Doctor Who – Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS – Mad Man with a Cardboard Box

This is the episode of Doctor Who I’ve been waiting for. Sort of. It’s about a mad man with a box. That’s been my favorite image of the Doctor since Moffat took over, and we finally see what exactly it means. Turns out, it doesn’t mean much

It could have been an interesting episode. We could have seen Doctor on the offensive. We did, for a split second or two at the beginning. It’s rare to see that. I think the last time was “Demon’s Run.” Then and at the beginning of this episode, he’s pretty much balls-to-the-wall, all or nothing, blow up everyone or save the girl. It’s fun when he’s mad.

Except it’s not. Because he doesn’t stay mad and the episode doesn’t stay exciting.

If the Doctor trapping salvagers in an exploding TARDIS isn’t exciting, what can we call Clara’s side of the story?  She wanders around the TARDIS interior occasionally glimpsing cool things, but generally running from poorly rendered CGI danger. What should be an adventure through this magical machine turns into a fevered chase through hallways of annoyingly flashing lights. The disappointing thing is that the dangers in the TARDIS should be the TARDIS itself, in some shape or form. It is a labyrinth  dungeon, and castle all rolled into a spaceship burrito. The dangers turn out to be boring explosions and surprisingly unthreatening monsters. The leak in time was interesting, but ultimately undeveloped and not in any way scary. It was more a thing that sort of happened, was confusing for a second, and then was explained away.

The “wonders” we find in the TARDIS are also somewhat mundane. We glimpse the swimming pool, and Clara stupidly pauses to giggle at a telescope while running for her life. The whole thing seems a bit off. Clara finds perhaps the most impressive room we’ve been shown, which is a library. Except for a massively advanced and sentient spacecraft, that’s not that impressive, or that creative.

Except, in the library, Clara finds “The History of the Time War.” She opens it, leafs through a few pages, and just sort of throws away the possibly massive line “so that’s who.” Turns out, she learns the Doctor’s name, but lo and behold, Deus Ex Machina once more, she ends up forgetting it when they rewrite time.

But for the most part, the “journey” into the TARDIS was much more exciting when it was being controlled by a mean-spirited planet in “The Doctor’s Wife” than by the TARDIS herself. Where’s the perils, the mind-torture, the wonder? Surely it isn’t the TARDIS that is uncreative but the writer, Steve Thompson. Recursive labyrinths are not exciting. They are, by definition, tedious.

The only really interesting moment was fining out the android wasn’t really an android. It’s probably the only interesting part of the episode, and it was dealt with in oh, two one-minute scenes. There could have been an entire episode revolving around that one tidbit, but it was just thrown in, having no real relation to the overall plot. Boring. Boring all the way down.

I will say that the TARDIS being powered by a sun perpetually turning into a black hole was pretty cool.

This episode had all the potential for adventure, absolute wonderment, and the excitement of a mad man with a box. It, instead, became quite literally a man in a box. A slightly annoyed man in a literal, boring old box. Nothing in it except walls on every side.

And that’s the worst curse any show, any piece of entertainment can receive  “It’s boring.” It wasn’t a pile of vomit, it wasn’t something that was chewed up, cut to pieces, lost in the garbage disposal of media. It wasn’t an atrocity. But it was boring, and that’s bad.

I give “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” two big friendly buttons out of five big friendly buttons. Better luck next time.

Doctor Who – Hide – Doctor What?

I thought I wouldn’t like this episode. It’s hit or miss when Doctor Who tries full-on, hardcore horror. It usually doesn’t do so well if it’s not Moffat writing it. Anyone remember “Night Terrors” when the Doctor and the Ponds were sent into a dollhouse? Pretty campy. But this episode was written by Neil Cross who proves one again how thoroughtly he gets Doctor Who.

The episode is called “Hide”, although that title has basically nothing to do with the episode. It should have been called, I think, “Doctor What?” since the ever popular “I’m the Doctor – Doctor who?” exchange was replaced with “I’m the Doctor- Doctor what? – If you like.” Very obvious, very clever.

“Hide” starts out as a ghost story with the Doctor (Matt Smith) and Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) helping Professor Palmer (Dougray Scott) and his smitten, psychic assistant (Jessica Raine) hunt down a ghost in a haunted mansion. It, of course, turns into a sci-fi horror, witha  bit of a twist at the end.

The assistant, Emma, is a psychic, and of course, the ghost won’t appear without the presence of a powerful psychic. This is just oozing classic horror movie. Every shot, in fact, oozes classic horror. It’s all shadow and amber lighting from candles and old bulbs. There is almost as much darkness in each frame as there is color. It paints an eerie picture and sends a nostalgic creeping up your spine.

Even the monster, the few bits of it we glimpse, lurches and crackles like a true horror monster. It is grey and bone and hunger lunging forward.

