A Good Man Goes to War

Chapter The 114th, which includes much sound and fury, but signifies not a lot.

Plot: 
An order of religious soldiers led by the eye-patch wearing Madame Kovarian have a major beef with the Doctor (we'll much later find out that it's because he might bring back the Time Lords through a crack in the universe, but right now it is not explained). They have kidnapped a pregnant Amy at some point off screen, replacing her with an identical avatar. How they knew she was pregnant with a baby conceived in the TARDIS, and how they knew this gave the baby unique powers is, erm, very easily explained, erm... oh look, some Cybermen! Amy gives birth to the child, whom Kovarian wants to turn into a weapon to use against the Doctor. At around this time, the Doctor realises that the Amy aboard the TARDIS is a fake. He sets about calling in every favour he can with people scattered throughout the universe to find and liberate the real Amy. Kovarian has set all this up as a trap, though, so waits around for four weeks, instead of just leaving with the baby. But she can't just leave with the baby because the trap is going to kill the Doctor. Oh no, sorry, she doesn't expect to kill the Doctor as otherwise she wouldn't need the baby in the first place, would she?

The Doctor easily infiltrates the base and frees Amy and the baby (named Melody Pond), but then the trap is sprung. The baby is also a fake avatar, and Kovarian has just left (only just left!) with the real Melody to a place of safety, which she could have retreated to any time in the last few weeks, and she wouldn't have had to put herself at risk or humiliate her army of allies to do so, but she didn't because of, erm... oh look headless monks! And the Doctor can't track her to whatever new hide-out she's in - as he did pretty effortlessly first time - because, erm... oh look River Song's arrived. River explains that she is Melody grown up. The Doctor realises that young Melody / River is the mysterious girl that they were tracking in 1969 America, so Amy and Rory have little to no hope of being reunited with their child, but he gives them false hope anyway and rushes off in the TARDIS, because, erm... oh look, To Be Continued.

Context:

The randomiser settled upon this story only a day after my youngest child (girl of 6) asked me, while I watched another in the seemingly endless early Davison stories from the Blu-ray boxset that I am still slowly working my way through, "When are we going to watch another of my favourite Doctor?!". Her favourite Doctor is Matt Smith. Not sure why, exactly. She was too small to watch any of his episodes on first broadcast, so Peter Capaldi would be closest to 'her Doctor'. It's because Matt's young, I guess. Anyway, at the first opportunity I watched this story from the Blu Ray Series 6 box set, accompanied by her and her brothers (boys of 9 and 12). They all enjoyed it, but didn't seem that blown away. The youngest was a bit scared towards the end when the headless monks started their "attack prayer".

First-time round:

First seen on its BBC broadcast in 2011. I was visiting my very good friend Phil, who I've mentioned a few times previously on this blog. We watched the episode in the front room of his home near Steyning, which he'd just moved into with his fiancée. I was there to discuss his stag night as he'd just asked me to be his best man. The viewing is thus kept in my memory by being associated with those wider happy events, and otherwise - just based on the story itself - I might have forgotten about it. It was the first time that 21st Century Doctor Who had broken a transmission run into two with a mid season break. A big deal was made in pre-publicity that this meant a 'game changer' cliffhanger that they couldn't have left people a year wondering about. Perhaps inevitably, it disappointed - the revelation that River is Amy and Rory's daughter had been speculated upon everywhere on the nerd-net since Amy's watery surname was first revealed (which presumably was in a press release sometime before David Tennant regenerated). It would have been more of a surprise if the reveal had been anything else.

Reaction

There are so many hours of extras on the aforementioned Davison Blu-ray box set that I feel like I've been watching nothing but Doctor Who all month. A recent watch was the Making-of documentary for the story Kinda. Its script editor Eric Saward moans a lot in said doco about the lack of logic in the writer's script, but Kinda clearly has a consistent albeit dreamy logic; what Eric meant, I think, was it lacked explanations. It's all the better for that, in my opinion. But how would a story fare that was the exact opposite, that was all explanations? Enter: A Good Man Goes to War.  I've now covered all five parts of the series 6 River Song arc (this includes, as well as A Good Man Goes to War,  the Silence / Moon landings two parter, Let's Kill Hitler and the Wedding of River Song finale), and - though there's some exciting spectacle in all those five - you'd be hard pressed to find much in the way of actual story beats.

Does any character change during the overarching plot, either in their values or emotions? I don't think so. Amy and Rory really should, as they lose their baby in a horrific moment; but, the script glosses over that, and the performances of both actors appear as if this has not made so much as a ding on their hard outer shells. This is the fault of the original conception, I think: one can intellectualise about how this isn't exactly an ordinary pregnancy, so might not cause an ordinary reaction, but the visuals are so emotive - their baby turns to goo in their arms - that no amount of writing or performance could have squared it. It's emblematic of the other flaws in the piece. A cool visual or tempting gag is thrown in even if it doesn't fit with - or even worse, actively works against - the story. There's an epic battle, reuniting the Doctor with lots of characters, but it is all meaningless: the battle is a diversion, so none of the heroics mean anything. After the battle, the Doctor's anger getting the better of him (in the 'Colonel Runaway' segment) also seems very dramatic as it's unfolding, but has no long term consequences. He looks crestfallen for a while that he's lost the baby, but then he finds out that the baby is River, and is let off the hook. His own personal history has already shown him that he could never have saved the child (she couldn't have been imprisoned in Florida later in her personal timeline otherwise).

