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Toby Whithouse

The Lie of the Land: They Have Always Been Here

by Hutch Morzaria June 3, 2017

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Monk trilogy has been building to a story about occupation and consent, and this is where it arrives, and where, after two genuinely excellent episodes, it settles for something much more ordinary. “The Lie of the Land” has a superb opening twenty minutes, a strong central idea, one very cheap gag at its heart, and a resolution that does not deserve the setup it’s been handed. It isn’t a bad episode. It’s the disappointing one, which in a trilogy this strong is worse.

Six months later

The opening is excellent and genuinely uncomfortable. The Monks have been here six months and have rewritten human memory wholesale. Everyone on Earth now believes they have been present since the dawn of the species, guiding and protecting and benevolent, and there is documentary evidence, statuary, textbooks and newsreel to prove it. Remembering otherwise is a criminal offence: memory crime, punished by arrest. The imagery is strong and specific, with propaganda screens on every street, informers, labour camps, and a population that is not oppressed so much as grateful. The occupation works because it is loved, exactly as the Monks specified. Wayne Yip shoots a grey, drab, surveilled Britain that looks convincingly like somewhere three seasons into a bad arrangement.

The production design deserves credit for how specific it all looks. The Monks haven’t built anything, they’ve inserted themselves into what was already there. Their statues stand in existing town squares next to war memorials. Their faces are on stamps and coins and school textbooks. The archive footage of the moon landing has a Monk in the background. It’s a much smarter way to show a rewritten history than a conquered landscape would have been: nothing was destroyed, everything was simply amended, and the amendments are boring and municipal and everywhere. The labour camps get similar restraint, grey and functional and full of people who mostly think the prisoners had it coming. Bill’s isolation is well handled too. She’s immune to the rewrite because she made the deal, which means she’s the only person who remembers what actually happened, and she keeps herself sane by talking to an imagined version of the mother she never knew, a mother she only has photographs of because the Doctor quietly went back and took them for her.

The bad joke

And then the episode does the thing that a lot of people will never forgive it for. Bill finds the Doctor. He’s been making the propaganda broadcasts, the voice of the occupation, explaining to humanity why the Monks are good for them, and when she confronts him he tells her, at length and persuasively, that he means it. Humanity is a danger to itself, the Monks impose order, and he has decided to help. It’s a good scene, and Capaldi plays it with enough conviction that you genuinely wonder how they’ll walk it back. Bill shoots him. Then he starts to regenerate, and stops, and laughs, because it was a test, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the whole thing was staged to check whether she was still herself. The fake-out is the problem. Not the test, which is defensible and rather cruel in a way this Doctor can be, but staging a fake regeneration as a gag, in a season that will end with a real one, cheapens something the show should treat as expensive. It’s a stunt aimed at the trailer rather than at the story, and the episode never recovers its seriousness afterwards.

The best material is in the vault, and there isn’t enough of it. Missy has encountered the Monks before and knows how to break them, and Michelle Gomez plays the consultation as a bored professional being asked to do somebody’s homework. Her solution is straightforward and monstrous: the occupation runs on a signal broadcast through one person’s mind, so kill that person. It’s Bill. Do it and the whole thing collapses. What’s interesting is that she’s right, and that the episode has to work quite hard to find an alternative. There’s also a genuinely affecting moment where Missy, apparently in the early stages of actually reforming, is troubled by the memory of people she’s killed, and Gomez plays it without a shred of pantomime. Every scene in the vault is better than the scenes outside it.

The resolution

The fix is that Bill’s mind is broadcast on the Monks’ frequency, so they need to overwrite her with something stronger than their fabricated history. The Doctor tries and fails. Bill succeeds, by filling the signal with the image of her mother, an idea of a person built entirely out of love and photographs, which is too personal and too coherent for the Monks’ fiction to displace. The world remembers. The Monks leave. Humanity, having been freed, promptly forgets the Monks ever existed at all. The emotional logic is fine and Pearl Mackie sells it. The mechanical logic is mush, because the power of a mother’s love overwriting an alien broadcast is a sentiment rather than a solution, and it arrives about four minutes after the episode has established that this exact approach doesn’t work. It’s the same soft landing that undercut The Rings of Akhaten, and it’s more of a shame here because the trilogy’s first two parts were so rigorous.