The way this episode plays with shadow and colored light really is delightful, in a spooky sort of way. It has palates, each one a different sort of creepy, all of them dominated by shadow and that familiar voyeuristic feeling we sometimes get during horror movies. We are watching, enthralled and safe in our homes, as people are tormented, frightened, hurt. It is delightful, and we know it’s pretend, but we anticipate and shiver almost as if it’s real and we have a direct line on the horrors that plague these people.

And when the Doctor opens the wormhole that holds the “ghost,” flashing blue and grey and white show us a glimpse of the terror of an open and disintegrating universe. This episode truly catches the fear that rests in the pit of the stomach. It lurches us viscerally like few episodes have.

But it’s still Doctor Who! There’s still that light and childish vigor. At one point the Doctor and Clara are walking through a hallway that is getting colder and colder. Then the candelabra Clara is holding blows out. She tells the Doctor that she’s not a child, the doctor agrees – mostly. She says, then, that he doesn’t need to hold her hand. The Doctor wiggles his fingers in the air. He’s not holding her hand. They both run down the hallway like terrified children. It’s funny and delightful. And that’s what we want in a good episode of Doctor Who, I think. We want to be scared and delighted. We want the darkness, and we want the Doctor to turn that darkness into hope, playfulness, and safety.

Like in “Cold War”, once again Clara is frightened. She isn’t the nutso intrepid adventurer that most of the Doctor’s companions have been. She feels far more real and vulnerable. At the end of the episode, Emma tells the Doctor that Clara is more afraid than she lets on. Although I don’t like everything about Clara, her continual fear and human reaction lets me empathize with her more than any companion since Rose.

In case you were thinking this was a ghost story, remember it’s not supernatural, it’s alien. To solve the mystery of the Witch of the Well, they travel through time, from the beginning of earth all the way until they’re back to when they started, taking pictures of lava and giant dragonflies and the mansion when it was shiny and new. And then when the earth is burnt out, nothing but a hot rock.

Seeing a dead earth upsets Clara, bringing the most emotional scenes of the episode. Clara is a bit horrified by the Doctor. She sees him prodding at the universe and an earth past its expiration date like a science project. “To you, I’m a ghost. We’re all ghosts to you,” she says. “We must be nothing.” The Doctor tells her she’s not nothing. She’s the only mystery worth solving, he tells her.

The Doctor gives us a bit of a double meaning here, I think. Clara is a mystery to him. She has died in front of him, died twice, and he doesn’t know how she keeps coming back. So he’s trying to solve the mystery of Clara Oswin Oswald. At the same time, I think he’s talking about all humans. He has a soft spot for them. He travels with them, loves them, protects them, almost to the exclusion of other creatures. The Doctor is also saying, I think, that humans are the only mystery worth solving – their drive, their aspirations, their contradictions, their charms. This moment of the Doctor’s infatuation with humanity calls back to pre-Moffat who, where the Doctor lauded humans as giants rather than ants.

Of course, they do solve the mystery of the Witch of the Well. The Witch is a time-traveller caught in a pocket dimension where time is massively slower and a monster is chasing her. There is a struggle to dive into the vortex and pull the time-traveller out, during which the Doctor gets stranded and Clara and the TARDIS have to work together to bring him back.

Everyone ends up safe and sound. And, it turns out, according to the Doctor, at least, it wasn’t a horror story at all. It was a love story. The Professor and Emma get together. Turns out, the monster in the pocket dimension is just trying to get back to the mansion in our dimension because his love, another creepy bone monster, is trapped there. The last scene is the Doctor and Clara bringing the monster back.

Now, the Doctor may think “Hide” is a love story, but if it is, it’s not a very good one. The love story, both parts of it, seem a bit tacked-on. The heart of the episode is the horror. It is full of shots and scenes that are reminiscent of classic horror films. But “Hide” doesn’t just pay homage to the horror genre, it brings horror up front. From the crawling shadows to the shivering monster, from the palpitating, cracking wormhole to the grey and deserted forest in the pocket dimension, this episode bled fear and breathed terror into the audience (or at least into me).

For chills and thrills, I give “Hide” four pocket dimensions out of five pocket dimensions.

Now, this was an episode FILLED with great quotes, so I’ll leave you with a few of my favorites.

• Emma: (Regarding the Doctor) “Don’t trust him. There’s a sliver of ice in his heart.”
• Professor: “Experience makes liars of us all. We lie about who we are, about what we’ve done.”
• Clara: “Do you feel like you’re being watched?” Doctor: “What does being watched feel like? Is it that funny tickling feeling on the back of your neck?”
• Professor: “It does tend to haunt you: Living, after so much of the other thing.”
•  Doctor: “I do love a toggle switch. Actually, I like the word ‘toggle.’ Nice noun. Excellent verb.”

