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armageddon-generation · 5 years ago

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The Big Moffat Rewrite: Series 7

Following on from my Series 5 and my Series 6 rewrites

XMAS SPECIAL The Snowmen

The Bells of Saint John

The Rings of Akhaten

Cold War

A Town Called Mercy

The Slow Invasion

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Asylum of the Cybermen

Nightmare in Silver

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

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Supremacy of the Daleks

Extermination of the Daleks

The Name of the Doctor

The Snowmen

· 11 is still a recluse in Victorian London, but because in my Series 6 he left the Ponds instead of losing them, it’s because he’s convinced he’ll screw up if he travels again. After wiping himself from history he’s lying low, not helping because he’s convinced he’ll make things worse

· (also he’s totally wallowing in self-pity because of his self-imposed exile from the Ponds)

· Clara re-convinces him he can make positive change, drags him out of his self-absorption, shows him something new

CLARA’s CHARACTER

· Clara gets all of series 7. Moffat originally wanted The Time of the Doctor to be a whole series, so we can fit some of that stuff about the Silence and Trenzalore in here.

· GIVE CLARA A FUCKING ARC – the Doctor takes an ordinary girl who he thinks is special, and accidentally makes her special

· Most people seem to prefer Victorian! Clara to her in S7B anyway, so she becomes that flirty, authoritative character by the finale

· The pieces were already there – her being scared in Cold War compared to her taking charge in Nightmare in Silver, but make it explicit – the Doctor realises he is changing Clara and turning her into the person he met in Victorian London and the Cyberman Asylum

· This sets up her arcs and relationship with 12 – he brings out the liar in her, forces her to become cold and calculating. This is now already happening with 11

The Rings of Akhaten

· Introduce Trisha Lem, the head of the Church of the Silence, here. The best part of this episode is The Speech, but we could easily say that the Silence is presiding over the Long Song ceremony to appease the Old God, taking the place of those creatures hunting the little girl.

· (I imagine the Church pre-Trenzalore as a kind of Shadow Proclamation for religion - presiding over and safeguarding the religious traditions of species across the universe)

· This way Trisha and the Silence’s role as confessionals doesn’t come out of nowhere in The Time of the Doctor

· 11 and Trisha’s relationship being so flirty confuses me - as the head of the Church, 11 must associate her with all the pain the Silence caused River and the Ponds. Instead, he acts really flirty but Clara notices he’s faking it – a reflection of their own relationship?

· Trisha doesn’t understand why 11 is being elusive.

A Town Called Mercy

· Use this story’s framework – a Western where 11 is forced to protect war criminal – and insert River

· Partly bc River and Clara interacting seems super interesting

· River is angry at 11 for ‘replacing’ the Ponds. I also think she’d be competitive with Clara? As she’s scattered all over the Doctor’s timestream, Clara is the only person who really could compete with her

· As an archaeologist expert on the Doctor River knows about Clara, but can’t tell 11 exactly what she is

· Also 11 agreeing with River’s more violent methodology is really interesting and shows how they can feed into each other’s dark sides – think River’s line from The Angels Take Manhattan – “One psychopath per TARDIS, don’t you think?”

The Slow Invasion

· A version of The Power of Three told from the perspective of the Alice character who replaced Craig in S5/6. 11 pops in and out of her life with different versions of Clara

· It’s revealed that 11 has tried to travel with different versions of Clara before, tracking her down all across the universe, but she always, always dies. Our Clara doesn’t know.

· Alice is deeply critical of what 11 is doing. She acts almost as his therapist; he comes over for tea and talks to her about what’s going on.

· Instead of the cubes being alien exterminators, this is a plot buy the Great Intelligence (series 7′s big bad) inspired by the Skith from DWM comic The First and Superman villain Brainiac – i.e. the Intelligence is collecting all information it can about a thing, and then destroys it to stop that knowledge becoming commonplace and therefore losing its value. Specifically, the Intelligence is also investigating Clara (because she keeps appearing across its timeline). The Intelligence’s fascination is a dark parallel to 11’s

· Alice asks 11 what happened to the Ponds, and he reveals they still think he’s dead. Alice tells 11 to go see them (the ending scenes of The Doctor, the Widow and The Wardrobe). She also tells him to start treating Clara like a real person, not a human question mark

· 11 takes Clara to meet them. River is also there, having dinner. The episode closes with them reconnecting

Pond Life

· After The Slow Invasion launch this minisode series about life post-11, with River barging in instead of the Doctor

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

· Tie the TARDIS disliking Clara into the series arc – it’s because the TARDIS knows Clara is an anomaly scattered through the Doctor’s timestream. Have a scene in Journey To the Centre of the TARDIS where 11 argues with the TARDIS about it – “Do you know what she is? You do, don’t you? I miss the time when you could talk and just tell me.”

· The TARDIS went to the end of the universe to throw Jack Harkness off, and 11 abandoned Future!Amy in The Girl Who Waited because the TARDIS hates paradoxes – this is the same kind of thing, just make it clear by the finale (Clara even jumps into the time stream INSIDE the TARDIS)

· Clara remembers the events of the episode so she can be be active in the investigation of who she is, (also fixing how the episode undoes the three brothers’ arcs, but still insists they grew as people at the end)

This represents 11 opening up to her and trusting her more

Asylum of the Daleks (retitled Asylum of the Cybermen)

Roll Nightmare in Silver and Asylum into a 2-parter, because the best part of Nightmare is Mister Clever. Both episodes even have the same ‘someone’s about to destroy the planet’ ticking time bomb.

The army fighting the Cybermen kidnap 11 to get him to destroy the Asylum with a bunch of expendable grunts they can afford to lose to a suicide mission.· Clara meeting/interacting with another version of herself is really interesting, so we keep converted Oswin saving them·

Changing it to Asylum of the Cybermen makes more sense thematically

All those people, including Oswin, being converted – the Asylum’s security system is its conversion machinery – attackers become part of the security system. Instead of a nano-cloud, use the tiny upgraded Cybermats·

It would also be scarier (a haunted hospital a la World Enough and Time- botched cybermen > insane Daleks) and would add an interesting layer to Cyberman lore instead of making the Daleks look weak. It can also use old models to explain the Cybermen’s multiple backstories, touched on in The Doctor Falls (”everywhere there’s people, there’s cybermen,” 12 says)·

The ‘subtracting love’ thing makes more sense with cybermen too – instead of Amy and Rory, focus on Clara holding onto her connection with 11 – emphasising their genuine, emotion-based bond over ‘flirty quirky plot device’·

This renewed focus on the Cybermen is good because the last full-on Cyberman story was in Series 2 (in The Next Doctor they’re just kind of in the background), and Moffat is much better at writing the body-horror of the Cybermen than he is writing the Daleks.

Nightmare in Silver

· 11 deliberately lets himself be ‘infected’ by the asylum’s nanocloud and begins conversion in attempt to save the converted Oswin’s mind.

· Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the origin of Handles, the Cyberman head from The Time of The Doctor: the remains of Oswin’s cyber-converted mind downloaded into a head.

· 11 uses Mr Clever to get information about her - i.e. that she just appeared one day as a fully-formed person without any family. This sets up the other Claras being time remnants.

· It also lets Mr Clever play more psychological games with 11 and Clara – Mr Clever reveals 11 is scared of Clara, putting more strain on Clara having to hold on to her emotional attatchments

· The Cybermen are actively trying to get out. This way we dig into their primary drive – survival at all costs,

· What happens when a Cyberman’s emotional inhibitor is broken, but they don’t die? Driven insane and desperate, and fiercely intelligent.

· I like the idea of the Cybermen like the Xenomorph in Alien; blending in with thoier broken down, mechanical environment, plugging into it and using to separate and play games with the soldiers.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

· Replace The Crimson Horror with a version of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with the Paternoster Gang replacing Brian, the Ponds, Nefertiti and that hunter bloke

· I just really need to see Vastra interacting with her culture OK? Seeing her be taken back to her childhood, opening up to Jenny about it. Her anger, realising what the villain Solomon has done to her people. Use this conflict to call back to and explain how she met the Doctor, how he stopped her slaughtering humans before.

· Clara and 11 go to the Paternoster Gang for help investigating her other selves

· Clara researches and finds her past selves, not only in Victorian London but also throughout the 60s and 70s, when she’s helping the past Doctors – finding this research is how the kids find out she’s a time traveller

· This is how THE DOCTOR REALISES HE’S SEEN HER MANY TIMES BEFORE, setting up The Name of the Doctor’s out-of-nowhere, un-guessable resolution.

· Dark!11 again. Matt saoid they would’ve explored a ‘meaneer’ version if he’d stayed on for series 8. Clara is the perfect way to bring that out as they lie and manipulate each other for their own ends.

DALEK CIVIL WAR STORY

· Progenitor Daleks vs the regular Time War model. Display how the Progenitor Daleks are different - each of them having a different weapon/role etc. The crux of the story is that the Progenitor Daleks are better at fighting the Doctor and come close to killing him, but the other Daleks value their ‘purity’ and survival more

· Maximum Dark!11

The Name of the Doctor

· When 11 rescues Clara she is changed – she retains bits and pieces of her time remnants’ experiences, it’s at once traumatising and exhilarating

The Time of the Doctor

· Whereas The End of Time felt stretched-out (135 minutes) this felt really rushed. Make it 2 parts.

· We see the set-up of Trenzalore and the Church of Silence in the first.

· The second part is the long siege of Trenzalore – we need to see 11 age fighting these monsters, taking his turn being left behind, the tragedy of him slowly losing his memory, focusing on his character

· We can also flesh out the citizens of Trenzalore and Christmas so their safety is important to us

· Let’s see Madame Kovarian and her splinter cell break off from the main Church of Silence and leave to try and kill the Doctor – make her a supporting character

· Then have Trisha Lem explicitly talk to the Doctor about how Kovarian blowing up the TARDIS caused the cracks in the universe in the first place, allowing the Time Lords to get their message out. Instead of a montage, have this be the moment that unites the Doctor and the Silence – they are both fighting to make up for their mistakes and the problems they caused

· We see the many races surrounding Trenzalore form the alliance from The Pandorica Opens

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celestial-depths · 5 years ago

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Dracula (2020)

(spoilers) I’m kinda sad that I didn’t watch this one with one with a bingo chart or a drinking game. Even with all of its plot mutations and character updates, Netflix’s Dracula (2020) is pretty much exactly what I expected from a Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat take on the classic source material: a self-congratulatory, over-produced adaptation obsessed with its own “cleverness” and with its overbearing main character, sprinkled with juuuust enough moments of genuine innovation to make it really sting when it all amounts to a big dud. If you have seen Jekyll, Sherlock, and the worst of Moffat’s Doctor Who episodes, you know exactly what I mean. If you don’t, I refer you to this entertaining and ridiculously long video essay (that absolutely merits every second of its 1 h 49 min runtime) by YouTuber hbomberguy: https://youtu.be/LkoGBOs5ecM; even though I don’t completely agree with all of his points, he does make a strong, multifaceted argument on why, despite his admitted talent, Moffat’s writing usually ends up sucking hard. Anyway. I think the first episode of the three-part Dracula series does make some kind of case for itself. It sets a distinctive mood, includes some pretty solid performances, tells a coherent story, and introduces some truly impressive and creepy horror imagery. I also enjoyed the inclusion of Sister Agatha - even though her being revealed as the Van Helsing of this version is definitely one of those Gatiss & Moffat moments that the writers thought would be much more of oooooh moment than it actually ended up being - who did serve as a formidable opponent for Dracula for the first two episodes. As I said, Moffat tends to anchor his stories to an overbearing lead around whom all other characters revolve, and while that’s is definitely the case here as well, Sister Agatha does stir up the dynamics by refusing to dance to his tune. Still, the writing is also riddled with the usual Moffat plagues, which stay mostly at bay in episode 1 but end up becoming more of an issue in the second episode. The second episode, which fully takes place on the doomed ship Demeter’s journey to Britain (which I believe has been the subject of a horror film script that has been stuck in Hollywood’s development hell for years and years - I wonder if it’ll ever get made now that the story concept was basically executed here?), is overlong, and it’s weighed down by an unnecessary framing device that develops into an unsurprising plot twist, and by the general lack of interest in creating emotional investment in any other character besides the two leads. Just like the ship, the story drifts in the fog for ages but almost makes it to shore in one piece, only to be sunken down by the most stupid thing I’ve watched in a very long time: episode three. Yikes. I do my best to give credit when credit is due and point of the merits of things I overall disliked, but I honestly can’t say that there was anything in the finale that I liked. It’s a mess, and not even a hot one. It’s more like they dug up the long-dead remains of Jekyll, carved out the most awful bits, reheated them, and then left them out to cool down again. I could go on and point out every little thing I found exasperating about the episode, from the regrettable time jump to the lack of thematic focus, to Van Helsing going on and on about the “illogical” nature of Dracula’s weaknesses like it’s remotely interesting, to the clumsy narrative structure that picks up and abandons plot threads like it’s an indecisive customer in a thrift shop, to Zoe Van Helsing becoming just another addition to Moffat’s long line of seemingly “strong” female characters who are rendered basically powerless by the overwhelming charms of the male lead, and all the way to what must be my least favourite horror trope - a paramilitary, pseudo-scientific secret organization set on capturing and studying monsters (seriously, can we please retire this unexciting trope that has never once improved any horror property?) - but for now I’m only going to address the one that made me groan the hardest: Lucy. If you are at all familiar with the novel or any of its numerous adaptations, you might also be aware of the conversation around Lucy and Mina, the novel’s two female characters who both embody Victorian ideas about women and sexuality. A popular reading is that Lucy, the flirty little minx with various suitors who ends up being seduced and corrupted by Dracula, is the whore to Mina’s virgin, which reflects the narrow, black-and-white, judgmental attitudes towards women who stray from the Victorian ideal of the virtuous, demure woman with no appetite for sex or male attention outside marriage. In that sense, the 2020 incarnation of Lucy is a faithful adaptation of the character from the book. And that’s precisely the problem! Just because Bram Stoker’s book is sexist, it doesn’t mean that this version should be that as well. But it is, and oh god I hate it so much. Gatiss & Moffat’s Lucy is a glittery, uncaring thot who takes selfies and DMs strange men, because of course she is; shaming young women for liking sex, being beautiful, and enjoying attention is exactly the sort of thing men who cannot relate to women do when they’re trying to be insightful. And as if that wasn’t enough, they also give Lucy “depth” by making her resent her beauty in some way that remains woefully unexplored, because heaven forbid pretty girls should have any thoughts inside their head that aren’t directly related to being pretty. Even the shallow, dark edge they give to the character fails to bring her any sense of complexity and humanity, and she ends up being just a beautiful creature for men to gaze at in both adoration and condemnation. A beautiful creature who must ultimately be cruelly punished for the sin of being lovely and untameable. How’s that for some Victorian bullshit? More than anything, Dracula reads like a revue of Gatiss & Moffat’s (particularly Moffat’s) greatest and most recurring grievances as writers: a self-defeating attempt at outwitting the audience with “surprising” plot twists hammered awkwardly into the story at the cost of anything that might have made it good, ambitious world-building ideas left to die as soon as they’ve been introduced, an overreliance on a scene-chewing, dickish male lead character who’s supposed to be bad but, like, in a fuckable way, pointless queer-baiting that is guaranteed to elicit frustrated screams from certain parts of the internet, and terribly written female characters with inner worlds conceived by a middle-aged man who is evidently unable to imagine a woman whose every thought isn’t motivated by uncontrollable lust for aforementioned dickish male lead. Jesus.

