{"id":1800,"date":"2015-10-17T15:23:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T15:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1800"},"modified":"2015-10-17T15:23:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-17T15:23:41","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-before-the-flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/10\/17\/so-what-did-i-think-of-before-the-flood\/","title":{"rendered":"So\u2026 what did I think of Before the Flood?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rsz_dw0904-b\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Doctor<\/strong>: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.<\/p>\n

Sally<\/strong>: Started well, that sentence.<\/p>\n

The Doctor<\/strong>: It got away from me, yeah.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blink<\/em> has got a lot to answer for. On balance I\u2019m thoroughly glad it exists, since on its own it\u2019s absolutely marvellous. But in terms of its legacy, it may very well have done more harm than good.<\/p>\n

Remember, one of the factors in the creation of Blink<\/em> was it that was to be that season\u2019s Doctor-light story. With David Tennant and Freema Agyeman filming another episode at the same time, Steven Moffat\u2019s script had to put something else in the place of the quirky hero most were tuning in to see. Blink <\/em>succeeds in part because the Doctor\u2019s presence is felt throughout, but also because the mind-bending paradoxes fulfil our desire for something otherworldly and strange and so make up for the Doctor\u2019s absence.<\/p>\n

Steven Moffat\u2019s insight was that Doctor Who is a series about a time traveller which very rarely tells stories which are about time travel. The TARDIS is frequently used only to deliver the leads to where and when the adventure is taking place. But this was not accidental. 26 years of episodes produced with hardly any time-travel adventures was not coincidence, lack of ambition (time travel paradoxes are very cheap to film), or inattention. It was because most time-travel stories are self-limiting. Time travel turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, or the use of paradoxes eventually undoes the causality of the story, which is why they are very often mere narrative window dressing. We don\u2019t watch Terminator 2<\/em> because it uses time travel to \u201cundo\u201d the first movie. We watch Terminator 2<\/em> for the epic life-and-death struggle, the then (heck, now) eye-popping special effects and the thrilling stunt work.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Blink<\/em> doesn\u2019t succeed because of the time travel paradoxes. They are neat solutions to seemingly impossible problems, and they create the mystery which Sally Sparrow is unravelling, but we watch for star-of-tomorrow Carey Mulligan\u2019s luminous performance and the pathos of poor Billy Shipton\u2019s inevitable death. Note also, that the final solution to the threat of the angels has nothing whatever to do with time-travel \u2013 it exploits a hitherto unnoticed feature of their biology: they can quantum-lock each other by mistake.<\/p>\n

But continuing to write more and more stories in which time paradoxes form the core of the plot, or worse are the means to resolve it, leads to diminishing returns. It leads to stories whose climaxes are not thrilling-escapes-from-death, or brilliant last-minute improvisatons, or moments of emotional catharsis, but instead are unrewardingly clever, like the solution to a crossword puzzle, giving a brief flash of insight but nothing more. And as writers work harder and harder to out-do each other and stay ahead of the audience, the danger becomes greater and greater that climaxes start to tip over into Bill and Ted<\/em> or The Curse of Fatal Death<\/em> absurdity.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t mind the Doctor breaking the fourth wall to give us a little lecture at the top of the episode, it\u2019s fun and so is his penchant for the electric guitar. Maybe it wasn\u2019t strictly needed, except to pad out the running time, but I don\u2019t object in principle. It\u2019s just that what he was saying was a little laboured. You don\u2019t have to have studied science-fiction in depth from H G Wells to the present day to have seen a bootstrap paradox before. You just need to have seen one episode of Doctor Who with Steven Moffat\u2019s name on it somewhere and you\u2019ll probably be fully up-to-speed. So it\u2019s the foregrounding<\/span> of this element which undoes this episode for me more than anything else.<\/p>\n

As I noted last week, the idea of travelling back in time to see how the events of part one were set in motion is one I found very fresh and invigorating, and early signs were good. Although I could probably have done without O\u2019Donnell\u2019s fan-squee over the Doctor\u2019s previous (and future) Earth-bound exploits. We don\u2019t want to return to the days of Eric Saward where the Doctor and the Time Lords were pretty much intergalactic celebrities, do we?<\/p>\n

O\u2019Donnell is written like that partly to give her death some added pathos, but it doesn\u2019t really work. She\u2019s too thin of a character, both in the writing and in the playing, and the directing is very weak here, with the camera playing the part of the Fisher King and swooping grimly near her while she just stands and feebly goggles at it, before being discovered dead but apparently uninjured.<\/p>\n

The Doctor\u2019s second trip in the TARDIS is also strangely redundant \u2013 another narrative loop, like his trip in Davros\u2019s wheelchair, which again suggests that there wasn\u2019t quite enough material to sustain 90 minutes of television. Back on the base, Clara et al are trying to work out what the ghost Doctor is saying \u2013 when the ghost O\u2019Donnell turns up. This is very strange. Prentis, who was alive when the Doctor arrived, is seen floating around the Drum right from the start. O\u2019Donnell\u2019s ghost only appears at the Drum after the Doctor witnesses her dead. No explanation for this is ever given.<\/p>\n

The Fisher King (strange name) is also rather a blank of a villain. Steven Moffat somewhat\u00a0pompously opined in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine that writing a straight-up-and-down Bad Guy is not “proper” writing, but the Fisher King just wants others to die and himself to live, plus a bit of gloating on the side. He cuts an imposing figure and Peter Serafinowicz does a good job on the voice, but he\u2019s a bit ho-hum.<\/p>\n

When the solution finally arrives, it\u2019s a bit of a flurry of other-shoes-dropping. The Doctor uses the missing power cell to shatter the dam, flooding the valley. Was that really the only way to deal with the threat of the Fisher King? It\u2019s uncharacteristically brutal, especially given his refusal to even try and save O\u2019Donnell or any of the rest, and the risk of collateral damage seems very high. For reasons which aren\u2019t particularly clear, the Doctor stuffs Bennett in the TARDIS and he takes the trip back to the Drum via the stasis chamber. Finally, the Doctor\u2019s ghost is revealed as a hologram, similar to the illusion of Clara used to mislead the ghosts in part one. That all just about makes sense as far as it goes, and the speed of the execution is thrilling enough, but there\u2019s no catharsis of any kind, not even when that wet and weedy romance between Lunn and Cass finally sparks up.<\/p>\n

So, it\u2019s another disappointing denouement I\u2019m afraid. I think three stars is appropriate. Capaldi does very good work, as ever, and Paul Kaye is fun. But I think that drags down the two parter\u2019s overall score to three-and-a-half. A tremendous build-up and a limp finish is so much worse than an early stumble and an amazing climax.<\/p>\n

PS: Sorry this was so late, I will try and get a review of tonight’s episode up by tomorrow evening at the latest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff. Sally: Started well, that sentence. The Doctor: It got away from me, yeah. Blink has got a lot to answer for. On balance I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[470,18,471,19,469],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-blink","tag-doctor-who","tag-hg-wells","tag-reviews","tag-terminator-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-t2","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1804,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}