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Immediate Reactions #2: Doctor Who - Spyfall Episode 2

 A most likely occasional, possibly regular series in which I note down immediate reactions to TV shows/films, with a view to longer form reviews in future.

Spoilers below!

Very good. The only bit from the main plot which didn’t quite work for me was the leap from “we’ve been harvesting all your data”, straight to “and now we can reformat all your DNA!” but, honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Doctor Who’s about ideas, rather than logic, so handwaving for effect is OK here.

Ada Lovelace! Charles Babbage! I really hope Sydney Padua was watching, and can verify the authenticity (or otherwise) of the references. It’s a shame Babbage wasn’t more like in the cartoons, though ;)

The original Tissue Compression Eliminator sound!

Anyone else thinking the WWII section was going to go a bit ‘Allo ‘Allo? Just me, then.

Are we the baddies? Why have we got skulls on our uniforms?

Nice touches to make it very clear the Doctor hates fascists. (Arguably a better treatment of WWII than ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’)

It’s good to have the Master engaging in a crackpot scheme yet again - although Missy was great, I never really liked the Simm version, and this just felt right.

That said, bringing back the Master so soon (comparatively) after we last encountered them as Missy, does feel a little odd in that there’s no reference at all to their last meeting. But, I guess that was almost three years ago now. One that will irk longer-term fans, but doesn’t really matter tbh.

The Doctor mind-wiping Ada and Noor - understandable, but perhaps a little icky? Less so than when it happened with Donna, I guess.

With the central plot, there was a little bit of having your cake and eating it - fearmongering about the power of technology, but also then marvelling at Ada Lovelace’s visions of the future. It’s a complex subject, for sure, but the former meant that the latter never really came across, fully sold.

I’ve clearly been binge watching Taskmaster too much over the holiday period - “You have three minutes to prepare.” Your time starts....now.

Overall, I’d say it stuck the landing from episode one. It’s a big opening number, and I suspect the return to something more mundane might be a little bumpy. But with an actual series arc to weave in, this time, perhaps there’s some hope. It feels (at least from these two, plus last year’s Resolution) that Chibnall’s being much, much more confident in his approach now. Long may it continue, please. (9/10)

Series Arc spoilers below...

Nice to explicitly pick up on the ‘Gallifrey in bubble universe’ thing - Chibnall’s basically pulling the same trick as RTD did with “they all died”, but this time tying it back to some (presumably new) Timelord mythos. Looms and the Other, perhaps? 

I just hope that the whole Rassilon/Omega stuff isn’t completely abandoned - fine for it to be cast in a new light, though.

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Immediate Reactions #1: Doctor Who - Spyfall Episode 1

A most likely occasional, possibly regular series in which I note down immediate reactions to TV shows/films, with a view to longer form reviews in future.

Spoilers below!

The pre-title sequence was pretty standard - setting up a mystery but not really imparting any information other than “there’s something bad happening and it apparently involves aliens”.

Was it me, or did the theme tune seem slightly ‘boosted’ this time around? A stronger and more noticeable bass line? It was great.

The first episode of a new series inevitably has to do a bit of heavy lifting in terms of reintroducing characters, particularly when there’s three companions plus the Doctor. It felt like it could have been done slightly quicker/snappier, to hammer home the ‘men in black’ thing - fast cutting between four sequences, for instance - as once we’d seen it twice, you knew it was going to happen again.

The car chase/sat nav sequence felt somewhat... forced. As if there was a requirement to have an action sequence early on, even if the narrative didn’t warrant it. And although the sat nav giving the direction ‘die!’ was rather fun, again, it didn’t (at least by the end of the episode) really feel like it made any sense in terms of motivation/

Lenny Henry put in a great shift as a menacing villain - I was getting rather Tobias Vaughn vibes from him and his interactions with the aliens.

Segun Akinola was clearly having fun playing ‘how close can we get to the James Bond theme without running into legal issues’.

I didn’t quite catch what Yaz initially said when she entered the weird forest/brain area....anyone else?

Having the aliens remain so unknown/unexplained felt a little like playing for time in this episode - and I didn’t quite get the whole ‘they’re alien spies’ thing. Perhaps this will become clearer after episode two.

Overall, a decent episode - good to keep the action pace from Resolution, and a vast improvement from last series. Still lots to pay off in the second episode, though, which will decide whether progress really has been made. (8/10)

MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD....

Sacha Dhawan was fantastic in the role of ‘O’/The Master. Better, I’d wager, at playing the unhinged character than John Simm. It remains to be seen whether this will directly tie into Missy’s last appearance (especially given the shots of Cybermen in the series trailer), or whether it’ll remain unexplained, but I did enjoy it (plus a Tissue Compression Eliminator!)

Does this mean that Waris Hussein is The Master, too?!?

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Class Announcement

There’s to be a new Doctor Who spin-off series, set at Coal Hill School, called Class.

