Turn Left

Chapter The 91st, when a stupid decision followed by a series of avoidable events turns the UK into an impoverished fascist nightmare, which could never happen in real life. Oh.

Plot: 
In a bustling market on the planet Cultural Appropriation, Donna is attacked by a time beetle which creates a parallel universe around her in which she never met the Doctor, and so never saved him from the climactic events of The Runaway Bride. The events of Smith and Jones, Voyage of the Damned, Partners in Crime and The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky then play out devastatingly without the Doctor to help, and the UK bit-by-bit turns into a totalitarian state, where Donna and her family are refugees without voting rights, and non-UK born residents are rounded up and put in labour camps. Throughout this, Donna is visited by a mysterious blonde woman from another dimension, who keeps popping up and then disappearing, and drops hints about a coming threat that's even worse than the ones so far - this is Rose Tyler, Earth Defender. Using TARDIS tech and with help from UNIT, Rose sends Donna back to the crucial decision point - where she turned right instead of left in her car - and Donna manages to put events back to their original course, but only at the cost of her own alt-life. Back in her real universe, she passes on the final message from Rose to the Doctor: "Bad Wolf"- oooh!

Context:

Watched from the DVD on a Saturday afternoon with my three children (boy of 11 from the beginning, boy of 8 and girl of 6 wandering in halfway through and staying put). Randomly landing on a David Tennant one has finally done the trick, and I'm not watching on my own for once. My eldest remembered watching this before, sometime in the last few years when he caught up on all the new series episodes that he'd been too young to watch first time round. He also expounded intelligently on the butterfly effect as he viewed. The youngest kept asking of Rose, "Is that the new Doctor?", and we had to keep disappointing her by explaining that this was an old one, and that Jodie Whittaker's series hasn't started yet; I hope she's blown away when it finally lands. As I'd hit 'Play All' on the DVD menu, the following episode The Stolen Earth started up instantly that Turn Left finished, and my co-viewing buddies insisted on watching the next two episodes: I was physically prevented from touching the remote.

I won't be blogging those other two parts yet, but it was a tricky decision. Doctor Who since 2005 (with one exception) doesn't bother with labelling anything part 1, part 2, and so on; it also has lots of arcs running through multiple episodes. Sometimes, there's no right answer to how many of those episodes comprise one story and therefore equal one blog post in my currency. In Doctor Who's third new series since its relaunch, showrunner and Turn Left's writer Russell T Davies, had played a similar trick as he does the following year: Utopia, which occupies the same position in the season. also acts as something of a teaser to the final two episodes. But, a lot of fans, and the official magazine, treat Utopia and the two episodes following it as one three-part story (as will this blog when it reaches that point). Why is Turn Left different?

It's all down to personal rules of course, but to me Utopia is an essential part of the 'Mad Master's drums' saga. Without it as the first part, the true nature of the monster revealed in the final episode of the season doesn't make sense nor have any dramatic weight. Also, Utopia doesn't really stand alone - the plot about the reappearance of the Master and the plot about the future of humankind both remain unresolved at its end and are only tied up later. Turn Left, on the other hand, is a self contained story of a parallel universe version of Donna facing adversity and making the ultimate sacrifice. It chimes with the final events of 2008's finale thematically rather than providing any essential exposition. As I watched The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, and marvelled at so many bravura sequences, it didn't feel right to allow them to overshadow the just as brilliant but different Turn Left - it deserves to be judged on its own merits.

First-time round:

I remember this one pretty clearly; I watched it slightly time-shifted but more or less live on its BBC1 broadcast debut with the Better Half and my good friend from university days Phil, who's been mentioned a few times before in this blog. It was slightly time-shifted as Phil and I were on a last-minute mercy dash to the - now sadly gone - local Oddbins to get essential supplies, and got caught in traffic on the way home. The Better Half and I only had one of our three children at the time, and he was just a toddler, so was probably abed before we watched. This is all almost exactly 10 years ago to the day as I write; how time passes.

Reaction

To my mind, Turn Left is Doctor Who's only counter-factual narrative to date. There have been a few parallel universe stories over the years, and they've invariably showcased fascistic dystopias, but they've never dwelt on nor even confirmed exactly what caused the divergence. Turn Left isn't a tale of the UK if the Nazis had won the war, it's just our world given one tiny nudge in a different direction at what looks like a meaningless point, and the Earth still ends up as a fascistic dystopia! It's a bleak but bracing experience watching ones own country, that one recognises and loves, turning incrementally but brutally and plausibly into a place where an emergency government have ruled that the displaced don't have voting rights, and immigrants - even those who've lived and worked here for many years - are treated deplorably.

