The Curse of the Black Spot

Chapter The 234th, is just what we never knew we needed, a prequel to The Smugglers. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory follow a distress call to the Fancy, a becalmed 17th century pirate ship captained by Henry Avery. The crew are picked off by a siren who emerges from the sea whenever anyone gets injured or sick: the affected crew member has a black spot appear on one palm, the siren appears and uses her song to turn them drunk / horny, they go to her, and she touches them apparently zapping them to destruction. Rory suffers a slight injury, and Avery's son - found stowing away on the vessel - has typhoid. The Doctor surmises that the siren travels within water, so they bar themselves in to the driest room on the ship, the armoury; but, the Doctor's wrong - it instead can travel through any reflections, so they have to throw all of the looted (and shiny) treasure overboard, much to Avery's annoyance. The TARDIS team, Avery and his son attempt to man the sails when the wind picks up in a rain storm. A stray piece of treasure that Avery had kept is released from its hiding place, which allows the siren back, and it claims his son. Rory falls overboard, and the Doctor decides that the people taken are still alive somewhere, so they allow the siren to take the drowning Rory from the water, then each prick their fingers to be captured by the siren too. They find themselves on a spaceship occupying the same space as the Fancy, but on a different astral plane or something; this was the source of the distress call. The siren turns out to be a medical program, the spot is a tissue sample, and the song a form of anaesthetic. Avery and his crew, who are all still alive, pilot the spaceship off into the stars, implausibly, and Amy saves Rory with some CPR, implausibly.

Context:

On a Saturday morning early in July 2002, I put on the disc containing this story, from the Complete Sixth Series Blu-ray box set. I'd planned to watch alone, but - maybe because of the unusual timing, my watching stories for the blog normally done in the evening - a number of family members came in and watched long sections with me. At the most populated, the living room contained me, the Better Half and the two younger of the kids, boy of 12, girl of 10, though none of them stayed to the very end. The Better Half and boy child had a long discussion about the Doctor's smashing of all the ship's mirrors and windows being a bad idea, as it will just create more, smaller reflective surfaces not less. The Better Half was also bemused, presumably like everyone else that's every watched this story, at what happened to Lee Thingy from Press Gang. He's the second most famous of the guest cast after Hugh Bonnerville, he's foregrounded in the action leading up to a dramatic scene where he's stuck as an unwilling ally of the regulars, unable to escape; then, in the next scene, he's vanished and nobody mentions him again. Presumably there was a scene deleted as he turns up with the rest of the crew in the space infirmary at the end, but it is a bit jarring.

First Time Round:

I have a blank spot when it comes to remembering The Curse of the Black Spot; I don't have strong memories of many of my first watches of the Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on or near to its UK BBC1 debut, at or near to the time of broadcast. As is usual on the blog in these instances, I will share another unconnected Doctor Who memory, and this one is itself about sharing. I've mentioned many times before that when I got to university in 1991 I rapidly found a cohort together with whom I could watch stories from VHS tape. Before that, though, watching Doctor Who was a solitary activity. No one in my house was a fan, so I never experienced the family viewing ritual during the classic series years. My schoolfriends in the mid-to-late 1980s who were Who fans, Dominic, Zahir, and Alan G, talked about the latest stories with me after they'd aired, and we occasionally swapped the new VHS tapes that had just started coming out, but we never got together to watch them. When the four of us did meet, we would play RPGs instead. I remember once bringing along a pirated version of a great recent film I had seen at the cinema called Back to the Future, but I couldn't drum up much interest in that, let alone us all watching Revenge of the Cybermen for what was likely the 20th time for some of us. My other close friends were not as into Doctor Who. I once - this must have been in 1990 when it came out on VHS - tried to interest my friends Andrew D, Alex and Paul in watching The Five Doctors, but they just wanted to fast-forward (fast forward!) to the action sequences, instead of watching the whole thing. We tended to watch Paul's Blakes' 7 videos instead (I was outvoted); these were the long edited compilation videos that were out at that time. Blakes' 7 got roundly mocked on these viewings. In particular, a line reading of Paul Darrow as Avon "This one is dead also" from Space Fall tickled the assembled throng (except Paul); who knows what they would have made of Darrow's much riper performance in the Doctor Who story Timelash!

Reaction:

This is not really a prequel to William Hartnell's 1966 story The Smugglers of course. As a plot point in The Curse of the Black Spot involves the tossing of Avery's accumulated treasure overboard, it's difficult to see how a large hoard of it came to be hidden in a crypt in England; maybe the villainous Pike from the Hartnell story was a crew member of Avery's before the events of the Black Spot, and Avery gathered two hoards over the years, one of which he hid in Cornwall, and one he kept onboard his ship. Apart, though, from creating minor issues for continuity-enamoured enthusiasts like myself, the story is fairly inoffensive to my mind. It is deliberately positioned as a self-contained genre-sampling romp, a palate-cleanser after the big two-parter series launch of The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon. It does everything you'd expect, swordfights, treasure, stowaway cabin boys, mutinous swarthy knaves, the plank. Costume, staging and music combine to perfectly evoke the genre. The use of a real ship in dock for the above deck sequences adds an extra few Duobloons worth of production value, but the sets that represent below decks (and the siren's spaceship) are pretty good too. The pirate guest cast is the epitome of the solid, UK character actor and supporting artist ensembles that one would put together for such a production (just like the similar crews of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, put together from similar quality stock). The regulars all get something fun to do - Karen Gillan as Amy gets to cosplay and wave a sword around, Arthur Darvill gets to do the comedy dope act that he excels at when taken over by the siren's song, and Matt Smith gets lots of scenes with the biggest guest star Hugh Bonnerville, bouncing off one another with 'Captain envy' as a theme.

