Deep Breath

Chapter The 242nd, is not that deep, really. 

Plot:

The newly regenerated Doctor and Clara arrive in Victorian London, accidentally bringing a giant dinosaur with them as the police box got stuck in its throat. Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax take them in to their place in Paternoster Row, so the Doctor can recover. At night, the dinosaur mysteriously catches fire, one of many recent cases of supposedly spontaneous combustion. The Doctor goes missing, investigating. A mysterious personal ad appears in the next day's paper, which the Doctor and Clara both see and believe was placed by the other, bringing both of them to a restaurant that turns out to be a trap. Clockwork droids surround them, and they are transported underground to the droids' original spaceship. It had time-travelled back and crashed in the past; since then, the droids have been patching up their ship, and their control-node leader Half-Face Man patching up himself, using parts harvested from humans (with the combustion of the corpses covering this up). The Half-Face Man is doing this as a malfunction in his programming (presumably) has made him believe it will lead him and the droids to a 'promised land'. The Doctor joins him in an escape pod attached to a hot air balloon made from human skin, floating over London. The Doctor either talks him into suicide or pushes him from the pod, and Half-Faced Man is impaled on top of a spire. The Doctor disappears again, but after some time passes, returns to pick up Clara. He's by this time redecorated the TARDIS interior, and donned a new outfit. Clara is still unsure about the Doctor's new self, but receives a call on the TARDIS phone from his previous self, made on Trenzalore just before he regenerated, telling her to give his new self a chance. Half-Face Man meanwhile appears in what appears to be heaven, greeted by Missy.

Context:

On the second weekend of September 2022, I was away meeting up with some university friends in London in around the same area as I was the previous weekend for the Abominable Snowmen screening at the BFI (and which a few days after my second visit would be the site of a long queue of mourners working their way towards Westminster Hall to view the queen's coffin as she was lying in state). In advance of travelling, I realised we wouldn't be too far away from the Embankment and Westminster Bridge, both featured settings for Deep Breath, which the random number generator had already chosen as the next story to blog. Nothing of Deep Breath was filmed in London, though, those Victorian locales having been recreated on location in Wales or in the studio. I didn't know it at the time, but I did walk directly through many parts of the bankside near The Clink Museum that weekend that had been used to recreate Victorian London, but for a classic series story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang; this excellent youtube video by Gav Rymill, which I only watched later, explains all about it. I recommend giving it a watch if you're interested in detailed Doctor Who investigations (and if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you are). Anyway, I considered downloading the story and watching it at some point when I got back to my hotel room, then remembered that the last time I met up with this same group of people in London I brought along a different story (this was back in 2019 and it was the Pting one, if you're interested) and failed to find any time to watch it. I didn't bother this time, and ended up drinking cocktails and dancing until the early hours like last time, having no scope to watch even the shortest video. In the end, I got round to watching Deep Breath at home from the Blu-ray in the Complete Eighth Series box set almost two weeks later, on my own late one evening.

First Time Round:

Sometimes certain events create a collective phenomenon where masses of people get a bit too carried away and there is behaviour displayed that in normal times would seem extreme; writing this in the UK just after the period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, I can say that I saw no hint of this during that period, of course - the entire populace of my country behaved entirely appropriately, with no going over the top whatsoever. I did see this phenomenon in the world of Doctor Who in 2014, though. An actor took on a role that previously was played by another actor. This perhaps should have been run of the mill by then, as it was something that had happened for this specific role nearly a dozen times before, but for a brief period it was treated like the biggest event in the world. Stars of the show Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman went on a world tour, and big crowds came out to meet them. Their first full story was a feature length one, directed by a big name UK movie director, Ben Wheatley, and it was shown in cinemas worldwide. This was the last echo of the noise made about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who the previous year, during which Capaldi was announced in a primetime shiny-floored live entertainment show (which even at the time seemed a bit much, and to my eyes Capaldi looked a bit uncomfortable with the excess of it). After Deep Breath, everything calmed down a lot and even the announcement and debut story of the first female Doctor a few years later wasn't quite as huge an event. All this rigmarole surrounding it could have risked the story being an anti-climax, but at the time I thought it held its own. The family was on holidays from work and school at the end of August 2014, and after the weekend would travel to a cottage in Kent for a short stay. On the night of the 23rd, though, we were still at home and had friends Alex, Rachel and Phil (all mentioned many times before on the blog) visiting. They watched with myself and the Better Half, and the elder two of our three children (youngest was only a toddler at that time and would have already been in bed). I think it would be one of the last, if not the last, time we got a reasonable crowd together to watch a new Who story broadcast; interest started to wane with some parties from then on.