#dracula

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green-violin-bow · 7 years ago

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Hawksmoor, BBC Sherlock and historiographic metafiction

First:

This piece is not of academic quality or rigour. I left university eight years ago; I studied literature in two languages and did well at it. Nevertheless I am no longer in academia and have not written an essay since then. My sources are partial, dependent on what I can get access to through my local library, through academic friends, or what I choose to pay for on JSTOR. I work full-time and have put no time into e.g. referencing (always my least favourite part of essays).

Although I personally hold out hope for unambiguous Johnlock still, I would not class this as a ‘meta’ arguing that it will certainly happen. This is a reading, undertaken for my own satisfaction and interest, jumping off from the inclusion of ‘Hawksmoor’ as a password in one scene of The Six Thatchers. I do not particularly mean to suggest that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are deliberately playing with/off literary criticism. They may well be holding two (or more) time periods in tension, however, in a way that I choose to explore through the lens of the literary tools described here. I do not seek to challenge or disprove other fan theories.

I am no television/film studies scholar. There are probably layers and layers of nuance and meaning that I’m missing because I simply have no frame of theoretical reference in that field (and one of the primary ‘texts’ we are talking about here is, after all, a television show). The abundance of television and film references discovered by Sherlock fans have made it clear that the show’s creators deliberately allude to other visual media within modern Sherlock all the time. I believe my approach here is valid because Hawksmoor, a literary text, is pointed to in the show, and because ACD canon itself was a literary text. But I want to flag up this important way in which my analysis is deficient.

I tagged a few people in this but I’m aware this is more of a musing/essay than a traditional ‘meta’ so don’t worry about reading/responding if it’s not your thing!

The Six Thatchers

In The Six Thatchers, Sherlock visits Craig the hacker, to borrow his dog Toby. On the left of our screen (taking up an entire wall of Craig’s house, realistically enough…) are lines of code, in the centre of which is written ‘Hawksmoor17’.

I was interested in finding out more about this. I decided my first port of call would be the ‘detective novel’ Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a historian and author, who has written a huge array of fiction and non-fiction, including:

London: The Biography (non-fiction)

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (non-fiction)

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (an imagining of the diary Oscar Wilde might have written in exile in Paris)

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (novel, presenting the diary of a murderer)

Hawksmoor (novel)

In his work London is present, constantly, a character in itself, woven into the very fabric of the story as irrevocably as it is into the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

Hawksmoor

In brief, Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story, running in two timelines. Each timeline focuses on a main character: in 1711, the London architect Nicholas Dyer; two hundred and fifty years later, in the 1980s, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective, responsible for investigating a series of murders carried out near the churches built by Dyer.

Ackroyd plays with the ‘real history’ of London throughout, muddling and confusing the past with fictional events, with conspiracy and rumour.

There was a real London architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Christopher Wren in eighteenth-century London to design some of its most famous buildings. He also designed six churches. Ackroyd chooses to change the eighteenth-century architect’s name to Nicholas Dyer, and to make Nicholas Hawksmoor the twentieth-century fictional detective instead – a deliberate muddling together of timelines and of ‘facts’.

Ackroyd had drawn inspiration for Hawksmoor from Iain Sinclair’s poem, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches’ (Lud Heat, 1975). This poem suggests that the architectural design of Hawksmoor’s churches is consistent with him having been a Satanist.

As well as changing the historical figure Hawksmoor’s last name to Dyer, Ackroyd adds a church, ‘Little St Hugh’. Seven, in total.

The architect Dyer writes his own story, in the first person and in eighteenth-century style.

Only in Part Two of the novel does Nicholas Hawksmoor – a fictional detective with a real man’s name – appear, to investigate the three murders that have so far happened in 1980s London. Written in the third person, the reader is nonetheless invited into Hawksmoor’s thoughts, his point of view.

As the novel proceeds, Ackroyd employs literary devices so that the stories – separated, apparently, by so much time – begin to blur. In particular, the architect Dyer and the detective Hawksmoor are linked. For instance, both men experience a kind of loss of self, a “dislocation of identity”, upon staring into a convex mirror (Ahearn, 2000, DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-2000-1001).

The cumulative effect of all the parallels is that the reader starts to lose any sense of temporal separation between the time periods; starts to see Dyer and Hawksmoor as almost the same person; to suspect each of them of being the murderer and the detective at the same time. The parallels between the time periods “escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present” so that “fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is […] inflicted on the reader” (Ahearn, 2000).

Importantly, I believe, Hawksmoor again and again “tries to reconstruct the timing of the crimes, but this is from the start impossible” (Ahearn, 2000). This is a rather familiar feeling to Sherlock Holmes fans.

At the end of the book, Dyer and Hawksmoor come together in the church, take hands across time, or perhaps out of time. They become aware of one another. Their perspectives dissolve and seem to merge into one person, into a new style of narration not like either of them: “when he put out his hand and touched him he shuddered. But do not say that he touched him, say that they touched him. And when they looked at the space between them, they wept” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Historiographic metafiction

Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story. It has been classified by critics as a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’. As a detective story, it lacks the most familiar feature – a detective who is able to sort and order the events and facts, before finally drawing together all the threads to present a coherent, satisfying and plot-hole-free conclusion. In other words, a solution to the mystery.

So what is ‘metafiction’? Waugh defines it as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984).

In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd uses a popular literary form (the detective story) to unsettle our understanding of fiction, reality and history. An Agatha Christie detective novel (for example) relies on an accepted, understood structure, where the reader has definite expectations of what the outcome will be; as such, Christie’s novels “provide collective pleasure and release of tension through the comforting total affirmation of accepted stereotypes” (Waugh, 1984). In metafiction, however, there is often no traditionally predictable, neat, satisfying ending: accepted stereotypes are disturbed rather than affirmed. The application of rationality and logic to the clues gets the detective no closer to solving the crime. Readerly expectation (“the triumph of justice and the restoration of order” [Waugh, 1984]) is thwarted.

Hutcheon coined the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, fiction where “narrative representation – fictive and historical – comes under […] subversive scrutiny […] by having its historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon, 2002). It is a kind of fiction that explicitly points out the text-dependent nature of what we know as ‘history’: “How do we know the past today? Through its discourses, through its texts – that is, through the traces of its historical events: the archival materials, the documents, the narratives of witnesses…and historians” (Hutcheon, 2002).

Whereas a ‘historical novel’ will present an account of the past which purports to be true, a ‘historiographic metafiction’ has a combination of:

deliberate, self-reflexive foregrounding of the difficulty of telling ‘the whole story’ or ‘the whole truth’ especially due to the limitations of the narrative voice;

internal metadiscourse about language revealing the fictional nature of the text;

an attempt to explain the present by way of the past, simultaneously giving a (partial) account of both;

disturbed chronology in the narrative structure, representing the determining presence of the past in the present;

‘connection’ of the historical period structurally to the novel’s present;

a self-consciously incomplete and provisional account of ‘what really happened’ e.g. via ‘holes’ in the [hi]story which cannot be resolved by either narrator or reader (Widdowson, 2006, DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984).

The above points are certainly true of Hawksmoor. The reader of Sherlock Holmes will find some of them very familiar – for example, Watson’s self-conscious in-world changing of dates, names and places; and the impossible-to-resolve timeline. The audience of BBC Sherlock will also find these features very recognisable, especially from Series 4 of the programme.

I’d like to examine BBC Sherlock itself as a ‘historiographic metafiction’: a ‘text’ which self-consciously holds the past and present fictional events of Sherlock Holmes’ life in tension, not merely as another adaptation of the source text, but as a way of destabilising the accepted ‘[hi]story’ and mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

The Great Game

The Sherlockian fandom is well-known for its practice of ‘The Great Game’:

“Holmesian Speculation (also known as The Sherlockian game, the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the practice of expanding upon the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by imagining a backstory, history, family or other information for Holmes and Watson, often attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' composition to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.” [x]

There are a number of interesting features about the Great Game. It:

pretends that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people;

ignores or explains away the real author Arthur Conan Doyle’s existence;

attempts to use ‘real’ historical facts (texts…) to resolve gaps in a fictional text;

in turn, produces additional (meta)fictional texts, often presented as ‘fact’ in journals set up for the purpose;

in so doing, adds constantly to the (meta)fictional destabilisation of chronology and holes in the story, as different, competing ‘versions’ are added by a multitude of authors.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom, as it attempts to elucidate ‘what really happened’, only destabilises the original (hi)story further – drawing attention, over and over again, to the gaps and inconsistencies in the original canon tales.

I would argue that the Sherlock fandom has been engaged, for over a century, in an act of collective historiographic metafiction.

The writers of BBC Sherlock are aware of themselves as fans, and of the wider Sherlockian fandom. They paid tribute to Holmesian Speculation in the episode title of Series 1 Episode 3. The title – ‘The Great Game’ – is a signal, an early marker of postmodernity in BBC Sherlock, a sign that the Sherlockian fandom will not be absent from this metafiction.

Implicating the reader/audience

There is an interesting moment in Hawksmoor where Detective Chief Superintendent Nicholas Hawksmoor goes to investigate the murder of a young boy near the church of St-George’s-in-the-East. The body is beside “a partly ruined building which had the words M SE M OF still visible above its entrance” (Ackroyd, 1985).

As Lee says, the “missing letter is "U," ("you") the reader” (1990).

Elsewhere in the book, Hawksmoor receives a note instructing him “DON’T FORGET … THE UNIVERSAL ARCHITECT” alongside a “sketch of a man kneeling with a white disc placed against his right eye” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Lee suggests that this drawing refers to “detective fiction’s transcendental signifier” Sherlock Holmes, and that the “Universal Architect, here, can only be the reader, since it is he or she who is in possession of all the histories: the historically verifiable past, the eighteenth-century text and the text accumulated through reading”. Thus, the reader is “doubly implicated not only as a repository of the past, but also as a co-creator of artifact and artifice” (Lee, 1990). In the Sherlock Holmes fandom, this is more true than in almost any other; co-creators indeed.

The missing ‘U’ in Hawksmoor can be clearly linked to the daubed ‘YOU’ in ‘The Abominable Bride’, a sign that, from that point on, BBC Sherlock will be clearly and mercilessly implicating its audience; putting the Sherlockian fandom back in the story, where it has always belonged. This includes the writers and creators of BBC Sherlock.

I also think there is reason to link the ‘YOU’ daubed on the wall to another piece of graffiti in BBC Sherlock – the yellow smiley face in 221b. An all-seeing, ever-present audience within Sherlock and John’s very home.

It is often repeated that Arthur Conan Doyle only continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories out of financial necessity and due to public demand; that he was bored and exasperated by his creation. The Sherlock Holmes fandom is (possibly apocryphally) known as having worn black armbands in the street in mourning for the fictional detective when Conan Doyle attempted to kill him off in The Final Problem.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom has long been considered importunate and unruly. As Stephen Fry puts it in his foreword to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes: “Holmes has been bent and twisted into every genre imaginable and unimaginable: graphic novels, manga, science fiction, time travel, erotica, literary novels, animation, horror stories, comic books, gaming and more. Junior Sherlocks, animal Sherlocks, spoofs called Sheer Luck and Schlock; you think it up, and you’ll find it’s been done before. There is no indignity that has not been heaped upon the sage and super-sleuth of Baker Street” (2017).

And yet, with every new adaptation, there is a tendency to regard it as a blank slate, in direct conversation with the canon of Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a tendency to forget the changes that fandom itself has wrought on the figure of Sherlock Holmes – a weight of stereotype and expectation which warps the character to a pre-fit mould in every incarnation. As Fry says, Holmes:

“rises up, higher and higher with each passing decade, untarnished and unequalled. Because, I suppose, we need him, more and more, a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful. In a world, and in daily lives, so patently devoid of almost all those marvellous qualities, how welcome that is, and how grateful we are, for its presence in our lives. So grateful, that we won’t really accept that Sherlock Holmes could ever be classed as ‘make believe’. Between fact and fiction is a space where legend dwells. It is where Holmes and Watson will always live” (2017).

This is the traditional understanding of Sherlock Holmes and its fandom, and is highly reminiscent of the voiceover by Mary Morstan in Series 4 Episode 3, ‘The Final Problem’: “I know who you really are. A junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war. Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final court of appeal for everyone. When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope. When all else fails, there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they’ve always been there, and they always will. The best and wisest men I have ever known – Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.” [transcript by Ariane Devere]

The conception of Sherlock Holmes as “a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful” shows what we, the reader, want: a traditional detective story, with an all-knowing detective, who uses rationality and logic to assess the clues and brings us smoothly, at last, to a solution which reasserts the order of things; where justice is done and society is made safe once again.

