42

"BURN WITH ME!"

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to review season one of Torchwood.  It’s not gonna be pretty.  It’s not that there aren’t good episodes in there.  There are.

… is.

… one.

… barely.

But still, it does eventually improve in the second season and then goes and makes a pure masterpiece for the third season.  Outside of Children of Earth, I don’t think it ever really lived up to its potential, and in fact usually falls short by a wide margin, and I find it incredibly frustrating for that reason.  But I still kinda like it overall, even though I don’t like the vast majority of individual episodes.  So before I tear it a new one, rest assured, if I survive the experience of re-experiencing the horrors of Cyberwoman, I will one day get around to saying good things about that show.

And that includes Chris Chibnall, who was the lead writer for the first two seasons and was consequently not only responsible for a large portion of what went so wrong (though some of the blame also has to go to Torchwood often bringing out the worst in Russell T. Davies), but wrote some of the worst episodes, including the aforementioned Cyberwoman.  He’s also an intelligent, clever, imaginative writer at his best who, late in the second season, wrote two of the best episodes of that show.  But it’s going to be a long, long, long time before I actually get around to that, so to at least partially balance out the wave of vicious criticism (read: smart-aleck mockery from a so-far failed writer) about to be unleashed, I thought I’d review something he wrote that I actually like.  42 is a good, enjoyable episode of Doctor Who that shows a genuine love for the show and does a few things spectacularly right that Davies’ era doesn’t always pull off.  It does still have its flaws, but even those are vastly overstated.

Probably the most common flaw 42 is accused of is that it’s too derivative of the previous season’s The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit.  After all, both involve the Doctor and companion separated from the TARDIS, both involving the crew being possessed and then killed off, and both involve not being set on Earth.

Of all the things to accuse 42 of, this is probably the most ridiculous if you watch the classic series.  After all, The Impossible Planet is itself just a variation on the old Hinchcliffe-style “gothic horror story where the Doctor fights a godlike villain” with the added twist of being separated from the TARDIS, which shows up in nearly every Hartnell story of the first two seasons.  The Impossible Planet has many qualities, but it’s every bit as derivative of previous Who stories as 42.

Which really isn’t a major problem – Doctor Who usually relies on standard sci-fi tropes itself.  It’s what you do with those tropes that matters, and while Chibnall uses a few too many standard ideas, he throws them together in a fast-paced, action-packed story with a couple of real dramatic punches.

Most of the reason this feels derivative specifically of Impossible Planet - even though it only uses a couple of the same ordinary tropes - is that Who under RTD is so obsessively Earth-based that this is only the second time in three seasons that the Doctor, an alien with a machine that can take him anywhere in time and space, has actually had an adventure not on or in the immediate vicinity of Earth (or New Earth, which, frankly, is pretty Earthish).  So the fact that it uses some of the same tropes as the only other one like it so far makes it stick out a little more.

The downside of this is an odd lack of imagination in a lot of the stories.  Not that there aren't inspired stories, but there are an awful lot of Evil TV Sets and similarly uninspired ideas.  At this point, in Season 3, the better episodes have been Giant Evil Spider Sits Around and Pretends to be Menacing, Space Rhinos on the Moon, and Traffic Jam in the Future.  And while those are perfectly fine ideas in themselves, they're a little underwhelming in a show that was doing Brains With Eyestalks back in 1964 on an off-day.  Too many RTD-era episodes are oddly forgettable and mediocre despite having good production values, great directors, and a solid group of writers, including at least a couple of geniuses. (to be fair, the back half of Season 3 totally rectifies this)  And a lot of it comes down to a lack of ambition and too few interesting ideas barely filling 45 minutes.

(Moffat's era more often has the opposite problem - too many ideas for 45 minutes, but as much as I've been frustrated with that, I've gotta be honest, I really prefer that between the two.)

Chibnall, however, finds a good balance of ideas for an episode: a setting that's interesting and unusual but not overly complicated; a supporting cast large enough to have a decent body count, but small enough to develop them (which is actually a mixed bag, but it's at least the right number); a couple of terrific set-pieces in the second half of a well-paced story; and one spectacular concept, saved for the last ten minutes.

The set-up is simple - the Doctor and Martha land on a ship that's out of control and hurtling toward a star.  Its shields will give out in 42 minutes.  Which would be enough of a problem if there wasn't a horrific entity possessing the crew and killing them off.

The best thing about Chibnall's script is its ability to raise the stakes.  The central gimmick -the story happens more or less in real time, with the 42 minute time limit for the characters paralleling the length of the episode - forces the story to be efficient and puts the stakes in a solid context.  The supporting characters start dying off pretty quickly, keeping the threat of death near.

