fact that it tries to make the audience smile at a modern cultural reference, makes the title perversely appropriate for the story… because the story itself throws lots of modern cultural references at us but fails to engage with Shakespeare as a man or an artist.


A TELEVISED THEATRE

When it was shown, 'The Shakespeare Code' was probably the most visually spectacular episode of Doctor Who yet made. It still looks absolutely marvellous. But there is a complex of ironies here.

There's always been a kind of affinity between Shakespeare (as a category of play) and Doctor Who. Like Shakespeare, Who is a sort of genre of its own, which comprises many different types of story, some of which are of dubious canonicity and some of which are hard to categorise. Doctor Who is highly theatrical. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare productions, can be very camp. Doctor Who often presents highly implausible plot developments. People who criticise RTD for sloppy endings should check out Cymbeline in which the god Jupiter turns up (in a real deus ex machina!) to sort out the plot. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, tends to buy into the 'King list' theory of history. Many of the early historicals are clearly indebted to Shakespeare, or to various writers’ idea of him. And Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, often presents us with fictional social worlds (shown in microcosm) in order to explore political themes. Both Shakespeare and Doctor Who create little worlds representing great societies which exist ‘offstage’, as it were.

Moreover, Doctor Who grew in a BBC culture that considered TV drama to be like 'televised theatre'. Who always strained against this... what with Sydney and Verity both being grounded in commercial telly... but most of the classic series looks much more like a televised play, with occasional inserts filmed on location... highly reminiscent, in fact, of the early seasons of the BBC Shakespeare series.

In many ways, Doctor Who's development over the years is a perfect example of the way that TV drama has gradually shifted away from this 'televised theatre' tradition, towards the prevalent style now, which is to make TV dramas look as much as possible like little films. 'The Shakespeare Code' may be the ultimate example of this trend in fruition... yet the irony is that it looks cinematic mostly because of its huge, impressive central set... which isn't a film set at all but an actual theatre! What's more, this theatre was built as a recreation of a place where Shakespeare and his company put on his intensely political plays, plays that built fictional worlds in order to examine politcal ideas and themes, plays that confronted their audience with unusually strong depictions of women, plays that had no choice but to summon up huge armies and black nights using only words, there being little in the way of special effects available... though the theatre of the English Renaissance certainly did attempt spectacle (with opulent costumery being a particular draw).  And, I must admit, the conceit of the audience applauding after the defeat of the Carrionites, as though they've just witnessed a special effects triumph, is genuinely funny.

'The Shakespeare Code', however, is set in a time and place that begs to be explored on a political and social level (as Shakespeare did), yet is apolitical and uninterested in worldbuilding. It's also decidely dodgy in its depiction of women. It's entirely reliant on its ability to dazzle us with special effects, entirely repudiating overt theatricality despite being set in (and filmed in) a theatre, and purporting to depict the life of a great playwright.

It actually starts trying to think about theatricality, via the relationship between reality and language. In fact, the relationship between reality and language is at the very heart of the story. And yet, language is actually devalued by the haphazard and garbled way the plot ends up depicting its putative power.

This is a serious set of problems. The last is all the more ironic, given that the story centres upon the person of Shakespeare, who used language to create (and tear apart) alternate 'realities' on stage.


LANGUAGE

The relationship of language to reality in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is soon revealed to be nothing more than a cheaty disguised magic. It looks, sounds and behaves exactly like magic (employing, as required, every witchcraft cliché in the book) but the Doctor is allowed to scoff at the idea that it actually is magic. We are told that it’s actually science of a different type… but the lines about Carrionites basing their science on words rather than numbers give the game away. You see, numbers are words. “3” is no less a word than “three”. They are different ways of signifying the same concept, just as are “horse” and “cheval”. Both numbers and words are the same thing: audible and textural symbols, pictures of reality.

‘Logopolis’, which frankly embraces scientists as monks/wizards, is based on this concept. ‘Logopolis’ is about maths? Why is it called “City of Words” then? For a brief, exhilarating moment, it looks like ‘The Shakespeare Code’ might mine the same seam... despite my having doubts about Bidmead being high on Roberts' hero list.  Sadly, it lasts for a couple of lines and then evaporates. Even if we grant that words and numbers are, on some fundamental level, different... and even if we grant that science can be based on one or the other... and even if we grant that Carrionites can use words to directly change reality (the Logopolitans do it, so we’ll let Roberts have that one)... then we are still left with the problem of why Carrionites use bad poetry as their method of communication and attack.

