Tom Salinsky

Yes, I know, I’ve left it weeks and by now you can probably barely even remember it was on. But on it was and I feel I should say something. Part of the reason that this review is so late, other than simple disorganisation on my part, is that I generally try and watch each episode at least twice before committing my opinions to Her Majesty’s Internet, and I just haven’t felt like re-watching this one. That already says a fair bit about it, doesn’t it?

Not that it was bad exactly. We’re spoiled these days, us Doctor Who fans. The programme has reached a consistent level of quality in almost all areas which we would have killed for back in the 80s. The production design, lighting design, camera work and FX are all absolutely first rate, as usual. Matt Smith knows exactly what he’s doing in the leading role, and the show can now attract guest stars that would be the envy of pretty much any other show on British TV.

So each week we tune in, hoping not that the sets and the monsters will be up to the vision of the scriptwriter (I’ve just been watching Barry Letts and Paddy Russell talk about Invasion of the Dinosaurs – poor old things) but conversely that the script will be worth all the time, talent and money which will be lavished on it.

And was it? Well, there was certainly some good stuff in it. The delightful feint of Claire Skinner picking the lock of a real police box was tremendously funny, the portal into a Christmas world of snow and trees was delightful, the inevitable reunion with Alexander Armstrong (never has a piece of casting given away a supposed plot-twist more clearly!) was suitably moving and the genuinely surprising reappearance of Amy and Rory was a lovely little Christmas present for the regular viewers.

But what on earth was the point of it all?

There are two basic approaches one can take to long-form storytelling. One is the classic three acts. Set up your problem, make your hero suffer, resolve the problem. See Blink, Midnight, The Empty Child, or actually – most successful stories. All of the events are connected to the main problem in some way.The other approach is to use the narrative just as an excuse for a lot of fun and games of a different kind. See most musicals, Marx Brothers movies, James Bond and so on. In these stories, the resolution of one problem creates another one, and so a more episodic feel is created. Splitting the difference, creating a series of related set-pieces, runs the risk of feeling episodic. I took Moffat to task for this with The Eleventh Hour which seemed to me to scarcely know what it was about despite being a lot of fun – but this is worse by far.

It’s about the Doctor’s relationship with Madge. No, about it’s the Doctor’s Christmas treat for her children (which, as the episode goes on, looks more and more like a sinister trap for whichever proves to be the most curious of her brood). No, it’s about those funny tree things. Oh look, it’s Arabella Weir. Hey, now Claire Skinner’s gone all magic.

To be blunt, this was a fucking mess. There are some delightful ingredients in the mix, but the artful constructionist of A Scandal in Belgravia has apparently assembled them using a blender. Of particular note is Claire Skinner’s blithe acceptance of pretty much all the batshit-craziness which visits her Christmas. It’s rather charming and funny until you realise how unbelievable it is and what a narrative short-cut it represents.

So, I’m starting to have deep misgivings about Steven Moffat’s reign at the head of the Whoniverse. While he’s undoubtedly capable of writing magnificent stories, I feel he sold us down the river twice last year – once by not noticing how distraught Amy Pond would be to have her infant daughter irrevocably ripped from her, and again by entirely failing to provide a coherent explanation for the Doctor’s death on the shores of Lake Silencio. If I’m dazzled by how clever everything is, then I may not notice that the characters are thinly drawn. If the emotions are big and important enough, then I may not notice that the plot doesn’t quite work. But you can’t fail at both and expect no-one to notice. This would have been a good moment to bounce back and prove that running both Doctor Who and Sherlock isn’t spreading Steven Moffat too thinly. So, far it looks like Sherlock’s gain is Doctor Who’s loss.

Two stars.

Well, it has been a long time since I was here!

This has been for a couple of reasons, largely, we’ve bought a flat which we will be renovating in the New Year – expect lots of bloggy fun covering that. And also, I’ve been writing my first play with my good friend Robert Khan. Coalition had its first reading on 30 November and is currently seeking producers.

Let me do a quick cultural round-up to keep you all up-to-date. In recent weeks I have seen…

• One Man Two Guvnors – a gloriously playful take on a classic farce, blessed with four stand-out performances from Oliver Chris, Tom Edden, Daniel Rigby and of course James Corden. A more purely joyful night at the theatre you couldn’t wish for. And a skiffle band too!
• Matilda – I knew it would be good, I didn’t dream that it would be astoundingly good. Tim Minchin’s lyrics and music are heartfelt, delectably clever and roaringly funny, Bertie Carvell turns in an award-winning performance as Miss Trunchbull, the sets and lighting are perfect and Dennis Kelly’s additions to Roald Dahl’s story fit seamlessly. All this without mentioning Matilda herself – there are four in rotation, but if the one we saw is anything to go by, then they are all stars in the making. Go!!
• Dave Gorman’s PowerPoint Presentation – Unfussy, unencumbered by a deadening theme, just an hour and a half in the company of one of the cleverest, most affable comedians on the circuit. A delight.

We also saw The Kitchen and Daniel Kitson both at the National Theatre. The former’s slight story is transformed by stunningly choreographed playing and the latter is his usual detailed, hilarious, heartbreaking self. But both have finished now, so you can’t go.

Come and see the next reading of Coalition instead though – 20-22 January, afternoons at The Leicester Square Theatre and follow the progress of the play on its new website.

Recent days in television have brought us two resurrections of once-feted comedy group, one recreated by new actors, courtesy of a script from The Thick Of It scribe Tony Roche, the other with many of the old team reassembled for another jog around the track.

