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"Sayonara, Squash Court Seven!" [SPOILERS for Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife]
I come to bury Neil Gaiman, not to praise him.
No, no, actually, I do come to praise him a bit, actually...
Well, not to praise him necessarily. I'm sure he's a lovely man. He seems pretty cool in the interviews of his I've seen and read. I've read his blog a few times - also seemed pretty cool. I've read some of his books over the years and given pretty much all of them resounding thumbs-ups. But you know, I'm not sure I'd ever consider myself a Neil Gaiman fan, except in this very loose sense. Definitely not a Fan-type fan. I wouldn't let his recent marriage/whatever change my view of him and his works, insofar as I have a view over and above "I quite liked that book I've just finished", even if I did know who it was he married that some people apparently think they have a right to think he shouldn't (I mean, seriously?).
But you know, he is a celebrity in the world of genre fandom and "geekdom". His name was always going to overshadow his long-awaited Doctor Who script, for better or for worse. I mean, in the week or so before The Doctor's Wife aired, there seemed to be many, many people working under the assumption that the story was going to be - just had to be - sheer genius surpassing just about anything seen in Who to date, while nearly as many people seemed to be pushing the idea that the emperor has no clothes and that anyone who liked it just a little bit would be proving themselves some sort of shill and dupe of the fiendish Gaiman-Moffat hype machine (ah, Larry Miles, gawd bless yer and all who sails in yer! :D). Of course, the reality was going to be somewhere in between these two extremes because, quite frankly and without putting too fine a point on it, those two extremes are pretty ludicrous.
Was it the greatest Doctor Who story ever? No, don't be silly. Don't ask me to name the greatest one, though, because my opinion on that changes every half hour or so. Was it even the best NuWho story ever? I wouldn't say so, but again don't expect me to name the definitive answer to that one either. Was it very, very good and a worthy addition to Doctor Who? Well, yes, I would say so. Definitely.
I think I went into this on the one hand wanting to be fair to it and judge it purely on the basis of what was on the screen in front of me, regardless of other concerns, and on the other hand conscious that I may have been tainted by the hype. As I say, I wouldn't say I was a fan-type-fan of Neil Gaiman, but I know plenty of people who are, and are also Doctor Who fans, so I did fear that something of their excitement and anticipation was rubbing off on me. Certainly, by Thurday or Friday of last week I was getting to the stage of being pumped/hyped/psyched/stoked/whatevered and slightly obsessing about watching it on Saturday. More than usual, even! ;D And as I was experiencing this feeling, another part of my mind was telling me "you're setting yourself up to be disappointed, you know. Nothing's going to be as good as what you're imagining it might be like". And on that basis, by Saturday afternoon I had managed to flipflop completely to the point where I was bracing myself for a disaster. Which was a little silly, really. So, ultimately, and entirely due to my own mysterious mental processes, I ended up being surprised by how good it was. You know, the emperor wasn't the best-dressed emperor I've ever seen, but he was certainly very nicely turned out.
So, as if we needed reminding on this point, the proof of the pudding and so on and so forth...
There was also the less quality-oriented concerns that had led me to be particularly expectant not to say anxious about this story. For months now, there have been speculations on who or what the character Idris was going to be. It was known that the story would have some relation to the Time Lords and a lot of the pre-publicity from Moffat and his crew was suggesting that it was going to be in some way game-changing or canon-busting in that regard. Now, we fans are a funny lot. It could be the best story in the world, but we still might think of it as the worst if it happened to push one of our particular fannish buttons. We all have those buttons, don't we? In my case, as anyone who's read any of my fic might be able to guess, one of those buttons where I'm concerned is Romana and her relationship with the Doctor and her eventual fate before NuWho began. And there was a lot of speculation that Idris was going to turn out to be Romana or some near-as-dammit stand-in. And this worried me. Especially as I've been obsessively avoiding spoilers this past few weeks and genuinely didn't know until I watched the story whether this was going to turn out to be true or not.
Well, I was pretty relieved when it turned out Idris was "just" the TARDIS in a human body, I can tell you. Not that I wouldn't love to see Romana in NuWho, but it would carry the risk of them doing something to the character that would "ruin" her in my fannish heart of hearts, or even kill her off for real or something. So, you know, I felt like I'd dodged a bullet in that respect at least, which probably bought the rest of the story a good deal of goodwill with me, really.