Doctor Who – Cold War

The title is a pun, you see, because it takes place during the cold war and the antagonist, Skaldak, is an Ice Warrior.

This episode had two major flaws. One was sort of necessary, the other most definitely was not. The necessary flaw was that there were big themes and interesting ideas in this episode, and almost none of them were explored. However, it’s only forty minutes of television. You can’t fit all that much into forty minutes and still have a plot. The unnecessary flaw was that Skaldak’s hands, when he’s out out of his armor, were clearly cheap rubber. They looked like something you’d buy for five dollars at a Halloween store. The colors blended together and the nails looked like they were pained on, which they were. I have no idea why the show couldn’t spend a few more bucks and make those hands just a little more realistic-looking.

“Cold War” has a pretty straight-forward plot. The Doctor (Matt Smith) and Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) pop out of the TARDIS and into a 1983 Russian nuclear submarine. They were clearly shooting for sin city, since the Doctor enters shouting “Viva Las Vegas.” Immediately after arriving, the TARDIS disappears because Deus Ex Machina, this time in the form of Hostile Action Displacement System.

After a bit of shouting and the obligatory “Who are you? Time travelers? I don’t believe it. Oh wait, maybe I do,” we find out that a scientist on board brought a block of ice on board that he thought was a mammoth but turns out to be a Martian Ice Warrior hero named Skaldak (Spencer Wilding, Nicholas Briggs as the voice).

The episode turns into Doctor Who‘s version of Alien. The Doctor, Clara, and the crew go about searching for the angry Martian that’s hell bent on killing everyone, except instead of trying to kill Skaldak, the Doctor wants to convince him to leave them in peace.

The Captain (Liam Cunningham) tries to help the Doctor, while the war-crazed first mate (Tobias Menzies) helps Skaldak realize the consequences of sending out one nuke from the sub – starting World War Three.

Skaldak believes that all the Martians are dead, since he was frozen in a block of ice for five-thousand years. He wants to take out his anger on the human race. Finger on the button, the Doctor makes his usual 11th hour save by convincing Skaldak to show humans mercy. Skaldak relents and then, lo and behold, he’s beamed up by Martians who are still around and kicking.

What irks me about this episode is that it’s set during the Cold War but the Cold War is hardly addressed at all, aside from allowing the consequence of failure to be total nuclear war. But it could easily have been a modern nuclear submarine, with one nuke being just as terrifying. Not everything has to be safety or total destruction of everything nice.

No Cold War themes were discussed, there was nothing about the nature of cold wars or nuclear weapons or the similarities and differences between two enemy countries. There was no perspective either from our time or from the Doctor’s.

Also, the conspiring first mate really wasn’t a necessary character. Skaldak could have learned about the Cold War from overhearing a conversation or just by being smart. We didn’t need a jerk to help him out.

I did enjoy Skaldak’s sentimentality about his daughter and the percieved destruction of his people. I thought that his character was well formed, and now I want to see more Ice Warriors of Mars and learn about their culture and civilization. Another season, perhaps?

Still, the episode also failed to make the connection between Skaldak’s threat of genocide and the Doctor’s past as an agent of genocide. Skaldak did not refer to the Doctor as a warrior who wiped out not one but two distinct species of sentient beings (the Time Lords and the Daleks). The Doctor did not refer to the psychological and emotional toll such an act takes on a person. The Doctor’s past is staring any good fan of Doctor Who right in the face like an itch begging to be scratched, and Cold War ignores it like it’s nothing.

The most interesting part of the episode was, once again, Clara’s character. I’m really starting to like Clara, not in the way I liked Amelia and Rory Pond, sentimentally, but in a more intellectual and curious way. Clara is very much a character with layers. The Ponds were static characters, Amy, loud, controlling, and secretly very loving, Rory, shy but truly courageous and devoted. Clara changes as she experiences things. This episode we see here actually fearing for her life and the lives of others. Travelling with the Doctor stopped being a fairy tale and turned into a horror story, something not uncommon in Doctor Who. Clara reacts to it, and not in a positive way. She is terrified by the death of crew members and the danger of it all. It’s not exciting; it’s terrifying. Ultimately, she sticks with the Doctor in the end, but we see her really examine things.

A few interesting things:

There’s some fun Game of Thrones crossover in this episode. The Captain, played by Liam Cunningham, is the noble and stupid Davos Seaworth in GoT. The first mate, played by Tobias Menzies, is introduced this week to GoT as the incompetent Edmure Tully.

We finally see the red setting of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. River Song’s screwdriver in “Silence in the Library” has a red setting. She says it was the Doctor’s screwdriver, so presumably at some point the Doctor gets a red setting. Well here it is!

