Plot:
Twenty million Zygons, in disguised human form, have been resettled across contemporary Earth, with the peace between them and humans maintained by members of UNIT, chiefly two versions of Osgood, one human and one Zygon (following her duplication in The Day of the Doctor). The two Osgoods represent the fragile balance, with neither ever answering to (nor even acknowledging the relevance of) the question of which one is human and which is Zygon. When one of the Osgoods gets killed, the peace starts to unravel. A radicalised splinter group of Zygons, who want to stop hiding and go to war for the planet, start to kidnap humans in the UK and duplicate them. Elsewhere in the world they perform acts of terrorism. When the remaining Osgood is kidnapped, she manages to get a distress call to the Doctor, who calls Clara. The Clara that answers however is a Zygon duplicate called Bonnie. She lures the small contingent of UNIT troops that are in on the Zygon secret into an ambush. Kate Stewart is attacked by a lone Zygon in the US, and the Doctor and a rescued Osgood's plane is shot down by Bonnie. Luckily, they all survive, and catch up with Bonnie, who has brought the real Clara to the UNIT Black Archive. This is the setting for a heavy handed war metaphor involving the Osgood box(es). The Doctor gives a speech, persuades Bonnie not to be evil, and she becomes the new second Osgood. Memories are wiped, and things carry on as before. Implausibly.
Context:
I'm finding everything Who-related hard going at the moment. The season 18 Blu-ray, and my current snail-like pace in consuming the episodes within it, is persuading me that season 18 is one of the dullest runs of stories ever produced for my favourite show. The last story covered for the blog, The Creature from the Pit, manages to be dull even though it features a monster with a giant green cock and jokes by Douglas Adams. The next story that's come up for the blog is a whopping seven episodes long. And before that, I have the stodgy Zygon two-parter from Peter Capaldi's difficult second year to contend with. That year, with the Doctor suddenly donning shades and playing electric guitar, and his disappearing off for years to deal with his grief, is nothing less than Who's mid-life crisis. And like anyone else's mid-life crisis, it's not that exciting to watch play out. I nonetheless tried to find some enthusiasm, and put on the Blu-ray for a episode per night on consecutive nights over the recent Bank Holiday weekend in the UK. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 7) but the youngest got freaked out fairly early on in the first episode and decided to stop watching; the boys liked it though.First-time round:
The end of October / start of November 2015. A very different time: back then, Jodie Whittaker's taking over of the main role in the world's longest-running sci-fi TV series looked as likely as the UK voting to leave the EU. A few months earlier I'd had the bright idea to start a blog where I covered every story - new series and old - in random order, massively underestimating how much time and effort that would entail. Had I been more organised, I'd have thought then to keep a viewing diary of the episodes broadcast after I started the blog, to feed in to these First-time round summaries in years to come; but, I didn't. All I remember from back then is watching these episodes in a slough of despond; well, I watched them in my front room, but that's how it felt. The first couple of two-parters were only okay, the Viking and Highwayman ones with Maisie Williams were a bit pants; every week, I was tuning it hoping it would be better than expectations. The Zygon story kept my attention, but offered not much more. The Better Half, though, reached breaking point, and after the closing credits of The Zygon Inversion decided not to watch Doctor Who for a while.
Reaction:
Reaction:
This is an example of the globe-trotting thriller Who story, a type tried a few times during Peter Capaldi's tenure. The production values are very high, the team having got very good at making the most of their budget and putting some great visuals on screen. It's a contemporary twist on the traditional use of a body-snatching alien threat, using them as a proxy for international terrorism (which was casting a particularly dark shadow at the time of these episodes' production and broadcast). It's also fan service central: a sequel to anniversary show The Day of the Doctor, another outing for the popular duo of Kate Stewart and Osgood (the latter cosplaying with elements from two or three 20th century Doctor costumes), a rematch with the Zygons, a furthering of plot threads and characters from recent stories like Death in Heaven and The Magician's Apprentice. Jenna Coleman gets to play a baddie, which she does with aplomb, and there's a deftly assembled moment of misdirection in the cut from one scene to another, withholding the moment where she's been converted, but giving the audience a subtle clue (Zygon Clara's ponytail). So, why is the product of all those inputs so disappointing? Maybe it's because the plot is so clumsily put together, that if you think twice (maybe even just once) about the logic of anything that transpires in these two episodes, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.