Taking The Comic Strip’s The Hunt for Tony Blair first, it can certainly be said that this is better by far than the almost entirely uninteresting Sex, Actually. It also runs true to that strand’s usual form, in tone, structure and approach. The team that satirised the miners strike in 1988 (three years after it ended), The Professionals in 1984 (three years after it ended) and The Fly in 1988 (two years after the film was released) now tackles the Prime Ministership of Tony Blair four years after he left office.

Structurally, the film resembles several other Comic Strip efforts including War (the second-ever), South Atlantic Raiders and Spaghetti Hoops, being essentially a series of sketches, related only by the fact that the same protagonist turns up to each situation in turn. Here that protagonist is Comic Strip newcomer Stephen Mangan whose wide-eyed optimism suits Blair nicely, and the recurrent trope of Blair’s blithe optimism and ruthless rationalisation is probably the film’s best joke. “It’s never pleasant strangling an old man with his own tie,” muses Blair in a voice-over, “but what’s done is done and we move on.”

However, the secondary focus of the satire is all over the place. Lurching from decade-to-decade the piece spoofs The Thirty Nine Steps, The Fugitive, Sunset Boulevard and others, never really skewering any of them. From the steady aim and clear focus of Five Go Mad In Dorset, we are now dangerously close to Scary Movie territory. It’s when Blair turns up at Mrs Thatcher’s mansion (with Jennifer Saunders reprising the role with far less wit than in GLC) that things completely fall apart as tone, taste and even basic plotting are jettisoned in pursuit of cheap laughs.

Elsewhere, Robbie Coltrane and Nigel Planer prove once again that they are the best actors in the team, but are never given anything funny to say. Rik Mayall is reduced to face-pulling and falling over. Harry Enfield is very funny but only on screen for sixty seconds and Richardson himself is embarrassingly poor as George Bush. Technical standards have slipped too with several shots overexposed, ruining the film noir look and several mismatched shots just stuck together hopefully when surely a cut-away could have been found somewhere.

Overall, this feels laboured, plodding and rather uninspired. Holy Flying Circus at least had energy, taking the smart decision to tell the story of the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian by focusing on a manageably short period of time – the few months between the film’s American release and Cleese and Palin’s appearance on TV opposite Malcom Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark. Whereas the Comic Strip film shows a shaky hand, falteringly guessing at what effect these various choices might have on an audience, Tony Roche’s script has a very clear intent – to play fast-and-loose with time, space, reality and truth (to the ire of many of the real Pythons).

This is only partially successful. Some of the tropes are fun, like the same actor playing both Terry Jones and Mrs Michael Palin. Others just seem pointless, like Darren Boyd apologising to camera for basing his portrayal of John Cleese mainly on Fawlty Towers or Jason Thorpe’s ludicrously manic TV director Alan Dick screaming absurd insanities in the manner of Matt Berry in The IT Crowd. The trio of Christian protestors lead by Mark Heap get a bit too much screentime for my liking, and their rejection of the Bishop is too pat to be convincing. Far more telling, I think, is the story oft-told by the Pythons but omitted here, that back in the green room after the show was over, a genuinely angry Michael Palin was staggered to see Muggeridge and the Bishop genially passing around drinks and congratulating all concerned with having pulled off such a lovely piece of television.

Hats off to some of the other cast members though, including a spookily accurate Michael Palin from Charles Edwards, a hilarious Malcolm Muggeridge from Michael Cochrane and a brilliantly sappy Tim Rice from Tom “PC Andy” Price. A worthily experimental telling of a fascinating moment in English comedy history, told with brio but with enormous self-indulgence, and that probably only needed an hour to be just as effective.

Oh, that Steven Moffat can write a Doctor Who season finale, can’t he? A weird vision of Earth – all familiar elements but jumbled up in delightful ways, a storyline which jumps back and forth in time, revisiting events from earlier episodes and seeing them from a new angle, set ups from the very first episode of the season now being paid off, old friends and enemies popping back for a visit, a quick appearance of a Dalek just for fun, Rory nobly in uniform bravely protecting Amy who has forgotten who he is. Some of it was a bit of cheat, sure, and I’m not quite sure I understood what the Doctor did at the end there, but it came with such a huge emotional wallop I really didn’t care. Four stars.

Unfortunately, that’s last year’s season finale I’m talking about. And this year’s slavish emulation of last year’s is the least of its problems.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. As irrelevant and idiotic as it was, the vision of the 5:02 universe was bracing and superbly well-realised – what a pleasure to see Simon Callow back as Charles Dickens. The Doctor with a beard is a fun image and the Silents are as effective as ever, albeit rather under-used. Amy’s office-on-a-train is all sorts of awesome and her execution of Madame Kovarian finally gives some heft to the baby-kidnapping plot which has been treated in such an off-hand manner since the series returned. The punch-line with The Doctor (like James Bond at the beginning of You Only Live Twice) believed dead by his enemies is a good way of modestly rebooting a series which was rapidly disappearing up its own probic vent. The tribute to Nicholas Courtney is touching and appropriate.

Okay, now the minor niggles.

The whole story requires the Doctor to be constantly talking to other people about how clever he is being, which is dramatically weak, despite Moffat’s best efforts to ramp up the tension by having Churchill’s palace progressively invaded by Silents. When Churchill is abandoned, a not-very-convincingly decapitated Dorium Maldovar takes over the role. The last thing we need at the end of this Moebius Pretzel of a series is the set-up for another arc, let alone one derived from Silver Nemesis of all things. Could we not have even a little bit of closure for once?

My need for a good, hissable villain and some genuinely malevolent monsters is fed by the reappearance of Madame Kovarian and her army of Silents, but her reappearance doesn’t achieve anything (except her satisfying death at Amy’s hands, as noted) and it’s not at all clear to me what, if any, role the Silents played in her plan to turn Rory and Amy’s offspring into a custom-made Doctor-killer, nor really how the events of The Impossible Astronaut and A Good Man Goes To War are even remotely connected.

