Doctor Who and The Devil’s Chord

First: what a great title!

If “Space Babies” was about re-establishing what median-value Doctor Who is like and getting everyone back on board, “The Devil’s Chord” seems like it’s about building out from that and establishing how the show is going to work going forward. Because as soon as The Maestro climbs out of that piano, it’s clear we’re operating in a different gear—excuse me—different key than we have before. Between this and the previous, theres a real sense of “mission statement”: this is the vibe Doctor Who is going for in this iteration. Evil drag queen space gods eating the concept of Music and destroying the future? Yes, please. We’re miles away from anything else on Disney+, or anywhere else on TV.

This is also where Gatwa’s and Davies’s take on the character is starting to come into focus. Back at Christmas and then in “The Space Babies” the take on the character was basically “big and fun.” And this stays true here, the Doctor’s excitement over where Ruby wants to go is a standout, and also feels like Davies riffing on the last time he was relaunching the show, where the first place the new companion wanted to go was to watch their dad get killed in a car accident? Finally, as he says, they want to go somewhere fun.

But I’m starting to run out of ways to phrase “this is all really fun!”, so fortunately this is where they start—and I’m sorry but I can’t help myself—adding more notes to the character. Presumably we’ll all be writing “this is when they really cracked the character” pieces next week, but for the moment two observations:

The second most interesting of these is when the Doctor realizes who or what they’re dealing with, and his response is to just… run away. The scene where they’re hiding from The Maestro and the Doctor makes a sound-proof zone to cover their tracks is probably the most effective sequence in any of Gatwa’s time so far.

“Scared” isn’t usually an emotional state the Doctor operates in, for solid structural reasons if nothing else. Doctor Who is frequently a scary show, and it’s sweet spot is right out at the edge of what the younger audience is capable of handling. But one of the things that lets Doctor Who get away with operating that far out on the ice is the character of the Doctor themselves. The Doctor is effectively indestructible, nearly always wins, and almost never scared, so they provide a real emotional safety net for the younger audience—The Doctor is here, so this is all going to be okay. Obviously we’ll see where this goes, but combined with them running away from the monster in “The Space Babies” as well, this take on the character seems to be centering on “enthusiastic but scares easy,” which is a fascinating take.

The most interesting scene, though, was the bit where he mentions that he and his granddaughter are currently living on the other side of town. Gatwa takes an interesting angle on the scene, and rather than sad or wistful, he plays the Doctor as basically cheered up by the idea that she was out there, regardless of where she is now. Unlike the last time Davies was show-running, this clearly isn’t a character that’s going to stand crying out in the rain.

This is, I think, the first time Susan has been mentioned by name in the 21st century version of the show. Like the premise speed-run in the previous episode, or the re-staging of the ruined future scene from “Pyramids of Mars” in this one, this feels less like a deep-cut continuity reference than a combination of making clear what elements of the show are in play while also deliberately hanging some guns over the mantle. Add to that the name drop of The Rani last week, and the not one but two mysterious women lurking around in the background of these last couple of shows, and clearly something is up. I’m going to refuse to speculate further, sine Davies likes to drop in these crumbs but never before built up a mystery that was solvable, these are always things that can’t make sense until the context of whatever the big-ticket finale does in June. But! Fun spotting the things that will make more sense on the rewatch regardless.

Because I grew up in a very Beatles-centric house, a few notes on the boys from Liverpool themselves. Lennon didn’t start wearing that style of round glasses until much later, but I understand wanting to flag “which one is John” with his most signature feature considering how little the actors look like the real people. I was hoping the the secret chord was going to turn out to be the mysterious opening chord of A Hard Day's Night. And look, if it had been me, I’d have had Harrison be the one to solve the puzzle.

Finally, the ending dance sequence looks like it was a lot more fun to make than it was to watch, mostly because that song wasn’t nearly good enough to spend, what, three whole minutes on? I think I see what they’re trying to do, but more than anything it had the quality that they had under-run and needed to pad out the show.

But, it was big and fun, and one of the all-time great cinematic battles of Ham vs Ham since Shatner and Montalban squared off. Jinkx Monsoon clearly looked at what Neal Patrick Harris did back in December and thought, “I can beat that.”

Were these two premiere episodes the best episodes of Doctor Who ever? No. But they’re more entertaining than the show has been in years, and it’s been even longer since it’s had this clear a vision of itself. In the six stories since November, we’ve gone from a 2008 revival piece to tuning up a whole new instrument. And then next week they’re handing it to the best person that’s ever played it…

Doctor Who and the Space Babies

And we’re back!

There’s an absolute sense of glee here. This is a show that’s absolutely in love with existing, made by people who are clearly relishing every second of their day, and inhabited by characters “glad to be alive.”

Thise sense of all-encompassing joy seems to be the central animus of Ncuti Gatwa’s take on the character—his is a Doctor who is psyched about everything and is here to have the best time possible, and hopes you’ll come along.

My favorite scene, if I’m honest, is the show ostentatiously spending the new Disney-infused budget on some gorgeous throwaway dinosaurs and then an absurdly expensive-looking prosthetic to land a butterfly-effect joke. It’s a show having an absolute ball that it can do things like this now. There’s a shot of the Doctor leaning against the Tardis while a volcano erupts in the background that’s exactly the kind of shot Doctor Who has always wanted to do, but never could until now.

And then, the final punchline of that scene with Gatwa’s muttered aside about having to turn on the Butterfly Compensator is the perfect example of the Doctor Who difference. On the one hand, it’s the exact kind of winking semi-science that’s Doctor Who’s bread-and-butter, but it’s also one of the things that makes the Doctor being an unreliable narrator of his own show so great, because it could just as easily be complete bullshit he made up on the spot because the real solution was more complex than he wanted to talk about.

But this is also our old friend, Russel T. Davies, angry nihilist, so my other favorite scene was the absolutely snarling satire about abortion and child care he banks into the episode halfway though, once everyone had relaxed and wasn’t ready for it.

Davies always liked a mostly fun and frothy lightweight season opener, and this is right in line. It’s just fun, infectiously so. After it was over, as the closing credits rolled, my fourteen year-old looked up and the screen and said “this show has got to be the best job in the world.”

⁂

It both is and is not a relaunch. On the one hand, Who has been in continuous production since 2005, albeit with an increasing irregular schedule. But on the other hand, this is the first regular actual season that wasn’t a one-off special or miniseries or something since January of 2020, and the show hasn’t been a mainstream hit since 2014 or so. And there’s probably a fair number of new-ish viewers coming in via Disney+.