But it's the two centerpiece scenes that really drive home the intensity.  The first is a scene where Martha is ejected into space in a tiny escape pod... directly toward the same sun the main ship is hurtling toward.  In the midst of a loud, rousing episode, the sound suddenly cuts to a minimum as Martha suddenly gets a chance to realize that she really is about to die.  She calls her mother and has a deeply emotional conversation while trying desperately not to get emotional.  By dealing with the threat of death so directly and emotionally, the meaning of the episode grows exponentially.

(The entire subplot about Martha's family basically flops around and fails throughout the entirety of Season 3, but for this one scene, it works brilliantly, contrasting her mother's genuine concern with her attempts to get Martha to give real information to the mysterious people she's letting listen in.)

While making the companions actually think about the possibility of dying is probably something that should be done a little more often (not every episode or anything, but occasionally doesn't hurt), Chibnall's most effective trick to raise the tension is something Doctor Who can only do very rarely: he has the Doctor fail to defeat the antagonist and become completely scared... but only after the Doctor confesses that he's terrified.  These two things together are the most frightening trick the show can pull.

And Chibnall does manage to earn the right to actually pull out that one.  The antagonistic creature possessing the crew is actually the sun itself, which is alive.  It's possessing and killing the crew because their ship was killing it by extracting its fuel.  That's a compelling twist in itself, but Chibnall's approach to the crew, and particularly the captian (played by Michelle Collins) - they're a desperate, working-class group illegally scooping energy from the star simply to survive.  And in their efforts to be undetected, they didn't scan for life because who would scan for life on a star?

This is a brilliant addition of complexity - neither side is really the hero or the villain.  Both sides are simply trying to survive.  And between the complex writing and the sheer stunning idea of a living star, it earns the right to possess the Doctor.  And it's an absolutely brilliant scene, showing what an astounding actor David Tennant is.

Which isn't to say the script is perfect or anywhere near it.  First, the characterization of the Doctor is largely off.  His dialogue sounds more like "generic hero" than the Doctor.  In particular, when he's outside the ship trying to save Martha, he almost gives up and says he can't do it, and has to be encouraged onward by one of the humans inside.  It's jarringly unDoctorish.  And Chibnall gives the Doctor one of his ever more tiresome RTD-era tirades about how humans are alternately the greatest species ever to exist and the lowest form of self-serving idiots.  Yes, Tennant is brilliant and covers it as well as he can, but it's still a problem.

And while Chibnall has enough time to develop the small crew of the ship, he never actually does.  The captain is well-written and has a good last scene, but the rest are generic and interchangeable.  Even in the midst of that wonderful scene in the escape pod with Martha, Riley still isn't actually developed.  At the end, when she says goodbye to him, the only difference between him and the other survivor is that he looks slightly different.

His dialogue is uneven in general.  There are good exchanges here and there, but most of the dialogue is forgettable.  And while it's not necessarily a major problem that he uses the ol' "alien killing off the crew one by one" device, it doesn't smooth things over to have a character actually say, "He's killing us off one by one!"

And yet it pretty much gets away with flaws that should have left it forgotten because it pulls out one of Doctor Who's secret weapons: Graeme Harper.  Harper proves he's still Who's greatest director, giving the episode such intensity, energy, and drama that he actually plows right over the flaws, reducing them to minor quibbles.  He makes the "monster" - just a guy with a welding mask - a genuine force of terror.  He gets Murray Gold to deliver one of his best scores of the season, highlighted by a deeply effective use of synthesizers. (frustratingly, Gold's music for the episode doesn't show up on the CD.) Harper makes the most of every image and idea and gets superb performances from every actor.  And you can feel the heat.  If the next two stories - Human Nature and Blink - weren't so spectacularly brilliant and the three-part finale so memorable (however debatable its actual qualities), 42 would probably be remembered as one of the highlights of the season.

Which isn't to say the flaws aren't there.  And the thing is, those flaws all seem pretty easily fixable.  Give the supporting characters some personality on the page, cut a couple of the weaker lines, and make the Doctor's dialogue more Doctorish.  Really, this is one rewrite away from a terrific script.

And that, actually, is pretty defining for Chibnall.  He's got a lot of good ideas and genuine talent.  But like Terry Nation, he desperately needs two thing: a script editor to get him fixing the flaws and a director who can make the most of his ideas, because his scripts tend to feel like pretty good first drafts, not polished final drafts.  And on Torchwood, he's the lead writer.  So all the things that get smoothed out in rewrites - weak characters, inconsistencies, plot holes - don't get noticed.  And while they get pretty serviceable directors in the first season, they let a lot of major mistakes fly.

