Army of Ghosts / Doomsday

Chapter The 128th, which sees a parting of the ways and a journey's end, but not much of a day of doom. Funny that.

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose return to the Powell Estate in London, visiting Rose's mother Jackie. They find that the world is being visited regularly - to the minute, in shifts during the day - by what appear to be ghosts. The Doctor tracks a signal which is opening a breach to another dimension and letting the 'ghosts' through. Accidentally taking Jackie as well as Rose, he pilots the TARDIS to Canary Wharf Tower, which is really Torchwood One, the main base of the organisation in London. They are met by Yvonne Hartman, a ghastly corporate 'people person' boss, who runs the operation (which is like a UK nationalist version of UNIT). The skyscraper was built around a mysterious floating sphere, which has - according to the Doctor - broken through from the void, the space between dimensions, and created cracks through which the supposed ghosts are entering. This is being accelerated by Torchwood, who have been running the shifts to widen the cracks, as it is providing energy that they believe they can harness. The Doctor persuades Yvonne to stop the ghost shifts until they can work out who is really coming through, but it's too late: Torchwood has been infiltrated by Cybermen from the parallel universe where Rose's Dad is still alive. They came through the cracks early as a scouting party, and now accelerate the ghost shift to maximum.

Rose discovers Mickey in the Sphere room, just as the sphere becomes active; he has also travelled back to our universe using technology stolen from the parallel version of Torchwood. Across the world, the ghosts, who are really Cybermen, break through and take over. The sphere opens, but inside are not Cybermen but four Daleks - the Cult of Skaro, an R & D division of Daleks, who even have names. Also in the sphere is the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord artefact that's a mystery to the Doctor. There's a skirmish between Cybermen and Daleks, and in the confusion Mickey accidentally touches the Genesis Ark, which - because he has travelled in time and so has picked up residual time energy, powers up the Ark. It opens and millions of Daleks pour out - it is a Time Lord prison, bigger on the inside than the outside. Battle is joined between Daleks and Cybermen. Yvonne and Jackie are taken off by the Cybermen to be converted, but Jackie gets away and meets up with her sort-of husband Pete, who's also arrived from the other dimension.

The Doctor works out a way to reverse the ghost shift, which will pull anything that has travelled through the void back into it, and close the breach forever. But because Rose has travelled through (when they visited the parallel Earth previously), she has to make a choice which side of the breach she wants to be on: with her Mum and Dad and Mickey in the parallel Earth, or travelling with the Doctor in her usual universe. She chooses the latter, and so she and the Doctor have to hang on tight to some gravity MacGuffins, while all the Cybermen and Daleks are sucked back in (although the Cult of Skaro implement their 'Jump to the Sequel' circuit and vanish until the following series). Rose loses her grip, and is drifting back towards oblivion, but her Dad appears again (somehow knowing exactly what difficulty she'll be in and where), grabs her and zaps her back to the other side of the breach, just as it closes up. A few weeks later, the Doctor and Rose get to have a final holographic face time, but he loses the connection and disappears before he can tell her how he feels about her. A bride mysteriously appears in the TARDIS. What what WHAT?!!

Context:

This wasn't a random selection, but was a request from the eldest child to watch "the one where there's Cybermen and Daleks together". As it is his Doctor Who birth story (see below for more details), I indulged him. We watched the story one evening after school and work, accompanied by the other two children, with the Better Half poking her head round the living room door occasionally. The kids were perspicacious from the offset, following the pre-credits sequence  - an epic round up of Rose's story to date, which ends with ominous v.o. from Billie Piper about her imminent death - they had a discussion about how she clearly wasn't dead or she couldn't be speaking. I didn't want to mention Sunset Boulevard to them (and they were right in this instance, anyway).

First time round:

The Better Half was pregnant with our first child (now a boy of 13), and her due date was the same as that for the delivery of previous story Fear Her, Saturday 24th June 2006. In the end, he was a little bit late and arrived midweek. Mum and baby stayed in hospital for a few days, but on the following Saturday (1st of July), they were to come home some time in the afternoon. This period, having been through it three times now, is very dull: waiting for a few hours to be discharged, eager to get the new sprog home, and for his Mum to be able to rest in her own bed. We're neither of us football fans particularly, but it was welcome to have something to watch to pass the time, a World Cup quarter final between England and Portugal.