That said, the mother thread is the episode’s best long-game payoff, and it reaches back further than it first appears. Bill has no memories of her mother at all, since she died when Bill was a baby and there were almost no photographs. In the season’s first episode the Doctor quietly went back in time and took some, and left them for her without ever mentioning it. So the image she uses to break the Monks’ signal is not a real memory, it’s a person she assembled out of a gift she doesn’t know she was given. That’s a genuinely elegant piece of construction, and it’s the one part of the resolution that feels earned rather than asserted. The final beat is the sharpest thing in the hour: everyone forgets. Six months of occupation, collaboration and informing on neighbours, gone and unexamined, no reckoning for anybody. The show tosses that away in a line, and it’s the most interesting idea in the episode.

Rating: 3/5. A tremendous first act and some of the best Missy material of the era, undone by a cheap gag at the midpoint and a resolution that substitutes sentiment for a solution. After the ingenuity of Extremis and the tension of the pyramid, this is a distinct step down, but the imagery of the occupation is strong enough that it’s still worth the time.

June 3, 2017 0 comments

A Town Called Mercy: Nobody Gets Away Clean

by Hutch Morzaria September 15, 2012

written by Hutch Morzaria

Doctor Who does a Western about once a generation, and the temptation is always to treat it as costume: hats, a saloon, a showdown at noon, everyone very pleased with themselves. “A Town Called Mercy” wears the costume properly and then uses it for something considerably harder, a story about whether a man who did monstrous things for defensible reasons is owed protection, and about what happens when the Doctor is the one asked to decide. It’s the best-argued episode of the season so far, and the one that most obviously has something on its mind.

The town of Mercy, Nevada, 1870, has a problem: there’s a line of stones and skulls drawn in the dirt around it, and a cyborg standing beyond it who will kill anyone who crosses. The setup is beautifully economical. Mercy has electric light ten years early, and a doctor who cured its cholera outbreak, and a population who are quietly, deliberately not asking too many questions about either. Kahler-Jex crashed here, made himself indispensable, and the town has been protecting him ever since, partly out of gratitude and partly because their lamps work. What he did before he arrived is that he and his colleagues took volunteers from their own people during a war and turned them into cyborg weapons, without consent, in enormous pain. The war ended. The weapons were left. One of them, Kahler-Tek, has spent a very long time working through the list of the men responsible, and Jex is the last name on it.

Two arguments, both good

What lifts the episode is that both sides are given a genuine case and the script refuses to quietly rig it. Jex is not a cackling villain. Adrian Scarborough plays him as a tired, courteous man who is entirely willing to explain himself: the war was killing millions, the programme ended it, and he has spent every year since trying to balance the ledger by healing whoever is in front of him. He also, crucially, does not claim innocence. He knows exactly what he did, he simply doesn’t accept that it was wrong, and he’s rather good at explaining why. The Gunslinger, meanwhile, wants one man and has been scrupulous about it, because he has not entered the town, has not killed a bystander, and gives fair warning. He is the most reasonable creature in the story and he is also a walking atrocity, and the episode lets both of those be true. And the town sits in the middle, having eaten the benefits and now being asked to pay.

The Western trappings are handled with more discipline than the show usually manages with a genre. It’s shot in Spain and looks it, wide and dusty and sun-flattened, and Saul Metzstein frames the confrontations as proper standoffs rather than as pastiche. More importantly, the script uses the genre’s actual grammar: a frontier settlement is a place where the law is whatever the people present agree it is, which makes it exactly the right venue for an argument about whether a man gets a trial. The anachronisms are used sparingly and well too, since electric streetlights ten years early are better alien-presence shorthand than any amount of explaining, and the townsfolk’s careful incuriosity about them says everything about what they’ve agreed not to notice.

The Doctor at the line

Then the Doctor drags Jex out past the stones at gunpoint and leaves him there to die. It’s an extraordinary scene, and Matt Smith plays it with a flat, frightening calm, because this isn’t a rage, it’s a decision. He lists the people who died because he kept giving monsters second chances. He points out that mercy has a body count. And he is entirely prepared to let the Gunslinger take the shot. Amy stops him, and the way she does it is the reason this episode matters. She doesn’t argue that Jex is innocent, she argues that this isn’t how they do it, that the moment they start deciding who has forfeited the right to a trial they’ve become the thing they’re objecting to. And then she says the line the season has been circling: this is what happens when he travels alone too long. She’s right, and he knows it, and the show has been building the evidence for a while, through the summary execution in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship barely a week earlier and the reputation-as-weapon problem of A Good Man Goes to War. What’s new here is that someone finally names it to his face while he’s holding a gun.

The Gunslinger’s design is worth a note too. He’s a good practical build, half a man and half ordnance, with the weapon grafted where an arm was and a targeting display where an eye should be, and the show resists the temptation to make him lumbering. He walks like a person, which is what makes him unnerving, because the machinery lands as something done to someone rather than something built from scratch. When he finally speaks about the procedure, and about waking up as this, the episode has already made the argument visually and doesn’t need to labour it.