Simon Fisher-Becker needed to keep his head a lot stiller in that box to avoid looking like he was wearing it on his shoulders (which of course, he was). And on the subject of dodgy effects, the sight of Mark Gattiss (for it was he) being chewed up by those skulls was just embarrassing.

Right.

Since 23 April 2011 – 161 days ago, 23 weeks, over five months – we’ve been told that the Doctor dies at Lake Silencio. Canton Everett Delaware III intones “that most certainly is the Doctor and he most certainly is dead.” Now, shortly before the series finale, news reached us that filming on the Christmas Special with Matt Smith had begun, so if even a scintilla of doubt remained that the Doctor would in fact survive this encounter, those doubts were swept away. We all knew, sitting down on 1 October – as in fact we know every week – that this was not the end of Our Hero. The question was not “whether?” but “how?”

And after this much build-up, after cranking up the stakes this high, after making us wait nearly half a year and then making the Doctor increasingly pessimistic, resigned, fatalistic and gloomy as his certain death approaches, the answer that was provided needed to clear a pretty high bar. To be clear, it needed to be…

• Surprising. If it’s predictable, what’s the point?
• Set up. The solution needs to be hiding in plain sight (to coin a phrase), not some magic new whoosit we’ve never seen before. Note that these first two are in apparent conflict, and yet Moffat has proved himself a master at this kind of sleight-of-narrative in the past.
• Not a cheat. It must not contradict anything we’ve already heard, or rely on anything brand new. Agatha Christie rules. It’s only satisfying if we have enough information to work it out ourselves. It must be consistent.
• Come at a cost. If it’s too glib, too easy, then who cares? The apotheosis of this is the Doctor’s despatch of the Daleks into the Void in Doomsday. The solution is apparently a little too easy, but the cost of carrying out this plan, turns out to be heartbreakingly mighty. As noted in paragraph one, The Big Bang rescues the glib nonsense of its ending with the emotional punch of the Doctor’s goodbyes and Amy’s resurrection of the TARDIS using the wedding rhyme – something old, something new…

In my view, the resolution of the death of the Doctor in The Wedding of River Song fails in every one these. Let’s take them in order.

Was it surprising? No, not really. As I noted in my review of Let’s Kill Hitler, we now have not one but two sources of Doctor-Dopplegangers to take that supposedly fatal blast by the shore of Lake Silencio. This in itself is poor plotting. Just as The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People ought not to have needed two different crucibles of magic goo serving different purposes, Series Six ought not to have need two different magic people-copying technologies. If the surprise is just a matter of guessing which of them is needed to accomplish the switch, then it’s hardly a surprise at all. In fact, the heavy favouring of the Tesselecta in the “previously” gives the game away almost completely.

Now actually, for me this is the least important of the four. It will never be a total surprise anyway, because we know the Doctor won’t die, but making the resolution so totally predictable puts even more pressure on the other elements. Unfortunately, they all fail too.

Set up. Well, insofar as we have seen the Tesselecta before, I suppose this is set up – at the cost of surprise as noted above. But when we consider point three – is it a cheat? – we begin to see just how poorly set up it is. Almost nothing about what the Tesselecta is required to do is set up in its earlier appearance in Let’s Kill Hitler. Although able to mimic humans, clothing and even motorbikes (although not glasses, bizarrely), it nevertheless renders them rather stiffly and bloodlessly. It carries a human(oid) crew which can react, albeit not very quickly, to fresh stimuli and all of whom are apparently necessary for its operation.

However, the Doctor we see at Lake Silencio is not stiff and awkward, he’s not slow to react, he’s just as quicksilver, lithe and supple as ever. When the astronaut zaps him (with what weaponry, by the way?) he then appears to regenerate, despite the Tesselecta having shown no ability to regenerate and no known ability to simulate the appearance of such a thing. Steven Moffat’s slightly grumpy Twitter reply to a fan who raised this – very fair – point is as follows: “If it can simulate a human being to the last detail, a light show is nothing. We can do that NOW – ask the Mill.” Sadly, all three of these points are wrong. It has been set up as being unable to simulate a human being to the last detail, it’s simulations have always been depicted as flawed and imperfect up till now. But even if it had been depicted as able to replicate humans perfectly, it does not follow that it perforce has the ability to simulate a uniquely Time Lord attribute. It’s like rebutting a complaint that a hero had shown no previous ability to hold his breath for ten minutes by pointing out that he is very good at skiing, so holding his breath for a superhuman length of time would probably be easy – no? Finally, The Mill may be able to overlay a flat image of a regeneration effect on a flat image on a TV screen, at a modest resolution and given sufficient rendering time. Neither they nor anyone else can make such a thing appear, in three dimensions, visible from all angles, in real-time, around a moving human.

Finally, the Tesseledoctor “dies” and is burned. So all the exquisite machinery which drives this phenomenal robot is burned up and at no time is anything resembling a mechanism revealed. Everyone who witnesses the pyre continues to see burning flesh and bones, and not the charred remains of circuits, gantries control panels – oh, and while I’m at it – the burned and useless remains of the machinery required to return the Doctor back to his regular size. And presumably the rest of the crew, all willingly risking their lives too. Or does the ship only require one operator now?

Now, no doubt it’s possible to invent explanations for all of these apparent contradictions, but that’s not my fucking job. It’s the writer’s job, and when the writer fails, it’s the show-runners.

