The Crimson Horror

STRAX: And how will [Jenny] locate the Doctor?
MADAME VASTRA: To find him, she needs only ignore all "keep out" signs, go through every locked door, and run towards any form of danger that presents itself.

There's a flip side to my criticisms of Mark Gatiss back in Cold War: he's actually a good writer. His plots might not be interesting in themselves, but they set everything up carefully and build to a climax that follows the story's internal logic. That might sound like basic stuff, but it's the kind of basic stuff Moffat's era struggles with in the midst of all its glorious but underdeveloped ideas. Basically, you can count on Gatiss to get everything put together right technically, and when his story is worth telling, it's good entertainment. Here, Gatiss takes a fresh approach to apparently straightforward material. By focusing on Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and keeping the Doctor out of the story for the first third, his talents in blending humor, drama, and horror in a competant and entertaining brew rise to the surface.

And to give him some credit, Gatiss has been held back from unleashing the full force of horror he imagines at times - The Unquiet Dead, in particular, was supposed to have included a world of zombies and had a bleaker tone. Gatiss delights in the macabre and leavens it with black humor. Moffat seems to have given him free reign on nightmare fuel, so he builds a story around drowning the Doctor in boiling, blood-colored oatmeal. Later, the now red-skinned Doctor becomes the monster pet to a blind, scarred young woman, whose look suggests monstrosity, and who was raised by a metaphorical monster of an evil woman.

The script overflows with that sort of cleverness. There's a particularly clever suspense sequence as Jenny has to bring the red-skinned, mechanically-walking Doctor down a hall, when the blind daughter of the villainess comes out, hearing them. The scene builds the suspense and complexity in a way that would make Hitchcock proud.

Gatiss also revels in the Victorian era, and the episode drips with atmosphere. Some of that, of course, is thanks to director Saul Metzstein, but Gatiss' story lends itself to a much more vivid exploration than Metzstein's (and Moffat's) The Snowmen. And Gatiss is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and builds the story on a winding, complex mystery yarn. (Murray Gold throws in a fun musical reference to Hans Zimmer's Sherlock Holmes scores, although it really isn't quite as cool on a piano that actually works.)

Centering a story around Vastra, Jenny, and Strax works nicely, too. I'm not sure they need a whole series of their own, but they're a pretty engaging trio to come back to every now and again. Jenny is especially showcased, rescuing the Doctor and beating down a half-dozen bad guys in a hallway while barely raising her heartbeat. Strax is a one-joke character, but it's a very funny joke, so as long as he's kept more or less in the background, he's a gas. Vastra, though, feels utilized; she's still a great character, but, as in The Snowmen, it feels like she doesn't really have anything to do.

After reveling in the tension of "When will the Doctor show up?" for a third of the story, and then ratching the tension further with the reveal that the Doctor has been monsterized, Gatiss flies into a flashback about how the Doctor got there. It's a nice way of jamming an extra half hour of story into about 2 minutes onscreen that don't feel overly rushed. And in a nice touch, Metzstein uses sepia tone and similar tricks to make it look like a silent movie.

At which point we finally arrive at the plot itself, with the great Diana Rigg commiting all manner of evil. The character's pretty one-dimensional, but Rigg is magnificent and finds exactly the right mix of humor and sinister insanity to make Mrs. Gilliflower fun. And her aged voice has taken on airs of the older Katherine Hepburn, which only adds to the effect.

DOCTOR: Mrs. Gilliflower, you have no idea what you are dealing with. In the wrong hands, that venom could wipe out all life on this planet.
MRS. GILLIFLOWER: Do you know what these are? [giggles] The wrong hands!

The other major guest character, Ada, is just a brilliantly played by Rigg's real-life daughter, Rachael Stirling. Stirling nails the tragedy, the creepiness, and the hidden strength of Ada; she's a complex character who refuses to actually fall in either the villain or hero camp, even though she always seems to be in one or the other.

As everything rockets toward the finale, Gatiss wisely climaxes primarily with a dialogue scene of five great actors talking very dramatically at each other in a small room. That's the essence of what makes Who great: fantastic, imaginative stories centered on great actors being dramatic. It's a blast of a sequence.