Isaac, and the ending

Isaac, the marshal, is the town’s conscience and Ben Browder plays him with exactly the right weary decency, a man who has decided that Mercy will be a place that doesn’t hand people over, and who dies making that stick. Handing the Doctor his badge as he goes is a slightly on-the-nose gesture that works anyway, because it makes the Doctor responsible for the town rather than just passing through it. And the resolution is genuinely satisfying, because Jex solves it himself. Offered the chance to be defended, he instead walks to his ship and destroys it with himself aboard, having decided that the ledger will not balance and that his people’s afterlife requires him to carry his own dead. It’s the choice of a man who has finally accepted the terms he spent the whole episode refusing. The Gunslinger, left with no purpose, becomes the town’s silent protector, which is either redemption or another weapon someone else pointed and abandoned, and the episode is content to let you pick.

Rating: 4/5. Handsome, thoughtful and unusually willing to leave its central question open, with a guest cast that plays it entirely straight. It loses a little to pacing, since the middle act circles while it waits for the confrontation, and Rory is given almost nothing to do. But the scene at the line is among the best the Eleventh Doctor has had. A line of stones, a cyborg who kept his word, and a doctor who healed a town because he couldn’t heal what he’d already done.

September 15, 2012 1 comment

Doctor Who Television

The God Complex: Praise Him

by Hutch Morzaria July 23, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

There’s a particular kind of Doctor Who episode that starts as a haunted-house runaround and ends up quietly dismantling the show’s central premise. “The God Complex” is one of those. It has a hotel, a maze, a monster and a body count, and by the end it has made a serious and rather uncomfortable case that travelling with the Doctor is a form of worship, and that worship is what gets people killed. It’s one of the creepiest hours the show had produced to that point, though the creepiness isn’t really what it’s for. It is also the episode where he takes Amy and Rory home, and that is not a coincidence.

The hotel with a room for everybody

The setting is a shabby, endless 1980s hotel of swirling carpet, brass fittings, muzak and framed prints of the dead hanging in the lobby, and every room in it contains one person’s worst fear. It’s a superb concept, cheaply and brilliantly executed. Nick Hurran shoots the corridors with the same restless, off-kilter grammar he brought to The Girl Who Waited, all canted angles and hard cuts, and the rooms are a parade of small, specific, deeply personal horrors: a sad clown, a gorilla, a jilted bride, a row of ventriloquist dummies laughing in an empty function suite. Nothing cosmic. Nothing that requires explanation. Just the things individual people cannot look at. The rule is what makes it frightening, because once you find your room and see your fear, something in you turns over, and then you start saying praise him in a flat contented voice and walk off down the corridor to meet the Minotaur, and you are grateful.

The guests are a good crowd, and Rita is the best of them. Amara Karan plays a medical student with an unflappable manner, a genuinely quick mind, and no interest whatsoever in being impressed by the man with the screwdriver. She works out the hotel’s logic roughly in parallel with him, she organises the survivors, and she’s funny, dry and entirely unbothered by the Doctor’s charm. When he tells her, only half joking, that she’s fired, the joke lands because everyone in the scene understands he’s been auditioning her. He does actually offer, in the end. She declines to be saved on his terms, because by then she’s been converted, and she asks him as a kindness to let her go somewhere he can’t watch. She wants to keep her dignity, and the one thing she is certain of is that his need to save her isn’t about her.

Killing Rita is the episode’s most deliberate cruelty. She’s the most obviously companion-shaped guest star the show has produced in years, and the story removes her specifically to demonstrate that being brilliant and brave in the Doctor’s vicinity is not a survival trait. It stings, and it’s meant to. Gibbis, by contrast, survives everything. A mole-faced bureaucrat from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy, whose national anthem is reportedly Glory to [insert name here], he has made cowardice into a civic religion, will betray anyone within about four seconds, and comes through without a scratch. It plays as comedy for two acts and then curdles. The universe is not, it turns out, arranged so the brave ones come home.

Not fear, faith

The turn is excellent, because the creature isn’t eating fear at all. It feeds on faith. Fear is just the crowbar: put someone in front of the thing they cannot bear, and they reach for whatever they actually believe in, and that is the meal. Rita has her religion. Howie has his conspiracies. Joe has his luck. The room doesn’t create the belief, it exposes it, which is a much nastier idea than a monster that simply wants you frightened.