BBC Sherlock, however, resists these comforting fictions. The detective unravels, becoming more emotional, more human as the story progresses. Mysteries go unsolved. The narrator gets more unreliable with every episode. Characters inhabit strange states, seemingly alive or dead as the story demands. The ‘rules’ of traditional detective fiction are flouted left, right and centre.

Viewed as a historiographic metafiction, BBC Sherlock aims to hold up the historical text (ACD canon) against the modern one (BBC Sherlock) in such a way as to slough away a century of extra-canonical fan speculation and addition, and give a new reading to canon.

‘Writing back’: re-visionary fiction

I would now like to look at Peter Widdowson’s journal article, ‘Writing back’: Contemporary re-visionary fiction’ (DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984). He argues that there is a “radically subversive sub-set of contemporary ‘historiographic metafiction’” which, while being “acutely self-conscious about their metafictional intertextuality and dialectical connection with the past”, ‘write back’ to “formative narratives that have been central to the textual construction of dominant historical worldviews”.

Widdowson explains that his term ‘re-visionary’: “deploys a tactical slippage between the verb to revise (from the Latin ‘revisere’: ‘to look at again’) – ‘to examine and correct; to make a new, improved version of; to study anew’; and the verb to re-vision – to see in another light; to re-envision or perceive differently; and thus potentially to recast and re-evaluate (‘the original’)” (2006). He points out that this is closest to Rich’s approach to feminist criticism: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (Rich, 1975).

This act of ‘knowing it differently’ can also be achieved by “the creative act of ‘re-writing’ past fictional texts in order to defamiliarize them and the ways in which they have been conventionally read within the cultural structures of patriarchal and imperial/colonial dominance” (Widdowson, 2006).

Widdowson lays out what he regards as the defining characteristics of re-visionary fiction, first negatively by what it is not:

Re-visionary fiction does not simply take an earlier work as its source for writing;

It is not simply modern adaptation – instead it challenges the source text;

It is not parody – whereas parody takes a pre-existing work and reveals its particular stylistic traits and ideological premises by exaggerating them in order to render it absurd or to satirise the ‘follies of its time’, a re-visionary work seeks to bring into view “those discourses in [the source text] suppressed or obscured by historically naturalising readings. The contemporary version attempts, as it were, to replace the pre-text with itself, at once to negate the pre-text’s cultural power and to ‘correct’ the way we read it in the present” (Widdowson, 2006).

As to what re-visionary fiction is:

First, it challenges the accepted authority of the original. “[S]uch novels invariably ‘write back’ to canonic texts of the English tradition – those classics that retain a high profile of admiration and popularity in our literary heritage – and re-write them ‘against the grain’ (that is, in defamiliarising, and hence unsettling, ways)”. This means that “a hitherto one-way form of written exchange, where the reader could only passively receive the message handed down by a classic text, has now become a two-way correspondence in which the recipient answers or replies to – even answers back to – the version of things as originally delineated. In other words, it represents a challenge to any writing that purports to be ‘telling things as they really are’, and which has been believed and admired over time for doing exactly that.”

Second, it keeps a constant tension between the source and the new text. A re-visionary fiction will “keep the pre-text in clear view, so that the original is not just the invisible ‘source’ of a new modern version but is a constantly invoked intertext for it and is constantly in dialogue with it: the reader, in other words, is forced at all points to recall how the pre-text had it and how the re-vision reinflects this.”

Third, it enables us to read the source text with new eyes, free of established preconceptions. Re-visionary fictions “not only produce a different, autonomous new work by rewriting the original, but also denaturalise that original by exposing the discourses in it which we no longer see because we have perhaps learnt to read it in restricted and conventional ways. That is, they recast the pre-text as itself a ‘new’ text to be read newly – enabling us to ‘see’ a different one to the one we thought we knew as [Sherlock Holmes] – thus arguably releasing them from one type of reading and repossessing them in another.” The new text ‘speaks’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by very exactly invoking the original and hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

Fourth, it forces the reader to consider the two texts together at all times: “our very consciousness of reading a contemporary version of a past work ensures that such an oscillation takes place, with the reader, as it were, holding the two texts simultaneously in mind. This may cause us to see parallels and contrasts, continuities and discontinuities, between the period of the original text’s production and that of the modern work.”

Fifth, they “alert the reader to the ways past fiction writes its view of things into history, and how unstable such apparently truthful accounts from the past may be”, making clear that the original text, though canon, was also just a text and should not necessarily govern our perceptions and understanding forever.

Sixth, “re-visionary novels almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust. That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts’ complicity in oppression – either as subliminally inscribed within them or as an effect of their place and function as canonic icons in cultural politics – be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies.”

That last point, I think, should also apply to queer re-visionings of source texts (and indeed, Widdowson uses the example of Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation re-visioning Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in his article).

We can view BBC Sherlock as a re-visionary fiction which aims to ‘speak’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by […] hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

BBC Sherlock as re-visionary fiction

Not only does BBC Sherlock have to hold itself up against the original canon of Arthur Conan Doyle; there is also a century of accumulated speculation and creation by an extremely active and resourceful fandom to contend with.

I think that BBC Sherlock asks us to re-vision ACD canon, but has a few sly jabs at the Sherlock Holmes fandom (including the writers themselves) along the way. Let’s look at some concrete examples:

John Watson’s wife:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan has no fixed identity. Her name is taken from a dead baby; she is not originally British; she is an ex-mercenary and killer; she is variously motherly, friendly and threatening; she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? In Series 4, her characterisation is more unstable than ever. She is a romantic heroine, a ruthless killer, a selfless mother, a consummate actress, a wronged woman, a martyr, an ever-present ghost, and the embodiment of John’s conscience. She is also the manifestation of the Sherlock Holmes fandom’s speculation about John Watson’s wife: did he have one wife, or six? Was she an orphan, or was she at her mother’s? When did she die? How did she die?

Ultimately, however, if you hold BBC Sherlock up against ACD canon, it highlights the fact that so many Sherlockians have tried to compensate for: in order to reconcile the irregularities in Mrs Watson’s story as narrated by Watson, she would need to be a secret agent actively hiding her identity. Examining BBC Sherlock against ACD canon makes us apply Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest explanation will always be best. John Watson’s wife was only written into the story because homophobia was so pervasive at the time that ACD was writing that his characters – and by extension he himself – would have been suspected of ‘deviance’ if there had not been a layer of plausible deniability in the shape of a wife.

And there you have it: the central problem of Mary Morstan/Watson, in both ACD canon and BBC Sherlock – she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? Look at ACD canon again. Does Mary Morstan’s engagement to John Watson hurt Sherlock Holmes, to the point that he replies, at the end of SIGN, “For me, …there still remains the cocaine-bottle”? Or does Mary Watson save his life? In the nineteenth century, suspicion of a romance between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson could have meant imprisonment or even hanging; many men suspected or accused of same-sex relationships chose suicide rather than total disgrace. Mary Watson’s presence provides Holmes and Watson with a lifesaving alibi.

Let’s have a look at this against the criteria for a ‘re-visionary fiction’:

Challenges the idea that Watson ‘told things as they really were’ – instead, it introduces the idea that Watson deliberately obscured the facts of his and Holmes’ partnership

Keeps the pre-text Mary Morstan constantly in view – a startling contrast, which rather effectively comments on the position of both women and queer people in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

Enables us to abandon our “restricted and conventional ways” of reading the original – if it makes no sense for Mrs Watson to have existed in ACD canon, then the reader must radically reconsider Holmes and Watson’s relationship; no longer ‘just’ a friendship, but a lifetime’s commitment, as close and loving as a marriage. BBC Sherlock encourages this re-visioning by setting Mary up as a rival to Sherlock; by having her attempt to get rid of him; by highlighting that she both kills and saves him. It re-casts Sherlock Holmes as the dominant romance of John Watson’s life, in every version.

It causes us to see parallels and contrasts between the two time periods: the societal homophobia that made Mrs Watson a necessity in ACD canon has largely gone in modern Britain. But BBC Sherlock hints at a profoundly closeted bisexual John Watson who strives after a ‘normal’ wife who “wasn’t meant to be like that”. The continued presence of a Mrs Watson very effectively shows us that societal attitudes are not as profoundly different as we may think.

BBC Sherlock shows us how the existence of a Mrs Watson has been written not only into the [hi]story of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but into the fabric of society: Sherlock Holmes is a great man, but God forbid he should also be a happy, human man, in a loving relationship with another man. The cultural script has been written: the great figures are either straight, or they are nothing. There is always a wife.

As discussed above, the presence of Mrs Watson is also important politically and culturally. It draws attention to the total lack of agency for nineteenth-century women, and to the restrictive narratives imposed on female characters in today’s culture. It makes terribly clear the extent and dangerousness of the homophobia in nineteenth-century Britain. It highlights the fact that there are still countries today where people are forced to hide their sexualities for fear of being imprisoned or killed.

The Watson baby:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan is revealed to be pregnant on the Watsons’ wedding day. In ACD canon, Watson never mentions a child from his marriage. In Holmesian speculation, plenty of children have been suggested for Watson, especially since it is often posited that he must have had more than one marriage (that Watson might be infertile is not something the proponents of the ‘Three Continents Watson’ school of thought often like to suggest).

As a re-visionary fiction, then, BBC Sherlock forces us to examine the source text: in a time when reliable contraceptive methods were virtually non-existent, why did John Watson and his wife never have a child?

The options, broadly, are:

Mrs Watson was infertile (if Watson only had one wife)

Watson was infertile (if he had more than one wife)

They didn’t have sex, either due to ignorance (but Watson was a doctor…) or reluctance

Mrs Watson only ‘existed’ because societal homophobia made her a necessity (see above).

John Watson:

In Series 4 of BBC Sherlock, John behaves in an unrecognisable manner: he beats Sherlock bloody, so that his eye is still bloodshot some little time later. This is said to be due to the pain of losing his wife, and the fact that her death is Sherlock’s ‘fault’.

Viewed as re-visionary fiction, as metafiction, BBC Sherlock here satirises the idea of the ‘deutero-Watson’ which has existed since Ronald Knox wrote his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. It also, however, critically examines the fact that, in ACD canon, there are (at least) ‘two Watsons’: one, the narrator, seemingly the most reliable and loyal of fellows, straight (in all senses) and true, good in a fight; and a second, the ‘true’ John Watson behind the narration, the man we discern when we look beyond the surface of the tales. A man who is devoted, above all, to Holmes; prepared to adopt Holmes’ habit of ‘compounding a felony’ to follow the idea of justice as opposed to law; prepared, in fact, to break the law if Holmes thinks it right; prepared to abandon his wife at a moment’s notice, when Holmes calls; prepared to alter all kinds of details in his stories to protect their participants. (Also, presumably, a bit of a joke about the accidental ‘dual personality’ that ACD gave his Watson by naming him James and John on different occasions.)

Looking at ACD canon through the lens of BBC Sherlock, the entirely unreliable nature of Watson as a narrator comes to light, but the enduring feature of his stories – his love for, and loyalty to Holmes – provides the obvious answer to why he should be so unreliable. Watson may be ‘two people’, but he lies, he breaks the law, he abandons his wife and his patients for only one person: Holmes.

Ultimately, the reader understands that they have been lied to, because the truth would have been impossible to tell at the time ACD was writing. Famously, the final story in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, ends with the words, “some day the true story may be told.”

If BBC Sherlock is seen as re-visionary fiction, Series 4 of the programme becomes a representation of the artificiality of the construct that we think of as BBC Sherlock and – viewed through its lens – ACD canon becomes visible as an equally artificial construct, filtered through the writings of an unreliable narrator and governed by the societal and cultural imperatives and prejudices of its time.

Every trick has been employed in Series 4 to highlight its artificiality: lack of coherent structure, temporal uncertainty, incoherent character arcs, introduction of a deus ex machina character, fluctuations of genre, and members of the crew actually appearing on screen. Just as in Hawksmoor, the ‘case’ of Series 4 defies solution. BBC Sherlock and Hawksmoor are both postmodern detective fictions. We have been told that this is ‘a show about a detective, not a detective show’. The form of the show, like the form of the traditional detective novel, leads us to expect a neat, tidy ending, explained carefully by an all-knowing figure of authority. The makers of BBC Sherlock, however, have done everything they can to pantomime a lack of care for, or understanding of, their own show. They have simultaneously inserted themselves into the story (Mark/Mycroft; giving varying accounts of when/how Series 4 was written; lying and saying that they lie) and withdrawn the ‘grand narrative’, the fiction of the omniscient narrator.

Why?

For over a century, ACD canon has been read in the same way: as the most archetypally logical detective story available to us. The fact that the canon is a huge mess of inconsistencies, requiring the collective effort of thousands of people to pick away at, is typically explained by the idea of an omniscient but uncaring storyteller: Arthur Conan Doyle.

This is particularly ironic for a fandom which supposedly wishes to disavow the existence of an author at all.

And yet, the problem is, if you don’t slip into extra-universe speculations on ACD’s attitude to Sherlock Holmes, you have to face head-on the conclusion that Watson is a very, very unreliable narrator indeed.

And you have to face why.

@devoursjohnlock @garkgatiss @221bloodnun @tjlcisthenewsexy @may-shepard

#sherlock meta #hawksmoor #bbc sherlock #acd canon #historiographic metafiction #postmodern detective fiction #hawksmoor17

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goodbysunball · 7 years ago

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Best of 2017

Countering the truly embarrassing news cycle of the past year was the deluge of great new music released upon the world, so much so that I’m leaving a good chunk of more than deserving albums hanging. To simplify everything, this is a compendium of what was played most around here, along with a handful of new-to-me reissues/archival releases.