Despite the bleakness, the story finds some lighter moments too ("Well, isn't that wizard!") and the mix is very satisfying with scene after scene delivering the goods. To pick a few memorable examples, and these are more of less contiguous: the collected inhabitants of Number 29 joined together singing Bohemian Rhapsody only to be interrupted by gunfire, the young squaddie levelling his gun at Donna while Wilf and Rocco are shouting at him to stop, the scene where those same two men salute each other as Rocco's family is being taken off, everyone putting on a brave face despite the terrible fate they are heading toward. Finally, and probably best of all, there is the scene that director Graeme Harper lets play as a close-up on Jacqueline King as Sylvia, barely moving, defeated, with Donna behind out of focus talking about being a disappointment to her mum. But ultimately, Donna proves herself: even without ever knowing the Doctor, she is a hero.

It's all the more miraculous that this is so good given it's the year's cheapo filler story. Every year, there was a 'double-banked' episode made at the same time as another, not always including as much of the main cast, some or all of whom may be needed on other sets. This time, they have split things neatly in two: David Tennant is making Midnight while Catherine Tate was making this. Davies makes this limitation a virtue, the story is all about the absence of the Doctor. Recycling clips, actors and plot points from previous episodes from the last year or two doesn't seem like a tired retread, but instead gives everything greater scale, a sense of foreboding, and a slow progression to the climax of the two-part finale to come. Many of the themes and memes of the season are paid off here (something on Donna's back, Rose reaching out across the divide between dimensions) but also nods to previous years of the new series, and its spin-offs too: Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith and her gang, Captain Jack and the remaining members of Torchwood, all are brushed aside off-screen, leaving only Donna and Rose to save the day.
 

One barely misses David Tennant, as there's so much performance power packed in to this 45 minutes. Billie Piper and Catherine Tate work very well in their scenes together, although - as was pointed out by many at the time - there's something off about Piper's vocal delivery, which she seems to fix by The Stolen Earth / Journey's End: it's like she's got someone else's false teeth in. Bernard Cribbins and Jacqueline King are amazing in this; Joseph Long too: is it possible for more than one actor to steal the same scene? If so, that's what happens with this three actor crew, executing perfect joint scene-heists all the way through.

 

It's so nearly perfect - I haven't got space to go too much into the peerless dialogue, the electrifying score, the Back to the Future inspired ending sequence. There are only a few tiny flaws: the wicked Fortune Teller is a bit too fairy tale and broad for this story, the time beetle when finally revealed is a bit fake, it looks like novelty backpack. But, I'm nitpicking; overall, it's great.

Connectivity: 

Another new series show that's part of a trilogy of episodes, and ends on a cliffhanger, but also just about works as a stand-alone story. Both story's feature Joseph Long (appearing in the "previously" sections of The Pyramid at the End of the World as the Pope, and making a memorable contribution in Turn Left as Rocco Colasanto. Both also feature UN personnel, if UNIT are still part of the UN since they've changed their name to Unified whatever.

Deeper Thoughts:
Politics again, naturally. Turn Left was written and produced in the last few months of 2007 when not much was well known about the scale of the global economic crisis - which would impact and influence pretty much everything for the next ten plus years to date - but some bad signs were gradually becoming apparent. The emergency at UK mortgage lender Northern Rock had only happened just over a month before Russell T Davies started writing. Flicking through the collected correspondence of this period between Davies and journalist Benjamin Cook in their essential and superlative book, The Writer's Tale, you'll mostly find discussions about the craft of writing, as you'd expect; later on, when 2entertain's budget input into Doctor Who production was in doubt because Woolworths UK was going to close, it got a bit closer to home; but, early on, Doctor Who is clearly too all-consuming for those making it not to be in a bit of a bubble.

Maybe just a little of the news seeped in to Davies's outlook when he was writing his counter-factual narrative, though. At the beginning of the season, in Partners in Crime, Sylvia berates Donna because "no one's unemployed these days except you", the last fading echo of the New Labour boom years; by Turn Left things are more desperate, as they were to become in real life. Russell would build in a minor subplot about Barack Obama's recession busting plans in The End of Time, and that's not aged very well; but, Turn Left in 2018 still resonates. If I can be so bold as to quote myself from a few paragraphs and sections earlier on this page: "It's a bleak but bracing experience watching ones own country, that one recognises and loves, turning incrementally but brutally and plausibly into a place where an emergency government have ruled that the displaced don't have voting rights, and immigrants - even those who've lived and worked here for many years - are treated deplorably". Does this remind you of anything?!