So Davies splits the difference, correctly I think, and mostly seems to focus on people who have some familiarity with the show but need a refresher. “Remember that Doctor Who show you watched a decade ago? it’s back!” So the show speedruns laying out the premise, but in the gear of an extended “previously on” bit instead of making sure new viewers are keeping up.

But also, every show is a tangled mass of dense auto-continuity these days. And every episode of the show is streaming on iPlayer. Wikipedia will point you and the right ones. And every single references or easter egg is going to spawn dozens of explainer articles or reddit threads or youtube videos or some other SEO-chasing content glurge. Davies seems to cheerfully shrug and recognize that everyone that doesn’t know all this by heart is going to look it up anyway, so why burn too much screen time on it when he can use that for something else.

This doesn’t feel like anything so much as the start of a new creative team on a long-running comic, so the lore recap is not only there to help people jump back on board, but gives Davies a way to lay out which bits he’s going to be using. He’s clearly taken with the idea of the Doctor as an orphan, but all the other store-brand Campbell chosen one “revelations” that surrounded that a few years ago are left unmentioned. And his description of what happened to the Time Lords doesn’t really match anything we saw on screen before. But that’s less about “being inaccurate” than, I think, establishing the vibe the show intends to go on with. “There was a genocide and I was the only survivor” sets a very specific tone here in 2024, even before you factor in the fact that those lines are being spoken by the child of Rwandan refugees. It’s a very different tone from 2005’s “there was a war and everyone lost.”

It’s worth comparing the approach here with how Davies relaunched the show the last time, back in 2005. There, the show very carefully walked the audience through what was happening, and made sure everyone got it before moving on to the next thing. Here, the show knows that shows this complex are the default rather than the exception, assumes most of the audience already knows all this but needs reminder, and for anyone else, here’s enough keywords so you can fill in the gaps on wikipedia tomorrow morning.

The TV landscape around Doctor Who is very different now than it was in 2005. In ’05, there was basically nothing doing what Who does best—science fantasy adventure stories for smart 12-year olds and their parents. The only other significant science fiction show to speak of was Battlestar Galactica, and that was in a whole different gear. Buffy had just gone off the air, Star Trek Enterprise was gasping out it’s last season. Who had a lot of room to maneuver, but not a lot of context, so it started from “basically Buffy” and then built up from there.

Here in ’24, there’s a lot of TV operating in Who’s neighborhood. Heck, even just on Disney+, the various Marvel and Star Wars shows are going after much the same audience, and the next streaming app over is full of new actually good new Star Trek.

As such, Davies doesn’t waste a lot of time on median value Who, but leans all the way in on stuff only Doctor Who would even thinking of doing. One of the major animating forces here seems to be, basically “Yeah, Loki was pretty good. You ever see Loki do this?” and then pulling back the curtain to show a room full of babies. Space babies.

What makes this show different from all the other sci-fi-eqsue shows with baroque lore? A main character who loves life, loves what he does, doesn’t carry a weapon, and thinks it’s just as important to save the monster as anyone else.

A criticism you sometimes see about this show is that it “doesn’t take things seriously enough”, or variations thereof. And this is one of those criticisms that almost gets it, but missed the point entirely. Because the show does take things seriously, just not the same things that a show like Star Trek does. To quote the show’s own lead character, the show is very serious about what it does, just not necessarily the way it does it. To put that another way, Doctor Who is a show that takes being very silly very seriously.

At 46, I loved every second of this, but if I’m honest, I know I would have absolutely hated this at 15, and (even more embarrassingly) probably would have hated it at 30. What I didn’t understand then, but understand now, is that being incredibly serious all the time isn’t a sign of strength, or maturity, or “adultness”. It turns out, it’s the exact opposite. To quote the Doctor again, there’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.

And maybe serious isn’t the right word for what I mean here. Doctor Who frequently isn’t “serious”, but it is always “sincere.” And that’s “The Space Babies”; it isn’t serious for an instant, but it’s as sincere as anything.

Plus, they spent a tremendous amount of Disney’s money to put a huge fart joke on BBC One in primetime.

Nice to see you again, Doctor.

Doctor Who Grab Bag

The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight

I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.

Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.

Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.

Meanwhile….

If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.

One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?

Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.

Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.

Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”

With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.

And finally…

From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.

And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”

Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):

Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times

My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.

This is gonna be really fun.

Doctor Who Season 1/14/40

As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:

Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?

Caves of Androzani at 40

As long as we’re talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of “Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davison’s final story as Doctor Who.

One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isn’t totally unusual—Bond does the same thing—but what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.

The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can “regenerate”, healing themselves but changing their body.

This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Who—stories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. “Regeneration Stories” tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something “really extra bad” is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And they’re always deeply unsatisfying, because it’s always the sort of problem that wouldn’t be that big a deal if the main actor wasn’t about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.

Except once.

In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as “fine”. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.

For Davison’s last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the show’s dominant—and best—writer throughout the seventies, but had’t worked on the show since ’79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.

The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as “a pathetic little war”, and he’s right—it’s almost perversely small-scale by his standards.

That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on what’s going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. It’s a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor has—just by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.

What’s really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end he’s only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.

It's also remarkably better than everything around it—not just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. It’s better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.

It’s not flawless—the show’s reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, there’s a “computer tablet” that’s blatantly a TV remote, and there’s a “magma beast” that’s anything but. But that’s all true for everything the show was doing in the 80s—but for once, it’s trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.

My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it back—it’s ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show won’t do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.

It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.

As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the show—it was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, I’m not inclined to argue.

Books I Read In ’23: Part 3

Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas by John Scalzi

Redshirts caused quite a stir when it came out originally, and rightly so! It’s brilliant. The premise is straightforward: the junior officers of the Universal Union starship Intrepid start to notice that whoever goes down to the planet with the captain and other senior officers always dies while those senior officers always live, and they decide to do something about it. It was, and probably still is, Scalzi’s best book. The extended riffs on Trek tropes are fun, and then manages to move into a place thats both more meta and more interesting. I recall the length of the codas getting some criticism at the time, but like the Scouring of the Shire, they’re the whole point.

I could have sworn I read this back when it came out, but my copy has vanished over the years, so I impulse bought a new one. I remembered the front half very clearly, but the back half not so much, which implies a variety of funny things.

