Blink and you'll miss your chance to get a man

Someone I respect a lot has recently said that Moffat's Who stories don't really display much in the way of viewpoints.  With all due respect to Gallibase forum poster Affirmation (and that's one heck of a lot of respect), I actually think Moffat's stories do tell us a lot about what he thinks. I think they tell us quite a bit about what he thinks about women, for instance.

'Blink', for example, tells us that following a woman you've just met is an acceptable (even whimsically amusing) way of wooing her. It tells us that geeky internety guys are amusingly tragic pratts... but that women exist to redeem them by accepting them. Ultimately, the gorgeous young girl misses her opportunity to 'get' the hot cool copper (she automatically imagines marrying him once she's automatically attracted to him) and has to settle for the nerd. Settling for the nerd (i.e. finally getting herself a man of some description) is the sign that she's grown up, settled her issues, is ready to move on with life, etc. Living with her mate and having a laugh were the preludes to Real Life, the start of which (for both female characters) is naturally signfied by becoming a wife or permanent girlfriend to the nearest man ready to accept her.

And 'Blink', I should add, is one of Moffat's better stories (in my 'umble). Compared to other of his episodes, 'Blink' actually does seem (to me) to have some things to say. It rather amusingly takes bad sitcom characters and subjects then to a very non-sitcom plot (which is more than Gareth Roberts could manage). Of course, they're still just bad sitcom characters... but the episode does say something about the passing of time and the achievement of emotional maturity.

Of course, the sentiments expressed are somewhat sexist (see above) and are not particularly original or shattering. Life passes quicker than you think it will, you don't always get what you want or expect in life... well, unless you're the steadfastly and creepily loyal nerd who eventually 'wins' his 'out-of-his-league' girlfriend once she realises what a loyal puppydog he is.

One doesn't have to be Freud, does one?

Beasts of England

In 'The Beast Below', you - as a subject of Liz 10 and a citizen of Starship UK - get to vote.  You get a choice of buttons.  You can 'Protest' or 'Forget'.

This is evidently an attempt to express something about electoral democracy.

Every time we are exposed to some unpleasant and uncomfortable fact about our society or our world, or even to a suspicion of some such thing, we are presented with an implicit option to protest or forget. Beyond voting booths, we have a set of these buttons inside our heads. When you hear, for instance, that thousands of dirt poor South Africans were forcibly evicted from their shanty towns and moved to settlements of corrugated iron shacks to get them away from the new $450 million World Cup football stadium, you have the option to kick up a stink or to sigh, mumble some platitude like "tsch, how awful" and then put it out of your head so you can comfortably sit back and enjoy watching teams of overpaid jocks play amidst the McDonalds adverts.

By the way, don't think I'm being holier-than-thou. I'm just as guilty of this kind of thing as anybody. God knows how many times I've found myself scrunching up a Kit-Kat wrapper and only at that point remembering that Nestlé are evil. This is normal human frailty at work, the understandable instinct to flee from guilt, as 'The Beast Below' indicates by showing Amy's reflexive, horrified pressing of the 'Forget' button and her subsequent remorse.

So, we are clearly banked upon the sharp and shaley shores of satire.

'The Beast Below' presents a picture of Britain as an island in space, a star-traversing city (after James Blish's fascinating 'Okie' novels, collected as Cities in Flight), with tower blocks representing counties... ah, we're already in trouble. So, everyone from Essex lives in the same tower block? Rich and poor side by side? Maybe there are luxury apartments up at the top, opulent penthouses above floor after floor of pokey little prole cupboards... but we don't see anything like that, unless we count the private apartments of Liz 10, but she's a problematic figure anyway (which I'll get to). You might argue that, in a lifeboat, rich and poor would have to budge in together... but a look at the stats for Titanic survivors might be salutary at this point:

Number of 1st class passengers: 325. Of whom survived: 202.
Number of 2nd class passengers: 285. Of whom survived: 118.
Number of 3rd class (steerage) passengers: 706. Of whom survived: 178.

Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in 'The Beast Below', i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they'd be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton's novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour. Their new world would be a world without a viable economy, incapable of progressing and supporting future generations. They would just have to live on the support systems and luxuries they'd provided for themselves, until those support systems ran down and the luxuries ran out. As soon as they needed anything fixed or produced, they'd need grease monkeys, all of whom they'd have left to die.

