Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

 It's hard to find the time to blog so far this term. I want to write about the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the DC comics "reboot" but all that marking has to take precedence! Anyway, today I'm going  to talk about the return of Doctor Who.

"Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me".

If you have no investment in the saga of River Song, I think Let's Kill Hitler would be a baffling and frustrating experience. The sugar-rush excitement of a new "season" began last week with the metatextual  "You've had all summer" and then the narrative moved into high gear (literally) with Mels and her Little Red Corvette- although anyone who didn't foresee her reveal must be very slow on the uptake. There was a beautiful shot that referenced 2001: A Space Odyssey as Mels casually tossed a Tardis-model into the Vortex. The entire Hitler sequence was simply a feint as the episode centred on yet another regeneration (so commonplace these days!) Again Rory got some of the best lines while Karen Gillan was required to play a Terminator operated by the Numskulls from the Beezer. Ultimately, this was a playful and camp episode which riffed on the "timey-wimey" machinations in 1999's The Curse of Fatal Death. Matt Smith's Doctor evoked charm and pathos (and a little self-flagellation). Alex Kingston impersonated  Anne Bancroft and Steve McQueen and the story tied up some of the  loose ends about the time-tripping archaeologist daring back to Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.
 But, yesterday, in a weird moment of Jungian synchronicity (thanks, Gordon Sumner), I read this passage by Grant Morrison:

"Kathy Kane, Batwoman, made her debut as a plainly obvious beard for a Batman who had (let's remind ourselves) no real need to prove his heretosexuality on the grounds that he was a creation of pen and ink made to entertain children and had no sex life on the page or off it. ... (a) daredevil who wore jodhpurs and rode a motorcycle...Batwoman detourned the image of the atom age housewife by packing her handbag with laser lipsticks...that could chemically castrate you there on the spot. Kathy Kane was the weaponization of the Stepford Wife, the Avon Lady as a  Special Forces commando." 1.


It strikes me that establishing the heterosexual credentials of a children's character is the dullest outcome of Moffat's "timey-wimey" approach. The lugubrious, paternalist Scot began this process in 2005 with the question of the Doctor's "dancing" and continued with his romance with a brilliant French courtesan and the tragic sacrifice of an enigmatic female who appeared to know all the Doctor's secrets.  In the last season, Moffat teased that River Song might be the Doctor's killer and then rebooted the universe, seemingly erasing the polymorphous worldview of RTD's Rainbow Nation and placing the Doctor's cougarish "bespoke psychopath" centre stage. So what next for the Doctor's Pussy Galore? What is she for?

Something for the dads

Ater the manic energy and invention of the previous episode, a change of pace was required. Night Terrors by horror fan Mark Gatiss featured a return to the Tylers' world of concrete Brutalism, snarkily referred to as "Eastendersland" by country boy Rory. If this is a comment on the BBC's brand of  social realism by Moffat, it's highly inaccurate: Albert Square is all decaying Edwardian gentility and its inhabitants only rarely visit tower blocks and sink estates. Such a sideswipe would be rich coming from Moffat, who, after all, gave us the surreal Avengersland village of Leadworth.
 The strongest performances in the episode arose from the interaction of Matt Smith, the Grandfather Paradox who blends slapstick and  tenderness and  Daniel Mays as anxious father Alex. All weary adult stubble and fashionable t-shirt, Mays is a symbolic modern male parent: the infantilised man-boy who can't protect you.

However, I found Terrors rather flat and predictable, a retread of 2006's unloved Fear Her. Crucially, the episode had no sense of danger and  was overpowered by Murray Gold's music, which I genuinely enjoy but its use should have been restrained here to ratchet up the tension (Coincidentally, yesterday afternoon, I had a similar issue with a lunchtime play in Inverness. The onstage piano playing, perhaps because of the acoustics of the Ironworks venue, drowned out the dialogue and obscured the narrative.) In the final scene of Terrors, the visuals suggest the nursery rhyme is pointing up the Doctor's impending "death" but it was too indistinct and irritated me.