Underpinning this is an interesting science fiction idea, which efficiently explains lots of the trappings of pirate curse legends. It's not a particularly original science fiction idea, of course, being one of the go-to inspirations of this era: abandoned / out of place technology seeming to be an evil monster. Writer Stephen Thompson even brings in a role for a child actor too, only unable to squeeze in any timey-wimey paradoxes to make it the hat trick of Showrunner Steven Moffat's favourites. The depiction of the siren is great, which helps enormously, with Lily Cole as a beautiful floating wraith who before you can say "that early scene in Ghostbusters" turns into a fearsome projection in attack mode. There's also a bit of humour mined from the initially ludicrous situation of the big, butch pirates frightened of getting so much as a scratch. Taken on its own by the random sampling of the blog's approach, it is much more effective than when seen in situ of an ongoing series. At the time, the obvious thing that was glaring was why the Doctor isn't following up on the many loose ends of the ongoing Silence / mysterious girl in Spacesuit plot set up in the first story of that year. There's obviously long-form serial drama sequencing reasons why this story has to be a palate-cleanser, but they're not story or character reasons. Interestingly, though, in isolation without those worries, another issue becomes more obvious: the script has a couple of sizeable holes.

I'm not talking so much about Lee Thingy from Press Gang disappearing, as - I'm assuming but pretty confidently - that that was an editing snafu, not a script problem. It doesn't exactly help matters, though. No, there are other holes. For example, all the way through the first section of the narrative, the siren is assumed by audience and characters alike to be a killer; the Doctor advises everyone on his changing theories for how best to protect themselves from being attacked by the siren, including by getting rid of all the reflective surfaces in the ship, and they look to escape. The TARDIS gone, their only escape is to wait for the winds to pick up, and when that happens - and Rory goes overboard - apropos of nothing, with no build up, the Doctor decides the siren isn't dangerous after all and they should all get zapped by her. I mean maybe the scene of his growing awareness that things are not what they seem was cut out along with Lee Thingy from Press Gang's comeuppance scene, but I doubt it - it just seems like a switch is flipped and the Doctor then knows the plot needs to move on to its next phase. Perhaps the deleted scenes also included a convincing explanation for how the 17th century crew can pilot the futuristic spaceship at the end, or how an untrained Amy can save Rory with CPR. That last script decision seems a bit irresponsible, and also unnecessary. They can (and do) get Rory into the TARDIS which presumably has lots of devices to give a plausible scientific reason for saving Rory. Instead, the script goes for an unearned emotional crescendo where Amy is the only one to save Rory because of her love for him. I don't think it quite works. The Curse of the Black Spot is a story that doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but some of these issues (there's also a flippant tone from the Doctor throughout the early sessions that grates) means that as an audience member I could barely clear that low bar.

Connectivity: 

The Mechanoids in The Chase are the prototype for the regular Steven Moffat trope mentioned above (in stories he either writes or exec produces) of technology that appears to be evil but is just following the logic of its programming, just as the medical hologram / siren is in this story. Plus, both The Curse of the Black Spot and that 1960s Dalek story feature a sailing ship's entire crew forced to abandon the ship by an alien force.

Deeper Thoughts:

Beginnings and endings, but not necessarily in that order. Blogging The Curse of the Black Spot has completed another season of Doctor Who. Jumping around randomly to select stories as I do, the completion of any season is not a predictable event; but, having been covering stories for the blog for more than seven years now it becomes inevitable that - if I keep up the same rate of posting - it will happen more and more. Counting the classic and new series years together, there are a total of 39 seasons, or series if you prefer, as well as a number of specials in the gaps between. I have now completed six of them: season 3 (first Doctor William Hartnell's third year in the role), season 8 (third Doctor Jon Pertwee's second), season 17 (fourth Doctor Tom Baker's sixth and penultimate run), season 23 (sixth Colin Baker's second and final full season, which happened to act as one long linked story), and new series 13 (thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's third and final full season, ditto). The latest completed one is new series 6 (eleventh Doctor Matt Smith's second year). There are 33 to go (and soon there will be more, as new stories are being made as I write this). There's a philosophical conception from antiquity about time that suggest humans are walking backwards into the future - able to see the past and our beginnings receding before us, but turned against what's coming next, unable to peek at it. I wonder what will be the final story I ever cover for the blog. I have no way of knowing, though it's fun to speculate. In that past I see in front of me, though, I can see times when I've done something similar to this experiment before.

Any completist Doctor Who fan who wasn't lucky enough to watch the series from its first episode in November 1963 has had to catch up with stories as they were repeated, or as they came out on VHS, or DVD, until bit by bit - in random order inevitably - they reach the end. So, what were the first and last stories I watched for every Doctor? Let's start with the starts. From Colin Baker's first appearance in the title role (in late 1984), it's a fairly easy and prosaic journey, as that was when I was fully on the Who bus and making every regular stop. I'd finally been born (nine whole seasons of Who went out before I even existed, wasted), had grown up to an age when I could watch the programme, discovered it, and then become a regular viewer. There were always difficulties catching any particular episode, though - even in the video age, I ended up failing to record something and missing it on occasion. I was blessed (cursed?) though that I managed to see every minute of every episode of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's debuts, The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani, respectively. I'm only going to count whole stories for the purposes of this exercise: I caught many glimpses of stories before I properly started watching the series, and have watched many orphaned episodes and audio-only versions of missing episodes since; that doesn't reflect the original experience, though. Paul McGann's first (and last) story was fairly easy to catch, as it was available on sell-through VHS before it was even shown on TV. And from Christopher Eccleston on, it became impossible to miss (with regular repeats and then iplayer to fall back on). So, the first stories for every Doctor since Colin were the first ones originally broadcast. That goes for the last ones too (it's one and the same for Paul McGann, of course).

