Face the Raven

Chapter The 218th, wherein I just can't face it - I just can't face Face The Raven.

Plot:

Present day England. Ashildr, a rather petulant and ungrateful person whom the Doctor saved from death but inadvertently made immortal hundreds of years before, is running a refuge for aliens in a so-called trap street in London. The street is hidden using a telepathic field, which also makes the aliens appear to be human. Persons unknown (it will later turn out to be the Time Lords) approached Ashildr and threatened the street unless she contrived to capture the Doctor. She somehow found out that the Doctor and Clara had briefly met graffiti-artist Rigsy once before, and somehow got Rigsy to visit the trap street. She then framed him for the murder of a popular resident, wiped his memory, and sent him home. Before that, though, she applied a chrono-lock to the back of his neck - a tattoo that's continually changing, counting down. When it gets to zero, a Quantum Shade - a cloud of black gas that sometimes manifests as a raven - will kill him, no matter how fast or far he runs. Rigsy contacts the TARDIS using a number that Clara had given him in case of emergencies. The Doctor and Clara help Rigsy to investigate, and find the street. The Doctor confronts Ashildr, who grants him time to clear Rigsy's name. He eventually finds that the supposedly murdered person is still alive in a status pod, but when he tries to free her, he's trapped with a teleport bracelet on. Ashildr then says she'll take the chrono-lock off Rigsy. Unfortunately, Clara has agreed earlier to take on the chrono-lock herself, and Ashildr can't save her. The Raven kills Clara. The Doctor is teleported to location unknown, and he's not happy.

Context:

January's been a bit of an exhausting time, back to the day job after the Christmas holidays with much work to do and cold, dark days outside. I had a brief break from watching Doctor Who stories for the blog after a couple of intensive marathons watching every story on the recent season 17 Blu-ray box set including Nightmare of Eden, and then before that watching all of Flux in one go; refreshed, I felt ready to watch and blog something new (and preferably involving less of a time commitment), so figuratively rolled the many-sided die (actually an online random number generator) to decide which story to cover next. When this dictated that the story was Face the Raven, I have to admit that my heart sunk a little bit - it wasn't a story of which I had fond memories, and sitting through it again felt like a bit of a chore. I put it off for a little while longer, instead choosing to watch the last special feature I had left to view on the last Blu-ray box set but one. Yes, at that point I preferred to watch six hours of different takes of scenes from Delta and the Bannermen (the location footage from a disc in the Season 24 set) than watch a 45-minute story from Peter Capaldi's middle series. Finally finishing that set after so many months, I considered going back to season 17 (I still have info text, commentaries and a couple of extras to watch), but decided to buckle down and get Face the Raven over with. How bad could it be? I watched from the Blu-ray on my own on a Saturday afternoon.

First Time Round:

In November 2015, I sat at a desk at my day job next to a woman from North Wales whose name I sadly can't remember any longer (it's only been six years, but I'm coming up blank, sorry Whatever-your-name-was). I can recall, though, her telling me on the Monday after Face the Raven had been first broadcast in the UK (Doctor Who's 52nd anniversary, November 23rd, after the episode was shown on Saturday the 21st) that she'd seen it and that it had been "pretty weird". As is usual for me in these events, I got bashful and changed the subject - I'd had enough of defending my favourite show as a youngster; if adults had problems with it they were on their own. I'm not even sure that she didn't like it as the following Monday she told me that the episode that week, Heaven Sent, had been "very weird" - her experience the previous weekend clearly hadn't stopped her from watching. Maybe weird is good. One person who had given up on Doctor Who around this time was the Better Half. So, I would have watched Face the Raven alone late on the Saturday night to judge its suitability (at that point, my three children's ages ranged from 3 to 9 years old); it was fine for them, so we four watched it the following morning. The Better Half had got bored with the series after the Zygon 2-parter, but watched Face the Raven retrospectively after she'd seen Heaven Sent the following week (she'd watched Heaven Sent as I'd nagged her to, based on its quality). To this day, she has not ever watched Sleep No More. 

Reaction:

Face the Raven is a story where one of the Doctor's friends, a character played by a regular cast member, one of the TARDIS crew, dies. This had happened only a few times previously in the history of the show - a couple of short-lived companions in the 1960s, Adric, Peri (sort-of), and no one after that, no new series companion before Clara. Each time it had happened before, it had had a considerable impact. I liked Clara as a character, and I liked the way Jenna Coleman played her. I should have felt something when she died, but there was no impact. The music and the slo-mo of her death scene is supposed to jerk tears, no doubt; the effect of the black smoke pouring out of her mouth is supposed to be grim and scary. I felt nothing, apart from mild disappointment, both when viewing in 2015 and 2022. Why might this be? Maybe the scenario is just too unreal. This one 45-minute story contains so many concepts that have no readily graspable scientific explanations: a tattoo on someone's skin that's counting down, a mystical raven that steals people's souls and will follow them to the ends of the Earth, a woman that can live for ever, a race with heads looking in both directions who can see the past and the future, a hidden street in London where people who are different from the general populace can go. That last one is pure Harry Potter (the trap street is essentially Diagon Alley), but all of these concepts belong more to the world of magic and mythology than Doctor Who's normally much less fantastical science fantasy. That wouldn't usually be a problem - Doctor Who's flexible format can sample any tone or subgenre - but it's hard when the narrative is expecting me to believe in finality. In this magic world, will death really prove to be the end? It doesn't feel like it.