The match was almost over, as I remember, when we were finally given leave to drive home. As we stopped at a supermarket to get nappies on the way home, the staff's groans and cheers clued us into how the penalties were going. As we were getting settled at home, I switched on the TV and the Pet Shop Boy's song Numb was playing over a montage of sad looking footballers, as England had lost and been knocked out of the competition. Once that was done, Doctor Who started. Silly, I know, but I thought that it augured well for our new family that the first things that I heard and saw happened to be my favourite pop group and my favourite TV show. The sun was shining, it was the middle of a heatwave in the UK, and little one was reasonably settled - sleeping through Doctor Who. The following week, he napped through the finale episode too; so, the first story his Dad inflicted upon the poor wee mite was that year's Christmas special (see the First Time Round section of this blog post for photographic evidence of this).

Reaction:

I was fast-tracked down the road to being a fan. By the end of watching my first season on broadcast in 1982, I was reading the official magazine, and drawing my own Doctor Who comic strips. Like every other fan who was ever 10 years old, as I was at the time, I conceived of and drew at least one story where the Daleks and the Cybermen were brought together (either to fight or to team up). It's pretty much a rite of fan passage, and presumably has also occurred to every person who's ever had anything to do with Doctor Who production over the years. They all resisted it. Should Russell T Davies have resisted too? I can see why it was an attractive idea. Like Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks planning The Three Doctors, Davies was on the look out for a publicity hook to bring in a big audience for the series finale, and it is an easy and visual concept to sell (the Radio Times for the week of the final episode, with a cover for each metal race, was a good example of this). The thing, though, is that the story didn't need this push. It's a massively popular character's swansong - a fact that garnered Billie Piper a Radio Times cover a couple of weeks earlier. That, plus an invasion of the Cybermen, would have been enough.

What we got in the end was too much. It took me three tortuous paragraphs above to describe everything that happens in the two episodes. It's very busy, but I'm not sure a lot of it constitutes plot exactly. Items are moved around as if on a chessboard - Mickey here, Jackie there, Pete Tyler over there - all to manoeuvre Rose closer and closer to the exit; but it feels like an inevitably of the production process rather than the weight of the drama. This, despite Davies' attempts to hype things up with meaningful-sounding voice-over monologues. Show don't tell. It's a shame, because despite all of this, the first episode still manages to be an absolute cracker, with good new spins on Davies' Earth Invasion tropes (celebrity cameos, as background is filled in by channel surfing) and it builds to a wonderful, exciting climax. As soon as part two starts and the Daleks and the Cybermen are bitching at one another, all the energy leaks away. This may be a built-in design flaw, and the reason nobody had done this combo before: metal on metal grates. Both these foes need to be pitted against humans to throw their unique qualities into sharp relief. If you don't have that, you are just listening to two drone-like electronic voices squawk at one another. (Though, this is not, as Mickey describes it in the script, like Steven Hawking meets the speaking clock - the speaking clock is just an ordinary recorded human voice; a rare duff joke from Davies there, and pretty tasteless regarding Hawking too).

Without the crowbarred-in Daleks, there might have been more time to integrate the Rose departure plot elements so they flowed more naturally, and the mechanics weren't so much on show. The business with the two big levers, meaning both the Doctor and Rose are at risk of being sucked into the breach at the end, is very clumsy: we've already seen them be operated remotely, so it seems unlikely that the Doctor couldn't have thought up a better a solution to put himself and Rose out of harm's way than just holding on very tight. He also did his best beforehand to persuade Rose to leave him alone to do it - who would have manually operated the other lever, if she had? The resolution sequence, with Rose hearing the Doctor calling her from another universe underscored by Murray Gold's magnificent Doomsday theme, is great and almost worth it; but the lead up to that is somewhat disappointing. Director Graeme Harper fails to depict sufficient scale: there's a bit reveal of Torchwood's purloined swag that's supposed to be awe-inspiring, but just looks like a big, empty warehouse. The script keeps bigging up the 'war' to come - show don't tell (again) - but there is no war, just a very short battle between CGI multitudes that don't feel like a real integrated part of proceedings. Tennant too has not found his feet, and is displaying some of the annoying tics that he'd iron out towards the end of filming his first year (these episodes were filmed midway through, as part of a block that included the previous Cyber set-up story).

There is a lot to enjoy here, nonetheless. Camille Coduri has her best episode to date: some great funny lines delivered well - "If we end up on Mars, I'm gonna kill you", "I'll show you where my ankle's going" - but also the quiet and dramatic moment where she wonders about her own daughter's future untethered by any family or sense of home on Earth. Guest star Tracy Ann Oberman is good value too, playing an awful smiling corporate boss. Her presence is odd though in an episode which also contains the ghost of Eastenders' Den Watts rising from The Queen Vic's cellar, given that it was Oberman's character Chrissie Watts that famously killed him and buried him there. Nobody remarks on the resemblance.