Except for these missed opportunities, there is no emotional impact of the stories at all (nor of the whole season arc for that matter). It is just about the slow dissemination of exposition, with the action set pieces spread out to deflect from this rather mundane purpose. In this particular story, we find out that someone is another couple of characters' long lost daughter. It's not a game changer, as their relationship remains exactly the same as it was before. We find out that she's got some superhuman abilities and has been trained to kill the Doctor. But, if we've been paying attention, this has all been already made clear. Later in the season we find out more detail about the religious order(s) and exactly why they want to kill the Doctor. None of this is story, it's backstory. And backstory is not as good as story, which is why any narrative grinds to a halt if it needs to take a big info dump to clue in the audience. The best writing avoids this.  If you don't believe me, just think of the obvious historical precedent of a SF franchise deciding to make a set of big narratives out of some backstory that could have just stayed as scribbled notes. The Series 6 River Song stories are the Doctor Who equivalent of the Star Wars Prequels.

That may seem harsh, and certainly the characters are better conceived and played than in The Phantom Menace and its two follow-ups. The action too - despite being an order of magnitude less well budgeted - is more exciting and fun. But this just makes it worse: there are some very heroic moments, e.g. Matt Smith's first appearance being held back to almost half way through the episode, as he pops up in a shock reveal and that assured line: "Amelia Pond - get your coat!". But it's all for nothing. Some nice new and old characters are introduced. Vastra, Jenny and Strax all arrive fully formed, and it was great that the death of the Sontaran was later reversed so they could all come back again. The "getting the old band back together" vibe of the beginning is something new for Doctor Who. But once everyone's together, they don't achieve anything. Oh well. One other aspect that's better than The Phantom Menace (the very definition of faint praise, I realise): I've now blogged all the parts of the Series 6 River Song arc, but have not had time and space until now to mention how good Frances Barber is. She knows exactly how to pitch a larger-than-life baddie, and is magnetic to watch, lifting every moment she's on screen. She might have been even better in a story with some actual story.

Connectivity: 

Another story, like Resolution, which sees the Doctor operating with a large group of people brought together to defeat the bad guys / bad squiddy thing.

Deeper Thoughts:
Shuffle play, or The Great Curator. At the start of every year (which I realise we're a little way past now, but it's still January, so I think I can just get this in under the wire) I resolve to embrace more modern music. As a Smash Hits reading teenager, and when transitioning to the NME and Q as a college student, and throughout my 20s and early 30s (by which time I was reading The Word magazine as befitted my increasing age), I was keeping up more or less. In all that time, I never wanted to end up one of those blokes listening to the same old songs, ossifying along to a soundtrack of my faded youth. Sometime around the birth of my first child and the folding of The (wonderful and late lamented) Word magazine, though, I became out of touch. This is brought home to me every December when my children and I watch the Christmas Day Top of the Pops. None of the songs speak to me, and I can't even tell some of them apart (a real old codger thing to say, I know, but nonetheless true). It was no different this year to any other year.

There's great new music out there, for definite, but it was a long shot to expect the Christmas Day Top of the Pops to serve up something I would enjoy. The nature of such a selection - the programme showing only the biggest selling hits of the year - is too narrow. The sort of people who contribute to the yearly placings are very different from me, and they all seem to favour songs that sound like particularly uninspiring Craig David album tracks, with only something like George Ezra's Shotgun cutting through by dint of being slightly irritating. Help came from Tracey Thorn's column in the Christmas number of the New Statesman. She nominated her favourite tracks from the year, and - of course - some kind soul had turned them into a playlist, which I found online and listened to between Christmas and New Year, and very much enjoyed.

I hadn't realised how much the playlist sits at the heart of one's enjoyment. I always think of it as a recent invention, coming along with itunes and Spotify, but it's always been there. Top of the Pops curated a playlist every week using the criterion of record store sales. In my formative years, this regularly provided me a diverse set of songs, some I'd already heard, and some of which would be new discoveries, some of which I'd love, some of which I'd hate. Would it work this way now if Top of the Pops was still on every week? Possibly not. The cost and difficulty of obtaining music is so low now as to be effortless, and is barely distinguishable from the act of streaming a song for nothing - as such, the act of purchasing doesn't have so much significance.

The issue then is - like most mid-life challenges I find - one of free time.When I became that NME-consuming student, and Top of the Pops was no longer providing me the playlist I needed, I had the time to research what I might like (I possibly should have been doing some studying at the time, but somehow I had hours and hours to devote to reading about music and searching through CD and tape racks). Now, I'm too busy and need a guide. Tracey Thorn won't be there every time I want to cross the road (with my headphones on). A DJ perhaps? The opportunities for going clubbing are limited for a middle-aged fart with three kids, so we're only talking about the radio variety. But I never get on well with music radio - sooner or later the music stops for someone to blather. The price of getting an expert to curate an interesting playlist for me is the interruptions with opinions, weather or travel. Curation by algorithm? No matter how good the AI is, that's ultimately only going to serve up things similar to what I already like, and the chance to be surprised by something new is essential.

I'll keep looking for a solution. In the mean time, to take my mind off my ossification, I will at least put the same old songs from my faded youth on shuffle, so I get them in a somewhat surprising order. It has certainly helped me when rewatching all the old Doctor Whos I've seen a zillion times before to view them again in this way.

In Summary:

Better than The Phantom Menace, at least.