Oxygen

 

Chapter The 186th, remember capitalism = bad, kids.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor, Bill and Nardole visit a space station in the future. They are rapidly separated from TARDIS and sonic, and have to don spacesuits to breathe. These are smart suits that can walk around on their own and have some artificial intelligence built in, but they've gone wrong, Gromit! 36 casualties out of the 40 person crew are roaming the station: dead bodies having been electrocuted, animated only by their suits, trying to zap anyone still alive. The TARDIS team meet up with the final four survivors, whose suits were offline when the kill command came through (which they believe to have been down to someone hacking the system). Evading their attackers, with limited oxygen left, they have to take a space walk. In the air-lock when just about to be exposed to the vacuum of space, Bill's suit malfunctions, taking off her defective helmet. The Doctor gives her his helmet and survives the harsh conditions of space, but at the cost of his eyesight. They return to the interior of the station. Bill is then apparently killed, but it later transpires that there wasn't enough juice in her suit to do more than knock her out. Despite being blind, the Doctor works out that the suits have been deliberately programmed to kill everyone, so that the company running the station can dispose of an unprofitable crew. He wires something up so that any attempt to kill him or his friends will cause expensive damage to the station, so the suit zombies cannot attack. Back home, after dropping off the surviving crew, the Doctor pretends to Bill that his sight has returned, but confides to Nardole that it has not.   

Context:

Sat down on my own to watch the story from the Blu-ray on the Series 10 box set one afternoon during the long Easter weekend of 2021. I was soon joined by middle child (boy of 11) who watched through to the end. His sister (girl of  8) came in a few times and watched short sections too. Interestingly, there are no comments from them to relate, as whenever they were watching they were rapt and silent. You could hear a pin drop. This is usually a good sign that an episode is working for them.

First Time Round:

Watched this go out live on 13th May 2017 with all the family, not that the two youngest could remember that they'd already seen it on this latest watch. I'd published a blog post on previous story Knock Knock earlier that Saturday, but apart from that I can't remember much about that time. Based on my comments about the episode the previous week, I was enjoying the series as a whole, and Oxygen didn't stand out as being much different from Knock Knock in terms of quality. I was probably intrigued at the end as to how long they could keep the Doctor blinded, and I probably cynically expected it to be all sorted out by the following week, rather than, as it turned out, the week after.

Reaction:

It would be great to be able to do a pun and say that watching Oxygen was like a breath of fresh air (ho ho); but, it's too archetypal a story for that. It's not to say that it wasn't a fun watch both this time and when first shown, but it is written to be a straight-ahead action adventure in space, and it delivers on that promise. There's not much that's surprising. The only plot twist  - the cause of the spacesuits' malfunction - is screamingly obvious to everyone watching from early on. That leaves a linear progression through the expected story beats, with only the Doctor's exposure to the vacuum and subsequent blinding being in any way unexpected. What stops this from being dull is the conviction of everyone in front of and behind the camera. The space walk on the outside of the station, for example, shown in impressionistic gasps fading in and out, to depict Bill's POV as she drops in and out of consciousness, is a bravura sequence. In this part, and throughout, there is great production design and sound displayed, to sell the reality of the situation.

Another key element in selling the reality of the situation is the performances, and the best of them - an astonishingly powerful performance without being too showy - is Pearl Mackie as Bill. This is the first time the three main characters have been together for a full adventure, with Matt Lucas's Nardole having been kept mostly for cameos in the previous episodes. The new dynamic is good, Nardole and the Doctor are seasoned travellers taking all the dangers in their stride, demonstrating some of the glib, comedy super-heroics that the lead roles in showrunner Steven Moffat's era often tend to do. Bill, though, grounds everything, displaying a real and palpable fear without ever straying into the hackneyed old Doctor Who territory of the companion that needs to be rescued. Bill is a resourceful person put in an impossibly hostile environment. The scene in the air lock of rising tension as the small group is about to be exposed to the vacuum of space with one helmet too few is one of the best of the series; Mackie's heightened fear, but underlying bravery as she refuses to panic, is so well conveyed. The scene later on when Bill faces her imminent death, asks the Doctor to tell her a joke, and finally calls out for her Mum is wonderful too. The story's only 45 minutes long and there's lots of running around, so these great scenes come at the cost of leaving no time for the guest characters to be fleshed out. They aren't very distinct: there's the female one, the blue one, and two un-blue male ones that you can barely tell apart. One of those last two is given the tiniest of backstories (his girlfriend gets killed early on when trying to tell him she wanted to start a family, then they exchange a glance at the end), that's about it.