The Doctor finds his own door, too. Room eleven. He opens it, the cloister bell begins to toll somewhere inside, and he looks at whatever is in there and says, with a tired little laugh, of course. Who else? The camera never goes past his shoulder. We are not shown it, and the episode is quite right not to show it, because every answer the audience supplies is worse than anything a set dresser could have built. It’s a superb piece of withholding in an hour otherwise built on making fears explicit, and the restraint is what makes the scene stick.

Which raises the question the episode has been walking towards from the start, and it doesn’t flinch: what does Amy Pond believe in? Her room is number seven, and it contains a little girl in a coat sitting on a suitcase in a hallway, waiting for a raggedy man to come back, the same child who waited in The Eleventh Hour and who has apparently never entirely stopped. Amy’s faith isn’t in a god or a system. It’s in him. It always has been, since she was seven, and the hotel has known it since she walked in. So he breaks it. He sits her down and tells her, deliberately and coldly, that he took her with him because he was vain and lonely and wanted to be adored, that he isn’t a hero and never was, that he is a madman with a box who has got a great many better people than her killed. Amy Williams, it’s time to stop waiting. Matt Smith plays it as an act of demolition that costs him everything, Karen Gillan plays the moment the belief actually goes out, and the creature, cut off from its food, dies on the floor of a fake hotel room.

The keys and the car

Its last words are the sting. The Minotaur is an ancient thing, related to the Nimon, kept alive for centuries by an automated prison that never stopped feeding it, and translated, what it says is that it is glad to die: an old creature drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting through an endless shifting maze, for whom death would be a mercy. The Doctor points out that it isn’t talking about itself. He’s right, and nobody in the room argues with him.

So he takes them home. A house, a set of keys, and the red E-Type Jaguar Rory has always wanted, parked at the kerb. He doesn’t make a speech about it. He explains, more or less honestly, that he knows how this ends, that he has seen what happens to the people who keep saying yes to him, and that he would rather they were bored and alive than remarkable and dead. Amy lets him go without a fight, which is the saddest part of the whole thing. The girl on the suitcase would have chased the box down the street. This woman stands in a doorway and says goodbye properly, because he’s just taken the thing that would have made her run.

What it leaves behind is a hotel of specific fears, sad clowns and dummies and a gorilla, no cosmic horror required, just the exact wrong door for each person. It leaves the best conceptual turn of the season, a monster that doesn’t want you frightened so much as certain. It leaves Rita, the most companion-shaped guest star in years, killed to prove that being excellent near the Doctor doesn’t save you. It leaves room seven, and the fact that Amy’s faith was never in a religion but in a raggedy man who said he’d be back in five minutes and took twelve years. And it leaves the keys and the car, because he breaks her belief in him and then goes before it can grow back, which doesn’t feel like a rescue so much as a man cutting his losses.

Rating: 4/5. Sharp, ruthless about its own show, and beautifully directed, with an idea at the centre good enough to justify the entire hotel. The guest cast is uneven, since Howie and Joe are functional rather than felt, and the automated-prison explanation is a touch tidy for something this suggestive. But the closing twenty minutes are as brave as this show gets, and the goodbye is devastating precisely because nobody shouts. Every room has somebody’s name on it, and behind the door is the thing you’d fall back on. He knew which one was hers. He’d known for years.

July 23, 2011 2 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Vampires of Venice: Fish Out of Water

by Hutch Morzaria May 29, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

After the tension of Flesh and Stone, Series 5 does what this show always does after a heavy two-parter: it goes somewhere sunny, throws in a monster, and gets on with the character work. “The Vampires of Venice” is a perfectly decent runaround with a good gag at its centre and one genuinely excellent scene. It’s also the episode where Rory Williams stops being a punchline.

A wedding to save

The Doctor’s motivation here is unusually personal and rather funny. Amy threw herself at him at the end of the last episode, he panicked, and his solution to a delicate emotional situation is to leap out of a cake at Rory’s stag do and take the pair of them on a romantic minibreak to sixteenth-century Venice. It is exactly the sort of thing this Doctor would consider a sensible plan. That framing does a lot of work. Rory has been on the periphery since The Eleventh Hour, the fiancé at home, the one who isn’t magic, and putting him in the TARDIS forces the show to decide what he’s for. It turns out he’s for telling the truth. The triangle the episode sets up is more honest than these things usually are, too. Amy isn’t really torn between two men, she’s torn between two lives, the ordinary one waiting for her in Leadworth and the one where she gets to be extraordinary, and Rory understands perfectly well which of them he represents. There’s a small, well-judged moment where he watches her light up at something the Doctor has said and simply absorbs it without comment, and Arthur Darvill plays the resignation of a man who has been quietly losing this particular argument since she was seven years old and he was the boy playing the Raggedy Doctor in her back garden.