I hope it’s good. I want it to succeed. I’ve not read the lead writer, Patrick Ness’ work, but I have every faith he’ll do a great job, and it’ll hopefully last for a long time, and be popular too.

So, good news. But a ‘big announcement’? Maybe just slightly over the top. Small fry in the grand scheme of things to be concerned about, I know. Just the slight fear that if everything is uncritically big and brilliant, then that lessens the things that are big announcements. And that what is ‘big’ to TV production & commissioning people isn’t necessarily ‘big’ to everyone else.

Ah well. The feeling of slight bewilderment and disappointment will quickly pass, I’m sure. The hype just felt a little bit like trolling, y’know?

But ignore that - a new show, a wider fictional universe, a different set of people to appeal to. The good will win out.

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Confession and Compassion

“If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?”

It’s certainly a brave move, to kick off a new series with a two parter that, at least at first glance, appears to be heavily invested in the series’ mythology. Some have used this, whilst pointing at the supposedly fallen ratings, to suggest that the current production team have finally lost it, and should be replaced forthwith, or worse, the show put on ‘hiatus’ once again.

The thing is, scratch beneath the surface trappings, and you’ll find that this story is less of a sequel to Genesis of the Daleks (or even, if we were to go further back, The Mutants/The Daleks), and instead, it’s a sequel to a far more recent story.

It’s true to say that in the case of the dilemma above, only a very brave, or foolhardy person, would take the step of writing into the mythology the complete removal of the Daleks, via the death-as-a-child of Davros. Not that past stories have ever stopped anything from being rewritten, of course (see Missy’s nonchalant side-stepping of how she escaped the climax of Death in Heaven), but it’s clear that one of the choices available isn’t going to be taken.

What the story does, in the first episode, is make it less about the will-he-won’t-he choice, but about the effects of living with the consequences of that choice. And indeed, what would happen if the potential victim was then to try and wreak revenge on the would be assassin in years to come. The tension of the story isn’t in the choice. It’s in how the characters responds, seeing how they react, and learning about the characters personalities as a result.

So, if not Genesis, then, which story is this a sequel to? It’s Listen. Ultimately, this story is a character piece, a further introspective look at what makes the Doctor, the Doctor.

If Listen was about harnessing your fears and becoming a hero through that, then this story is about making your stand about what you want to represent.

Compassion, mercy - being a healer, a Doctor. These are themes that have been expressed before in the recent years - why the Doctor chose that particular title, is something that Steven Moffat posited a theory about way back in the 90s - and this is what is at the heart of this story. A further exploration about what makes this character tick.

We know the Doctor’s not going to die in this story. Although we know Clara will leave at some point soon, it’d be unlikely for that to happen just yet. So, somewhat strangely, the ‘character fate’ tension lies with the two supposed baddies - Missy and Davros.

Michelle Gomez’s portrayal of Missy is, as has been noted elsewhere, spot on. She’s the first person since 2005 to perfectly capture the mix of cruelty and insanity that makes up this character. It’s clear that Missy is the Heath-Ledger-as-Joker approach. Not particularly original, one might add, but it  does at last mark Missy out as different from the usual evil schemer. She’s in it for the laughs. For chaos. Taking over the world isn’t her style - she’ll happily risk extermination by Clara-Dalek just to cause trouble.

And yet, at the same time, Missy has some form of affection and compassion for both Clara and the Doctor. Indeed, for most of the second episode, Missy essentially becomes the Doctor, and it works really well. It harks back to the original characterisation of the Doctor - someone you really can’t trust completely, but has some kind of plan up their sleeve nevertheless. If there was some storyline that ended up with Michelle Gomez taking over from Capaldi, once he decides to leave, I would not complain at all.

Compassion and mercy are at the heart of the dealings with Davros, too. As mentioned, we know the Doctor won’t die in this story. We know, too, that Davros’ confession and schtick about ‘just wanting to see the sun rise one last time’ is a trick. So the tension, and the enjoyment of the second episode, is to be found in two places - what will Davros’ ‘end state’ be, and, more importantly, how will this all be strung out? What concessions will each side make, what will be exchanged.

Mercy drives the Doctor - for as much as Davros hints at a terrible reason for the Doctor leaving Gallifrey, the truth is not about fear, not any more - it’s about being driven to help - to truly be a Doctor.

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Doctor Who - Series 9 - The Prologue

Pieces like this must be a joy to write. The dialogue is deliberately vague, which lends itself to naturalistic dialogue.

If the two characters speaking know each other reasonably well, then just as in real life, they make little concession to outside observers. No need to state the obvious of who they’re referring to - which in turn leaves a huge amount of room for speculation - queueing the audience to build up questions, and to speculate on the unknown characters discussed.

So, it’s clear that this is a well worn strategy for a teaser - throw the audience into an already moving plot, and store up questions to keep you going over the weeks ahead. 

