Tag:

Fourteenth Doctor

The Giggle: The Toymaker Dances and the Doctor Gets Let Off

by Hutch Morzaria December 18, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

Neil Patrick Harris is having the time of his life, and for about forty minutes so was I. “The Giggle” hands the show its best villain in years and gives him a toyshop, a string of accents, a music-hall dance number and a genuine sense of menace. Then it spends its last stretch on a regeneration that isn’t one. Three-quarters of it is terrific, and the ending quietly rewrites what this show has always been willing to do to its lead. It’s a frustrating hour for exactly that reason.

The premise is a good one. Every screen since the first television in 1925 has carried a signal that makes everyone certain they’re right about everything, and the world has torn itself apart as a result. It’s a nasty, funny idea, and the opening of ordinary people turning on each other in the street is properly uncomfortable. The 1925 prologue is a creepy start as well, with John Logie Baird demonstrating his invention in a cold London room while a puppet stares into the lens. It gives the special a real edge of horror before the plot has even started.

The Toymaker is superb

Harris plays the Toymaker as a performer who’s never once been bored, and the constant costume and accent changes turn a fairly thin classic villain into something properly unstable. He isn’t threatening because he’s powerful. He’s threatening because he finds all of it delightful and genuinely doesn’t care how it ends. The toyshop sequence is the standout, a long run through a shifting workshop while he narrates the fates of people the Doctor failed, and the show has the nerve to let it play at length. The moment he brings up the Flux and the billions who died in it is the first time any story has made the Doctor answer for that.

And the dance number works. It shouldn’t, but Harris commits to it completely, and the episode has already established him as someone who would absolutely stop a global catastrophe to do a musical bit. The final game is the right shape too, because it isn’t a puzzle the Doctor can out-think, just a game of catch. Deciding the fate of everything with a children’s game is entirely in character for him. It also turns the whole special into the show negotiating with its own history, and the Toymaker suits that because he’s the one villain who treats everything as a game already. This is the most fun a Doctor Who villain has been since Missy.

UNIT and a genuinely good middle act

Kate Stewart finally gets real material, which is long overdue. Jemma Redgrave has spent a decade being handed a briefing and a corridor, and the stretch where the signal takes hold of her and she turns on the Doctor with complete conviction is the best thing she’s had to play. Mel turning up is a lovely bit of continuity handled lightly, and Bonnie Langford is used better here than she ever was in the eighties. She’s a competent adult with a job instead of a screaming companion, and the brief exchange where she and the Doctor acknowledge how long it’s been, without a speech, is the kind of low-key continuity the show should do more often. Shirley remains a good addition, and the middle act never stops moving.

The bi-generation is a cop-out

Then the Doctor is shot, regenerates, and doesn’t die. Instead he splits, with Tennant staying whole and alive while Ncuti Gatwa steps out of him as a second, separate Doctor. The Fifteenth goes off to have adventures, and the Fourteenth stays behind with the Nobles, gets a garden and a family and retires happily. My problem isn’t the new Doctor, it’s what’s been done to the old one. Regeneration has always been the show’s contract with itself: the Doctor loses, dies, and somebody else has to carry it on.

That cost is why the goodbyes land, and Twice Upon a Time is as affecting as it is because the man saying goodbye knew he was finished. Handing a Doctor a house, a family and a peaceful retirement doesn’t reward the character so much as take the stakes out of the mechanism. If one Doctor gets to opt out, every future regeneration has an escape hatch sitting behind it. I can see the argument for it, since Tennant’s Doctor died saying he didn’t want to go and there’s something to finally letting him stop. The show already told that story properly the first time, though, and telling it again with a happier outcome softens it instead of deepening it.

None of which is a complaint about Gatwa, who’s excellent from his first line. He gets about ten minutes and uses them properly: playful, physically expressive, and completely at ease sharing a scene with a predecessor, which isn’t an easy trick. The moment he tells Tennant to go and be well is generous instead of deferential. Wild Blue Yonder is the special I’d rewatch and this is the one that changes things, and I’d rather those had been the other way round. On the casting, at least, there’s nothing to worry about.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this. Neil Patrick Harris is magnificent, the signal premise is nasty and clever, Kate finally gets something to do and Gatwa’s arrival is genuinely exciting. It loses real ground for an ending that spares its lead the one cost this show has always insisted on. That’s going to be hard to walk back.

December 18, 2023 0 comments

Wild Blue Yonder: Two People, One Ship, Nothing Else Out There

by Hutch Morzaria December 11, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

The middle anniversary special was kept secret before broadcast, and now I understand why. There’s nothing to spoil except the fact that it’s very good. No returning monster, no cameo, no continuity fireworks, just two actors, one enormous empty spaceship and something out there copying them. I loved it, and it’s easily the best thing the show has done since the Capaldi years.

