The Name of the Doctor

"I don't know where I am. It's like I'm breaking into a million pieces and there's only one thing I remember: I have to save the Doctor. He always looks different; I always know it's him. Sometimes, I think I'm everywhere at once, running every second just to find him. Just to save him. But he never hears me... almost never. I came into this world on a leaf. I'm still blowing. I don't think I'll ever land. I'm Clara Oswald. I'm the Impossible Girl. I was born to save the Doctor."

The Name of the Doctor. That title itself fires a broadside at the show - the Doctor's name has always been a mystery, one of the defining aspects of the show and character. Even threatening to reveal his Gallifreyan name packs a wallop - remember the punch to the gut of River knowing his name in Silence in the Library. And Name of the Doctor opens with a montage worthy of that title.

In particular, it opens with the Doctor stealing the TARDIS, the unseen beginning of the show. But something's strange. Clara shows up and tells him he's about to make a mistake. And, like the title, this opening threatens to rip the show apart at its very core. The following montage of Clara running through the show, trying to save every Doctor, is as gripping as openings get, but it's also just a blast to see all the different Doctors and Clara's decades-specific costumes.

The story proper begins with a psychic "Conference Call" between Clara, River, Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax. Making the latter three a presence throughout the season pays off nicely; as with any supporting cast, it's just wonderful having them around. Of course, Moffat's dialogue here is delightful.

JENNY: How did you do that?
RIVER: Disgracefully.

It's a terrific bit that sneaks in a little exposition, but is mostly just about having these characters sit back and hang out for a few minutes. There's all sorts of great details - my favorite bits are Strax taking his vacations in Glasgow because he fits right in and the Doctor having not even mentioned to Clara that River was a woman, let alone his wife. Kingston's reaction to the latter is priceless, as is Strax's response. But Moffat turns the tables very quickly, going from funny to scary in an instant. The Whisper Men ooze creepiness.

It's only after all this that Smith finally shows up, and the result is a beautifully written and acted scene. The Doctor crying is the sort of thing that can easily feel forced or false, but it's neither here; credit both Moffat and Smith for making the Doctor's brief breakdown at realizing he's meeting his fate work so well.

DOCTOR: My grave is potentially the most dangerous place in the universe.

And thus we finally go to the planet of Trenzalore promised almost two years ago. It lives up to it - a massive graveyard, site of the Doctor's final battle in some unforclosed future. The Doctor's grave itself is, naturally, the dying TARDIS. It's a gorgeous, poignant image, drawing us further in. The rest of the middle act brilliantly balances humor, horror, suspense, and drama, moving between them with incredible skill.

STRAX [immediately on waking up]: This base is surrounded. Lay down your weapons and your deaths will be merciful! Surrender your women and intellectuals!

But it's the last act that's important here - the rest is simply a masterful build-up to the final third. While Moffat has two more stories to wrap up the Eleventh Doctor's threads, this ties up a lot of what he's done, and moves the rest inexorably toward its conclusion. River, The Great Intelligence, Clara, and the Doctor all come to a conclusion of one sort or another.

Throughout the story, the Doctor speaks about River in the past tense - as though he knows he won't see her again as such. I'm not entirely clear on why, and I hope this gets followed up on in the last two 11th episodes. Regardless, the sadness here is quite moving, however convoluted the reasons for that sadness are. Smith plays the Doctor's refusal to deal with his emotions as well as ever. And Alex Kingston has been an incredible gift to this show, and if this does turn out to be her last appearance, it's a lovely farewell. (And, in a nice touch, Murray Gold uses his music from Wedding of River Song to underscore it.)

RIVER: How are you doing that? I'm not really here.
DOCTOR: You're always here to me. And I always listen. And I can always see you.
RIVER: Then why didn't you speak to me?
DOCTOR: Because I thought it would hurt too much.
RIVER: I believe I could have coped.
DOCTOR: No. I believed it would have hurt me. And I was right.

And, of course, Moffat is such a genius that he can follow that up with a hilarious joke without undermining the emotion, and then can turn right back to the waterworks.

DOCTOR: There is a time to live, and a time to sleep. You are an echo, River, like Clara, like all of us in the end. My fault, I know. But you should have faded by now.
RIVER: It's hard to leave when you haven't said goodbye.
DOCTOR: Then tell me, because I don't know... how do I say it?
RIVER: There's only one way I'd accept: if you ever loved me, say it like you're going to come back.