As I've mentioned many times, my indoctrination into Doctor Who was a series of repeats in late 1981 called The Five Faces of Doctor Who. As such, I know that my first stories watched for the second, third and fourth Doctors were - in order - The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis. This is where random sampling can get interesting: the first ever Tom Baker story I watched in full was his swansong in the role. I missed the first couple of episodes of the William Hartnell repeat in the Five Faces season, so the first ever full story I saw of his was the first Hartnell VHS release, The Daleks. Every other episode of Peter Davison's first series clashed with Cub Scouts, and we didn't have a video in my house in 1982; but, thanks to the power of malingering, I managed to catch all the episodes of Davison's third story Kinda, so that was my first of his (still random, but I couldn't have chosen better - it's one of the very best and a firm favourite to this day). Endings for Doctors Three to Five took a bit of detective work, but the situation is nonetheless relatively straightforward. If not being in full colour makes no difference, then my last Pertwee was Invasion of the Dinosaurs on VHS in 2003 (with the first episode in black and white); but, if all the colour has to be there, then it was the restored The Mind of Evil on DVD ten years later. If full colour is properly restored to the first part of Dinosaurs for Blu-ray though (the DVD had a semi-successful restoration that was not seen as broadcast standard), then that will re-take the final place instead. My final Tom Baker was The Sun Makers (see the First Time Round section of its blog post for more details), and my final Peter Davison was Time-Flight (of which I missed one episode when it was first broadcast, so I caught up when the VHS release came out in summer 2000).

The first two Doctors Hartnell and Troughton are a little bit more problematical. Do animations count? If so, I may never be done as all those missing episodes and stories might get animated eventually, but nobody can know when. Besides, as mentioned above, stories experienced wholly or partially in audio form are not the stories as originally made or broadcast, even if they are accompanied by wonderful moving art; also, any of the stories might get rediscovered in their original format after having been animated. Adhering to the 'as broadcast' rule, the final Hartnell story I ever watched was The Gunfighters, when it came out on VHS in 2002. It was in a box set with two other stories, but I'd already seen both of them by that point. The final Patrick Troughton story I caught up with was The Enemy of the World, which was rediscovered and released on DVD in 2013. Before that one was known to exist, it was The Tomb of the Cybermen, when that was rediscovered and released on VHS in 1992. Before Tomb was known to exist, the final story of Troughton's I caught up on (at least that I knew existed at the time) was The Dominators in 1990. Given that the VHS range only started in the mid-1980s, to have provided every Troughton story I hadn't seen as early as 1990 just shows how few of the stories of his tenure survived in the archives back then. I am therefore grateful for the animations, and hope they continue (rumour is that their budgets have been cut and so there might be a gap before new animations are worked on, but I live in hope). It also brings back the mystery, which is what Who's all about: after the announced The Abominable Snowmen, nobody knows which of those missing stories of the first two Doctors will be animated - or possibly even rediscovered - next, let alone last. Predictions are a mug's game; I could go out on a limb and guess that the last story I ever cover for the blog would be, ooh, I dunno, The Stones of Blood, and then find that's the very next story to come up randomly. Oh.

In Summary:

Yo-ho-plot-(ho)les! 

The God Complex

 

Chapter The 211th, where you've not gotta have faith, you've not gotta have faith, faith, faith-uh...

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in what appears to be an empty 1980s hotel, but the walls are moving - separating them from the TARDIS - and each bedroom is filled with a different horror that seems to have been specifically tailored for a particular person. They meet with others that have been brought there against their will: Rita, Howie, and Joe are from Earth, Gibbis is from Tivoli, a planet of mole-like people who pathologically yearn to be subjugated by invading forces. Joe is already possessed by some process that makes him worship a Minotaur creature, also resident. The Doctor sees that the place is designed to evoke fear, so tells everyone to hold on to their deep rooted certainties to keep the fear at bay. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of the right tactic, as it is the faith in a higher power invoked by the fear that makes people susceptible. Joe trusts in luck, Howie believes in conspiracy theories, Rita has her Muslim faith; and, one by one, they are taken over and killed, the Minotaur devouring their life force. When Amy starts to come under the influence too, because of her faith in the Doctor, the Doctor has to break her faith in him, Curse of Fenric-stylee, and that interruption in its food supply let's the Minotaur finally die. The hotel disappears to reveal a holodeck-like area where the TARDIS is parked. The creature is one of a race of beings that descend on planets to be worshipped as gods, and was imprisoned by ex-worshipers that turned against him. The rest, the kidnapping and scaring of people to keep him fed, was an automatic process he could not stop. The Doctor drops Gibbis home, then, concerned about Amy and Rory's safety, leaves them on Earth in a nice new flat, and goes off to face his fate at Lake Silencio.  

Context:

As a festive thing, I am watching an episode of the BBC adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights weekly with the whole family (Better Half, boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) on Sundays, 37 years on to the day from when they were first shown in 1984. The first episode on 21st November (it was a Thursday in 1984), with the final episode planned for Christmas Eve 2021. I watch this serial in the run up to Christmas periodically as a tradition, but - given that the youngest child's age is almost into double figures - this might be the last time we can do it as a family (I didn't expect the eldest to be up for it this time, but he surprised me). With one weekly telly of yore watch ongoing, I didn't want to chance my arm suggesting another. As such, I watched The God Complex on my own later on that Sunday evening after watching the latest episode of Flux earlier, from the Blu-ray disc as part of the series 6 Box set.