I skipped doing the rap recap this year because my list was so pathetically brief, and doing so seemed both short-sighted and irrelevant. That being said: Quelle Chris’ Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often was my favorite album, followed by Starlito’s Manifest Destiny and Playboi Carti’s vapid, relentlessly fun album. Goldlink’s “Crew” featuring Brent Faiyaz and Shy Glizzy was my favorite song, like everyone else.

Full list of 30 records below. We’ll do better next year.

12. Mount Trout, Screwy (self-released)

This unassuming, digital-only gem crept up on me as the months turned cold. Scraps of paper with notes written on them are held afloat by spare guitar lines; elsewhere winds whip in and chaos overtakes clarity. Lots of the lyrics sound like half-thoughts that forced themselves out after extended periods of solitude, sometimes peaceful, sometimes anguished. Screwy rewards patient attention without dragging you through the mud - but it’s there, should you need to cool off.

11. Group Doueh & Cheveu, Dakhla Sahara Session (Born Bad)

The intriguing pairing on Dakhla Sahara Session turns out to be one of the best surprises of the year, and easily one of the most listenable. Cheveu’s robotic yet effervescent contributions are immediately recognizable, as are Group Doueh’s swirling guitar lines and sweeping vocals; the two fit in and around each other, explosion welded together into a foundation for a colored smoke tower.

10. Leda, Gitarrmusik III-X (Förlag För Fri Musik)

The two people behind Neutral put out a lot of music this year, most of it well worth hunting down despite its highly limited, premium price barrier. I can’t claim to have heard everything, but by my count the two best were Neutral’s När mini-LP and Leda’s limited-to-100 Gitarrmusik III-X LP. Most of this sounds like King Blood collaborating with Robert Turman, looping machinations mixing with heavily distorted shredding, all of it recorded in a metal-walled bunker. Doesn’t sound like much on paper, but when you arrive at “Gitarrmusik VIII” and “IX,” time just about stops. (If you missed out, “Gitarrmusik I” and “II” are available here.)

9. The Body & Full of Hell, Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light (Thrill Jockey)

The first collaboration between these two heavyweights was a slow grower, both bands clearing the land by seeing how far out they could push their respective versions of extreme metal. Ascending, then, is the sound of the two bands communicating as one. The immediate standout is “Farewell, Man,” exactly what comes to mind when one imagines what kind of song the Body and Full of Hell could write together. But tracks like “Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft,” all free drumming, violently humming noise and sandblasted vocals, hint at a broader, uglier horizon.

8. Bad Breeding, Divide (Iron Lung/La Vida Es Un Mus)

One of the year’s nastier hardcore records, and a reminder that the shitstorm at home extends across the Atlantic, too. The band’s got enough chops to rip through every track here - check out that stuttering riff on “Anamnesis,” and how it comes roaring back after a quick respite - but the best songs close each side. The screaming of “Now what?” that concludes “Leaving” is chilling, and serves as one of the best summations of this mess of a year.

7. The Terminals, Antiseptic (Ba Da Bing)

I’ve been hankerin’ for more Steven Cogle ever since that self-titled Dark Matter LP, and if that’s one of your favorite records of recent yore like it is mine, you oughta get your mitts on Antiseptic. The long-running band is absent Brian Crook, but he is ably replaced by Nicole Moffat, who also appeared on Dark Matter; her violin seeps into the empty pores, creating a dense, beautiful atmosphere ripe for Cogle’s powerful vocals. The deal’s done by the time “Edge of the Night” hits.

6. Taiwan Housing Project, Veblen Death Mask (Kill Rock Stars)

Wrecking crew led by Kilynn Lunsford and Mark Feehan brings the heat, here as two parts of a six-piece ensemble. The ten tracks on here range from caustic to catchy (”Eat or Be Eat” into “Luminous Oblong Blur” for the former, “Multidimensional Spectrum” for the latter), accentuated by sax blurts and ever-present static grime. If that ain’t enough, lyrics acidic enough to melt bone make Veblen Death Mask a complete meal worth droolin’ over.

5. Sida, s/t (Population)

The Theoreme LP that came out last year turned into one of my favorites this year, syrupy-thick industrial body music from one Maissa D. She fronts Sida, and she turns in the vocal performance of the year on their first LP. She seemed more restrained as Theoreme but that’s all out the window here; "Qu'Est-Ce Qui T'As Pris?” ups the ante and things don’t slow down from there. The band, for their part, turn in a burly and caustic punk/no wave hybrid that does all it can to keep up. An aural steamroller.

4. Omni, Multi-task (Trouble In Mind)

It was a real mistake to not include Omni’s deceptively catchy debut Deluxe on my year-end list last year, so when they came back and made an even better record, credit is due. Not sure how Frankie Broyles doesn’t sprain his wrist or let melodies go off the rails, but his snappy drumming and spindly guitar work are the stars of the show. The lyrics slyly present a general malaise with modern romance, and when it all clicks, like on “Supermoon” into “Date Night,” strap in.

3. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys, Rot (R.I.P. Society/What’s Your Rupture?)

Ready for Boredom was a great album full of weary-headed anthems, and it looks like growin’ up hasn’t come any easier for these bedwetters on Rot. The Boys left their glam rock tendencies (i.e., “Sally”) behind this time, and they stick to making gruff pop songs for people whose weeks slip by uneventfully more and more frequently. Songs like “Plastic Tears” and “Device” are urgent and unbelievably catchy, and whoever did the vocals on “Work Again” needs more time at the mic. The Replacements are still a good reference point for these guys, but after two rock-solid albums, it’s time they get to shed that flattering-yet-overbearing label and lay claim to this sound that they’ve perfected.

2. Dreamdecay, YÚ (Iron Lung)

Man, Dreamdecay are so good. They’ve softened the edges from N V N V N V but they’re even more potent this time around, figuring out how to include big slow-moving guitar riffs in a nominally punk framework. Songs like “Mirror” just about leave you on the floor with the guitar theatrics, while “IAN” is a one-way ticket to the stratosphere. All of it sounds incredible, and I think Andrew Earles said it best, so I’ll let him do the honors: “YÚ could easily rearrange how someone thinks about music… in that unforgettable way that stays with the experiencer forever.”

1. Aaron Dilloway, The Gag File (Dais)

What more can I say about The Gag File? I have gushed. Not only a complete statement of an album, but one of the only records to force a localized shutdown when it’s on, keeping everything else at arm’s length. A world unto its own. Clear the cobwebs out.

7″/12″

Anxiety, Wild Life 7″ (La Vida Es Un Mus)

There’s a good bit of cornball humor present in Anxiety’s lyrics and credited band member names, the sort of thing that has persisted/pervaded a lot of modern punk and hardcore. But these guys sell it, and more: with better (read: less juvenile) lyrics, sly and self-deprecating; a monster vocal performance (”Dumped” especially); and a blistering intensity that oughta put their peers on notice.

Bent, Mattress Springs 7″ (Emotional Response)

Bent’s been on my radar since their Non Soon tape, and this year they dropped the Snakes & Shapes LP, every bit the shifting, shambling and at times annoyingly silly experience Non Soon prepped me for. The Mattress Springs 7″ came soon after, and compressed all the best parts of the LP (including “Mattress Springs”) into several minutes of leaky roof drums, hypnotic bass lines and smothered, frantic guitar parts.

Crack Cloud, Anchoring Point 7″ (Good Person)

Whereas Bent are happy to let their songs droop and flow, Crack Cloud come across as almost militaristic in their approach. Perfectly rehearsed, not a hair out of place, and yet as urgent as anything released under the banner of post-punk in the past however-many-years. The first three jagged and dense tracks whip in and cut out, just in time but somehow just too soon; “Philosopher’s Calling” is the payoff.

Hothead, Richie Records Summer Singles Series 7″ (Richie)

The Richie Records Summer Singles Series once again distinguished itself in a household where 7″s aren’t really given the time of day. Sure, Writhing Squares Too breathed life into krautrock in 2017, and David Nance’s "Amethyst” is kingdom come on the right day, but Hothead? Their shambling take on two covers (and a quick sketch) netted them the gold.

Mordecai, What Is Art? 7″ (Sophomore Lounge)

Mordecai is one of America’s great treasures, ain’t no way around it. Their Abstract Recipe LP on Richie from this year is great, reclaiming the highs of Neil’s Generator while pushing further from their influences - but the two disparate sides of this 7″ compress everything great about the band into a tidy package. The A-side rambles out of the gate in the same way Abstract Recipe does, whereas the B-side goes all Don Howland: low fidelity, downtrodden but toe-tapping. Buy everything they’ve recorded.

Mutual Jerk, s/t 7″ (State Laughter)

“He’s really a nice guyyy” begins the A-side track “He’s Harmless,” and hoo boy you better sit down for this one, because that bass line is not quitting anytime soon. Feeble excuses pile up, a disinterested defense of a friend presented with a mocking snarl until the constant pummel causes the dam to burst. The flip cynically covers comfortable suburban lifestyles and macho hardcore, two new takes on No Trend's vast influence, but not quite reaching the impossible heights of song-of-the-year “He’s Harmless.”

Neutral, När 12″ (Omlott)

Neutral’s self-titled LP quickly turned into a favorite here in the early months of 2017. The duo kept busy all year, eventually releasing this mini-LP that favors electronics over guitars. The brittle backbone is the perfect support for Sofie Herner’s fragile yet mechanical vocals, a fitting soundtrack for a walk home so cold your eyelashes freeze. Shadow music that lacks a distinct time or place but leaves a flood of sensory overload in its wake.

Scorpion Violente, The Stalker 12″ (Bruit Direct Disques)

“The Wound”’s slow ooze remains one of my favorite musical moments of the year; there’s a reason it’s the only one you can’t stream via Bandcamp. Pay up, because if any modern label deserves your money, it’s Bruit Direct Disques.

The Shifters, “A Believer” b/w “Contrast of Form” (Market Square)

Brilliant little single of downer pop from the Shifters, whose self-titled cassette gained them a lot of Fall comparisons and was previously mined for a 7″ by It Takes Two. But it looks like they’ve got ambitions beyond the record nerd cadre: both songs are immediately satisfying without imparting a sticky sweetness - who can find fault with that?

Straightjacket Nation, s/t 12″ (La Vida Es Un Mus)

This is the punk record of the year for me, one that maybe got lost in the deluge of releases from La Vida Es Un Mus. If you wanna learn about effective vocal delivery in hardcore, please see “2021.” Eight tracks, all meat. Please tour the US.

Reissue/Archival

I don’t really feel too qualified to comment on music largely made before I was born, especially since I am the owner of several 2017 reissues with flowery press kits that I will probably never listen to again. But if you’re gonna be a sucker, let a sucker clue you in to these tried-and-true slabs deserving of any and all accolades. Unrepresented here, somewhat criminally, is the Black Editions, a label doing really amazing work reviving the P.S.F. catalog.

The And Band / Perfect Strangers, Noli Me Tangere split 7″ (Look Plastic/Noisyland)

Noli Me Tangere is two sides of barely-music from early ‘80s Christchurch, with this new edition featuring extensive liner notes from George Henderson, he of the And Band (and perhaps more recognizably, the Spies and the Puddle). Both sides showcase a coupla outcasted NZ bands supporting each others’ avant-scrawl, as inspirational as it is baffling.

Byron Morris & Gerald Wise, Unity LP (Eremite)

Freedom music, full of raw intensity (”Byard Lancaster did push-ups when not playing”) and fiery exchanges. The two sidelong pieces are demanding of your full attention, repaid in kind with chills so deep you’ll swear a spirit passed through ya.

Cosey Fanni Tutti, Time to Tell LP (Conspiracy International)

Gorgeous reissue with a foil-stamped gatefold and a huge booklet full of ephemera from the recording period. Less Throbbing Gristle menace than new age shimmer, especially on the B-side; the gentle ascent is the natural conclusion once you’ve lived through the stunning title track. Cosey, take me away.

Die Tödliche Doris, “ “ LP (États-Unis)

Brutally minimalistic post-punk from early ‘80s Germany, painstakingly restored by the Superior Viaduct sub-label États-Unis. The A-side is full of blistering, manic bursts; the flip smoothes things out, allowing ideas to stick around, proving this approach works in both short- and long-form. Call it ZNR meets DNA.

Harry Pussy, A Real New England Fuck Up LP (Palilalia)

Two live sets, one on each side, both monstrous and in shockingly high fidelity, especially given the circumstances detailed by Tom Lax and Tom Carter on the sleeve. The show from T.T. the Bear’s is the performance I always want (”Harry Pussy took the stage and sandblasted the night into oblivion”) and rarely get.

Khan Jamal Creative Art Ensemble, Drum Dance to the Motherland LP (Eremite)

Capping off a brilliant year for Eremite was a beautiful reissue of Drum Dance to the Motherland’s cosmic transmission. All of the hyperbolic reviews ring true when “Inner Peace” stumbles into a groove, but my favorite part is the almost painfully shrill horns on the title track.

Meat Thump, “Metal Gun” b/w “Left to Rust” 7″ (Coward Punch)

Coward Punch Records kept the memory of Brendon Annesley alive with a couple of archival Meat Thump 7″ers this year. The earlier one was good, but didn’t quite hit home; here, “Metal Gun” could be twice its length, and “Left to Rust” rambles down my spine in the same way that still-great “Box of Wine” 7″ does.

V/A, Oz Waves LP (Efficient Space)

I did not have more fun this year than when I was dancing along to this record like a poorly operated marionette, which was every time “Will I Dream?” started. Efficient Space continues to deliver the goods I didn’t know I needed.

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the-desolated-quill · 7 years ago

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The Name Of The Doctor - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I remember at the time there was a lot of panic within the fandom. The Name Of The Doctor? Oh God! He wouldn’t! Is Moffat actually going to reveal the Doctor’s real name?! Heresy! Sacrilege! The end of Who is nigh!