The satire at the story's heart is a bit toothless, but this probably doesn't matter too much: it's just a bit of window dressing really. The trouble, as mentioned above, is that the real villains are very obvious from the start. It's rare in the genre for any company running sci-fi operations not to be evil. If we were in any doubt, the early foregrounding that the company doesn't allow oxygen on the station, except that which it provides to its workers for a price, because it wants to keep that price high, is a hell of a giveaway. It might have been more sinister if the company was presented as caring and supportive right up until the moment when the team became less efficient, and then they kill 'em. The Doctor's solution at the end is a good one: he make's it unprofitable for the company algorithm to kill him and the other remaining crew members, thereby neutralising the danger. Capaldi gives it all he's got on the groan-some Dad joke line of "We're fighting the suits!" and it's almost a punch the air moment. It's also nice that there's a coda where the Doctor remembers the future history that the events we've witnessed are the beginning of the end for the company. Shades of the Duncan Jones's film Moon in that moment, I think.

Like most stories in this era there's good dialogue and great gags. I can't remember where I heard this, but I think the line "Some of my best friends are blueish" was ad-libbed by Matt Lucas; whoever wrote it, it's a funny line. The music is good too. All the elements are there, and it is effective in achieving its aim: excitement and some urgent, dramatic moments. It just doesn't achieve, but probably doesn't aspire to, anything more than that.

Connectivity: 

Both Oxygen and Colony in Space feature commercial organisations involved in mining that have a lax attitude towards the sanctity of human life. 

Deeper Thoughts:

It's like Alien never happened. There seems to be a constant refrain in Doctor Who interviews and articles where a member of the production team talks about the difference between science fiction's gleaming antiseptic environs and the grimy, dangerous realities of space exploration. I remember it being a particular selling point of some early new series episodes (The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, for example) with the refrain coming from various production personnel on the Doctor Who Confidential making-of show. There's an echo of it in the beginning voice-over in Oxygen, with the Doctor stating that sometimes "we" take space for granted with its "suits, ships" and "little bubbles of safety". Did "we", whoever we are, really take it for granted? Did anyone ever imagine that space travel was safe and shiny? Were they given such an impression by the popular sci-fi of the time? I don't think so. I think the people talking about this are thinking of one source text only, Star Trek. At least in its original TV series, Gene Roddenberry's famous creation did present space travel as sleek and shiny and safe. It did that. though, as its dramatic focus was on exploration rather than survival; it would have changed the nature of the show if there were too many stories where a broken dilithium crystal, or whatever, caused half the crew to die. As the years went by and Trek proliferated in different forms and media, it did get darker, dirtier and more dangerous on occasion anyway.

All three series of the original Star Trek were made and first broadcast before man set foot on the moon. I'm tempted to therefore give them and any TV or films before them a free pass. Until that point, nobody really knew what it was going to be like out there, and so everything was speculative. Something like 2001: A Space Odyssey was informed by space race intel, and could be seen as the epitome of sleek, shiny and safe sci-fi. But, though it has commercial space flights elegantly docking with space stations like a well choreographed ballet, it also has famous scenes of terror and survival as a crew have to deal with the sort of intransigent AI also seen in Oxygen as it tries to eject them into cold, unforgiving space. A few years later, you have the film Dark Star depicting space travel as grimy, dark and haphazard, and this is more than thirty years before The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. Even if one argues that not enough people saw Dark Star for it to have shifted perceptions, its creators refined this take in their next script, Alien. Nobody can argue that Alien didn't have cultural impact. Anyone in the 21st century saying that sci-fi presents too clean a vision of space travel has to ignore perhaps the most influential sci-fi film of the late 20th century. Even for the younger demographic that might not have been able to get into a cinema to see Alien, Star Wars has the broken down, grimy past-its-prime Millennium Falcon and lots of people getting blown up WW2 dogfight style.