Reaction:

Unless you are someone that thinks that The Meg is a more important film than Jaws, you'll know that size doesn't necessarily equate to impact. Like that Jason Statham vehicle, Deep Breath features an oversized CGI creature - in the case of the Doctor Who story, a dinosaur - that's just a bit ridiculous. If you're going to depict something an order of magnitude larger than any known dino fossil, then why not just make it a new original space creature rather than pretend it's a time-displaced great lizard from prehistory? Narrative plausibility has already been left far behind, after all, if we're expected to believe that the history books just looked the other way and never recorded God-flippin'-zilla wandering around Westminster in the 1890s. The first fifteen to twenty minutes or so of the story focussing on this OTT-Rex could lift right out, and the plot would be undisturbed - the dinosaur's narrative function is merely as the latest victim in a series of suspicious deaths, the Doctor's cue that there's a mystery to solve. There are numerous ways such an inciting incident could have been done that would have been more in keeping with the rest of the narrative, so why graft on a beginning that's of a different scale to the rest of the proceedings? The short answer is no doubt that it's to create spectacle. The story needs to instantly grip its audience (some of whom have paid for a cinema ticket). Could audience engagement not be generated by a gradual investigative beginning, more in keeping with the Sherlock Holmes / Jack The Ripper trappings thereafter, though? The Half-Face Man is a good adversary, well written, well performed and well realised. Hints of him from the off, followed by a slow burn reveal, might have cohered better than a comic monster movie opening. If the idea is to create something filmic, well, not all films have to begin with action sequences, do they?! It speaks to me of a lack of confidence. Paradoxically, at a time of grandiosity (with the cast going on world tours and such - see First Time Round above), there is something tentative about Deep Breath.

The giant dinosaur up front, if a bit silly, whizzes by so fast on first watch that it's not so big a problem. Where I feel the story is also too tentative, in a way that's much harder to forgive, is in relation to its new leading man. Deep Breath is doing something somewhat rare for the new 21st century Doctor Who, a post-regeneration story with a regular cast member carried over from the previous lead actor's tenure. The only other time this had been done was with Rose's reaction to Doctor Nine Christopher Eccleston turning into Doctor Ten David Tennant. That was the first time such a change of actor had been done since the return, and was very early on, still in the first year that the show had come back. As such, the script of that story rightly pushes hard on Rose's doubts about and eventual coming to terms with the change, to mirror what the audience might be feeling. Writer of Deep Breath Steven Moffat wants to emulate this, but time has moved on since 2005, and multiple different actors playing the Doctor (sometimes simultaneously) has been normalised. Clara is also the worst possible character to express any doubts about the Doctor changing, because she has been set up in the previous year as someone who has met the Doctor in all his different bodies. So, the script, seemingly desperately casting around for a motivation, has her deeply concerned about the Doctor being suddenly too old. But two stories previously, Clara met the Doctor played by septuagenarian John Hurt, and one story before that she was shown meeting him as William Hartnell, who was in that footage exactly the same age as Capaldi in Deep Breath. The conflict seems confected; it doesn't convince that this behaviour would emerge from the character, so it seems more like a behind-the-scenes preoccupation that's bled through into the world of the story.