I have to admit, though, this plays very different in a world with Lower Decks. When this came out in ’13, Star Trek was pretty much dead as an ongoing concern, so metafictional deconstructions had a lot of space to breathe. Now, in a world where the two best Trek shows of all time are currently in production (LD and SNW, for the record,) one of which is covering much of the same ground of digging into the long-running tropes of the franchise, Redshirts stops feeling quite so cutting edge and starts feeling a little behind.vvI’ve not seen Redshirts cited as a specific inspiration for Lower Decks, but I’d be stunned if it wasn’t in the mix. As it is, I spent a lot of time (re?)reading this book thinking, “Boimler and Mariner landed this joke better.”

Still! Great read, and the codas are what make it work. Great, great ending. (When the time comes, I hope LD has one as satisfying.)

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Scalzi’s latest operates much in the same zippy, light-weight “beach read” gear as last year’s Kaiju Preservation Society. The main character unexpectedly inherits his estranged uncle’s super-villain business, hijinks ensue. It’s not his best work, but still a thoroughly entertaining potboiler.

As he’s been very open about, he was clobbered by COVID halfway though the book, and as he put it got “brain scrambled” afterwards, and as such he turned the manuscript in very, very late. It’s dangerous to try and map too much of an author’s private life onto their work, but I feel like you can spot the exact page where he shakes off the Long Covid stupor and says “shit, I have to finish this.” I do not believe for one second that the resolution at the end of the book is what he had in mind while writing the first half, it’s sloppy in a “genius in a panic” sort of way, but it’s still fun.

(And man, I could have sworn I wrote this review already, but damned if I could find it.)

Midnight pals vols 1-3 by Bitter Karella

The print form of the @midnight_pals twitter feed, we find a collection of horror authors (King, Lovecraft, Barker, Poe, Koontz) sitting around a campfire telling stories, with guest appearances by… basically every other author you’ve ever heard of? It’s hilarious when you know who the guest authors are, and utterly inscrutable when you don’t. I loved it. As an aside, more people from the old twitter should just sell a print copy of their tweets?

Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Inspired by the next entry, I started reading Calvin & Hobbes with the kids. Turns out: just as good as you remember.

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson

Oh wait, I already wrote about this: The Mysteries

Dracula Daily by Bram Stoker and the internet

Hang on, I already wrote about this one too: Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 by Elizabeth Sandifer

I am a huge, huge fan of Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum, “An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who”. Essentially, a history of British culture told through the format of “in-depth literary analysis of all of Doctor Who”. Primarily a blog, she’s been updating and repackaging the material into book form. This is a format I wish more bloggers would use; there’s quite a few bloggers I wouldn’t mind picking up a print essay collection from every few years.

This is Volume 8, which covers the period from the disastrous TV movie in ’96 to the first season of the revived show in ’05, with all the deeply weird spin-off material from between those. There’s two threads to this one: what had to happen for the show to finally come back, and why didn’t any of the various previous swings work? (Spoiler: an actually good writer finally got ahold of it.) She’s much kinder to most of this material than I am; none of this stuff was very good, but there’s a lot to talk about, and she always has an interesting take. Due to the scale of the undertaking, there are very few critical works that cover all of Doctor Who. Of those, the Eruditorum is my favorite.

As an aside, she’s just kicked off her coverage of the Whittaker years on the website, having gotten a preview on the patreon, it’s gonna be a banger.

Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases

With the announcement of Doctor Who Season 15 on Blu-Ray, that means we’re a little over halfway done with the blu-ray re-release of the old show, and of 27 possible sets, there are 12 remaining. Part of the “fun”, for certain values of “fun”, is that they release them out of order, and never annouce more than one ahead.

The DVD releases worked the same way, and back then I used to try and reverse-engineer the release scheme. I enjoy this sort of corporate kremlinology, so lets see if we can guess which ones are coming next.

First, some prelimiaries!

I’ll leave these two links here for anyone who wants to play the home game:

List of Doctor Who episodes (1963–1989) )

List of Doctor Who home video releases

The out-of-order releases are for a couple of reasons. First, Tom Baker Fourth Doctor sells the best, followed by Jon Pertwee’s Third, and the color seasons sell better than the black-and-white ones, so they like to spread the better selling ones out. Second, some of these seasons are “harder” to put together than others. All of the first six seasons sill has episodes that are missing. The BBC has been re-creating these with animation, but they’re not done. As a side effect of what state formerly-missing episodes were recovered in, every season up through (at least) 11 has at least one show that needs some heavy-duty restoration.

Looking back at the blu-ray releases so far, they do 2 or 3 releases a year, and like to spread out the “hard” ones. They kinda seem to alternate between 2 and 3 in alternate years, pandemic non-withstanding?

With all that said, which seasons are left, and what problems do they all have?

• 1—William Hartnell’s First Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story, and some weird rights issues around the first story, “An Unearthly Child.”
• 3—First Doctor, black and white, four unanimated missing stories including one really big and complicated one.
• 4—Mostly Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor with a pair of Hartnell stories at the start of the year before the handover, black and white, two unanimated missing stories, although one of these is strongly rumored to be in production as I type this.
• 5—Second Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story, plus this season contains the one officially missing story that’s known for a fact to exist in private hands.
• 6—Second Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story.
• 7—Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, originally made in color but three of the four stories were only preserved in black and white; the color has been restored at various levels of success, and clearly would need more restoration work for a blu-ray release.
• 11—Third Doctor, originally made in color, but a single half-hour episode only survived in black-and-white, which is also the same story full of terrible dinosaur special effects, which if you’re already throwing a bunch of money at fixing the color why not also do new dinosaurs?
• 13—Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, color, no issues I know of, but back in the DVD days there was a long-standing rumor that the first story in this season, “Terror of the Zygons”, was going to be the last one released on DVD, and it essentially was.
• 16—Fourth Doctor, color, no issues as far as I know.
• 21—Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, color, no issues as far as I know.
• 25—Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, color, there was a American PBS behind-the-scenes documentary made for one of the stories this season which they would absolutely want to include and I could see having some complex rights issues to sort out.
• The 1996 TV Movie, plus “the wilderness years”—Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, color, there’s some strong rumors that they’re going to wrap the terrible FOX movie in a set covering all the weird stuff that happened between 1989 and 2005, there’s actually quite a bit of stuff you could put on such a set, rights allowing. (Curse of Fatal Death, Scream of the Shalka, the web version of Shada with McGann, the material made for the 1999 “Doctor Who Night”, the FMV from “Destiny of the Doctors”?)

Assuming 2 or 3 a year, that’s 5 more years. Let’s try to guess a release plan.

The two best-selling Doctors, Tom Baker and Pertwee, have five seasons left between them (including the just announced season 15.). Assume one of those a year, alternating. We also have five B&Ws left, so we can assume one of those a year. That leaves seasons 21, 25, and whatever they do with the TV movie as the three “floaters” to make up a third release. And, just for fun, let’s assume “Terror of the Zygons” is last this time too.

