The Bells of Saint John

Chapter The 137th, which features the world wide web of fear.

Plot:

Eyes down for Steven Moffat bingo: the Doctor is hiding out away from society (playing at being a monk in 1207), but gets brought back from his self-imposed exile to solve something timey-wimey (someone's able to call the TARDIS phone, even though she's in a different era); he joins up with a new female companion who has some cosmic significance of which she is unaware (he's met versions of her twice previously, but both of them died); the bad guys utilise an everyday object / concept (wi-fi) for their own ends, and victims of their evil trot out a catchphrase ("I don't know where I am") when they die; a childhood image is twisted into an object of fear (an illustration from the dust cover of an old book comes alive and stalks Clara), but it's really misunderstood technology (a walking wi-fi base station); Doctor and companion get involved in the adventure with lashings of quippy dialogue and innuendo; the Doctor and villain (Miss Kizlet) have a confrontation where the Doctor grandstands about how he's going to stop their plan; he then resolves everything with a solution that's clever but a bit pat (using the disguised base-station against Kizlet). The Doctor asks the companion to travel with him, but he's not letting on about the ulterior motive of wanting to uncover the mystery of them. Plus, if you include the online prequel for the story, there's even a bit where the Doctor meets the companion as a child before embroiling himself in their life later on as an adult. House!

Context:

I didn't find an opportunity to watch this with the family over the recent half term, so watched it on my own one evening the week after, from the appropriate disc of the series 7 Blu-ray box set.

First time round:

Easter weekend 2013; if I remember rightly, we had our friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned many times previously on this blog) staying; there were a few glasses of wine drunk, and the story was watched (likely a few hours after broadcast to allow time to put our youngsters to bed first). I watched the episode again the following day, as I couldn't really recall much. This was not down to the wine this time, but instead is an apt summary of The Bells of Saint John - it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression.

Reaction:

As you can tell from the plot synopsis above, I feel this story is very much a Steven Moffat script by numbers; that doesn't however mean it isn't good or worthwhile necessarily. After a couple of years running the show, he and the production team around him have got efficient at delivering this kind of action-packed series curtain-raiser. It has some nice moments. In fact, it's pretty much all nice moments. There's the bravura sequence early on where the Doctor and Clara - helped by some subtly disguised edit points - step from an exterior scene into the TARDIS control room, then double back out through its doors again, finding themselves on board a rapidly descending aeroplane  - all in what looks at first glance to be one continuous shot. This is then topped off with a rather lovely rapid-fire introduction of the character to Clara - and to some new audience members at home no doubt - as he says "I'm the Doctor. I'm an alien from outer space. I'm a thousand years old, I've got two hearts and I can't fly a plane!"

Then there's the beginning sequence, where a lone vlogger's 'youtube video' explains the chilling concept - if you are tempted to use a free Wi-fi connection labelled with some odd symbols, it will steal your soul - interspersed with lots of users worldwide dropping like flies as they succumb. The episode was, according to interviews at the time, an attempt to do an urban thriller in the Doctor Who format, but the set up is instead pure urban horror. This is typified by the sequence where Clara's mouse pointer hovers over the strange symbols long enough for the audience to chant inwardly "Don't click it, don't click it", but of course she does. Not far in, through, the episode loses all pretence that the bad guys need someone to have used their cursed Wi-fi connection, or that the victim is being excessively punished for their transgression. Suddenly, they can control anyone who's even walked past a piece of technology. This is much more like an urban thriller with a seemingly all powerful unseen conspiracy to be defeated, but it doesn't fit very well with the opening section at all. Both succeed in their own way, though, and first time of watching, you glide right past any anomalies.

Celia Imrie is excellent as Miss Kizlet, giving a veritable masterclass in how to pitch a Who villain perfectly; the sequence where the morally outraged Doctor has a conversation with her through the medium of random bystanders, taken over to become mouthpieces for her words, is another stand-out moment. The surprise ending, which leaves all the baddies returned to their mental state when they first were ensnared gives Imrie the chance to do a different bit of acting, which is hauntingly shocking. One also has to acknowledge the chutzpah of the bit with the Doctor riding his motorbike up the side of The Shard ("Did you even hear the word 'anti-grav'?") to confront Kizlet towards the end, which is made all the sweeter by being accompanied by one of the best of Murray Gold's cues from this era (called, prosaically, 'Up the Shard'). Another suitably scary moment - apt for urban thriller or horror alike - is the 'Spoonhead' reveal, where a character's head rotates 180 degrees to reveal a shiny concave surface which then starts sucking the life out of people - it's a triumph of effects work, as well as being an interesting idea and visual.