This is not the version of things that we see in 'The Beast Below'. Indeed, it seems essential (if Moffat is going to achieve what appears to be his goal, i.e. a political satire of Britain as a notional totality) that Starship UK should have taken everyone along.  The enclosed social spaces that we see appear very communal, a bit like the deck of a cruise liner.  Social normality seems exemplified by shopping and cafe society.  We don't see any homeless people slumped in corners.  Nobody is poor.  Nobody appears to be producing anything.  This is Britain as a matrix of complacent consumers.  This is the social optimum that the space whale is tortured to preserve.

Now.  In order for this to be a satire or a polemic or anything like that, the episode needs to be (so to speak) conscious of the fact that it has depicted Britain as a nostalgiac, consumerist blandnessdrome that only limps along because it is parasitic upon suffering.

Does it notice this?  Really, does it?

Does it bollocks.

The retro production design amounts to nothing more than decoration; it connects to nothing in the story that might suggest an indictment of the reality of Britain's 'good old days'.  The shopping is explicitly celebrated by the Doctor and, beyond suggesting that the pleasures of the mall might be an escape for us from our collective guilt, there is no critique of economic relationships.  The visual quotes from the past suggest only a strained attempt to hammer home a kind of quintessential Britishness.  The indoor high street is just there to represent the 'normality' beneath which there lurk dark secrets... when, in fact, the modern high street is a physical compendium of dark but open secrets about capitalism.

The episode fails to sort out exactly what kind of society Starship UK really is.  There's a great ballyhoo made of the fact that it's a "police state"... and yet, it seems to be one on the basis of the consent of the voters (but we'll get back to that).  Also, it isn't really clear why it needs to be a police state at all.  Why do the Smilers and half-human-half-Smilers bother to send children to be slowly digested for minor offences?  Particularly when they know full well that such naughty children will be rejected by the whale anyway.  Why would it be necessary for the police to terrify the population into fearing to display curiosity about sobbing children?  Why do the supposedly quelled and repressed populace look so entirely sanguine as they hang around in cafes?

The business with the buttons could have been used to express the way that electoral democracy limits our influence over the Powers That Be to a regular opportunity to push one of a few pre-set levers. Our choices are decided upon, circumscribed and laid out for us by others, by a state that - in practice - is largely impermeable to change stemming from ballot boxes.  You may be able to change the governmental management team so that it passes back and forth between the wings of a political class, all of whom are more-or-less open about the fact that they represent Property. Meanwhile, you don't get to elect the police, the army, the diplomats, the civil service, the intelligence officers, the judges, the royalty, the lords...  You get a say in one sphere, once every few years; the rest of the time, butt out. We all know the kind of contempt that the media reserve for ordinary people who try to influence their society outside the approved avenues of an occasional vote, support for a mainstream political party or charity. They get called pressure groups (as opposed to the more neutral term 'lobbyists', reserved for rich and powerful people when they try to influence politicians), eccentrics, extremists, zealots, conspiracy theorists, politically correct wackos, bleeding hearts, rent-a-mobs, tree huggers, feminazis, etc.

The nearest 'The Beast Below' comes to noticing the existence and efforts of dissidents and activists is in the person of Liz 10... and she's the fucking Queen.  So, royalty has usurped the role of the dissident and the activist.  Dissidence and activism has become the lone purview of courageous individuals.  And Liz 10 is eventually shown to be implicated in the abuse of the space whale, further emphasizing the liberal "we're all to blame" bleat at the heart of the story's half-hearted anger.

The story takes for granted such ideological chimeras as the national community, with communal interests, communal guilts and a state that exists to protect these communalities. Everyone budges in together.  The population is subdivided by county not class.  Beyond the existence of a mockney Queen and a caste of monk/dummy guards, there is no class in evidence at all.  Power seems to exist everywhere and nowhere.  It is at once localised in the form of the Smilers and diffused throughout the entire population of voters.  Even the Queen gets to forget and become a powerless citizen.  In the end, the regrettable excesses of this willow-the-wisp power structure are depicted as misguided attempts to safeguard the common good, with all the people (via their contemptible moral cowardice) equally implicated.  The police caste must shoulder the unpleasant but necessary tasks for the plebs so that they may go about their little lives untroubled by the dirty work that makes those lives possible.  The most conscious, snide and cynical ruling class mouthpiece could hardly have expressed this bourgeois ideology better than Moffat, who appears to have done so entirely unconsciously.

The crux of the problem is back in the voting booths.  The voter gets full disclosure.  The state explains its crime to the voter.

