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Steven Moffat

A Good Man Goes to War: The Army Was the Trap

by Hutch Morzaria June 25, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

Here is a thing Doctor Who does not usually do: build an army. The show’s whole disposition is one clever man with a screwdriver talking his way out of a room, and it has spent decades being faintly appalled by force. So an episode that opens with the Doctor calling in debts across the universe to assemble a war party is a statement of intent, and the sharpest thing about “A Good Man Goes to War” is that it turns out to be an argument against the thing it appears to be celebrating. It’s also the episode where a question the show has been dangling for three years finally gets answered, and the answer is very good.

We open on Rory Williams, in full Roman centurion dress, standing on the bridge of a Cyberman fleet asking politely where his wife is. It’s a magnificent piece of showmanship. He asks twice. He is told, condescendingly, that the Cyber-legion doesn’t negotiate, and behind him, through the window, the entire fleet detonates. He doesn’t turn round to look at it. He asks his question a third time. Arthur Darvill has quietly become the best-served character on this programme: the joke of Rory used to be that he was the one who got left behind, and two seasons on he is the man who waited two thousand years, and the show has stopped treating that as a punchline. This is his introduction as something genuinely frightening, and it earns every second of it.

It’s set up by a small piece of misdirection that’s worth admiring. The episode opens on Amy, holding her newborn in a cell, telling the child about a man who is coming for them, the last of his kind, brave, unstoppable, the best man she knows. Every beat is written so you assume she’s describing the Doctor. She isn’t. She’s describing her husband, and the switch that lands on Rory in Roman armour rather than a bow tie is the episode announcing, in its first ninety seconds, whose story this actually is.

Calling in favours

Amy has given birth on Demons Run, an asteroid fortress crewed by the Church, Colonel Manton’s clerics, and the Headless Monks, an order who have taken their vows rather literally and carry their heads under their arms. Against them the Doctor brings a collection of debts. Madame Vastra, a Silurian living in Victorian London and eating Jack the Ripper. Jenny Flint, her wife, who is handy with a sword and handier with a straight line. Commander Strax, a Sontaran clone-warrior serving out a penance as a nurse, which is exactly the sort of joke that shouldn’t work and completely does. Dorium Maldovar, blue and venal and reluctant. And, arriving by pirate ship, Captain Henry Avery and his son Toby, still crewing the alien vessel they inherited in The Curse of the Black Spot, which is a payoff for an episode I’d written off entirely and a reminder that this season’s plotting is playing a longer game than any given week suggests.

The assault itself is over almost before it starts, and deliberately so. The Doctor takes an armed fortress without a shot fired, by making a speech, and then makes Manton order his own troops to run, repeating the phrase until it sticks, so that the man will be known for the rest of his life as Colonel Runaway. It is a brilliant, ugly, deeply unpleasant piece of business, and the episode knows it. That’s the thesis, in fact. Vastra puts it plainly and River puts it harder: the word “Doctor” means healer on most worlds, and on a great many others it has now come to mean something else entirely. Warrior. The reason there is a fortress full of soldiers here at all, terrified, armed to the teeth, defending a baby against him, is him. His reputation built this. The monsters have started planning for him specifically, and one of them has worked out that the most efficient weapon to use against the Doctor is a person he loves.

Lorna Bucket carries the same point in miniature. She’s a girl from the Gamma Forests who met the Doctor once as a child, joined the Church specifically to see him again, and dies on the floor of Demons Run having never really been noticed by him. He doesn’t know who she is. He pretends he does, because she’s dying and it’s kind. It’s a small, mean, honest scene about what it costs other people to have been briefly interesting to this man, and the episode drops it in without underlining it once.

Melody

And then the trap closes, and the trap is that there was never anything to win. The baby in the cot has been Flesh since before the Doctor arrived, the same programmable matter that took Amy’s place in The Almost People, and Kovarian has been gone with the real Melody for some time. It dissolves in Amy’s arms while she’s holding it. Karen Gillan plays that beat without a shred of vanity and it is genuinely hard to watch. The army was a distraction. The Doctor did exactly what his enemies needed him to do, at exactly the speed they needed him to do it, because they knew he would come.

Then River Song arrives, having refused to come any earlier, and delivers the answer. Melody Pond. In the language of the Gamma Forests there is no word for “pond”, because the only water in the forest is the river. It’s the line Idris handed to Rory in The Doctor’s Wife as something he’d need one day, and here is the day. River Song is Melody Pond, Amy and Rory’s daughter, conceived aboard the TARDIS in the vortex on their wedding night, which is where the Time Lord DNA came from, which is why Kovarian wanted her. It’s a proper answer, one that reaches backwards and improves things rather than replacing them. Every scene River has played opposite these people acquires a second meaning, her flirtation with the Doctor, which has always run slightly hot, is suddenly a much stranger and sadder shape, and her death in a library in Forest of the Dead, still from his side a thing that has already happened, is now the death of Amy Pond’s baby in his arms years ago. The Doctor’s reaction is to laugh, grab his hat and leave immediately, which is either delight or panic and is very obviously both.

Lorna Bucket is the detail that stays with me longest: a woman who crossed a galaxy just to see him again, and who has to explain her own name to him as she’s dying. Demons Run exists for no reason except that he does, and nobody around him seems to be frightened of a man with a screwdriver anymore.

Rating: 4.5/5. Enormous, confident and cleverly built, an episode that spends its whole runtime assembling a triumph so it can demonstrate that the triumph was the trap. It drops half a mark because the army it builds is more fun as a promise than as a fight, since Vastra, Jenny and Strax are so good you resent how little they get, and the Headless Monks are a superb design given almost nothing to do. A centurion, a Silurian, a Sontaran nurse and a pirate walk into an asteroid. They win it in an afternoon, and it costs a baby. Somewhere out there a woman he has already buried is his best friends’ daughter.

June 25, 2011 2 comments

Day of the Moon: An Army You Can’t Remember Recruiting

by Hutch Morzaria May 21, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

The problem with a monster you forget the instant you look away is that it’s very hard to write a way of beating it. “Day of the Moon” solves that problem so elegantly that the solution is genuinely thrilling, and then spends the rest of its runtime on the most frightening half-hour Doctor Who has produced in years, plus a two-minute scene that quietly guts you.

We open three months on, with Amy shot in Utah, Rory gunned down in a canyon, River throwing herself off a skyscraper, and Canton Everett Delaware III hunting all of them across America, and none of it is what it appears. It’s a ruse, elaborately staged so the Silence stop watching, and the fact that the team have been running an operation the whole time is a good bit of misdirection after the disorientation of The Impossible Astronaut. The tally marks have multiplied horribly since then. Amy’s arms are covered, Rory’s are worse, and they’ve been counting encounters they cannot remember having, with the sheer density of the marks telling its own story about how thoroughly infested the world is. The dwarf-star-alloy cell in Area 51 is a nice touch too, because they’ve built the perfect prison and then locked themselves inside it, it being the only room on Earth the Silence can’t get into. Canton is the quiet pleasure of all this. Mark Sheppard plays him as a man doing an absurd job with total professionalism, and the show gives him a small, sharp bit of characterisation on the side: he was forced out of the FBI for wanting to marry the wrong person, and when Nixon asks whether the problem was that they were black, Canton confirms it and adds that he was also a man. Nixon’s baffled, non-committal reply lands the period detail far better than a speech would have.