The setup is stripped to nothing. The TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna at the edge of the universe and then flees without them, leaving two people in a corridor with no exit and a robot slowly walking the length of the ship toward a self-destruct button. It opens on a broad gag with Isaac Newton and an apple, so I assumed I was in for a romp, and then the tone drops through the floor. After the first ten minutes there are no jokes that aren’t nervous ones. Everything that follows is character.

The Not-Things are a superb monster

Whatever is on this ship has never met life before, and it learns by copying. It starts with shape and gets it wrong, so the early glimpses are of arms that are too long and faces that don’t sit right, and the effects are restrained enough to be genuinely unpleasant instead of silly. Then it learns properly, and the horror shifts from body to identity. There are two Doctors and two Donnas, and neither the characters nor I can reliably tell which is which. The show plays entirely fair about it, too, because the tells are behavioural and you can spot them if you’re paying attention.

The reason it beats most duplicate stories is that the copies aren’t hostile at first, they’re curious. They want to understand what these creatures are and they’re prepared to ask questions to find out, which turns the middle act into a run of conversations where the wrong answer gets somebody killed. Tennant and Tate play four parts between them with almost nothing but posture and timing to tell them apart. Tate deserves as much credit as Tennant and gets less because the showier scene is his. She makes the copy of Donna slightly too helpful and slightly too keen to agree, and when the truth comes out you can go back and see exactly where you should have noticed.

The Doctor and Donna aboard the empty ship in Wild Blue Yonder

What the copies learn

The best idea in the special is what the Not-Things do with what they learn. To copy someone properly you have to know them, so they read the originals, and everything the Doctor and Donna say to each other becomes something the copies can use. That gives the one quiet confession in the hour a horrible edge. The Doctor finally tells Donna what’s happened since she last saw him: that he isn’t who he thought he was, that half the universe was lost to the Flux, and that he’s been carrying all of it alone. Tennant plays it as a man saying it out loud for the first time, and then the show reminds me that something else was listening.

It matters that this lands in the anniversary run. Sixty years of a character who talks constantly and gives away almost nothing, and the special’s answer to “who is this person” is a tired man admitting how frightened he is, with a copy of himself standing in the dark taking notes. That’s a far more interesting way to mark the occasion than a montage of old faces, and it costs nothing but two actors and a good script. Donna gets her moments too, quieter and just as sharp, about her family and the years she spent not knowing what she’d lost. The special uses horror as a way into character rather than as decoration, and that’s the difference between this and most bottle episodes.

Underneath, this is the same trick as Midnight. Confine the Doctor, take away his tools, and let something use his own words against him. That’s still the most reliable way to frighten me with this character, and it’s good to see the show remember it. Midnight did it with a stranger’s voice and this does it with his own face, which is a nasty little escalation.

Small, and shot like a film

The ship is vast, white and almost featureless, and the camera uses the emptiness properly, holding wide shots long enough that I started scanning the frame for something that shouldn’t be there. The sound does most of the rest. It’s also a good bit of design thinking: a single enormous vessel built to carry something dangerous away from everything else, with a self-destruct that takes years because nobody was in a hurry. All of that comes through the architecture instead of a briefing, and you work out what this place is for just by looking at it. There’s a lovely lull in the middle where the two of them sit and talk about nothing much, the sort of scene the show almost never has room for.

What strikes me most is the restraint. This was the middle special of a 60th anniversary, the point where the show could easily have wheeled out returning monsters, old faces and a multi-Doctor sequence. It does none of that, and spends its anniversary hour on two people in an empty room being frightened of each other. The Daleks would have made this worse, and a cameo would have broken the spell. The ending is the one wobble, wrapped up a little too neatly after everything before it, and Bernard Cribbins appearing in the last minute is genuinely moving but belongs to a different episode.

Rating: 4.5/5. Loved this. Two actors, one set and the most frightening hour the show has managed in years, built entirely out of performance and restraint. The confession scene is a career-best moment for Tennant, the monster is a properly good idea, and it proves the anniversary didn’t need a single cameo. Only the slightly tidy resolution keeps it off a five.

December 11, 2023 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Star Beast: The Best Double Act on Television, Back Again

by Hutch Morzaria December 3, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

Fifteen years after Journey’s End took Donna Noble’s memory away, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are standing in a Camden street shouting at each other again, and it’s a genuine pleasure. Whatever else “The Star Beast” gets wrong, and it gets a couple of things properly wrong, the reunion is worth the wait. These two have always been the best double act this show ever put together. Neither has lost a step.