That Turn Left coincidentally chimes with Trump's or the Daily Mail's worst recent excesses, or the shameful treatment of the Windrush generation, is maybe not so surprising. Economic strife brings out the worst in people, and we're seeing a long tail of the impacts of inequality and the resultant (and wrong-headed) austerity to which that inequality gave rise. It wasn't so hard to predict, perhaps. Of course, Turn Left also features courage, spirit and heroism in the face of insurmountable odds. That's a nicer reflection of humanity. The longer the slow-motion car crash footage that is Brexit carries on, the more I'm hoping we, somehow, can get an ending where we're all happy and all together putting the planet back onto its correct axis, as opposed to looking out into the darkness as the stars go out, one by one.

In Summary:
About right.

The Pyramid at the End of the World

Chapter The 90th, features some meddling monks, and the U.N. and some I.T.

Plot: 
Along with Bill and Nardole, the Doctor - who's hiding that he was blinded a few stories back - is summoned by the UN secretary General to help investigate a pyramid that's appeared from nowhere in a global hotspot border area where US, Russian and Chinese troops are massed. The pyramid is really a disguised spaceship that contains alien invaders who appear as corpse monks. The Monks have been running a computer simulation of everything that can possibly happen on Earth and have arrived when a disaster is just about to befall the planet. The Doctor was part of this simulation, and managed to get a message out to his real self, but his real self hasn't done much to prepare seemingly (he's been too busy practising his mournful guitar work, perhaps).

Anyway, the Monks will help avert the disaster, at the cost of enslaving everyone, but only if Earth opts in with full consent (the monks were GDPR compliant a year early!) The Doctor works out that a mistake in an experimental lab is where the end of the world will start, and all the massed armies stuff is just a diversion. He goes to the lab with Nardole, leaving Bill with the Monks. The end of the world is averted; but, because of an unfortunate sequence of events, the Doctor ends up stuck in a room unable to open its combination lock as he can't see, with an explosion imminent. To save him, Bill gives consent to the Monks who restore his sight. He escapes from the room just in time, but now the world's going to be enslaved. To be continued....

Context:

Late on a weekday from the series 10 blu-ray, with beer, on my own (I'd add "natch", but I didn't even ask any of the family whether they wanted to see this one; maybe there'll be an upswing in their interest after a bit of a gap, who knows?!). Watching it, the story already felt like one from a bygone era (albeit a good one), and it's only a year old. It reminded me a little of watching The Smugglers a few weeks back - the ongoing tapestry of Doctor Who has barely gained more than a couple of stitches representing this team (be it One, Ben and Polly or Twelve, Bill and Nardole) and any moment now it's going to be "all change". Still, it was good while it lasted, and it was nice to be reminded of it again (even though you'd think it would be fresh in my memory).

First-time round:

You'd think it would be fresh in my memory, but no - a year later, and it's a blank. Only with a little digging into my online history of last year am I able to ascertain that around the time of broadcast I was blogging The Time Monster (oh, the pain!) and was also bored of the ongoing - and seemingly endless - campaigning leading up to the general election to take place a few weeks later. Likely, I watched the episode time-shifted on the evening of its BBC1 broadcast and showed the kids the following day, and likely I saw a news programme sometime in that period too, and no doubt Theresa May was on it, and she likely said "strong and stable" at least once. Strange days indeed.

Reaction

There's a thread that runs throughout the first two-thirds of this story where the audience are being shown the ominous build up of chance occurrences which will lead to an as yet unknown disaster. This structure seemed oddly familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on from where at first. Towards the mid-point, though, it hit me. All the little coincidences of broken glasses and broken bottles and where they're leading is no deep art film symbolism about a cosmic joke, they're instead a run-through of another Saturday night series' staple plot: it's not causality, it's Casualty. The long-running BBC series focuses, like this Who story, on ordinary characters away from the main action of the regulars, who step-by-step are leading themselves to the point where they'll need a Doctor. This structure was once satirically skewered (a No-Prize for anyone who can tell me where) as "Look at these mint imperials scattered on the floor. Oh that's dangerous. I wonder if someone will slip on them in the next 49 minutes!" Once I was aware of this, it did detract and distract a little, which is a shame, as the performances by Tony Gardner and Rachel Denning were particularly good.

What also took the edge off the enjoyment, was the knowledge of how royally this story is going to screw up the following one. The Monks are presented as just too powerful for their defeat after 45 minutes of The Lie of the Land to ever feel satisfactory, and that latter story would be massively improved by being a one-off rather than part of a trilogy, and having its (different) alien menace already in situ at its start, exerting control. But Pyramid was screwed up in its turn by Extremis, its preceding story: for example, if the Monks can simulate every aspect of our planet in such detail, including the Doctor's impact on events and the fact that he's blind (they knew that enough to simulate it last week), then why isn't the last twist part of their plan all along (and it's definitely not - the doomsday clocks start running backward and the Monks act surprised when the Doctor saves the day, then act suddenly suitably smug again when Bill clues them in that they have some leverage after all).

