{"id":721,"date":"2011-05-07T13:23:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-07T13:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=721"},"modified":"2011-05-07T13:23:31","modified_gmt":"2011-05-07T13:23:31","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-day-of-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/07\/so-what-did-i-think-of-day-of-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of Day of the Moon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last week I wrote that it\u2019s hard to judge a two parter on the basis of the first episode, and so I declined to give it a score. This week, I\u2019m feeling as if it\u2019s hard to judge a whole series on the basis of the first story, such is Steven Moffat\u2019s new-found commitment to serialised TV.<\/p>\n

But before we get on to that, let\u2019s look at the story itself. I find myself pulled in two different directions almost throughout. The nitpicky adult in me sees flaw after flaw, but the wide-eyed child is so enraptured by the dash and wit and spectacle of it all that the adult feels curmudgeonly even existing. Declining at first to properly resolve its main cliffhanger (we finally get an answer in a throw-away line deep into the episode), the story springs giddily months into the future and through a series of improbable events reunites the TARDIS crew for some important exposition.<\/p>\n

The adult me is rather suspicious of these elaborate charades during which characters decline to share information with other characters who might benefit from knowing it simply in order to surprise the audience. I adore Star Trek II<\/em> but not all of the plotting stands up to repeated viewings. In particular, when Kirk et al are apparently trapped forever in the Genesis Cave, how does it help anyone for Kirk to continue to let them imagine that they are going to slowly and horribly starve to death when he has already arranged secretly with Spock for them to be rescued?<\/p>\n

Likewise, why does Canton produce a bodybag to shit Amy up when his only goal is to reunite her with The Doctor? As lovely a reveal as it is when the even-more-than-usually-raggedy Doctor slouches against the cloaked TARDIS, it\u2019s all for our benefit as viewers. In a story which begins with the supposed death of your main character, this is a dangerous, dangerous game to play.<\/p>\n

And so it continues with the resolution of the main threat. The recording of the Silent signing its own death-warrant is a mite convenient, but inserting the footage into the Apollo moon landing footage is a brilliant device and along the way we get some marvellous set-pieces, notably the superbly-handled haunted house with veteran character actor Kerry Shale giving it everything he\u2019s got as twitchy Dr Renfrew. Amy\u2019s kidnap provides a nice moment of tension between Rory and the Doctor too, and the final showdown is spectacular without being gratuitous.<\/p>\n

So far so good. But, on reflection, some niggles start to appear. Okay, in gun-toting America despatching a Silent is fairly easy (and most of the Silents are in America), but just what will happen when residents of Calcutta or Nairobi or Copenhagen hear these instructions and see a Silent? Will they get Joy-splattered? How many human death warrants has the Doctor just signed? And even if the Silents are pretty easy to kill, what happens to all the bodies? Surely some people are going to get as Silent-aware as the Doctor and his friends? And just how did they manage that anyway? Are we sure that the Silents deserve this kind of treatment? Apart from killing Joy in that bathroom, we\u2019ve never seen them doing anything malevolent. And if they\u2019ve been guiding human technological development since the invention of the wheel (side-by-side with the Jagaroth I assume) then isn\u2019t humanity better off with them than without them? In fact, if they\u2019ve made this planet and this species what it is then doesn\u2019t that give them any kind of rights?<\/p>\n

But the episode is basically far too enjoyable to spend too much time on these kind of musings. The counter to all these whines is basically \u2013 the Doctor says this will work and the Doctor says they\u2019re bad and we should take the Doctor’s word for it, because he’s the Doctor (only a fool argues with his Doctor). Apart from anything else if they were really so fucking benevolent, why go to all that trouble to make sure nobody knows they\u2019re there? And besides, they have weird shaped faces and wear dark suits so that proves they’re up to no good and therefore can be slaughtered on sight without the least hint of moral twinge.<\/p>\n

But this episode also makes it very plain that Steven Moffat\u2019s vision of Doctor Who is more serialised than ever before. This is not a new trend in TV. Back in the eighties, mainstream American shows like LA Law<\/em> would frequently include season-long arcs which ran alongside various one-off case-of-the week storylines. In the nineties, shows like Murder One<\/em> and Babylon 5<\/em> put most of their emphasis on season-long stories, or in the case of Babylon 5 series<\/span>-long stories. For its first two years, Babylon 5<\/em> included a mere handful of \u201carc-episodes\u201d per year which drove the series-long story, while most episodes were self-contained narratives. In its third and fourth years, the need to accelerate the storytelling lead to every episode simply driving the main plot. Creator J. Michael Straczynski described it as a television novel.<\/p>\n

This approach was picked up by some sit-coms, notably Friends<\/em>, which for a while became almost a soap opera with a laugh track as many episodes included almost no new story elements, simply picking up threads from the previous instalment and leaving them still dangling waiting for the next one. Now it’s a mark of prestige. Shows like The Sopranos<\/em>,\u00a0Lost<\/em> and\u00a0The Wire<\/em> get the critical acclaim that they do precisely because they tell complex stories over tens of hours, rather than simple yarns in forty minutes.\u00a0The advantage of this approach is that regular viewers can’t wait for the next new show. The drawback is that it\u2019s hard to join the party late, so new viewers may be left stranded.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s almost impossible now to imagine a long-running series which doesn\u2019t do this to some extent, and so when retooling Doctor Who for the twenty-first century, Russell T Davies, while still basically thinking of ten discrete stories told over 13 episodes, nevertheless included a little device which could crop up in more than one story early in the run and which would pay off only in the season finale. Bad Wolf in 2005 was followed by Torchwood in 2006 and then by Mister Saxon in 2007. But in all these cases, the emphasis was still on stand-alone stories. Remove or ignore the \u201carc\u201d material and you lose nothing.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the game that Moffat is playing. A lot of the material we’ve seen so far is almost meaningless except in the context of a storyline that has yet to fully reveal itself, which leads to a slightly “bumpy” viewing experience. In this one episode, all the material about the Silents harks back to the beginning of last year, and we still don\u2019t know the meaning of \u201cSilence will fall\u201d (or is it \u201cSilents will fall\u201d?). The plotline about the Doctor\u2019s death in 200 years is still unresolved at the end of this episode and we are still no wiser about who the little girl is and why she\u2019s in that space suit. What we do know is that she has the ability to regenerate and all this presumably has something to do with Amy\u2019s Shroedinger\u2019s foetus, but it\u2019s impossible to say what at this stage. Then there\u2019s the startling appearance of Frances Barber with what looks like a cyber eyepatch popping up from a later episode and all this is without mentioning River Song, the mystery of whose identity was first posed in 2008\u2019s Silence<\/em> (Silents?) in the Library<\/em>. It\u2019s a bit much for the casual viewer, isn\u2019t it? And even for the devoted fan, is it asking too much to include material only when it’s actually relevant, instead of making much of the episode feel like those “next week on Doctor Who” throw-forwards?<\/p>\n

So, finally let\u2019s talk about River Song. As anyone will know who\u2019s read or seen any of his work before, Steven Moffat loves language and loves exploiting ambiguity in language. The utter absurdity of the rebooting-the-universe plotline (\u201cjust turn it off and on again\u201d) from the end of last year was redeemed for me in its entirety by the sheer breathtaking brilliance and heartstopping power of the TARDIS being described as \u201csomething old, something new, something borrowed, something blue\u201d. He\u2019s been teasing us for four years with who River Song might be. Let\u2019s look at some of the evidence.<\/p>\n