Let me poke at just one minor card - just a Two of Clubs in the wider scheme of things - and show you how it brings everything fluttering down. Early on, the Doctor confronts two schoolgirls in a children's playground. (Not good optics, by the way; why leave it so long before they speak and confirm their true identities? Until they do, it looks very dodgy, but anyway...) These two girls are the Zygon High Command in disguise. So, what happened to the real girls? They must have existed at some point, it's always been established that Zygons have to copy humans, they can't just make up fictional new identities. The exact dialogue about the settlement is "They were permitted to permanently take up the form of the nearest available human beings." So, did these girls get killed to allow the Zygons to hide out in the UK in their forms? It hardly seems likely that the Doctor would condone the murder of lots of humans even as a way to ensure peace. So, were they two girls who had died? If so, are their parents Zygons too? Whole families couldn't have died of natural causes. So, are there unsuspecting human families out there sharing a home with Zygon children?
Perhaps all the Zygons are copies of still living humans. But then, isn't there a constant risk of the humans bumping into their Zygon doppelgängers and blowing the secret? Perhaps they were copied and then the Zygon copies were moved to other countries to avoid this (like the group taken to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), but then why would there be such a concentration in the UK? Also, how deep is the deep cover of these two little girl Zygons? It would probably be good to leave this vague, but we are instead explicitly shown that they spend lots of time in a kids' play park and a school. The thought then occurs of two Zygons spending all their time playing with LOL dolls and doing Key Stage 1 homework - when exactly are they squeezing in all the high commanding of Zygons on Earth? Even if one can rationalise all that somehow, there are then all the people in London that the Zygon terrorists have been forcibly replacing. They can't have kept them all alive in underground pods (and the script again is overly explicit in stating that this would be the exception rather than the rule), so are all those that are gone to be left missing presumed dead after the events of these two episodes, or will the terrorist Zygons continue taking up their place? At least it seems that the terrorists were dispatching entire family groups, but there will still be aunts and uncles and grandparents that will eventually twig that their relatives' personalities have completely altered. UNIT can't wipe everyone's memories.
Essentially, the nuts and bolts plot just isn't workable, whichever way you look at it. It's not even very good on a purely metaphorical level. A lot of people rave about the Doctor's final anti-war speech, but it's too long and Capaldi overplays it terribly. Much better - one of the best scenes from this era, in my humble opinion - is the stand-off in a shopping centre between the Doctor, Osgood and a Zygon who just wants to be left alone, but has been forced to come out into the open. It almost works as a comment on the vast majority of peaceful members of any minority who are not represented by the hothead political agitator faction. Except, those minorities look and sound different to the majority, that's kind of the point. Whereas the point of the Zygons is they look exactly the same as everyone else. They are the opposite of what they need to be to make the comparisons work.
If these were the only problems, it might not be too bad. But there's lots of other annoyances: all the tiresome 'comedy' Doctor bits talking about question mark underwear or calling himself Doctor Disco; the waste of Rebecca Front's talents playing a one-note character; the hoops the script has to jump through to rationalise that Zygons somehow now have the power to model themselves directly from someone's mental images, even if they're miles away from them; the repetitive trick of UNIT being confounded by the Zygons modelling themselves on their loved ones so they won't pull the trigger (they're soldiers ferchristsakes, why don't they shoot their Mum in the leg and ask questions later?). All told, it's a mess... and that's before one even gets to the possibly offensive nature of its themes (more on that anon).
Perhaps all the Zygons are copies of still living humans. But then, isn't there a constant risk of the humans bumping into their Zygon doppelgängers and blowing the secret? Perhaps they were copied and then the Zygon copies were moved to other countries to avoid this (like the group taken to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), but then why would there be such a concentration in the UK? Also, how deep is the deep cover of these two little girl Zygons? It would probably be good to leave this vague, but we are instead explicitly shown that they spend lots of time in a kids' play park and a school. The thought then occurs of two Zygons spending all their time playing with LOL dolls and doing Key Stage 1 homework - when exactly are they squeezing in all the high commanding of Zygons on Earth? Even if one can rationalise all that somehow, there are then all the people in London that the Zygon terrorists have been forcibly replacing. They can't have kept them all alive in underground pods (and the script again is overly explicit in stating that this would be the exception rather than the rule), so are all those that are gone to be left missing presumed dead after the events of these two episodes, or will the terrorist Zygons continue taking up their place? At least it seems that the terrorists were dispatching entire family groups, but there will still be aunts and uncles and grandparents that will eventually twig that their relatives' personalities have completely altered. UNIT can't wipe everyone's memories.