Other than that, though, it's a rather good little tale. As familiar as it is from its Saturday night schedule stablemate, Doctor Who's not really done the Casualty plot structure before, so it feels fresh, and those scenes have a brooding, intensifying atmosphere of doom. The intercut UN scenes effortlessly give the illusion of scale beyond the budget they actually will have had. The Doctor looks amazing - a craggy stick of determination in sharp threads and dusty boots. He comes over even more here as the aged gunslinger, persuaded to take up arms once more to face off the bandits, than he did in Hell Bent, where his playing that role felt somewhat forced. He gets to show off a little too - the scenes of the team working out what the threat might be, honing in by process of elimination, and finally the Doctor's master stroke: to turn off all the camera feeds to all the suspect labs, to see which one the monks turn back on. Well, I thought it was clever!

Right at the start there's a nice little sequence squeezing some great moments out of the "Previously:" section by interspersing parallel material set in the now. In these scenes, Pearl Mackie is at her best: you believe wholeheartedly that this is a student out on a date, even though the scene was co-written by two middle-aged men: she is effortlessly charming, but somewhat gawky and ordinary too. I miss her.

Connectivity: 

Not that Steven Moffat recycles tropes or anything, but this is the second story in a row from his showrunner period to include a pyramid that's the scene of a battle with some scary grey-faced aliens. And that group of aliens in both stories is styled as a religious order.

Deeper Thoughts:
London 1965, and a Twitch of Mortality.  I was a fairly early-adopter with social media, but I'm still rubbish at it. I've been on twitter for nearly 10 years and haven't reached a thousand tweets as yet. I think there was one year when I didn't get round to tweeting at all. I figure nobody wants to see a picture of what I had for lunch, or hear what I did during a dull day, or what I overheard on a train, or whatever. I consume a lot of my news, comment, humour and articles through the filter of social media, though, and sometimes this means I don't understand a meme or some millennial chatter, and - yes - it makes me feel old. But that's okay. For example, "London 1965" has become a thing over the last couple of weeks, a Doctor Who running gag (but somewhat respectful and celebratory) based on an amusing line reading of that location and year by William Russell (playing Ian, one of Doctor Who's first ever companions) at the end of The Chase.

This meme has come about because something called Twitch - which I don't fully understand as I'm not young nor savvy enough - is live-streaming loads of classic Doctor Who's online over a number of weeks  - and I mean loads of them, almost the lot. As this platform, as I understand it, is normally for watching gaming videos and other youthful content, it's bringing these episodes to a whole new audience; and, by and large, this new audience is loving it. Part of the fun is a constant text stream running alongside the pictures where viewers comment pithily on the action, try to catch everyone's imagination with a new meme, or repeat the memes that have already caught on. "London 1965" came from a trailer for the First Doctor's adventures, so had taken root long before The Chase was shown. I have found all this out from some digging (which essentially involved me finding middle-aged fans on twitter explaining it for their fellow codgers), but - inevitably - by the time I've got round to writing about it, nobody's saying "London 1965" anymore. (At the time of writing, Twitch is well into the Jon Pertwee episodes.)

So, poor old Grandpa Web 2.0. with his fusty blog is having trouble keeping up with new-fangled shenanigans. This, coming so soon after the new Time Team made everyone feel old has given me just a little cult-TV inflected pause to reflect on my own mortality.  My Dad died in the same year - 2005 - as the Better Half and I found out we were going to have our first child; of the two events, it was the latter that brought home my own mortality much more than the former. As sad as a parent's death is, your child is someone who you expect, and want, to have adventures you won't get to know about. I remember thinking it was the same as knowing, and somewhat sadly accepting, that there would be episodes of Doctor Who I would never get to see, not because they were made and lost before I was born, but because they'd be made after I die. In 2005, that had suddenly become a possibility again, and now I'm certain it will come to pass.

This idea, when it hit me, struck me as one that was fairly original and that I'd never seen expressed before. I filed it away, and four years later Gary Gillatt beat me to print: it formed a central theme of an article he wrote in Doctor Who Magazine's 400th issue. At least he's not younger than me. Though, as a university contemporary who went on to edit Doctor Who Magazine when hideously and obscenely young (and did it so well, too - it was the best ever period for the mag) he is yet another measure of my ageing. Still, ageing is at least preferable to the alternative. 

In Summary:
Better than an episode of Casualty.