Did Moffat have lingering doubts about casting Capaldi because his age was so different from the other 21st century Doctors? Probably not, but he seems to have inadvertently suggested this in the script. It all comes to a head with a scene that I think is a serious misstep, where Capaldi's predecessor Matt Smith cameos as the pre-change Doctor calling up Clara through time on the TARDIS phone to reassure her that this new version is the same person. The series had never done this before, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine if Capaldi's later companion Bill had stayed on, and Capaldi had a scene in Jodie Whittaker's debut calling Bill to reassure her that Jodie was still a man underneath. It would be rightly decried, and I'm struggling to see why the Deep Breath scene is that much different. The first story of a new Doctor should be a clean break, and Capaldi should have been left to make his mark alone. Ironically, the awkward phone call scene functions only because of the performance of... Peter Capaldi - he really sells it with minimal acting, just stillness, and the barest flicker of facial expression. He is as good as anyone could expect in the role, burning up the screen in every moment despite some of the dialogue ("Planet of the pudding brains") being questionable. All the cast comport themselves well, including the previous era's recurring guest actors, playing the Paternoster Gang in their final baton-passing TV appearance. They mainly provide the light relief. Special mentions also should go to Peter Ferdinando as the Half-Face Man, and Brian Miller as the unnamed homeless man (in the credits, he's called Barney). Both get one-on-one sequences with Capaldi, and in both Capaldi raises his game above the - still more than adequate - performance he gives elsewhere, seemingly enjoying the sparring with these characters / actors. The dark ambiguous ending - did Half-Face Man jump or was he pushed by the Doctor? - is great for the story and the character too.

Jenna Coleman does what she can with the material she's given, and is much better once the clockwork droids plot starts up properly and gives the story a single focus. The central idea of characters having to hold their breath to fool the droids into thinking they are also robotic is a strong one, and gives rise to some good sequences in the latter part of the story, such as the POV shot of Clara walking through a group of droids while rapidly running out of air. Clara applying her hard-won teaching skills to the scenario is a nice character moment too. There is a lot to enjoy here: the production value in all departments adds up to a handsome look and feel. The new trappings that come with a new Doctor - new costume, new theme arrangement, new title sequence, new incidental music motifs - are all nice. Wheatley and the crew capture some magnificent imagery, including at the end the shot of the Half-Face Man impaled on a spire, and the Doctor full-frame, inscrutable, looking out from the hot air balloon where they had tussled. There are a few good gags, and the set-ups for the overarching plot of the series are intriguing. Looking back on these now its all been resolved, however, and this aspect too seems not to have the courage of its convictions. It's ages since I've watched  Dark Water / Death in Heaven, the two-part finale of the season that started with Deep Breath, but I'm sure the plot was something about Missy - using a corporate institute as a front - fooling humans into being uploaded into her fake afterlife, and then turning their bodies into Cybermen. If so, what's the point of her uploading Half-Face Man, and how did she do it? And when did this happen, given he died so suddenly? Why did the Half-Face Man develop a fixation on going to some undefined 'promised land'? Why is Missy so keen to put and keep Clara and the Doctor together? Something was later said about how they are somehow a bad combination that will bring the Doctor down or something, but it wasn't convincing, and didn't really pay off anything set up in Deep Breath.

Connectivity: 

Another story like Castrovalva where the Doctor is erratic after a recent regeneration and spends a lot of time recuperating.

Deeper Thoughts:

Voluntary Memory. I am currently reading the mammoth multi-volume Proust novel Remembrance of Times Past, or In Search of Lost Time (the two English versions of the original title 'À la recherche du temps perdu', as I am most assuredly reading an English translation, being not clever enough to read it in French). I have a few times in blog posts previously mentioned the concept of involuntary memory that forms part of Proust's philosophy within the novel, and have often done this in relation to Doctor Who (e.g. when talking about 1993 and a particular kind of 3D specs in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Green Death post earlier this year). I'm now though thinking I was incorrect to do so. To summarise: involuntary memory is when one's brain, presented with a surprising external trigger, is flooded with unexpected memories. The famous example from Proust is his unnamed narrator and author proxy in the first of the seven volumes of the novel tasting a madeleine cake that's been dipped in tea, and this bringing about a rush of memories about his childhood spent at his family's country home. I have experienced something a bit like this with Doctor Who, but nowhere near as extremely or surprisingly as true involuntary memory would be, for the simple reason that I've never stopped watching, reading, and studying Doctor Who. My avidity over the years has taken away any possible element of surprise, as I'm too well versed in the detail. And yes, the external trigger of watching a story will bring back some memories, but they are memories that I've experienced over and again, having watched all these stories many times each. Even something relatively recent and relatively less re-watched like Deep Breath has still settled in my mind somewhere not far from the surface. The memories are stubbornly voluntary, and their retrieval a more controlled process.

My enthusiasm for the show long ago spilled over into a knowledge of other archive TV fare, further limiting the scope of finding a truly surprising trigger. If ever I see a post on social media saying something like "Who remembers Blakes' 7 / Words and Pictures / The Book Tower / etc.?" my answer will always be: "Oh course I bloody well do!". Is there anything from TV that could cause such a reaction after 50 years of obsession? Madonna performing Like a Virgin in a pink wig on Top of the Pops in 1984, for example, brings back some strong memories - I don't even need an external trigger to recall them. This is, I think, a different phenomenon, driven by youthful lust, and something Proust definitely knew about as it seemingly forms the bulk of his immense novel. One short passage about a cake dipped in tea, and the remainder of the seven volumes is all about girls and women he fancied. So, probably it can be described as Proustian, but it is not involuntary memory. No, I would need to go further back into childhood to find my own madeleine, and - given the nature of these things, this could not be forced. I would have to wait until something came up that acted as a trigger to memories that I'd actually given myself opportunity to forget. A few weeks back, it finally happened, and then very rapidly happened again. Both times were prompted somewhat inevitably by nerdy blog posts on a linked theme that I'd happened to find. Thankfully, everybody out there in nerdy web land is looking for more obscure topics than Blakes' 7 or Words and Pictures or The Book Tower. Not that the first madeleine-like trigger was obscure when it was first around, being a best-selling book, Masquerade by Kit Williams. This was the perfect candidate, something that I had been obsessed with for about eighteen months around 1980 and 1981, before my interest in either Doctor Who or Madonna in a pink wig came along to distract me; after that, though, I hadn't really thought about it again.

The blog coverage I referred to earlier is by Jimmy Maher and is in two parts, Part 1 - The Contest and Part 2 - The Aftermath; it gives the background of the book (and is a very interesting read). In short, Masquerade was a picture book that held clues to a real buried treasure that had been hidden somewhere in Britain by artist / author Williams, a nifty publicity wheeze of the time that captured the imaginations of many an adult or child worldwide, myself included. This meant that I spent many hours poring over the pictures across an extended period of time, looking for the clues. The pictures are in a style that I found, still find, quite disturbing, so a shiver of memory hit me as soon as I stumbled across the blog posts. Once the treasure had been found back in 1982, the book was not of much value to me (it is not a great story, nor really even a great puzzle, and I'd had enough of the art). So, it was much more potent when the memories flowed back, suddenly jumping a 40 year gap and flooding the present. It was nice to remember being part of a brief international craze (I never came anywhere near to solving the damn thing, by the way). Interestingly, I reached that blog using a link in another and this had given me it's own Proustian rush. This was In Search of the Golden Brain by John Hoare, and talked about the first Spitting Image tie-in book, which I had owned when it first was published. This again acted as a trigger for similar reasons: slightly disturbing artwork - tick, mightily obsessed with it for a brief period - tick, not thought about it since I last read it 30+ years ago - tick; I was transported back to Christmas 1985 when I received it as a present. Amazingly, the book had it's own similar treasure hunt, which Hoare expounds upon in the post, which is also a very interesting read. Because the puzzle was presented as a parody of Masquerade, most people probably - as I did - assumed that it wasn't real, but it was, and eventually two parties worked out the puzzle and shared the treasure.

These examples of being parachuted directly down into memory lane have made me a little regretful that I could never feel exactly the same way about Doctor Who. The only way to achieve it would be to go cold turkey and not watch any of it, new or old, for an extended period. How likely is that ever to happen, though, even if I didn't have a blog to write?! 

In Summary:

Tentative about things it should be sure of, but also overconfident about some less good elements; in other words, a bit half-arsed as well as half-faced.