Sorry to parade my fanwank in front of you like this, but to be honest in the context of this story fanwank seems entirely appropriate. I have absolutely no idea what a non-Who fan would make of this, and to be honest I don't really care. I think the genius of this story (and I have to be careful using words like that in relation to anything Gaiman or Moffat were in any way involved in, for fear that Larry Miles will somehow track me down! ;D) is that it does manage to be game-changing and canon-busting, in some quite interesting ways, without actually changing the game or busting any "canon" (if Who even has canon in the Trek sense). Well, okay, so there's the throwaway reference to Time Lords changing sex, but you know, as with the thirteen-regenerations thing, such things are in the whim of the showrunners anyway and not worth getting fanwanky about, are they? So, the TARDIS stole the Doctor rather than the other way round? She loves him and he loves her more closely than maybe he does any of his companions? A million TARDIS/Doctor shippers may have just punched the air, but really this doesn't contradict anything we don't already know as Doctor Who fans. It tells us something that makes perfect sense, something we always "knew" as fans even if we didn't know it consciously. In other words, for me the defining thing about this story, quite apart from lovely little references like the Eye of Orion or the psychic cube from The War Games, is that it positively drips with love for Doctor Who. Gaiman has been accused of questionable ideological soundness by some Who fans for basically saying he's not too keen on anything that came after Two. That's his right as a fan - I think that whatever else may or may not be true of his opinion of Who he clearly loves the show and its premise deeply and sincerely. As much as the Doctor loves the TARDIS, maybe. He's one of us, this bloke, and it shows.
Now, the depth of fanwank on display here isn't the only good aspect of this story, although it is the major one. Everything else here, even Amy and Rory's plight in the hijacked TARDIS, was definitely secondary to the Doctor and Idris and their interaction. It seems almost churlish to wonder whether the story was actually any good or whether the story as a whole worked as anything other than a love letter to Doctor Who and a meditation on its central premise of the Doctor and his magic box. It was certainly very slight, plotwise, compared to the Moffatian shell-game we are now used to since the beginning of S5. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. This didn't feel like a lesser story or a filler story like Curse of the Black Spot did, more like a change of pace.
I think this was down to a couple of factors. The dialogue here was, without wanting to be unduly harsh, about ten times better than Curse of the Black Spot, and the actors responded accordingly. Matt Smith was...well, I know, it gets repetitive, but Matt Smith was astonishing here. He was required to show a greater range of emotion than he maybe ever has as Eleven, and he did it all with aplomb. From bouncing with enthusiasm to seething with quiet anger, to heartbroken at the end. We're lucky to have him, you know, even if his chin is hilarious. I'll admit to being a bit wary of Suranne Jones guesting as Idris, not that I consider her a below par actress, quite the opposite. I used to think she was great in *cough*CoronationStreet*cough*. However, her frankly rubbish turn in the SJA episode Mona Lisa's Revenge made me think that she was one of those actors who thinks being in something that's genre or "for kids" somehow means they don't have to bring their "A" game (Richard Briers in Paradise Towers - I'm looking at you!). Not so here. Definitely not so. I thought she was great. And Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan were pretty good too, you know. "Aged Rory" was pretty scary, wasn't he? And Gillan, as she gains in acting experience, goes from strength to strength I think. I liked her in S5, whatever some people might have said, but I think she's growing all the time.
The other thing working in this story's favour was the absolute black-as-pitch fairytale element which certainly struck me as very Gaiman-esque from my exposure to some of his other work (and I'm sure people who have literally read everything he's done would have felt it even more strongly than I did). Not only the grotesque element like Aunty and Uncle and their patchwork bodies (and the genially macabre tone of their dialogue and actions), but stuff that only gets bleaker and more disturbing the more you think about it. All of those distress calls, unanswered. The dismembered Time Lords. The graveyard of dead TARDISes. Brrr... House, as voiced by Michael "Tony Blair/Brian Clough" Sheen, was an absolutely monstrous creation. An near-omnipotent thing with an endless capacity for cruelty, seemingly for no other reason than his/its own amusement. And probably the real "whoah - that's a bit strong!" moment for me - Rory's withered years-old corpse surrounded by wall after wall covered with embittered graffiti expressing his hatred for Amy. That it turned out just to be an illusion didn't really make it any better - the real Rory might never feel that way about Amy, no matter what happened, but clearly it's Amy's deep-rooted fear that he might. I think that shows very interesting insight into her character indeed.