On Doctor Who, he's got a fantastic group of collaborators to cover for him.  On Torchwood, he's kinda the whole show.  And it's a mess of a show.

But 42 shows that he can write good TV.  And even on Torchwood, sometimes he does.


RATING:

* * * ½




SIDENOTES:

• One more good thing Chibnall does - he doesn't spend more than minimal time with the crew disbelieving the Doctor.  It's just long enough to be credible, but not enough to slow down the story or make them seem unintelligent.

• His lack of subtlety - the characters actually saying the tropes out loud, for instance - is another major problem. (and again, the sort of thing that gets smoothed out in good rewrites) But there's one awesomely not-subtle moment that's nicely effective - the annoyed crew member grumbling sarcastically, "Please, kill me now," right before actually getting killed.

• The effects are just absolutely awesome in this one.  I mean, the sun actually looks pretty much like what you'd expect a living star to look like.  And this came out right around the same time as Danny Boyle's spectacular Sunshine, and it looks just fine right next to it.

Army of Ghosts / Doomsday

Army of Ghosts and Doomsday are essentially three different stories spliced together.  The first, Army of Ghosts, is a well-structured yarn of escalating suspense and intriguing mysteries.  It's not just the ghosts themselves, although that's certainly a fascinating idea, but also a sphere that, according to all technical instruments, doesn't actually exist.

Finally, we learn what became of the Torchwood institute Queen Victoria created in response to the Doctor and Rose being smug jerks amongst death and tragedy.  These scenes are carried by the brilliant character of Yvonne Hartman, head of Torchwood; she hits that perfect sweet spot of complex, intriguing, and larger-than-life, thanks to both multi-layered writing by Davies and a charismatic, impassioned, cheeky, and often very funny performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman.  She's the rarest of Doctor Who villains: a human antagonist worthy of the Doctor.

Also, the Doctor passing off Jackie as Rose is a wonderful spark of whimsy.

Then, inevitably, the Cybermen show up, increasing the steadily-built intensity.  Now the situation is really grim: not only is Torchwood helping a mysterious entity punch holes in the continuum between Universes, but the Cybermen are coming through and invading earth (again).

And this is where opinions usually split on Army of Ghosts and Doomsday.  While a lot of people are perfectly happy with what follows, what happens next essentially negates everything so carefully built about the Cyber-invasion and Torchwood-evilishness.

Because all of a sudden, the Daleks show up and hijack the story.  The semi-evil Cybermen and Torchwood are reduced to distant silver and copper to the Daleks' shimmering gold.  For some, this is a disappointment.

Those "some" are wrong.  It may be opinion, it may be how they honestly feel, but they're wrong.  The Daleks showing up and upstaging the main plot only increases the fun of the story.  After all, for all its flashes of darkness, Doomsday is fundamentally a fun romp, full of humor and action.  Just because it's dramatic doesn't mean it can't be fun.

The Daleks face off with the Cybermen, which results first in a series of insults, for which Davies deserves tremendous credit -- the insults are not just hilarious, but perfectly toned for both races.

DALEK:  This is not war - this is pest control!
CYBERMAN: We have five million Cybermen.  How many are you?
DALEK: Four.
CYBERMAN: You would defeat the Cybermen with four Daleks?
DALEK: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek!  You are superior in only one respect.
CYBERMAN: What is that?

DALEK: You are better at dying!

And then the shooting starts and it plays out exactly as it should: the Daleks, despite being insanely outnumbered, mop the surface of the Earth with the Cybermen's faces.  The tone of the Dalek/Cybermen fight isn't one of horror or suspense: it's pure pop spectacle and breezy fun.

As this goes on, though, yet another thread slowly intrudes: Davies' conclusion to the various threads of the last two seasons.  As time goes on, it becomes clear that even the Daleks' superiority to every other villain ever invented by humans, or even the stunning sequences of millions of Daleks invading London, aren't the true centerpiece of Doomsday.  It's the emotional journey - for many, the last - of a gallery of wonderful characters.

Yvonne is taken by the Cybermen and gets a fantastic final scene as she's brought away to be cyberized.  Even brought to a fate she fully understands and fears, and even as she faces the consequences of her own actions, she's dignified and defiant.  Her cyberizing scene is genuinely moving.  And then, later, she gets an even better scene as a Cyber.  A great villain meets not one but two brilliant ends.