The orphanage

And then Amy goes to Graystark Hall, and the episode becomes something close to unbearable. The orphanage sequence is the finest sustained horror this show has attempted: a crumbling building, a caretaker whose memory has been so thoroughly eroded he can no longer track a conversation, and words scratched into every surface by someone desperate. GET OUT. The Silence are nesting on the ceilings, in the dark, in their dozens. Amy has a torch and a camera-phone and no way of retaining what she sees, and the show plays the whole thing with a photographic flash, light, a room full of them hanging above her, darkness, and she’s forgotten again by the time the next flash comes. It is a genuinely nasty use of the rule established the week before, and Karen Gillan carries it alone.

The detail that finishes the job is the woman with the eyepatch, glimpsed through a hatch that opens in a wall where no hatch should be, who looks at Amy, says “no, I think she’s just dreaming,” and closes it again. No explanation, no follow-up, and it’s the most disturbing thirty seconds of the season. And then a photograph of Amy holding a baby, in a room she has no memory of being in. There’s a second, quieter cruelty running underneath all of it. Amy has a live comms link open the entire time she’s missing, and at one point, convinced she’s about to die and believing the Doctor is the one listening, she says a great deal about how she feels, and about Rory, and about which of them she was really waiting for. The Doctor isn’t on the other end. Rory is. Arthur Darvill plays a man hearing something he was never meant to hear and deciding, in real time and completely silently, that he is never going to mention it.

Weaponising the moon landing

The solution is superb, and it’s built out of the monster’s own mechanism. If the Silence implant post-hypnotic suggestions that people obey without remembering why, then the trick is to give humanity a suggestion of its own, so the Doctor takes footage of a Silent saying “you should kill us all on sight” and splices it into the Apollo 11 broadcast, the single most-watched piece of film in human history. Every person on Earth sees it. Nobody remembers seeing it. And from that moment the entire species is carrying a standing order to destroy them on sight, which it will act on without ever knowing why. It’s ruthless, it’s clever, and it’s morally quite dark in a way the episode doesn’t dwell on, because the Doctor has just committed an entire species to a genocide it can’t consent to or recall. Nobody raises it. It sits there.

It’s worth noting how neatly the solution fits the monster. The Silence never conquered Earth by force; they simply stood behind humanity for thousands of years, suggesting things, and let people build what they wanted built. The Doctor doesn’t out-fight them, and he doesn’t out-think them so much as out-use them, taking the exact mechanism they’ve relied on since the Stone Age and pointing it back down the way it came. Beating a parasite by turning its own host against it is a genuinely satisfying shape for a resolution.

The kiss

And then the two minutes that hurt. River kisses the Doctor. She’s been circling it for two seasons, and she finally does it, and he’s startled and delighted and completely unprepared, because he has never kissed her before. She understands immediately what that means. Their timelines run in opposite directions, so if this is the first time for him then they are past the point where their meetings overlap, and everything ahead of her is a road where he knows her less and less. She’s just had her first kiss with him and it was, from her side, one of the last. Alex Kingston plays the realisation and the collapse in about four seconds without saying a word about it, and it is devastating. Since her death in a library in Forest of the Dead, which for him has already happened, the show has been running this relationship backwards, and this is the first moment it lets us feel the arithmetic properly.

Then comes a coda the episode barely bothers to explain: the little girl, out of the spacesuit and loose in New York six months later, collapsing in an alleyway and beginning to glow, regenerating alone with nobody there to see it. She’s a Time Lord, or something very like one, and not a single character in the story is present for it. It’s aimed squarely at us.

What it leaves behind is that orphanage, torchlight and a ceiling full of Silence and a woman who forgets each time the light moves, which is the best horror set piece the show has done. It leaves a post-hypnotic genocide, superb plotting whose ethics go deliberately unexamined. It leaves the eyepatch woman, glimpsed through an impossible hatch, unnamed and unexplained, one line long and the thing I can’t stop thinking about. It leaves a photograph of Amy holding a child in a room she doesn’t remember, which combined with the pregnancy she denied means something has been done to her. And it leaves River’s arithmetic, first kiss for him and last for her, the whole structure of that relationship delivered in one silent reaction shot.

Rating: 4.5/5. A resolution that fully earns its cliffhanger, with a horror sequence that stands with the show’s very best. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being wilfully confusing, and the little girl’s regeneration in a New York alleyway raises more questions than the two-parter answers, but the ambition is thrilling. Tally marks up both arms, a message hidden in the moon landing, and a woman who has just worked out that her love story runs the wrong way.

May 21, 2011 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Impossible Astronaut: They Killed Him on the Beach

by Hutch Morzaria May 14, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

Most seasons open by establishing a threat. This one opens by killing the Doctor, on a beach, in broad daylight, about fifteen minutes in, and then spends the rest of the episode getting on with things as though that’s a perfectly reasonable way to start. “The Impossible Astronaut” is the most audacious premiere the show has attempted, and it introduces a monster so good it makes you check the corners of your own living room.

A death at the lake

Amy, Rory and River are each sent a numbered envelope in TARDIS blue, and they converge on Lake Silencio in Utah, where the Doctor is waiting in sunglasses and a deckchair, delighted with himself. Except this Doctor is eleven hundred and three years old, two centuries further along than the one they last travelled with, and he has clearly brought them here for a reason he won’t explain. Then an astronaut walks out of the water. The Doctor goes to meet it, tells his friends to stay back whatever happens, and is shot. He begins to regenerate, and the astronaut shoots him again mid-process, which stops it dead. He dies on the sand in front of the three people who love him most, and they burn his body in a boat because that’s what you do with a Time Lord. It’s a genuinely shocking sequence, played with absolute sincerity, and the episode does not offer a single reassuring wink. Fifteen minutes in, the lead character is ash.

What really sells it is the aftermath rather than the shooting. There’s no swelling music and no vow of vengeance. Three people stand on a beach and do the practical things: find a boat, gather driftwood, work out that you have to burn a Time Lord because a body that might still regenerate cannot simply be left in the ground. River is the one who knows the correct procedure, which tells you something about her that nobody in the scene stops to comment on. Amy is just wrecked. It’s a funeral staged in the first act of a season premiere, and the show plays every second of it straight.

The rule

And then, in a diner, they meet him again, a Doctor two hundred years younger, alive and cheerful and entirely ignorant. He got an envelope too. That’s the trap the season sets, and it’s a beauty. They know how he dies. They cannot tell him, because a person cannot be allowed to know their own future, and River is explicit that time would unravel. So the three of them have to travel with a man they’ve watched die, being cheerful about it, carrying the worst secret imaginable. It’s the sharpest use yet of the River Song problem. She’s spent her run being ahead of him, promising him the Pandorica in Flesh and Stone when he had no idea what she meant, and from his side she already died in a library in Forest of the Dead. Now Amy and Rory have joined her on the wrong side of the information, and Alex Kingston plays River’s weariness at it beautifully. She’s used to knowing things she can’t say. They aren’t.

Amy has a second secret of her own. She tells the Doctor she’s pregnant, and then, a scene or two later, tells him she isn’t, and the episode leaves you genuinely uncertain which of those was the lie. It’s a small hook, well buried, and it lands differently given how much this season has already established that Amy’s memory and perception are not to be relied upon. She’s been travelling since her honeymoon in A Christmas Carol, and something has plainly happened to her in the interim that neither she nor we have been let in on. Meanwhile the younger Doctor’s envelope points him to 1969, and to Richard Nixon, who is taking phone calls in the Oval Office from a terrified little girl who won’t say where she is. The period setting is superb, the most expensive-looking the show has ever been, all Utah desert and Washington marble, and Canton Everett Delaware III is a fine addition, an ex-FBI agent drafted in because he’s the only man Nixon trusts and thoroughly unimpressed by everyone in the room. Mark Sheppard plays him dry as dust. The Doctor’s approach to Nixon, which amounts to barging into the Oval Office, being arrested, and then being so obviously useful that the President keeps him, is very funny, and the episode balances the comedy against genuine dread without either curdling.