There's lots of nice dialogue and gags: "Did you just hack me?" "Because you changed your mind?" "I hope I did"; "When you say mobile phone, why do you point at that blue box?" "Because it's a surprisingly accurate description"; "I invented the quadricycle!"; plus, the Doctor's mission statement: "I can't tell the future, I just work there" and Clara's suspicion that the TARDIS is a "snogging booth". Then there's the episode's title, where the whole monk sequence appears to been inserted just so that Moffat can pull the wool over our eyes about what the title of the story might mean (spoiler - it doesn't really mean anything!). As well as that, there is a sprinkling of enjoyable continuity kisses - a book written by Amelia Williams (née Pond), Jammie Dodgers, the Big Bad revealed at the end to be an old friend (well, enemy), doubly underlined when UNIT make an appearance to mop up at the end. These are pointless, probably, but not dwelt on long enough to be alienating for the unaware.

So, with all of that going for it, why is the sum not as much as the component parts, and why does it all seem so thin and ephemeral? It might be because it is so the beginning of a new run of stories: it's precision-tooled to tease the audience, but not to provide any closure. Maybe Moffat had pulled the same trick too many times before to diminishing returns. Was I curious about who Clara really was, and how she can have lived and died as separate entities in other times? No. I'd been through similar wondering recently about Amy, and it turned out the answers weren't as interesting as the questions. The same is also true of what the Great Intelligence is up to. I can't really care when watching The Bells of Saint John, as I know I'm not seeing the whole picture yet. The story is simply not self-contained enough.

Connectivity: 

The Bells of Saint John, like The Face of Evil, was shown as a launch story after a mid-season break. It is also the third story in a row covered for the blog that features the introduction of a new female companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Mid-life crisis. When Doctor Who reached the age of twenty in 1983, there was a standard yearly run of episodes, each of which to a lesser or greater extent looked back, taking something from Doctor Who's past; this was then followed after a bit of a break by a one-off feature length special (The Five Doctors) reuniting some of the actors who'd previously starred as the Doctor with the current version, in a celebratory story. For the 30th and 40th anniversaries, the show was off the air. The next big birthday bash was when Doctor who became officially middle-aged, turning 50 in 2013. Curiously, the pattern was much the same: a run of stories starting with The Bells of Saint John which individually, and taken together as an arc, were mostly fixated on the history of the show. In both instances, there was a one-off feature length special with the return of old Doctors following a little time after; in 2013, it was The Day of the Doctor. Curiously, in both 1983 and 2013 the special proved massively popular, but the run of stories preceding it... not so much.

As someone who is fast approaching his own 50th anniversary (still a few more years off, yes, but too few) I can understand why. You're allowed to dwell on the past as a one-off on the actual day; stringing out the nostalgia for the whole year, however, is rarely entertaining for anyone else. The 2013 launch story is already part 3 of a lengthy set-up of the mystery of Clara (with previous appearances by Jenna Coleman in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen the previous year), so even the new companion doesn't feel that new. The episode also includes an old enemy from the 1960s, The Great Intelligence, who'd also been featured in The Snowmen. The Ice Warriors return in a later story, which nobody had really been crying out for, Moffat going on record as saying he wasn't keen, but had his arm twisted by the writer of that story Mark Gatiss. The Cybermen come back later on too, and then The Great Intelligence features again. There's an episode delving deep into the mysteries of the one constant in the history of the show, the TARDIS (but why?), plus the return of old friends Vastra, Jenny and Strax.

Only Neil Cross's two scripts for the 2013 run are nostalgia free, mostly - Hide does keep name-checking the planet Metebelis 3 which featured regularly in the later Jon Pertwee stories (though they end up pronouncing it wrong, undermining the callback somewhat). So, the only wholly original story in the series is The Rings of bloody Akhatan, and the less said about that better. The series ends with an orgy of continuity with Clara breezing through the back catalogue, visiting every Doctor and era, with loads of clips and cameos. It is the equivalent of a maudlin drunk in the early hours after their birthday party droning on about all the great times they had when they were young. God knows, I've been there, so I know: it doesn't last forever, and you can move on from it. This happens with Doctor Who - periodically it binges on the good 'ol days, but then periodically it cleanses itself of the excess nostalgia. The most recent series shown last year was an extreme detox, containing no elements at all from the previous 50+ years of Who; but this itself seemed artificial, like a middle-aged man donning Lycra and doing triathlons every weekend, pretending to be young again with no baggage. It will be interesting to see the reaction against that in the next batch of episodes, and see how much of the old stuff is featured when the (soon come?) new series begins.

In Summary:

Not uninspired, but somewhat uninspiring.