As well as being unreal, the set-up in the story is convoluted. A simple ending where Clara sacrifices herself in place of Rigsy would be easily digestible by the audience. Instead, it's framed clumsily as a contractual negotiation. Ashildr has a deal with the Raven / Shade (how exactly one would go about brokering an agreement with a cloud of gas or bird is not clear, but never mind) that it is owed a soul, but she can somehow avoid that for Rigsy but not for Clara. Ashildr has a long bit of dialogue that's whizzed through at speed but is worth dwelling on: "I made a contract with the Shade when I put the chrono-lock on Rigsy - I promised it a soul and only I can break that contract. When you took it from him, you changed the terms, you cut me out of the deal." This doesn't make any sense. If Ashildr indeed has an obligation to provide a soul - a position that's reiterated multiple times with dialogue like "You can pass it on but you can't cheat it" - then why would she be able to break the deal? Why would it make any difference whose soul it was? Why can nobody else make the same deal she did originally? Why can't the Doctor take on the countdown from Clara, just as she did from Rigsy? Given the intended drama of the moment, the logic has to slot together perfectly for the audience to suddenly realise the trouble that Clara is in at the climax, but it just leaves one scratching one's head. It also is the culmination of a plan that's massively overcomplicated. The Doctor needs to be separated from the TARDIS and then teleported off somewhere. Yes, just asking him to come along might have aroused suspicions. The plan as shown, though, is so far the other way it's ridiculous.

Ashildr has to arrange for someone that the Doctor's met only once before to be in a specific place at a specific time to be framed for murder, then wipe his memory and send him back home while the clock is ticking. What if Rigsy had slept in the following day? What if he'd lost the Doctor's number? What if the TARDIS team and Rigsy had taken longer to find the trap street? Rigsy wanted to call the Doctor as his advocate when he was first accused, so why didn't Ashildr let him? It doesn't make any sense for her to risk her plan by wiping his memory; it only happens to give the first 15 minutes of the story some mystery. There isn't any narrative-world purpose to those first 15 minutes at all - the story could start with Rigsy calling in the Doctor directly to the trap street; the Doctor would still get the investigation to do that's meant to flatter his nature and entrap him. It wouldn't set up Rigsy's partner and child, of course, but I'm not sure that's very well handled anyway. Presumably a scene was cut from the script or final show introducing Jen, the mother of Rigsy's baby, as it looks in the final product like they're leaving the baby alone with nobody to look after it. A TV-literate viewer will immediately be alerted when a character has a new baby and a scene dwells on it, it's like a character saying they're one day away from retirement. Perhaps that was misdirection as to who was not going to make it to the end of the story. Any TV-literate viewer, though, will be very suspicious of a main character disappearing when there's still two episodes left of the season; it was almost certain that Clara would be back in either or both (both as it turned out). It's also a trick that's been pulled before: Clara had pretend leaving scenes at the end of the last series, and again in the last Christmas special. Face The Raven's ending, already questionable for the reasons above, is further undermined by these metatextual factors.

The final reason why Clara's death won't be the end is it's not heroic. She's very brave facing her fate at the end, but the action that she's taken is dumb. The script, and various moments in the previous stories of that year, have been sketching in a motivation that Clara has become reckless thinking she's invincible, but that doesn't quite sell why she makes such a foolish decision. She says it will buy them more time, but she knows it won't - the countdown doesn't restart when it passes to her. She also says, somewhat contradicting the buying more time thing, that she can't die as Ashildr has promised her absolute protection (which is set up earlier, but comes to nothing as Clara still dies). Again, it's just confused and not precise enough to be any kind of twist. More than that, though - and channelling Lalla Ward in some interviews on the season 17 boxset who makes this point - Doctor Who is a melodrama, and melodramas have rules. One is that a hero can't do something knowingly unheroic. As such, it seems obvious that Clara will be back before the end of the series to redeem herself. (An aside: when she does return, Clara doesn't really redeem herself, which makes the year's finale Hell Bent somewhat underwhelming too, but I'll review that - and who knows maybe change my position - when it comes up to blog.) The execution of the story is not that bad; the production design and pacing is fine, the mystery of the first 15 minutes is effective, even though it's fake. There's some great visuals like Rigsy's painted TARDIS memorial to Clara shown in a post credits scene. The performances are mostly good; Maisie Williams is okay, but she just doesn't have the heft to be a credible antagonist versus the forceful presence of Peter Capaldi. That he's beaten by her ruses, at a terrible cost, is not that satisfactory or heroic for him either, but it ends 'To Be Continued' so he can maybe do something about that in the next story...