Yeah.  Right.  Because the state is constantly confessing to us that we live in a society that is based on ruthless and cruel exploitation, asking us whether we consent and then abiding by our decision.

The way the episode presents the issue of the relationship of the citizenry to the crimes of the state (and/or the exploitative base of society, depending on how you read the metaphor) distorts the way it really works, in my opinion, to the point of blaming the populace and excusing the state.

I've made this criticism before and been upbraided for taking the episode too literally.  Trouble is, it's the episode itself which is too literal.

The issue at stake is a contingent, complex one: i.e. how structures of power are able to secure widespread public consent - tacit or explicit - for brutal and/or undemocratic policies and actions, while also presenting themselves to that public as democratic, peaceful, diplomatic, communitarian, an 'honest broker', etc.

By representing what goes on as a literal choice made by a fully informed electorate, the story actively distorts the truth of society, which is subject to massive systems of state secrecy, ideological conditioning, doctrinal systems in the media, reproduction of ideology in schools, systemic buffers in the structure of 'democracy' to keep the electorate out of most zones of policy decision-making.

Representing the state in the story as labouring for the common good, and as abiding by the morally culpable decisions of the majority who make their decisions in full awareness of all the facts and ramifications, only adds huge insult to grievous injury.

The episode confusedly shows the state as tyrannical but also seeks to spuriously dissolve the divide between state and populace by showing the state as honestly seeking the best ends for the population, offering voters access to the darkest secrets, etc.

To put it in inflammatory language, the episode tries to implicate the ruled in the crimes of the rulers... which, in some ways, is valid... but not without enormous qualification and contextualisation, if any form of honesty is to be preserved.  Yes, 'we' need to take responsibility for what 'our' state does... but the state as it exists (and as it is poorly reflected in 'Beast') is not, in my view, 'ours' in any meaningful sense. Moreover, it exists precisely to protect those it really does represent (the miniscule minority of those who own the vast majority of the wealth and property) from 'us'.  It is this very elision of a whole range of antagonistic relationships within the spuriously inclusive 'us', 'we' and 'our' of 'Britain' that makes it impossible to take 'Beast' seriously as offering anything like an accurate appraisal of what's wrong with our society.

For all that, the story does place Britain as a parasitic growth upon pain and suffering.  But in order for this to mean anything, we need to have some idea whose suffering is being lamented.  For that, we need to know what the 'beast' of the title represents (remember that I'm not just imposing this necessity; the episode touts itself as a satire).

Alexander Hamilton (whose vision of America as a militarily-strong quasi-aristocracy run for the benefit of the propertied classes has turned out to be the operative one) once told Jefferson that 'the people' was "a great beast".  Burke called them "the swinish multitude".  Shakespeare's Coriolanus uses lots of animal epithets for the Roman plebs he holds in such contempt.  Walter Lippman called the public "the bewildered herd".  Animal metaphors for the common people have been very prevalent from reactionary and even liberal thinkers down the centuries.  It's tempting to read the whale as representing 'the people'.  But, in 'The Beast Below', the people (assuming we accept that classless category in the first place) are sitting at outdoor cafes and shopping happily, forgetting the tough choices they've had to make to preserve their way of life because they have a functionalist state that bravely shoulders the blame for them.

Could the whale be the conquered and colonised peoples whose suffering underwrites the profits of imperialism?  If so, the text of the episode is being very coy about it.

I'm not sure that the whale represents anything.  I think it just sits there, looking a lot like a symbol or a metaphor without actually managing to be one.

Moreover, if it does represent any particular set of victimised and oppressed people then it hardly does them any favours.  The putative referents to which the whale refers would thus be represented as noble victims, upon whom rests the duty to save their oppressor via a superhuman excess of generosity towards them.  And, when it comes down to it, there is no doubt, even in the mind of the Doctor, that the lives of the parasitic shoppers trump those of the tortured oppressed.

Mind you, I'd hate anybody to think I'm singling out this story as something unusual. Doctor Who, like most media culture in hierarchical societies, is inherently prone to reproducing the... well, what would be a good phrase... how about "the manufacture of consent"?

Who just has a better rep than most shows when it comes to bucking such tendencies.

At least, it used to.

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.

Village People

A (positive) review of 'Amy's Choice'.  Because not even I can complain all the time.


Okay, that's better.  The best episode for quite some time.  The first really good one since 'Turn Left'.  Nothing major... but genuinely clever and verbally playful, with nice imagery and a texture of ideas, hints and suggestions.