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I recognise that was just silly. Of course Moffat isn’t brave enough to reveal the Doctor’s real name. He’s stupid enough, but he’s not brave enough. And in some ways that provides a small comfort. While The Name Of The Doctor is without a shadow of a doubt the worst series finale in the whole of New Who, at least the Doctor’s name has been left untouched.

So the Paternoster Gang, Clara and River Song (yes she’s back again. Sigh) meet up via a hallucinogenic trance to discuss the Doctor. Because it’s always about the Doctor isn’t it? And I want you to bear this in mind as we continue.

So some gibbering serial killer has revealed that ‘the Doctor has a secret that he will take to his grave, and it has been discovered.’ This is soon revealed to be yet more of Moffat’s pretentious bollocks because it turns out the grave has been discovered, not the secret. So why didn’t the serial killer just say ‘the Doctor’s grave has been discovered’? And how the fuck does he even know about it anyway? Did the Great Intelligence tell him? Why didn’t the Great Intelligence talk to the Paternoster Gang directly if he wanted to lure the Doctor to Trenzalore?

This leads me to quite possibly the only thing about this episode I actually liked. The Whisper Men. They never give an explanation for where they came from, but I like them. They’re very creepy. At least at first. Unfortunately as the episode goes along, their threat is diminished dramatically because all they ever seem to do is just stand around hissing at people and spouting stupid nursery rhymes. Also they kill off Jenny, which made me sit bolt upright in my seat as I realised that the characters are actually in danger for once, only for Strax to magically bring her back to life with his remote control. So what was the point of that?

So off we go to Trenzalore to visit the tomb of the Doctor. I have several problems with this. For starters, I really don’t want to see the Doctor’s grave. I think in Moffat’s zeal to massage his own ego and pull the rug out from under our feet, he’s now at serious risk of stripping too much of the Doctor’s mystery away. Also I get why the Doctor would be reluctant to find out where he dies, but how can he possibly avoid information like that? He’s travelled to so many places and helped so many people to the point where he’s become one of the most well known people in the universe. He’s in recorded history. Surely he’s bound to come across the date and circumstances of his own death at some point whether he wants to or not. Besides, haven’t we done this already in Series 6? Why are we doing this again? And if the Doctor was always destined to die at Trenzalore, why bother killing him at Lake Silencio? And if him dying at Lake Silencio is a fixed point, how could he possibly die at Trenzalore? This makes no sense.

Still, at least Trenzalore is nice to look at. There’s some gravestones and a giant TARDIS. Then it gets ruined by yet more Moffat idiocy. Who put the River Song grave secret entrance there? They never explain that. And if this is post Library River Song, I’m not 100% sure how she can be taking part in the Paternoster Gang’s ‘conference call.’ Nor how she and Clara can be communicating with each other when it’s been firmly established you need to be unconscious to make the conference call. I certainly don’t get how in God’s name the Doctor is able to talk to her at the end when he hasn’t even had a whiff of hallucinogen. Truth be told, I haven’t the faintest idea why River Song is even in this. She’s basically there to open the tomb because she’s the only person who knows the Doctor’s real name. Moffat’s ego working overtime yet again. It’s funny how Moffat likes to make fun of RTD’s obsession with Rose when his obsession with River is infinitely worse. I mean I wasn’t too fond of Rose neither, but credit where it’s due, at least Rose was a three dimensional character. River is nothing but a Mary Sue who always has to be better than the Doctor at everything and yet displays no actual character or agency of her own. The fact she apparently made the Doctor tell her his name should tell you everything you need to know about Moffat’s mindset as a writer. The Doctor didn’t tell her because he trusted her. She made him. She’s always the one who has to have an advantage over the Doctor, the title character, because she’s Moffat’s special creation and he wants her to be oh so important without putting in the effort to properly justify it. Plus she’s not really that strong or independent because, like every other female character Moffat has ever written, her life still utterly revolves around the male protagonist. At least one silver lining we can draw from this episode is that it looks like River Song might finally be gone for good at last. Thank God.

Then the Great Intelligence shows up, played by Richard E. Grant, to give us his bullshit evil plot. Apparently when the Doctor died, he left a wound in time that stretches right back to when he was on Gallifrey (I don’t get it either. Just go with it), and now the Great Intelligence wants to use this wound to kill the Doctor because of... reasons.

Now if you’re not familiar with the Great Intelligence, I imagine you must have been pretty confused as to why he hates the Doctor so much. And do you know something? As a die hard Whovian who has seen both the new and classic series multiple times, I’m pretty confused too. Seriously Moffat, out of all the villains you could have picked, why the Great Intelligence? For one thing, his prime motivation has always been to try and find a body. He clearly has a body now, so that’s his motivation gone. And second, why does he hate the Doctor so much that he’d be prepared to kill himself in order to unwrite the Doctor’s entire life? I’m not saying the Great Intelligence and the Doctor don’t have history, but compared to the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master or even the Sontarans, the Great Intelligence seems like a really odd choice. Outside of ‘it’s the 50th anniversary’ I honestly don’t get why the Great Intelligence is the baddie. They don’t even give a good reason for what he’s doing. He’s basically doing it just because he’s evil and killing the Doctor would be an evil thing to do, so he’s going to do it I guess. I don’t even understand how the Great Intelligence is able to unwrite the Doctor’s life. He steps through the wound and then just stands there scowling. And how does Clara manage to stop him in the end? She steps through the wound, multiple versions of her appear throughout the Doctor’s life and then... what? It’s all so vague and utterly moronic.

Sigh. I suppose I can’t put this off any longer. I know @prettycanarynoir and @thealmightytwittytwat have been really looking forward to me tearing Clara’s story arc a new arsehole, so here goes.

Clara, the impossible girl, was born to save the Doctor. Now the funny thing is I could see this arc actually working (you know? In an alternate universe where Steven Moffat was a long distance lorry driver rather than a showrunner and someone with an actual brain was writing this episode instead). The problems is, like with a lot of Moffat’s idiotic series arcs, the buildup has been so poor. Outside of the Doctor constantly bellowing how impossible she is, there’s no effort to actually explore this or get Clara involved in her own arc. She never finds out about her alternate selves until the very end and she doesn’t so much choose to sacrifice herself for the Doctor rather than be forced into it by circumstance. Clara has the same problem as River. Moffat is determined to make her better and more important than the Doctor, but he never gives her any real character or agency of her own. Just look at the scene where she makes the decision to jump into the wound. Flinging yourself to your death isn’t exactly something you take lightly, is it? But the way Jenna Coleman performs it, you’d think she was just popping off for half an hour to do a spot of bungie jumping. You don’t feel the emotional weight of her sacrifice whatsoever because there is none. Clara isn’t scared or apprehensive or anything. She’s just her usual smug self. She doesn’t behave like an actual person would, and that’s because Clara isn’t a person at all. She’s a plot device. And to make things even worse, despite establishing that once you jump through the wound, there’s no way back and you’ll be lost forever, Moffat once again changes his own rules so that the Doctor can rescue her, thus making her sacrifice completely meaningless. it’s just utterly dreadful writing.

But the worst thing of all is what this whole Impossible Girl arc ends up doing to the Doctor. I completely resent the implication that the Doctor is utterly ineffectual without a companion to help him. What? Did you think the Doctor got out of those situations using his wits and his brains? Nope. Turns out Clara was the one responsible all along. (And as for the scene where Clara tells the First Doctor which TARDIS to steal, I would like to take this opportunity to tell Moffat to grab something long and spiky and to shove it firmly up his own rancid, self indulgent arse).

Finally I’d like to go back to something I touched upon at the beginning of this review. It’s all about the Doctor. Remember the good old days when the Doctor was just some guy who went on adventures across time and space and helped people out? Now he’s become this ultimate puzzle piece that completes the universe. Whole star systems blink out of existence just because he dies. He’s that special and important now. There have been quite a few times during the Moffat era and indeed this very series where the action has ground to halt in order to talk about just how special the Doctor is. To a certain extent I can understand why Moffat is doing this. It’s the 50th anniversary. Things were bound to get a little nostalgic and no doubt Moffat sees this as a fitting tribute, but the problem is the show is starting to become too insular. Doctor Who was never just about the Doctor. It was about the worlds, cultures and people he met, and we learnt about his character through his interactions with them. By making the Doctor the centre of the fucking universe that everything revolves around, it actually constricts and restrains the rest of the show. That’s what Moffat really can’t seem to understand and it’s this reason, among others, why I have such a low opinion of his work on Doctor Who.

The Name Of The Doctor doesn’t make any sense on any conceivable level. A lot of it just comes across like really bad Doctor Who fanfiction. In fact the majority of Series 7 felt like that. Most of the episodes were badly written, under-developed and/or poorly thought out, and at this point Moffat had become so pretentious and so ego driven that he was actually starting to put a serious dent into the franchise. I honestly can’t think of a worse candidate to write a 50th anniversary special than him. I mean the insulting way he introduced the War Doctor alone was... No. I’ll save that for next time.

#the name of the doctor #steven moffat #doctor who #eleventh doctor #matt smith #clara oswald #jenna coleman #river song #alex kingston #the great intelligence #bbc #review #spoilers

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zugzwanggin-blog · 8 years ago

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Amo, Amas, Amat

OR: WHY MARY ISN’T THE DEVIL YOU GUYS COME ON, MOFTISS WRITES BETTER CHARACTERS THAN THAT, AND JOHN ISN’T A PERFECT HUMAN BEING HE NEEDS TIME TO GRIEVE, THE JOHNLOCK IS CANON AND IT’S COMING

Everyone is so determined to turn Mary into this conniving, evil, backstabbing criminal mastermind whose sole purpose in life is to make John miserable and come as a wedge between him and Sherlock. But she’s...not.

She’s a good fucking character. She was a freelance assassin, a mercenary, part of a team. She’s not Sebastian Moran. There’s still a chance she is somehow connected to Moriarty, but honestly? That isn’t his style. Moriarty was a genuine sociopath--he was so far gone, in fact, that interacting with him was what made Sherlock realize he wasn’t sociopathic after all. Moriarty doesn’t understand the nuances of love and self-sacrifice and sentiment. He sees them, he makes use of them, but he isn’t--wasn’t--the type to manipulate them in such clever and intricate and prescient ways. He arranged terrorist attacks and murders and assassinations, he dealt drugs and arms, he strapped semtex to the only person Sherlock cared about just to bully and frighten him and to empower himself. I’m not saying that arranging three assassins and then shooting himself on a rooftop was his coup d'etat, obviously he’s still got his fingers in a few pies, but Mary wasn’t one of them.

Mary was an assassin whose professional life went to shit. She started over. She met John. John’s a good bloke. John’s a fantastic bloke. John is steady, and clever, and understanding, and loyal, and sardonic. John has been hurt deeply. John does not hurt in retaliation. John absorbs. John cares and comforts. John patches you up, and he doesn’t judge you in the process. John is exactly who she needed. She fell in love with John. And John fell in love with her.

No, I don’t think it’s the same as the way he loves Sherlock. He and Sherlock have been through too much, have bonded too irreparably, have insinuated themselves together too irrevocably for a woman to come between them. (And honestly guys? Using a woman just to come between the two main male characters is such an overused trope, and I really think Moffat and Gatiss are more clever and self-aware than that.) They loved one another. Even Sherlock could see it, could respect it. For the longest time I thought he was just blindly keeping Mary safe in order to protect John and John’s happiness by proxy, but TST showed us otherwise. Sherlock cared for her as well. He called her a friend, he showed baby pictures to his brother, he made that vow and he really, really meant it.

When John found out about AGRA he meant it when he said he was determined to move on. And he tried. He did. But he has trust issues, remember? John has trust issues. These have been built up slowly, added to bit by bit, over a lifetime. I personally believe his mother was his rock, and she is canonically dead. He has trust issues with his sister, who he deems unreliable. I’m sure he has trust issues with his father, who he has never once mentioned. He has trust issues with the military, who kicked him out and now ridicules him for his life choices. He has trust issues with his own body, which betrayed him and his chosen profession--a surgeon who can’t even operate? How pathetic. He has trust issues with Sherlock, who killed himself in front of John and then reappeared. He has trust issues with his wife, who pretended to be a woman she wasn’t, and lied to his face, repeatedly. John has some fucking trust issues, okay? And they’re not minor. He has gone out of his way to be everyone’s rock, they even went out of their way to point it out in TST. But you know what? Rocks are strong, but they’re not shatter-proof. Rocks can still fucking break.

He tried to make it work with Mary, genuinely, but the trust was gone. They co-parented, they cooperated, they co-sleuthed and cohabited and co-everything the way couples do, and it was genuine. They both cared. They both put forth the effort. Neither was pretending. But the trust was gone, for John. Because John has trust issues.

Yes, he looked. A pretty young bird on the bus noticed him, and he looked. And he chatted. And he probably had coffee. Did he sleep with her? Maybe. I really don’t think so, but it’s possible. I think he’d have been a little more hesitant to bring it up if he had. But he thought about it. He was tempted. And John is loyal. The temptation was bad enough for him to want to come clean. I thought it was odd at first, but the more I look back at it the more I understand his point of view. He doesn’t feel completely comfortable in his relationship with Mary anymore. He doesn’t feel completely devoted to her like he might have done if she hadn’t turned out to be, you know, a killer--but also a liar, first of all. And that said, I feel there’s a lot to be said for the fact that there’s a lot of shit between Sherlock and John, but the one thing that isn’t there is lying. Not big things--little things like whether or not Sherlock really is responsible for swapping the milk out with horse semen is on another scale entirely, and John actually appreciates those sorts of deer-in-the-headlights obvious fibs.

When Sherlock finds the second USB, he goes straight to John. Before he confronts Mary, before he does anything else, he takes it to John. And you know what? John was suspicious enough to say “Hey Sherlock, maybe we’d better bug the device in case my wife who I love and trust so much makes off with it and tries to run from us, ‘cause that’s what loving, trusting couples do, that.” And the same thing happened in HLV when Sherlock revealed Mary to John. Sherlock has, I believe, actually learned his lesson when it comes to trusting John--he has not once kept John purposely in the dark just to save him from something, not once since TRF, not once since he returned and learned how badly he’d hurt John by lying to him, even if it was just to keep him safe. And now he’s learned another lesson about humility, much as it pains him--but the most painful lessons are the stickiest, aren’t they? John and Sherlock are tighter than ever. Sherlock has made that final leap off the edge, and now goes to John for everything. It’s John’s turn to do the same.

Does he blame Sherlock for Mary’s death? Of course he does. Sherlock made a vow, and he needs to blame someone. He also blames himself. He blames everyone. Life isn’t fucking fair, and it’s been especially unfair to John. Everything he’s tried to build for himself has been broken. Do you understand that? Review it, and really, really let it sink in for a moment:

He tried to be a doctor, he tried to save people, he went to war for it. He joined the Army. He was deployed to Afghanistan for three years. Then he got shot. In his dominant arm. No more military, they tossed him out like a useless sack of spoiled potatoes, as all militaries are wont to do once you’ve outlived your usefulness to them. No more surgery, his left hand sustained so much nerve and tissue and bone damage that he can no longer operate safely. All of those years of training and sacrifice, gone. Unappreciated. And now he’s left fucking useless and unwanted. He was even contemplating suicide before he met Sherlock. Our Mr. Strong Rock Who Can Weather Any Storm was ready to end it because he felt so useless and pathetic and lonely and all of those other horrible emotions that make up depression. He made a good go of it in life, and look where it got him. Abso fucking lutely nowhere. And no one cared.

Speculation, but I suspect he tried to save his sister. I suspect he spent much of his younger years trying to be there for her, to give her alternatives to the alcohol, to be there as he rock and her trustee and her caretaker, and he failed. And now, as adults, their relationship is so fractured that his own sister was a no-call no-show for John’s wedding. He tried to be there for his family, and they have proven themselves to be unreliable to him. Not even touching on his father just because John has never mentioned him, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that he was likely an alcoholic (as in Doyle’s canon) and perhaps even a little bit abusive--John brawls like he grew up brawling, that isn’t something you learn in the Army, trust me I’m an Army veteran myself. So yeah, that didn’t exactly work out for him either, did it?

He attached himself to Sherlock. He moved into a flat with Sherlock, went out on cases with him, to crime scenes, chased murderers through the London streets, killed a man to save his life. Sherlock was his life. They were partners. Then Sherlock killed himself in front of John on a lark, and reappeared two years later as if it was all just a big joke. As if he hadn’t shattered everything John had just started to believe in again. That trust isn’t back yet. In fact, I would dare to suggest he threw himself so hard at Mary immediately after Sherlock returned in an effort to keep himself from becoming glued back to his side again. Once burned, twice shy. This will change eventually, because Sherlock has realized his error and is actually putting forth an effort to be there for John. That was the entirety of season 3. Season 4 will very likely be John coming to terms with his own shortcomings, and opening himself up to be there for Sherlock, despite the risks inherent in that trust. John has trust issues. John’s character arc will be learned how to let Sherlock in despite them.

He made a family with Mary. Who turned out not to be the woman he fell in love with, the woman he spent the last two years with. She was a stranger. All right. He accepted that and struggled to move on. And now Mary is dead. Everything John touches falls apart. I would not be surprised if he turns to drink. I hope not, because he has his daughter to look after and his sense of responsibility has always been just a hair stronger than his temptations, but I would not be surprised. I think this episode explains pretty well for itself how everything fell apart in their relationship. They were not a solid foundation. They crumbled. Mary sacrificed herself for John. She was not an idiot. She knew this was inevitable. John would get over her own death, eventually, with help. But she saw John after Sherlock’s, and she knew he wouldn’t survive that again--not after he’d just started to trust in Sherlock again.

So, John blames himself. For all of it. What’s the one common denominator in all of those events? John isn’t stupid. He’s a natural caretaker, and everyone he’s cared for has broken him. It’s his turn to be cared for. He cared for his sister, he cared for the soldiers in the RAMC, he cared for Sherlock, he cared for Mary. No one has stopped to care for him. He hasn’t let them. He doesn’t let them in. He needs to learn how to do this.

Mary died in his arms, and John still didn’t cry. Those sounds he made were horrific. He was trying so desperately hard not to cry. And now he’s flinging blame around, because that’s what hurting people do, especially, especially, especially especially especially especially especially when they blame themselves.

I keep seeing around on tumblr that Mary orchestrated this whole thing, that Moriarty is behind it after all, that John and Sherlock can’t repair their friendship over this, etc etc. No. Just, no. John needs time to grieve. And he needs someone to be there for him. And Sherlock will be there for him. He realized throughout season 3 that he wanted to be there for him. And now he’s trying so, so hard to be, in his own eccentric not really reliable but still genuine Sherlock way.

The Johnlock is canon. This is the conclusion to their arc. Sherlock has come around, and now it’s John’s turn. So much fanfic is about how broken Sherlock is, why he cut himself off from his emotions, what traumas he suffered to turn him into a “sociopathic” drug addict. So few are about why John is so drawn to him, why John needs violence and adrenaline to function, why John is so broken, why John can’t express himself or grieve or feel when his wife dies right there in his own fucking arms. That’s what this is about. I hope. Because if it isn’t I might die.

Also EEEEEEEEEEEE SHERRINFORD!!!!

/rant

#bbc sherlock #johnlock #sherlock holmes #john watson #mary morstan #james moriarty #season 4 speculation #the three thatchers #couch therapy #computer chair therapy?#phew now that that's off my chest #can i move on with my life now

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yeonchi · 6 years ago

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Doctor Who Series 11 Review Part 10/10: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Air date: 9 December 2018

Here we are, everyone. We’ve finally reached the series finale. The signs weren’t that obvious throughout the series, but in the end, there were a number of mini-arcs that were finally resolved in this episode.

In my opinion, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos was probably one of the best episodes of this series, but then again, I’ve probably said that about every Doctor Who series finale.

I’m going to dispense with the spoiler-free policy in my introductory thoughts and say that with the villain for this episode, this series was truly Tim Shaw’s fault. Congratulations, Tim Shaw, you’ve risen to the level of Decade, God Dan Kuroto and Evolto combined, which goes way past the level of “Decade, the Destroyer of Worlds” alone.

The spoilers continue after the break.

Build-up hype

Even though there was no explicit story arc for this series, some hints for the finale were dropped in the first two episodes. The Doctor threw his recall device back to Tim Shaw in Episode 1, which he used to teleport away. In Episode 2, we are introduced to the SniperBots and shown what the Stenza did to the planet “Desolation”.

After the first episode, we’ve seen villains or aliens being transported or sent away throughout this series. Ilin, Angstrom and Epzo were teleported away at the end of Episode 2, Krasko was likely sent back to the distant past by Ryan in Episode 3, the Pting was jettisoned in Episode 5, the Thijarians just came and left in Episode 6, the Morax were sealed back into their prison in Episode 8 and the Solitract was left to its own universe in Episode 9. Some people thought that they would be coming back in the finale, but with the exception of Tim Shaw, this rumour or theory was proven wrong. Not having them come back kind of makes sense as well, because I think that with the criticisms I’ve given some of them, they would have just dragged down the episode.

Graham and Ryan’s relationship was also a recurring arc in the series. At the start, Ryan didn’t recognise Graham as his (step-)grandad, but he finally did in Episode 9. Likewise, Ryan didn’t want to reciprocate Graham’s fistbumps until this episode. We finally made it, fellow kids. We made it.

Graham’s grief of Grace’s death was also made into a mini-arc, with Graham and Ryan constantly being reminded of her during their travels with the Doctor.

Sadly, there was not a lot of focus on Ryan’s dyspraxia or Yaz’s family through this series. Their stories are set to continue in Series 12, so I hope these lingering arcs will be addressed then.

I gotta believe! (Turn it on)

To me, elements from this episode felt like they were taken from Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and Kamen Rider Amazons. The latter series symbolises the dark themes in the episode, while the former series symbolises the motivations of this episode’s characters.

The main characters of Ex-Aid are symbolised well by Graham’s actions in this episode. When Graham learns that Tim Shaw is still alive, he is intent on killing him to avenge Grace. This motivation mirrors that of Hiiro Kagami and Taiga Hanaya in that the former’s girlfriend, Saki Momose, died when the latter failed to defeat her Bugster, Graphite, and cure her game illness.

When Graham tells the Doctor about his intentions, he does it rather calmly and nonchalantly, which mirrors that of nonchalant liar Kiriya Kujo, who lost a friend before the events of Ex-Aid and has been looking for a chance to avenge him by fighting Kuroto Dan, the man responsible for the events that led to his friend’s death.

In the end, however, Graham was the bigger person and so, he did not end up killing Tim Shaw, but rather incapacitated him and put him into a stasis chamber with Ryan’s help. This mirrors that of Emu Hojo, who stripped Kuroto of his powers so that he could atone for his crimes, only for Parado to kill him and take over his plans.

After Tim Shaw teleported to Ranskoor Av Kolos, he was found by Andinio and Delph of the Ux, who worshipped him as their Creator. This makes him similar to Kuroto Dan, specifically during the time when he called himself God Kuroto Dan (Deus). Andinio and Delph were then used to create a weapon for Tim Shaw, which he would use it to pull whole planets out of space and time and trap them in stasis, killing all life on them in the process. With this, it makes him similar to Evolto of Kamen Rider Build and by extension, the Stenza are similar to Evolto’s race, the Blood Tribe. To top that off, here’s an image you can hear.

Other general thoughts

The reference to “dog-whistling” (as used by the Doctor when she is trying to summon her TARDIS) sounds like a subtle lampoon to that nature of politics. It’s not really an SJW red flag per se, but even then, the rest of the episode drowned it out anyway.

The Doctor summoning her TARDIS with her sonic screwdriver or key is such a deus ex machina, but this time, I kind of think that it is justified because her sonic screwdriver was made with a part from Tim Shaw’s transport pod; maybe she was able to sync that with her TARDIS when she presumably modified and refined it between adventures.

Before the Doctor and her friends went to Tim Shaw’s lair, they were questioning whether it was actually Tim Shaw or another Stenza on the screen in the ship. Evidently, the Doctor knows that it was Tim Shaw and Yaz hears about it when she meets with her and Paltraki in the room with the Ux. So, did Graham and Ryan just jump to the conclusion that it was Tim Shaw (and also the Doctor and Yaz before they entered his lair)? If so, they were really lucky that he was there and not another Stenza who just happens to have a similar voice to him.

It wouldn’t make sense to call the Ux misunderstood villains, because they were manipulated and used by Tim Shaw for his plans. To be honest, I’m glad that there were no misunderstood villains in the episode.

Summary and verdict

Like I said at the start, this episode was one of the best of this series. I would have been disappointed if Tim Shaw (or the Stenza) didn’t come back for this episode. I was kind of hoping that the Stenza would replace the Daleks or Cybermen as recurring villains; their setup in the first two episodes of the series was perfect for that.

I think that this is the first (post-revival) Doctor Who series finale with a sole villain and a minimal cast. The hype and suspense were kind of toned down this time around because it’s just Tim Shaw and some SniperBots, not cameos of the Doctor’s past incarnations, returns of past characters or villains with massive armies of minions.

By this point, a few mini-arcs have been wrapped up nicely, but there are still a few of them left to address. In my opinion, the most important one that should be addressed is the “Timeless Child” arc. I have a feeling that this is something that will be elaborated throughout Jodie Whittaker’s tenure, though it’ll be a while until we hear something new of it again (2020 at the earliest).

In the Episode 8 review, I mentioned that I could compare Chris Chibnall to Shoji Yonemura in terms of writing. After watching this episode, I felt like I should promote this comparison to Toshiki Inoue because despite his weaknesses, the episodes he writes at least make some sort of sense compared to Yonemura’s. I could say the same about Steven Moffat in that he has some story arcs that were concluded too quickly, but that’s a whole different topic altogether.

Rating: 10/10

Stay tuned for the epilogue to this review series. Don’t forget that I’ll be back after New Year’s Day to review this year’s special, Resolution.

#doctor who #doctor who series 11 #thirteenth doctor #doctor who series 11 review #thirteenth doctor review

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armageddon-generation · 6 years ago

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Making an arc out of series 11 (and other fixes)

I DON’T MEAN TO HATE - I genuinely really liked this TARDIS team, Jodie has completely won me over and the episodes not written by Chibnall were great - but this series does have several frustrating Issues.

One recurring problem I see people having is that the finale didn't feel climactic because there was little build up.

A few ways to fix this :

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

Just improve Tim Shaw - alter his design so he’s not just a black robot-man - take the tooth idea and do something like the Sycorax?

Change the ball of electricity into an actual creature - then establish Tim Shaw’s abusive relationship with it, taking out his viciousness on this helpless slave, because he’s a coward

This mster/beasty relationship would give Tim more character and make him easier to hate

It also establishes the running theme of the Stenza altering/controlling other creatures - it gives them a distinctive ‘gimmick’ like Dalek extermination and Cyberman conversion, which we can expand on in The Ghost Monument, The Tsuranga Conundrum and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

The Ghost Monument

Establish the threat of the Stenza - ravaged worlds better (show us the flesh eating water instead of telling us about it and have more time with the Remnants instead of those boring robots)

Do this by giving Desolation (which is out of orbit) short, irregular days (5 hours, 3 hours) so the threat of the Remnants is always there - build tension and character at day (the “Mum told me to jump” speech) and have scary chase sequences during the two night sections

The Stenza using Desolation to create weapons of mass destruction reminds the Doctor of the Time Lords' tactics in the Time War, (that's why she's so interested in the planet) and establish that Yaz wants to know what happened to the Doctor's people/family

One of the racers should've had their planet stolen, not just enslaved, to establish the mystery of the planets Tim Shaw is stealing

Show their desperation by having the racers actually compete and fight with each other, with Team TARDIS stuck in the middle. Both characters believe they deserve the prize because they've suffered and lost more.

Yaz separates them, directly paralleling her intro scene in episode 1 - from parking disputes to this.

GIVE 13 HER BIG MOMENT because I waited until literally the last line of the series to understand where she's coming from. 13 is the joyous explorer, she doesn't have time for wallowing in angst, there's too much universe out there to see.

Something like: "It's not about what you've lost, that doesn't make you better than him! All that matters now is what's ahead. What are you going to do if you win, where will it take you? Have you even thought about it? Because maybe, just maybe, if you stopped pitying yourself you could make something good from this. Yes, you're family is gone and I'm sorry. But just because they're dead doesn't mean your life should stop too. Move forward."

This helps Chibnall's 'Fresh Start' mandate because it establishes 13 as completely different from RTD and Moffat's Doctors (especially 10 and 12) who felt a sense of superiority because of their past pain. It also ties into Ryan and Graham letting go of Grace.

The TARDIS went to Desolation in the first place because it wanted to help the planet (remember she has personality) - 13 realises this once they reunite.

We've previously established the TARDIS can change the weather, and it's had thousands of years on Desolation to prepare calculations etc, so have a sequence at the end where they show off to the new conpanions and terraform the planet, reversing the Stenza's damage

Post - credits scene / stinger - while the companions explore the TARDIS, show 13 viewing the footage the TARDIS collected over thousands of years of the Stenza violating the planet - she doesn't look happy, but then Yaz calls her for a tour and she puts on the bright smile again.

Yaz

I think Team TARDIS in series 11 was meant to be split between the familial relationship between Ryan and Graham, with the standard swept-off-her-feet almost-romance between the Doctor and Yaz in the background. They didn't focus on Thasmin much because I think Chibnall assumed 'oh, we've seen this before'

SHOW THE GROWTH OF YAZ AND THE DOCTOR'S RELATIONSHIP. IT SHOULDN'T BE ROMANTIC (YET) BUT JUSTIFY THEIR DEVOTION TO EACH OTHER

Because Yaz is a police officer have her 'investigate' the Doctor's past - especially her family, as that's an important part of her character and theme in the series as a whole. Since Chibnall loves Classic they could mention Susan

This makes 13 telling Yaz about her Granny in It Takes You Away an important milestone in their relationship

Yaz to Ryan about the Doctor's family:

Thirteen's character

People complaining Jodie isn't unique enough kind of have a point, but the seeds are there:

I like the idea of 13 being easily distracted and careless ("I'm almost going to miss you." / "Hi Yaz, forgot you were there."). Her being slow to trust contrasts nicely with Jodie's infectious enthusiasm. Have Yaz's role be keeping 13 focused, grounded and on-track when she needs to be.

Also! I've seen the idea thrown around 13 is only acting all bright and chipper. It'd be really interesting if she prioritises Team TARDIS' emotional wellbeing over her own

This way we have parallel arcs - Yaz gets the Doctor to open up as Ryan gets closer to Graham

13 and her Sonic

13 is meant to be a tinkerer, but we don’t see much evidence of this outside building the Sonic

So she wears a tool belt

The belt is TARDIS-like (bigger on the inside) and 13 pulls things out of it like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag

13 pulls bits of scrap out of the belt and cobbles things together when she’s excited / nervous / talking (pipe cleaner helicopters! Catapults! Wind-up mice!)

This distinguishes her from 11, who also did a lot of hand-flapping and is already superficially similar personality-wise

More floofy/fly-away haired 13! It makes her seem more energetic, constantly in motion, which really suits her.

The popular headcanon is that the Sonic works randomly (one episode it can do things, the next it can’t) because over the years the Doctor has added so many features they’ve overloaded it. So now she’s got a new Sonic, 13 is constantly fiddling with it/adding new features

Address the NuWho Doctors’ over-reliance on the Sonic - 13 keeps expecting the Sonic to do things but because it’s new hardware, it can’t, and she has to solve problems on her own

A running gag where 13 goes ‘watch this, gang’ and the Sonic does something completely opposite what she wanted and now they have to improvise

In the finale the Sonic finally works properly and 13 uses it to beat Tim Shaw

Occasionally (in an episode opening) 13 makes weird machines without knowing what the fuck they do:

13: [holding up a small device] Does this look familiar? Do you know what it is? Neither do I. I made it last night in my sleep. Apparently I used Gindrogac. Highly unstable.

Yaz: Doctor…

13 : I put at button on it. Yes. I want to press it, but I’m not sure what will happen if I do.

Ryan: [runs for cover]

13 and Graham

In Series 11, 13 always seemed annoyed by Graham (“Don’t kill the vibe”) and never seemed to grow past it.

Suggest 13 is living vicariously by helping Graham reconnect with Ryan – the Doctor first started travelling in the TARDIS to connect with their grandchild, so this is 13 coming full-circle

13 notices how good and Granddad Graham is trying to be for Ryan, and as he grows braver she comes to really respect him.

Graham becomes her confidant – he’s the only one 13 shows her age to, and she helps Graham begin again: They talk about how the Doctor has had to reinvent and regenerate themselves again and again because the universe needs them – much as Ryan needs Graham. 13 has lots of experience moving past loss, and they support each other through the pressure of being responsible (for Ryan and Yaz respectively)

Ryan

Have the Doctor and Ryan's relationship develop - in The Woman Who Fell to Earth they suggested 13 would take a nurturing parental role for him ("That's the kind of thing Grace would've said") but it's not really built on. All the pieces are there (him being immature and using weapons in the beginning)

Ryan and 13 have a sibling-like relationship - she teaches him about life and the universe - have 13′s use of slang (skillz with a z) come from Ryan having fun teaching slang to a socially inept alien

also maybe a reccuring joke about Ryan going for a fist-bump and 13 patting his fist, that pays off by the finale

Does anyone remember Ryan and Yaz went to Primary school together? Capitalise on that. When Ryan talks about how his Dad left him in Tsuranga and It Takes You Away, make it explicit that she understands because she saw Ryan go through it as a kid, and remembers what it did to him emotionally

A common complaint about Ryan is that he rarely actually does anything - he just stands there and says "they're gone!" or "it's a spaceship!". So have this be part of his character. In the early episodes have Yaz be the most active companion (allowing her to develop!), with Ryan (nervous about his dyspraxia) in the background, and have him become more and more active and competent as the series goes on.

Episode Order

For this to work I suggest shuffling the episodes - 1, 2, 8, 4, 6, 5, 7, 3, 9, 10

10 60-minute episodes to fit the new stuff in and give the large cast more room. The Woman Who Fell to Earth (60 minutes) was Chibnall's best script.

This way series 11 gets the same screen time as the 12 episode Capaldi series

Instead of 2 trailers for the next episode (one pre and one post credits) insert a post-credits stinger hinting at arcy things

The Witchfinders (We’re Going on a Witch-Hunt)

Swap Rosa and The Witchfinders around. We can get the 'female discrimination' thing out of the way faster (it felt weird they didn't explicitly address it until episode 8). Yaz and 13 can bond over their shared oppression (this is the first time the Doctor realises what history is like for her female companions - for the first time, they are of equal status and must work as a team).

Also have Yaz, the POLICE OFFICER, be personally offended by the miscarriage of Justice in the Witch Trials, and defend the victims - relate it to her experience on the job (maybe touch on domestic abuse?) instead of the cliche bullying story

The villains being escaped convicts from a prison also links to Yaz's character and job - contrast her applying police protocol to the Morax (she never had a case this big at home!) with 13's "fuck it, time to wave the glowy science stick' attitude - Yaz forces 13 to be disciplined, 13 forces Yaz to think outside the box and bend the rules

Arachnids in the UK (Spiders in Sheffield)

Still episode 4 - this needs a complete rewrite IMO, but for starters make the Trump parallel less explicit and cringey

Address Yaz has left her job as a police officer behind - she goes into work (with 13 as her ‘consultant’) and learns about people disappearing - we meet the spider expert at the Police Station, (because Yaz’s neighbour being the only victim AND working in that spider lab was too big a coincidence)

The expert is being ignored because the disappearances are higher priority, so low-ranking Yaz gets stuck with her

The spiders have spread all over Sheffield, not just the one flat and all around Yaz’s building

Have Ryan, Yaz and the Doctor go to meet Yaz’s mum at the hotel while Graham is mourning Grace in their nearby flat

When the spreading spiders reach Yaz’s family, Graham goes to help them, showing how brave 13 has helped him become.

We now have two tension-filled scenarios:

A home invasion subplot where Graham helps Yaz’s family keep the spiders out of their flat. Use this to flesh out and make her sister and Dad likeable - Graham comforts them when they’re scared, calling back to Grace's last line "promise you won't be scared without me" - 13 has helped him!

13 and Co being chased around the hotel (PROPERLY chased - the spiders use webs to cut off corridors and herd them around like rats in a maze)

YAZ GETS TAKEN BY THE SPIDERS - this is the moment 13 realises how attached she is to her new friends. She and Mrs Kahn work together to go and save Yaz from the Spiders’ nest (eliminating that annoying Jackie Tyler “you’re endangering my kid” trope) while Ryan uses his music to draw the spiders away

13 gets to see Mrs Kahn’s maternal affection and we see her desire for family. Ryan’s music draws the Spiders back and saves Graham and Yaz’s family

When Ryan and Graham reunite it’s very emotional - Ryan saved Graham’s life - ‘looking out for each other’

Finally have the Doctor save the Spiders by using the TARDIS as an Ark, instead of leaving them to die - call back to Planet of the Spiders and drop them off there

Since she's at home, once they’ve saved everyone have Yaz do girly things with the Doctor (because they haven't been able to rest since episode 1) - maybe nail painting? Only 13 starts using the varnish as finger paint. Also! I like the idea of them choosing 13's earring together bc 13 has no clue about jewelry

Demons of the Punjab

This should be episode 5, because it's connected to 4 by Yaz's family and together they provide a nice rounding-off of the half of the series more focused on her

The Thijarians have had their planet stolen, not just destroyed (it would still kill everyone)

That way when we see the hologram of what happened to their planet we establish the threat of what will happen to the Earth if Tim Shaw wins in the finale

(the powder they have can still be the stuff left over afterwards)

Also it's weird that Yaz goes to see her Grandmother, who she discovers remarried, and Ryan doesn't react at all.

Ryan has nothing to do in this episode, and because we're putting Punjab earlier in the series, Grace's loss is fresher. Give him a moral dilemma: He wants to go back and see her when she was young (and with her first husband - implicitly rejecting Graham) like Yaz is seeing her Gran

After seeing what happens to Yaz's family, and seeing Graham's caring reaction to Prem, he follows 13's advice and gives up on seeing Grace again - he's content with Graham

He bonds with Yaz over the episode and warns her not to take family for granted. At the end Yaz takes him to meet her Gran in the present day ("I was lucky enough to know yours")

The Tsuranga Conundrum (The Good Doctors)

Have the medical ship be a war ambulance helping victims of the Stenza's conquest

The general on board has fought the Stenza

Cut her brother and the 2nd nurse, they're unnecessary - have the ship be understaffed because of the strain the Stenza are putting on the medical service, give the engineering role to 13

The asteroid field they have to fly through (which we should ACTUALLY SEE) is not just an asteroid field but the wreckage left behind by another missing planet.

Replace the P'ting. It may be cute but the vast majority of people thought it was ridiculous. Instead have it be a Stenza weapon left over as the ship is flying through an old battleground - it can still be small and destroy the ship from the inside out, but its design can be more threatening and it can be more sympathetic (it was experimented on/created to kill, it isn't evil)

13 tries to pilot the ship first but can't because she's wounded. She has to rely on Team TARDIS and delegate the usual ‘Doctor’ roles. She faces off against the tactical P’ting, trying to fix the ship as fast as it disassembles it, while Yaz runs around trying to catch the thing, and Ryan and Graham take care of the passengers

The sonic STAYS BROKEN so 13 has to do this all by hand

Once 13 is told the Stenza are still out there hurting people, introduce a subplot over the next 3 episodes before the finale where she's sneaking off at night to go and help fight them (without the others knowing, because they're too emotionally biased)

The next episodes (Kerblam!, Rosa) gradually shift the focus onto Ryan's growth as he becomes more active

It Takes You Away

Add 13 and Graham - now close friends - talking about grandkids, and put more emphasis on 13′s reaction to the abandoned girl

This sets up the Solitract turning into Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, instead of the frog at the end

You don’t require previous NuWho knowledge to know about Susan - she has barely been mentioned.

Have her be played by the actress from An Adventure in Space and Time, like David Bradley as the First Doctor

This way we directly address the theme of grandchildren and family

The Solitract is a link to 13's childhood and family. It's also another omnipotent consciousness she can relate to (think 9 and Bad Wolf - "That's what I feel, all the time!"). Finding that and immediately letting it go must be traumatising

Have a quick scene of Yaz catching 13 crying, but she quickly covers up because Graham just saw Grace and he's distraught

Finale (Battle Phantoms)

When they arrive on the battlefield 13 accidentally reveals she's been helping fight the Stenza offscreen (which is how she knows about this battle - one of the ones she was too late for)

This lie infuriates Graham - she's been blocking his revenge for ages

BIG EMOTIONAL MOMENT

13: Maybe I am a liar, and I promised I wouldn't be, but that's because I know what it's like, Graham. To want to hurt the people who hurt you. How that anger burns like fire, like a supernova. And it took me so long to get over it, so long to move on. Whole lifetimes wasted hurting and hating. I didn't want that to happen to you. No one deserves to be broken twice.

This gives Graham a legitimate reason to go against 13 without announcing his intention to kill Tim Shaw like an idiot. It also plays up 13's hypocrisy, which was touched on in the original script

What was the point of 9 distress calls if they're all in the same place?? Use this pportunity to split team TARDIS up and showcase how they've grown as individuals before bringing them back together (Ryan and Graham, Yaz and 13) for the 3rd Act

Graham being on his own drives up the tension over whether he'll kill Tim Shaw - Ryan gets there just in time

Explicitly call back to the moment in The Ghost Monument when Ryan used a gun - highlight how far he's come because of 13, talking Graham down

Get rid of the robots, because they weren't in The Ghost Monument now, and they turned the intimate story into an action movie.

Over the series we've established the Stenza genetically engineer other creatures into weapons (the Remnants, the P'ting, the cable ball in The Woman Who Fell to Earth). Replace the robots with scary leftovers from the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (because that title was irrelevant to the original episode) - Think the Hand Mines from The Magician's Apprentice

Have each of the missing planets throughout the series be named - that way when we discover the stolen planets in the finale there is emotional impact because their being stolen has caused so much suffering.

This way not only are the Stenza a lot more threatening because they are present throughout the series, there is more build up to seeing Tim Shaw again

Also, the subplot about returning the planets is more emotionally impactful - the Doctor is retroactively providing closure to lots of the side characters from the series

Finally the threat to Earth is much greater - the companions have seen what losing your planet does to a person emotionally, and they fear that

WHEN THE EARTH IS THREATENED CALL BACK TO YAZ'S FAMILY SO WE FEEL SOMETHING

Also the continuing thread of missing /lost planets could link to Galifrey, raising 13's emotional stakes

Multiple people have complained the plot thread about the planet attacking you psychically and erasing your memories went nowhere - when 13 and Yaz take those devices off they get slight headaches

Instead have the planet actually attack them - 13 and Yaz have to remind each other of their memories and their families - exposing Yaz to a rare snapshot of the Doctor’s lonely childhood on Galifrey

This gives Jodie the opportunity to do some SERIOUS DRAMATIC ACTING, and finally opening up about Galifrey to the whole TARDIS team at the end gives an emotional climax to her relationship with them, as well as the relationship between Ryan and Graham

The Fam line is cute, but we need ACTION to evidence this growth - this way throughout the series we’ve established how much family means to 13, how much she wants that, and Yaz saying “I’ve always liked fam” means so much because it means she understands 13 as a person

Resolution

Change how the Dalek got split.

Medieval humans killing a Dalek on their own is ridiculous and makes itr less threatening. Instead, have the Dalek be a scout from the Time War, looking to attack Earth to distract the War Doctor. The Doctor, furious, rushes over and helps the human armies divide it, to stop the Time War spreading to his second home.

We’re told this legend by the archaeologists, positioning the Doctor as a vengeful wizard. We can get a flashback with the War Doctor as a dark silhouette on a hill or something.

This makes the “it’s personal” stuff even truer

Use the archaeologists and dig site to expand on the Dalek race’s impact on humanity, because they’ve visited Earth dozens of times. I’m thinking wall paintings depicting the Dalek Shell as a Divine war chariot, and the mutant as a Cthulhu-like God

This way we’re really throwing Team TARDIS in the deep end - they are immediately aware of the number of times the Doctor has fought the Daleks, which is completely different to the rest of series 11, where 13 was encountering everything for the first time

Change the junkyard Dalek shell.

The Scout goes to a storage facility where pieces of its shell are stored. Now this place is owned by the modern incarnation of the cult we’ve set up who worshipped the Dalek in ancient times (their logo is the same symbol found on the wall paintings)

Instead of killing the gay (AGAIN), have the company staff welcome and exult the Dalek - only for it to turn around and kill them all, establishing its racial superiority complex. (This is something Chibnall glossed over - his Dalek wanted to conquer like anyone else, not exterminate)

The company has collected the remains of dozens of different Dalek models from invasions across the show’s history (we still have the parallel to 13 making her Screwdriver)

The Dalek reassembles itself not using Earth metal, but into a Frankenstein’s monster welded together from different Dalek designs (classic 60s, Imperial, Special Weapons, Time War, Supreme, Progenitor)

When the Dalek and 13 face each other this one Scout now represents the entire Dalek race, every type the Doctor has ever fought. The idea of it stitching itself together is also a nice parallel to Regeneration

Destroy the Dalek by separating all the different sections - use Ryan’s dad’s technical skills but don’t have all of Team TARDIS rush the Dalek without getting killed - them pushing it around immediately removed any threat.

Emotional Impact

Seeing the remains of all the Daleks the Doctor has killed at the storage facility and hearing the stories of the War Doctor makes Team TARDIS reconsider 13

Police officer Yaz realises she is devoted to a murderer, and considers whether she wants to get closer to such a person

To make the Dalek more impactful to both Team TARDIS and the new audience that has only watched Series 11, when Graham asks why it’s so dangerous have 13 say something along the lines of “the Daleks are my Stenza”

Graham realises why 13 stopped him killing Tim Shaw in series 11, and (considering his Dad must’ve fought in WW2) gains a new level of respect for her

Don’t have Ryan immediately forgive his Dad and declare that he loves him - set up that he’s willing to give his Dad a second chance as an arc for series 12 - the push and pull between Graham and Ryan reconnecting with his Dad

The Scout is trying to complete its original mission, bringing the Tile War to Earth - 13 has to literally defend her freinds from the ghost of the War and finally let go of her violent past (personified by the War Doctor). She’s also letting go of the deified, Messiah-like version of herself (represented by the wall paintings of the Doctor’s battle with the Dalek) that RTD and Moffat loved

13’s arc is worrying learning about the Daleks and their toxic relationship will change the way her friends look at her, because she’s been trying to protect them from this side of her life (it’s revealed she’s been deliberately avoiding places she’s been before because she’s looking for a fresh start)

By now Ryan and Graham are getting along fine, they’ve avenged Grace’s murder and Ryan is now talking to his Dad. 13 worries everyone has outgrown her, and they’ll leave

Have a scene at the end where Yaz comforts 13 and assures her she won’t abandon her - 13 doesn’t need to save their lives for them to want to travel with her - it’s their job to save her. They are here because they care about her.

This way we get a new emotional climax of 13′s emotional arc and reaffirm the status-quo for Series 12

Improving Matt Smith’s era here

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the-desolated-quill · 7 years ago

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The God Complex - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Oh great! Another Toby Whithouse episode! They’re always good for a giggle!

I’ve always felt Whithouse was the obvious candidate to take over from Moffat as opposed to Chris Chibnall. Granted not everything he writes is amazing, but he always maintains a decent level of quality and he seems to have a good handle as to what makes Doctor Who such a unique show. I absolutely adored School Reunion and while The Vampires Of Venice was a tad flawed, it was still hugely entertaining due to its camp silliness. The God Complex is very much in the same vein as Vampires. Although problems do crop up toward the end, it’s still very enjoyable overall.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive at a hotel, only to discover it’s not a hotel at all. It’s a prison made to look like a hotel with other ‘guests’ trapped inside, their worst fears hidden behind every door and a hungry Minotaur roaming the corridors. Bit like a hotel I stayed at in Rome during a school trip.

Now of course the advertisements describe the rooms as containing their worst fears, but I do hope Whithouse didn’t actually intend this to be scary. Because if he did, he may have fallen short by a few... light-years. See the thing about fears that are personal to you is that only you find them scary. Everyone else just finds them either tame or just plain hilarious, especially if it’s something weird like a gym teacher or a man in a gorilla suit clutching some toilet roll, both of which appear in the episode and both of which are hysterically funny. So I’m assuming that Whithouse was going more for surreal rather than scary. And yeah, it works. It works really well. If Whithouse was going for surreal, this is definitely surreal. The hotel is a great setting and it does lend itself to some very weird imagery, like the dining room full of ventriloquist dummies. A lot of it feels very reminiscent of Stephen King. The most obvious is The Shining with perhaps a little bit of It thrown in for good measure. Not very original granted, but it’s executed very well. And I did like the Minotaur. Okay the design is a bit crap, but the use of fisheye lens and inventive camera angles help to make it somewhat threatening.

Let’s talk about the characters, starting with my favourite. Rita, played by Amara Karan. Having had to put up with obnoxious plot device in a mini-skirt Amy for what feels like two ice ages rather than series, you can imagine I was very excited when the Doctor offered to take Rita with him in the TARDIS when all this was over. A woman that’s not defined by her physical attractiveness or her importance to the Doctor and is actually a fully realised character in her own right? Whithouse, please, remind me what that’s like! It’s been such a long time!

Needless to say, I really liked Rita. She’s funny, really smart, she’s got a good head on her shoulders, and is able to keep her cool while everyone else is losing their’s. I particularly liked the exploration of her faith. She believes the hotel is actually Jahannam, the Muslim version of Hell, and I liked how she’s able to take it all in her stride. She’s confused as to why she’s been sent to ‘Jahannam’, believing she has lived a good and moral life, but remains steadfast that everything will be explained and that she will get out of this somehow. Plus it’s just nice to have a Muslim woman on Doctor Who. I certainly would love to see a Muslim woman become the Doctor’s companion. I was utterly heartbroken when she died, although I suppose I should have seen it coming. I thought Amara Karan gave a really good performance and would have fit in really well with Matt Smith’s Doctor. I feel she would have provided a nice rational counterbalance for him. I especially liked her calm rejection of the Doctor’s all mighty saviour mentality.

I could have done without the stereotyping though. When Rita opens the door to her room, her worst fear is revealed to be her strict dad berating her for getting a B in mathematics.

Really Whithouse?

In fact this episode contains a lot of stereotyping now that I’m thinking about it. I mean look at Howie. Bespectacled nerd with a stutter who blogs about conspiracy theories, likes Star Trek and is afraid of talking to girls. Joe doesn’t escape this either. He’s a gambler and we know this because he wears a horseshoe pin on his tie and dice cufflinks. It just feels really lazy on Whithouse’s part.

The other character I liked was Gibbis, played by David Walliams. Now this surprised me because David Walliams worked with Matt Lucas in the sketch show Little Britain, which I’ve always thought was about as funny as passing a kidney stone. They also worked together on the short lived mockumentary series Come Fly With Me, which was quite possibly one of the worst comedies I’ve ever sat through in my life. In fact I still vividly remember that Christmas. My family and I staring open-mouthed at the telly watching David Walliams and Matt Lucas in yellowface singing a really offensive, mock Chinese song about Martin Clunes. I actually consider it an insult to my backside that I had to sit through that deeply racist pile of dreck and to this day I still don’t know what possessed the BBC into thinking that was in any way appropriate. To cut a long story short, I don’t like Walliams or Lucas very much. What can I say? I have a thing against talentless hacks thinking casual racism is funny. It’s a quirk of mine. But yeah, I really liked Gibbis. It’s a great idea. A race of aliens that have survived by sucking up to their invaders and oppressors. It lends itself to some really funny moments (their national anthem is ‘Glory To... Insert Name Here.’ LOL), I liked how Gibbis’ cowardice is used to pit the characters against one another, and as much as I’m loath to admit it, I thought David Walliams did a good job in the role. Well I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day (unless it’s digital of course).

As I said, I do mostly like the episode. It’s very surreal and engaging. Silly but entertainingly so. It’s just a shame the whole thing had to go a bit tits up at the end.

So the Doctor works out that the Minotaur isn’t actually feeding on fear, but on faith, and that the reason the TARDIS was drawn there was because of Amy’s faith in the Doctor. Okay, not a bad idea. It’s certainly a good way to explore their relationship and how Amy has never really grown up, as demonstrated when the Doctor talks to her and he sees her as young Amelia. The problem is the whole faith aspect isn’t done very well. For instance, I can see Amy having faith in the Doctor, Rita having faith in Allah and Joe having faith in luck, but Howie’s faith in conspiracy theories? That’s a bit of a stretch. And what about Rory? He’s repeatedly shown the fire exit because apparently he doesn’t have any faith in anything.

BOLLOCKS

Everyone has faith in something.

And then there’s the resolution. If Amy’s faith in the Doctor is so strong, would a two minute monologue really be enough to break it? It feels very similar to a moment in The Curse Of Fenric where the Seventh Doctor had to break his companion Ace’s faith in him, but the reason that worked was because it was genuinely shocking and uncomfortable to watch. He coldly attacked parts of Ace’s self esteem and made her feel like little more than a piece on a chessboard. Here it just feels a bit pathetic and half-arsed in comparison. Also you never get the sense that the Doctor and Amy’s relationship has actually changed once her faith has been ‘broken’. They’re still laughing and smiling like they normally do. With Seven and Ace, while he does apologise and explain why he did it, you get the sense that their once close relationship is slightly more fragile now going forward.

But one thing that puzzles me especially (and this is in no way Whithouse’s fault) is why is Amy’s faith in the Doctor so strong considering everything that’s happened. Would Amy’s faith really be that unshakeable after the Doctor failed to save her daughter? Or when he coldly left her alternative self to die in The Girl Who Waited?

Which brings me to this. Remember in my previous review when I said I had a problem with how The Girl Who Waited was resolved, but it wouldn’t become apparent until now? Well this is it. Wouldn’t it make so much more sense if Amy and Rory left after that episode rather than this one? The God Complex is really jarring at the beginning because the three leads are getting along, but surely after what happened in the previous episode there would be some tension between them. Can they actually trust the Doctor after everything that’s happened? So I have a really hard time buying that Amy would still have faith in the Doctor. Or at least that her faith would be as strong as they’re claiming it is. I would much rather have seen Amy and Rory take some initiative and choose to leave the TARDIS of their own accord because of what the Doctor did rather than having them get unceremoniously dumped for the weakest and most patronising of reasons. He’s worried they’re going to get killed if they stay with him. Well big whoop! Get over yourself! Yes it’s dangerous travelling with him, but his companions are well aware of that. They want to travel through time and space because it’s cool, not because they’re too stupid to know better. If Amy and Rory want to take the risk, that’s their choice. By stripping them of that choice, the Doctor is basically treating Amy like the child he just encouraged her to grow up from and leave behind a few minutes ago.

The God Complex was never going to be special. I realise that. But it was still a decent enough story that was both imaginative and enjoyable to watch. It’s just such a shame that ending had to spoil it.

#the god complex #toby whithouse #doctor who #eleventh doctor #matt smith #amy pond #karen gillan #rory williams #arthur darvill #steven moffat #bbc #review #spoilers

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