If anything, that element could have been expanded and made more of. The Doctor-Idris relationship was the heart of the story, but the other elements that got glossed over such as Aunty and Uncle and their bizarre little world or Amy and Rory's scary flight through the TARDIS's dark heart, they could have been expanded upon. That would be one criticism of this story, although arguably that would have made the story a two-parter and I don't know if there was really enough material here for two whole parts. Another criticism, as already suggested, would be that the plot, such as it was, felt very slight, and the resolution was really just a way of bringing the story to a close - there was no real tension or cleverness there. And when are the poor Ood going to catch a break? For that matter, while Eleven's trembling yet understated emotion at the fate of all those Time Lords was certainly a standout moment, the deaths of Aunty and Uncle and, let's be honest, Idris's de facto death to allow the TARDIS's "soul" to occupy her body didn't seem to exercise him much. I think Lawrence Miles actually makes this point, and a good point it is - dismiss him as a bitter bile-monger at your peril! Maybe Aunty and Uncle had forfeited their right to such consideration by being willing, even gleeful, servants of House's agenda (not that they really seemed to have much choice in the matter), but Idris, the person not the TARDIS-receptacle...?
To be honest, though, such "lapses" on the Doctor's part in S5 and S6 don't really bother me that much - Eleven's at times flawed ethics seem somehow truer and more Doctorly to me than Ten's bleeding-heart hypocrisy. Discuss.
So yes, not a perfect episode by any means, and it was never going to win any awards for plotting, but still a very, very good story I would argue, and Mr Gaiman may come again if he'd like. ;D And quite apart from whether it was objectively "good" or not, it made me smile. It made me more than smile, it made me squee. I enjoyed it on a very basic, straightforward, purely gleeful level without any angst or anxiety or wanting to write angry letters to my MP. And in the post-Journey's End era of NuWho I think that's quite enough for me to count that one as a win, really. :)
EDIT: Looks like Lawrence Miles has in the meantime actually deleted his blog post that I link to in this post, which is something he does sometimes. So that's why the link doesn't work any more.
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I want to know who these people were originally and how they ended up in this desolate bubble universe. Why do they masquerade as a family? What about Nephew Ood? He really makes me wonder because if the whole family slid down the plug hole together then there's only one position in that family Nephew could've had... and it wouldn't have been a paid one.
I wonder about Idris and why she didn't have a family name. Why her name was so close to TARDIS.
Most of all, I wonder, if for each Time Lord lured to that rock there had to be a human shell to plop their TARDIS Matrix into then, well... Idris died from the transfer. She also seemed to be relatively complete in comparison to Auntie and Uncle. Was Idris a construct? Was she a Time Lord? Was she the walking receptacle that was used for every TARDIS soul... and if so... was she a TARDIS before her mind was blown out to accommodate the soul of the Doctor's magic box?
I like an episode that makes you think. I liked this episode. I very much liked your commentary on it which is, I think, one of the sanest best thought out reactions I've read. If not the sanest and most thought out (but I wouldn't want to swell your head).
The thought that the "Kill Amy. Hate Amy." graffiti was something out of Amy's head honestly hadn't occurred to me. At first I'd been horrified at Rory's despair and lashing out. It seemed believable to me, since love and hate are both such passionate emotions (though I didn't completely buy it, because, well, Rory). Then I dismissed it as House being a bastard. But you're right. He must've been drawing on something. A telepathic being like that. No one ever told him how long Rory waited.
Which also makes me wonder what Rory saw when he was separated from Amy. Especially since I'm still not completely convinced that the first Rory, the one who waited for hours, wasn't real.
More thought for food (er, or maybe the other way around).
The fanwank and references were lovely and the dialogue was sweet as... a very sweet thing salted with flakes of wonder (that metaphor isn't my best, but sue me). The TARDIS calling Rory pretty made me happy inside.
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It's a troubling thought.
On a more cheerful note, hearing the TARDIS refer to the Doctor as her thief and saying that she stole him made me grin: "Borrowing implies an intent to return. What makes you think I would ever give you back?" Made me smile, and made my gut twist. I'm not sure wife is the way to describe their relationship, neither are they mother and child. Still, the whole TARDIS-stealing-him thing somewhat canonizes a main plot point in my Doctor origin fic and it's always good when things are anti-jossed.
And, finally... I'll admit that I'd never heard of this Gaiman fellow before it was announced that he was writing an episode for series 5 and fanon exploded with their polarized reactions. I thought to myself: "I ought to check this fellow out" and between then and now have managed to read every single thing he's written with the exception of a few children's books and the Sandman comics (which are, admittedly, a pretty big chunk of his work). I like his style, but agree that he's become a bit stuck in it. Still, it melded with Who nicely (perhaps because it's been, at least partially inspired by it).