Simon Kinnear called this, with his customary acuity, a "Freudian farce".  The Dream Lord is the truth of the Doctor as an older man, lusting after a young redhead... or at least, lusting after her attention and loyalty and esteem.  He and Rory compete over her as though she's territory.  The Doctor wants Amy's bump to disappear so that the bumpless reality will prove to be real.  Meanwhile, the ancient beings inside the elderly Ledworth residents annihilate the village's children.  The aliens are even 'oral'.  "They're not going to be peeping out of anywhere else are they?" asks Rory pertinently.

This is all played for laughs and, refreshingly, it's actually funny.  (Thinking back, I remember quite liking How Do You Want Me? whereas Chalk just made me want to kick things.)

The unreal tweeness of Ledworth, which was such a bore in 'The Eleventh Hour', here becomes the perfect figurative backdrop to a story about people who are negotiating and renegotiating (with themselves as much as with each other) their emotional priorities and allegiances, their desires, etc.  In this story, Ledworth manages to be less the unironic cutesy St. Mary Mead / Avengers setting and becomes a bit more... well, it's funny but here they manage to make it both more real (with the snobbery of "Upper Ledworth" for example) and more genuinely dreamlike.  All the more dreamlike for being sparing with the wanton surrealism.

There's a witty aesthetic connectedness about it, even down to the way the shifts in reality (which seem like multiple awakenings from dazed unconsciousness) are heralded by the sound of birds tweeting, which recalls the cartoon way of signifying concussion as much it reminds us of Ledworth's rural pleasures.  The first instance of this sort of thing even has a neat verbal pun.  The Doctor slips into and then wakes from oblivion as he tries to say the phrase "good old days"... or should that be "daze"?

There's something smart about the way the three characters compare their different interpretations of the same dream.  The differences in emphasis are telling.  Amy's "little village" becomes Rory's "sweet little village".  The Doctor's "nightmare" becomes, for reasons of tact, "a really good... mare".  These are gags, but also failures to communicate.  For once, the constant quipping seems to actually be playful with language rather than just showoffish... and actually serves plot, concept and characterisation (at least some of the time).  And then, just as the puns are about to get tiresome, the episode realises this and starts playing them self-consciously, with the Dream Lord complaining that they're lost on the Doctor (and us).

Toby Jones is excellent... and his character is effective, not least because he seems more like the old Doctor (I mean the old, prehistoric, C20th Doctor) than any of the new fellas, least of all the latest incumbent (who is good, by the way, given something interesting and not-entirely-glib to do).  In some ways, the Dream Lord isn't just an aspect of the Doctor as he is now, he's also like a ghost from the cheaper, pre-HD, pre-Cardiff past come back to haunt the present.

Mind you, he also takes on the aspects of bourgeois village life, masquerading as the posh pin-striped consultant, the tweedy squire, the whingeing petit bourgeois butcher...

This is a bit of a blast from the past in other ways.  Entropy, such a longstanding preoccupation of the 'classic' series, comes centre stage again here.  Ledworth has a ruined castle, an aging population, people instantly dessicated and turned to piles of dust... meanwhile the TARDIS has stopped working and is losing all its heat as it drifts towards a cold star.  Even Amy's bump becomes significant... because life is the only thing that can fight a temporarily successful battle against entropy by creating and re-creating its own structure.  And via the pensioners-as-zombies imagery that it borrows from Father Ted's 'Night of the Nearly Dead', the episode makes time into a predator that relentlessly stalks you and threatens you with dissolution.  Life is a dream that passes in an instant, before you've had a chance to figure out what you really want... and the zimmer frames are chasing you.

There are all sorts of these half-glimpsed resonances, along with lots of gorgeous or amusingly callous imagery - the ice-smothered TARDIS, the lonely box drifting towards the cold star, the gleeful violence by and towards frail old people - but, in the end, this is a character piece.  Rory's gesture by cutting off his pony tail, Amy's shocked reaction, the Doctor's hurt look of bruised subjectivity when Amy asks "Then what is the point of you?", the Doctor's squirming as his other self taunts him with uncomfortable half truths, the moment when he and Amy clasp hands to seal a pact on the newly settled nature of their relationship...

One serious gripe though... why did the nature of the Dream Lord need to be spelled out so crassly and literally?  Couldn't we have been trusted to construe him in our own way?