In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Yes, the title of this post is correct. I was away all of last weekend, only saw this episode on Monday night, didn't have time to write it up in the week, and haven't even seen Listen yet either due to being out at a house-warming party last night. (The sacrifices I make for you, glitzfrau!) So here I am, slightly over a week behind on Who-blogging.

I expected little more than fun and fluff from this story, but actually it delivered fun, fluff and quite a bit of substance to boot. In particular, it continued to develop the ( questions of heroism and what constitutes a hero from the first two episodes very nicely )

This is great, but it also leave me with a slight niggling sense of dissatisfaction, because a naive belief in heroes ( can be dangerous as well as inspirational )

Maybe I'm over-reading what was basically just ( a meta-fictional romp through story-land, though )

Meanwhile, both Clara and the Doctor get some further ( nice character moments )

Finally, obviously this week's nod to the season's Big Plot Arc ( is a spoiler )

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This is a BBC Eleventh Doctor plus Amy and Rory spin-off novel, which I read mainly because it was written by LJ's very own altariel. She has another one out now, but this was her first, and I remember her being pleased as punch when it came out. I've been meaning to read it ever since.

I have read a few of the Virgin New Adventures or Missing Adventures novels in the past (e.g. Lungbarrow, The Well-Mannered War and Human Nature), but this is my first experience of a BBC-branded Doctor Who novel (i.e. one starring the current Doctor and marketed as spin-off merchandising), so I don't have much comparable material to judge it against. But I certainly really enjoyed this book in its own right - which is lucky, really, as it would be a bit embarrassing having to write this review otherwise!

What I liked about it most was the meta-references to story-telling which are woven throughout the narrative - something which always presses my buttons, but I think was done especially well here. The book opens with an evocative snippet of the scary rumours which circulate around (what will turn out to be) the book's main setting, the city of Geath, using the opportunity not only to foreshadow some of the excitement and peril which will come later, but also to establish some important themes - particularly unreliable narration and the way that oral stories become embroidered in the telling, but also the way that they have the strongest power in the half-glimpsed semi-darkness and over people who are on their own.

Later on, as the story unfolds and the characters are getting to know Geath, we also meet a Teller whose stories have an inexplicable and politically revolutionary power over his listeners, and find the Doctor rigging up the alien equivalent of Renaissance technology to project cinematic images of ancient wars, and to beam TV-style communications into homes and public squares all across Geath. I very much liked the way all these different media - oral stories, films, TV - appeared together in a narrative all about the power of story-telling, and one which inherently bridges two different story-telling media in itself by virtue of being a novel about characters from a TV series. It meant that the central theme really was the power of stories writ large, rather than the power of stories told in one particular medium, which in this case I am able to add chimes strongly with what I know of Una as a person.

In much the same vein, I was also pleased but not surprised at the treatment of gender in the novel. Again, I know this is something Una feels strongly about in other people's stories, and it was great to see her getting the opportunity to Do It Right in her own novel. It's not just that as many of the major characters in the novel are female as male, or that the female characters have a strong sense of agency while also steering well clear of being tropish Strong Women without any meaningful flaws or dilemmas. What really told me I was reading a novel by someone who had thought about gender equality while writing it was the way that minor characters who were little more than the equivalent of extras in screen productions, and who so often simply default to being male in novels or on screen, turned out to be female. The example which particularly struck me was a knight who got killed when her horse bolted after being frightened by a hostile alien influence. It wasn't a speaking part, and of course the word 'knight' particularly invites a male-as-default reaction, but this particular character was quietly female. A nice touch, both in terms of portraying gender equality and prodding the reader to question their own assumptions.

