Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

    

Chapter The 173rd, which assumes the kids want less of Narnia and more of the wardrobe.

Plot:

The Van Baalen Bros, a three-man team of unscrupulous galactic salvage dealers, try to use illegal scoop tech to grab up the TARDIS floating in space. The Doctor happens to be giving Clara a lesson in the console controls, and has lowered the shields. The resultant damage causes lots of temporal instabilities, with past and future leaking into the present. The Doctor is thrown out of the ship, but Clara remains trapped inside. Her hand has been burned by a grenade-like device that flew into the console room at the moment of impact. Outside, the Doctor hoodwinks the salvage dealers into helping him find her, with the promise of the best haul of their lives. They and Clara wander round the maze-like TARDIS interior, pursued by burnt-flesh zombie creatures that have appeared out of nowhere. Gregor, the de facto leader of the Bros, steals part of the TARDIS architectural configuration system, and the TARDIS defense mechanisms kick in, causing doors to disappear behind them, replaced with impenetrable walls, or corridors that go round in Escher-like never ending circles.

Eventually, they find themselves all together trapped in the Eye of Harmony, power source of the TARDIS, with zombies blocking every way out and the Eye about to blow. The Doctor realises that the zombie creatures are future versions of themselves who got caught in the yet to happen explosion, and their fate is not yet fixed. They escape, and the Doctor and Clara work out that they have a literal reset button - a remote control for the scoop technology which the Doctor took from Gregor early on. This was the grenade-like device that flew into the console room at the beginning - it was a plot device all along. A message carved into it has been marked on Clara's hand reading "TURN STORY OFF NOW" or something like that. To do this, with sense-defying gusto, the Doctor throws the remote control into one of the gaps in the space-time continuum, and it lands at Clara's feet a few hours back. He shouts in to his early self to reset time, and the earlier Doctor hits the button. That timeline is then aborted, but still somehow has some impact on the prime timeline as Gregor decides to be a bit nicer to his two brothers.

Context:

The family are continuing our newly adopted tradition of watching a Doctor Who story every Sunday afternoon through November. Again, it was just me and the kids (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) watching from the series 7 boxset blu-ray. This time - unlike last week's viewing of A Town Called Mercy - all three made it to the end of the episode without getting bored and wandering off. The youngest is now consistently - and mostly correctly - saying "He's definitely going to die" about a particular character, this time it was dopey elder brother Bram, and then saying "I told you he was going to die" if proved right. She was also intrigued by the developing messaging burnt into Clara's hand: "Her hand is trying to tell her something". The eldest opined that there would be mileage in a first-person console game where one played a character trapped inside the TARDIS walking the corridors. I didn't mention to him the 1997 CD-Rom spectacular Destiny of the Doctors, in which you could indeed do such a thing and yet it proved exquisitely dull. The effects work in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is a lot better, of course, and I'd hazard a guess that the videogame aesthetic was one reason why it held attention more than the wild west hokum had the previous week.

First time round:

Watched on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast in April 2013, just the Better Half accompanying me. The kids would all have been put to bed a few hours earlier. Can't remember anything about that first watch, so as I've started to do when I come up empty of memories (which tends to happen with Matt Smith stories more than others for some reason), I offer a small, random and unconnected memory instead. This one is from the 1990s, the so-called 'wilderness' years when no regular Doctor Who series was being made, but it still seemed to me like an exciting time to be a Doctor Who fan. The videos and DVDs made old material more available, and books, comic strips and audios were creating new stories regularly. Even beyond that, though, there were tangentially connected cultural events of interest in that time. One such was the release of Tom Baker's autobiography Who on Earth is Tom Baker? in 1997, and his book tour to promote the same.

I attended one night of that tour, at Methven's Bookshop in Worthing's South Street, one evening in 1997. This was another regular haunt in those days, and was the place I would go to buy actual books or have a coffee and a read (Volume One up the road was better for videos and certain genre titles). I met the Better Half, and the two of us watched the one-and-only Tom tell some funny anecdotes, then use the Q&A section to tell some more funny anecdotes that were nothing really to do with the question asked (Tom Baker has a politician's gift for spinning a question into whatever he wants to talk about). I marvelled at getting an evening of superlative entertainment for free (I would have bought the book anyway), and an autograph thrown in to the bargain. The BH and I queued for that, and after exchanging pleasantries with the great man, he signed the book to the two of us together. This created a bit of an issue when we decided to 'go on a break' a couple of years later, but as long as the book was in existence, it was destined that we'd get back together. We did, after a couple more years as just friends, and have stayed together ever since. Tom Baker linking us as a couple in writing was just as solemn and binding as any wedding vows: what Tom has put together, let no man put asunder! 

 

Reaction:

Part of Steven Moffat's showrunner job was to keep finding new and interestingly different takes on Doctor Who, week after week. He did keep coming up with the goods, and he had to do it for the longest time. Even if one didn't like the stories as they turned out, it couldn't be argued that they weren't distinct on paper. Perhaps by this, his third series in charge, it was getting a bit more difficult, though. He'd done a western in the same run, something that, as pointed out in the blog post for A Town Called Mercy, didn't turn out well the last time it was tried in Doctor Who; he'd brought back the Ice Warriors, reportedly against his better judgement because Mark Gatiss had twisted his arm, and with this story he commissioned a script set almost wholly within the TARDIS. Years before, in a 1999 interview about the possibility of Doctor Who coming back as a going concern, he'd said that such a story would be a terrible idea, with a quote along the lines - I can't find the exact quote online annoyingly - that kids want more of Narnia and less of the wardrobe. That was many years before, and he's free to change his mind, of course, but I think he got it right the first time. The TARDIS is balanced on a fine line between science and magic. When kept vague and secret, its workings do seem tantalisingly intriguing. Expose them, though, and you risk making them prosaic and boring, or - if you try to go the other way - esoteric and silly. Perhaps it's better not to risk opening up this box at all?