Pete, the alternate universe version of Rose's father, returns for a last hurrah.  I had very mixed feelings about his return in Rise of the Cybermen, but they ultimately went in an interesting direction with him, so his return is welcome.  Shaun Dingwall is as perfect as ever, and Pete's character arc is ultimately satisfying.  Camille Coduri also makes her final regular appearance as Jackie, and Davies gives her some of the funniest material she has had.  The scene where Pete and Jackie meet is just wonderful, equally hilarious and moving.

Mickey returns, but transformed by his time in Pete's World into Awesome Action Hero Mickey, and it's terrific.  It's really remarkable how far he's come - he was basically a failure of a character in Rose, but was carefully developed over time, becoming more and more likable, before being thrust into heroism in the early second season.  Here, when he shows up and starts going Bruce Willis all over the place, it somehow feels natural, as those it's actually the ideal ending to his character.  And really, it is; it's just totally unexpected, and a delight to watch.  Noel Clarke has been good as Mickey with a great variety of material, but he's just a blast to watch here.

Much more importantly, however, it's Rose's last (regular) appearance, and she's given a tremendous send-off.  Piper has all the appeal and humor she's always shown, she also shows a remarkable presence.  Doomsday opens with her stealing the Daleks' spotlight by facing them down with the sort of fearless power ordinarily only the Doctor shows.  Of course, Rose can't quite keep it up - she's not the Doctor, after all -- but it's a terrific character moment that, further, feels absolutely natural.  The Rose of End of the World could never have stood up like this, but the Rose of Doomsday has grown so believably that it isn't just cool; it's the culmination of the Doctor's influence on her.  She started as a normal, average person; now, she's become a mythical heroine, and deserved it.  Davies and the other writers may have occasionally stumbled with her in parts of the second season, but on the whole, her arc has been brilliant.

At the climax of the story, she saves the world, probably the entire universe with a genuinely selfless, sacrificial act.  As she falls into the Void, she is saved by the other universe's version of her long-dead Father, and rescued to safety in the other universe.  There, she can live her life with everything she ever wanted - her father alive, her parents together and in love, Mickey - except the one thing she wanted most.

Her Doctor is gone from her forever.

Davies can't help but give her a final farewell, but he takes tremendous care in the writing; it's melodramatic, but still underplayed just enough.  Tennant and Piper play their final scene perfectly.  But it's Murray Gold's music, particularly the entirely unexpected "Doomsday", that raises it to such a high level.  It's a devastating and extraordinary ending.

It's a complex, beautiful closing for a very strong companion.

But, really, Doomsday isn't even about saying goodbye to Rose.  It's about the Doctor - about the close to this part of his journey, and his moving on to a new one.

He's faced the Daleks just a season before.  Then, however, he was a different man.  Then, even having recovered much of his mojo thanks to Rose, he's still a traumatized war veteran, always on the edge of fury and destruction.  He faced them grimly and half-crazed.  But now, in Doomsday, he's not the Ninth Doctor, born of the tragedy of war and genocide, but the Tenth, who came from the Doctor's sacrifice of his own life to keep Rose from being utterly destroyed by the Time Vortex.  From the very first, he was cheerful and goofy.  Villainies could draw out his darkest side, yes, but it hasn't been constantly lingering under the surface, ready to explode.  This is the Doctor who, for the first time in more than a lifetime, is truly happy.

And so, when he faces his greatest adversaries, while he certainly respects their abilities, he's much more ready to fight them.  None of the full-on horror and desperation the Ninth Doctor felt, or the near-crazed edge to his threats and mocking.  No, he has his swagger back, the swagger than first put such fear into his enemies when he was a young man in an old man's body, telling off the psychotic creatures who have utterly conquered the entire Earth.  He can beat these guys, and he knows it, and he gleefully makes sure they know it.

And he does - literally sending the Daleks to Hell.  But it comes at a staggering cost.  Rose is alive, but locked away from him forever.  Just as before, he's alone.

But there's something more.  There's a magnificent moment where Rose and the Doctor lean their faces against the corresponding walls of their own universes, imagining and even, in some way, feeling each other's presence.  Rose sheds tears, of course, but the Doctor has no tears.  Every depth of the tragedy is buried in his eyes.  The look of utter devastation in Tennant's eyes is stunning.  Every day of his millenial life is etched across his face.  It's a man defeated and alone, more alone than any can imagine.  Again.  More so than anything else in the scene, even Gold's fantastic music, it's Tennant's face that hits the hardest.