Let’s face it, the Carrionite couplets are pretty awful.  Are they really meant to represent transcendental, dimension-puncturing, alien supertechnology? If their culture really is based on language this banal, then we must hope they never return and stumble into Clinton Cards. They’d probably be able to use the doggerel inside the Mother’s Day cards as some sort of interdimensional superweapon. God only knows what they could do with Alanis Morrisette lyrics.

The Doctor comes out with something about the words of a play promoting emotions in an audience (nothing to do with actors, musicians or anybody else involved in staging theatre then) and supposedly this show us how words can alter reality. This is part of the episode’s underlying theme of art being all about prompting and manipulating the emotions rather than challenging the aesthetic sense, the political conscience or the intellect. This is very much in keeping with the mawkish tendencies of modern Who and it is a sentiment that Shakespeare, for all his populism, would probably have rejected. But, to return to the point, how do we get from feeling sad because Cordelia is dead to ripping open inter-dimensional portals? And why, if emotion is part of the mix, is the necessary ‘code’ such gibberish, utterly unlikely to move anybody in the audience to do anything but go “huh?” (I can't help suspecting that this is what Roberts thinks Shakespeare sounds like to a modern TV audience.) 

After all the stuff about words rather than numbers being capable of summoning Carrionites, the speech that will supposedly enable the Carrionites to manifest themselves contains a whole string of numbers! The story ought to be able to explain this to us but it can’t. It doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Apparently, the emotional impact of words is enough to punch holes in reality. But it works with numbers too. It works when actors speak emotionless words without understanding them. It even half-works when the actors are rehearsing to an empty theatre… so is it not about emotions but just about words and polygons? In which case, why bother having the spell performed in front of an audience? Where exactly does the power of the words come from if it isn’t from their status as words, their beauty, meaning, performance or reception? What else is there?

It isn’t just that the concepts underlying ‘The Shakespeare Code’ are bollocks. Zigma energy is bollocks too but nobody minds. The problem with the bollocks in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is that it’s badly thought-out, self-contradictory, lazy, uninterested bollocks.  Maybe (I’m casting around in desperation now) the power of the words comes from the author? The Carrionites do seem to need Shakespeare… But why?  Ah yes... because he’s a GENIUS.

 
SHAKESPEARE THE GENIUS

The Shakespeare presented to us is not a person in any real sense. He’s a GENIUS. There is no sense of him having to struggle for his words or work at his writing. He seems superhuman; he sees through the psychic paper and makes leaps of intuitive understanding simply because he’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare was, to use Martha’s word, “clever”. The Doctor, in his drooling hero-worship, implies that Shakespeare was born a GENIUS (presumably it’s genetic... which is biological determinism... which is reactionary bullshit). Shakespeare himself is seen to endorse this idea. Never mind that the idea of ‘genius’, particularly of the artistic kind, is a very modern idea that stems largely from the Romantic movement.

No room is made for the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with others, probably often adapted and rewrote others’ work, learned as he went along and developed his style from early talent into its later greatness. The Doctor calls him “the most human human” (whatever the blithering fuck that might mean), yet Shakespeare is robbed of his humanity. The story makes his words the result of magical inspiration, not talent or toil… something which implies a massive lack of respect for his work.

Beyond the crashingly anachronistic Russell Brandesque laddishness, he is presented as a sort of übermensch; a man inherently more insightful than anyone else around him simply by virtue of his status as icon... or, to use a different word that seems to get more to the heart of the problem, a celebrity. By making him into a superman, they make him less than human. And this is the fundamental problem with the whole notion of the "celebrity historical", going right back to its half-hearted birth in 'The Mark of the Rani' (which itself stupidly and inaccurately reduces the industrial revolution to the work of a few GENIUSES): the 'celebrity' is gawped at and worshipped by the story as though the programme makers are paparazzi stalking them for Heat Magazine.

The personality of the real, human Shakespeare can only guessed at. He seems to have been ambitious, well educated, romantic, fond of his children... perhaps less fond of his wife, etc. There's a whole publishing industry devoted to worthless speculation about his personality. More pertinently, he may have been a secret Catholic sympathiser. He also seems to have been liked by his colleagues and contemporaries. But none of that tells us what he was like. We don’t really know if he was a prudish man or a frequenter of brothels, if he was teetotal or a boozer, if he was modest or a braggart, if he was mild or fond of the odd pub brawl (there does seem to have been a summons for GBH).