The last little bit of the climax, in the steampunk rocket chamber, isn't quite as strong. Besides the question of how they survived being inside a chamber with a rocket lifting off, it's not as satisfying as the earlier scene, leaving the Doctor as basically a bystander while the guest stars finish off the plot. But then, in this story, that at least makes sense.

Clara is left as a stray appendage, though. There's supposedly an arc about the Doctor discovering who she is, and Clara discovering that there's a lot more to her than there should be, but said "arc" has basically amounted to a half-season of the Doctor asking, "Who is she?" and whoever he asks going, "Dunno." It's less an arc than a dangling thread that refuses to be tied up until the finale. Journey even had her learn about it, then immediately forget. It's as though rather than actually deal with it throughout the season, Moffat's just saving up for the finale, which would be a lot easier to roll with if she had any identity beyond this mystery. It's particularly frustrating here, where she's less of an actual presence than something the Doctor talks in circles about with Vastra and Jenny. Her mysteriousness is all she is.

But how much of that can actually be laid at Gatiss' feet is questionable. The same goes for the final scene, where Clara's two charges insist on being brough along for an adventure because otherwise they'll tell their parents Clara's a time traveler. That's gotta be the least threatening thing they could have hung over her. I mean, really? Are they expecting their parents to actually buy that?

If there's a flaw I'd actually blame on Gatiss (besides underusing Vastra), though, it's the swipes at religion. Gatiss' anti-religious bits are subtle but have a real nastiness to them. I mean, Stephen King does all kinds of evil religious people, but it doesn't actually seem hateful. Gatiss seems to really been sneering at religion itself. It's an odd, off-putting undertone to an otherwise fun yarn.

But that's the thing: this is a really, really fun story. It's freaky, funny, exciting, and acts convincingly like all the silliness is all manner of dramatic without losing its sense of goofy adventure. For the first time since Unquiet Dead, I feel really happy one of Gatiss' episodes exists.

"The bright day is done, child, and you are for the dark."

RATING:

* * *

Cold War

As I mentioned in Rings of Akhaten, there's a New Who tradition of giving the new companion an adventure in the future and an adventure in the earth's past - The Unquiet Dead, Tooth and Claw, The Shakespeare Code, The Fires of Pompeii, Victory of the Daleks, and Vampires In Venice. But while I like the future ones, the past ones is the half of the tradition I'm not a huge fan of. With the exception of the excellent Fires of Pompeii, they tend to be servicable but completely unmemorable.

Though, to be fair, part of my problem may be that a lot of them are written by Mark Gatiss. It's not that Gatiss writes bad scripts - they're perfectly competent. They just aren't interesting. At all. When I have liked his stories, it's because a director like Euros Lyn or Richard Clark gave them enough atmosphere and enough sense of drama that they worked. And even Lyn, one of the best directors to ever work on Doctor Who, couldn't make anything interesting out of The Idiot's Lantern.

Even by Gatiss' standards, though, Cold War doesn't accomplish or attempt anything interesting.

Let's start with the Ice Warriors. The Ice Warriors are in that category of Classic Who monsters beloved not because they were particularly interesting - the only thing separating them from the Yeti was that they occasionally growled words - but because they looked cool. (Well, that, and Troughton and Pertwee each fought them twice, and three of those times were six-parters, meaning they actually had more episodes than the Sontarans.) And they really do look cool. But, like the Zygons, they really don't have much else going for them.

That doesn't mean there's no reason to bring them back. First, you could always add something to them - flesh them out, expand on their culture and their individualities. Gatiss doesn't do this. But there actually was one fantastic aspect to them: in their third story, The Curse of Peladon, they turned out in a pretty great surprise twist to be good guys. In all of Classic Who, they were the only monsters that started evil and turned good in a later story, and it pulled it off 15 years before Star Trek got around to redeeming the Klingons.

Granted, it's hard to write a new story about that, and Gatiss doesn't generally go for anything challenging, which really only leaves two worthwhile things about them. The first would be to have fun reconciling the idea that they come from an advanced civilization on Mars and the fact that Mars turned out to be a lifeless desert where the temperature rarely makes it above freezing at the height of summer. But that would probably be expensive, and with a season with so much visual spectacle, you've gotta cut costs someplace. So you get one Ice Warrior on a small, simple set.