Of course, River strongly implies she is coming back, at least from the Doctor's point of view, if perhaps not her own. And in my book, she's always welcome. But that takes away none of the beauty of this moment.

Then there's The Great Intelligence. The Second Doctor's era left a hole - The Web of Fear promised a final showdown between the Doctor and the GI. However, this never happened after its creators, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were angry about how script editor Derrick Sherwin handled their script for The Dominators. (Long story short, it was one of the worst scripts in the history of the show, so Sherwin cut it short by an episode and worked with Terrence Dicks to solve the compression instead of hiring the people who had just written said hideous script.) While it's not necessary of course, it's a nice nod by Moffat to fill in a hole from the Second Doctor's era (which turns out to be an echo of what he does with Clara...). As a wrap-up to the GI's trilogy, it's certainly far more clever than anything Haisman and Lincoln would have come up with. His plan to entire the Doctor's time stream and kill him at every point in his lifetime simultaneously has a level of crazed ambition that would impress the Daleks.

Richard E Grant really was wasted, though. He snarls and whatnot well, but any English actor with a whiff of presence could have played it as well. You hire Grant for something with some humor, some energy, maybe even a little camp. The GI, unfortunately, is written by Moffat as a one-dimensional monologuing villain, utterly lacking in wit or depth. And even on that level, Grant doesn't get enough room to do anything interesting. It's a tragic waste of a fantastic actor. Still, at least the concept for the Great Intelligence was worthy of his name.

But that's merely a sidenote to the centerpiece - Clara traveling into the Doctor's time stream and saving him at every moment. On the surface, it works as a clever solution, and it's absolutely thrilling to see her running around the history of the show, saving every one of the Doctors. I wish the scene had been longer and more detailed instead of implied in a quick montage, but that probably wasn't practical, and what's here will do nicely. Moffat's repeated refrain of calling Clara "the impossible girl" gets a little annoying, but what he's doing overall is almost too clever for words.

There are also two brilliant meta levels on which this works. Whether or not Clara as Generic Companion works across a host of stories, it works ingeniously here. Here, she represents every companion. Saying the job of the companion is to save the Doctor so he can save the universe isn't exactly a revelation - it's pretty much worked that way since the show figured out that it should be about the Doctor saving the universe. But having an episode just come right out and say it works beautifully.

The second, far more deviously clever meta level is that Moffat quietly sneaks into the back door of the show and fixes every plot hole his cracks didn't already fix. Every rubbish cliffhanger, every contrived attempt on the Doctor's life was the Great Intelligence in his final assault, and every ridiculous moment of survival was Clara saving him from the shadows.

And, then, naturally, the Doctor has to save Clara, and he finally tells her and us his name.

DOCTOR: My name, my real name, that is not the point. The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose, it's like a promise you make.

Because of course his real name is the Doctor. Whatever his Gallifreyan name was doesn't matter; it simply isn't who he is. It could be argued that it's a copout, of course. But no other name could have satisfied, and Moffat realizes the truth about his name. The Doctor has always been his name. What he was before he stepped into the TARDIS doesn't matter. Like his powerful but vacant race, he was nothing, a mere observer from a distance. But he chose the name of one who helps people, who saves them. (And an extremely educated one, because his ego is about the size of the TARDIS interior. His Doctorate is, after all, purely honorary.) And after a few false starts, that's who he became.

... which, of course, leaves that question of who in the void John Hurt is, but obviously we're saving that for later.

Am I the only one amused by the fact that he's both Winston Smith and Big Brother?

So, yes, Moffat's flaws mar the episode and the season. He's too in love with his own cleverness at times, and has left a terrific actress in Jenna Louise Coleman with something of a blank for a character for the sake of a neat bit of meta silliness. He doesn't give Richard E. Grant anything to do; the Whisper Men are far more effective. Moffat's talent in villainy has always been the silent ones. And sometimes he's in such a rush to get to his next great idea that he doesn't take the time he should to fully develop the one he's on.

