It Takes You Away

Chapter The 132nd, which is as mad as a universe of frogs.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz arrive in Norway in 2018, and investigate an isolated cottage, where they find a young girl has been barricaded in, alone. This is Hanne, a blind teenager who believes her Dad, Erik, has been taken by a monster that roams outside at night. Investigating, the TARDIS team find a mirror in Hanne's home that is a portal to another world. Leaving Ryan to look after Hanne, the others go through the mirror and find a world of dark and scary caves populated with strange creatures. They meet one of these, the only one with a lantern, who is called Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs. He offers to take them to Hanne's Dad in exchange for payment, but is trying to trick them, then falls victim of his own trap and is devoured by flesh moths. Meanwhile, Ryan finds that there is no monster outside the cottage, it's just a loudspeaker playing a recording.

The Doctor, Graham and Yaz escape through another portal that leads them to a mirror world where Erik is living with Hanne's Mum, Trine - but Trine died quite a while ago. Erik had boarded up the cottage and left Hanne alone, with the monster recording to make her stay safely inside. But he can't find any way of bringing her Mum back into our world. Trine isn't the only dead person somehow still alive in this world: Grace is there too. The Doctor realises that they are in a reality created by an ancient consciousness called the Solitract, which is incompatible with our universe but wants to engage with us; it has created versions of Graham's and Erik's dead partners to keep them in the mirror world, but it is already unstable due to the incompatibility and is breaking apart. Graham realises that this isn't Grace, and - heart-breakingly - leaves her behind, but Erik still wants to stay. The Doctor offers herself so that the Solitract lets Erik go, and she makes friends with it. Even with only the Doctor in it, though, the worldscape is not sustainable, and the Solitract lets the Doctor go. Hearing what he's been through in the mirror world, Ryan calls Graham 'granddad' for the first time.

Context:

Towards the end of August, after a rather marvellous break in Majorca, the family headed home on an evening Easyjet flight. I'm ambivalent about the budget air travel revolution of recent years. For many reasons, including environmental ones, our family avoided such travel, holidaying only in the UK for a period of about 15 years; this led to some inventive and fun breaks. That banked a bit of carbon, I hope, to allow some travelling more widely of late: the Better Half and I thought it was time that the children got to experience other countries and cultures, and relatively inexpensive flights are a good way for them to do that, as long as it's not taken for granted, and treated with the necessary respect. The other thing that I like about the no frills approach is that - if you're cheapskates like me and my lot - you get to personalise your journey. I don't think we could order a dull sandwich and short stack of Pringles from the trolley anymore, when we can make our own packed lunch (we snacked on rolls with choritzo and local cheese, pastries and Spanish oranges on our journey back to London Gatwick). The same homespun approach can also be applied to the in-flight entertainment, of course, and I had prepared by downloading this story onto my phone using the BBC iplayer app, specifically for the journey home.

First time round:

Watched live on the BBC1 transmission last Autumn, with the whole family except my youngest (girl of 7 now, but who was 6 at the time) who had taken against the new series at the exact point that Tim Shaw revealed his true face, including its additional sets of teeth, to the nation. We have been able to tempt her back to watch the odd few episodes, but she's not watched this one as yet. It's unlikely that she'd get past the scary monster sounds coming from the woods at the start, which is a shame as she'd probably like the bit with the frog.

Reaction:

In the last blog post on The Web of Fear, I mentioned that Web’s distinct phases of plot fixed around ‘islands’ of set piece action seemed similar to an approach Stanley Kubrick was reported to take in constructing his screenplays and films. I can picture It Takes You Away patiently waiting for its turn before boldly saying “Hold my beer”. If ever a story has shifted through phases, abruptly changing genres every few minutes of its running time, it’s this one. As an illustration of this, try an exercise: watch the opening scene of four travellers investigating a mysterious cottage in the wilderness, then watch the climax scene with a time traveller talking to a frog on a chair in a white void, then imagine writing a plot to join up those two scenes. The beginning of the story, and its conversational title, promise a chilly modern Scandi horror, where the scenario will be depicted naturalistically and menace will be unseen except in glimpses. And so it indeed seems to be for a few scenes, but then a magic mirror is found, and the adventurers and the plot enter a completely different genre altogether.

Stepping through the mirror, we leave naturalism and restraint behind (you don’t hire Kevin Eldon for naturalism or restraint, after all). With dark mysterious caves, a glowing balloon-like lantern, flesh-eating moths and an avaricious goblin, we’re into full on surrealistic monster horror with more than a dash of Grand Guignol. It’s OTT, but it’s just as good in its new way as what went before, and Eldon’s performance as Ribbons is ripe but rewarding, if you can go with it. That’s probably the challenge of any piece that makes such jarring genre shifts – it either feels a little bit wrong-footing or just plain wrong, depending on the individual viewer.

It’s obviously intentional though, as it isn’t long before things shift again. Now, if you’ve been enjoying Eldon’s performance – as I was – it feels like he’s gone too soon, just as if you’re a real fan of the style of the early scenes, you’ll be annoyed that the monster in the woods is revealed to be fake so early on. With this story, you can’t dwell too long, as it’s moving fast – you just have to hold on tight and try to enjoy the ride. On the other side of the mirror, we’re into yet another style of story -  more sci-fi, chilly again and much less gothic fairy tale, plus there’s big dollop of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The attention to detail of the mirror world, with backwards T-shirts and hair parted on the opposite side, is good, but the real reason we’re here is for the emotional plot – building on themes for the whole season. I’ll come back to that in a moment, because even that’s not the final phase.