I will admit that my attention wandered a while during the middle part of the novel, once the major characters had been established and there was rather a lot of impending war and capture-and-escape business to get through before everything could be resolved. But I get that that stuff is pretty much par for the course in this sort of fiction. Meanwhile, there was a lot more to enjoy than the two major points which I have outlined above - like the pre-industrial city-state setting, the central device of a gold-like substance called Enamour which has a hypnotic influence on those who come into contact with it, the strategies for dealing with a substance like this which are worked through in the story, some explorations of the disjunction between bureaucratic adherence to set rules and actual justice, and the fact that in the end the centuries-old alien conflict which constitutes the main drama of the story is resolved through discussion and negotiation, rather than fighting. I also thought the characterisation of the Doctor, Amy and Rory was very good, which is quite impressive given that I know from Una's LJ posts that she had to be given notes about what they would be like while writing the novel, as they hadn't actually appeared on TV yet at the time.

One slight 'Buh?' moment came from what appeared to be an extremely slashy scene between the Teller and the king whom he served, Beol, containing lines like "He rested his strong hands upon the other man's shoulders and smiled down at him", immediately before the revelation that they were, in fact, brothers. Come on, Una, spill the beans - was this originally straightforward slash which you were asked to tone down into brotherly love by a conservative editor?

Anyway, I don't know if I'm likely to read more Doctor Who spin-off stories for their own sake, but I'm definitely open to more by this author. ;-)

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So relieved, and so happy! So glad that I kept my hopes up, and kept the faith after all. I may have started watching the fiftieth anniversary episode feeling a little nervous about what exactly we were going to see, and I may have kept a sense of reservation about the main storyline for a good hour I think as I watched (in spite of all the squee fodder we got along the way). But once Clara worked her magic and turned it all around, it ( literally became the episode I have been waiting for ever since the reboot )

OK, let's try to be a little more coherent.

( The sweet spot between silly fun and format-redefinition )

I can't quite resist the urge to write up a list of ( my favourite 'cool bits', followed by a couple of disappointments )

Meanwhile, ( we have some continuity re-adjusting to do )

First, though, it seems from the teaser trailer for the Christmas special that we must go back to Trenzalore and witness the battle there which led to the creation of that enormous graveyard - and perhaps even see the burial of the Doctor in his TARDIS at the end of it all. Whatever happens there, it is going to be epic.

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An Adventure in Space and Time broadcasts later this evening, and I may well want to write up some Thorts on that, so I'd better make sure I note down my reactions to the anniversary prequel, Night of the Doctor, first.

There's plenty to like in it. Obviously it is GREAT to see Paul McCann's Doctor getting some proper screen time beyond the 1996 movie, and he does his stuff really well. So does Clare Higgins as Ohila. In under seven minutes, the dramatic weight of the Doctor's situation is set out very effectively, so that his decision at the end makes emotional sense. And there are some good lines: "I'm a Doctor... but probably not the one you were expecting" for the meta, "Bring me knitting" for the funnies, and especially "Fat or thin? Young or old? Man or woman?" for reinforcing the suggestion (already made in The Doctor's Wife with respect to the Corsair) that Timelords can opt to change gender.

But somehow I don't seem to have had the "OMG SQUEE!" reaction to it that has dominated fandom. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from a seven-minute short which needs to make sense to people who may never have seen the Eighth Doctor or the Sisters of Karn before, but in some ways the script felt to me a bit work-a-day and pedestrian. Cass in particular felt very generic, and the way she died in order to prompt the Doctor into finally engaging with the reality of the Time War makes her a classic Disposable Woman.

But above all I think my sense of slight disappointment reflects how invested I've become over the years in my long-running assumption that it was Eight who took on the burden of ending the Time War, dying in the process and turning into Nine. I've always liked that image precisely because all we have seen of him (on screen - I do know about his audios) is a rather starry-eyed ingénue Doctor in a frock coat. The idea of Eight the romantic idealist gradually watching the Universe turn to chaos around him, changing himself in response as it does so and finding a steely core of determination and responsibility that made him step up to the mark to bring it all to an end - but at the cost of his life - is really powerful. I get that in a way we do see a much-changed Eight doing the beginnings of that in Night of the Doctor, but it isn't the full narrative trajectory I'd always imagined for him. The truth is I am very fond of the Eighth Doctor, and I wanted him to have that story in the shadowy territory which lurks between his movie and the start of the revived TV series