We can also kick season 1 to the end, to leave more time for the AUC rights situation to shake out. It’s hard to guess what the gameplan will be for unanimated episodes? The season 2 release has one incomplete show on it, so they’re willing to ship blu-rays with gaps.

Since the last two years have been two-release years, we can guess we’re due for a triple-release year this year, then alternating after.

So, putting some bets down, that all looks like:

• 2024

  • 15—always start a list with something you can check off at once.
  • 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?
  • 25—they did a Davison last year, so this is the other remaining 80s season.

• 2025

  • 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if they do try and replace those dinosaurs.
  • 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”

• 2026

  • Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.
  • 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
  • 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.

• 2027

  • 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
  • 5—The missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually .

• 2028

  • 1—the checks should have cleared by now.
  • 21—one last Davison set.
  • 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.

That kinda hangs together? Except 2027, thats gonna sell terribly and is definitely wrong. On the other hand, that’s how the cards dealt out. We’ll see, I guess!

Doctor Who Season 15 on Blu-Ray

They’ve announced the next Classic Doctor Who Blu-Ray season set, and as such there’s an absurdly overly elaborate trailer:

Leela vs the Time War | The Collection: Season 15 Announcement Trailer | Doctor Who - YouTube

Over the last few years, they’ve been re-releasing the old show on Blu-Ray in season sets (whereas before they released it on DVD a single story at a time). They’ve become the gold standard for an archive TV release: fully restored and cleaned-up picture and sound, upscaled to HD despite having been shot in extremely not-HD, making-of documentaries for every story, historical interviews, new interviews deleted scenes, any other thing they can find that’s relevant in the BBC vaults.

The DVDs were mostly released before the show came back, so they had a sort of, not apologist attitude, exactly, but certainly defensive. Lots of interviews on the theme of “it’s not as bad as it looks, you wouldn’t believe how little money we had,” and so on. The Blu-Rays, made in a world where the new show is occasionally the biggest thing on the BCC, are much more relaxed. Much more willing to lean back and just say “yeah, this one was trash, but the next week, that one was pretty good.” That, mixed with a sense that this is their final swing at this, so there’s an impressive amount of attention to getting the details right, cleaning up things that were skipped on the DVDs, digging up any potential bonus material. It helps that physical media has gone back to being a niche thing, so it’s understood that these are a deluxe product for mega-fans, not a low-price item that someone is going to impulse by at Fry’s Electronics. (RIP)

One of the goofy new special features they do for the Blu-Rays are these announcement trailers, which have grown in complexity into being, essentially, bite-sized episodes of the old show. They get back a variety of the old actors, build sets, put credits on them.

Mostly they’ve fallen into a pattern of “let’s see what happened to the companion from this season after they left the show,” which isn’t a terrible impulse, but the answer is never interesting. The downside is that there’s a certain subset of fans who want everything to be moar epic, which is not the register in which Doctor Who operates the best. But that’s how we end up here, where poor Lousie Jamison is acting as hard as she can against a bluescreen that’s going to have Daleks added on later, because the answer to “what happened to Leela” is “she fought in the Time War”, which… okay? So what? (This also feels like someone was ticking a box, and since Leela was never in a Dalek episode, she got one here.). And it ends with a big speech about how great the (off-screen) Doctor is, and then she gets to escape while everyone else on Galifrey burns? The ethics there are a little questionable, but this was witten and directed by the same guy who wrote the episode where Space Amazon were the good guys and the workers looking for labor protection were the bad guys, so no surprise there. And this is as close as something with only one female character can get to failing the Bechtel test.

That’s the best idea you have for a mini-sequel trailer thing? Leela monologues at some Daleks and then beams away? And they’re all like that, zeroing in on some weird fan lore point with Big Speeches. The limit case for this was the Season 17 trailer, Davros Rises! which was an overwrought fan-fiction elaborating on a moment in the deeply terrible Dalek episode they did that year, which is utterly bizarre since that’s the same season where Douglas Adams wrote the single best episode of the old show with seven (authentic) Mona Lisas. (“Where are you going?” “I’m going to go see a middle aged Italian. Well, late middle-age, early renaissance.”). Which tells you a lot about who they think the target audience for these are.

Personally, if I had gotten this kind of budget to do a mini-sequel to an episode from season 15, I’d do a fake episode of In Search Of about the mysterious deaths in the 1920s at the lighthouse on Fang Rock, and have one of the locals be Leela, now mysteriously living in retirement in the mid-1970s. Put a glimpse of a Time Lord robe in her closet. K9 is in the shed.

But grousing aside, it’s all in good fun, and what a joy that my favorite TV show gets this kind of treatment.

Doctor Who And Some Stray Thoughts About Bigeneration

I didn’t put this together immediately, but on the commentary track for “The Giggle”, RTD moots the theory that every regeneration to date was actually a bigeneration. It isn’t totally clear if he means that this rippled back retroactively, or that this always happened off screen in a parallel timeline or something. I guess this does a better job explaining “The Two Doctors” than Season 6B ever did? Or even better, the way Troughton and Pertwee play their Doctors as having come out of retirement for “The Five Doctors”.

But this also illuminates the intent behind what’s going on in Tales from the Tardis, the previous Doctors really are out there running around as older versions of themselves.

But to what end? There were much simpler ways to justify the multi-Doctor teamup in “The Giggle” or old actors returning for “Tales from the Tardis”. This feels like table-setting, but table setting for what, I wonder?

On the one hand, I believe them when they say they don’t have any plans to bring Tennant back again, but on the other hand, that’s a hell of an artillery piece to load and ostentatiously hang on the mantlepiece if you’re not planning to fire it.

Doctor Who and The Church on Ruby Road

When the first trailer for “The Church on Ruby Road” aired, opening as it did with a shot of the new Doctor dancing in a nightclub, I saw someone online react something along the lines of “why would a thousand year old Time Lord go dancing?”

To this, I had a very strong two-part reaction, namely:

1. I think you mean “billion”, not “thousand”
2. My nightclub days are long, long behind me, but if I woke up looking like Ncuti Gatwa, you couldn’t drag me out of them

But this grouchy internet person made an interesting point, albeit accidentally: there’s a solid sub-genre of Doctor Who where the story opens with the Doctor already in the middle of something, and I can’t remember there ever being one where that “something” was “having fun”.

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Taken entirely on its own, “The Church on Ruby Road” is an absolute delight. Just fun from beginning to end. The stakes are never that high, and the plot is a slender thing, but that’s the point; we’re here to launch the two new leads and set up the show going forward. And be as Christmasy as possible while doing it.