The Silence

Because the monster is the best thing here. The Silence are tall, thin, suited figures with blank grey faces somewhere between a Munch painting and a decomposing skull. They have been on Earth for as long as there have been humans. They are everywhere. They are in the room right now. And you cannot remember them, because the instant you look away the memory goes, not fades but goes, and you carry on with your day. That’s the whole rule, and like the best of this show’s monsters it’s something you can test yourself: how would you know? What would be different? The design is the thing, a skeletal head on top of a Men In Black suit and tie, and the suit is doing more work than the skull. They don’t lunge and they don’t roar. They stand very still in the middle distance, in ordinary rooms, under perfectly adequate lighting, and they are considerably worse for it. That’s the detail that finishes the job, because a monster in a lounge suit looks like something that has business being where it is, something that belongs in the room and expects you to leave. The effect isn’t a creature attacking. It’s you walking in on something that was always standing there.

The episode wrings extraordinary things out of it. Amy walks into a bathroom, meets one, watches it kill a woman, and forgets all of it before she’s back through the door. She starts marking her arm with tally strokes every time she sees one, and the marks accumulate on her skin while she has no idea where they came from. It’s a brilliant, unnerving image, evidence of an encounter you cannot access. The implication is worse than the monster. If they’ve been here since the beginning and nobody can remember them, then every unexplained thing humanity has ever done might have been suggested to us by something standing just behind us.

What it leaves behind is the Doctor’s death, up front, not as a threat or a prophecy but as an on-screen killing, witnessed, with a body burned, so the season now has to earn its way out of that. It leaves a secret his friends can’t share, which is a superb engine and poisons every scene between them. It leaves the Silence, a monster you forget the moment you look away and a rule the viewer can test at home, the best new creature since the Angels. It leaves tally marks on skin, proof of something you cannot remember, which is the most chilling image the show has produced in years. And it leaves a girl in a spacesuit, with Amy firing a gun at a child because she thinks it’s the thing that kills him.

Rating: 4.5/5. A bold, gorgeous, deeply unsettling opener that trusts the audience completely. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being hard to follow, and it’s the first part of a two-parter, but the ideas here are as strong as anything the show has done. A dead Doctor burned on a beach in Utah, a President taking telephone calls from a frightened child, and monsters standing in the room that nobody alive can hold on to for more than a second. And Amy has just pulled the trigger on a little girl in a spacesuit. I genuinely have no idea what happens now.

May 14, 2011 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

A Christmas Carol: The Kindness Is What Breaks Him

by Hutch Morzaria January 15, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

Doing Dickens straight would have been the obvious move and a bad one. What “A Christmas Carol” does instead is take the actual structure of the book, past, present, future, a hard man softened, and hand it to somebody with a time machine, so that the ghosts are real and the visits leave marks. It’s the best Christmas special the show has produced, and it’s the first one that’s genuinely about something.

Amy and Rory are on honeymoon, which after the wedding at the end of The Big Bang they have thoroughly earned, and their galaxy-class starliner is falling out of the sky. They’re barely in the episode, mind, which is its one real complaint. Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill spend most of the runtime on a shuddering flight deck in fancy dress, still wearing costumes from the wedding reception for reasons the script cheerfully declines to explain, relaying the passenger count over a comms link, and the story has no genuine use for either of them beyond a ticking clock. This is the Doctor’s episode and Kazran’s, and the regulars are effectively scenery. The ship is caught in the cloud belt of a human colony world, and the clouds are not weather, they’re a controlled system, and the man with the controls won’t switch them off. Kazran Sardick is a moneylender and a miser, and Michael Gambon plays him with a wonderful, weary cruelty. He owns the sky. He also owns a vault full of people, frozen as living collateral against family debts, and he is entirely unbothered by four thousand strangers dying overhead, and when a family begs him for their frozen relative at Christmas he refuses on principle and goes back to his ledger. The setting is gorgeous, a Victorian-ish colony town under a fog full of fish, actual fish swimming through the cloud layer, occasionally very large ones with teeth. It’s the sort of detail that could be twee and instead just makes the world feel properly alien.

Rewriting a man

The Doctor’s solution is the episode’s central conceit and it’s a beauty: if this man cannot be reasoned with, go back and make him a different man. So he does. He drops into Kazran’s childhood on successive Christmas Eves, befriends the frightened boy, takes him out to catch a sky-fish, and keeps coming back, and old Kazran, sitting in his chair in the present, watches his own memories rearrange themselves as they happen. New recollections arrive mid-sentence. A photograph on his desk changes. He remembers things he didn’t remember thirty seconds ago. It’s a superb piece of television, and the show plays it for wonder rather than horror for a good while, with Matt Smith at his most likeable, the Doctor as a chaotic uncle arriving through a fireplace with a shark in tow, treating a child’s misery as an engineering problem. But the episode is quietly honest about what he’s actually doing, which is rewriting a person without consent to get what he wants. Nobody says it out loud. They don’t need to. You can see it.

The mechanics are handled with real elegance as well. The Doctor doesn’t sit old Kazran down and explain the procedure, he simply hands him a recording and lets the man watch himself acquire a childhood he never had. And the show resists the obvious version in which the new memories overwrite the old ones. Kazran keeps both. He remembers being loved and he remembers being beaten by his father, and Gambon plays a man holding two incompatible lives in his head simultaneously without either one cancelling the other out.

Abigail

And then the twist that lifts the whole thing. In the vault is Abigail Pettigrew, frozen against a debt, and young Kazran falls in love with her. Every Christmas Eve they wake her, and the three of them go somewhere wonderful. It’s charming, and then the Doctor notices the counter on her casket, and it isn’t a debt tally. It’s days. She is dying, she has a fixed and very small number of days left, and every single one they spend together is one she will never get back. So Kazran stops, and not out of cruelty but out of the opposite: he cannot bear to spend her last day, so he never opens the casket again, and he becomes hard and cold and bitter across the decades because the alternative is saying goodbye.

That is a magnificent inversion of the Dickens machinery. The Doctor set out to make a miser kind, and the kindness is what breaks him. Softening a man doesn’t automatically make him good, it just gives him something to lose. It’s the same lesson the show delivered so painfully with Van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor, that you can add something wonderful to a life and not change the ending.

A Christmas Carol: The Kindness Is What Breaks Him - Doctor Who episode still

The man he became

The resolution is properly clever. Old Kazran, memories thoroughly rewritten, still won’t work the machine, and then the Doctor brings the boy forward to look at what he grew into. The old man sees a terrified child flinching from him exactly as he once flinched from his own father, and it destroys him. And then the sky machine refuses him anyway, because it’s keyed to his biometric signature and he is, by now, a measurably different person. The Doctor’s meddling has worked so thoroughly that the lock no longer recognises the man it was built for, which is genuinely satisfying plotting, because the solution and the obstacle are the same act. Which leaves Abigail, on her last day, singing into a machine that resonates the cloud belt so the ship can land. She spends the day she was saving to save four thousand people she’ll never meet, and the show lets that be both beautiful and unbearably sad rather than picking one.

Katherine Jenkins is rather better than she needs to be, too. Abigail isn’t written with a great deal of interiority, existing largely to be loved and to die on schedule, but Jenkins gives her a calm, unfussed acceptance that stops the character tipping over into pure tragic ornament. She has always known exactly how many days she has left. She’s the only person in the entire story who has been at peace with it from the beginning, and she’s the one everybody else is busy protecting from a truth she worked out years ago.