Finally, what’s the cost of all of this? Absolutely nothing! And who is it for exactly? Either time – all-powerful, all-knowing TIME – requires and insists that the Doctor meet his death at Lake Silencio or it will be 5:02 forever, or the universe will end, or some fucking thing. OR time merely requires that four random individuals witness something which looks a bit like the Doctor being murdered and the Doctor knows that and so can cheerfully stage a fraudulent version of the supposed event whenever he wishes with a minimum of soul-searching and companion-torturing. But not fucking both. If he could have sent a Flesh avatar or a robot double in his place at any time, why didn’t he just do that and get on with it? Quite how these four eye-witnesses turn into the entire universe knowing of the Doctor’s death is also not remotely apparent.

By the time River was switching between “I can’t stop myself” and “hello sweetie” for no apparent reason at all, I was ready to abandon the whole enterprise. Consider what we are being asked to swallow here – a robot double of the Doctor from 200 years in the future, controlled by a miniaturised Doctor, summons Rory, Canton, a Flesh avatar of Amy and one version of River Song to watch another version of River Song dressed in a spacesuit for no reason, hiding in a lake for no reason, to pretend to execute him and then burn the robot body because a nursery rhyme told him to. For fuck’s sake.

So, that was Series Six. I can’t give the finale more than one star. It’s worth at least two, maybe even two-and-a-half. Technical standards are high, performances are faultless, lots of good jokes. But the one thing it had to accomplish was to pay off all the set-ups and after this much waiting, it just wasn’t good enough. This is a particular shame, since Series Six has been in general a huge improvement over the vertiginously variable Series Five. Whereas last year gave me disappointment after disappointment in the form of mis-fires like Victory of the Daleks, Vampires of Venice and Vincent and the Doctor (yes I know you liked it, fair enough), and a competent but unremarkable piece like the Silurian two-parter seemed magical in comparison, this year we’ve had a much higher average, with even minor disappointments like The God Complex and Closing Time still seeming fresher and more confident than much of the previous year, and the best this year was some of the best the series has ever done. I suppose what I’m saying is that a creative team that can come up with The Doctor’s Wife, A Good Man Goes To War and The Girl Who Waited is surely capable of a better season finale than this. Apparently not.

Final ratings…

• The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon – The Silents are a brilliant creation, and this is vibrant, funny, challenging stuff. Four stars.
• Curse of the Black Spot – Soggy. Two stars.
• The Doctor’s Wife – perfection. Five stars.
• The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People – didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Just scrapes four stars, largely for the Doctor/Doctor double act and the shattering ending.
• A Good Man Goes To War – propulsive, kinetic stuff. Some of Moffat’s very best writing with Strax and Colonel Runaway. Five stars.
• Let’s Kill Hitler – Again, this is so structurally awkward that I want to downgrade it to three stars but it’s just so winning. I think the finale has tarnished it a little. Three-and-a-half stars.
• Night Terrors – not the very best of the best, but everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Especially if you ignore the series arc, four stars.
• The Girl Who Waited – outstanding stuff. Proper science-fiction, proper acting and proper tear-jerking. Five stars.
• The God Complex – a better start than Curse of the Black Spot, but exactly the same damned low-stakes, who cares, ending. Three stars.
• Closing Time – amusing but uneventful. Two-and-a-half stars.
• The Wedding of River Song – colourful but entirely vacuous. I feel rather betrayed. One star.

I like Gareth Roberts’ stuff enormously as a rule, and although I felt some of the humour in The Lodger was over-done, I liked the Craig character very much and was genuinely invested in his relationship with Sophie, so I was perfectly happy to see them return. As it happens, the splendid Daisy Haggard is bundled out of the door with unseemly haste, so we can explore the relationship between The Doctor, Craig and of course Stormaggeddon.

I’m really not sure what this episode was about. One of the issues I had with The Lodger was the way in which the Doctor, purportedly desperate to discover what was happening in the flat above Craig’s, was perfectly happy cooking omelettes and playing football for the most part. Likewise here, while I’m pleased to see Cybermats again, and pleased that they still fly through the air as unconvincingly as ever when on the attack, I don’t have any real sense of who these Cybermen were, what they were doing there or what they wanted, or what the Doctor was doing there.

There’s plenty of fun and funny lines along the way. The play on the word “companion” is delightful, exploiting always-amusing male homosexual anxiety without being too On The Buses about it. Matt Smith excels at making the Doctor’s bizarre behaviour result in having people who have never met him instantly like and trust him, and Craig’s fumbling attempts to recreate Time Lord charisma makes for a fun set-piece.

But surely nobody believes even for a second that when that dodgy-digital Cyberskull closes around Craig’s chubby head that he will never be seen again, or even be affected in the least by his encounter, so the climax has no real suspense or power or energy at all. Worse, after the Farpointing of last week’s minotaur, Craig’s demolition of the Cybership is only a millimetre away from the horrendous Star Trek cliché of confusing a computer to death (not that Doctor Who has always successfully avoided this trope either). Hanging a lantern on this by having Craig make fun of it doesn’t make it go away either.

In what has been a remarkably strong run of episodes, navigating the mid-season bridge very effectively, this penultimate instalment unfortunately feels cheap, second-hand, uninspired and not at all thought-through. Presumably Moffat was too busy making sure that episode 13 was going to be a total barnstormer. Again, the most effective part of the episode is the coda, which has nothing whatever to do with the episode-of-the-week plot, but is sowing (and reaping) seeds for the season arc, confirming that – yes indeed – it was River Song herself in that sub-aqua spacesuit. And providing the welcome return of the genuinely villainous Frances Barber complete with her Travis-style eyepatch. Now, if she turns out to be a misunderstood automated medical program, I really am going to be pissed off.

Apparently I gave The Soggy Pirate Rubbish three stars when I first reviewed it. This is an obvious error. That story goes down to two stars, which gives me room to give Closing Time two-and-a-half.

