The Woman Who Lived

Chapter the 256th, where the dandy highwayman grabbing your attention is old enough to qualify for this year's old age pension.

Plot:

The Doctor is searching for a powerful alien MacGuffin, which leads him to England in 1651. He bumps into Ashildr, who he'd saved from death but made immortal hundreds of years earlier. She is occupying a large house and styling herself as aristo Lady Me, but is secretly also posing as a highwayman called the Knightmare to aid her in her search for the same MacGuffin. The Doctor finds out all about the ups and downs of Lady Me's long life. She wants to escape the planet, and was expecting the Doctor to help her with this, but he's not keen (something about two long-lived beings not having the necessary perspective without a pet mortal with them, or something). He continues to scan for the MacGuffin, and Lady Me helps him find it. She is secretly in league with a lion creature from space called Leandro who says he needs it to open a portal to leave Earth, and has promised to take her with him. Unfortunately, the MacGuffin requires the death of a human to power it. Lady Me betrays the Doctor, and goes to the public execution of her rival highwayman Sam Swift to use his death to power the opening of the portal. When it opens, though, Leandro's people attack: he really wanted to open up a route for an invasion force. Lady Me rediscovers her lost humanity and uses a different MacGuffin that the Doctor had previously given her to save Sam and close the portal. As it closes, Leandro's people assassinate him for his failure. Lady Me tells the Doctor that she will use her time on Earth to look after the people the Doctor leaves behind.

Context:

I decided to watch this one on my own, from a disc in Complete Eighth Series box set. The disappointment of the reveal of a returning character, and how long they had been away (see First Time Round section for more details) resonated for the time I watched the story: it was the week that UK politician and former Prime Minister of the country Liz Truss staged a comeback after people had barely missed her. I briefly made a joke in the synopsis of the Asylum of the Daleks blog post last year about the leadership election that would appoint the new prime minister, comparing both the two remaining candidates to Daleks (apologies to all Daleks out there). That was published on the 12th August 2022. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on Castrovalva I mentioned that Liz Truss had taken on the role, and talked about how the cycles of politics and news were accelerating (I didn't know the half of it). That was the 13th September. By the time I blogged about Orphan 55 on the 25th October, she was gone and her predecessor had attempted his own brief comeback. It's now early February 2023, and Liz Truss's attempt at public rehabilitation after her disastrous tenure is already fading from memory. By the time you read this, it'll be completely forgotten and she'll no doubt be planning her third coming. Hollywood remakes seem to be on a similar accelerating curve (Tobey Maguire's Spiderman films still feel recent to me), as does Doctor Who. The Master used to have the decency to be offscreen for a good few years before returning with a new face, now new Masters seem to be popping up every couple. I'm not a young man anymore, and I'm not sure I can keep up at this speed.

First Time Round:

This is another time where I remember some online discussion in advance of a story more than I remember first watching the story itself. A teaser trailer was released mid-July 2015, a couple of months before the season was due to start. (I'd just started a new Doctor Who blog at the time, the one you're currently reading, which is surprisingly still going strong almost eight years later.) At the end of the trailer, post the BBC One logo and start date, was a clip from The Woman Who Lived, where Maisie Williams as Lady Me removes her mask in a close-up; the Doctor responds "You?!" in astonishment, and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". This led to weeks of fervent speculation from fans that the character was a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani (no woman can be cast in Doctor Who, it seems, without someone thinking that they will be a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani). At some point before the broadcast of The Woman Who Lived on the 24th October - which I watched on that evening with the Better Half, then again with my three children (aged between three and nine years old then) the following Sunday morning -  showrunner Steven Moffat went on record to say that Williams was playing a brand new character. Anyone who missed that, or just didn't believe it, was presumably very disappointed.