And yet, there's something else in that face.  There's strength, and calm, and resolution.  Even after sending all the Daleks to Hell, the Doctor has lost Rose, and in a way, this was the ultimate loss for him.  But he hasn't just survived.  He's still the Doctor.  And in his farewell to Rose on Bad Wolf Bay, he's sad, but also warm and funny.  Now, he has the strength to go on to other adventures and feel the joy and fun and wonder, as he did before the War.  Even his own personal Doomsday can't take that from him.  Not any more.

RATING:

* * * *






SIDENOTES

• Okay, so, is there a reason we got Fear Her, but didn't get this episode?  I know RTD has said that he's more interested in stories about humans that about aliens on planet Zog.  But if that's what planet Zog looks like, why would anyone want a story about boring old humans?
• Come to think of it, the only other purely human adversary worthy of the Doctor I can think of is Salamander from Enemy of the World.

• Graeme Harper's direction is truly brilliant.  Harper's directing is always great, but this is among his finest work for Who.  He can't have had more than a few million bucks, but makes a spectacular, action-packed epic that weaves adventure, action, and a wondrous sense of breezy fun with quiet drama and melodramatic tragedy.  It's a stunning achievement to make all those work so smoothly and so powerfully.  There's a reason he's considered the greatest director Who ever had.

Fear Her

So, my review of The Idiot's Lantern was a bit brief.  It's a problematic episode to review.  It's not a bad one - perfectly competent and not really boring.  It's not a good one, though, either - there's no real tension, or excitement, or particularly memorable humor, or strong characterizations.  Nothing really imaginative.  The one creepy idea it has - people's faces being erased - isn't done in a particularly creepy fashion.  It's very, very mediocre.  But it's also one of the rarest birds in Doctor Who: it's an episode that isn't interesting.

And that's frustrating.  Doctor Who is almost always interesting.  Even when it's bad, even when it's really, really bad, it's interesting.  The worst of the worst -- Time and the Rani, Timelash, Terminus, Nightmare of Eden, The Celestial Toymaker -- are all in some ways interesting.  They have settings and ideas that are, on some level or another, intriguing.  But The Idiot Lantern doesn't.  There's not one interesting, original, or unusual thing about it.  It's really hard to do that with Doctor Who, and maybe it deserves some sort of reward for actually pulling that off.

Fear Her is like The Idiot Lantern, except bad.  Really, really bad.  And unlike those other terrible episodes, it isn't even interesting.  It's difficult to believe that a director as good as Euros Lyn and a writer as talented as Matthew Graham could make something as fundamentally awful as The Celestial Toymaker, but by making something so terribly uninteresting, they've actually, in some ways, created something much, much worse.

Love and Monsters

As much fun as it is to go through action-driven Doctor Who stories, every now and again, it's nice to sit back and see something offbeat and experimental like Love and Monsters, which uses the Doctor as a background character in a romantic tragi-comedy.  And thanks to wonderful characterizations by Marc Warren as Elton Pope and Shirley Henderson as his love Ursula, it works beautifully... for a while.  Watching these two lonely people meet due to their mutual fascination with this mysterious traveler and then fall in love is absolutely charming.  Jackie's presence adds immensely to it; the scene where Elton tries to get information from her is a comic gem.

And then... and then, the monster shows up, and it all falls to pieces.  Partly because he looks like Fat Bastard painted green, and partly because Peter Kay does a Fat Bastard impersonation.  The monster is way too goofy, even for a comic Who story.  It tramples the tragic elements completely, and is too weird for the comic elements to work.

The reason for the Doctor and Rose showing up at the climax is a brilliant laugh, but otherwise, the second half of the story limps to a whimper.  And then it closes on an awful fellatio joke, and adds distasteful to a weak conclusion.

But the experiment of throwing an offbeat character romantic comedy-tragedy into the story?  Total success.  It's when the actual plot comes up that the whole thing derails.  But it's great seeing Doctor Who try something this bizarre and risky.  If only the plot had taken the same risks...

RATING:

* * ½

The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Something I've talked about several times is the unfortunate default format of the Davies-era show (and, to this point, the Moffat era, though he seems to be moving away from it).  See, for most of Doctor Who's run, the normal story length was four 25-minute episodes, making for stories lasting just over an hour and a half.  And there's a reason that's the right length.  Because Doctor Who is about a madman with a magic box that can take him to any time and any place, and because it's very character-driven, it has a greater burden than most shows: every single story has to succeed at world-building, convincingly transporting us to a brand new time and place.  Every story has to develop a new cast of characters.  And it has to take the time to tell a compelling story.   It's really difficult to cram all that into 45 minutes.  Not impossible, but you are restricted to only one or two compelling characters and a simple plot.  And Doctor Who can be and should be so much more than that.