Connectivity: 

A tough one this; both Face the Raven and Nightmare of Eden contain references to a drug (Vraxoin and the Retcon amnesia drug respectively) and both contain creatures that are not quite what they seem (the Raven is a Quantum Shade, the Mandrels are the source of Vraxoin). That's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Golden Age Myth Ballooning. The narratives of Doctor who stories in general encourage looking to make the future better rather than dwelling on some perhaps glorious but now faded past. There are many stories with ex-imperial villainous races trying aggressively to recapture past glories and coming a cropper, and one story explicitly calls out "There never was a golden age... it's all an illusion." Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped commentators (both amateur and professional) from harking back to golden ages they have perceived in the show itself. For example, as part of my intensive and extensive quest to consume all the material on the season 24 boxset (sorry if it's dominating this blog post, but it has dominated my life for many months), I listened to the Time and the Rani commentary, recorded in the first decade of this millennium when the returned post-2005 Doctor Who was a few series in; the late writers of that story Pip and Jane Baker both bemoaned the return of the sonic screwdriver in the new episodes, as it was the equivalent of a magic wand and made the Doctor into a wizard rather than the scientist he's supposed to be. They are not alone in those involved in the making of Who in thinking that things had got a bit silly or too easy compared to previous times. Does this stand up to scrutiny, though? Was there ever a golden age of Doctor Who? Many people will have their favourite periods of the show, but agreement as to which will never be anything even approaching 100 percent even amongst the smallest group of fans.

I do not think there's ever been a particular golden age of quality. No matter which year from 1963 to 1989 and from 2005 to date, there will be classics and there will be clunkers. And different people will put any one story into those two categories differently. Many people like Face the Raven a lot more than me for example, but I'm not silly enough to think that they're wrong and I'm right. I'll go one step further, though: never mind quality, there's not even a golden age of tone, approach or detail. All is fluid, and anything could happen - it's exciting. For example, I don't think the Doctor has ever consistently been portrayed as being a scientist, no matter what the Bakers thought. In the early days, he was a curious dilettante who liked to go off exploring and was very proud of his synthetic food machine, but he wasn't depicted using scientific methods; but then, in the early days he wasn't the hero, Ian was, and the science teacher, who'd on paper be much more likely to used his applied knowledge to solve problems, was more of an action hero. The Doctor tended to talk his way out of tight spots (his oratorial skills are to the forefront in stories like An Unearthly Child and The Keys of Marinus in that first season). Later he's seen tinkering with the odd bit of engineering here and there. The only couple of times I can think of that the Doctor ever used a truly experimental approach was when trying to find antidotes to diseases in The Ark and Doctor Who and the Silurians; the former is just a quick montage to ramp up tension, and the latter is one section of a seven-episoder, where they clearly wanted to fill up the story time any way they could. Daleks have never been able to shoot straight, and the sonic screwdriver has always been able to open any door in the universe, except when it can't. Everything else is propaganda.

It's forgivable that Doctor Who fans fall for the golden age myth, though, as it's endemic in many walks of life. Politicians and the media are particularly susceptible, always hankering for imagined times when people knew their place, or when there was no crime, or when nobody had to pay a licence fee for their TV (a recent and particularly egregious example in the UK). Perhaps it is this fertile ground that grew a rumour that's blossomed recently, that the next actor taking over from Jodie Whittaker to be the incumbent Time Lord will be none other than David Tennant. I don't think this is likely to happen. The returning showrunner Russell T Davies has always tended to demonstrate that desire to push for the new rather than dwell on the past. It's the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, of course, which might lead to some celebratory celebrity shenanigans - I could see Tennant making a guest appearance (though I'm not even sure that's a good idea) but not taking over the role for good. This rumour, taken as fact, is also being used by the usual clickbaiters as a stick to beat the current show. What's interesting, though, is that this didn't happen the last time an actor made an indelible mark on the role. If the equivalent of David Tennant for the classic series is Tom Baker, I don't remember any time during the 1980s that there was hope or even speculation that he'd come back. Perhaps this is a good sign. Towards the end of the classic series, rightly or wrongly, Doctor Who was not seen as the sort of successful venture that would tempt back a star who'd already made their mark. That it is currently seen as something that a busy and popular TV actor like Tennant would want to re-do is testament to the good shape that the series is in. The only golden age therefore is right now.

In Summary:

I've watched it a couple of times, and I'm not feeling the love, so I'm afraid I now shall watch this story... nevermore.