Reaction:

The DC comic The Sandman, written in the late 1980s / early 1990s by the later bestselling author and two-time Doctor Who writer Neil Gaiman, features a character called Hob Gadling. Hob cannot die, and lives through many centuries fighting in wars, losing people he loves, and enduring changing fortunes. In other words, he shares exactly the same situation as Lady Me / Ashildr in The Woman Who Lived. There's a reversal in that Sandman story that's almost a metatextual one, as Hob reacts to his predicament in a way that confounds obvious expectations: he stays positive about life and always wants to keep living. This avoidance of the usual cliché of the curse of longevity is not just surprising but life-affirming; Hob never gives up, and can always see the value in carrying on. Compare Hob to Lady Me, and the Doctor Who story unfortunately seems the poorer: it leans in to the cliché, and shows that 800 years of life has left Ashildr / Me jaded and petulant. I don't think this is a good or even realistic message: centuries of life have not given her an expansive perspective, she's instead moaning about how long it takes to get anywhere, desperate for a lift off planet. It makes it hard to side with her, and makes her distrust of the Doctor and his treatment of people seem disproportionate and hypocritical. At the end, she decides she's going to look after the people he leaves behind; but does he really treat people that badly? And wasn't Lady Me prepared to kill an innocent person just to power her transport only a few moments before?

The character conflict seems artificial and inflated. It also doesn't feel integrated enough into the main plot. The highway robbery and house breaking to find the magic amulet has to screech to a halt for long info-dump sequences where the Doctor learns about Lady Me's backstory. Now, it's probably the case that all involved in the production intended that the scenes with the Doctor and Lady Me about her last 800 years were the main plot, and the highwayman / amulet parts the distraction. If so, it's just not dynamic enough a narrative - it's just talk, talk, talk. The scenes of carriages and people being held up are at least well shot; the machinations of Leandro may be simplistic (it's a double-cross that can be seen coming a mile off) but allow a little bit of sci-fi spectacle where the portal is opened and the Earth is attacked, though it is done on the cheap. The make-up and prosthetics to create the leonine beast are a little bit panto too: is the issue throughout a lack of budget? I have a feeling that it might just be very difficult to make any creature that looks realistically like a lion be threatening rather than cuddly. The best part of the highwayman plot is Rufus Hound as Sam Swift, but he's barely in it. The most enjoyable sequence is the one where he effectively does stand-up comedy on the gallows, entertaining the crowd to put off the moment of his execution. It's life-affirming in a similar way to the Hob Gadling plot, and Hound provides the same wide-boy, ducking and diving energy as the comic book character.

I am conscious of my potential patriarchal bias here, by the way. Maybe Sam Swift and Hob were able to be happy-go-lucky because they were men, and Lady Me doesn't have the same luxury. She is shown, though, to have achieved mastery and power in a world run by men. Why couldn't she achieve resilience as well, without losing her zest for life? She loses her children, this is true, but such tragedies sadly happen to women with normal life spans, and those people still can and do learn to live with the pain, and move on. To make a big point of this being the event that made her shut herself off from her humanity, even though she has eternity to heal, maybe makes the opposite point than the writer Catherine Tregenna intended. It's very hard to be persuaded from the evidence here that the Doctor did anything except give her the most enormous gift, for which she is ungrateful. In general, and not just in this story, it's hard to root for the Lady Me character. I get the feeling that this could be different if I'd seen the previous work of Maisie Williams, the actor portraying her. I think perhaps there was a feeling that with that work "in the bank" as it were that there would be a short cut to audience empathy. Unfortunately (as I go into within the Deeper Thoughts section below) I hadn't seen that work. So, I was left feeling Williams was miscast, without the necessary gravitas for the character. And that's before the story's awkward tonal shifts into broad comedy detract further from any underlying sadness. Overall, the story stands as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme, but the final product is a mixed-bag, and ultimately - and sadly - not much of a success.

Connectivity:

In The Woman Who Lived, just like The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, a character performs before an audience and will stay alive only as long as he can keep that audience entertained; in both stories there is a search for a powerful artefact connected to opening up a gateway to another time and place. Plus, highway-people and hippy circus folk alike favour noms de guerre such as The Knightmare, Flowerchild, and so forth.