But he's still a genius who can create a story as layered and complex as anything Christopher Bidmead wrote, but filled with the raw intensity of Saward, the eye for character and humor of Robert Holmes, and the geniune emotion of Russell T. Davies. At his finest, his writing is everything beautiful and wonderful about this most beautiful and wonderful of shows. Like the Doctor, he took a title - lead writer of Doctor Who, and took the promise it required. Even if he trips here and there, he stands back up and lives up to that name.

RATING:

* * * ½


SIDENOTES:

• This is now four season finales in a row about the Doctor's death, five if you count the tease in Journey's End. I know the finales have to be big somehow, and Moffat has come up with three very different and clever ways of doing it, but it's starting to lose its impact.
• There's a payoff to Journey to the Center of the TARDIS here, but I don't think it fixes any of the problems in that episode. A better-written and more thoughtfully plotted version of Journey would have paid off just as nicely.
• Saul Metzstein has proven himself a reliable (if stylistically anonymous) director who can handle just about anything. A particularly nice touch here is in the conference room scene, where he gradually moves the camera close and makes the lenses longer as things get more tense. But on the other hand, he really doesn't use enough master shots. It's not so much a bad thing in the episode as much as it is really hard to get good screencaps for these reviews. (It's really a plague of modern film making, to be honest; movies and shows feel like they're all close-ups all the time, and while close-ups are important and useful, they don't communicate things master shots can. The art of the Master, so to speak, seems to have been lost.)

The Bells of St. John

A lot of my Moffat-era reviews slam against the conflict between the slower storytelling of Classic Who verses Moffat's lightning-paced modern episodes. In general, I've come to the opinion that Doctor Who is generally better suited for 90 minute stories - most stories worthy of the Doctor simply have too many ideas, characters, and emotions to adequately fit into 45 minutes, keeping the episodes from fully paying off. On the other hand, when the 45-minute format is used correctly, the sheer speed and wealth of ideas is exhilarating. And while its story does suffer from the compression, The Bells of St John mostly balances its plot, characterization, and wild ideas into a yarn both emotionally and intellectually rousing.

So, yes, Moffat just dumps "people's souls are getting uploaded to the internet against their will" into the opening minute, then jumps into the 13th century halfway into minute 2. While just throwing the premise out there like that keeps a pretty mind-blowing concept from have the emotional and intellectual punch it could if set up properly, the sheer craziness of blasting from the digitally uploaded souls to the Doctor giving a 21st-century Clara tech support from the 13th century without giving us a breath is exciting stuff. Still, while I love this sort of insanity in Doctor Who, you could ease us into it a little, maybe buy us dinner first.

But no time for that. The Doctor and Clara (who actually survives an episode for once) have the bond, and Moffat's dialogue sparkles as always, and Matt Smith and Jenna Louis-Coleman give off a wonderful screwball chemistry. It's going to be a delight to watch these two. I've gotten a little annoyed in the last few episodes by the overuse of characters asking the question, "Doctor Who?" But I loved this exchange:

DOCTOR: Do you remember me?

CLARA: No. Should I? Who are you?

DOCTOR: The Doctor! No? The Doctor? [checks mirror to make sure he's still him]

CLARA: Doctor who?

DOCTOR: No, just the Doctor. [checks mirror again] Actually, sorry, could you just ask me that again?

CLARA: Doctor who?

DOCTOR: One more time.

CLARA: Doctor who?

DOCTOR: Okay, just once more.

CLARA: Doctor who?

DOCTOR: Ooh, yeah. Do you know, I never realized how much I enjoyed hearing that said out loud? Thank you.

That said, while the Doctor going through Clara's things is played as charming, it verges just a tad too close to creepy after a while. A little too much of the eccentric whimsy. A lot of it is Murray Gold overdoing the whimsy music for that and the next scene that pushes it too far. (To balance that out because for all my complaining I really do like a lot of Gold's music, I've gotta say I loved his timpani-driven suspense piece when the robot girl shows up.)

And seeing more of the TARDIS, I like it a lot more. Maybe it was just the way it was shot and used in the Christmas Special that threw me. It actually looks really cool when shot well.

All this stuff is nicely balanced with the plot, which zips along nicely. Moffat tries to use Wi-Fi and the internet in general turning on us to create fear, and while it isn't quite scary, it's certainly intriguing. The half-head duplicates are fantastic, and the villains' attempt to kill the Doctor and Clara with a plane crash is thrilling. And when the Doctor does defeat the villains, it leads to a haunting moment when the villainess regresses to childhood.