Essentially, the nuts and bolts plot just isn't workable, whichever way you look at it. It's not even very good on a purely metaphorical level. A lot of people rave about the Doctor's final anti-war speech, but it's too long and Capaldi overplays it terribly. Much better - one of the best scenes from this era, in my humble opinion - is the stand-off in a shopping centre between the Doctor, Osgood and a Zygon who just wants to be left alone, but has been forced to come out into the open. It almost works as a comment on the vast majority of peaceful members of any minority who are not represented by the hothead political agitator faction. Except, those minorities look and sound different to the majority, that's kind of the point. Whereas the point of the Zygons is they look exactly the same as everyone else. They are the opposite of what they need to be to make the comparisons work.If these were the only problems, it might not be too bad. But there's lots of other annoyances: all the tiresome 'comedy' Doctor bits talking about question mark underwear or calling himself Doctor Disco; the waste of Rebecca Front's talents playing a one-note character; the hoops the script has to jump through to rationalise that Zygons somehow now have the power to model themselves directly from someone's mental images, even if they're miles away from them; the repetitive trick of UNIT being confounded by the Zygons modelling themselves on their loved ones so they won't pull the trigger (they're soldiers ferchristsakes, why don't they shoot their Mum in the leg and ask questions later?). All told, it's a mess... and that's before one even gets to the possibly offensive nature of its themes (more on that anon).
Another story with an underground lair containing blobby aliens that aren't all they seem. In both stories, the Doctor arrives after answering a distress call.
Deeper Thoughts:
"Mixing Doc and politics, he asks me what the use is..." I can't yet bring myself to watch Years and Years, Russell T Davies' dystopian glimpse into the future history of a family living through the years 2019 to 2034 (at the time of writing, the first episode is available on iPlayer). This is not because I think it will be bad, but because I think it will be excellent, and it will thereafter haunt me. Politics in the UK is depressing enough to live through at the moment; I'm not sure whether my psyche can take any fictional extrapolation from that base point. Davies' work has haunted me before: a close cousin of Years and Years, from what I've read of the set-up and seen in trailers, would be Turn Left, a 2008 David Tennant episode of Doctor Who that Davies wrote. The political subtexts of Doctor Who stories are often discussed by fans and the wider media. I've mentioned in blog posts previously that I think this analysis is overblown, or at least misdirected. I doubt Turn Left would be on many of the top ten most political Doctor Who stories lists (there are such things, of course - have a Google) but it nonetheless still works for me as a neat exploration of the worst human attitudes exposed by economic strife.
Conversely, those stories where the direct inspiration is more obvious turn out not to be dwelling much on the politics at all. The Curse of Peladon is a good example: it's not about the UK joining the European Community, that's just a bit of a gag in the set up of a gothic whodunnit runaround. The Mutants might touch on apartheid in a couple of brief moments, but most of its running time is about people turning into colourful psy-powered space butterflies - not something that reflects on the geo-political landscape of the early 1970s. Even in The Happiness Patrol, the story most discussed in this regard, including in a Newsnight debate and an Archbishop of Canterbury speech, the satirical touches are mostly just window dressing, plus a bit of 'capitalism's bad, kids' tacked on at the end.
This makes sense, though: the point of science fiction and fantasy to a great extent is to explore wider and darker themes, but in a different context, one that's perhaps more palatable by being one or two steps removed from reality. Superficially more palatable, I should say. The great trick of the best science fiction and fantasy is that the new context makes the exploration of the theme more effective. The many many lives destroyed by Stalinism over the years are of course important, but not easily graspable as more than a statistic. The fate of the horse Boxer, loyal follower of the regime, in Animal Farm, on the other hand, is devastating. And, like some of the scenes in Turn Left do - and probably Years and Years will when I finally get brave enough to watch it - it haunts me.
The Zygon 2-parter though is something else again. It is seriously attempting to explore the themes from which its context is derived, but the context is not any step removed. With splinter groups of radicalised youth, terrorist
training camps, refugee trails, videos of executions, even a recurring symbol echoing
the Isis flag, it's too close for comfort. That also risks it being too close to be effective. And, as discussed above, the concept is not really aligned with the reality that it attempts to reflect. This adds up to something tasteless. The shows were broadcast while the most egregious of Isis's filmed executions were still fresh in the memory, and executions were still happening. It was too soon to do something so on the nose, unless it was going to be exactly right and hit its targets with precision. It doesn't manage this. The safest and probably better choice would have been to construct something with more distance between the trappings and the theme. It's okay - to take another example - for Daleks or Kaleds to be Nazi analogues, but when they start doing Nazi salutes, it perhaps oversteps a mark.
This makes sense, though: the point of science fiction and fantasy to a great extent is to explore wider and darker themes, but in a different context, one that's perhaps more palatable by being one or two steps removed from reality. Superficially more palatable, I should say. The great trick of the best science fiction and fantasy is that the new context makes the exploration of the theme more effective. The many many lives destroyed by Stalinism over the years are of course important, but not easily graspable as more than a statistic. The fate of the horse Boxer, loyal follower of the regime, in Animal Farm, on the other hand, is devastating. And, like some of the scenes in Turn Left do - and probably Years and Years will when I finally get brave enough to watch it - it haunts me.
In Summary:
Like a house of cards. Or like House of Cards (c. season 3, when it was getting very silly).
No comments:
Post a Comment