In Journey, writer Stephen Thompson leans heavily in the more magic direction: the scene with liquid encyclopedias in the TARDIS library is pure Harry Potter. The effort is put in with the aim to leave the TARDIS mysterious and unknowable even after this adventure, but that means nothing really has any consequences. The entire story takes place in an aborted timeline that gets reset, people die and come back to life. I don't think it's a cheat or cop-out, as reset buttons can be, as it's already been established that the initial accident has put time out of whack - how could it be otherwise if the monsters are forms of the regular and guest characters from the future - but it is frustratingly woolly. What are the rules of how past and future can interact? It seems that it's only possible future timelines that are bleeding through, and that the Clara and the Van Baalens we see searching within the TARDIS are just one of any number of alternate timeline versions. But somehow, because of Time Lord superpowers let's say, the Doctor is a constant throughout, and is able to reimpose a prime timeline at the end by talking to his previous self. But who threw in the remote control first time round, if not the Doctor? My brain hurts thinking about this, which is not a problem in itself as all time travel narratives can be like that. What's disappointing is that there's no satisfying moment where it all clicks together, as you get in the best of time travel narratives. It's just messy. The speed everything moves at stops one from dwelling too much, but it adds up to a generally confusing experience.

When time can be rewritten at the press of a button, it's hard to care very much about the impact to the characters. This doesn't harm this particular story, though, as the characters are difficult to empathise with anyway. We only have the three Van Baalen boys aside from the regulars to feel for, and they are a pretty unsympathetic bunch. This isn't the fault of the actors who all do well. It's wrong on the page, and the director's chosen to embrace what's on the page rather than softening it. Gregor is shown to be aggressive and profit-obsessed, when it would probably be better if he were a more lovable rogue, who can't help but be greedy and take the vital TARDIS component that causes the trouble. Tricky is supposed to be the character we invest in emotionally, I think, but he's not exactly a universal everyman. He's instead a person who's been brainwashed into thinking he's a robot by his brother, having become part-bionic following an industrial accident. What was the point of creating such an odd character set-up anyway? It doesn't integrate well with the story and damages Gregor's character further that he would do such an extreme thing to his brother just for a laugh. If he's cruel as well as avaricious, why would an audience sign up to spend time with him?

 

Maybe the whole Tricky as a robot subplot was introduced to allow a visual representation of the tiny improvement to the timeline at the end, shown in the photo of the three boys together with their Dad. The problem for me was that I missed this completely. If one is not paying attention - and it is a blink and you'll miss it moment right at the start of the episode - you won't see that the photo pinned up in the Van Baalen spaceship has been ripped along one edge and is only showing two of the brothers and Dad. At the point you see it, you haven't met any of the characters yet, and it doesn't easily register that one of the figures in the photograph is older than the others. I've watched this a few times and missed it every time until this most recent watch. As such, I've always previously been surprised that Tricky doesn't know he's related to the other two when it is revealed. The outfit is called the Van Baalen brothers, and Tricky looks and acts like a brother to the other two. He's obvious partly or wholly robotised, but that doesn't mean he isn't their brother. As such, the final slight redemption of Gregor, and the photograph being intact, didn't land for me, as I'd missed the set up. If you did notice and take in the detail of the photograph, though, you'd know something was amiss anyway and work it out long before the reveal. As such, maybe they should have dispensed with that subplot, and built a less difficult relationship between the brothers, which still can be improved by the end. I like to think they could be pitched at the level of the Trotters in Only Fools and Horses, dodgy dealers always having a go at one another, but with affection underneath.

Other points of note: it's visually very interesting; there's some good effects work and production design on display in the action within the TARDIS, with good use of sets and locations. Some of the CGI of the salvage spacecraft looks lower than the usual standard, though. The music is excellent throughout, with composer Murray Gold producing cues that are his most electronic yet (not a bad thing to my mind). Matt Smith gets a few good moments to act, particularly with him being a bit wild setting the TARDIS self-destruct to fire the brothers into action. And the whole things moves fast, probably because it has to; it has lots of kinetic energy at the very least.

 

Connectivity: 

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is another Matt Smith story from the same season as A Town Called Mercy. It doesn't feel like it, though, as the season in question was split into two sub-sections each broadcast in a different year with a substantial gap between them. A Town Called Mercy was in the first sub-section and this story in the second. The TARDIS team has also changed with Clara replacing Amy and Rory. Journey is now the fourth 21st century one part story on the trot for the blog, all of them mid-season makeweight stories - I yearn for something different, if I'm honest. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Doctor Who Marie Kondo. The Van Baalen Bros are not the only people in the universe who are keen to acquire anything that crosses their path; Doctor Who fans can give them a run for their money. The latest Doctor Who Magazine, issue 558, is themed around merchandise, collectibles and memorabilia. Maybe these three words appear to be synonymous, but I think there are shades of meaning within them, and perhaps shades of snobbery too. I've probably been guilty of such snobbery on many occasions over the years. If it is of nothing but ornamental use - unlike, say a book or a video, or even a T-Shirt at a push - I couldn't see why anyone would bother cluttering up their life with it. So, my collecting has been specifically within the merchandise area, and has been selective even there. I collect Doctor Who on home video formats, as I am keen to keep and rewatch the stories, plus documentaries about the stories and other value added material, in the highest possible quality format. I collect books about Doctor Who because I'm interested in it; these are mainly non-fiction now, as I don't have time to read Doctor Who fiction. I'm not exhaustive, though, as even just the non-fiction Doctor Who books that have been published over the years would fill up any remaining storage space in my house and leave no room to breathe. The other thing I collect is Doctor Who Magazine itself. Ironically, subscription copies of issue 558 were significantly delayed by a postal issue. When it hadn't arrived for a couple of weeks, I was becoming worried that the issue about collections might end up becoming a collector's item itself, and might end up one of the very few issues I didn't have in my own collection.