Bring on Lake Silencio!

First of all, I’m aware how horribly late this is. It might be a bit briefer than normal, as I try and crank out this and some thoughts about Closing Time before the finale starts.

To begin with, I’m not a huge Toby Whithouse fan. School Reunion was lovely whenever it was about Sarah Jane and K9, but I detect the jolly Welsh hand of Russell T Davies in much of that material, and I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the standard-issue and barely coherent science-fiction plot it was grafted on to. Did those silly bat things want to eat the children or harness their brains? What was the Skasis Paradigm anyway? Why do I care?

Vampires of Venice was one of a number of stories from series five which I thought suffered badly from being composed largely of left-over-bits and pieces of other (generally better) stories, and so I wasn’t really looking forward to this one much. However, once it began, my wariness began to evaporate. I always enjoy stories confined to a single location – I appreciate the economy and the look forward to seeing the results of a creative constraint. The direction is particularly stylish and energised, with text flashed up on the screen to dramatise poor Lucy’s collapsing mental state.

The Doctor and co. arrive and meet a fairly standard-issue gaggle of cannon-fodder types who explain the horrible secret of this hotel with its shifting walls. I say standard issue, but actually they’re for the most part clearly differentiated, written with wit and played with style. David Walliams as eager-to-surrender Gibbis is terribly funny and Amara Karan makes a huge impact as never-was companion Rita. The large ensemble cast sidelines Rory and Amy a little but the central conceit of the rooms which hold your worst fears is a lovely one.

However, not all of the characters are as fresh or as interesting. Joe is well-played by Daniel Pirrie, but just serves as Basil Exposition. Howie is a tedious cliché, and among a lot of rather uninteresting “worst fears” (PE teachers, spouting hand-me-down lines about “doing it in your pants”, old monster costumes pressed into service, shouty parents who feel disappointed) his is the least interesting by far. An awkward teenage boy afraid of girls. What a waste. A brilliant mechanism for probing each of these characters’ deepest, darkest fears and we get this miserable shop-worn collection. We don’t even get to see what the Doctor’s was, which might have seemed sly and smart if everyone else’s was gangbusters, but here it just seems like a lack of imagination.

And then, as mysteries are replaced by answers, the whole thing completely falls apart. The scene of the Doctor talking to the minotaur is shot splendidly – I imagine there was deep concern here that the thing looked immobile, awkward and not a little ridiculous and consistently shooting it through other semi-transparent objects is a wonderful solution, but what on earth did the explanation mean?

Two new clichés of twenty-first century Doctor Who are pressed into service here. I mentioned Encounter At Farpoint when writing about The Soggy Pirate Rubbish which has basically the same dénouement as this episode. Star Trek, in most of its recent incarnations has suffered a bit by “Farpointing” all of its best enemies. Not content with putting a Klingon on the bridge, DS9 we had jolly Ferengi and in Voyager we had to put up with a friendly Borg. But the best movies – Wrath of Khan, First Contact – are the ones with genuinely evil villains who have to be destroyed. It might be more sensitive and new-age to make your villains well-rounded and understandable, but it’s much, much harder to bring your adventure story to a thrilling conclusion if all your bad-guy wants is a hug.

Then we have the other dominant cliché of modern Doctor Who – say it with me – The Automated System Run Amok. Not only do we have this for the arguably fifth time this year, here it doesn’t even make any sense. As with the leathery Anthony Head things in School Reunion, I’ve absolutely no idea who gains from having this demented prison operate in this bizarre way, nor why the minotaur was so powerless to stop it, not what the Doctor did to bring about its end. It reminded me a little of the Cylons in the (generally excellent) rebooted Battlestar Galactica, whose plan – as it was revealed – appeared more and more to be designed less to bring about what the Cylons claimed to want, but instead to be designed to create maximally dramatic psychological suffering for a small handful of humans. It’s fun for viewers to watch people face their worst fears (or it would have been if they had been more interesting) but what purpose does it solve?

Possibly the best scene in the whole episode was the Doctor ruthlessly dismantling his companion’s faith in order to allow his plan to work. This however, is a near-identical replication of a scene from 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, which uses the neat idea that vampires may be warded off by crosses, not it’s not the object itself that matters but the faith of the person carrying it.

A very frustrating watch – lots of wit, invention and energy, especially in some of the supporting cast, but a central idea which is poorly exploited and a resolution which fatally lacks energy or coherence and – despite Nick Hurran’s extremely accomplished direction – a very ropey looking monster. And then – that coda.

Rather like the Flesh two-parter, a rather run-of-the-mill script, redeemed by some excellent direction, is suddenly elevated by a single stunning scene which ties the events of the preceding story into the fabric of the season as a whole. The Doctor dropping Amy and Rory off in suburban luxury is not shocking in the way that Amy’s milky disintegration was, but it still calls the whole nature of the Doctor/Companion relationship into question in a profound way. I don’t think the Doctor has flung anyone out of the TARDIS since he locked the doors on Susan in until-recently-Dalek-occupied London. Yet, I imagine we’ll see Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill’s names in the credits next week, and I know they will be on the shores of Lake Silencio, so just what is happening here? Is this a genuine departure, with just a few loose ends to tie up, or is it a feint? Is this Adric on the bridge of the freighter his presence in the Radio Times listings for Time Flight notwithstanding, or is it Tegan at the end of that same story, apparently left behind, but picked up again before the next story is over?

In any case, The God Complex earns three, rather generous, stars.

I always rather liked The Rise of The Cybermen / The Age of Steel. Not a perfect two-parter by any means, but with a lot of very good stuff in it, so as opposed to the unease with which I greeted a fourth script from Mark Gatiss last week (sort-of), I was looking forward to a return effort from Tom MacRae.