Russell T Davies is back as well, with Disney money behind him, and you can see it in every frame. The Wrarth Warriors are a full prosthetic build, the spaceship crash over London is a proper spectacle, and the whole thing has a gloss the show hasn’t had in years. As a statement of intent for the 60th, it announces itself confidently. On the story, I came away with more mixed feelings.

Beep the Meep is a great joke

The central gag is an old one from the comics and it still lands. A tiny, fluffy, enormous-eyed creature turns up asking for help, everybody immediately wants to protect it, and it’s actually a genocidal maniac being chased by the perfectly reasonable police officers it made look like monsters. The puppet itself is a big part of why it works. Beep is a physical build with real fur and real weight, so everyone on screen is reacting to something that’s actually there. When the voice changes and the face doesn’t, a real object sitting in someone’s arms being quietly monstrous is more unsettling than any animation would have been.

Miriam Margolyes voicing him is the best casting decision in the special. The moment the voice drops flat and bored and vicious while the puppet keeps blinking adorably is properly funny, and the episode gets decent mileage out of nobody quite being able to stop finding it cute. The Wrarth Warriors work for the same reason in reverse. They look like insectoid horrors and behave like slightly exasperated officers with an arrest warrant, and the joke is that everyone’s instincts about who to trust run entirely on appearance. It’s a simple idea cleanly done, and it’s the sort of thing this show does well when it isn’t straining.

The Doctor and Donna reunited in The Star Beast

Donna, and the problem with the ending

Here’s where it comes apart for me. Donna’s metacrisis has been the most famous unresolved thing in the modern show: a human mind holding a Time Lord’s knowledge, which would burn her up if she ever remembered. It’s been treated as permanent and terminal for fifteen years. The fix is that Donna and Rose let it go together, because a Time Lord mind is binary and they aren’t, and it’s delivered in a couple of lines before the crisis is simply over. I don’t have a problem with where the show is pointing, but it’s a line of dialogue where the story needed a scene.

Fifteen years of buildup, a rule we’ve all been asked to take seriously since 2008, and the way out is a bit of terminology stated instead of acted out. Nobody struggles, nothing costs anything, and the Doctor stands there and has it explained to him. Whatever I make of the idea itself, as storytelling it’s a shortcut, and it would have annoyed me whatever the wording had been. The follow-up is worse, because Donna lets go of the energy and a stray gag hands it back about ninety seconds later. It undercuts the resolution almost as soon as it’s delivered.

What makes it more frustrating is that the scene it needed was right there. Donna spent fifteen years not knowing what she’d lost, Sylvia spent fifteen years guarding the gap, and Rose grew up alongside a mother with a hole in her memory. Any of those three had a version of this that could have been played instead of stated. Give the resolution to the family that lived with the consequence and it becomes a scene about them. Hand it over as a rule about how Time Lord minds work and it becomes a technicality.

Everything around it is strong

The rest is genuinely good. Shirley Bingham is an excellent addition, played by Ruth Madeley as a UNIT scientific adviser who’s quicker than everyone in the room and has a wheelchair full of weaponry, and the show treats her competence as unremarkable, which is the right call. Sylvia gets the best small scene, snapping at the Doctor the second he appears, still furious with him and still right to be. Jacqueline King has always been underrated in this part. Rose is well handled too, written as a teenager with a specific hobby, a specific temper and a specific relationship with her mother, and Yasmin Finney plays her as somebody’s actual daughter.

The opening is a smart bit of housekeeping. Tennant narrates directly to camera over a montage that catches a newcomer up on fifteen years in about ninety seconds, and it could easily have been a slog. The pacing elsewhere is faster and more careful to be understood by someone who’s never watched the show, which is reasonable for an anniversary opener with a new international streaming deal attached, even if characters sometimes explain their own feelings out loud. Tennant himself is doing something subtly new. This isn’t the Tenth Doctor replayed; he’s warmer, more tired and visibly rattled at being back in a face he thought he’d finished with. The special is quietly about the show revisiting its own past and being slightly uneasy about it, and that unease is the most interesting thing running underneath the plot.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok. The reunion is a delight, Beep the Meep is a great joke well told, and the production values are the best the show has ever had. The metacrisis fix is a fudge delivered in dialogue after fifteen years of setup, though, and then it’s undercut almost immediately. That’s the one thing the whole special was built to pay off, and it’s why this sits firmly in the middle.

December 3, 2023 0 comments