What it leaves behind is Dickens with a time machine, ghosts that are real and leave fingerprints, the smartest possible way to adapt a story everyone already knows. It leaves memories changing live, Gambon reacting to his own past being edited in real time, the standout effect of the year and all of it performance. It leaves kindness with a cost, since making Kazran capable of love is precisely what makes him cruel, a far sharper idea than the redemption arc it’s dressed as. It leaves consent, unmentioned, because the Doctor rewrites a man’s entire life without asking in order to save a ship, and the episode notices and declines to comment, which is its own kind of comment. And it leaves Abigail’s last day, spent singing to a sky for strangers, the best-judged ending the show has managed at Christmas.

Rating: 4.5/5. Beautiful to look at, cleverly built and genuinely moving, with a central performance from Michael Gambon that carries the emotional weight effortlessly. Loses half a mark only because Amy and Rory are barely in it. Fish swimming through the fog, a shark pulling a sleigh over the rooftops, and a man who turned himself into a monster because he could not face a single goodbye. Comfortably the saddest thing this show has done at Christmas, and the cleverest. Best one yet.

January 15, 2011 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Flesh and Stone: Don’t Open Your Eyes

by Hutch Morzaria May 22, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

The second half of the Weeping Angels story does something I didn’t expect: it barely bothers with the Angels. “Flesh and Stone” resolves them almost casually and spends its real energy on something far more frightening, a crack in the wall of the universe that doesn’t kill you so much as delete the fact that you ever existed. It’s the episode where Series 5 stops being a fun new era and starts showing its teeth.

Out of the crash

We pick up from The Time of Angels with everyone about to be torn apart, and Moffat resolves it with the sort of trick he’s very good at: the Doctor shoots a gravity globe and the whole party falls up into the crashed hull of the Byzantium. It’s clever, it’s fast, and it buys the episode a much better setting, an oxygen forest growing inside a starship, all trees and dappled light and sprinklers, with an army of stone angels closing in through it. The forest is a lovely piece of design work, a vast internal biosphere gone dark, tree borgs humming quietly to themselves, shafts of emergency lighting falling through the canopy, and it gives the Angels somewhere genuinely unnerving to stand. Statues among trees work very differently from statues in a corridor: every trunk might be one, the shapes keep resolving wrongly at the edge of frame, and the camera keeps letting you check and then declining to let you check again.

Father Octavian’s clerics are the best guest ensemble the new era has had. They’re soldiers doing an impossible job with good humour, and the episode kills them methodically. Octavian himself gets one of the finest exchanges of the season, because dying, held in a statue’s grip, he tells the Doctor he wishes he’d known him better, and gets the reply that he did know him at his best. It’s a lovely, sad little beat in the middle of a monster chase. It’s a strong showcase for Matt Smith too. His Doctor is at his best here, a young face carrying a very old temper, snapping orders at armed soldiers twice his size and being obeyed without argument. There’s a moment where he tells Amy to trust him and she simply does, instantly, because of who he was to her when she was seven years old, and the weight of that lands without anybody having to stop and explain it.

The angels, and the thing behind them

The Angels here are meaner than the ones in Blink, and the story keeps adding rules to them. They snap necks now rather than politely displacing people in time. They talk, through a dead man’s cortex, which is genuinely horrible. And the nastiest new rule of all is that whatever holds the image of an Angel becomes an Angel, so Amy, who looked one of them in the eye, now has one growing inside her head with a countdown to prove it. That gives the episode its standout sequence. Amy has to walk through a forest packed with Angels with her eyes shut, alone, pretending she can still see them, because the moment they realise she’s blind they’ll take her. Karen Gillan is superb doing it, the shaking hands and the counting and the forced calm, and it’s the most nerve-shredding four minutes of the season so far. If there’s a criticism, it’s that the Angels are ultimately dispatched rather offhandedly. They fall into the crack and are unmade, and the episode moves on. Everything resolves very suddenly around the thirty-five minute mark. For a monster this good it’s a perfunctory exit.

Because the crack is what the story actually cares about. It’s the same crack that was in Amy’s bedroom wall when she was a little girl, back in The Eleventh Hour, a split in the universe itself, glowing white, and it is here too, on a different world in a different century. What it does is far worse than killing. Anything that falls into it is erased from having ever existed. A cleric walks into the light and vanishes, and thirty seconds later nobody in the room can remember him, not his name, not his face, not the fact that he was standing there. Only the Doctor remembers, because he’s a time traveller and the rules bend around him. Amy doesn’t. She’s talking to a man one moment and has never met him the next, and she doesn’t notice a thing.

The show is unusually disciplined about it. There’s no scene where somebody explains the mechanism, no helpful diagram, no moment of the Doctor working it out aloud for the audience’s benefit. People simply stop having been there, and the episode trusts you to spot the gaps on your own. By the final act the surviving party is a fraction of the size it started at, and nobody in the room besides the Doctor, and you, has the faintest idea that anything has gone missing. That’s an exceptional horror idea and the episode plays it patiently. The group gets smaller and the survivors don’t grieve, because there’s nobody to grieve for. It’s also doing quiet arc work: Amy can’t remember the Daleks, she can’t remember the year the stars went out, and the Doctor’s face when he realises how much has been eaten out of her memory is not reassuring.

River, and a date that matters

River Song remains the most tantalising thing in the show. She’s here as a prisoner on day release, escorted by armed clerics, working off a sentence, and when the Doctor asks what she did, Octavian tells him she killed a man. A good man. A hero to many. Possibly the best man she ever knew. She still knows the Doctor’s future. He still doesn’t know her. Since Forest of the Dead, which from her perspective hasn’t happened yet and from his has, the imbalance has flipped in a way that makes my head hurt pleasantly. She promises him he’ll see her again, at the Pandorica. He has no idea what that means. Neither do I. The two-parter is really about advancing her and the crack rather than the statues, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.

Then the episode does something genuinely awkward, on purpose. Amy, wired on survival adrenaline, throws herself at the Doctor, and he is completely, comically out of his depth, all flailing limbs and horrified politeness. It’s played for laughs, but there’s a serious point underneath. The Doctor asks about her wedding, and the date, and the date is the twenty-sixth of June, 2010, and something about it clearly matters enormously. He drags her back to the TARDIS not because he’s offended but because he’s worked something out and won’t say what.

What it leaves behind is a crack that unmakes people, erasure rather than death with nobody left to notice, which is the most frightening idea the new era has produced. It leaves Amy’s blind walk, four minutes of pure nerve and the moment Gillan proves she can carry a sequence alone. It leaves Angels with new rules, talking and neck-snapping and infectious through the eye, meaner than Blink if less elegantly used. It leaves holes in Amy’s memory, things she was present for and has lost, with the Doctor visibly alarmed about it, because something has been eating this universe for a while. And it leaves a wedding date that matters, the twenty-sixth of June 2010, which he wouldn’t explain and I’d very much like to understand.

Rating: 4.5/5. A superb, tense hour that trades a bit of monster satisfaction for a much bigger idea, anchored by a terrific Amy and the best guest cast of the run. The Angels deserved a better exit; everything else is close to flawless. A forest growing inside a crashed spaceship, a girl walking blind past a hundred statues, and a crack in everything that quietly eats you out of history. Also, River Song killed a hero, a good man, the best she ever knew, and she still won’t say who.