Connectivity: 

Both this and the last story are based on concepts long anticipated by the fans (teaming up all the Doctors, the Daleks versus the Cybermen), but resisted by various production teams for a long time before they finally were put on screen. Both stories feature long-term regular chracters taking their first ever trip in the TARDIS, and both end with a significant change in direction for the overarching story of their respective eras. Additionally, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday is the first Doctor Who story broadcast after my eldest child's birth; The Three Doctors by coincidence is the first Doctor Who story broadcast after his Dad's.

Deeper Thoughts:

A cult... with an L!  At the recent BFI event I attended (see previous blog post for a full write up), I had a strange epiphany. This was before the drinking started too: during the interval, as I watched everyone filing back in to NFT1 for the second half of the days entertainment, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of well-being for my fellow humans, based on their sheer and unshakeable love for something, however silly that thing might be. I checked myself: had I ever looked down on anyone for being a fan? I didn't think so, and I was immensely relieved. I don't think I could ever cast aspersions on anyone for being obsessively fond of something. Not just because it would be throwing stones from my own very delicate glasshouse, but also because I fundamentally think it does everyone good to have a passion or two: trainspotters, soap addicts, Cliff Richard fans, campanologists, Morris Dancers - you are all wonderful, and - in the words of Homer Simpson - just because I don't care (for the same thing as you do), doesn't mean I don't understand. The interval ended, and I was distracted from this line of thought by Dalek action on the big screen, but later on when the beer was flowing like wine, the topic came back to me, with a twist. What about Nigel Farage fans? Could I extend my compassion to them?

For, what is the Brexit Party but the Nigel Farage Appreciation Society? It isn't a political party, it's a company that was set up specifically to be a vehicle for that MEP to speak to his fannish audience, which you can see in footage of every meeting and rally - they are enjoying his pronouncements just as the crowd I was in at the BFI enjoyed Jon Pertwee and the Daleks. Am I really that different from one of those people, looking up from different but similar seating to a different but similar stage? I've always thought I was, and that there was a clear difference; but, now that I looked at it in this new way, I was starting to doubt that. I can see a wide ocean of difference between myself and the people who are on stage on behalf of the Brexit Party, I believe most of these people (apart from a very few genuine but - in my opinion - crazed idealogues) are deliberately peddling lies and stoking up divisions for less than laudable reasons. But the people watching them believe they are on the level, and passionately adhere to their cause. If I were to enter into rational discussion with them, I believe most of them would listen, but none of them would change their minds. If any of them were to calmly and rationally explain to me how Doctor Who was rubbish (there's enough hard evidence they could present, for sure), I would listen too, but wouldn't change my mind either. Because I love it.

Of course, undying affection for a daft old TV programme has no risk of causing anyone else damage or hardship; the same cannot be said for the Farage crowd's favoured approaches for leaving the European Union. Knowing this, and that these minds can't be changed, only makes thing worse, though. Awareness that something's impossible doesn't help to work out what one can do about it. If it did, then I'd be doing my best to wake them all up to the thing they want that's impossible: to leave the European Union, no longer have to abide by its rules, and still be prosperous (let alone better off). Brexit, though, is no longer the main problem. Nobody can deliver on all the many promises that have been made about it, and they might not even be trying anymore. Alexander Johnson MP - someone who also inspires a similar personality cult to Farage - is now Prime Minister of the UK. Nigel Farage has been uncharacteristically quiet throughout the process of Johnson's ascension, which is troubling. The nationalist fervour lampooned in the Torchwood Institute as depicted in Army of Ghosts seems less funny now, and more like a vision of what's to come.

It's clear that both gentlemen are planning (maybe together?) to use their respective cult of followers to cement their power, and my feeling is we'll be going to the polls very soon. If we don't want another five years of the sort of policies these gentlemen espouse, then what can we do? Embrace some of that love for other tribes I was alluding to earlier. Not for Johnson or Farage's crews, I think they are too far gone, but I believe they are a minority, albeit a significant one, No, we need to share the love with everyone that stands against them. As hard as it may be, we must put aside our differences about Corbyn or Swinson or Sturgeon, and get out the vote, vote tactically, keep them out. Maybe then we can avoid our own doomsday.

In Summary:

Some things would be better without the Daleks; otherwise, it's too much of a bad thing (or two).