If you couldn't read it or watch it, though, I didn't see the point. I'd possibly buy a Doctor Who Easter Egg, but I would not hesitate to eat it, and I wouldn't keep the box. My interpretation of collectibles is anything like that egg with a Doctor Who connection, but that's not necessarily official merchandise of the show. So, tie-in chocolate and sweet wrappers, cards given away in cereal packets, that sort of thing. The connection could be tenuous too. Someone who accumulated anything to do with police boxes could have a lot of collectibles, but they might not all be Doctor Who merchandise. It can be where the smart money is. A lot of merch is mass produced, and so isn't that rare on the market; complete collections of things like old sweet cigarette cards, if well looked after, can be rarer and appreciate more in value. I could never understand the marketplace angle though, unlike my sixth-form mate Bill. Bill liked to tell tall stories about himself. Everyone has a friend like this, I'm sure; he made many claims over the years and I'm pretty sure most of them - he almost certainly wasn't SAS-trained at age 17 for example - were false. One time, though, when he'd claimed to have one of the largest collections of Star Wars related items in the UK, it turned out to be 100% true. I remember walking into his spare room and boggling. He had two copies of most action figures, one in the box, one not. He had enough stormtrooper and imperial guards to recreate movie scenes with loads of extras, like they used to in the 1980s adverts. Merchandise or collectibles, he had the lot. He managed to make a lot of money out of the collection in the end, but only by flogging it off to other people who wanted to build up collections of their own. Collecting begat collecting, sustaining itself; the money seemed to me just to be a measure of this collective insanity.

Memorabilia has an even wider scope, it probably includes both collectibles and merchandise, but more besides, as it is anything that one collects that is connected to the memory of something else. The bus ticket I purchased to take me to Worthing town centre on the evening I met Tom Baker and he signed my copy of his autobiography (see First Time Round section above for more details), had I kept it, would obviously not have been merchandise, and wouldn't have been a collectible to anyone but me, but it would have been memorabilia. This is where I realise my absolute outlook has been flawed all these years. Something can be useful even if its use is only to bring back to mind a happy memory, like my reminiscence of an audience with Tom Baker. or just the more general happy memory of the favourite thing in general. It also now comes to mind that this is not an original idea, it's the basis of a very memorable scene in Throw Momma From The Train, a 1987 comedy film, where Danny Devito and Billy Crystal disagree as to what constitutes a coin collection. I also realise I am becoming the Doctor Who equivalent of Marie Kondo here - if it sparks joy, keep it, otherwise make some space.

Stop press: talking of things that spark joy, I just saw the new trailer for Revolution of the Daleks, this year's festive special. It's looking very good, and I greatly anticipate seeing some old friends and old enemies appear in the story. The only problem is that it's on New Year's Day again. I'd hoped the impact of Covid, and the possible dearth of big tentpole material suitable for December 25th telly, might have meant that Who was promoted back into the big day's line-up again. No such luck. I'll just have to wait until next year as patiently as I can.  

In Summary:

Superficially exciting and fun enough as a first-person video game come to life, but too flawed to remain the centre of attention for long.

A Town Called Mercy

  

Chapter The 172nd, when the Doctor brings a sonic to a gunfight.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in the old west c. 1870 and visit, well, a town called Mercy. The town has anachronistic electric lighting, 10 years ahead of its time. The townsfolk are under siege by a cyborg cowboy terminator, the Gunslinger, until they give up to him the "alien Doctor". This leads to brief confusion where the Doctor is nearly thrown to his doom, but the townsfolk know deep down to whom the Gunslinger is referring. In recent years, a member of the Kahler race, Jex, arrived in their town. They sheltered him, and he provided the electricity supply, using his spacecraft - hidden in the surrounding desert - as a generator. He also brought advanced medicine, saving many lives as Mercy's doctor. Unfortunately he's Space Mengele, his altruism a self-imposed penance for the genetic experimentation he did on his home planet. The Gunslinger is one of the enhanced super soldiers Jex created to end a war. There follows lots of arguing about what to do, during which Mercy's marshal gets accidentally shot and killed. The Doctor takes up the badge, and arranges a deception to allow Jex to escape in his spacecraft and take the battle to another world. Jex has a sudden change of heart and kills himself, which he could have done at the start and saved everyone 45 minutes. The Gunslinger remains out in the desert for generations afterwards serving as the town's protector.