At this point, the script does some inventive heavy lifting, dramatically tying all the disparate phases together, and swinging us off into a new direction: it’s all a honey trap, and they have to get out of there. The script also makes a quite abstruse concept easily digestible to the audience: it’s a sentient universe that is destructive but not malevolent - it’s a kid with chicken pox that just wants to play. This sets up that final sequence with Jodie Whittaker speaking to the aforementioned frog. It’s magnificently, operatically bonkers, and I mean that as a compliment. This is challenging material for Whittaker, and she makes it look easy. It shouldn't be taken for granted just because it doesn’t have the feels of what Bradley Walsh and Sharon D Clarke get to do elsewhere, it’s just as excellent: a quiet sorrow at having made a new friend, but now having to say goodbye (like a holiday romance after the Doctor’s trip to a new universe… or maybe that’s just me finding connections with the circumstances in which I watched it).

Going back to the Graham and Grace plot, and, well, look... I…  I’m not crying – you’re crying!  Maybe it was the circumstances of my viewing affecting me again. If you listen to Kermode and Mayo’s film review radio show / podcast, you’ll probably be familiar with AALS – Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome – that many listeners have reported over the years. Apparently, it may even be scientifically plausible: the theory is that one is more likely to blub watching drama when eight miles high. I don’t know if it’s true, but I can report that I did shed tears as Graham has to say goodbye to his dear departed all over again. Then, I shed a few more when the Graham and Ryan’s long-running arc was resolved as Ryan finally accepts Graham as his Granddad.

It’s a very clever script to cover all that and keep things coherent while still finding room to feature a resourceful but not perfect teenage character, played by a blind actor (Ellie Wallwork), satisfactorily round off the emotional plot between Hanne and her Dad, and also round off a small subplot of conflict between Ryan and Hanne too. This is probably the aspect I’d lose if I had to lose anything: it’s reminding us of Ryan’s issues with abandonment by his own father, but it doesn’t significantly add to proceedings. Some of the quirky Doctor dialogue early on, where she eats soil and talks about sheep, could be snipped out too, and I wouldn’t be bothered.

Connectivity: 

Apart from the Kubrickian style, there's more disembodied forces taking the form of humans, including a human who's already dead, and a touch more being stalked by unrelenting monsters in the Flesh Moths sequences.

Deeper Thoughts:

Balearic Story Beats. The family were in the S'Arenal area of Majorca in August. I took a lot of Doctor Who related entertainments with me this time. Not just It Takes You Away and The Web of Fear, but also the novelisations of Rose and City of Death. None of it was particularly linked to the holiday locale, but to find something that was connected was a pretty tough task: there have been no Doctor Who stories filmed in Majorca or any of the Balearic Islands. If I had wanted to override the random selection and pick something close to being apt, there are quite a few now that have been filmed in Spain or Spanish territories. The closest I suppose would be Planet of Fire, which was also filmed on an island - Lanzarote; in the new series, Kill The Moon and the Zygon Invasion / Inversion were also filmed in the Canaries. I have, though, already blogged two out of those three and I'm in no hurry to see Kill The Moon again (is anybody?!). Mainland Spain - which is geographically closer - was the location for The Two Doctors, but I wasn't really in the mood for that one either.

Without my really registering it, in recent years several more stories have been filmed in Spain: Asylum of the Daleks, A Town Called Mercy, Smile and Demons of the Punjab. The production of Doctor Who has got more and more international as this decade has gone on, and the makers of it clearly like to escape to the sun just like me and the family do. Would any of these count, though? It would be silly to visit Spain and watch Demons of the Punjab or A Town Called Mercy, as Spain is masquerading as India and America respectively. And the other two stories use very specific locations as alien planets; there's no sense of that particular place in the narrative. The best Doctor Who foreign locations, to be honest, are the few classic era stories that in their excitement at getting away from Blighty revelled in this and splashed the location all over the screen. Unfortunately, I blogged Arc of Infinity, City of Death and Planet of Fire pretty early on in the blog's life from no further away than my own living room, before this idea of immersive location blogging occurred to me. I am just going to have to go to Seville at some point, and watch The Two Doctors. Someone has to do it, I suppose!

Enthusiasts carry their fandom with them wherever they go, anyway; Doctor Who is never far behind whenever I travel. It isn't particularly connected to the region, except that I was drinking a very nice Spanish Red and listening to some ambient chill-out music when the thought occurred, but reading a novelisation of Rose in 2019 is the equivalent of reading a novelisation of The Web of Fear in 1982, when Peter Davison was the Doctor and I became a regular viewer for the first time: it has been an astonishing 14 years since the series returned. It's massively impressive that the post-2005 run has endured long enough to have distinct eras of its own: the Christopher Eccleston series seems a world away from the Jodie Whittaker run last year. With all those years of success banked, no wonder they get to gallivant around the globe these days, though I'm not holding my breath for a story set in Majorca or Ibiza, with zombie podium-dancing ravers or something, any time soon.

My chilled out holiday couldn't last forever, and having avoided much in the way of news while we were away, being back in the UK and catching up was a hell of a bump. I realised very quickly that I was going to have to learn how to pronounce the word 'prorogue'. (I'll always be more anti-rogue when it comes to the UK's current prime minister - do you get it? Oh, you've heard it... oh well!) The more horrible the world seems to get, the more I am thankful for a little escapism, so my advice is: carry your fandom with you, wherever you go.

In Summary:

One of the most successful stories, and certainly the most value - as it's four stories in one, really - of 2018.