Failing all that, the only thing left, I guess, is to give your Ice Warrior a really great characterization and dialogue. That still wouldn't give a reason to bring them back, but at least it would be entertaining. What we get, unfortunately, is the Xenomorph from Alien, except instead of a horrific being of sheer visceral terror, he occasionally growls a few vague threats. Yes, the updated version looks very cool, and they manage the very difficult feat of taking his mask off and still making him look cool.

But that's it. The whole episode is just an alien with no personality going around killing everybody off. And without anything going for it besides an alien runninig around killing people in a tight space, it can't help but be compared to Alien. Douglas Mackinnon is a fine director, but he's not Ridley Scott. There's a little bit of claustrophobic atmosphere here, but not much. There are a few moments of minor suspense, but nothing to really get your pulse moving.

But Gatiss is the real culprit. Not only does he fail to do anything interesting even within the very basic concept of "monster chasing people on a ship", but he writes a staggeringly stupid script. Right from the beginning, it's just dumb. Seriously, how stupid is that guy who thaws out the Ice Warrior? What possible reason would he have to do that? Even by the standards of stupid people doing stupid things to drive horror plots, that's pretty dumb. Even in Friday the 13th sequels, the idiots aren't trying to bring Jason back to life.

It extends to every aspect of the story, including, tragically, the Doctor himself - within the same breath, he says that the Ice Warrior is so powerful he could easily kill all twelve of the living people in one go, and that their best chance of surviving is to split up into teams of two. Which, naturally, results in the crew's decimation. Again, if these scenes were scary, or if the characters were anything other than generic cardboard, it might be at least moderately forgivable, but it's all so totally standard.

And in this scenario, the Doctor stopping the captain from shooting the Ice Warrior to negotiate falls flat. It makes the Doctor seem even more foolish. In any half-decent horror yarn, the idiotic authority figure getting everyone killed would meet a richly deserved death (or, if it was a really good horror movie, they would see the error of their ways and be racked with guilt).

And the ending really sinks the whole enterprise. The Doctor gives a big speech. Which fails. Again. It's one thing for the Doctor to fail on occasion, but up to this point in this season, he's had four companion deaths out of three companions; Clara solved two stories after he, The Doctor, failed to give a compelling speech, and two more basically because he showed up (and she was already more or less dead, once because of the Doctor's own stupidity); Amy and Rory solved another after he failed; and his solution to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was to straight-up murder the villain after stopping the hunter from shooting him with a tranquilizer gun because it's a gun, and guns are bad but killing is totally okay. Oh, and he solved Power of Three by waving the Sonic around and apparently getting all the human victims on that spaceship killed (or sucked into a plot hole). As clever, Doctorish solutions go, he's only got A Town Called Mercy and Bells of St John out of nine stories. And he's been kind of a creeper to Clara. If I was basing it solely on this season, I don't think I'd be cheering for this guy as the lead; I'd be hoping he'd get killed off so Clara could take over the show.

And the whole thing with the TARDIS flying off to the South Pole? Gatiss manages to end the episode by making even Sexy herself seem brain dead. It was dumb enough reviving the long-dormant Krotons bit about the TARDIS flying off to the nearest "safe location" when you're on a submarine and they could easily just be, you know, locked out of that room, but why would she fly off to Antarctica?

The result is an episode insulting to the audience's intelligence, the characters' intelligence, and the abilities of some very fine actors. And the combination of that with the usual bunch of cliches without style or invention is the single most boring episode since... Timelash? Man, that sucker came out two years before I was born. And at least that was cheesy enough to provoke a couple of unintentional laughs. And, you know, had the Doctor actually solve the plot and do Doctorish stuff here and there.

Besides the Ice Warrior costume, there is one good thing about the episode - Clara. In her fifth appearance, she's still not a fully-developed character as such, but she's gradually getting more layers. I like how genuinely scared she is when the Ice Warrior threatens her, and then how quickly she jumps from being scared to diving back into the action - "I'm okay! I'm okay! Where did he go?" At some point, I'd like to see her as fully fleshed out as the other companions, but even without that, she's consistently fun.

 But in a black hole like this, it doesn't count for enough.

RATING:

* ½

It gets an extra half-star for Smith doing little moments like this, though.