Context:

We're falling into a pattern of watching a Doctor Who story every Sunday in November. As on the last few weekends, last Sunday saw myself and the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) collected together to watch A Town Called Mercy, from the series 7 boxset blu-ray. The younger two stuck with it to the end, but the eldest got bored at about 20 minutes in and wandered out of the living room never to return. Comments from the children during the course of the action included questions about what happens when you put Dry Clean Only clothes in the washing machine (after the Doctor made an offhand comment early on about ignoring such instructions) and lots of concern during early scenes - even from the eldest - about the welfare of the horse that the Doctor says is named Susan. Later, the youngest mentioned that this story was "The trolley problem again". Once it was finished, I asked the two remaining kids what they thought. The 8-year-old gave A Town Called Mercy a thumbs-up; her brother said it was "Meh". 

First time round:

Watched on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast in September 2012, almost certainly timeshifted to later in the evening as the youngest child was particularly young back then, and we would have been in the process of putting her to bed during Doctor Who's slot. I can't remember anything about that first watch, or my initial impressions of the story beyond thinking it was just okay. Casting my mind back to the time, I believe I would have resumed commuting to my London-based day job in the week leading up to the story's broadcast, after having worked from home for the entire period of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. I don't know how bad travel was when the games were on as I didn't ever chance it, but I remember having to trudge round a snaking queueing system to get out of the station even though the games were all finished. This added a few minutes to my door-to-door journey time, and mildly pissed me off. Eight years on, I can remember that long and winding escape route from London Bridge, but nothing about the Doctor Who story I watched after the working week had ended. I suspect this is because A Town Called Mercy does not provoke any emotional response in me, not even annoyance.

Reaction:

A Town Called Mercy is, so far, only the second Doctor Who story in the show's long history to be set in the old west. It's a UK show, so the genre wasn't as culturally important as it might have been if it had originated in the US; but, the series has been going so long and has sampled every other genre multiple times. Why is it so rare for it to do a western? It may have something to do with the first attempt. This was The Gunfighters in 1966, which wasn't very well received on original broadcast based on the audience appreciation surveys commissioned by the Beeb at the time. Probably because of the lingering memories of a handful of the taste makers of early organised fandom, who were mere boys when it went out, the story got an increasingly bad reputation in the 1970s and 80s. It was often stated as fact that it was one of the worst - if not the worst - stories in Who's history. The two showrunners of modern Who up to 2012, Russell T Davies and then Steven Moffat, were both fan enough to know of The Gunfighters' bad rep, but they were and are also TV professionals. I doubt they'd have let that put them off. It's more likely that it was the root cause of negative reaction to The Gunfighters that made a similar story something to shy away from from 2005 to 2012, just as it did to the successive producers making the show from 1966 to 1989, i.e. that it's all but impossible for a UK production to do a western well.

 

This is why I suspect that Steven Moffat commissioned this story from writer Toby Whithouse only after the location was found. This was Fort Bravo, an area in the desert near Almeria in Spain. It's a permanent film set and theme park, and has been used for many western-themed shoots over the years. This allows some wonderful sweeping vistas of which the cramped, studio-bound 1966 story could only dream. Or maybe the genre came first - this was the "movie marquee" period, after all - and Moffat trusted that it could be done. Either way, what's delivered by the writer, cast and crew definitely delivers on a brief to showcase the location, or to pastiche the genre. Whithouse includes as many tropes as he can including a scene of townsfolk staring from doorways with suspicion at newcomers walking down main street, a saloon going quiet when someone walks in, the Doctor riding a horse in the desert and donning a sheriff's badge. There's also a showdown at high noon, and lots of people staring at each other, hand poised over holster, waiting to draw. All that is fun enough, and there's some not bad jokes: "Tea. But the strong stuff. Leave the bag in." The plot too is a neat sci-fi twist on a western staple, the rogue hiding out in a small town looking for redemption whose old life comes a-callin'.

Unlike The Gunfighters, this story manages to get at least one American actor, and the accents throughout are okay (at least to my ear). The ensemble, regulars and guest performers alike, give solid but unsensational performances. This is clearly at least partially intended - for all the pastiche elements and the running around, the story is not pitched at the level of shoot outs and adventure. Instead, it is a more meditative piece on the morality of war. The trouble is, that's a bit boring. Ben Browder as the town's marshal Isaac is a TV SF casting coup, having starred in both Stargate and Farscape. He gives a solid performance of a solid character, but that character does not have anything significant to do. He is just a spout for exposition. The top billing of the guest cast is Adrian Scarborough as Kahler-Jex, who is one of those actors one sees in everything and they rarely disappoint, always delivering the goods no matter how big or small the role (I just watched 1917 where he shines in the tiniest of roles, about three lines tops, as an army sergeant). He gives his Doctor Who performance everything he's got, but it doesn't work because he's miscast. He's just too cuddly to be a Doctor Frankenstein war criminal, even a reformed one. He also has some unactable stuff to handle in the script like "It would be so much simpler if I was just one thing, wouldn't it?" hammering home the theme in case someone missed it. The character says a lot, but does very little, and that's true of everyone in the story.

It's such a well made piece - good location, good production design, decent acting - so why is it leaving me cold. Why are good actors giving decent performances not involving or moving me? There's a movie rule that says that while a good script can lead to a bad production, a bad script can never succeed, no matter how good the production is. I think this is very apt when considering A Town Called Mercy. It's not that the script is bad per se, it's just clumsily constructed. This is probably because the central moral dilemma of the story, should Jex be given to the Gunslinger or be left alone, doesn't provide an engine with enough horse power (pun intended) to get through 45 minutes. It's going to end with one way or the other, all that's left is a decision. The narrative has to put that point that off with lots of earnest discussions, and lots of action that doesn't change anything related to the plot or characters. The ending is inevitable, so inevitable as to be telegraphed. Unfortunately, the TV comedy The Good Place (see last time's blog on Kill The Moon for more details) has blown the secret of how to resolve the Trolley problem - with a self sacrifice. Even if you haven't seen it, or anything covering similar ground to A Town Called Mercy, it's still obvious Jex will have to die at his own hand. Doctor Who is not a show that will leave a war criminal unpunished, or allow vigilante justice, so what else is left? Despite being inevitable, though, it still feels wrong, as Jex has up to that moment wanted to survive, and he doesn't go through any Damascene moment to explain why he's decided to do the 'honourable' thing at the end.