In Doctor Who, these films and other trends, both fictional and based on real world space exploration, influenced. Sometimes it just made Who move in a completely different direction, as it couldn't compete, sometimes external influences did steer what appeared on screen, at least as filtered through tiny BBC budgets. In a show like The Moonbase, broadcast in 1967 when the production team were learning from ongoing news about cosmonauts and NASA, there are reasonably realistic spacesuits and weightlessness, but the moon's atmospheric pressure can be kept out by a thin plastic tray. A couple of years later, The Seeds of Death has a dangerous rocket journey to the moon which could give Apollo 13 a run for its money (ish). Even in the very first season of Doctor Who in 1963/64 there is a bleak and reasonably graphic depiction of our heroes succumbing to sickness on a radioactive planet as early as the second story, as well as visiting a more Thunderbirds / Dan Dare efficient spacecraft in the sixth. It could and did do both extremes of story, and all the permutations in between. Any debate seems to be based on a false premise; in fiction and in Doctor Who, space can be shown as safe and sleek and shiny or it can be shown as dirty and grimy and hazardous. It just depends entirely on what story is being told that particular week. Long may the show continue in all its inconsistent glory.

 

In Summary:

Not quite a breath of fresh air, but it will make you gasp in places.

Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead

Chapter The 47th, from when a Moffat scripted story was a rarer and more wonderful thing.

Plot: 
A little girl in her normal suburban living room starts having visions that her imaginative fantasy - a planet-sized library containing every book ever written - is real, and has been invaded. The Doctor and Donna are two of these invaders, having come to the library following a call for help on the psychic paper, with a mysterious kiss at the bottom. A team of space archaeologists arrive hot on their heels, led by a Professor River Song, who sent the message; she's met the Doctor loads of times, but he's not met her yet because time travel. They're investigating as 100 years previously something happened in the library, something to do with the shadows. All the people were locked in, but there’s no one inside to be seen, and no bodies. It’s all down to the Vashta Nerada, a carnivorous swarm, which has somehow infested the place. Trying to save the crew, who are getting picked off one by one, and bickering with River who appears to be his wife from the future, the Doctor at least manages to send Donna back to the TARDIS to save her. And it does save her, but not perhaps in the manner he was expecting. To be honest, to say anymore would spoil it, sweetie. If you haven’t seen it before, go and find it and watch it now… Go on, I’ll be waiting here for when you’re done… I mean it, go and watch it – it’s on Netflix for a start off, or Blu-Ray or DVD. Go!

Context: 

Watched on DVD, with a week separating the viewing of each episode, not because it was planned to recreate the original experience, it just turned out that way. As well as myself and the Better Half, only the middle child (boy, aged 7) watched the whole thing, but his older brother (aged 10) joined us for episode 1. They liked it, but were not as effusive as their Mum and Dad.

First-time round:

I remember being very interested in this one before it was broadcast: there was some puzzle you could do, if I’m remembering correctly, on the official BBC Doctor Who website, which earned one a viewing of a clip. I went ahead and did it, I was that excited to get a glimpse of the new Moffat story. I don’t remember the last time I even visited the official website, let alone stayed long enough to do a puzzle. These days, of course, I’d see the clip online because the first person to do the puzzle would have uploaded it somewhere, and it would appear on one social media feed or other before the official website had even got its boots on.