From the moment he pops onto screen, here in his first real episode, Ncuti Gatwa makes it clear why he got the part; playing a character that’s unquestioningly the Doctor, but a different model than we’ve ever seen before.

The script does a lot of heavy lifting for him, giving him a series of, if you will, “median value” Doctor Who moments, and letting him show off his spin on them. He gets two scenes—where tells the police officer that his girlfriend is going to say yes, and then later when he compares “real time travellers” to whatever the goblins are doing—that are practically Doctor Who audition pieces (and I’d be surprised if at least one of them wasn’t literally one). You can close your eyes and hear how any of his predecessors would have done either of those scenes. Gatwa manages to land a take on both that’s both utterly unlike how any of the other actors would have done it, but also unmistakably the Doctor.

And, mind you, this is after being introduced in a scene doing something no other Doctor would do—that seems custom designed to stroke out anyone left watching who’s been complaining about “woke doctor who”—and then immediately snaps into frame and Doctors the hell out of his first scene with Millie Gibson.

Mille Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, on the other hand, is a little harder to get a read on, mostly landing on “high energy” and being unflappable. Frankly, introducing the character by having her recite her life story in a literal TV interview feels a little—not lazy, exactly, but impatient? Mostly, she’s there to have stuff happen to, which is a little unfortunate. Her big moment comes at the end of the big song set-piece—the Goblin Song was heavily promoted ahead of time, but of course that turned out to be a headfake to cover the fact that we’ve got a Doctor that can sing now too, and then that turned into the reveal that we’ve also got a companion that can.

“Can ad-lib lyrics to a goblin song while trapped in a sky ship” isn’t the strongest character premise, but it’s a pretty solid start.

The goblins themselves, meanwhile, feel like exactly the kind of move you do when you have a new potential audience and you want to make sure they know “hey, this isn’t star wars.” Doctor Who has always worked better when it knows it’s science fantasy instead of science fiction, and musical steampunk goblins feels like a real statement of purpose. Plus, a solid use of that extra Disney+ money.

The ending is a little clunky? The brief riff on It’s a Wonderful Life and closing the time travel loop both feel a beat too short and easy, and the look on Gatwa’s face as he watches the figure that dropped off the baby walk away is “I could find out now, but I guess I’ll save it for the season finale.”

And then, Ruby runs down stairs and boards the Tardis because… the episode is over? Even the bigger-on-the-inside scene is swallowed so that the Mysterious Neighbor can break the fourth wall.

It’s clunky, but what’s funny is that it’s clunky in exactly the same way “Rose” was.

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Russell Davies is now in the unique position of having written the introductions for three Doctors and four companions, which puts him in solidly in the forefront versus anyone else that’s worked on the show.

(Okay, anorak time: Prior to this, RTD and Moffat had both done two Doctors. Terrance Dicks was involved with two—3rd and 4th—but script-edited one and wrote the other. JNT was the producer for three new Doctors—5th, 6th, and 7th—but had a different script editor and writer each time. Moffat did four companions if we include Rory, which we do. If I’m counting off the top of my head right, JNT hired seven companions, but again with different creative staff nearly every time.)

So how does this compare to his other two?

The first time—“Rose”—was a full reset of the show, assuming that the vast majority of the audience had never seen the old show. That episode spent a lot of time setting up the “Rose Tyler Show” so that the Doctor could crash into it.

The second time—“The Christmas Invasion”—was mostly a character piece about existing main character Rose Tyler reacting to her friend changing, and then David Tennant swaggers in with ten minutes to go and takes over the show.

This doesn’t resemble either of those so much as it does “The Eleventh Hour” in that it has to introduce a whole new cast and serve as a jumping-on point, but assumes that most of the audience already knows the score.

Besides, the “swagger in and steal the show” scene came two weeks ago, this is more worried about getting on with it and showing what the show is going to be like going forward.

RTD has an interesting tic where the Tardis is sidelined for a companion’s first story, and then the story ends with “all that and also a time machine!” “Rose” gets the Tardis involved earlier, but doesn’t time travel, but both “Smith and Jones” and “Partners in Crime” leaves it to the end. (“The Runaway Bride” has a lot of Tardis, but, like “Rose”, obscures it’s more unique features.)

Compare that to “The Eleventh Hour” or “The Pilot”, where the fact that it’s a time machine factors heavily into Amy/Bill’s first encounter.

“Rose” was pretty deliberately designed as part of a triptych with “The End of the World” and “The Unquiet Dead”; that first part ends with her running towards the Police Box, and most of the “Tardis Stuff” gets handled at the start of the second; that is, other than the big “bigger on the inside” beat halfway though “Rose”.

“The Church on Ruby Road” kind of awkwardly straddles the middle The perfunctory ending would play a lot better if the next episode was next week instead of in 4 months. And the show spends a lot more time setting up the mystery about Ruby’s birth than exploring what her life is like now, and why she’s willing to run off with the Doctor at the end other than a vague sense of “waiting for her life to start” malaise.

But, having typed all that out now, I actually think that’s pretty savvy. “Rose” was about pulling in a whole new audience. “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Eleventh Hour” were about telling that existing audience not to worry, it’s still the same show.

“The Church on Ruby Road” is doing something new, it’s trying to get the old audience back. It’s no secret that the ratings, however you measure them, have been in a slow but steady decline since the 50th anniversary. These four 2023 specials aren’t really about attracting new people, their job is to reel back in all those people who were watching in 2008 and saying “that show you like is back in style”.

Much like how “The Eleventh Hour” accidentally became the jumping-on point for everyone in the US who discovered the show on BBC America, this might be that for a next generation of Disney+ first time viewers, but: no. Those people all clicked “Special 1” instead of “Special 4” and discovered the show with “The Star Beast.”

Historically, the closest analogue to what the show is doing here is “Remembrance of the Daleks”, but in a parallel universe where they had bothered to tell anyone that the show was about to be better than it had maybe ever been.

So, this can get away with having Millie Gibson pop onto screen, deliver her character brief directly to the camera, and the audience goes “got it, new companion. So about those goblins from the trailer?”

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Something that does come through clearly is that RTD has been watching the show since he left. Ruby Sunday doesn’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those, please”. And the casual use of time travel in way the Doctor goes back in time to make sure the baby gets where it needs to be isn’t something that really entered the show’s vocabulary until Moffat took over.

And, after having Neal Patrick Harris look the fanbase directly in the eye and say, essentially, “you can’t trust anything the Master said about the Doctor’s origins”, he picks out the most interesting nugget—that the Doctor might be adopted—and runs with it.