There are other issues with the script; one in particular is so big that I'll need to cover it in more detail in the Deeper Thoughts section below, but there's a few others. I don't buy The Gunslinger using a siege strategy when he can just walk into the town and get Jex, and nobody can harm him. There's a line that states that it's perhaps because he's following his programming, but he later does indeed walk into the town, so it can't be that. There's another line about him not wanting to risk innocent people getting hurt, but the script also points out that he's a very accurate shot, so he's not going to endanger them with stray bullets. At least, he won't more than he's endangering them anyway: why is it okay for them to starve to death because of his actions, but not get shot? He ends up shooting Isaac anyway, and it doesn't cause him to malfunction. It's another in a set of slightly illogical methods of spinning out what should be a five minute discussion into a long debated moral quandary, just like all the confusion about two different Doctors, which doesn't move anything on. The story is mostly just marking time. It's a very good-looking and well made marking of time, but perversely this counts against it, I think. Unlike Kill The Moon, it doesn't ever end up laughably bad, but that makes Kill The Moon more memorable. The Gunfighters too, though flawed, is more interesting than its slicker genre-mate.

Connectivity: 

A Town Called Mercy is the third 21st century one part story in a row; also, like Kill The Moon it has at its heart a Trolley problem style moral quandary about whether taking a deliberate action to sacrifice one life is worth it to save multiple other lives. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Goldman, Ryan and Mercy. To quote a wise man of a few moments ago: Doctor Who is not a show that will leave a war criminal unpunished, or allow vigilante justice, so what else is left? This turns out to be a very good question indeed, because the obvious answer is - Jex should stand trial. There's a line where the Doctor suggests this early on, and the gun-crazy vigilante robot says no dice, and that's the last time it's mentioned. Well, that's alright then, he said sarcastically - the vigilante wants to kill Jex personally, why not let him?! No. Wrong. This is not how the Doctor should behave, which Amy even points out, but it doesn't change his actions: he still believes - and the story behaves - as if the only options are to hand Jex over to his death, or let him escape. It's reminiscent of a blisteringly negative review of Saving Private Ryan by the late great William Goldman. You can find it online with a simple search, and it is well worth a read. I came out of seeing Ryan at the cinema back in the day feeling uneasy about what I'd just watched; there was something wrong with the film but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what. Turns out there were about 10 things wrong with the film, and Goldman puts his finger on every one of them.

One such flaw is the construction of a phoney dilemma, ignoring an obvious third option. Private Ryan, if you remember, doesn't want to be saved, and wants to stay on to fight with his unit. There is then a discussion about whether the squad under orders to bring him home should leave without him or stay and fight with him. The option of obeying their own orders and bringing Ryan home, which one would think would be their preference being soldiers and all, is forgotten about. Goldman suggests a fix for this that would also work for the Doctor Who story: create urgency by having the third option removed by events. It's easier to do in Saving Private Ryan (the Germans would arrive before they can get the private out, forcing their hand) than it would be in A Town Called Mercy. The Gunslinger would have to block the way to the TARDIS somehow, but that still leaves Jex's spaceship that could be used to take him back to face true justice on Kahler. Other options are difficult too: you can't make the Gunslinger an official agent of Kahler justice, as there's then no reason not to hand him over, and no story; you could say that Kahler's destroyed and the Gunslinger and Jex are the last Kahler people alive, but that makes a mockery of Jex's saving his planet by ending its war; it also muddies motivations further. There'd have always been the Shadow Proclamation anyway, or some other neutral arbiter.

Essentially what's missing is the Doctor at least trying to bring Jex to proper justice, a scene perhaps with him escaping the town using a distraction elsewhere and trying to get to the TARDIS, but finding his way blocked. This would be very similar to the scene that exists already where he goes to Jex's ship to retrieve exposition, but you could move that to the TARDIS perhaps, and the Doctor get the historical information about Kahler's war from its data banks. He steps out and the Gunslinger does something weapon-y and clever using his Kahler tech which blocks the doors of the Doctor's ship thereafter. That way you could make the Kahler ship more damaged, so there's no option to use that either. But then the ending would need to change, as there would be no escape - and perhaps no final self-destruct - available. Any option necessitates a big rewrite, and maybe that was the problem. Perhaps there just wasn't time, and those other lines were added to cover - they do give the impression of an attempt at papering over the cracks. Still, even though I seem to have talked myself into accepting that A Town Called Mercy isn't as good as The Gunfighters or Kill the Moon, I'd still rather watch it a hundred times over than see Saving Private Ryan again. Awful, awful film.

In Summary:

For all this story's good qualities, I would rather watch The Gunfighters.

Kill the Moon

  

Chapter The 171st, in which the Moon turns out to be a dragon egg. That's not a joke, by the way, that's really the plot. The Moon. Turns. Out. To. Be. A. Dragon. Egg.