This was a definite love letter to the show and I think it will go down among the great episodes. Gaiman can definitely write again if he so chooses. I will not complain. I'll just sit back and be glad to be part of a fandom with so many quality writers in it (even if it has some, er, less quality writers as well... but really, it's Who - would we have it any other way?)
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Maybe Idris was a Time Lord, one of the House's previous victims, somehow scrubbed clean for use as a receptacle? That's pretty horrible thought actually - only a little bit more horrible than my initial idea that House was just continually recycling the body parts of his victims over and over - creating bodies, letting them die, building new ones from the remains... O.o
As I've said elsewhere, there was a lot like that in this story - nasty, nasty stuff that gets worse the more you think about it. So many unpleasant implications, and what's more from reading some of Gaiman's other stuff I'm sure they were probably all intentional. Having said that, I do see how what people who are more familiar with Gaiman's work than I have said could be true - just on the basis of a limited sample, I'm thinking he might be a bit of a one-trick pony. It's a very, very, very good one trick, I'd say, but I could see how it would be difficult keeping it fresh over the course of twenty years or so. And of course, when you become as famous as Gaiman with the following he has, if you ever do try to change your game and freshen things up a bit, you have a million fanboys whinging that your last book wasn't what they've come to expect from reading all your other books... D: I need to catch up with Sandman, though, I really really do, because by all accounts it is the real deal.
Regarding "Kill Amy" etc - as I said in a comment above, I assumed that stuff was somehow feeding on Amy's inner fears because, well, that's the kind of thing you expect in Who and in TV sf in general, but I realise on reflection that I have no evidence for it whatsoever. But it does seem implied by the general nature of the proceedings - it seems like the kind of thing House, gleeful sadist that he/it is, would do. And it certainly does say something about Amy and Rory's relationship and make you think about some of the things he's been through for her and the guilt that she might feel somewhere inside, even if she's not the sort of person to feel it consciously.
As to what Rory could have seen? Well, it may be trite, but I'd imagine his equivalent would be Amy and the Doctor together, laughing at him or maybe not even thinking about him at all. Something that said Amy and the Doctor never missed him when he was away from them, or that she didn't really care that he'd waited 2,000 years. Something like that. Or maybe he's just really, really scared of spiders or something? XD
Oh I agree - I don't see how the TARDIS and the Doctor can't not have been communicating during their time together, but undoubtedly in more subtle ways than conversation. I agree they probably have a telepathic connection, but maybe it doesn't take the form of words - maybe it's just feelings or moods or more subtle indicators like the Cloister Bell. I think that Eleven was overcome with emotion, though, just to have things he'd always known or felt in his heart(s) communicated out loud. Which is a bit meta, if you think about it, because it seemed that this story was trying to do a similar thing to us long-term fans... :D
And isn't it the best feeling when something you've always believed in your fanon or maybe speculated on in fic is confirmed on screen? Doesn't happen often enough to me - but then my fanon is pretty weird, some of it. ;D But see the previous paragraph for more thoughts on that.
But yes, it was a lovely story in so many ways. It was strangely feel-good in the end for a story with so many bits of darkness in it, and brim full of Who-love. So yes, Gaiman can have another go if he wants. I'd like to see him do something a bit meatier next time - a two-parter or something with real tension and consequences. That'd be great to see.
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So yes, each TARDIS needed a different human receptacle.
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It sounds like there might have been enough script to make this a two-parter after all, had scheduling and Moffat's story arc allowed. Which would have been interesting, because watching it there were definitely areas of the story that could have been expanded on and explored in more detail. And I thought Auntie and Uncle were great, in a creepy sort of way, so I would have liked to see a bit more of them.
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And yes, having seen the full Q&A, what we need is for Gaiman to do as he did with Neverwhere, and novelise his story.
I did chuckle at his reply to the question of whether the Corsair could be cloned or otherwise reconstructed from his arm ala Journey's End:
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Yes - I'd like to see that. I wonder if there are any plans to follow up the Michael Moorcock novel from last year with other "name" writers? Because if so, I think that'd be a good one to do next. It'd be like one of those late-period Target novelisations that they were still mining throwaway lines from in the NAs years later.. ;D
Yeah, that's the spirit of Who right there! ;D It's like the Master - he's always dead...until there's a new Master story...!