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Love that “mavity” is going to be running thing.

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There’s a long running fan “tradition” of breathlessly claiming any mysterious character is the return of the Rani/Romana/Drax/Susan, etc. That last shot seems to be there specifically to wind those people up, but okay, I’ll play along. I think Mrs. Flood is going to turn out to be… K'anpo.

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What would you do if you woke up, and you were young, and beautiful, and all the pain was gone? You still had your memories, you’re still the same person, but healed?

How great would that be?

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One of the big innovations when the show came back into 2005 was to massively expand the emotional palette. Now, this is as much a ding on the old show as its a compliment to the new one; the old show went off the air less than four months before Twin Peaks started, which is a remarkable demonstration of how behind-the-times the show had gotten. Expanding the emotional palette was less an innovation and more admitting that there are other shows on TV.

But, the upshot was the main character was suddenly allowed to have actual feelings for the first time, which tremendously widened the scope of what kinds of stories the show could tell.

The last time RTD rebooted the show, the character and the show had both been though some stuff. The Time War was pretty explicitly a metaphor for the show’s cancellation; and both the character and the show were pretty angsty about everything that had happened since we saw them last.

Now, almost two decades later he’s rebooting it again, and both the show and the character have been though even more stuff. It’s been a weird time! But now, the characer and the show’s reaction is to just be glad to be here, thrilled to be alive. That feels like an older and wiser reaction.

Here in 2023, having an angst-filled tortured main character feels positively old-fashioned. Instead, now we’ve got one that seems motivated more by joy and raw enthusiasm.

Good to see you, Doctor. Glad you’re back. Roll on the future.

Doctor Who and the Canon… Of Death

I’ve very much been enjoying the commentary around the last couple of Doctor Whos, especially “The Giggle”. There’s a lot of intersting things to talk about! But there’s a strand of fans, primarily ones used to American Sci-fi, that really struggle with the way Doctor Who works, and especially with how Doctor Who relates to itself. It fundamentally operates on a different set of rules for a long-running show than most American shows.

You see—Doctor Who doesn’t have a canon. It has a continuity, but that’s not the same thing.

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Lets step back and talk about “canon” for a second.

“Canon” in the sense of organizing a body of fiction, originates with the Sherlock Holmes fandom. There, they were making a distinction between Doyle’s work and what we’d now call “fan fiction”. Using the biblical term was one of those jokes that was “ha ha only serious”, it’s clearly over the top, but makes a clear point—some things exist at a higher level of importance than other things.

But it also sets the stage nicely for all future uses of the term; it draws a box neatly around the core works, and the social contact from that point on is that any new work needs to treat the material in “the canon” as having happened, but can pick and choose from the material outside—the apocrypha, to continue the metaphor.

So, any future Sherlock Holmes work is expected to include the fact that he faked his death at the top of a waterfall, but isn’t expected to necessarily include the fact once he was treated by Freud.

Again, here the term mostly draws a line between what today we’d call “Official” and not. It’s a fancier way of putting the work of the original author at a higher level importance than any other continuation, formally published or not.

But then a funny thing happened. As large, multi-author franchises became the norm in the late 20th century, we started getting Official works that still “didn’t count”.

As usual for things like this, Patient Zero is Star Trek. When The Next Generation got going, the people making that show found there was an awful lot of material out there they didn’t want to have to deal with. Not fan-fiction, the official vs fan device was clear by the mid-80s, but works that were formally produced by the same people, had all the rights to do so, but “didn’t really happen.” Specifically, the Animated Series, but also every single spin-off novel. So, Roddenberry & co. declared that the “Star Trek Canon” was the original show and the then four movies, and everything else was not. Apocrypha. Official, but “didn’t count.”

(Pushing the biblical metaphor to the breaking point, this also introduced the first “deuterocanonical” work in the form of the Animated Star Trek, where nearly everything in it has been taken to have “happened” except the actual plots of the episodes themselves. And those force-field belts.)

(And, it’s absolutely insane to live in a world where we act like the Voyager episode “Threshold” happened and Diane Duane’s Rihannsu didn’t, but at least the rules are clear.)

And this became the standard for most big sprawling multi-media franchies: sooner or later nearly all of them made some kind of formal statement about which bits were “The Canon.” And the key detail, always, was that the only reason to formally declare something like this was to leave things out. This isn’t always a bad thing! As I said before a lot of this was around establishing a social contract between the authors and the audience—“these are the things we’ll adjust future work to fit, and these are the things we’re giving ourselves permission to ignore.”

The most extreme version of this was Star Wars, twice over. First, you have the overly complex 4-tired canon of the late 90s and early 00s, which not only established the Canon, but also provided a borderline-talmudic conflict resolution system to determine which of two pieces of canon that disagreed with each other was “right”.

Then, after Disney bought LucasFilm, they rescoped the canon, shrinking it down to pretty much just live action movies and the Clone Wars cartoon, banishing all the previous novels and such into the Deuterocanonical wilderness of “Legends”, which is sort of like if Martin Luther had also been the CEO of the company that bought the Catholic Church.

But, the point remains. Canon is way to exclude works, largely as an attention-conservation device, a way for a franchise to say “this is what what we commit to pay attention to, and the rest of this is fun but we’re going to ignore it.”

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Which is where we get back to Doctor Who.

Because Doctor Who is unique in that no one in a position to do so has ever made a formal declaration about “Canon”. And this makes a certain kind of fan go absolutely bananas.

There’s no point in having a canon if you’re not excluding something; the whole point is to draw a box around part, rather than the whole thing. And that just isn’t Doctor Who’s style.

There’s a quote from 70s script editor Terrance Dicks that I can’t find at the moment, that goes somesthing like “Doctor Who’s continuity is whatever the general public can remember,” and that’s really the animating principle. It’s a more free-wheeling, “it’s all true”, don’t sweat the details kind of attitude. This is how you end up with three completely different and utterly incompatible destructions of Atlantis. It’s not really a show that gets wrapped up in the tiny details? It’s a big picture, big concepts, moving forward kind of show.

And this completely violates the social contract of something like Star Trek or Star Wars, where the implied promise of having a Canon is that everything inside it will fit together like clockwork, and that any “violations” are opportunities for deep navel-gazing stories explaining the reasons. This leads to those franchises worst impulses, for example both to aggressively change how the Klingons look in an attempt to prove that “this isn’t your Dad’s Star Trek”, and then also spend three episodes with the guy from Quantum Leap explaining why they look different.