Plot:

The Doctor for some unfathomable reason decides to take Clara and Courtney, one of Clara's Coal Hill School pupils, on a trip in the TARDIS to make up for something he'd said previously that hurt Courtney's feelings. Their dangerous destination is the moon in the year 2049. They immediately come across three ageing astronauts, who've come to the moon with lots of nuclear bombs to investigate the reason why gravity and tides are going berserk and causing death and devastation on the Earth, then use the bombs to blow up that reason, whatever it is. Giant spider-like creatures attack, and two of the three astronauts are killed. The Doctor jumps into a huge crack in the moon's surface, and discovers that a creature is incubating in the centre; the moon turns out to be a space dragon's egg, and the spider-like creatures are space germs that live on the space dragon. Yes, really.

If the creature hatches, the pieces of shell flying out and / or the sudden absence of moon could cause an extinction event on Earth (unless by a lucky coincidence neither of them do, but that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?!). So, a choice must be made: one innocent creature's life versus all the people of Earth. The Doctor insists that the humans make this choice themselves, and goes off in the TARDIS leaving them, which makes Clara very unhappy. She broadcasts to the Earth to get them to signal their choice, and they choose to blow up the creature. Clara disregards this, though, and aborts the imminent explosion. The Doctor turns up in the TARDIS, somewhat like a god in a machine, funny that, and whisks them off to the Earth to watch as the moon egg hatches. By a lucky coincidence, neither the pieces of shell flying out, nor the sudden absence of moon, causes any extinction event on Earth. The newly hatched creature lays another egg in exactly the same place as the old one, so Earth still has a moon. Yes, really.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon  from the series 8 boxset blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8); I still can't tempt the Better Half to join us. Based just on the cold open flash-forward of Clara explaining the central dilemma, all the children said almost as a chorus: "It's the trolley problem". This is because in the last year they have all watched and enjoyed (and for some of them re-watched over and over) all four series of The Good Place, which has given them a decent basic knowledge of moral philosophy. Thank you Michael Schur. As the story played out, they were all quite vocal; make of that what you will. During the early sequences, they had fun second-guessing the plot with comments such as "He's going die any second" and "Those pictures will be part of the plot"; that latter comment was from the 8-year old who was pleased with herself when said pictures (the photos on the desk in the abandoned Mexican mine area) were picked up by the Doctor a few minutes after she said it. There was a long discussion from the middle child about whether Courtney had the same phone as his elder brother, or just the same case. The eldest stayed the course, but in the second half was becoming increasingly agitated with the plot, and making comments starting "But...?" and "How...?" and "That doesn't make any sense" like every other viewer of Kill the Moon over the years.

First time round:

Watched after its BBC1 debut broadcast in October 2014, timeshifted to later but still on the same evening. This was the seventh episode of Peter Capaldi's first season as the Doctor. It's unusual, given the varied nature of the series, to enjoy six episodes on the trot with no reservations, but that was my feeling at the time. I've since reviewed quite a few of those six for the blog, and nit-picked a bit, but at the time I thought the series was in rude health, and that's not too far from the truth. Then there came Kill the Moon, though. Oh dear.

Reaction:

So, I mentioned immediately above that Doctor Who is a series that relies on variety of subject matter, tone and genre. It doesn't even limit itself always to sticking to one theme or approach in a single story either. Maybe it should, but it's just not made that way. Stories can start off comedic and take a turn to tragedy, or stories can comprise any number of sub-stories leapfrogging around genres and locales within one overall title. How well this works depends on many factors, and it is not without some risk. A story that doesn't blend all its different parts together well enough will look less like a single seamless whole and more like the story equivalent of a cut and shut motor - two (or more) sections artlessly welded together. This is a big part of the problem will Kill The Moon. The first section is fairly hard sci-fi, at least as close as Doctor Who gets (see Deeper Thoughts section below). We have a realistic depiction of organised space travel, with a team brought out of retirement to do an exploratory mission to the moon to solve a crisis. The fluctuations in gravity seem plausible. The sets for the spacecraft and base on the moon are good, and the filming and treatment of the footage in Lanzarote captures the moon's surface in the most realistic fashion imaginable. We move into creature feature horror territory very quickly, but this is the slightest of genre bumps, barely perceptible.

 

Why might this be? Well, these two genres have been fused together so often in films and TV that it's a standard. Real-life space exploration involves moving into dangerous unknown environments, so we expect it to look and feel like a horror movie to a certain extent. There are also handy analogues for the monsters, so they do not seem too outre. They are some kind of spider that can exist in a vacuum, but still can spin webs. That's fine, and easily mentally digestible, and the action's moving fast anyway, so as a viewer I'm not dwelling on this. Rapidly, though, the story changes again. They aren't spiders, they're macro germs on, as we later find out, a larger creature. This is more of a jolt to the viewer. If they're germs why make them look and act like spiders in the first place? Do germs spin webs? Courtney sprays one with some household disinfectant she's contrived to carry, and this kills it. After all, as she says, it's marketed to kill "ninety-nine percent of all known germs". But this isn't a known germ, it's a very unknown giant weird spider space germ. The effectiveness of spraying a bit of Flash with Bleach bathroom spray on it is a bit of a stretch. A minute later, sunlight kills the germs too; Clara explains this using the old adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But that's just a phrase, and not about cleaning your kitchen, but instead about openness and transparency. Did the giant weird spider space germs know of the phrase somehow? The protagonists just got lucky twice in a row with actions only tenuously connected to the established facts of the plot so far. This dodgy logic breaks the rules of horror, let alone hard sci-fi. Bad welding.

