"Sayonara, Squash Court Seven!" [SPOILERS for Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife]

[jjpor]

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.

Comments

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

I'd freely hold my hands up at this point and say I can't judge Gaiman's body of work as a whole, only the bits I've read, none of which I think are particularly recent. I liked what I've read, and some of the elements in this story made sense in the context of what I've read, but I can make no sweeping statements on how good/bad he might have been in recent years or even as a whole. I prefer Terry Pratchett, if I'm honest. ;D

You could well be right about that - I tend not to have too much forgiveness in my heart for Rusty post-End of Time, as you can probably tell ;D. I think if historical characters are going to appear in new Who, then it's more or less a given that we're going to get a much-simplified verion and if they're a supposed historical "goodie" then the Doctor's going to be quite keen on them. I actually think Nixon was one of the better portrayals so far, because you know, the natural approach would probably be to have him as a bit of a villain, and in the first part of the two-parter anyway they kept it a bit more shades of grey. I think Moffat lost a lot of that nuance in the second part, what with him "amusingly" appearing from the TARDIS to give NASA guys pep talks and stuff.

But yeah, it would be a savvy RTD sort of thing to do to avoid those sorts of controversies by just not having controversial (or at least controversial to people other than historians) historical figures in his series. And you know, in light of the Churchill thing, not actually all that bad an idea really. :D

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I quite enjoyed Gaiman's earlier work! I think if he had one fault back then is that it would often seem he cares more about the cool setting than the characters' story, but that's a pretty common fault. But... his more recent books, I felt a bit like he's trying to write a Gaiman book, does that make sense? Like, becoming a bit too aware of the Gaimanish traits that made his earlier books good and trying to consciously duplicate them.

(Hooray for Pratchett fans! :D)

Hmmm... I dropped Nixon into it but I can't really comment, because while I heard he was portrayed in a positive light, I haven't watched the episode yet, so I don't really know how it was done. As for Churchill, I'll be honest - seeing as Victory of the Daleks has the dubious honours of being my least favourite Who episode and I disliked everything about it other than Daleks serving tea, it's possible I can't comment with enough objectivity! But yes, I think it would have been better to just not touch it. Even with Nixon - like you said, it might be too easy to portray him as the villain, but it would be just as foolish to portray him as any kind of a good, decent guy. It's a lose-lose situation...

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, that can be a problem, can't it? When they get a formula or, as you say, a set of traits people expect. I think that's the thing about Pratchett - he's developed a lot as a writer over the years. He might recycle the same jokes from time to time, but the type of stories he was trying to tell and the way he tried to tell them got more ambitious with time. It's...it really is a crying shame that he's ill now, and that illness in particular for someone like him. D:

Yeah, I think on reflection Doctor Who would not be any worse off if Victory of the Daleks didn't exist, and might well be quite a bit better off. FWIW, it was my second-least-favourite story of S5 (really, really didn't like the Silurians one! ;D). Nixon probably got a fairer portrayal than a lot of people would have liked, which may be where the idea of him being positively-portrayed comes from, but I think it was fair on the whole, and significantly it was the Doctor who was most judgmental of him. That was in the first part, anyway. I think things were a bit more rushed in the second part so that aspect of it suffered a bit. But on the whole, I'd say it was fair enough, especially as it was Nixon at the start of his first term before he'd done things like Cambodia or Watergate or whatever, although that might be hair-splitting. ;D