Which brings up another point, something I've probably hammered too much: this show shouldn't be restricted to Earth.  Not that we should never spend time on Earth, but we have all of time and space.  Earth gets kinda boring after a while.

This isn't to say I dislike the Davies era.  On the whole, I'm very fond of Davies' version of the show.  I think he made it fresh, energetic, exciting, modern, and very dramatic, and gave us several of the finest stories in the show's history.  And what's more, he really didn't give us more than a small handful of duds along the way.  Even the lesser stories in his era were usually more mediocre that truly bad.

That said, Impossible Planet, as a well-structured 90-minute story set on a fantastic landscape, is exactly what I'd been waiting for from the new series when I got to it.  It opens exactly where it's been needed for a season and a half: somewhere not-Earth.  Eighteen stories into the new series, and this is the first time that the Doctor, actually sets foot on somewhere that isn't Earth, or Earth-orbit, or New Earth.  It's truly somewhere new.  And what a spectacular setting!  A station on a planet orbiting inside the event horizon of a black hole...

And now, with modern effects and a little money, it looks absolutely stunning.  The world-building is superb.  It's not only imaginative and well-produced; it has a strong sense of geography, crucial for what turns out to be a base-under-siege story.

And then it one-ups that with the introduction of the Ood.  Not only is it a fantastic makeup job, but they're a genuinely fascinating race.  Here, in their first appearance, they're voluntary slaves, a terrific concept that brings up all sorts of moral dilemmas that the show will later only sort of deal with.  They also bounce very effectively from convincingly friendly to absolutely terrifying.

Next, the Doctor is cut off from the TARDIS - of course - but this time, it seems permanent.  It's not nearly as convincingly just gone like in Frontios where it outright disintegrates in front of the Doctor's eyes, leaving only a hatstand never seen before or since.  I mean, it just fell down a cliff.  No big deal.  But there's a more important difference here: there, after the stunning cliffhanger, Frontios just sorta forgets about the TARDIS disappearing until it shows up at the end.  No discussion, no wondering what's next for our stranded explorers.  Even the Doctor doesn't seem that upset.  Here, though, it actually thinks through what it would mean to the Doctor to really, truly lose the TARDIS.  His discussion with Rose about their future is perfectly written, nailing their relationship.  Rose, of course, talks about settling down, maybe together or something, you know, but the Doctor totally ignores her.  He loves her in his own way, but that's not how things are.  It's a complex relationship, beautifully captured in just a few short lines of dialogue.

Besides, we all know he just lost his true love. (actually, he says as much, pretty much right to Rose: "I need my ship! It's all I've got! Literally the only thing!")

Of course, it's not long before things start getting really, really bad.  One of the crew members, Toby, is possessed by an evil entity and starts killing everybody without getting noticed, the Ood go crazy, and the impossible planet seems like it might not be far from doing exactly what it should be doing and going straight into the black hole.  The base under siege elements are excellent.  There's a genuinely sense of escalating terror and reduced spaces.  There's also an excellent sense of geography; you feel like you could draw a map of the base after the story ends.

There's one particularly riveting sequence in The Satan Pit where the surviving characters are forced to crawl through the vents.  It's an old cliche, but it's done brilliantly, particularly in the absolutely chilling shot where Toby suddenly goes from screaming for his victims to help him to silently giving his orders to the Ood.  Great stuff.

Rose is nicely characterized.  She's brave and loyal and pours herself into things, but it's also characteristically narcissistic: all her work to bring together the crew and stuff is solely to save her Doctor.

The crew is all nicely written and superbly acted.  They seem like complete, individual personalities.

And then there's Toby, the possessed.  Will Thorpe's performance is absolutely sensational.  I could site virtually every scene he's in as an example; he's just amazingly creepy.

The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit stand out in nearly every way, with a brilliant setting, strong characterizations, superb acting, and some terrific horror scenes...

... but if Doctor Who was going to take on Satan himself, it would have been nice if its depiction of the Devil had been a little more sophisticated than the version in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.

I guess you could argue he isn't necessarily the Devil, but building him up like that forces the result to aim pretty high.  For The Devil, this guy's a pretty weak, uninteresting character. I swear, there is a more powerful monster somewhere in every single season of the show -- he isn't anywhere near as compelling or as threatening as villains like Edrad, or the vampires in State of Decay, or even, say, the steampunk Cyber-King thing.  It's a really weak villain.