The early parts of the episode are strong. Some cheerful banter between the regulars (still no mention of their family tragedy this week, but hey-ho) and then a very nice arrival into a Mind Robber-esque void which contrives to separate Mr and Mrs Pond. Time streams running at different rates is not a wholly new science fiction idea. Mr Moffat has played with it more than once (notably in The Girl in the Fireplace) and I think but can’t be bothered to check that it also comes up in Red Dwarf and Star Trek The Next Generation. Hell, it’s in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe.

The exact mechanism is a little hard to follow if I’m honest. If this disease kills you in a day, is time sped up for you or slowed down for you? In either case, why aren’t you hungry? How does Amy know she’s been there for a week? Just how does that spy-glass work anyway? Oh it doesn’t really matter – it’s such a nice science-fairy-fiction-story touch isn’t it?

In fact, from the moment that Rory confronts 50-plus-year-old Amy, none of this matters. Two weeks ago I compared the glib treatment of Amy’s baby to the reality of Rose’s disappearance. This episode is the good bits of Aliens of London all over again, with so much depth and thought and care it’s almost unbelievable. Having someone turn back up to “rescue” you after you’ve been fending for yourself, with no human company, for 36 years is a preposterous idea. But Tom McRae, director Nick Hurran, some spiffy make-up and blessed, saintly, astonishing Karen Gillan made me believe every single ridiculous second of it and to care desperately how it turned out.

In a very neat twist, it’s the Doctor who is trapped in the TARDIS, having to pilot Rory by remote control and some familiar-looking spectacles through the arcade game of Kill The Robots and Save The Girl. But the girl turns out to be a hardened, obstreperous, embittered version of sprightly Amy who has become so determined to hang on to life that she won’t lift a finger to prevent the younger version of herself from going through her decades of lonely hell.

When she eventually relents, the deal she strikes is quite extraordinary and again it’s a testament to the care and attention to detail of everybody involved that I was perfectly prepared to believe that the TARDIS might be home to two different versions of Amy Pond, at least temporarily. But the eventual inevitability of the elder Pond’s sacrifice, when it dawns, had the agony of a classic tragedy rather than the listless predictability of a reset button. Helping the power and emotion of this scene is the Doctor’s cold insistence that this is Rory’s decision, and the cut-away when young Amy comes around, expecting to see her elder self there is entirely appropriate – but I do hope the Doctor’s lies will be at least mentioned again next week, and given the way this series picks up and drops ongoing storylines whenever it feels like it, that’s not a given.

Some people have griped that the TARDIS being unable to sustain the paradox of multiple Amys is hardly consistent with earlier episodes such as Mawdryn Unead, The Five Doctors, or even – if you really want – Space and Time, but the reality is that these episodes are also entirely inconsistent with each other, so what really counts is whether this story works, and for my money it really, really does. It reminded me less of Mawdryn than the Doctor’s agonised inability to save Section Leader Shaw and the Brigade Leader as the Inferno project turns the Earth inside out. The only problem I have with multiple Amys is that – as with Let’s Kill Hitler – a series which needs us to believe that there is just one Doctor who is shot to death in Utah is giving us another doppleganger to contend with.

Ultimately though, this was absolutely tremendous stuff – funny, complicated, startling, moving and as a stand-alone episode only bettered this year by The Doctor’s Wife. And I’m beginning to think both of those episodes are better than anything we had last year. If I’m going to have one more tiny gripe (and I think I am) it’s just to mention that yet again, we have an implacable automated system whose benevolent (often medical) intentions turn out to have awful or fatal consequences (nanogenes, clockwork soldiers, Lily Cole) often while chanting catch-phrases in even tones (“Are you my mummy?”, “Who turned out the lights”, “Donna Noble has been saved”, “You will experience a tingling sensation and then death”). It’s not that this is a bad idea. It’s not even that it’s a worse idea than power-mad psychopaths hoping to take over the universe (we can do without a re-run of Logopolis). It’s that anything becomes boring if you repeat it often enough, and it’s especially annoying when it’s meant to be a revelation, like all those seventies stories called something like Here Come The Daleks Again which spend the first 24 minutes of episode building up to the stunning revelation that the bad-guys hiding in the shadows are… the Daleks!!

Maybe we should view all of these Doctor-vs-automated systems stories as more like all of those Troughton base-under-siege stories? So the question ought not to be “have we seen a set-up like this before?” but rather “is this The Moonbase or is this The Ice Warriors?” And it doesn’t hurt The Ice Warriors at all that everything in it has been done before, because here it’s done better. And that’s The Girl Who Waited. Not entirely novel, but breathtakingly well done. Five stars.

Firstly, sorry this review is so late. I’ve been running around the country and the planet and suffering from a cold. Admittedly on September 11, this seems like very little to complain of, but there it is.

Back in 2005 a script from Mark Gatiss (long “a”) seemed like a splendid idea. I’d been following his career since “Quatermass and the Hat” at the Edinburgh Fringe circa 1991 and when buying Virgin’s New Adventures every month had thoroughly enjoyed his efforts including “Nightshade”, featuring the star of a beloved BBC TV science-fiction series plagued by fictional characters come to life. I always enjoyed The League of Gentlemen too and so when the series was revived, he seemed an obvious choice to contribute a story, but The Unquiet Dead was the one which proved to Russell T Davies that if getting the scripts up-to-scratch in time meant doing huge rewrites himself then so be it. Dickens-vs-ghosts-in-Victorian-London seemed to be much more about Russell’s vision of Who than Gatiss’s.

The Idiot’s Lantern, part of David Tennant’s first season, was a lesser effort, with no real sense of jeopardy, despite a pleasingly bonkers performance from national treasure Maureen Lipman and the Sapphire And Steel-esque vision of people with stolen faces. Last year, his script for Victory of the Daleks easily walked away with the wooden spoon in a series which was almost comically uneven and incoherent. It was with a certain amount of caution that I approached Night Terrors therefore.

But, it’s also worth noting that Mark Gatiss is one of the most prolific non-show-runners to have written for the programme so far. Only Moffat has written for every series since the show came back, although Rusty currently holds the record for the most scripts by some margin (credited with 31 episodes as writer or co-writer – Moffat can rack up only 18). When Closing Time goes out, Gareth Roberts will overtake Gatiss with five scripts. Next is Helen Raynor with four scripts over two stories. No-one else can get past three. So, he must have something going for him. Mustn’t he…?

The early part of the episode left me a little cold. The frightened little boy seemed so rote, so much a heavy-handed articulation of Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who as behind-the-sofa TV, and the “house call” a quite unnecessary gag which added nothing. As with The Soggy Pirate Rubbish earlier this year, I’m heavily invested in the series-arc plot and I need something really special to make me forget it. And this hand-me-down London estate, bringing back awful memories of Fear Her (aka The Scribbly Olympics Rubbish) didn’t look like it was going to be enough. Even the Doctor’s relationship with Alex started to bring back not-entirely happy memories of The Lodger’s over-done humour.

But as the episode unfolded, I became more and more invested in George’s plight and more and more keen to know what these creepy dolls were up to. The interior dolls house was wonderfully realised by director Richard Clark and Amy and Rory bounced off each other beautifully. The revelation that Claire, George’s mother, can’t conceive was well-handled and George himself was portrayed with laser-like sincerity by little Jamie Oram.

Finally, it all came together with modern Doctor Who doing what it does best – finding the human heart in a science-fiction idea without compromising either. George and Alex’s reunion is genuinely touching and the Doctor’s intervention manages to balance the twin forces of making this Alex’s story while reminding us that Matt Smith is the star (and what a star!).

So, ultimately this is nothing terribly special, but it is a strong, classy, well-realised slab of business-as-usual Doctor Who in 2011. And that’s a good thing, maybe a precious thing. As Tat Wood points out in volume 6 of the preposterously comprehensive review of Doctor Who stories “About Time”, making bread-and-butter episodes of the programme is what Doctor Who pretty much forgot how to do sometime in the mid-eighties and it proved to be the death of the show, killed by Michael Grade, Coronation Street, and – yes – its own fans.

What issues I do have with this episode are all to do with the unfolding arc story. Not only are we expected simply to suspend our interest in the Doctor’s impending death, the continuing complexity of River Song’s life history and the machinations of the evil Madame Eyepatch, but we are obliged to forget about them altogether. If we remember, even for a second, the events of the previous two episodes, then the Doctor’s actions in this episode seem pointlessly, disgusting, heartlessly cruel. Is it supposed to be some kind of demented therapy to take two young parents who have just a child ripped away from them, and who now have to live with the knowledge that they will never be able to nurture and protect that child, and stage a parable for them about how parental love is the most powerful and precious force in the universe? What a cunt!

That aside, four stars.

Back after its mid-season break, but the Moffat-Masterplan shows little sign of letting up. Within the first twenty minutes, Moffat has ret-conned an entirely new character as part of Amelia Pond’s childhood in Leadworth, revealed her to be an earlier incarnation of River Song, killed the Doctor (again!) and locked Hitler in a cupboard. And that’s before we even begin to tackle the robot Amy Pond operated by tiny self-appointed kangaroo court judges (shades of Father Ted – “I won’t be able to relax, Dougal, until the last rabbit round here is the one inside your head, working the controls”).

Despite Moffat’s insistence on giving us everything all at once, let’s try and take things one at a time.

Mels / Melody / River Song
There seems to be some controversy on the Internet about whether Mels’ identity was childishly obvious or a brilliant reveal. Obviously, if something is set up as a surprise and it fails to surprise you, then you are likely to have a low opinion of the plotting (this flawed study notwithstanding). For the record, it did surprise me, and it’s fun and it’s neat and it makes sense (knowing of the connection between Amy Pond and The Doctor, it make perfect sense for a brainwashed Doctor-killing psychopath is inveigle herself into the life of young Ms Pond) and the Leadworth scenes are fun – but it does seem a shame that among all the Leadworth supporting cast members introduced in The Eleventh Hour and never heard of again, Mels was not among them. Or is that asking too much?

However, as well as showing off Moffat’s dazzling plotting, this strategy also exposes a weakness along his flank. RTD’s take on Doctor Who aimed to make the show far more emotionally resonant and realistic. This approach is described by some as moving, by others as overwrought and still by others as hysterical, but it brought a huge audience back to a programme that (fairly or unfairly) had become a joke by the time it was taken off the air. The moment when I began to see and admire what the new “show-runner” was up to, was early in Aliens of London, an episode now derided by many on the production team as it was the first to go before the cameras and they hadn’t really ironed out the kinks yet. For the first time, the Doctor brought his companion back to her own time and place, just to say hello. And because he can’t pilot the TARDIS properly (hurrah!) he brings her back a year too late.

Bang!

Rose has been missed. People who love her, care about her and are desperately worried for her safety. Her boyfriend stands accused of murdering her. Her mother is out of her mind with anxiety. Posters are still up with her face on them. Of course there are. You can’t rip a young woman (or man) out of her home and not expect her to be missed, despite the fact that that’s exactly what happened to Susan (sort-of), Barbara, Ian, Dodo, Polly, Sarah Jane, Tegan, Peri, Mel and Ace and no-one they left behind ever seemed to notice – or at least it wasn’t anything the programme-makers were interested in.

Suddenly the show had a whole new texture, a whole new reality which I for one greatly appreciated. Where Moffat often scored over Rusty was in his intricate plotting. I found that too many RTD stories ended up with a technobabble rabbit pulled out of a deus-ex-machina hat but in stories like The Empty Child, Blink, The Time of Angels, the solutions are properly bedded-in and I don’t feel cheated. However, here Moffat is asking us to pay a very high price for his narrative invention.

At the end of the last series, Amy and Rory are frantic – every bit as frantic as Jackie in Aliens of London – horribly fearful that they may never see their baby again. The maternal instinct is ferociously strong, and the limp consolation of learning that their baby was also their childhood friend and so they sort-of raised her is unlikely to do anything at all to salve that wound. Moffat punches a hole straight through the emotional fabric weaved by RTD and challenges us not to like it.

Well, it’s lucky that there’s so much else going on in this episode then, isn’t it!

The Teselecta
This is a delightful science-fiction idea, and although not entirely new, it’s new to Doctor Who, so that’s good enough for me. In fact, it’s three ideas – the murderous judge sent through time, the robot doppelganger and the miniaturisation ray (“well, there was a ray – and we were miniaturised”). Of course, this does mean another possible identity for the Doctor on the beach, although I imagine that a fake regeneration effect might be more than the Teselecta can muster. I was disappointed that the transformation effect was so Quantel-y but I suppose they have to save money somewhere.

Nazi Germany
Not even the usual Doctor Who Ladybird Book, the third Reich becomes first a gag and then simply a backdrop against which the ongoing series-drama of the Doctor, his married companions and their psychopathic daughter is played out. They put Hitler in the title, then lock him in a cupboard for the rest of the episode!?

The Doctor’s Resurrection
Again, the solution is bedded in by Moffat, but River’s change-of-heart feels a little rushed. From murderer to suicidal sacrifice in twenty minutes? However, there’s no actual cheating here, and some precedent for this kind of thing in the series mythology (I’m thinking of the promises made by the Time Lords to the Master in The Five Doctors as well as the proposed use of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations in Mawdryn Undead – neither conclusive, but both persuasive). Furthermore, as others have pointed out, this exchange potentially paves the way for the twelve-regenerations  limit to be extended, in the Doctor’s case at least.

Overall
Thoroughly in the new-familiar Moffat style with all of his strengths and weakness on full display. There’s nothing quite as original as Victorian Siluarian and the lactating Sontaran from A Good Man Goes To War, and certainly nothing to match the depth and power of the “Colonel Runaway” scene, but we did get “So I was on my way to this gay Gypsy bar-mitzvah for the disabled, then I thought, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish”, that temporal grace business sorted out once and for all, and the origin of River Song’s diary, so I reckon we’re about even. A good start. Four stars.

Professor Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes” in real social situations – city sidewalks, suburban malls and the like. His conclusion about almost all of the utterances which triggered laughter in these situations? They weren’t funny.

Oddly, it seems that the laughter reaction engendered in a studio audience, or a family at home watching Only Fools and Horses, has little or nothing to do with what makes people laugh socially, and therefore why laughter exists at all (after all, laughter almost certainly predates comedians by some way, and since babies laugh it obviously predates language). In all probability, modern comedians and comedy shows have hijacked a response which evolved for another reason altogether.

“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioural fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.” Laughing together is a way of saying: we are the same. We’re part of the same gang. When I laugh with you, I’m saying “I get you.” That’s why we laugh more in a big audience than we do on the sofa on our own. And that’s why so many comedy shows have a laugh track.

The drawback of the laugh track is the same as discussed under Just-A-Flesh-Wound – it reminds the audience at home that they’re watching a TV show, and this may wreck the tone (and pace) of your show. But the advantage is clear to see: it can make a show seem funnier.

Summary

Asking why we laugh doesn’t really tell us what will be funny, and analysing humour doesn’t necessarily make us better “laughter technicians”, since comedy is so fragile. But here at least are eight tools to use in the creation of comedy, which have fairly predictable effects.

Comedy based on STATUS seems human and universal. Comedy based on JUXTAPOSITION can seem obscure, but can also be a great vehicle for SATIRE. Comedy based on WITHDRAWN EMOTION can help make extreme situations acceptable, broadening the range of possible topics. Comedy based on HEIGHTENED EMOTION may end up seeming silly, but can have very broad appeal. Comedy based on INSIGHT seems clever and may provoke admiration rather than gales of laughter, whereas comedy based on ANTICIPATION or SURPRISE (which includes almost all slapstick) seems more simplistic but is likely to appeal to more people. Combining these elements creates the strongest effects. Here’s an example from Scrubs which is by no means exceptional for that show.

The Janitor tells JD he is no longer pursuing his vendetta against him, and quietly returns to painting an X on the surface of the hospital car park. Later, JD drives his scooter away, not noticing the heavy iron chain around the rear bumper. Suddenly, the chain tautens, and JD is flung over the handlebars, landing exactly on the Janitor’s X, besides which sits the Janitor in a deckchair, sipping a cocktail. “Bullseye!” he cries. “We’re not done yet, are we?” asks JD, spread-eagled on the floor. “No, my friend, we’re just getting started,” remarks the Janitor, sauntering happily away.

JD’s loss of status, combines with the mix of surprise and anticipation that the Janitor has not in fact turned over a new leaf, and the twin insights of the meaning of the X and the fact of the chain. JD’s reaction to this horrifying injury is one of withdrawn emotion; we don’t believe he has been seriously hurt and so we are free to laugh.