May 22, 2010 3 comments

Doctor Who

The Eleventh Hour: Fish Custard and Twenty Minutes to Save the World

by Hutch Morzaria April 11, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Eleventh Hour” is the Series 5 opener that introduces Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, under new showrunner Steven Moffat. The newly regenerated Doctor crash-lands in young Amelia Pond’s garden, promises to return in five minutes and comes back twelve years later, just as an alien prison ship threatens to burn the Earth unless its escaped prisoner is handed back.

The review finds the debut lives up to its promise despite a few hiccups, with Smith still settling in and trying slightly too hard, and singles out Karen Gillan and the young Amelia as the stars. It rates the episode 3.5 out of 5.

Doctor Who is finally back, with a new Doctor, a new companion and a whole new team behind the scenes, and after The End of Time that’s a lot to live up to. David Tennant was immensely popular, and Matt Smith has some very big shoes to fill. “The Eleventh Hour” picks up right where the regeneration left off, with the TARDIS on fire and plummeting towards London and the new Doctor hanging out of the door. There were definitely some hiccups in this first episode. Overall, though, it lived up to the promise, and if Matt Smith was perhaps a bit wooden in places, his new companion was stellar.

Fish fingers and custard

The TARDIS crash-lands in the garden of a little girl called Amelia Pond, and the best stretch of the episode is the Doctor trying to find out who he is now. He’s starving, and every food she offers him is wrong, until he lands on fish fingers dipped in custard, which is a very funny sequence. It shows that while each Doctor keeps the memories and feelings of the one before, the body really is brand new, and he has to discover its limits like anyone else. The little girl playing Amelia is excellent, by the way, completely unfazed by the strange man in her kitchen and taking him entirely on trust. It’s the fairy-tale tone Steven Moffat has clearly decided his era is going to have, and it suits the show.

Amelia has a crack in her bedroom wall, and through it she can hear a voice warning that Prisoner Zero has escaped. The Doctor hears it too, and it’s genuinely unsettling, a scar in the fabric of the universe that he says should never have been there. He dashes back to the TARDIS to stop it exploding, promising to be back in five minutes, and doesn’t return for twelve years. It’s a heartbreaking little turn. Amelia spends her childhood being laughed at by the whole village for her story about the Raggedy Doctor, and it’s clear she never really got to have a normal life after that night.

Amy Pond in her police kissogram outfit in The Eleventh Hour

Twenty minutes

When the Doctor finally does come back, the girl he left behind has grown into Amy Pond, and she’s furious. Karen Gillan is fantastic from her very first scene, strong and feisty and more than a match for the Doctor’s manic energy, and she handles him in a way I don’t think we’ve seen from a companion before. Prisoner Zero turns out to be a shape-changing alien that has been hiding in the local hospital disguised as its coma patients, which is a lovely creepy idea. Its jailers, the Atraxi, arrive in orbit and give the Earth twenty minutes to hand it over before they burn the whole planet. With the TARDIS still rebuilding itself and his sonic screwdriver fried, the Doctor has nothing but his wits and a borrowed laptop.

There’s a nice introduction for Rory too, Amy’s boyfriend, a nurse at the hospital who has noticed that his coma patients keep turning up around the village and has the photos on his phone to prove it. Nobody believes him either, which rather fits. The best creepy moment is a man out walking his dog, where it’s the man who barks, a tiny detail that tells you something is badly wrong before anyone says so out loud. The Doctor’s scene on the village green is great as well, standing still for a few seconds and noticing every wrong detail around him in a way that sums up how this Doctor works. It’s all very Moffat, small and domestic and then suddenly unsettling.

The Atraxi are a striking bit of design, giant eyeballs inside spiky crystal ships, and hearing their warning boom out of every radio and television on the planet at once is a good way of making a village-sized story feel global. They don’t get much personality, but they don’t need it, because the real threat is the clock. Twenty minutes is a lovely device for a new Doctor, since it forces him to show us everything he can do in a hurry rather than telling us about it. By the time he’s calling them back, I was firmly on his side.

That’s where Matt Smith really starts to win me over. He saves the day after a string of close calls, and then calls the Atraxi back and makes them look at who they’re dealing with, the faces of every Doctor before him flickering past. “I’m the Doctor. Basically, run.” It’s a great moment, and it’s also where he steps through the projection in his new outfit for the first time, bow tie and all. It felt like the show honouring the old guard while the new one took over.

A new era, with some hiccups

My only real negative is that Smith is perhaps trying too hard at times. The pressure on him must have been immense, and he needs to relax into the role a bit more, but that’ll come with time. He’s got a unique look, which is a necessity for the Doctor, and I think he could play the part very well once he settles. The story itself doesn’t have huge ties to the wider universe yet, apart from that crack, and in some ways it plays like an introduction more than a standalone adventure. As an introduction to two new characters, though, it does a very good job, and the reaction I’ve seen so far seems fairly positive.

The end is lovely. The Doctor offers Amy a place in the TARDIS after another two-year gap that you really have to see to enjoy, and she accepts, running away with him the night before her wedding, which is a thread I suspect they’re going to pull on. The TARDIS interior has been completely redesigned, and it looks radically different from the one we had in the David Tennant years, more storybook than coral. There’s a new green sonic screwdriver to go with it. It’s a proper fresh start, and it made me want to see where this Doctor and this companion go next, which is exactly what an opener should do. Put it next to the way Rose relaunched the show in 2005 and it holds up well.

Rating: 3.5/5. A confident, funny and genuinely magical opener with a few hiccups, a new Doctor still finding his feet and a companion who’s brilliant from the first minute. Karen Gillan and the young Amelia are the stars, and the fish custard scene alone is worth tuning in for. I’m looking forward to seeing Smith relax into it.

April 11, 2010 3 comments

Doctor Who Television

Forest of the Dead: Saved, and What That Costs

by Hutch Morzaria June 28, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

The second half of a two-parter like this is usually where the clockwork becomes visible, and “Forest of the Dead” is no exception, because every apparently disconnected thing from Silence in the Library turns out to be holding something up. But what elevates it above a clever machine is that it spends its resolution on grief. Three separate people lose something irreplaceable here, and only one of them ever finds out.

Donna’s other life

We left Donna’s face on a statue and a voice announcing she’d been saved. What that meant, it turns out, is that she’s inside the computer, living a life. The sequence is superbly unsettling. Donna is in a bright, ordinary world where time jumps: she meets a man called Lee, and then she’s married to him, and then she has two children, all in a series of hard cuts that skip the connective tissue entirely. She never notices, because that’s how the simulation works. Everyone in this world moves the same way. Everyone’s memories start in the middle. It’s Miss Evangelista, dead and uploaded and rendered brilliant by a data corruption that also disfigured her, who forces Donna to see it. And the moment Donna does, the episode turns genuinely cruel: she looks at her own children and they simply blink out of existence, because they were never anything but a subroutine. Catherine Tate plays the whole run beautifully, and the show doesn’t spare her.

Evangelista is the standout of that whole strand. In life she was the one everybody talked over and quietly sniggered at. Corrupted in the upload, she has become the cleverest person in the story and is profoundly, articulately miserable about it, hidden behind a veil because her face didn’t survive the process intact. The episode uses her to land the point it was always building toward, that she was never stupid and was simply never listened to, and the cruelty of it is that now she can out-think every person in the building, she’s lonelier than she has ever been.

What the library did

The central explanation is elegant. A century ago the Vashta Nerada hatched in their millions and the Library’s computer did the only thing it could: it teleported all four thousand and twenty-two people inside itself and stored them. Saved, exactly as you’d save a file. They’ve been sitting on a hard drive for a hundred years while the shadows owned the surface. And the little girl watching it all on her television is CAL, the computer, a dying child of the Lux family whose mind was wired into the Library so that she could live forever with every book ever written. That’s a genuinely lovely, sad idea, and it retroactively explains every strange cut and flicker in part one.