I mean, he has the power to, what, possess one person? If and only if that one person reads his symbols one too many times? He also influences the Ood, but honestly, that doesn't seem like that big of an accomplishment. The Doctor mentions the Devil who appears in legends throughout the Universe, but on Earth, at least, in many religions and myths, the Devil is the great liar, the master manipulator. In most versions, he's a trickster -- Satan, Loki, Mara -- not just an ordinary monster. The Doctor taking on that challenge, of an evil far trickier and more manipulative than he is, should be fascinating. Instead, it's boring because this villain, for all his build-up, isn't all that powerful by the Doctor's standards, and isn't actually interesting for any other reasons.

Its defeat is the final insult: his plan succeeds, succeeds: he has escaped the unescapable prison, has a ride to an inhabited planet, and tricked the Doctor into a wild goose chase, leaving the Doctor to give his awesome Doctorish monologue to himself.*  The only thing he has to do, literally the only thing, is not tell everyone he's possessing Toby's body.  But no, in one of the most hilarious uses of the Talking Killer Syndrome ever, he turns monstrous and starts ranting and raving.  So, of course, Rose kills him cleverly, and then quips... no, no, you can guess it.  It's not a good quip.  Nothing clever or interesting.  Just the most obvious possible one.

* Clever idea on the writer's part, by the way.  It'd be brilliant if the actual conclusion was satisfying.

And that kills it for me.  I find the villain totally laughable.  More laughable than the Creature From the Pit, or the Menoptra, or, hell, the Optera.   The story will throw out a brilliant scene like the Doctor ruminating on the existence of God, and then has some laughing giant with horns appear, and don't even have the courtesy to give him a good rock-off.

"I'm the Devil, I can do what I want

Whatever I got, I'm gonna flaunt

There's never been a rock-off I've ever lost..."

You know, if the climax wasn't so lame, I'd be a lot more forgiving.  But yeah, he doesn't die because the Doctor is clever, or he falls to his flaws, or anything like that.  He dies because he starts monologuing when that is the single thing that could possibly kill him.

And that's it.  Everything I wanted in a Doctor Who story except one thing, but that one thing is so bad it ruins the whole thing.

But hey, it's not on Earth!

RATING:

* * ½

The Idiot's Lantern

[2006, Season 28/Series 2, Episode 8]

Meh.


RATING:

* * ½

Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel

The Tenth Planet, we were introduced to a horrific mirror version of humanity, people who had replaced more and more of their bodies with spare parts until they were machines.  They were human but not human.  Their look and voice enhanced this terrifying vision.  They were also intelligent, logical machines who convinced some people to volunteer to become cyberized. 

They never appeared in Doctor Who again.  Later, there were creatures who called themselves the Cybermen and said they came from Mondas, but they weren't the Cybermen.  They were just evil robots.  Cool evil robots, threatening evil robots, fun evil robots, but evil robots.  Never again in the classic series were they the object of such psychological and physical horror as their forebears.

Which isn't to say I don't like the later Cybermen.  I enjoy every Cyber story to some extent except "Revenge", (yes, even Silver Nemesis, at least up to a point) and certainly get some whimsical joy out of them.  But after The Tenth Planet, I was always waiting for a story that really got what made them so original and eerie, and never really found it.

Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel aren't quite the episodes I was waiting for, but they're really, really close, and in a few moments, they do capture excactly what I always wanted out of them.  Oh, they still work on the more common level: they're incredibly dangerous, virtually unstoppable robots.  But in exploring an alternate version of their origin from another universe, it finds some of that inhuman humanity.  We watch humans being led away and forced to take the "upgrades."  We see the horrific saws and tools used to splice the metal into the humans.  There's one especially unnerving scene in the second episode where the Doctor opens up a Cyberman and finds shredded flesh inside.

Also, the tools they use to cut people up?  Excellent.

And the Doctor's actual defeat of the Cybermen powerfully digs to the heart of their mix of human and machine.  It's far and away the most satisfying defeat of the Cybers in the history of the show.

As for their redesign... well, they definitely look slick and big-budget.  Very shiny, very big, very threatening... but totally robotic.  There's no hint of humanity in the design, which sucks out a little bit of the meaning.  They're also really, really loud when they walk, which makes the various scenes when they walk up and surprise the heroes kinda hard to buy.  But on the whole, this is a superb outing for the Cybermen.

And the rest of the episode, you ask?  Well, the production team did one masterstroke: hiring Graeme Harper to direct.  Back in the old show, Harper directed The Caves of Androzani and Revelation of the Daleks; the former is almost universally considered one of the finest stories ever produced in the show, and the latter is a masterpiece of atmosphere, intensity, and pacing, regardless of whatever flaws the script may possess.  Harper made two of the best-looking, most atmospheric, and most gripping stories in the old show, directing with the kind of energy far ahead of its time.