The design and the visual aesthetic of the episode were striking however: the painted dollhouse clock, the aeroplane wallpaper and the grim and soulless rows of identical flats. The living dolls were ugly and disturbing so maybe the episode did scare the bairns.For me though, Smith and Mays only just managed to steer the script away from mawkish to the heart-warming side of sentimental.

It's a Mini Adventure

Just as Gatiss rather pointlessly references Sapphire and Steel from over thirty years ago, the first release in Big Finish's sixth season of Companion Chronicles is entitled Tales from the Vault, nodding to the 70s portmanteau movies Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror from the Amicus studio.
 Viewers of The Sarah Jane Adventures saw a Vault of Secrets on tv last autumn but I think this cache (hidden beneath the Angel of the North) is a call back to the Missing Adventures books of the 90s, particularly The Scales of Injustice, which introduced Department C19 who tidy up what Sylvester McCoy would call "Zzzzzzenotech"( essentially functioning as a kind of prototype Torchwood -more about them later!)
Aside from fan-pleasing references to Terror of the Autons, The Seeds of Doom and the audio The Crimes of Thomas Brewster, the USP of this disc is a cast composed of former companions, primarily Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, Grace and Chang Lee from the TV Movie, recast as UNIT operatives. Yet again, the almost ageless energy of Peter Purves drives this audio but Katy Manning's Jo Grant also amazes, channeling all the character's kooky charm and innocence from forty years ago. Wendy Padbury's Zoe sounds bright and spirited but doesn't mask her maturity as succesfully as Katy. Unfortunately, Mary Tamm's Romana is only a cameo part. As they uncover the Doctor's involvement in the stories behind the  vault's artefacts, the UNIT characters really grated on me. They sound so American: professional and upbeat but bland and lacking personality. Fundamentally, there's nothing real about them. Their dialogue is delivered with the robotic chirpiness of Wal-Mart employees.

Last week, I got around to re-reading the re-issue of 1975's Doctor Who and the Cybermen, the second Patrick Troughton story to be novelised in the Target range. For me, as an eleven-year-old, it was an arresting  glimpse into a televisual world I had never seen  and never imagined I would. I had encountered Ben and Polly in the 1967 Annual and in the pages of the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special. But this was the first time I would read their dialogue ( and disdain Jamie the Highlander, who sounded to my mind like a Sassenach parody.) Twenty years later, give or take, I would actually be able to watch the two surviving episodes on video (The Cybermen Years) and nearly thirty-five years later, I would discover that Jamie sounds exactly like someone from Culloden, Lanarkshire prejudices aside.
The story is a little dull and largely a rewrite of The Tenth Planet. The international personnel of the base are national stereotypes like the Blackhawks and yet fairly indistinguishable. But in Davis's book the Tardis crew are inventive and plucky and the Cybermen, bizarre and somewhat silly in the tv episodes ("Zzzstupid Earth Brainzzz-ah!") are shadowy and sinister.

Finally, a word on Torchwood. It's all gone a bit Da Vinci Code as The Families step out of the shadows. It's logical that Jack the immortal is finally at the centre of the story. But  I couldn't tell if it was just inadequacy on Barrowman's part that rendered the Captain an unlikeable mess of passivity, flippancy and smugness. Then it all went Star Trek Franchise as Major Kira from Deep Space 9 was blown up by a human bomb and Q from Next Generation turned up as a caricature CIA boss, the Melodramatic Hard-Ass. Equally, I found the scene where Pullman's Oswald Danes goes all David Lynch in a hotel room cringingly awful. Miracle Day has never felt real in the way that Children of Earth sometimes did, possibly because- as in Tales from the Vault- the US characters seems like television stereotypes, sketched out with a few signifiers. I also think the story could have been told in six episodes. I don't hate it but I don't enjoy it all that much either.

Next: Mars or Bust

1. p.77, Supergods by Grant Morrison, Jonathan Cape, 2011
The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respective owners.