Doctor Who on the other hand, just kind of says “hey! Look how cool the Cybermen look now!” and keeps moving.

The point is, if you’ve bought into the clockwork canon worldview, Who looks incredibly sloppy, like a bunch of careless bunglers just keep doing things without any consideration of what came before.

(Which is really funny, because I absolutely guarantee you that the people who have been running Who the last two decades are much bigger fans of the old show than anyone who’s worked on Star Trek over the same period.)

So when the show got big in the US, the American fans kept trying to apply the Star Trek rules and kept getting terribly upset. This has spawned a fair amount of, shall we say, internet discussion over the years. The definitive statement on Doctor Who’s lack of canon is probably Paul Cornell’s Canonicity in Doctor Who. But there’s those Trek fans that remain unconvinced. Whenever the show tosses out something new that doesn’t really fit with the existing material—bigeneration, say—there’s the fan cohort that goes completely mental. Because if you treat decades old stuff as having higher precedence that new ideas, the whole thing looks sloppy and careless.

But it’s not carelessness, it’s just a different world view to how this kind of storytelling works. Thematically, it all works together. The details? Not the point.

I tend to think of Who working more like Greek Myths than a documentary about fictional people. Do all the stories about Hercules fit together? No, not really. Is he always the same guy in those stories? Yes, yes he is.

Same rules apply to the madman in a box. And if someone has a better idea for a new story, they should go ahead and tell it. Atlantis can always drown one more time.

Doctor Who and the Giggle

Spoilers Ahoy

An older man embraces his younger self. The younger man is filled with guilt, and rage, and dispair. The older man is calm, almost serene.

“It’s okay,” the older man says. “I got you.” He kisses his younger self on the forehead.

Sometimes the subtext gets to just be the text, you know? Or, to slightly misquote Garth Marenghi, sometimes writers who use subtext really are cowards.

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It turns out we got a multi-Doctor story after all!

It’s maybe the most obvious idea that the show has never used—what if a Doctor’s last episode was also a teamup with the next Doctor? You can easily imagine how that might work—some time travel shenanigans, they team up, defeat the bad guy, then some more time travel shenanigans as the loop closes and the one regenerates into the other. Imagine if the Watcher in Logopolis had been played by Peter Davison!

On the other hand, it’s also perfectly obvious why no one has ever done it.

First, this is a hard character to play, and most Doctors have fairly rough starts. Having to share your first story with your predecessor is beyond having to hit the ground running, you have to be all the way there.

Second, it’s disrespectful to the last actor. A villain the current Doctor can’t beat, but that the next one can? Seems like a bad story beat to go out on. But more than that, making this show is an actual job—people come in, they go to work, they know each other. Imagine spending your last couple of days at work sharing your job with the next guy. That sucks. You don’t get a going-away party finale about you, instead you have to share with the new kid.

But this finds a solution to both of those.

There’s a long history in the show of easing the new lead in by keeping the old supporting cast and letting them do the heavy lifting while the new Doctor finds their feet. Look at “Robot”, Tom Baker’s first episode as an example—that’s essentially a baseline Jon Pertwee episode that just happens to have Tom in it instead. This story realizes that you can extend the concept to include the old Doctor as well, treating them as part of the existing cast to help get the new Doctor going.

But more critically, in this case, the old Doctor has already left once! Tennant got his big showpiece exit back in 2010. This is bonus time for him, and can’t diminish his big exit in any way.

Instead, after two and a half hours of a greatest hits reunion, he steps to the side and pours all his energy into getting the new guy off the ground. It’s hard to imagine any other actor who’s played the part being willing to put this much work in to making their replacement look this good.

And good he does look. Ncuti Gatwa bursts onto the screen and immediately shows why he got the part. He’s funny, he’s exciting, he’s apparently made out of raw, uncut charisma. Tennant is still there, but once Gatwa arrives, he’s the only one you’re watching.

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The whole thing is just tremendously fun, an absolute delight from beginning to end. Presumably it’s title refers to what the author was doing the whole time they wrote it. It’s a big goofy, exciting, joyous, ridiculous adventure where the Doctors win by being brave, and clever, and charismatic, and kind, and what more could you possibly want from this show?

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The Toymaker is an interesting choice of returning classic villain. For everyone not steeped in the Deep Lore, “The Celestial Toymaker” is a mostly-missing story from late in the original show’s 3rd season where the Doctor gets pulled into the realm of the Toymaker, a siniser, seemingly immortal being living in a domain of play. The Doctor has to defeat him at a very boring game while his companions have a whole set of largely filler encounters with evil clowns and whatnot.

Oh, and the Toymaker himself (played by Batman’s Best Butler, Michael Gogh) is a deeply racist Chinese caricature, a white man dressed in full Mandarin robes and all. “Celestial”, get it? He’s from space, and also Chinese! It’s a racist pun.

This is strangely controversial take in some corners of Who fandom, where the arguments that the Toymaker isn’t racist seems to boil down to the suggestion that the show correctly used a racial slur for their yellow peril character during an uncharacteristically racist period of the show to perfectly craft a racist pun… by accident?

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That said, it’s easy to imagine that if you were ten in 1966 this was probably the coolest thing you’d ever seen—and then no one ever got to watch it again. For ages, that impression of the original viewers held sway in fan circles—the Discontinutity guide, formal record of mid-90s fan consensus, calls it an “unqualified success”.

Reader, it is not. It’s slow, the bad kind of talky, and feels like a show made entirely out of deleted scenes from another, better show.

Once we could watch reconstructions, the consensus started to shift a little.

Credit where credit is due, what it does have going for it is one of the show’s first swings at surrealism, and also one of the first versions of a powerful evil space entity; the adjective “lovecraftian” didn’t really exist in ’66, but this is one of the show’s first takes on “spooky elder god”. Also, it was strongly implied that the Toymaker and the Doctor already knew each other, and that was definitely the first time the show had hit that note.

So why bring him back?

Well, The Toymaker has the “mythic heft” to be the returning villain for the big anniversary show, while also not having anyone who would care that he got dispatched early, and in a way where he probably won’t be back again.

I thought the reworking of the character from a racist caricature to a character who likes to perform racist caricatures was very savvy, a solid way to rehab the character for a one-off return.

Plus, Neal Patrick Harris clearly understands the assignment, and absolutely delivers “evil camp” like no one else can. (More on that in a bit.)

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Let’s talk about Mel for a second. Mel wasn’t anyone’s favorite companion, barely a sketch of a character during a weird time on the old show, despite Bonnie Langford being probably the highest profile actor to be cast as a regular on the original show’s run.