All in all, I give “Cold War” three sonic screwdrivers out of five sonic screwdrivers.

Doctor Who – “The Bells of St. John”

Where’s the magic, Moffat?

Yes, Doctor Who is a sci-fi show, but it’s always been on the fanciful side of science fiction. It rarely goes into detail on the workings of the technology or how the Doctor travels through space and time. The most beloved answer about the nature of space and time on the show was that it’s “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.” That was the answer and it was satisfactory  We accept flippant and fanciful explanations like this because Doctor Who is about the mystery and wonderment of the impossible. It’s about magic, even if that magic is science.

So again, I ask, where’s the magic, Moffat?

Doctor Who has always been magical but never more so than under the guidance of show-runner Steven Moffat. He turned the Doctor into some sort of fairy tale knight who isn’t sure if he’s really just a frog. He’s made a somewhat action-packed series whimsical and terrifying at the same time.

“The Bells of St. John” seems like a step backwards for Moffat. It’s leaning towards an action show in all the wrong ways.

Strange wi-fi signals are trapping peoples’ consciousnesses in TV sets controlled by a mysterious organization. The Doctor (Matt Smith) gets inexplicably contacted by Clara Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman) he travels through time and space (as he tends to do) and rescues her in the nick of time from robots that look like people but are missing half of their heads. Apparently they’re camouflaging throughout London and stealing people through the wi-fi? Do people not notice that half of their neighbor’s head has been replaced by a satellite dish?

The Doctor “hacks” (in the broadest sense of the term) the evil organization and puts Clara back in her body. Then the evil organization takes over an airplane and sends it hurtling towards the Doctor and Clara.

Our intrepid duo jumps into the TARDIS, teleports onto the plane, and saves the day. And while this sequence is well shot and somewhat thrilling, it adds absolutely zero to the story. We already knew the evil organization has zero regard for human life. They’re trapping people in TVs. Tiny ones with glass screens. Haven’t they heard of plasma? Or HD? And the evil organization is hacking its own employees, messing with their levels of obedience  paranoia, and even altering their IQ.

Let’s take a break from running through the episode to think about this evil organization apparently run by a middle-aged woman. This is modern London. Where the heck is any of this technology coming from? Even if we consider that it’s actually being run by the Great Intelligence (spoiler, but this is a recap and everyone saw it coming), the GI (great intelligence, not gastrointestinal) isn’t an alien civilization with technology it brought to the planet. It’s some sort of sentient amalgamation of information. Even if it knew how to make the technology to download and hack people, who manufactured it? It’s not like you could hire a tech company and expect them to not realize this technology is absolutely impossible. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

So our heroes escape the suicide plane, yada yada yada, they ditch the TARDIS for some bogus reason so the Doctor can’t use it to save the day when Clara once again is downloaded, this time apparently irretrievably. Instead, he opts for an equally deus-ex machina’d anti-gravity motorcycle, which he proceeds to drive up the skyscraper where the bad guys have Clara (or at least her mind/data/whatever).

The Doctor saves the day, although it turns out all the employees of the evil organization are unwitting pawns, hacked by the Great Intelligence, except for that middle-aged woman who was brainwashed from the beginning and is left with the mind of a six-year-old. That part, where she asks where her mummy and daddy are, was truly sad.

But all the rest of the episode was just a bit ludicrous. Steven Moffat has eschewed clever writing and misty fairy tales for action-packed motorcycle riding and unexplained tech. The Doctor lost his mystique. The entire episode, he was just a weirdo with cool toys. The only compelling and mysterious character in “The Bells of St. John” was Clara Oswin. She’s the strange one with unanswered questions. Which I dig! But not if the Doctor turns into some boring Hollywood cliche.

I understand the recent switch in style. In season 10, Moffat had gotten a little too into himself. Things were too fairy-tale, too cutesy and heart-string-pulling at times. I was starting to miss the insane adventures of the previous show-runner (Russel T. Davies). But Moffat shouldn’t give up his entire identity as a writer for the sake of explosions and gadgets. The middle-ground he found with “The Snowmen” or “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” combined the best of both worlds.

I have been ragging on “The Bells of St. John” too long. I didn’t hate it. It gave us a good intro to this newfangled Clara (sometimes Oswin) Oswald. The action scenes were surprisingly well shot, probably thanks to Colm McCarthy, a new director to Doctor Who. Despite its flaws, I would watch “The Bells of St. John” a hundred times over before I’d sit through an episode of the best crime procedurals out there. It’s just that Moffat has accustomed the audience to a high level of writing and entertainment that this past episode lacked.

So, to answer my own question, Where’s the magic? – hopefully in a future episode.

I give “The Bells of St. John” three TARDISes out of five TARDISes.