First Time Round:

I always find it difficult to remember the details of my first watch of stories of this vintage. The series had been running long enough to become part of the furniture, rather than shiny and new, by Matt Smith's second year, and there was enough going on in my life to distract me. In general, I was still watching with the Better Half on the day of broadcast, time-shifted after putting our then two young children to bed. It would be another year or two before the youngsters were regularly watching new Doctor Who. The only thing of note I can recall was that long before it was shown, a dedicated trailer for the story was available online, before even a glimpse was revealed of the other episodes in this subsection of the series (Matt Smith's second run was split into two with a mid-series gap of a few weeks in the middle). At first, this looked like a big vote of confidence in the story: it must be one of which the producers were very proud if they were trailing it months ahead of broadcast and ahead of the three episodes set to air before. It turned out, though, that the trailer had just been prepared for Comic-Con as the writer Toby Whithouse had been on a panel to talk about it there. 

Reaction:

Despite it not necessarily being thought worthy of being trailed ahead of every other story in series 6 part 2, and it just being a Comic-con related coincidence, I still think this is one of the best of the bunch (not just of the second half, but of all the stories of 2011). Some of those other stories had dabbled in overblown space opera, or got too deep into the intricacies of the human condition, and most had got tangled up in the increasingly convoluted series arc plots. The God Complex just presents a high-concept horror scenario, efficiently and cleanly. It also touches on the overall arc, but just with a well-integrated and significant character moment between Amy and the Doctor at the end. Sometimes less is more, and if The God Complex is simple compared to the stories around it, it is elegantly so. First up, the concept is a strong one, an abandoned hotel with bespoke fears in every room that's really a prison with in-built feeding system for a fake god. This allows for a wide diversity of different tableaux that could appear in each room, some of which get almost Fellini-esque in their gleeful visuals. It also allows for a decent "the Doctor's got it wrong" reversal, when the Doctor realises that it is not fear that the Minotaur at the centre of this labyrinth feeds on, but faith, and that all his advice up to now has been the opposite of what was required. The transformation of each person as their faith gets hijacked is nicely chilling, with the possessed getting a catchphrase "Praise him" as is a tradition in Doctor Who stories (like "Burn with Me" in 42, or "Contact Has Been Made" in classic Who story The Invisible Enemy); as people succumb one by one, obviously and inevitably the ante is upped as one of the regular cast (Amy in this instance) says "Praise Him" towards the end of the story.

The production design to encapsulate this concept is very strong throughout. There's clearly something about the idea of abandoned hotel corridors and rooms, particularly ones with chintzy 1980s decor, that is unsettling. If I remember right, some idea of a story set in an empty hotel was one that had been discussed from around the relaunch of the series in 2005 but never made it to screen before this point. As well as the retro furnishing, there's all the different fears to visualise, and they are all done very well, with the roomful of laughing ventriloquists' dummies being a highlight for me. The design and execution of the Minotaur is impeccable too: this is an aged and weary beast, and that really come across. Its dialogue being whispered groans that only the Doctor can understand and translate is a good choice too. It's a teensy bit clumsy at the end though, when the Doctor translates the creature's dying words about an aged creature drifting through space to whom death would come as a release, and we realise that the creature is talking about the Doctor when the Time Lord slavishly repeats "I wasn't talking about myself". The line just needs to be forced out of him a bit more - he repeats the other stuff, the creature says something else, the Doctor pauses with a sad look, Amy asks what it said and maybe asks again, and finally he tells her. That would work better. It's a minor flaw, though.

Another quibble is with the character of Gibbis, and again it's a minor one. The Tivoli are an interesting race, a planet of space Uriah Heaps, outwardly humble but inwardly calculating. The make-up job is good, and David Walliams (a lifelong Doctor Who fan) is having fun playing him as the cowardly comic relief. It's just that the script then has to hammer the point home of his cowardice being a passive aggressive technique to allow his survival, in a way that Dickens never had to for Uriah. It was already shown, it didn't need to be told too. As well as Walliams, the cast - guest and regular - are on top form, and their talents marshalled well by director Nick Hurran. Matt Smith has some great moments, not least the emotional (temporary) farewell with Karen Gillan as Amy at the end, but also in smaller moments - near the beginning, there's a scene where he's doing the eccentric act (the Doctor I mean, not Matt Smith) and turns in an instant to thoughtful and worried when nobody else can see. Arthur Darvill as Rory does dry humour very well, but also gets a nice moment where he mentions that Howie had previously overcome a stammer, an everyday victory far away from "saving the universe" but nonetheless important. It's nice too that Rory, normally the weak link who's always getting killed, is the one who's immune to the effects of the Minotaur and his prison, and for a similar reason - he believes in simple kindness as a nurse, and doesn't get into anything more high falutin'. It's a bit odd when the Doctor says that this is why the Minotaur prison "kept showing [Rory] a way out", as that only happened once and Rory didn't get to tell anyone about it - I'm assuming this means some moments ended up on the cutting room floor for time.