As for the wider character of the Doctor, I'm also just not that keen on the whole set-up which we got at the end of the last series of him having distanced himself from the actions of the Hurt Doctor (aka the Warrior Doctor). If, as looks so likely now, he basically renounced his normal persona in order to end the Time War, and then denied that it was ever anything to do with him afterwards, that just double-trashes my favoured image of Eight fully owning the decision and taking it, and its consequences, directly on the chin. There is a lot of weight in the idea of the Doctor being faced with two really appalling options, and making a wise choice between them in a way that is consistent with his morality both before and afterwards. Contracting all of that out to a temporary personality instead really feels like a cop-out to me.

Maybe I (and many others) have got the wrong end of the stick, and the story of the Hurt Doctor won't be as I am expecting it to be at all. Maybe part of what we'll see in the anniversary special is Ten and Eleven finally re-absorbing his actions into their personal timelines, and coming to terms with them as their responsibility after all. I hope so. Moffat is certainly good at toying with us and misdirecting our expectations. All I know for now is that the signals we've been given in this prequel aren't really pointing in a direction which I feel as enthusiastic about as I would like to for the 50th Anniversary Special of my favourite TV show of all time. Here's hoping the special itself changes that.

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I never did finish reviewing the most recent half-season of Doctor Who at the time, so here I am belatedly catching up with the final two episodes.

This was Neil Gaiman's second Who story (after The Doctor's Wife), and it's fair to say that it wasn't as good as the first. There were a lot of good elements in there, but they didn't manage to add up to the sum of their parts - a lot like many other Doctor Who stories over the last couple of years.

The re-imagining of the Cybermen was definitely one of the good bits. They now look genuinely technological, rather than like men in suits, and it occurred to me that this change was deliberately referenced in what happened to Angie's phone in the story - a chunky old thing deemed by Cyber technology early on in the story to be in need of an upgrade, which is replaced with a shiny new model by the TARDIS at the end. Yes, these are definitely iCybermen to Cybus industries' old Nokia jobs. The way they constantly upgraded themselves, using software patches as much as hardware, and could move with supernatural speed lent them a new scariness which they always ought to have had, but have never been allowed before, while the scuttling cybermites were genuinely scary - especially when they came out of the chess-playing automaton. I still wish the Cybermen would rediscover their creepy inhuman speech patterns from The Tenth Planet, but I can now see good things being done with them in the future.

Obviously I also liked the Romanesque Imperium, what with its emperor, the Doctor pretending to be a proconsul, the eagle wings and laurel wreath on Clara's badge of command, and the (obliterated) Tiberian spiral galaxy. This was mainly just about conveying the workings of a galactic empire efficiently by using signifiers taken from a familiar real-world equivalent. But having done that smoothly and swiftly it bought space for a nice exploration of what it means to be the single individual with ultimate responsibility for the safety of an empire, who, even with the best of intentions, still sometimes has to do dreadful things for the sake of the majority. Porridge is explicitly coded as a 'good' emperor, and of course as several people pointed out when this episode aired there are certain parallels between his story and Gaiman's stand-alone Sandman comic August, which follows Augustus as he spends a day disguised as a beggar on the streets of Rome, and accompanied by a dwarf actor. But the influence of the 'bad' emperor stereotype (think Caligula, Nero, Commodus) on contemporary popular notions about (Roman) emperors is still clear from his line, "I could have you all executed, which is what a proper emperor would do".

We got some brief glimpses into the dark side of the Doctor, which I usually like, but which here mainly left me with a sense of how much further they could have been taken. I liked seeing him unable to help admiring the cybermites, actually telling one of them 'you are beautiful!' even when he has just warned whoever might be watching him through it that the children are under his protection. And I liked that the Cyber Planner was also able to take control of nearly half of his brain awfully easily, almost as though there's a big part of him which is pretty open to megalomaniacal plans to take over the universe. But on the whole the good Doctor, bad Doctor struggle fell flat for me.

In fairness, psychological battles are not very easy to portray on screen. You can either depict a clear good vs. evil battle or paint a convincing portrayal of a character genuinely torn between two options who might go either way, but not both. This story went for clarity, but in the process it ditched a lot of the potential horror and tension which could have come out of the situation. The 'bad' Doctor was really just the Cyber Planner, while the 'good' Doctor remained himself, always distinct and articulate throughout the struggle. So we never really saw 'our' Doctor being drawn towards evil, or feared that he might succumb to it. And that's before even getting into the awkward shifts between portraying the struggle as seen to external observers and the struggle playing out within his head.

I also didn't think that what I understood to be the moral issue at the core of the story was well enough articulated or worked through on screen. OK, so there's quite a lot of set-up about how the human empire has got into the habit of destroying whole planets in order to contain the Cybermen. This potentially has a lot of resonances for the Doctor, who apparently faced a similar issue himself in the Time War, not to mention with the Daleks in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways and the Pyroviles in The Fires of Pompeii. But when the issued is raised directly at the end of the story he sounds very casual about it. He's encouraging the emperor to detonate the bomb, saying that surely that's a price worth paying to stop the Cybermen. And that would be fine if we knew that he knew it wouldn't actually kill everyone with him on the planet (including Clara and the children), but merely prompt the Imperium to locate the emperor and pull him (and everyone else) back to his ship. I'm prepared to believe that that was something the Doctor knew all along and was part of his plan, but there should have been at least a hint to that effect on screen at some stage for the moral arc of the story to work properly.

And it's a much more minor issue, but why make a big thing of the Comical Castle being comical, when it fact it wasn't - not even slightly. Just one scene in which a Cyberman came perilously close but then fell foul of a distorted mirror, automated mannequin or false floor would have been enough pay-off from that set-up, but we didn't get it - which looks like poor script-editing to me.

Finally, I was so sure, along with the rest of fandom, that we were getting a sequence of themed references to previous Doctors in each episode of this half-season. But this one, where we should have expected a Sixth Doctor reference, is where the theory fell down. It's not that there weren't any. This is a season working hard to remind us of the programme's past, in keeping with other strategies for the anniversary year like the monthly short stories and BFI screenings. So the Sixth Doctor appeared directly in the montage of past incarnations that the Cyber Planner flicks through within the Doctor's head. But so did all the others, while there was no line or setting with the same ostentatious feel as the references to previous Doctors in the other stories to foreground Six particularly. So I guess that was either wishful thinking from fandom or a genuine intention on Moffat's part which he only half carried through. Like so much else in Doctor Who these days, it's difficult to be sure.

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I am horribly behind with Doctor Who reviews, partly because I was in New York when this (half-)season started, and partly because I didn't find the first few episodes very inspirational anyway. This is an attempt to catch up.

( 7.7 The Bells of Saint John )

( 7.8 The Rings of Akhaten )

( 7.9 Cold War )

( 7.10 Hide )

( 7.11 Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS )

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I did watch The Snowmen on Christmas Day, and will rewatch and review that in good time. But I have another catch-up review to do first: The Angels Take Manhattan, which I likewise saw at the time but never got round to reviewing because work was so busy and even my watching had slipped about two weeks behind schedule by the time it was broadcast. Time to put that right.