That said, the use of lying-in-dialogue does prove a barrier to clear exposition - possibly deliberately. It takes a moment to realise, in the conversation between the Doctor and Ohila (one of the Sisterhood of Karn, last seen in ‘The Night of the Doctor’, keepers of the flame of eternal life, themselves a rejection of the Timelord way of doing things), that we’re meant to take the Doctor’s initial responses as lies, opposites. Once that leap has been made, however, progress can be made.

From here, there’s references to someone who’s been an ‘enemy for a long time’ - this would seem to be a reference to the Master/Missy, given what we know from trailers for the first story, but I suspect it could be throwing us off the scent. Something tells me there will be a more throwaway character introduced in these first two episodes that will be the source of this dialogue.

As is often the case with Moffat-plots, we seemingly enter mid-adventure, or at least at a point where the Doctor is mid-way through some kind of plan or strategy. This isn’t a Moffat-exclusive, of course - one of the things that initially threw me quite a lot when watching ‘Rose’ for the first time, was that we were starting in the middle of a story, from the Doctor’s point of view - something that watchers of the classic series would mostly have found quite alien.

Here, of course, it feels familiar, and arguably has echoes of the ‘darker’ aspects of Sylvester McCoy’s portrayal - the Doctor as an arch schemer, able to pull things out the bag at the last minute, revealing he’s been two steps ahead the whole time - a narrative trick that can be somewhat disappointing for an audience, although it then does lead you to try and piece it together all over again.

One thing that is very pleasing, is Capaldi’s performance. I sometimes felt last season that he was a little stilted - nervous, perhaps, given his avowed fandom - but here, as in the previous Christmas special, he seems much more at ease, even showing flashes of a Malcolm Tucker-like natural delivery into the mix. Obviously without the swearing.

I know a few people didn’t quite warm to him last season, and I definitely agree that they took the somewhat spiky nature of his relationship with Clara too far a few times (a couple of mis-intended ‘insults’, fine, to establish his alien nature, but when repeated frequently, it just looked mean and spiteful). I have every hope though that we’ll see a much more confident performance this time around.

Capaldi seems to be taking cues from Jon Pertwee - an interesting choice, given that Pertwee is probably, currently, the least in vogue of the past Doctors amongst some fans, given the supposed ‘Establishment’ characterisation of his performance. The first story promises a match up between Missy/Master and the Daleks, something that echoes Frontier in Space. But I have a feeling that aside from the velvet jacket and the wild hair, it’s William Hartnell that Capaldi has in mind this time around.

There seems to be a very sixties vibe running throughout the trailers - a kind of back-to-basics, back to the very beginning, ethos, which is intriguing. This also feeds into speculation over the nature of the character that Maisie Williams will be playing later in the series.

The other aspect of the Prologue which feels familiar, especially when taken with references made in the trailer for the first episode, is the underlying plot point. The Doctor appears to have made some decision which has left him resigned to the end of his life (hence the Gallifreyan disc referred to by Missy in the trailer as a Last Will & Testament).

A suitably mythic story awaits, one would expect - but how different will it be from what would, at first glance, appear to be quite similar to the latter half of Matt Smith’s era, where the Doctor resigned himself to his fate (or indeed to Tennant’s last adventures)?

It’s worth also bearing in mind that Moffat commonly will pose an epic narrative such as this, then to abandon it - not because he’s bored by it, or wants to be wasteful, but it itself is a narrative strategy to hook in the viewer. The warning here, though, would be - don’t expect this apparently very serious and doom-laden plot point to last through the series. I could be completely wrong, of course, but I’d expect it’s very likely that this Last Will and Testament all turns out to be part of a plan to bring out an enemy or two...or is it? We’ll see.

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Spoilers!

As I write, there’s just over a week to go until the new series of Doctor Who starts on BBC One. Today, a ‘Prologue’ to the series was released, which means we’ve had about five minutes of material overall, spread between three trailers and the prologue (not counting any shots which have been re-used). From this tiny morsel, and as a prologue of sorts to this blog, let’s consider what we’ve learned.

First of all, it’s triggered an interesting discussion around spoilers. Obviously, this is nothing new, but to me, it’s clear that engagement with the narrative within Doctor Who is firmly no longer restricted to just the episodes as broadcast. Reveal of information from official sources (i.e. the production team in interviews, trailers and in Doctor Who magazine) are (or at least appear to be) carefully managed, and deliberately done in order to encourage speculation.

Indeed, that’s part of the writerly appeal of Doctor Who - the fact that there are no facts, no single established canon - so you can take snippets of information and essentially weave your own stories around them. So, for me, I take any of these official releases of information to be ‘non-spoiler’. They are part and parcel of the release of story information, they just don’t happen to be part of the episodes themselves.

Others, though, regard anything but the episodes to be spoilers. No trailers allowed, no set reports and so on. Which is admirable and fine - it’s just a different way of enjoying the series, predicated on surprise, rather than concentrating on speculation.

Of course, if you are one of those people, you probably shouldn’t read any further ahead.