Deeper Thoughts:

I've never listened to I've Never Watched Star Wars. Perhaps I'd rate Maisie Williams more if I'd seen her performances as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones; I haven't ever, though, seen more than one frame of Game of Thrones (that being the one of Emilia Clarke doing a face that people often post as a meme). This has surprised a few people of my acquaintance over the years since that series debuted in 2011, as people assume it's the sort of thing I would watch religiously. I've picked up enough from references or jokes in other shows or online to know roughly what the show is like and about (including, after a few years of seeing it, that the meme of the blonde-haired woman was Emilia Clarke playing a character from GoT). I don't have any particular antipathy towards the series, but neither am I in any big hurry to see it. I think this is something that has become increasingly common as the availability of content has grown, and the means for engaging with such content diversified: significant and highly popular examples of media can be missed or ignored by individuals. Nothing will be so big that it can't slip below the radar. I've never seen Titanic or either of the two Avatar movies, for example, and they are three of the biggest selling movies of all time. The BBC made a radio programme about this phenomenon called I've Never Watched Star Wars, which took a celebrity and gave them the opportunity to close their personal gaps. Perhaps appropriately, I've never listened to a single edition of it; I probably never will, either, as like GoT it ended a few years back.

What about equivalent gaps within the world of Doctor Who? I've been a fan of the show for over four decades now, and watched every broadcast episode of the show and all the TV spin-offs. One would think I'd covered everything, and would have no surprising confessions. But there are a few things I need to get off my chest, don't judge me too harshly. First, I have never collected action figures; in fact, I've never purchased a single one. When I was first a fan, there wasn't anything to collect. I'd arrived too late for the Denys Fisher toys of the late 70s (dollies of the Tom Baker Doctor, Leela, K9 and a few others). A few years later, a company called Dapol started to release figures about the same size as the Star Wars figures that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, but I only ever saw them in adverts in Doctor Who Magazine and never in the shops (not that I had the money for them anyway). When the show came back, there was an explosion of merchandise available, including hundreds of action figures, but I still wasn't tempted. Perhaps more surprisingly, as someone who was a writer for a while, I've never written a piece of fan fiction, Not a single sentence. When I was writing semi-professionally, I wasn't ever writing prose, and I was serious enough about it to know that nobody was going to produce a Doctor Who screenplay written by an unknown, so I concentrated my efforts elsewhere. Before that, when Doctor Who was off air in the 1990s, Virgin Publishing would accept unsolicited manuscripts from new writers for their range of original Who novels. I did think about sending in something, but I could never think of an even half decent idea. Maybe it was because I didn't have any action figures to act my stories out.

I've never been to the Fitzroy Tavern, a London boozer where fans congregate monthly. I've never cosplayed (i.e. dressed up as the Doctor or another character from the programme). Like with Game of Thrones, I don't have any particular antipathy towards other people enjoying this pastime, but I'm not in any hurry to join them. I've never asked a Doctor Who star for their autograph (though I have got a couple of books with signatures in them because they came with the book or event where I purchased the book anyway). I'm struggling to think of anything else significant that I've never done. I've been to one proper Doctor Who convention in my life, but I have gone to at least one. I've listened to four whole Big Finish Doctor Who stories, a tiny fraction of their output over the years, but it's something. It shows what a broad set of potential activities are concealed within the summary "being a Doctor Who fan". This is probably why I bristle a bit at the cruder characterisations of Doctor Who fans in other media (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) as there is no single, simplified type of Doctor Who fan. And I haven't even got onto the more niche fan activities like making fan films / videos (never done it), or recording a podcast (no), or doing a blog where you review every Doctor Who story one by one (okay, guilty as charged). Am I in any hurry to close my Who gaps? No, but it might be fun in Doctor Who's 60th anniversary year to try something new. I can't see myself cosplaying, but never say never!

In Summary:

Stands (as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme) but doesn't really deliver.