The Vashta Nerada get a good explanation too, and it’s the best line in the story: the paper in every one of those billion books was pulped from trees on their world. They didn’t invade the Library. They hatched in it. This is our forest. The monster has a legitimate grievance, which is a very Doctor Who move. The confrontation that follows is a good one as well. Faced with a swarm capable of stripping him to the bone in about a second, the Doctor doesn’t fight it at all. He tells them precisely who he is, invites them to go and look him up in the several billion books surrounding them, and then asks for one day to get the survivors off the planet. It’s the sort of scene this programme does better than anything else on television: a man winning an argument with a trillion carnivorous microbes purely by being enormously confident and extremely well documented.

Spoilers

Then River Song, and the part of the episode that will stay with me. The plan requires someone to be wired into the computer to power the download that restores four thousand people, and it will kill them. The Doctor intends to do it himself. River handcuffs him to a pillar and does it instead. Her argument is unanswerable and it’s the whole point of the character: he can’t die here, because she has already met the man he becomes. She knows his future. She’s seen him older, and kinder, and standing at the Singing Towers of Darillium with tears on his face, giving her a sonic screwdriver as a gift. She knows all of it, and she refuses to tell him a word of it, because, and she keeps saying it, spoilers. Alex Kingston is magnificent, and the imbalance set up in part one pays off completely. She’s dying for someone she’s loved for years, in front of a man who met her yesterday and still doesn’t know her name. He is devastated and slightly bewildered, which is exactly right. He hasn’t earned this yet. She does it anyway. The show has circled this territory before, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this is sharper, because River isn’t waiting for him. She’s ahead of him, and she’s chosen to go first.

The Doctor works out that the screwdriver she carries is one he hasn’t given her yet, which means he will, which means there’s more of this coming. He uses it to catch her consciousness at the moment of death and upload her into the Library, where she gets a kind of afterlife with the crew who died and a little girl who owns a world of books. It’s a fudge, and it’s a beautiful one. This is an episode destined to have far-reaching consequences, and even watching it cold that much is obvious.

The quietest heartbreak is saved for Donna. Restored to the real world, she doesn’t remember what she lost, but Lee was real. He was another saved mind, and he’s there, in the crowd, trying to call after her. He has a stutter. He can’t get her name out in time. She walks away without ever seeing him. Nobody tells her. The Doctor sees the whole thing and says nothing, which is either mercy or cowardice and the episode refuses to specify. After the way she’s grown since Partners in Crime, watching her lose an entire life she never knew she had, twice and in different ways, is a bleak note to leave her on. The show plays it in near silence, too. No swelling strings, no dialogue spelling out the tragedy, no reaction shot telling you how to feel. Just a man in a crowd failing to force a word past his own stutter, and a woman walking straight past him toward a blue box, and the moment closing over both of them. It is comfortably the most restrained thing in the episode and comfortably the most upsetting.

The idea that actually holds the whole thing together is CAL: a dying child given every book ever written and an entire world to live inside instead. Everything else in the episode, the shadows, the hundred years of missing people, River’s sacrifice, is built around that one tender image, and it’s the reason the ending works instead of just resolving.

Rating: 4.5/5. A dense, satisfying resolution that pays off every thread and finds real emotion inside its own machinery. The upload ending softens River’s death slightly, but by then the episode has earned a little kindness. A library full of the dead, a diary full of a future, and a woman who died to protect a man she hasn’t met yet. Spoilers, apparently. I’ve never wanted a spoiler more.

June 28, 2008 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

Silence in the Library: Count the Shadows

by Hutch Morzaria June 21, 2008

written by Hutch Morzaria

This show has now done five episodes built around something ordinary being made frightening: gas masks, the statues in Blink, clockwork, and now shadows. “Silence in the Library” takes the simplest possible thing, the dark patch on the floor behind you, and turns it into the most efficient monster of the season. It also introduces a character who upends everything about how the Doctor’s story works, and it does that quietly, in the middle of a horror episode, while nobody’s looking.

A planet of books

The setting is magnificent. The Library is not a library on a planet, it is a planet that is a library, the whole surface of a world given over to shelving, containing a copy of every book ever written. Continents of fiction. An entire biography section the size of a country. And it’s empty. A hundred years ago the Library sealed itself, broadcast a single message, count the shadows, and four thousand and twenty-two people vanished from it without trace, while the systems simultaneously logged a million million lifeforms still present. Nobody has been back since. That’s a superb opening mystery, and the direction sells it: enormous vaulted halls, dust, silence, and the Doctor cheerfully wandering into it because he can’t help himself. Donna hates the place on sight, which is the correct response.

They aren’t alone for long. An archaeological expedition arrives, funded by Strackman Lux, a corporate heir with a proprietorial interest in the planet and a non-disclosure agreement he’d like everyone to sign before they’re permitted to die in it. His team are a decently sketched crew: two men both confusingly called Dave, a dry, capable archaeologist called Anita, and the sweet, slightly dim Miss Evangelista, who is treated with casual contempt by nearly everyone around her and whose fate the episode later uses to make a very sharp point about exactly that. Running alongside all of it is something stranger still, a little girl in what looks like a present-day suburban living room, who sees the Library whenever she closes her eyes. Every time the story cuts to her the Library flickers, people vanish mid-sentence, corridors rearrange themselves, doors reset. Her psychiatrist calmly tells her that the Library is the real world and her own life is the dream. The episode never explains it, and it keeps quietly pulling the floor out from under everything else.

Count the shadows

The Vashta Nerada are the best monster this show’s done since the Angels, and they work on exactly the same principle: a rule you can check yourself. They are microscopic, they swarm in their trillions, and they live in shadow. They strip a person to bare bone in about a second. You cannot fight them, you cannot outrun them, and you cannot see them, but you can count your shadows, because a person with two shadows has already been marked and the second one is not a shadow. The horror lands because the show plays it with total discipline. There’s no monster reveal, no creature effect to be disappointed by. There’s just a dark patch on the floor that is fractionally in the wrong place, and a man in a spacesuit who has stopped talking, and a helmet full of skull. The moment a character glances down and sees two shadows where there should be one is as good a scare as this programme has managed. The monster here is essentially a lighting note, and it works better than half the CGI creatures this show has ever spent real money on.

Even better is what happens to Miss Evangelista. Killed early, her neural relay keeps transmitting an echo of her last thoughts, a data ghost, looping and confused, asking where everyone’s gone and then repeating two words about ice cream until the signal degrades. It is genuinely horrible, and the other characters’ helpless embarrassment as they listen to a dead woman fade out mid-sentence is the most upsetting thing in the episode. It’s also, characteristically, an idea nobody else would have thought to put in a Saturday teatime drama. Donna’s part is smaller than usual, and the show makes that unease part of the texture rather than hiding it. She spends the hour wanting to leave, saying so out loud more than once, and being gently talked round each time, and on every occasion she raises the possibility of simply going home the Doctor breezes straight past it without really hearing her. Given where she ends up by the closing minutes, that little pattern looks rather different on reflection than it does in the moment.