The trouble with ‘The Shakespeare Code’ isn’t that it misrepresents Shakespeare (we’d need a substantial, accurate picture to distort and we haven’t got one) but that it doesn’t really attempt to represent him at all. We don’t even get a proper guess at what Shakespeare may have been like. We get a GENIUS. We also get, in outline, a caricature of a figure very much of our times: the celeb artiste. You can easily imagine the character in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ appearing on chat shows or doing I’m a Playwright, Get me Out of Here! if his career went on the skids. Even this, in itself, wouldn’t be so bad if what we got was a witty satire of such a character… but we hardly get a character at all.

Shakespeare, in ‘The Shakespeare Code’, isn’t a human being. He’s a cultural icon familiarised as a modern media archetype. They don’t want to present him as the bald, middle-aged, baggy-eyed man of the famous picture (not sexy enough)… yet he has to be given his ruff at the end, just to make him into the icon we recognise, to make him visually complete. It’s a very sterile approach and a very safe one. Doctor Who ought to be about confronting audiences with things they haven’t seen before, things that are uncanny and unfamiliar. But ‘The Shakespeare Code’ presents us with a jazzed-up English Heritage icon rather than a flesh-and-blood man. The episode obviously thinks its being irreverent by showing Shakespeare as a star who joshingly insults his audiences but, while this might jar with some popular preconceptions about the man, the behaviour itself is so familiar from our own time that it still fails to surprise.

Sadly, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ shrinks from attempting to give Shakespeare any semblance of a genuine 16th Century psychology or to even refer to the complexities in his character. He was a loyal Elizabethan but also, possibly, a recusant Catholic who had seen members of his mother’s family arrested, tortured and executed as traitors. He was both an artist and a commercially minded theatrical entrepreneur (he probably wouldn't have comprehended the opposition that we are inclined to see here). He spent most of his time away from home and family, living alone in London. He might have been bisexual (though it’s simplistic and facile to cast Elizabethan sexual attitudes in modern terms) if we tendentiously take the Sonnets to be autobiographical. This last is referred to, but only in a throwaway joke. At least, in this instance, it’s rather a good joke. At least some of his poems, brilliantly wrought works of high beauty and intensely dark emotion, were nevertheless written for rich patrons who could cough up the cash.  They were not improvised as chat-up lines. The death of his son Hamnet is dutifully ticked off the List of Things to Mention and Shakespeare dutifully looks a bit melancholy… yet there is no real attempt to find out what this means to him (beyond the casual bit when he trots out the obligatory “to be or not to be” in completely the wrong context).

The death of Hamnet is deemed to be of significance by modern Doctor Who because it is directly to do with emotion, because it’s likely to effect the audience on a maudlin emotional level. (Later it is revealed that Shakespeare’s grief is itself enough to open some sort of gateway into our world for the Carrionites, as though Shakespeare’s superhuman status means that his emotions effect cosmic reality. More bardolatry, more elitism, more confusion of the concepts.)

Sadly, many far more interesting facets of Shakespeare’s character and personal history are deemed unworthy of attention because they refer to the political and social context of his life. There is, for example, his possible association with the Catholic underground and his friendship with Kit Marlowe (rival playwright and part-time government spy).

I suppose it could have been worse. The episode might, for instance, have tried to suggest that Martha actually was Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’. We might have had scenes where Anne Hathaway got into a cat-fight with Martha. I can easily imagine the current production team sniggering over a scene in which Mrs Shakespeare starts wrestling Martha in the street shouting “Get away from my man, bitch!” while a crowd of Londoners gather round and cheer like a Jeremy Kyle audience.

After all that, it’s funny how the Carrionites seem not to actually need Shakespeare to write the words himself! They just need him to take dictation while going cross-eyed under the influence of a voodoo puppet… well, you could get Jeffrey Archer to do that! Or even Dan Brown. The words that form the ‘code’ are not Shakespeare’s words but Lilith’s; Shakespeare just happened to be holding the quill… so the strength of his superhuman talent for words is irrelevant, as are his dimension-puncturing emotions. He ends up being Lillith’s secretary… which, in case this had slipped us by, makes him utterly irrelevant to the workings of the plot.

They really might just as well have had the whole story set in the present day with the Carrionites manipulating Rowling into putting their code into the next Harry Potter book and summoning their race onto the film set when Daniel Ratcliffe says the line. Rowling’s words are, apparently, able to seal dimensional rifts just as well as Shakespeare’s handwriting can open them. Is Rowling a GENIUS too? A genetic freak with magical abilities and a superhuman intuition like Roberts’ version of William Shakespeare? Well, according to ‘The Shakespeare Code’, artistic worth derives not from technical merit but solely from the ability to emotionally stimulate a mass audience. Maybe that makes Catherine Cookson a candidate for artistic demi-godhood too. Along with Liberace, James Last and Hitler. Remember, it isn’t the quality of the words that matters, it’s how they effect the emotions. Some of those Nuremburg speeches really ought to be required reading in schools. Okay, they may be incoherent, bombastic, specious, fatuous, banal and filled with ideas of incomparable evil… but they sure made the audience quiver!

After all, this is the same writer who will, in the following season, assert that Agatha Christie was a GENIUS because she sold lots of books.  Well, I'm sorry, but Deepak Chopra sells lots of books.  Do we really want to go there?


1599

There are also, sadly, big problems in the way the episode presents Shakespeare’s world. The 1599 that we visit in ‘The Shakespeare Code’, and the Shakespeare who lives in it, are both constructed from images and clichés without social or political context. They are constructed, for the most part, from old episodes of Blackadder (which used the three 'witches' and borrowed the speech patterns of feigned madness from King Lear to much better effect than ‘The Shakespeare Code’ managed). I’m not saying that the story should have centred upon the political ructions and religious controversies of the age (the days when stories like that are considered capable of getting healthy viewing figures have long passed) but still, setting a story in Shakespeare’s day and not even mentioning the Reformation is a bit like basing a story on a meeting between the Doctor and George Orwell without once mentioning totalitarianism. Which would be pretty fucking dumb, frankly.

In view of all this, it almost seems redundant to mention factual howlers. I’m not, generally, the sort of person who nitpicks over the potatoes in ‘The Time Warrior’, but I may as well mention that the Globe was only polygonal because truly circular buildings were impossible to construct using Tudor building methods and materials. Not only is there no mystery to us, there would have been no mystery to people at the time. Asked “why fourteen sides?”, Shakespeare would have known the answer exactly: because that’s how you build something that looks circular. And Love’s Labours Won is known to have been published, rather than simply disappearing immediately after the first performance. And Love's Labours Lost almost certainly wouldn't have played at the Globe when it was new, earning thunderous applause from the groundlings; it appears to have been written as a bit of showoffish look-at-how-erudite-I-am material for an elite audience. It was used at the Globe, much later, but shows no signs of having been a hit. Even today it is considered a difficult, slippery, highly-cerebral, verbally inaccessible play.

Of course, Gareth Roberts makes it very clear that he really isn’t interested in Tudor London. What a fascinating setting he thumbs his nose at! A place full of bubbling religious and ideological conflict, a proto-police state swarming with informers and spies and torturers, an outwardly pious Babylon, the centre of the English renaissance, a hub of artists and thinkers, a pit of squalor lorded over by the rich. None of this gets a look in. Roberts is too busy telling us how the world of the Elizabethans was exactly like ours only in funny clothes. This wouldn’t matter so much if what we got worked as a 3D world, a place we can believe in. The darkly comic world of I, Claudius has more to do with the manner and morals of bourgeois 20th century England than the real ancient Rome, but we accept it because the world presented to us seems to have depth, to have nooks and crannies, to have side streets and byways, to have things going on around the corners. But Roberts’ 1599 London is made of clichés and nothing more: Blackadder’s hand-me-downs, at best.

To return to the theme of irony… it really is very sad to see the Doctor finally meeting Shakespeare while Doctor Who refuses to engage with his world in a way that would have recalled some of its greatest past successes, the historicals which borrowed elements of Shakespeare’s method to such fine effect. It isn’t just that ‘The Shakespeare Code’ misrepresents Tudor London. ‘The Time Warrior’ and ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ don’t bother trying to accurately depict their settings either, but they have satire and knowing pastiche instead... indeed, some of the great pseudo-historicals of the past base their success on a witty awareness of the impossibility of accurately depicting history. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ tries to replace an earnest depiction of its setting with a list of stock jokes.


CHARACTERISATION

For a story that revolves around a man who revolutionised the way characterisation was conceived of and executed in drama and literature, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is very short of proper characterisation of any kind. We have the Master of the Revels who has no existence beyond his bluster, the actors who don’t exist beyond their vain preciousness (they are actors after all... what do you want, something other than cliche?), the lady who runs the boarding house who is just a buxom wench and nothing more, the madman, the nasty attendant at Bedlam, the tetchy Queen Elizabeth… cardboard cut-outs all. Even Martha devolves into a sort of companion-shaped gap in the picture, asking dumb questions and fixating upon the Doctor at the expense of all else.

It’s telling that the scene which tries hardest to explore genuine characterisation is the Doctor and Martha’s bed scene. The message is clear: this week’s setting is a backdrop for Martha’s unrequited lust and the Doctor’s pining for Rose.

Unforgivably, Roberts can’t even be bothered to give the villains a proper motivation. Even the Krillitanes had more motivation than the Carrionites. They want to come to Earth and destroy it. Why? Because they’re witches and witches are nasty. They kill that chap at the start? Why? Because the episode needs a pre-title sequence. They don’t have any kind of mindset beyond cackling. They do Bad Things because they are Bad. Roberts can’t be arsed to do better than this. He wants to get back to the jokes, the cultural references, the sexual innuendo and the effects sequences before the audience (as he appears to percieve it) gets bored. Meanwhile, the villains can be scared off by having their own names shouted at them (which must make social life a tad difficult). Of course, this trick only works once. After all, the Obligatory Big Confrontation between Our Hero and this week’s Lead Bad Person has to go on a bit longer than the altercation with Savouryfinger or whatever her name was. If all David Tennant had to do was shout “Lilith!” then she wouldn’t have time to trot out the obligatory bit of taunting about how he’s all alone and misses Rose.


WOMEN

There is also the question of the gender politics. I can't help notice an extremely dodgy attitude to women submerged in this story.  (I'm not saying, by the way, that Gareth Roberts is a womanhater or anything like that... just that his use of stereotypical tropes about witches allows some nasty undercurrents to slink in unnoticed.)

We have a sisterhood, with one member called Lilith... which is kind of interesting, given the title of the story. One of the things that Dan Brown gibbers on about in The Da Vinci Code is the Catholic Church suppressing the "sacred feminine", which Brown fatuously connects to all sorts of nonsense about pagan goddesses, inaccurate accounts of Mary Magdalene and the myth of the millions of witch-burnings. There is, of course, a grain of truth hidden somewhere in this morass of ordure: organised religion has been systematically guilty of oppressing women in multifarious ways; most organised religions are heavily patriarchal in their internal structure, ideology and their social effect (we could argue about why this is but it would take us way outside the scope of this essay). Of course, Brown's book is itself highly sexist, not least in its 'worship' of the feminine as a receptacle for an essentially patriarchal conception of intellectual, spiritual and sexual power. The trouble is that 'The Shakespeare Code' manages to be even more reactionary than Dan Brown... because it presents us with evil in the form of a female organisation, made up of hideous old witches, who turn out to be exactly that: hideous old witches. They look evil because they have the temerity to be female while also being old (i.e. experienced, wise, sexually unalluring, unable to procreate)... and rather than buck this trope of patriarchal culture, they conform to it. They look evil... and they are evil.

The use of the name Lilith is telling. Lilith is a figure from Jewish mythology. She was, so to speak, Adam's first wife, created at the same time as him, before God plucked the altogether more subservient Eve from his rib as a replacement. Lilith leaves Adam, refusing to obey him, and has an affair with an angel. She has been a recurrent and reinvented figure in various traditions, almost always standing for female independence, sorority and disobedience... conceptualised usually as a demonic or semi-demonic being, or at least highly sinister. In the Western tradition she is constructed almost as a personification of the self-involved romantic/Romantic doom foisted upon poor victim men by heartless, remote females (as in the Pre-Raphaelites, for example). She has a tendency to hate children and to spend ages brushing her long hair and gazing lovingly at herself in a mirror. It's apparent from this short summary what she embodies: the male's terror of the woman who does not revere him, who does not submit to his rule, who does not wish to be a seedbed for his potency, who refuses/fears the role of mother, who does not look at him with awe but instead considers herself and the rest of her sex with esteem (such shocking selfishness!). In short, she's the opposite of the hopelessly lovestruck Martha, or the accommodating buxom serving wench who gazes adoringly at the GENIUS writer. She's the woman as enemy.

Not only does Roberts' script do precisely nothing to challenge this underlying notion, it actively embraces it. It makes men into the helpless puppets (literally) of a gang of ball-busters. It shows us men driven mad by female power. It shows Western civilisation (the Globe theatre is as good a symbol as any for this notion) menaced by a cloud of cackling women. It even has the Doctor chased away at the end by Queen Elizabeth I, the symbol par excellence of remote, autocratic, virginal, non-sexually compliant, gender role-defying, self-determining female power.

It's all the more ironic, given that the story revolves around Love's Labours Lost... a play which is about the various ways in which women can be independent, can challenge male self-esteem even within patriarchy, can construct their own destinies, can judge men on their terms, can be the intellectual and verbal equals of men, can even choose to delay their marriages for reasons of their own... all without also being evil, or even unlikeable!

Even the Weird Sisters in Macbeth (and they are "weird sisters", not witches) are not straightforward depictions of female evil.  They are highly complex representations and ambivalent figures (and looking at them in detail is well outside my scope here) but they tempt Macbeth into doing things he has already considered, and he makes their predictions come true himself by deciding to construe their words in a way that conforms with his own conflicted desires.  They are not simply cackling hag demons.

I'm not claiming, as some do, that Shakespeare was a proto-feminist. Indeed, although he pays far more detailed and sympathetic attention to female psychology, the female social situation and female inner life than any other dramatist of his time, he still writes embedded within the thoughtworld of a deeply patriarchal society... and it shows. However, the point here is that a writer in 2007 should surely be able to do better, on this subject, than one writing in 1599... not because we're so much more advanced and moral, but because feminism and other types of liberating politics have been highly visible and influential for decades.


POLITICS

In an article for DWM, Roberts once mocked the idea that Doctor Who should carry political messages. He ridiculed the notion that anything worthwhile could come of the green themes in ‘The Green Death’. Everybody knows pollution is wrong and they don’t need Doctor Who to tell them. His Big Finish audio ‘Bang-Bang-a-Boom!’, co-written with Clayton Hickman, seems designed to heap scorn upon those hateful episodes from the Trek franchise which indulge in asinine liberal/bourgeois philosophising about Arabs and Israelis… which is fine with me, except that the play seems to imply that all such attempts to use science-fiction as a space for political metaphors is inherently fatuous. Certainly, Roberts has disdained the worldbuilding/microcosm/metaphor approach that I mentioned above, at least in his televised episodes... though, in fairness, that may be because he hasn't been asked to do an alien planet/future story yet.

But, all in all, Roberts appears to have rejected the idea that Doctor Who, or sci-fi generally, can or should try to Say Something political. He even takes a moment in 'The Shaksepeare Code' to imply that global warming is a myth that only ranting, doommongering, soapbox-loonies go on about. Roberts himself may not believe this, but people do... which itself demonstrates the point (which he has questioned) of creating art which, say, attempts an ecological polemic.  He's got a point about 'The Green Death' (and Star Trek), but there's no reason why all such attempts must collapse into patronising didacticism.

This is all the sadder since Roberts' sophomore New Adventures novel, Tragedy Day, was a bravura exercise in caustically satirical social-sci-fi worldbuilding.

There's yet another irony here. 'Freedonia' is mentioned in 'The Shakespeare Code'. Freedonia is of course the quasi-Ruritanian country in the Marx Brothers' classic comedy film Duck Soup... the only one of their films to be set in an explicitly fictional country, a microcosmic/metaphorical social world of the Shakespearean kind. Duck Soup engages in the kind of speculative and/or satirical discursive worldbuilding that Doctor Who (and 'soft' sci-fi generally) inherited and developed from its origins in the humanist literature of the Renaissance, from Spenser's Fairie Queene, Golding's translation of Ovid and Shakespeare's confabulated Illyria, Bohemia, Elsinore and Venice. Duck Soup may not be Orwell, but it uses a fictional world as a space in which to poke fun (very, very broadly) at things like government, taxation, pageantry, polite 'society', diplomacy, espionage, war, etc. In this way, Duck Soup is more like classic Doctor Who (or Shakespeare) than 'The Shaksepeare Code'.


Anyway, here I take my bow and leave a stage bereft of flowers... the scattered, perfunctory, embarassed, insincere applause ringing in my ears.

[Exits pursued by a Carrionite.]