Puzzles on official websites have almost the same dusty whiff of history about them as VHS tapes or novelisations now, and yet in other ways this story feels recent. Perhaps David Tennant was so popular that he cast a long shadow, as it still seems like he only left a short while ago, but it was eight years, and his last full series, of which the Library story is part, nine years ago. I have to remind myself that when this was first shown, only one out of three of my children existed. Our eldest would have been under two, so I’d imagine there was some time-shifting involved, but we’d have watched each episode later on the same evening of its initial BBC1 broadcast.

Reaction:
This presents the tricky situation for the blog of trying to be measured and calm when I FLIPPIN’ LOVE THIS ONE!!!! It’s definitely a top 5 favourite, and that’s of all Doctor Who, not just of the new series episodes. I will try not to gush too embarrassingly, but it really is very good indeed. I have many reservations about Moffat’s work following this story; but as a writer for hire from 2005 to 2008, he was unsurpassed, melding his take on his showrunner’s emotional approach with intricate and deft plotting. Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead is a little bit messier than, say, Blink or The Girl in the Fireplace, but that’s a good thing: those earlier stories can seem too pat. The Library story is about life - particularly married life, but family life too - and that’s never straightforward.

 

In the course of two 45 minute episodes, the script manages to marry off its two main characters, the Doctor and Donna, and then effectively kill off their spouses. Then, it has its cake and eats it too, as both those spouses – River Song and Lee McAvoy – don’t really die. A criticism sometimes levelled at Moffat is that none of his Who characters ever really die.  But – and I won’t spoil it – though he survives, what happens to Lee McAvoy in his final brief scene is devastating, to the point where you want to (okay, I did) shout ‘No!’ very loudly at the screen, the first time you see it. This manages to counterbalance the literal fairy tale ending for River Song.

 

Putting out of one’s mind the future recurring role of Alex Kingston as River, and just concentrating on the character as one-shot concept, it’s very strong. Two romantically involved time travellers who don’t meet in the right order, though not necessarily 100% original – it’s The Time Traveller’s Wife squared – is something Doctor Who had never done before. Making the first meeting for him, the last ever meeting for her, is a wonderfully dark twist. River has to sacrifice herself to save the Doctor, because if it’s the other way round, they will never have a life together. Being in a relationship with someone where you want to be together, but you know one of you has to die first to make it even close to possible: it’s a perfect metaphor for marriage in my book. [But, then, I have a happy marriage; I explained this theory to a fan friend once, and he told he certainly didn’t feel that way… about his first wife; I had to concede the point.]

 

If you do consider all the future adventures of River Song, it’s remarkably consistent; nothing in the plotting contradicts anything we see in later stories, and there’s a remarkable amount of foreshadowing. I very much doubt Moffat had it all mapped out in 2008, but it’s testament to his attention to detail. It’s also testament to a storming performance by a wonderful actor: Alex Kingston arrives with the character fully formed, and owns it. She manages to have an equal level of chemistry with three very different Doctor actors over the years; that’s not luck, that’s skill.  In fact, there’s many parallels with John Barrowman’s Captain Jack, another recurring character turning up first in a Moffat two-parter, with a well-rounded story life away from the Doctor. It’s a shame the two characters never appeared in the same story.  If it wasn’t for Moffat seeming to have completed River’s arc in his two latest Capaldi Christmas specials, I’d be hoping he has this team-up saved for December 25th this year. Never mind – Big Finish will probably do it (if they haven’t already).

 

If I had to pick holes, there’s probably too many ideas. Apart from River Song, there’s the Vashta Nerada who provide enough material for a story just on their own - swarms that look like shadows and strip flesh from bone in a nanosecond, shadows that lock on to a victim, counting the shadows as a defence mechanism, people turned into spacesuited skeletons. Then there’s a child plugged into a dreamscape in a massive computer, who becomes a de facto viewer of Doctor Who’s adventures on her TV; the data ghost concept, allowing the catchphrase-tastic repeating of everyone’s dying words over and over; and Doctor Moon, and the nodes with donated faces, and the ‘saving’ of people, including the corruption of Miss Evangelista which gives her a bigger IQ.