The plot continues its metamorphosis with another violent lurch. There's a giant creature in the centre of the moon, and it, and the germs living on it, have been growing for centuries, because the moon is an egg. We're now into the territory of fairy tale or fable, and it's horribly incompatible with what has come before. A creature embedded in the centre of the moon might have just about worked, but the whole moon is an egg and always has been?! It's a hard imaginative leap to make. The moon has been surveyed and studied, in both the real world and the ongoing fiction of Doctor Who, and there's never ever been even the slightest iota of evidence that it's been an egg all this time. Maybe if a fairy tale atmosphere had been evoked from the outset, instead of pretty much the exact opposite, it might be easier to accept. Maybe not, though, as it is by any measure a very silly idea. The standard line at this point from a certain mindset would be something like "You can believe an old dude flies around in a box, why can't you believe the moon's an egg?" So, why can't I? The dude, or lady, flying around in the box idea is well bedded in, it's part of the furniture. There's also a very good rule of thumb in fantastical writing that - unless you're going full-on surrealist no-rules, then the fewer mental leaps you make your audience go through, the easier it is to get their buy in. I'm already believing that a man in a box can travel through time, and that giant germs would act like spiders, and that there's a giant creature living inside the moon. Make me believe that the moon is an egg on top of all of that, and my head might explode.

This isn't the final section to be welded on to this jalopy, though. The next part of the narrative involves a moral quandary being played out on a global scale. A minute before, alien lifeforms were fair game to kill if it ensured the characters' survival; now, everything slows down and the characters talk about whether they have the right. They didn't think twice when they were wielding the disinfectant, the hypocrites. The Doctor leaves the rest of the cast alone to make the trolley problem decision. This action has no consequence to the plot, as he quickly comes back, and stops them having to face the immediate impact of their action. There's a brief detour when those on the moon try to hold the biggest ever referendum (this story was shown in 2014, before anyone realised quite what a bad idea referenda are). The people of Earth - well, only the one half of the globe facing the moon at that point, as my eldest child did not hesitate to point out - must turn their lights off if they want the creature to be killed, leave them on if not. Imagine if you needed to get some kip at this point: I was on Team Moon Dragon, honest, I just needed to turn in for an early shift tomorrow. Anyway, this has no consequences either, as Clara disregards the vote and saves the creature. The creature hatches and this has no consequences too (I'm seeing a pattern here). The fragments of shell evaporate seemingly, there's a few seconds without a moon at all which has no impact on Earth somehow, and then the dragon lays a new moon of exactly the same size in exactly the same place, like newborns tend not to do. What was the moral of the fable that Kill the Moon has turned into? Be nice and everything will work out with no cost or pain? Pardon my French, but that's a bit of a shit moral.

There's now a final small section welded on to the end, of inter-personal conflict between the two regular cast members. There is finally a consequence to a character's actions, sort of, when Clara refuses to have anything more to do with the Doctor. She's back with him the following week, though, and then after that they keep travelling together. So, ultimately nothing had any consequence, it was just the story of two people having a row before they later made up. There's a couple of lines thrown in about Courtney becoming a more successful person because of this experience, but it's thrown away as a joke, and the character didn't have much to do with the rest of the story - she's in no way the protagonist. There's also a line in there about this being a significant moment for human space exploration, but it's again easy to miss, and it's hard to believe that the human race - just from having a lucky escape and seeing a dragon in the distance - is going to be in any way transformed. They will venture into the stars still wanting to kill anything different to them, which doesn't seem like something to celebrate. If the script had stuck to the early NASA horror story feel throughout, it would have been achievable but maybe a bit dull; if it had attempted to be a non-realistic fable from the off, it would have been braver but very hard to pull off. Trying to lump both together, and more, produces a script that no amount of efficient production (and a lot of the performances and effects work is of a very good standard) could save.

 

Connectivity: 

Two 21st century one-part stories in a row whose titles begin with the letter 'K'. Both are in the first series of a new Doctor and both are the first produced Doctor Who stories of writers new to the series called Peter. In both Kill the Moon and Kerblam! the TARDIS team investigate a working area of a private company (the Mexican mining outfit's abandoned base in Kill The Moon).

Deeper Thoughts:

Rolling along with the tumbling tumblr feeds. Science fiction isn't a story genre, nor even a single genre at all. Not only is there no set structure or structures for how a story can play out, there isn't any checklist of elements for inclusion that one could reliably apply to existing works either. Back to the Future is very different to Alien or to Blade Runner or to Star Wars or to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There isn't anything but a very high-level description that could unite them all, and the scope for stories as yet unwritten is so vast as to be almost infinite. Doctor Who is a rare instance of an incredibly successful and long-running series that was conceived in a way all the writing textbooks would say is wrong: it wasn't a red hot burst of creativity for a single person or creative team with a vision, it was designed by committee. No artistic genius woke up one day with the idea of an alien travelling around space and time in a phone box; instead, it grew out of a brief from a commissioning executive. It was a fairly loose brief too, essentially science fiction for kids to go on after Grandstand. Because of the flexibility of the supra-genre, there was a lot of scope for what the series could be, and it's stayed that way, more or less, over the years. Doctor Who can be any type of science fiction: SF horror, hard sci-fi, space opera, science fantasy. It can run the vast gamut of genres from the start of Kill the Moon all the way through to the end of Kill The Moon.