So the whole thing definitely works. Moffat's super-efficient storytelling gets the point across very excitingly. The lack of proper build-up for the ideas and atmosphere makes this a lot less satisfying than a fully-realized story would be, but Bells of St John delivers good entertainment and a terrific Doctor-Companion relationship. Good stuff.

RATING:

* * *

SIDENOTES:

• Nice touch.
• I'm not convinced people have to know what the internet is to make a "Twitter" joke. I'm fairly certain my grandmother made a twitter joke last time we spoke on the phone, and she'd still be using her typewriter if it was in full operational order.
• Oh, so the Great Intelligence is the Arc-Villain? That makes Richard E Grant's underuse in the Christmas special slightly less annoying. Now he can be underused all season!

The Snowmen

[2012 Christmas Special]

Two years ago, I began this blog with my review of the 2010 Christmas Special, which I found to be a brilliant story that lost much of its potential dramatic impact by rushing through its story too fast for the drama to really stick. Now, after five stories in a row this season and about half of last season drawing various degrees of the same reaction, it's feeling like every review of the Moffat era is becoming the same: it's too rushed to fit an emotional arc, a plot complex enough to be worth the Doctor's time and that builds to a satisfactory conclusion, strong material for the companions, and fully developed ideas. Great stories fall short their potential. Even the grand masterpiece of the era, The Doctor's Wife, would have benefited from double the length.

And here we are, two years later, at another Christmas special with the same report. For the first two-thirds, The Snowmen focuses on character and emotion, and it works beautifully. In particular, it introduces us to Clara Oswald. And she's awesome.

 Jenna-Louise Coleman is simply enchanting.. She plays the most ridiculously whimsical character ever without ever crossing over into too cute or obnoxious. Coleman doesn't just weave gold out of Moffat's clever dialogue; she makes even the not-so-clever and overboard lines shine. She even gets away with the really dumb parts like the whole "pond" bit. And she and Matt Smith have tremendous chemistry. It's a delight every moment those two are onscreen together. And their story builds to that magnificent scene where Clara climbs the Doctor's ladder into the clouds. As long as the story's about these two, it's lovely.

"What's wrong with silly?"
"Nothing.  I'm still talking to you, ain't I?"

Not that there isn't fun elsewhere. Madame Vastra returns, and while her role is primarily to get on the Doctor's case about not being Doctorish because he's too busy brooding, it's nice to see her back. There's also Strax, the good Sontaran. While I'm not overly fond of the way the Doctor talks down to him - though, again, he's supposed to be off his game here - but he's a hilarious addition to the story.

And the story, while relegated to the background, is fun, what with the villainous Richard E Grant, scowling like Judge Dredd, and his army of Deranged Mutant Killer Snow Goons.

It does feel like a bit of a waste to give Grant such a grim-faced villain. He's creepy and compelling, of course, but his best works leans toward the delightfully campy side of things rather than this dead serious, er, Snow Goon General. But there's nothing wrong with his acting.

Thus, for forty minutes, it's a wonderful yarn. And then there's the last twenty minutes, where it all falls to pieces. The third act is as poor as the first two are wonderful.

Moffat builds yet another of his original tragedies, but this time hinges it on a sequence of ridiculous contrivance. The Doctor completely forgets about the monster right outside his door, allowing Clara to be taken. Then, the monster takes Clara to the edge and they fall down to their doom. And the Doctor, despite standing inside the TARDIS, just stands and watches helplessly as it happens. Just a season ago, he caught River falling out of a skyscraper. Here, he fails to catch Clara falling from the clouds. He doesn't even try.

Look, I don't mind too much if the show doesn't remember some minor trick the Doctor pulled thirty years ago, but when Moffat can't remember that the Doctor had no problem solving this very problem in the very previous season, in an episode that he wrote, it's infuriating. Though, admittedly, less infuriating than the fact that the problem would never have arisen if they had simply closed the door behind them.