Best of the guest cast is as Amara Karan as Rita; the character is presented immediately as unflappable and resourceful, with the Doctor joking that she's companion material, so the savvy in the audience know her life expectancy is limited. She has some great moments both serious and sparky / funny ("You're a Muslim." "Don't be frightened."). When her inevitable death comes it's a magnificent scene: she bravely draws danger away from the rest of the party, then begs the Doctor not to watch her fate on the close circuit TV and instead remember her as she was before her dignity was taken away. She faces her final moments "at peace", and then Matt Smith gets to do righteous rage once she's gone (which he does very well too). The story has some nice little nods for fans (linking the Minotaur back to the titular foes in The Horns of Nimon for example) and some links into the overall story of the eleventh Doctor - we see Caitlin Blackwood as little Amelia again, the Doctor looks into his room and sees his greatest fear but the audience is not privy to it, and won't find out what he saw until his swan song story. As well as this, there's great music and good effects work; it's a gem.

Connectivity: 

The God Complex is the third story in a row (following The Myth Makers and The Lazarus Experiment) with a three word title starting with the definitive article and themes taken from writings from antiquity (here it is the legend of the Minotaur in the labyrinth).

Deeper Thoughts:

Nick Fletcher MP's speech; a restrained reaction. Though it doesn't go as far as to say faith is bad exactly, The God Complex does posit that it is dangerous and leaves one open to exploitation. This made me muse on my own faith or lack thereof; I'm probably closest aligned to Rory in this narrative: I have no particular religion or superstition. I suppose I could be seen to be more like Amy in one regard, though, in that I do have a disproportionate amount of admiration for the positive power of the Doctor. Really, of course, I mean Doctor Who the series more than the character. It's a large set of generally well written and well intentioned drama segments, often with a moral position to be accepted or challenged, and it all comes together to form an enriching cultural artefact - no, in fact, more than that, a cultural phenomenon. I truly believe that it makes the lives of those that engage with it just a little bit better; it certainly has for me. Is this faith, though? It's not exactly going to be a faith that's tested too strenuously. Even if one doesn't like it, the worst that one could say about Doctor Who is that it is a bit silly but harmless. Nobody could seriously think that what happens in a family TV show about a benevolent time-travelling alien could possibly have a negative impact on the world. Could they? This would, of course, mean that I would struggle to stretch the topic to make up a few paragraphs of Deeper Thoughts, and would have to think of something else to talk about (Maybe a treatise on why 80s decor is inherently such a good a fit for a horror story? "The long shadow of the Overlook Hotel"? Hmm... needs work.) Praise be, then, when on Thursday 25th November 2021, Nick Fletcher, a Conservative MP in the UK, made a speech in a Westminster Hall debate and suddenly gave me all the material I would need.

A positive role model

It was a speech that - if one is charitable, which I don't see why I should be, but I'll try - was based on a dubious premise. If one isn't inclined to be charitable, one might describe it as batshit crazy. Fletcher's vague thrust was that the dramatic arts (his focus being TV and film) have reduced the number of positive male role models, and - deprived of these - young men have increasingly turned to crime. I know this is demonstrably bobbins even in summary, but I still think it is worth going through the relevant section of his words - words, don't forget that were planned and written in advance, not said off the cuff by someone's crazy uncle in the snug of some pub after a boozy Sunday afternoon - line by line. "There seems to be a call," said he, the Member of Parliament for Don Valley, "From a tiny but very vocal minority that every male character, or good role model, must have a female replacement". Maybe this minority is so tiny that they don't show up in a scan, because: where are they? There's no organisation, no pressure group, not even a discussion forum I've ever seen that has been actively calling for any male character to be recast or rewritten as a woman, let alone all of them. One of the examples he gave was of course the Doctor in Doctor Who, and that's a world I know a great deal about. In all the years since Tom Baker first joked about his replacement potentially being a she - decades in which I have been studiously aware of the minutiae of every aspect of the programme and its fandom - I have never seen any person of any sex or gender orientation ever demand that the Doctor becomes a woman. They might have thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to try, or they might have considered that they'd be pleased if it ever happened, but that's not the same thing. Once it happened, though, I did see a small but vocal minority of fans that whinged on about wanting to turn things back the way they were, but the less said about them the better.

Another positive role model 

Fletcher continues: "One only needs to look at the discussions surrounding who will pay the next James Bond". Which discussions are these? If one googles "Who will play the next James Bond?" the first hit, as anyone who had been following the discourse over recent years would probably have guessed, is about Idris Elba. The next ten hits are lists of the usual suspects. Apart from Elba, there's Henry Cavill, Tom Hardy, Regé-Jean Page, etc. etc. The odd site's article pops a woman onto the shortlist to spice things up a bit, but a concerted campaign it is not. The simple but effective rejoinder to Fletcher would be that the discussions surrounding who will play the next James Bond are silly-season puffery, of no import whatsoever, and maybe shouldn't be a source for a politician's speech even if they said what the politician intimated they said, which they don't. There's more: "And it's not just James Bond, in recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, The Equaliser, all replaced by women." The sheer desperation of not being able to list four roles without having to scrape the barrel by including The Equalizer is quite something (many people online hadn't even realised that this female-led version existed, so Fletcher might have succeeded in getting it some new viewers). It's an odd mix of titles. The Paul Feig Ghostbusters is five years old now, and famously didn't make sufficient money back to be considered a success. The franchise lurched back to the original cast in a film that was new and in cinemas at the same moment Fletcher was making his speech. So, those particular role models - if they ever were such a thing - are restored to masculinity. The Equaliser is a recast in the relatively low profile series, but in the big Hollywood film version before that (going back a bit, but only two years before the female Ghostbusters flick) it was still a man in the title role.

Fletcher giving the speech, 25th November 2021 

Luke Skywalker didn't get recast, so I'm assuming that Fletcher thinks he's been replaced by Rey. But they're different characters, and they both appear in the Star Wars films together, so how exactly has been Luke been replaced? Is Fletcher upset that Luke isn't the young swashbuckling hero anymore? Putting aside that I'd ideally like my politicians' statements to be several cuts above the level of chatter you get in an online nerd boy forum, the only way for Luke to still be the young hero is if he was played by someone who is not Mark Hamill, a recasting choice that would likely be the only thing less popular in those nerd boy forums than The Last Jedi was. Fletcher continues: "Men are left with The Krays and Tommy Shelby". Where to start? The Krays were real people not characters, why have we suddenly switched? Is there a fictionalised TV series or film about the Krays on at the moment? Legend was 2015, but I suppose that's only a year before the Ghostbusters were last played by women, so maybe he was referring to that. Peaky Blinders hasn't been on TV for over two years either, though it is coming back in 2022. The main thing, though, is that these aren't the only two examples of TV or films around that feature male characters. What about Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Strange, Sherlock Holmes, Endeavour Morse, Withnail, Marwood? Completely random selection off the top of my head, but none of them has been recast as a woman in a big film or TV series - they are still around as positive role models (it might just be me that sees Withnail that way, but even so I'd pay to see a reboot with two female leads - that could be fantastic).

Some other dummies

Maybe these examples aren't current enough for Fletcher. So, what about the top ten films in the UK at the time Fletcher made the speech? First off, there's the slight embarrassment for him of a James Bond and a Ghostbusters film in there, with the roles being incontrovertibly played by men. There are then a couple of ensemble pieces (The Eternals, The Addams Family 2) which include men in positive lead roles as part of the ensemble. Of the remaining six, only one has a female protagonist (Spencer), and the remaining five (Dune, King Richard, The Boss Baby 2, Venom: Let there Be Carnage, and Ron's Gone Wrong) all have male protagonists and none of them are crime lords. And even if they were, that would not cause a single person watching to turn to crime. Criminals are not made by TV or film. It's seductively easy for politicians to suggest that there is some causal link, because the things that are much more likely to have an impact - poverty, educational under-investment, cuts to council facilities for young people, reduction in police, reduction in health funding including mental health services, etc. etc - are all things for which the government, run by the party of which Nick Fletcher is a part, are responsible. If Fletcher wants positive male role models, he should maybe try to become one, and fight to get that investment flowing again to help the nation's male youth. If he doesn't want to do that, maybe it's time a woman took over his role? 

  

In Summary:

I like it a lot, and as it has some strong roles for women in there it would probably annoy Nick Fletcher MP, and that makes me like it even more.

The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

Chapter The 205th, where it's double trouble for the Doctor and friends as they are ganged up on by Gangers.

Plot:

The Doctor is going to drop Amy and Rory off to get fish and chips, as he's clearly up to something, probably related to the inconclusive pregnancy scan he is covertly doing on Amy (which was well dodgy, looking back, wasn't it?). Before he can, a solar tsunami hits the TARDIS bringing it down in a 22nd century military facility situated in a 13th century island monastery. The five person crew there are pumping acid off the island. The hazards of the work are mitigated by their operating avatars of themselves, while they sit safe in remote harnesses. The avatars are made of a programmable matter known as "flesh". When another shockwave hits the island, it knocks everyone out, and makes the flesh avatars, or Gangers (short for doppelgänger; avatar is just as short, of course, but maybe that name was already taken somehow) self aware and self-controlling. With all the same memories and feelings as their respective human, including for their loved ones back home, there's a real moral quandary to face about how each pair can co-exist, but the Gangers are not yet stable. Jennifer's Ganger is particularly unstable; her human version is already dead, and this version seems intent on starting a war with the humans. The tsunami has made the facility too dangerous to stay in, and they need to evacuate it, but people don't know exactly who is who, and that goes for Who too. The Doctor, after a close encounter with the flesh vat earlier, has also been duplicated.

Amy doesn't trust the copied Doc (who she can tell apart from the original as they are wearing different shoes, the Doctor she arrived with having had an accident with some acid that melted his usual ones). The Doctors work together to try to calm the situation down and get everyone to safety. A lot of people, in both forms, get killed, including Ganger Jennifer, who transforms into a monster towards the end somehow. The Doctors switched shoes early on as a test for Amy; she unwittingly lets the original know hes going to die in Lake Silencio. The TARDIS team, two Gangers and one original escape in the TARDIS, each of their respective doubles having been destroyed (conveniently side-stepping the moral quandary). Ganger Jimmy has to take on parenting of his son; Cleaves and Ganger Dicken go to their HQ to blow the whistle on the dubious use of the Flesh. Ganger Cleaves and Ganger Doctor get dissolved, as they've bravely stayed on to ensure the facility blows up and Jennifer is finished off. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor reveals that Amy is really a Ganger and has been since being kidnapped before they visited America. He turns the Ganger Amy to goo, which is a bit harsh really given everything they've learned. The real Amy wakes up on Demons Run, and she's just about to give birth. To Be Continued.

Context:

This time, after several stories watched on my own, I was joined by the younger two of my three children (boy of 12, girl of 9) as we watched the episodes from the series 6 Blu-ray box set on a Sunday afternoon in October 2021. Surprisingly, they weren't sated by watching the first episode as I'd expected, so we watched the second straight away at their insistence, rounding off the Ganger plot. Of course, the second episode of this story also ends on an intriguing cliffhanger, but the middle child remembered how A Good Man Goes to War played out sufficiently to explain it to his sister, and they were happy not to watch further.

First Time Round:

I usually can't remember anything about watching Matt Smith stories for the first time, except the general descending rollercoaster feeling of high hopes being disappointed, either greatly or slightly. This one, though, I can remember a few things. This is a shame in a way, as usually when I can't remember in these situations I've been able to share an unconnected anecdote. I could have told you about starting at university, which - coincidentally - is 30 years ago pretty much to the day as I write this. I travelled up from the south coast of the UK to Durham, taking the InterCity from (I assume, I wish I had a clear memory of it) London King's Cross, with my school friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir (mentioned previously a few times on the blog). We both had plans to write sketches for the Durham Revue, and - at least for me, can't speak for how serious Zahir was taking it - to become professional writers. We had lots of fun that day and thereafter (I remember alighting from the train in Durham station singing "We're getting educated in the morning, ding dong the bells are gonna chime" - it was fun for me at least, I can't speak for those around me). On the way up, I had mentioned that there was a Doctor Who convention TARDIS in Durham happening within a few days of term starting, which I was tempted to scrape together the money to attend. Zahir thought we'd be too busy studying, and too strapped for cash. I sometimes wonder how I'd have found it if I hadn't listened to him, but I accepted his wisdom at that moment.

Anyway, 20 years on from that, I was something of a professional writer having been paid a couple of times for screenplays that didn't get produced. I had made the acquaintance of Matthew Graham, author of this Doctor Who story, who was something of a mentor. I remember emailing him that this double-parter was very good, but that I preferred his previous story, the generally unloved Fear Her. He replied, telling me jokingly that I was "perverse", but I stand by it. Fear Her is great and underrated. I don't think many of my issues with the Ganger story are with the script, though: my other main memory of that first watch was the trailer at the end of part 1. I remember it (and I felt the same on this recent watch) as a succession of under-lit moments of people shouting. Honestly, watch the trailer: it is various shots of pale people in gloomy spaces going Arggghh Oooh Urggggh Wahhhhh Arggh and such. It's enough to give one a headache. I'm sure they could turn the lights up a bit and not lose atmosphere too. I preferred the sunny, colourful palette of Doctor Who stories from a few years earlier, including Fear Her, so all of series 6 is a bit grey and moody for my taste.

Reaction:

I remember reading an interview with Matthew Graham about his first stint on Doctor Who, when he was in discussions with Russell T Davies before Fear Her was written. I can't find this interview online, so I'm paraphrasing, but Graham said he had lots of ideas with deep themes about the nature of existence. Davies stopped him, and asked him how old his son was (at the time, he was seven); Davies then told him to write something his seven-year-old son would like. On his return to the show, working this time with Steven Moffat as showrunner, Graham got a chance to do something more akin to that initial pitch. In between the two, he had of course got to dwell on some similar themes within a genre framework in his co-creations Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes; but, he's still having a good time digging in to some material that's a little less kid-friendly here. The existential angst created by being presented by an exact copy of oneself, complete with memories and feelings, is explored in the quieter moments within the more generous running time afforded by a two-part story. More than his own long-running shows, though, Doctor Who demands immediate thrills and action and cliffhangers, so eventually the philosophising has to go on hold. The difficulties for the characters are side-stepped by the convenience of there being no duplicates of any single person left alive by the end. This isn't a criticism, though, as it couldn't happen any other way. There could be an interesting tale to tell about Mark Bonnar's Jimmy and his life after the action of the story, taking his place in a family while knowing he's not the quote unquote real Jimmy, but this is not the place to tell it.

Bonnar's performance sells some of the subtleties without them needing to be more spelled out, and it's one of the big plusses of this story. The scene where the Ganger Jimmy has to talk to his / his original's child is one of the best of the Matt Smith era, despite a not quite 100% perfect child performance being involved (something that unfortunately tended to impact the productions of Graham's Doctor Who scripts). Pitch perfect, though, this time providing the light relief, is Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes regular Marshall Lancaster as Buzzer. His lines, such as "No need to get poncey - it's just gunge" are well written and delivered. Regulars Matt Smith and Karen Gillan fully commit to the material, exploring the difficulty Amy has dealing with the idea that both original and Ganger Doctors could be the quote unquote real Doctor. Sarah Smart as Jennifer has a more difficult time. Her and Arthur Darvill's Rory character are supposed to form some kind of bond, but the direction doesn't highlight it sufficiently, and so it seems to come from nowhere. There's also the challenge of making her character's descent into villainy and monstrousness believable. The script is clever giving her a traumatic childhood memory, an inbuilt wish to be some other, stronger version of herself. Collectively, writing, direction and performance just about pull it off when she's in humanoid or semi-humanoid form, but believability is stretched to breaking point when Jennifer turns into a CGI monster. Doctor Who being Doctor Who means that there's a pressure for there to be a big monster at the end, but there seems to be no easily discernible reason either why or how Jennifer should mutate in such a way.

In that original conversation with Graham, Davies was not trying to state that Doctor Who couldn't ever do deeper themes of course. It was just that the brief for Fear Her was that it should act as a small stand-alone adventure before that year's explosive and emotional finale; limits were dictated by the position in the season and by the budget available. As such, one can't blame Graham for enjoying being able to go full on Doctor Who in his next script, with monster action and scares and running around creepy tunnels; previously in Fear Her he'd only had "two blokes with a red lamp rattling a wardrobe" as he put it in an interview with Den of Geek around the time of the launch of the Ganger two-parter. The pale slightly unformed versions of the Ganger characters are a great make-up job and very effective in horror moments like the jump cut revealing them as a storm rages. The action is mostly very effective (it can get a bit muddled and hard to follow at times - the geography of the facility is never adequately established as the pace of movement is so frenetic and the lighting so low; this is a minor quibble, though). Another element that Graham gets to deploy that he didn't first time out is the cliffhanger. He gets to do two, and they're both cliff-Gangers if you will as they both revolve around the reveal that someone familiar has been made out of the gunge. The first episode's cliffhanger is interesting because of its inevitability rather than surprise. There have been so many hints building up that the Doctor's Ganger is forming, that it couldn't have caught anyone unawares, but the intrigue of what it's going to be like with two identical Doctors propels the narrative forward into the second part.

The cliffhanger ending of episode two, leading in to the next story written by Steven Moffat, is the one major problem with the Ganger story. The other quibbles above would be completely acceptable on their own, but the imposition of the season's arc narrative on this two-parter fundamentally undermines it. The story, after all, demonstrates that a Ganger copy has just as much right to exist as its original form. The ongoing series, though, can't have two Amy Ponds wandering around (think of the visual effects cost), so when it is revealed that she has been kidnapped and replaced by a Ganger since before the current season started (which, to be fair, is a great twist), the Ganger has to be removed in some way. Graham and Moffat are painted into a corner, and have no choice but to have the Doctor kill the Amy Ganger, something he's spent the two previous episodes saying wouldn't be a nice thing to do. There's an attempt to paper over the cracks with a line for the Doctor "Given what we've learned, I'll be as humane as I can", but it's not enough. To end that way, the entire story leading up to it has got to be changed. A simple way to fix it would be to have the Doctor's researches lead him to be able to start a trace of the signal back to Madame Kovarian (the eye patch lady controlling the Amy Ganger) and for it then to be Kovarian who breaks the link, killing the Amy Ganger (she doesn't need to keep the deception up anymore now Amy's going to give birth, after all).

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Arachnids in the UK end with an attempted corporate cover-up; in both, the situation involves new creations that have come about by accident causing difficulty because of human interference. Both stories also mention popular singers (Ed Sheeran, Dusty Springfield).

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Bad Company.  I'm not going to moan on about social media again in the Deeper Thoughts section as I did enough of that last time. Just briefly to say that since I posted a blog post last, Doctor Who twitter (and other places, but that's where I saw the fall out) was nonplussed at the decision to do a fake takedown of all the Doctor Who socials as a publicity gimmick, and a few people were disproportionately annoyed about it. Hey-ho. Ignoring that, the issue with social media is that it's so polarising, almost as if one has to hammer one's personality about a bit to make it fit into some pre-conceived slot. I am a bit of a leftie but I don't conform to the stereotype, for example, in despising all big business. I've indeed spent almost all of my working life at the day job employed at big capitalist organisations. Like anything involving lots of people, a large company is a complex system capable of doing awful, but also wonderful things. For some reason, though, in Doctor Who, the complexity is dialled down, and every company depicted in the series that employs more than, say, two people is bad. The contractor company depicted in The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People, which abuses the Gangers and tries to cover up the events at the facility, is just one example but is fairly representative.

I 'm struggling to think of any company in Doctor Who's long history that is featured significantly in a story and portrayed in a positive way. The obvious ones that leap into my mind are the IMC in Colony in Space (willing to commit mass murder for profit), or International Electromatics in The Invasion (subjugating humanity for the Cybermen), or Cybus Industries (doing the same as International Electromatics, but in a parallel universe). Looking at the most recent run of Jodie Whittaker stories last year, the first handful all included at least one company: Lenny Henry's tech company in Spyfall (evil), the tourism company in Orphan 55 (amoral at best), Tesla's company (good, but we only actually see two employees, and the enterprise is doomed to failure), and Edison's Company (many more employees, not nearly so nice). Many stories I've blogged this year (Oxygen, The Sun Makers, Planet of Giants, Dragonfire) have also centred around nefarious corporate shenanigans. Obviously, its not just private companies that are up to no good in the series; very often, military or governmental organisations are infiltrated by villains, or run by people who've gone insane, or both. But the Doctor has happily worked for or with UNIT and Torchwood, at least. What about a commercial company? It wouldn't be a very good look, I guess, for him / her to have an enduring working relationship with an entity that wants to make a profit. The only times I can remember were briefly held stints in a call centre in The Lodger, and a department store in Closing Time. Neither (fictional) company was portrayed in a particularly poor light either, but just two tiny examples in nearly 60 years is not very much.

It's also not just Doctor Who. Science fiction and fantasy does have a tendency only to include companies so that they can be the bad guys. The name of the firm in the Ganger 2-parter, Morpeth Jetsan, has something of the flavour of Weyland Yutani, the big corporation responsible for nasty goings-on in the Alien films and elsewhere. Heroic teams, such as the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation, have evolved beyond the use of money. Maybe this tells us that genre writers as a breed, indeed maybe all writers, with the pressure of deadlines looming as they type furiously to earn their crust, subconsciously hanker for a time when all money worries are behind them. Maybe all those evil corporations in Doctor Who were just reflections of one particular corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the evil overlords who hold the writers' livelihoods in their power. At the time of writing this, a Friday in the first half of October, that particular corporation has made itself look good at last, for Doctor Who fans at least, as it has finally - after all that mucking about on social media and teasing mentioned above - released a full trailer for the next series of Doctor Who. We only have to wait until Halloween night, the 31st October, to see a brand new episode. Even evil overlords can get it right once in a while.

In Summary:

A great idea and good script, mostly well executed, but let down by an occasional lack of clarity in the direction, and an imposed ending that just doesn't fit.