It's fair to say, though, that Doctor Who more often than not shines at the softer, fantasy end of the spectrum. It could have turned out differently; one of the earliest pitches to meet that open brief was for "The Troubleshooters", which featured a three person scientific team based on Earth, an older professor and two heroic leads, one male one female, who would investigate and fix the problems nobody else was equipt to fix. No time travel, no Bug Eyed Monsters. This was softened in development, gradually turning the three into the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, and adding Susan as a kid that was needed "to get into trouble, make mistakes" as Sydney Newman, the commissioning exec in question, put it in his handwritten notes on that pitch document. The time travel was then added, but Sydney still wanted to exclude the Bug Eyed Monsters. That rule was broken about five weeks in, and the rest is history (and science). I've always thought The Troubleshooters sounded awful, and wouldn't have endured more than a year or two, but taste is a funny old thing. I realise now that one of my favourite shows, Star Cops, is pretty hard sci-fi, and not too dissimilar to that original pitch. It is after all a series about investigators that go where nobody else can go, and has a strict rule of no alien monsters, and certainly no time travel.

I've been thinking about Star Cops recently because I've just finished reading Above The Law by Paul Watts (Miwk Publishing), the most exhaustive and interesting book on this unfairly overlooked 1987 series imaginable. Star Cops was devised by Chris Boucher who was already a genre hero for this three great scripts for Doctor Who, and his work as script editor and writer on Blake's 7. At the time (I watched from partway through the second episode on broadcast and then got the VHS releases in the early 1990s and re-watched them over and over), I don't know if I realised how different it was. Superficially, it doesn't look that different to Doctor Who of a similar vintage, but it is very restrained in comparison. The universe of the stories has been very carefully constructed, plausibly extrapolating from real science and politics. Boucher carefully laid out the early space exploration that had taken place in the 40 years from the broadcast date to the year 2027 in which the series was set: governments and multinationals have set up several orbital spacestations, a moonbase, and a colony is just starting up on Mars; a fledgling international police force is required to keep order in this new frontier. The character biogs too were worked out to the same level of detail. There are a lot of echoes with the characters at the start of Kill The Moon, in fact: spacesuit-wearing somewhat unwilling volunteers investigating mysteries on the moon.

Star Cops, though, has an unfortunate plot hole at its centre. This was not caused by the writers, mind you. The lead character Nathan Spring was written to be a whizz kid, in his early thirties at the most, promoted above anyone else in the force because of his precocious brilliance. The producers, though, decided to cast David Calder, who was over 40 at the time of filming. They were right to do so, too, as Calder is simply brilliant in the role. But it causes some anomalies, as there was not time to catch and rewrite all the details of the scripts. Nathan harbours a dark secret, that his tech salesman father was a crook that he himself ended up investigating, fumbling the case because of inexperience but ultimately having to arrest his old man. Based on evidence given on screen, this was at the beginning of Spring's career, but based on dialogue elsewhere, the company his Dad worked for, Recondite, which was destroyed by these shocking events, only folded two years before the events of the series. The change of age of the actor cast has left a ten or so year gap unaccounted. The explanation that Watts offers in his book is that the damage having been done, it took the company ten years of decline before it finally closed. This is a good stab, but is unfortunately undermined by Nathan's possession of a Recondite prototype, Box, a cross between a copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Siri, given to him by his father. Box is treated as a technological marvel by everyone in the series, so it can't logically be ten year old technology. Therefore, it must have been obtained more recently by Nathan's father, somehow given to him by a contact from the company, despite that company being in decline and despite Nathan's father having been sacked for industrial espionage many years before. He then gives it as a gift to his son despite that son being the person who busted hum for industrial espionage in the first place.

In another coincidental echo, Kill The Moon's dates don't add up either. It's perhaps the one unifying factor of the otherwise sprawling and difficult to categorise science fiction canon, that stories will make mistakes about the future, and gloss over the exact progression of events in future history. The Coal Hill characters are from the year 2014, visiting the moon in 2049, 35 years after their time. Ten years before that in 2039, 25 years on from Clara and Courtney's present, the four-person Mexican mining survey sends back something of an SOS. It takes ten years for the rescue team to go to the moon, as there is no longer any space programme, only very few aged astronauts remaining, and the only shuttle in existence had to be rebuilt as it was being used as a museum attraction. This throws up the anomaly of how the Mexicans got to the moon. They can't have been there for decades just for a mining survey that didn't find anything to mine, so presumably they travelled up after the major decline in Space travel. We're told it was privately financed, and presumably that was a one-off as there aren't any private outfits available for the rescue mission. So when did NASA become a museum piece?

Based on the actor Hermione Norris's age, Lundvik is 47-ish in 2049, so around 12 years old back in Clara's time. Based on the average age of astronauts, her training must have happened around 2030 to 2035. So, the complete collapse of a space programme, and dying out of all astronauts to the point where the bumbling three-person team we see on the moon is the only remaining option, has happened in 5 - 10 years. This seems too compressed a period to me. Maybe it's the same underlying cause as Star Cops, a casting decision, this time casting Lundvik too young. But there's also a line about Lundvik's granny using tumblr, which seems a generation or two out: based on the approximate age of the character, even if a little older than the person cast, it is most likely that she herself would have been using Tumblr than anyone older. Sure, Lundvik's granny in 2014 could have been an early-adopting silver surfer, but why conjure up a less likely character just for a throwaway line. My feeling is that instead the action in an earlier draft was set in a later year then 2049, but it was hastily pulled forward, perhaps to up the stakes by making it more likely that an older Clara and Courtney are alive on the future Earth that's threatened with destruction. Or maybe, given the mess that the script is overall, it's just a mistake. To summarise, then: watch Star Cops instead of this.

In Summary:

Over egged.