The Vampires of Venice: Fish Out of Water - Doctor Who episode still

The house of Calvierri

Venice in 1580 is beautifully realised, all sunlight and canals and plague paranoia, and the city is sealed against outsiders. The show hasn’t done a properly sunlit historical since it handed Shakespeare a very strange Tuesday in The Shakespeare Code, and the change of palette does the season good after weeks of dark corridors and crashed hulls. It also does the thing these episodes tend to do well, which is give the period a working internal logic. Venice is sealed because of plague, which conveniently explains why nobody beyond the walls notices a steady trickle of girls disappearing, and the Calvierris’ quarantine story does exactly the job a locked wing does in a gothic novel. Signora Rosanna Calvierri runs an exclusive school for the daughters of good families, and girls go in and come out pale, hungry, veiled, and unwilling to see their parents. The vampire staging is well done. The girls have fangs, they hiss, they move too fast, they don’t appear in mirrors, and they cannot bear sunlight. It plays as straight gothic horror for a good half hour, and Helen McCrory is superb as Rosanna: composed, weary, and entirely without remorse, treating the abduction of children as a tedious administrative necessity. The best sequence belongs to Guido, a boatbuilder whose daughter Isabella has been taken and who wants her back, and her death, trapped outside the gate in the sunlight and unable to run, is the one moment where the episode’s stakes genuinely bite.

Then the reveal, which is a good one: they aren’t vampires at all. The Calvierris are Saturnyne, a fish-like species from another world, using perception filters to appear human, and the fangs and mirror trick are side effects of a disguise rather than folklore made real. Under the filter they’re rows of teeth and gills, which is a much more unpleasant image than a cape and a widow’s peak. More interesting is why they’re here. Their world is gone. It was consumed by a silence, and they escaped through a crack, the same crack in the universe that was in Amy’s bedroom wall and in the hull of the Byzantium. Rosanna is the last mother of a drowned species, converting Venetian girls into brides for ten thousand surviving sons, and planning to sink the city to make a sea she can live in. That’s a genuinely sympathetic motive attached to a genuinely monstrous plan, and the episode is smart enough not to resolve the tension. She isn’t evil so much as bereaved and entirely without limits, and her end, throwing herself into the canal to be eaten by her own children rather than live alone, is the bleakest note in it. The mechanics around her are the weakest part of the hour. The Saturnyne plan requires a weather-control device at the top of a tower, and the resolution requires the Doctor to climb the tower and switch the device off, which is about as generic as this programme gets, and a man pressing a button is a poor finish for a season this strong. There’s also a regrettable quantity of running up and down the same flight of stone steps. The crack getting a second mention in as many weeks is the thing to watch here. Whatever it is, it isn’t just eating this universe. It’s driving refugees ahead of it.

You make them want to impress you

And then the scene that justifies the episode. Rory, sick of being talked over, turns on the Doctor and tells him what’s actually wrong with him. It isn’t that he makes people take risks. It’s that he makes them want to impress him, that ordinary people around this man start behaving in ways that get them killed, because they’re showing off for someone they admire. It is the sharpest criticism of the Doctor since Davros, and it comes from a nurse from Leadworth standing in a Venetian courtyard. Arthur Darvill plays it without any bluster at all, which is what makes it land, and Matt Smith’s Doctor has no answer whatsoever. He just looks caught. After a run of stories where everyone falls in behind him instantly, having somebody name the effect he has on people is bracing. It also redefines the trio. Rory isn’t a spare part or an obstacle to a romance, he’s the one person in the TARDIS who isn’t dazzled, and the show is far more interesting with him in it.

“You make them want to impress you” is a genuinely damning line to level at the Doctor, and it lands harder for coming from the least impressed person in the room. That’s Rory’s real arrival: he starts the episode as the joke fiancé and ends it as the one person willing to say that out loud.

Rating: 3/5. Perfectly enjoyable and entirely middle-of-the-road, with a monster plan that doesn’t bear much prodding and a resolution that amounts to climbing a tower and flipping a switch. Worth it for McCrory, for Venice, and for Rory finally getting a spine. Fangs that turn out not to be fangs, a mother trying to save a species that drowned in another universe entirely, and a nurse from Leadworth calmly telling the Doctor exactly what he does to the people who travel with him. The monster plot I’ll have forgotten by Christmas. That last bit is going to matter.

May 29, 2010 1 comment