He's lost none of his touch.  Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel is a superbly made action yarn with overtones of horror, intense, thrilling, and compelling.

As for the story itself, just keep in mind that while not everything is great, it's all done really, really well.  We start Rise of the Cybermen with the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey accidentally traveling into an alternate universe because... I guess because RTD has this belief that every Doctor Who story has to be about planet Earth, and he's gotta bring back the Cybermen with a big introduction, leaving us with an alternate origin story.  Which is fine, except that this alternate universe isn't really all that interesting.  The one other time Doctor Who did the alternate universe thing, we got Inferno, which turned all the companionish characters into the villains (including the Brigadier with an eyepatch), and then went absolutely insane near the end because on an alternate earth, you can do anything you want.  Here, we get... um, blimps.  An alternate universe with blimps everywhere.  Otherwise, nothing too interesting.  The UK has a president instead of the prime minister.  That sort of thing.

Mickey splits from the other two and after meandering a bit, finds that he has a double on this world named Ricky (of course), who is a tough-guy revolutionary. 

Rose, meanwhile, decides she has to look up her father, which means that we get to go through the whole Rose's father thing again.  Eventually, in Age of Steel, it does play out in an unexpected way, but for most of Rise, it just feels like an inferior rehash of Father's Day.  Shaun Dingwall is terrific again, and we do get the great bit where the Doctor and Rose sneak into his place dressed as servants.  We see an alternate Jackie who is... well, she's got all the negative, obnoxious characteristics of regular Jackie, but without the redeeming qualities.

Other than that stuff, this is just earth.  Nothing too imaginative, nothing insanely intense like Inferno.  So, outside of the Cyber stuff itself, the first episode, which is mostly about exploring alternate earth, is really well-made filler.  In what I'm guessing is a nod to some of the old Cyber-stories, they don't actually show up in full until 45 minutes in, which does a good job of building their eventual appearance up but leaves us mostly just waiting for the story to get started. 

There are some really strong performances in there, though.  Villain John Lumic is mostly just ranty on paper, but Roger Lloyd Pack digs his teeth way, way into the scenery and plays him with relish.

His not-entirely-onboard lieutenant, Mr. Crane, is played by Colin Spaul with intelligence and charm, making him a highly enjoyable villainous sidekick. 

Best of all is Helen Griffin as Mrs. Moore, who plays the revolutionaries' hacker, and makes her incredibly human and likable with only a few minutes of screentime.  And also awesome.

Anyway, the first half isn't boring; it doesn't do much inherently interesting, but it's done so well by Harper and his cast that it gets the work done.  And the second half is very cool: dark, shadowy, action-packed fun.  I could probably nitpick all day with minor issues, but the second half really delivers the goods.  The Cybermen go around being threatening, the Doctor gets big speeches, stuff blows up, and so forth.  Even the uninspiring Pete & Jackie subplot from the first episode ultimately plays out in a series of unexpected and compelling ways.  The payoff for Mr. Crane is incredibly satisfying.  And the climax is terrific.

Which is to say, there's a lot wrong with Rise and Age.  But the things it gets right are so good that, personally, I don't care.  It's a fun ride thanks largely to excellent direction by the master of directing Doctor Who.  And it's one of the best Cybermen stories ever, maybe the best.

But somewhere out there, there's still that definitive Cyber-story, one that nails the creepy horror, the awesome action, and the crazed logic throughout, and delivers a truly classic episode.

Till then, though, this'll do.



RATING:

* * * ½


SIDENOTES:

• "DELETE!  DELETE!  DELETE!"  Seriously?  That's the Cyber-catchphrase?  Lame.
  
  
• So, since this is Mickey's last regular appearance, I guess now's as good a time as any to discuss him overall.  I have to say, it's rare to see a character turn around so much.  In Rose, he's incredibly annoying.  But the more he was developed, the more likable he became.  And to be honest, by the end of Age of Steel, I wished he would have stayed on.  With him around, it wouldn't matter that Rose never held the Doctor back when he needed it, because Mickey would have filled that spot very nicely.  The three of them as a team would have been great.  Anyway, bravo to Noel Clarke for making the most of his
  
  
• I have mixed feelings about the Doctor's solution to the cliffhanger.  On the one hand, it comes out of nowhere.  There's no reason a subtle line couldn't have been put in the first episode to seed his solution.  On the otherhand, HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME!