TV Bonkers. Absolutely bonkers.
This week, the brilliant TV Cream Times mail out previewed the episode thus:
“Good grief - what to say about this week's episode? If you thought Utopia was verging on fan fiction, this one's through the looking glass and drawing a pen'n'ink picture of itself, all in stipple, with characters' heads floating on some kind of montage-y background. RTD really doesn't hold back here.”
They weren’t wrong. Having spent almost three series being perfectly circumspect about ‘the mythology’, carefully layering in everything on a need to know basis, letting the viewers imagination fill in the gaps, not even bothering to mention the Doctor’s home planet for two years, this was like watching one of those You Tube montages which edit together old episodes to evoke the time war or the eighth Doctor’s regeneration or a Star Wars fan film shot in someone‘s back yard casting the school prom queen as Mara Jade. Except with a much vaster budget and a modicum of taste. They didn’t even bother to redesign the headgear.
You can imagine the glee in Russell’s face as he tapped away until three in the morning wired on caffeine as forty-odd years of watching the show poured through his fingertips, finally letting rip doing absolutely everything that potential novelists at Virgin and BBC books and script writers were told not to do. No resurrecting of old villains, no continuity references and absolutely, definitely no flashbacks to the Doctor’s days at the academy unless we say you can. Perhaps he glanced now and then at Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow, Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties or Terrance Dicks’s The Eight Doctors trying to decide just how far you can take these things, how acceptable it is to reference The Sea Devils for a family audience now, trying to think of a zeitgeisty equivalent of The Clangers. ‘I know’ he thought ‘Teletubbies’ (at least it wasn’t The Hoobs).
But, and this is important, somehow magically it’s entirely possible that managed to reintroduce all of this mythology and still make it play for fans and non-fans alike. I would imagine if I was ten years old the Gallifrey flashback here would have been like the appearance of the time lords at the close of The War Games, vital elements of the Doctor’s past suddenly made real. And importantly this brought back some of their god-like status after years of fusty pensioners and the glorious Dynasty in space that was the Big Finish spin-off. As the camera panned through these robed figures, they seemed remote and powerful, the poetry of the Doctor’s words as he described the place (which had something of the Tolkien about them) conveying on its people a wizard or even Jedi remoteness. Perhaps, though, like the Doctor’s earlier incarnations in The Brain of Morbius, we’ll never really find out who they are.
Speaking of divided loyalties, the rest of the episode was a bit of a test, since at no point during its forty-five minutes could I actually tell if it was any good. Rather like Torchwood’s episode Cyberwoman you’ve got a horrifying feeling that in the middle of all the brilliance the core was rotten, that actually it was a bit of a flub. During the making of documentary for his film Magnolia there’s a moment filmed during the post-production process in which director Paul Thomas Anderson has his then girlfriend Fiona Apple (yes, the singer) to dance giddly until he pushes her over, at which point she gets up and dances and he pushes her over again. It’s an expression of his attitude to the film, which he feels is eager to please and does so until he nudges it too far the wrong way and he ruins the thing. Apple left him not long afterwards, and although I’m sure it had nothing to do with this incident I can’t help think of it being metaphor for The Sound of Drums too, so exciting, so loud, but just sometimes losing focus.
The prime expression of this problem is John Simm’s the Master. Quite rightly, Davies has noticed the whole point of the character is to be the flip side of the Doctor (he said as much in Doctor Who Confidential) and in this case it’s all about the humour, perhaps deliberately delivering a characterisation which is just a few miles and yards south of the Doctor that appeared in series two, laughing in the face of everything, the smug bastard who was a real turn off for some last year. Davies rational is that since humour is one of the Doctor’s main weapons then when faced with the same weapon they cancel each other out, a kind of sarcastic cold war. And there were some genuinely funny moments -- the aforementioned The Sea Devil’s reference or ‘I’m wearing a gas mask’. But now and then he seemed to go just too far, like the android Data’s emotion chip malfunctioning in Star Trek: Generations, that kind of bizarre madness which is probably ok in context but lacks shade, an underlying psychology.
Perhaps in the tone meeting Davies mentioned the Joker from Tim Burton’s Batman, that mad flamboyance, the shouting, the opening and closing of the door to see if a victim is still screaming within. If the purpose is to absolutely hate the character, you really do, but it’s a shame that he couldn’t have been more Delgado and less Eric Bloody Roberts (who was mild by comparison). If the shot of Colin Teague trying to direct Simm in Doctor Who Confidential was anything to go by (eye contact? What’s that?) there was little the director could do about it. But then it says a lot about the episode that Teague thought ordering a copy of The Five Doctors would be a perfect introduction to the character and that he ended up watching the rushes. Only now do I too realise that when the Cybermen are on fire in that episode, it’s actually a man being quietly roasted in bacofoil.
Then there was the storytelling, which was a case of if one idea suits, have twenty. From the Master’s mind control to the explaining of who he is and why he’s a menace and the Paradox device to the kidnapping of the Joneses to the Doctor’s premature aging to the invasion of who knows what from where (I’ve a few ideas thanks to the BBC’s press office and their synopsis of next week’s episode -- who needs THE FUNCKING S*N when you’ve got them?) I’ve read Fighting Fantasy novels with more coherence and narrative balance. Actually, this a feature of most of Russell T Davies’ episodes, an explosion of ideas and action and sometimes it really works (Gridlock, Tooth & Claw) and sometimes it really doesn’t (The Long Game).
The Canon Cops too are already all over exactly which year Martha Jones is supposed to be from -- all indications up until now put her pick up as being this year, but suddenly the events in The Runaway Bride are being remember by one and all and this is a president elect which means it has to be 2008? Has someone dropped a year in the writing? As you know, I’m quite happy with this all being a fairy tale so for all we know she is from 2007 but somewhere along the line time changed it to 2008 because it fits better but some might wonder if the writers forgotten about the year-change somewhere along the line.
It’s not too surprising that something fell through the cracks and unfortunately that was giving Jack something to do -- mainly spending the episode following the Doctor and Martha around, getting shot and fessing up to working for Torchwood, not too convincingly suggesting that he’s recreating it in the Doctor’s image (oh yeah, does that include handing a little girl over to fairies and helping the odd suicide -- and what about letting a giant beast from the pit of hell demolish Cardiff -- oh hold one -- the last one I’ll give you). Plus I really hope there’s a rational explanation for why a human woman would be so enamoured of the Master’s plan as to marry him. I was half expecting him to call her the Rani at some point -- in this episode, anything was possible.
But you know what? I loved every minute of it. Despite all of these things, even though it might have been self indulgent, I laughed all of the way through, sometimes with sometimes against what it was trying to do and indeed rather like Torchwood’s episode Cyberwoman never failing to be entertained, which was sort of the point, and the very antithesis of boring. Yes, Simms’ portrayal was noisy but in its own way was a refreshing change from all of the aliens with a heart which have thus far populated the series and yes, genuinely funny in places. The flying aircraft carrier was a startling addition, a Captain Scarlett reference apparently, but also a callback to the kind of space age technology that’s supposed to be knocking around on the planet if the dating of the original series is anything to go by -- we’re supposed to have a fricking space programme by now for goodness sake.
When it wasn’t being quite so incessant, quite so loud there was so much to enjoy, subtle bits of magic. Making the sound of the drums, whatever they are (return of the Cheetah people anyone?) the actual Doctor Who theme is a master stroke, merging the inner and outer diagesis of the series expressed most during the scene in which the Doctor works out that it’s the mobile phones that are the source of the hypnosis. If you listen carefully , as the diagetic ringtone beeps out the rhythm, Murray Gold subtlety layers on the melody non-diagetically as the time lord thinks it through. The session of catching up between the Doctor and the Master having the kind of conversation you really shouldn’t have over the phone but somehow always manage to, was wonderfully played by Simm and especially Tennant, understating his own characterisation to put Simms’ into sharper relief. The Master was resurrected by the time lords to help fight in the time war -- perfect -- mad, but perfect. In the midst of the mayhem it was the character moments that resonated -- like Captain Jack’s realisation that Martha has feelings for his old mate and her voicing of the retcon we’d all expected. ‘You’ve been watching too much television’ he said. Too right.
But you what I really loved? The cliffhanger. Now I know the unwelcome appearance of "Voodoo Child" by Rogue Traders was a bizarre touch (and some viewers would be forgiven for thinking that Doctor Who Confidential had begun ten minutes early), but that rift in the fabric of space, the millions of space balls (no doubt controlled by the ghosts of Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire), the Doctor looking on helpless and old and Martha phasing out at an opportune moment made for an excellent cliffhanger. That crane shot from Martha’s face as she stood up and the cut to the devastation and her dash into the distance and the subtle glance between Jack and the Doctor before hand indicated that something was up, they had a plan, and nothing was as it seemed -- and unlike last week’s cliffhanger in which we all sort of knew how they get out of it, I’ve no idea where this is going. I do suspect though that the paradox device is a big red reset button waiting to happen -- and that Reggie Yates may have something to do with saving the planet…