The woman with the diary

And then, in the middle of all this, there’s River Song. She arrives with the expedition and she knows him. Not knows of him. Knows him. She has a diary full of their adventures together, in an order that hasn’t happened yet. She’s exasperated by him, fond of him, calls him “sweetie”, and is visibly hurt when it becomes clear he hasn’t the faintest idea who she is. Alex Kingston plays it beautifully, and the effect is genuinely disorientating. Every scene between them runs on an imbalance the audience can see and he can’t: she has a whole history with this man, and she’s standing in front of a version of him who is looking straight through her. When she has to prove who she is, she does it by leaning in and whispering something in his ear, and whatever it is, it stops him dead. She knows his name. His actual name. It’s a hell of a swing. The show has spent four series treating the Doctor’s past as the mystery, and this quietly introduces someone for whom his future is the settled thing and the present is the awkward part. This isn’t the first time the show has done lovers meeting out of sequence, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between his visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this inverts it. This time the Doctor is the one arriving too early.

The cliffhanger is vicious, and it’s aimed squarely at Donna. She’s teleported out of danger, or so we’re told. Then the Doctor finds one of the Library’s information Nodes, the stone statues with real donated human faces mounted on them, and this one is wearing Donna’s face, and it says, in Donna’s voice, that Donna Noble has been saved. Nobody explains it. Nobody has time to. The shadows are closing, one of the crew is already a skeleton walking around in a suit, and the episode simply stops there. “Saved” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and none of it sounds good.

Rating: 4.5/5. Beautifully constructed, properly scary, and carrying a genuinely destabilising new character. It loses half a mark only for being the front half of a story, since everything it sets up, it sets up superbly. Four thousand and twenty-two missing people, a woman carrying a diary full of a future he hasn’t lived yet, and Donna Noble’s face bolted onto a statue in a dead library. I’ve no idea what “saved” is supposed to mean in that sentence, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to find out. Count the shadows. Seriously, go and count them.

June 21, 2008 1 comment

Doctor Who Television

Blink: Don’t Turn Your Back, Don’t Look Away

by Hutch Morzaria June 30, 2007

written by Hutch Morzaria

I’m going to say this plainly: “Blink” is the best episode of Doctor Who I have ever seen. It contains almost no Doctor. Its hero is a young woman we’ve never met and will probably never see again. It cost about nine pounds and was made to fill a gap in the production schedule. And it is a flawless, terrifying, perfectly engineered hour of television that I suspect people will still be talking about in twenty years.

Sally Sparrow

Our lead is Sally Sparrow, played by Carey Mulligan, who breaks into a derelict house called Wester Drumlins because she likes old things and finds, under a peeling strip of wallpaper, a message. It’s a warning. It’s addressed to her by name. It’s signed by the Doctor. And it was written in 1969.

Mulligan is tremendous — curious, dry, frightened but not helpless, the kind of protagonist who runs toward the mystery and then handles it sensibly once she’s in it. Making the audience surrogate a complete stranger rather than the Doctor is the boldest choice here, and it works because Sally is good enough company to carry the whole thing. She has one of the best throwaway lines the show has produced, too, when she’s asked why she’s sad and says that sad is happy for deep people. She’s a delight.

Where the previous Doctor-lite experiment in Love & Monsters swung wildly and connected about half the time, this one never puts a foot wrong. Same constraint, wildly different result — and the difference is that “Blink” turns the Doctor’s absence into the actual engine of the plot rather than a gap to be worked around.

The Lonely Assassins

And then there are the Angels. My God, the Angels.

The concept is so clean it feels like it has always existed. They are quantum-locked: they cannot move while they are being observed, so in the presence of any living thing they become stone statues, harmless and inert. Look away, and they cross the room. Blink, and they’re on you. They are the fastest, deadliest things in the universe and you can stop them completely just by staring — until your eyes water.

It’s the rare monster that turns the act of watching television into a physical experience. You start noticing your own blinking. You start distrusting statues. And the direction is brutally disciplined about it — no transformation shots, no CGI reveals, just a hard cut and the thing is suddenly six feet closer with its hands away from its face and its mouth open. The scene in the cellar where they advance in the strobing torchlight is one of the most frightening things this show has ever filmed. What makes them work on a shoestring is that they’re barely an effect at all. They are performers standing very still in stone make-up, and the camera simply cuts. No budget was harmed in the making of the scariest monster of the decade. The horror lives entirely in the edit and in your own inability to stop watching, which is the cleverest possible answer to having no money.

Even better, they don’t kill you. They send you back in time and let you live to death, feeding on the energy of the life you would otherwise have had. It’s a beautifully cruel idea — a monster that murders you with a long, complete, ordinary existence somewhere you never wanted to be.

Timey-Wimey

The plot is a machine, and every gear meshes. Sally’s friend Kathy is touched by an Angel and wakes up in 1920, where she lives a full life, marries, has children — and arranges for a letter to be hand-delivered to Sally by her own grandson at the precise moment she vanishes. A young policeman, Billy Shipton, is sent to 1969, builds a career in publishing, and meets Sally again the same night she met him, as a dying old man in a hospital bed. The gap between his two scenes is about four minutes of screen time and an entire human lifetime, and it is quietly devastating.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is stranded in 1969 with Martha and communicates the only way he can: as a hidden Easter egg on seventeen unrelated DVDs, appearing to hold up his side of a conversation with someone he can’t see. The reveal of how that works is the single most satisfying bit of plotting in the series’ history — Larry is transcribing the Doctor’s half, Sally is speaking the other half, and the transcript in Larry’s hands is the transcript Sally will eventually hand to the Doctor so he knows what to say. A closed loop with no loose ends, and the show is confident enough to let the Doctor shrug at it: time isn’t a straight line, it’s a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

There’s a lovely joke buried in the Doctor’s predicament as well. Stranded in 1969 without his ship, the cleverest being in the universe is reduced to leaving cryptic messages on home video and hoping somebody watches the special features. He spends the entire episode at the mercy of a stranger he hasn’t met yet, which is a very satisfying inversion — for once he’s the one who needs rescuing, and the only way he can ask for help is by post.

Moffat has form for this. The time windows of The Girl in the Fireplace played similar games with the same obvious delight in structure, and the creeping dread of The Empty Child proved he could terrify a nation of children with one repeated phrase. “Blink” welds both instincts together and is easily the tightest thing he’s built — the horror and the clockwork locked so closely that neither would function without the other. Nothing is arbitrary. Every apparent coincidence turns out to be causation running backwards.

Don’t Blink

The climax is beautifully simple. Sally and Larry, trapped in the cellar with the TARDIS and four Angels closing in, the lights failing, nothing to defend themselves with except their own eyes. And the resolution requires no weapon at all: the TARDIS dematerialises out from between them, and the Angels — lunging inward from four directions — are left staring directly at one another. Quantum-locked by their own nature, frozen forever by the only thing that can stop them. It’s elegant, it’s funny, and it’s the perfect use of an established rule.

Then the coda, which curdles everything. A montage of statues — in parks, in churchyards, outside your window — while Sally’s voice reminds us that they could be anywhere, and that the only defence is to keep looking. It’s a closing gag and a genuine threat at the same time, and it sends you to bed uneasy.

What Blink Leaves Us With

A masterpiece assembled out of a production problem. Here’s what it plants:

The Weeping Angels. A monster built entirely out of a rule the audience has to obey too. Instantly the best new creation of the revived series, and one of the great screen monsters full stop.
Death by lost life. Not killed but displaced, and consumed by the years you’ll never get. A far more haunting fate than extermination.
A perfect closed loop. The DVD Easter egg conceit is flawless plotting — a paradox that’s genuinely satisfying rather than a cheat.
A hero who isn’t the Doctor. Sally Sparrow carries an entire episode of the show without him and never once feels like a substitute.
Restraint as horror. No gore, no transformation effects, barely any music in the worst moments. Just a statue that’s closer than it was.

Rating: 5/5 — Perfect. Tightly plotted, genuinely frightening, emotionally sharp, and made with almost nothing. If someone has never watched Doctor Who and wants one episode to explain why the rest of us are like this, it’s this one.

Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink and you’re dead. I’ve been checking the garden ornaments all evening and I’m not entirely joking.

June 30, 2007 6 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Girl in the Fireplace: The Doctor’s Lonely Angel

by Hutch Morzaria May 9, 2006

written by Hutch Morzaria

“The Girl in the Fireplace,” written by Steven Moffat, follows the Tenth Doctor as he discovers time windows aboard a derelict spaceship that open onto 18th-century France, connecting him to Reinette, the future Madame de Pompadour. Clockwork repair droids stalk her through Versailles, waiting to harvest her brain as a replacement ship component.

The episode’s emotional weight comes from a doomed romance built on mismatched time. The Doctor lives minutes while Reinette lives years, and she dies still waiting for him to return. A final reveal, that the ship bears her name, reframes the droids’ actions entirely, in a detail the Doctor never learns.

Every so often Doctor Who produces an episode so complete, so confident, and so quietly devastating that you just sit there when it’s over. “The Girl in the Fireplace” is one of those. Written by Steven Moffat, the man who gave us the chills of The Empty Child last year, it takes a premise that sounds like nonsense on paper, a spaceship full of fireplaces that open onto the court of Louis XV, and spins it into the best hour Series 2 has managed yet, ahead of the alien queen and werewolf chase of Tooth and Claw. It’s funny, it’s frightening, and by the end it left me genuinely a bit wrecked.

Windows Into Versailles

The TARDIS drifts onto a derelict spaceship 3,000 years in the future, Rose and Mickey in tow, this being Mickey’s first proper trip in the box since he talked his way aboard in School Reunion. The ship is dead, its crew long gone, and yet its power is running full tilt and it’s riddled with “time windows”: doorways that open, impossibly, onto 18th-century France. Light an ornate fireplace on the ship and step through, and you’re in the bedroom of a little girl in Paris. Her name is Reinette, and she’ll grow up to be Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the King and one of the most remarkable women of her age.

The Doctor keeps stepping through, but time runs at different speeds on either side of the glass. He crosses in minutes; she lives whole years between his visits. So he meets her as a frightened child checking for monsters under the bed, then, a heartbeat later for him, as a dazzling grown woman who has been waiting for her “fireplace man” her entire life. It’s a gorgeous, dreamlike structure, and Sophia Myles plays Reinette as clever, fearless, and utterly a match for the Doctor.

The monsters under her bed are real, and they’re the episode’s masterstroke: clockwork repair droids in beautiful, blank-faced 18th-century carnival masks, ticking softly as they stalk her through the palace. The reveal of why they want her is pure nightmare logic. When the ship broke down, its robots had no spare parts, so they used the crew, every scrap of them, to patch the vessel back together. There’s an eyeball in a scanner, a heart wired into the engine. And now they’ve fixated on Reinette, waiting with terrible patience for her to reach a specific age, because they’ve decided her brain is the one component the ship still needs. The ship, you see, and the woman share a name. The droids are simply trying to finish their repairs.

The Lonely Angel

What elevates all this from clever to unforgettable is the romance. When the Doctor first scans the child’s mind, Reinette scans him right back, and what she finds there is the loneliness he carries everywhere, the same open wound we’ve watched him nurse ever since the Time War took everything from him in The Parting of the Ways. “You are the loneliest of them all,” she tells him, and it lands like a diagnosis. Reinette sees the Doctor whole, the way almost no one does, and she isn’t frightened by what she finds. She calls him her lonely angel, and she chooses him anyway.

Tennant is wonderful here: giddy, flirtatious, and then suddenly, nakedly moved. There’s a scene where he emerges from reading her mind having accidentally let her into his, and the vulnerability on his face tells you everything. This isn’t a companion crush or a bit of banter. For once the Doctor has met someone who runs at his speed, and the show lets him fall, hard.

Which is what makes the climax so magnificent. The droids open a window to snatch Reinette at a grand ball, and the only way through is a sealed mirror with no return. So the Doctor does the maddest, most romantic thing imaginable: he takes a run-up on horseback and smashes straight through the mirror into 18th-century Versailles to save her, knowing, as he does it, that shattering that last window strands him there forever, cut off from the TARDIS and everything he is. He gives it all up without hesitation. “One may tolerate a world of demons,” he says, “for the sake of an angel.”

And credit where it’s due: Reinette is nobody’s swooning damsel. She walks toward the ticking monsters when she has to, stares down a clockwork man twice her size with nothing but nerve and a fireplace poker, and when the crisis comes it’s her giving the orders. Moffat writes her as the Doctor’s equal rather than his prize, which is precisely why losing her cuts so deep. The script even finds room for comedy in the middle of the heartbreak: the Doctor strolls back through a time window having somehow acquired a horse, utterly deadpan about it, and christens the thing Arthur. Little grace notes like that keep an achingly romantic hour from ever curdling into the po-faced.

Too Late

And then the episode does the cruellest, most beautiful thing. Having sacrificed his way home, the Doctor discovers the original fireplace still works, still linked to the ship: a way back after all. Overjoyed, he promises to whisk Reinette off to see the stars, tells her to pack a bag, and pops back through to fetch the TARDIS. But time runs differently, remember. For him it’s a moment. For her, it’s years. When the Doctor returns, grinning, ready to make good on his promise, he’s met with silence, and a funeral carriage passing in the rain. Madame de Pompadour has just died, aged forty-three, still waiting for the angel who said he’d come back.

The King hands him her final letter, and the Doctor reads it alone, and Tennant plays the whole thing with a stillness that’s worse than any breakdown. She kept her window, her fireplace, her whole life. She never stopped believing he’d return. He was minutes too late by his own clock and a lifetime too late by hers. It is one of the most quietly heartbreaking endings the show has ever done.

The final gut-punch is saved for the very last shot. As the TARDIS leaves, the camera drifts across the derelict ship’s hull to reveal its name: the SS Madame de Pompadour. The droids were never mad. They were repairing a ship named for a woman, and in their broken logic they simply went looking for her. The Doctor never finds out. It’s the sort of detail that reframes everything the second you catch it, and it’s the mark of a script operating on a completely different level. Other Doctor Who fans single out that same closing shot as the moment the episode earns its ending rather than just delivering one.

What The Girl in the Fireplace Leaves Us With

A near-flawless standalone that doubles as the definitive statement of who this Doctor is. Here’s what it plants:

The Doctor can fall in love. Not a companion’s adoration, but a real, adult, doomed romance, and the show treats it with total seriousness.
Loneliness is the engine. Reinette reads it in an instant, and it’s the truest thing anyone’s said about the Tenth Doctor yet: for all the joy, he is the loneliest man alive.
The slow path and the fast path. Moffat turns time itself into the tragedy: the Doctor lives fast and arrives late, and someone who loved him grows old and dies in the gap.
Rose and Mickey, sidelined on purpose. Rose watching the Doctor lose himself in another woman quietly deepens the ache she’s been carrying since School Reunion, and that’s exactly the point.
A monster you’ll remember. Ticking clockwork men in porcelain masks are an instant classic: elegant, patient, and horrible.

Rating: 5/5 — Funny, terrifying, romantic, and tragic in a single tight hour, with an ending that recontextualises everything that came before. The best episode of Series 2 so far, and one of the best the revived show has produced full stop.

A horse through a mirror, monsters under the bed, and a love letter read too late — “The Girl in the Fireplace” is Doctor Who at the absolute top of its game. Give me a minute. I need to go stare at a wall.

May 9, 2006 5 comments

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