I felt that this was a story which made a lot of emotional sense in the way that it dealt with Amy and Rory's relationship with each other, and with the Doctor, and with the close of that story. It also put forward some interesting models for the way that Doctor Who deals with time, had a delicious meta-referentiality to it, and made good use of symbolism and locations. It is completely fair to say, though, as some reviewers did at the time, that the central idea of the Angels' 'farm' at Winter Quay ( didn't really make sense )

That aside, though, the rest of the story was great. I ( found the meta-fictional aspect particularly pleasing )

Other, smaller details about this episode which I liked included things like the very effective shots of New York statuary early on to establish the right atmosphere for the story, Amy's smart-specs, and the name of Julius Grayle - definitely spelt that way, as we saw it written out on The Dying Detective's typewriter, but with a nice aural pun on 'Grail' that is very appropriate for a collector of rare and impossible things. Best of all in my book, though, was another inscription, visible over the door of the Winter Quay building when the 1930s detective first enters it in the pre-credit sequence:


It is in Greek lettering, and reads ΥΓΕΙΑ - i.e. Hygeia, daughter of Aesculapius and goddess of health. As far as I could see it was a genuine inscription on the building, not a prop, probably suggesting that the exterior location used for the Winter Quay building was originally a hospital. But its clear placement within the shot shows that the production team knew full well what it meant, had chosen this building for that reason and were making the most of it within the story. It is, after all, a source of life and health for the Angels.

We also get yet another reference to light-bulbs - a thread which has been going all season and is yet to be resolved - when River asks whether the bulb on top of the TARDIS needs changing. And, talking of the TARDIS, I noticed a shift in established canon regarding its the effects of its translation circuits. River tells Rory that he can read the inscriptions on Chinese vases in 1938, even though the Doctor and the TARDIS are both in 2012(?ish?) because it is a gift of the TARDIS which hangs around. This certainly wasn't the case in The Christmas Invasion, when Rose and Mickey, who had both already travelled in the TARDIS, could not understand the Sycorax while the TARDIS was out of action because the Doctor was still busy regenerating properly. But it does at least now explain how on Earth Nefertiti and Riddell could understand one another after they had left the TARDIS and shacked up together at the end of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

Time to rewatch The Snowmen now, I think. :-)

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And now, for my return train journey, let us consider the matter of A Town Called Mercy.

( History and past continuity )

( References beyond Who )

( Kahler Jex and the Doctor )

( Weaknesses )

( Cool bits )

( Future implications )

And now I think I deserve to finally watch The Power of Three...

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I watched this last night with big_daz, and felt so-soish about it. It had a few neat ideas and surprises - ( which are themselves spoilery ) - but didn't really wow me. There wasn't much in the way of punchy character moments or intriguing puzzles. I guess in a way that shows how the bar has been raised over the course of New Who, by both Rusty and the Moff. This was a decent enough episode really, but I was somehow expecting more. I've watched it again this morning to see how knowing about Oswin's real situation from the start changes it, and spotted some things which made me slightly more impressed than I was last night. But then again I've also confirmed that some of the things which didn't appear to make sense last night genuinely don't, and also been made angry by a line which I missed the first time round, but which the internet did not. So in the end I feel much the same as after the first viewing - so-soish, but with an extra hint of *growl*.

My obviously very spoilerific thoughts after re-watching are gathered below under a series of headings.

( Things which didn't make sense )

( Careful structuring and symbolism )

( Oswin )

( Amy and Rory )

( Racist, sexist and biphobic clap-trap )

( Things that were fun / cool / scary )

( Past continuity )

( Future implications )

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Well, that was pretty good fun on the whole, and more satisfying than I expected it to be. I'm not going to comment in any detail on the many ( plot resolutions )

Back in this story, I loved the ( cracky mash-up of all of time happening at once )

I liked ( alt-universe Amy )

Meanwhile, ( Rory gets to be awesome and warrior-ish again )

What I didn't like, though, was ( River's role in it all )

Oh, and finally, I guess the mirrors I've been busy spotting never did come to anything terribly substantial, except simply as a symbol for a parallel world (cf especially Alice Through the Looking-Glass). But there was just one more to round us off anyway, which the Doctor leaned up against for a while in Amy's utterly awesome and rather Once Upon a Time in the West-ish train carriage office. Jolly good.

Anyway, there we are. New Sarah Jane Adventures starting on Monday - though watching it will be a terribly, terribly sad experience now.

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