This level of contrivance and stupidity from the Doctor would be frustrating in any circumstance, but when the entire emotional and story impact hinges on it, it torpedoes the entire concept. There's nothing genuine or moving about Clara's death because there's nothing remotely credible about it in context. Moffat's tragedies are getting increasingly iffy. Angels In Manhattan had to spend half of its time explaining its tragic finale, and only ended up emphasizing how stupid the whole idea was. But at least in Angels, the story hinged not only the reasoning, but on that centerpiece scene where Amy and Rory decide to jump off the building, and that was a knockout - a moment of tremendous power and genuine feeling. There's none of that here - not only can you see the gears grinding, they're not even grinding correctly.

It might have just finessed it out of sheer shock, but the Doctor's negligence throughout the scene makes the monster's sudden reappearance and attack far too obvious. The entire death scene has no way to overcome its artificiality, and it falls as flat as she does.

It's getting to some great underlying ideas - the Doctor making a bargain with the universe is fantastic - but the wires are stripped and shorting each other out. It doesn't even care to try making sense. Just throws out a random tragedy and some neat concepts and hopes they stick regardless of the execution.

They don't.

The rest of the third act fails to redeem this. None of the supporting characters get any payoff. Madame Vastra, the awesome samurai sword-wielding lesbian Silurian from A Good Man Goes To War gets nothing to do the entire episode. No good lines, no cool moments. She doesn't even get to cut one of the evil snowmen in half with her katana. If ever there was a Doctor Who monster that could get slashed apart Kill Bill style without giving the kids nightmares, this is the one. I said above that it was nice to see her back, but what was the point if she has literally no significant impact on the story and no good character moments?

The same goes for Richard E. Grant. He never gets the opportunity to add more than a single boring dimension to his villain and does nothing except scowl before reaching his ugly finish. What's the point of hiring Richard E. Grant and giving him not only a quiet, one-dimensional villain, but not even giving him a good face-off with the Doctor?

Nice set, though.

Ian McKellen is just as wasted. I like the way Moffat brings back The Great Intelligence from the Toughton era as an Easter Egg - just enough continuity for Classic Who fans to catch on, but not enough to leave anyone else lost.  But it doesn't actually do anything - just stumbles into the closing moments of the story before stumbling back out. McKellen has so few lines, and such generic ones at that, it could have been anyone. How is it even possible to waste Sir Ian?

Even the Snowmen never actually do anything in the story - they're just a cool effect largely forgotten.

And, as long as we're talking about forgotten characters, there's Tom Ward's Captain Latimer, where barmaid Clara moonlights as a governess. There's a big deal made about Latimer's crush on Clara, but nothing ever comes of it, even in her death scene.

So, if the companion gets dropped off the story at the end of act 2 and the emotional arc goes with her, and the villains and supporting characters are useless, that really only leaves the plot and the Doctor. What little plot there is gets simmers in the distant background before tripping into an incoherent and completely unsatisfying climax.

And so we're left with the Doctor. But the entire point of the story is that he's brooding and off his game the until the finale. That would be totally fine if the finale delivered the goods, but it's such a lame climax that you never get the feeling that the Doctor got his mojo back. Smith is terrific when he gets to bounce off Coleman and tries valiantly throughout the slog of dull material around it, but this never approaches one of the Eleventh Doctor's finest moments.

If the first two-thirds are everything wonderful about Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, the last third is everything wrong with it - a rushed, incoherent mess throwing ideas and emotions onscreen haphazardly and hoping they stick.

Still, Jenna Louise-Coleman rocks.  Amy and Rory are a dazzling act to follow, but she just might pull it off.  Onward!


RATING:

* * ½

SIDENOTES:

• There's a new title sequence and I like the concept; it certainly beats "clouds" from the last couple of years, but it's chaotic without being particularly weird, sort of cheesy in a 90s way. I guess I just prefer 80s cheese. Also, pepper jack. Still, it's great to see the Doctor's face in the opening again, and I'm sure I'll ending up liking this one once I get used to it. [UPDATE: I did.]

• There's also a new TARDIS interior, and I don't care for it. It's too artificial, for one - I suspect parts of it are CGI, and if not, it's an impressive job making practical sets look CGI. Too Earth-techy. It's one thing to be step down from the awesome previous interior, but I never thought I'd miss the coral. [UPDATE: After a few more episodes, I ended up liking this one, though I still miss the previous one.]
• Just exactly how many times is Moffat going to put "Doctor Who" into the dialogue? Once a season is kind of cute, but several times an episode just grates.