SIDENOTES:

• Wait, we're in Clara's third story and the Doctor hasn't explained the whole languages thing? Why didn't this happen last episode?
• I guess I didn't talk about the whole Cold War aspect, but honestly? It didn't really have anything to do with the episode. It was just an excuse for the lone alien to be able to blow up the whole planet, because we haven't had an alien threaten the entire Earth before. The Soviet soldiers are awfully quick to accept that the mysterious strangers who showed up on a nuclear submarine aren't some kind of sabeteurs or spies or anything of the sort. There's no sense of the fear and paranoia that pervaded even ordinary lives, let alone those manning a submarine that could end it all. Just a satisfactory exploration of that would have largely redeemed the episode. Unfortunately, none of these characters were more than the dullest cardboard.
• Whatever its flaws, I've gotta give some praise to the production team - this sucker looks good and expensive, even though it's probably the cheapest or near it of the season.
• NOTE FROM THE FUTURE - 9/4/2024 - Rewatching this for the first time in over a decade, I'm baffled at my original reaction. Maybe it's just having the distance not just of the years, but of Moffat's era being long past, Gatiss being effectively retired from the show (presumably), and having gone through three more Doctors and their eras; but I now find this to be a fun, suspenseful, atmospheric bit. No, it's not wildly original, but it's more thoughtful than I gave it credit for, it's well-made, and, well, I just had a really good time. Always nice to go back to something that didn't work on a first viewing and find myself completely turned around. I'd gladly give this a three-star rating were I to bother to rewrite this review. But then, if I did that, I'd sure want to rewrite every review here, especially the deeply embarassing early ones. Plus, given how I've effectively left this blog to quietly sail off into my past, it would be strange to revive it here and now. But, at any rate, this harsh review was my honest reaction at the time, and now, it's flipped entirely.

Night Terrors

Night Terrors is a breath of fresh air.  Not because it's a classic or anything.  It's a good, solid, well-made episode that wouldn't particularly stand out in any era of Who.

But it's a relief to have an episode this season for which I actually feel certain of my feelings.  I've had to watch the last four episodes three times each before even deciding whether or not I liked them, and then rewrote my Good Man review after seeing Let's Kill Hitler.  Even The Doctor's Wife had me torn a little between its shining brilliance and its unsatisfyingly jammed running length.  So a story I can watch once and know exactly how I feel about it is just wonderful.

Much of the praise goes to director Richard Clark, of Gridlock and The Doctor's Wife.  Clark's framing and pacing are superb; he creates a creepy yet whimsical atmosphere out of some pretty simple settings.  His visual sense adds a lot to the story; the TARDIS appearing reflected in puddle is a particularly nice touch.  The long shadows and sharp lighting reminiscent of German Expressionism give Night Terrors a uniquely eerie atmosphere that elevates the story.

Clark's mastery overcomes the shortcomings of Mark Gatiss' script, which is fine but entirely unspectacular.  It seems to come from the concept that Doctor Who's one and only subject is Monsters and the funny British guy who fights them.  Which is an important part of Doctor Who, but a very narrow view of the show. (I'm not saying Gatiss views it that way, but he sure doesn't give any hint here or in his other three Who scripts that there's much more to the show.  I haven't read any of his Who novels, to be fair) It's pretty straightforward: the Doctor lands somewhere, finds monsters, talks his way out of it, everything's happy again.

But the execution, on the whole, is really good.  Much of the story focuses on the Doctor trying to help out a worried father, nicely played by Daniel Mays.  He also gets some time with the kid, and Smith always amazes working with kids.  Amy and Rory mostly run through creepy hallways and such, but they do it very well.  Arthur Darvill has a particularly marvelous scene where he almost sighs when he comes to believe that the two of them are dead.  Again.

The monsters, when they do show up, are creepy enough; the transformations are very unsettling, utilizing terrific effects.  The choppiness of the transformations in particular sells the effect to the point that it's hard to be certain how much is CGI and how much is practical.  Nicely done.

This is, unfortnately, yet another case of Murray Gold blaring music over scenes that clearly need no music at all.  And again, it's not bad music, but it takes from the scenes' effectiveness.  And very often, his music really is effective; he (or the director, or producers, or someone) won't turn it off when it isn't needed.

The story, ultimately, ends up going exactly where you expect it, without ever quite managing to raise the stakes or the intensity high enough to really score.  But it's watchable, entertaining, and solid, thanks largely to a director who knows how to squeeze all the atmosphere and drama out of a simple yarn and small setting.

RATING:

* * *