 

This makes episode 1 a bit of bombardment, with idea after idea hitting the viewer. But episode 2 pulls everything together to a breakneck, apocalyptic but emotionally complete conclusion, and contains scene after scene of the most effective dramatic moments ever in Doctor Who.  Far too many to list, but two that I must call out as they showcase what a wonderful actor Catherine Tate is: the gut wrenching, horrific scene where her two ‘children’ disappear, and she claws at their bedding in desperation, and the last scene between Donna and Lee as they slip further and further away from each other, disappearing into the white void: “Am I real?” “Of course you’re real…I know you’re real… oh God, I hope you’re real.” All accompanied by the best single music cue Murray Gold ever wrote.

Connectivity: 

You can't get much better a connection than a story in a museum followed by a story in a library, and I didn't cheat either, completely random.

Deeper Thoughts:
Play Some Old! I said above that I was very excited in advance of this story’s original broadcast. Steven Moffat at the time was reserved one slot of the year, and annually delivered a cracker: The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink; each one built on the last in terms of crowd-pleasing scripting, and the productions were getting more sophisticated too. A lot of people at the time, at least online, thought the Library episodes were a slight disappointment, but only because a very high standard had been set. Then, before anyone had too much time to dwell on that, Moffat was taking over as showrunner, and would be delivering much more than one script a year; how could it fail to be utterly brilliant? Hmm.

We are now fast approaching the time when there will be no more Moffat Doctor Who scripts. I don’t think he’ll be tempted back to do any more once he’s delivered Capaldi’s Xmas swansong. Russell T Davies set a precedent of not writing for the show again once he’d vacated the boss role, which Moffat will probably emulate; plus, Steven will have delivered a lot more than Russell by the time he types his last INT. TARDIS. DAY. He’s done his duty. It’s doubtful that his work on the show as a whole will be thought of as well as those first four stories written for someone else’s production. As showrunner, he’s come in for a lot of flak, at least online, just as RTD did before him. Doctor Who is an extensive canon, and baked into its format is variety. No one likes it all, not even its biggest fans; often, the bits that were broadcast a while ago are said to better than the stuff being broadcast right now. This didn’t start with the World Wide Web. John Nathan Turner, producer in the 1980s, faced horrible levels of “it ain’t what it used to be” hostility. This didn’t even start with mass organised fandom; as was mentioned in my post about The Deadly Assassin, even at their start, the fan organisations were already used to the sharpening of knives.

This is common in all walks: every band who ever made more than one record is plagued by the cliché that the new material isn’t as good as ‘the early stuff’. But it sometimes seems that Doctor Who attracts more than its fair share of ire. Amusingly, someone recently tweeted a newspaper review complaining that the quality of Doctor Who had dipped. It was published during the broadcast of An Unearthly Child, the very first story in 1963. They didn’t even wait for the first whole story to be finished before they got stuck in to Verity Lambert’s work. So, Steven Moffat is in august company.

Not that it matters much anyway, but all this matters even less for Moffat, I think. If, heaven forfend, his obituary came to be written next year, I suspect it would describe him as “Sherlock and Doctor Who writer” in that order. Sherlock is the flashier show, with a fervent international fanbase, and two movie star leads; plus, Doctor Who, though his admirers and detractors alike will admit he’s made it his own during his tenure, does not belong to Moffat alone. Good luck to him in his future endeavours, but it’s hard to see how he will knock Sherlock from the top of his list. And that despite the later episodes being definitely not as good as the early ones – don’t get me started, blah, blah, blah …

In Summary:

DONNA: Is "all right" special Time Lord code for... "really really good, near peerless, best the show has ever managed, utterly utterly marvellous"?

DOCTOR: Why?

DONNA: Cos Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead is all right.