A much-told anecdote is that for the cliffhanger of her first episode, the producer asked if she could scream in the same key as the first note of the closing credits, so that the one would slide into the other.

The bit of that story everyone always leaves out is that 1) yes she could, and 2) she nailed it in one take. There was a whole lot of talent there that the show just left on the floor. She was there for a year and a half, and then got out of the way so Ace could anchor the final mini-renaissance of the show before it finally succumbed to its wounds. Consigned to that list of characters where you go, “oh right, them” when you remember.

But then a funny thing happened.

Classic Doctor Who has been embarrassingly well-supported on home video. The entire show was released on DVD, and they’re now about half-way through re-releasing the whole show on blu-ray as well. As result of their decision to release each story separately on DVD, every single story has a wealth of bonus material—interviews, archive clips, making-of documentaries. The bulk of the DVDs came out during the tail-end of the “wilderness years” before the show came back, and the special features tend to split their time between “settling old grudges” and “this wasn’t that bad, actually.” There’s a real quality that “this is for the permanent record”, and so everyone tries to put the best face forward, to explain why things were the way they were, and that it was better than you remembered.

The Blu-rays, on the other hand, have a very different tone. Released long after the new show has become a monster hit, the new sets repackage all the old material while adding new things to fill in the gaps. While the DVDs tended to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of the productions, the new material is much more about the people involved. And they are all much more relaxed. We’re long past the point where the shows needs apologizing or explaining, and everyone left just finally says what they really thought about that weird job they had for a year or two decades ago.

A consequence of all this material has been that several figures have had their reputations change quite a bit. And perhaps none more so than Bonnie Langford. Far from being “that lady that played Peter Pan who kept yelling about carrot juice”, in every interview she comes across as a formidably talented consummate professional who walked into an absurd situation, did the best job anyone could possibly do, and then walked back out again.

Faced with a character with no background, no personality other than “80s perky”, and not even a real first story, and in a situation where she got no direction on a show where the major creative figures were actively feuding with each other, she makes the decision to, basically, lean into “spunky”, hit her marks, and go home. From my American perspective, she basically settles on “Human on Sesame Street interacting with the Doctor as a muppet” as a character concept, which in retrospect, is a really solid approach to Doctor Who in 1986.

The character, as on screen from “Terror of the Vervoids” to “Dragonfire” still doesn’t, in any meaningful way, work, but the general consensus floated away from “terrible idea” to “actually fairly interesting idea executed terribly.”

So, here in 2023, Bonnie Langford can show up on BBC One and credibly represent the whole original show for the big 60th anniversary.

And, this version of the character basically does work, which it accomplishes by just giving her something to do. For example, she gets to deliver exposition through song, a mid-bogglingly obvious idea that the old show just never thought of.

And look, if Lis Sladen were still alive that probably would have been Sarah Jane, but that wasn’t an option, so RTD went for something interesting that hadn’t been tried yet.

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What’s this story for?

Like we talked about before, it’s hard not to read these three specials as an artist in conversation with their previous work. If “The Star Beast” was about resolving Donna, and “The Wild Blue Yonder” was about turning out a great episode of Doctor Who, what’s “The Giggle” here to do?

On a purely mechanical basis, this is here to give Tennant a big send off and clear the decks for Gatwa and the new, new show can get a clean start.

But also, you get the feeling there were a couple things RTD wanted a do-over on before he relaunched the show for real.

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One of the things thats so great about Doctor Who is that it’s camp, but not just any camp. Doctor Who is AAA, extra-virgin, weapons-grade camp, and most people can’t hit that.

A lot of the time, when someone complains about someone coming on Who and being “camp” what they really mean is that they weren’t camp enough.

For example: John Simm’s take on the Master back in 2007. Like most of Series 3, it almost worked. There’s a scene towards the end where he’s dancing around the helicarrier dancing to a Scissor Sisters song, and it’s supposed to be sinister and instead it’s just kind of goofy? Simm can’t quite throttle up the camp required to pull that off, and in all their scenes together you can see Tennant easing off on the throttle. None of it quote worked, it just never hit the “evil camp” that RTD was clearly looking for.

Harris dancing to the Spice Girls while the UNIT soliders fired rose petals at him was clearly what RTD had in mind a decade and a half ago, and it was glorious.

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And the reprise of the Flash Gordon hand retrieving the Master is just delicious.

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I think my favorite moment of the whole show was “But she was killed by a bird!”

The toymaker’s puppet show was glorious. It served (at least) two purposes.

First, this was clearly some gentle ribbing of one show runner to the other. While “The Star Beast” directly engaged with Moffat’s criticism of Donna’s mind-wipe, this was RTD responding in kind about Moffat’s fetish for killing-but-not-really his companions. And then, RTD locking in on The Flux as a source of more Doctor Angst^TM.

Second, it grounded the whole point of the episode. The Doctor has been through a lot. Trauma has been a core feature of the show since the 2005 revival, but this was moment to pause and underscore, mostly for Donna’s benefit, how many terrible things have happened since she was on the show.

Like the Doctor casually mentioning that he was “a Billion years old”, things have happened, over the last fifteen years.

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There’s been some suggestion that the puppet show was RTD throwing shade on in successors, and no. The shade was “I made a jigsaw of your history.”

This set of specials had a very relaxed attitude towards “the rules”, whatever those might be. The sharpest example of this is keeping the emotional reverberations of The Flux, but muddying all the water around The Timeless Child, and the general “aww screw it” anything-goes attitude towards regeneration.

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One of the big, maybe the biggest, innovations of the 2005 re-imagining of Doctor Who was to expand the emotional palette. While the original show tended to operate in a very narrow band of—frankly—safe emotions, the revival opened the throttle wide open. Mostly this was used for angst, and doubt, and unrequited love.

Now, here at the start of the 2023 revival, we add healing to the show’s vocabulary.

These specials summon up all the unresolved trauma of the revival show to date, and exorcise it.

Who in 2005 was about pain, and loss, and grief, and living with trauma. Who in 2023 is about healing.

For once, both the Doctor and the companion get a happy ending, and dine off into the sunset.

The new Doctor is a man healed, finally free of the weight of the revival show.

It’s hard not to read that as at least partly autobiographical?

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Having the Doctor talking about past challenges, and then list The Time War, The Pandorica, and Mavic Chen as equals is hilarious. It’s nice to remember RTD is one of us, you know?

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Bringing back Trinity Wells, but she’s become an Alex Jones/Sean Hannity–type is even funner.

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Formally, the upcoming season of the show is Series 1 of Doctor Who (2023). Much hay has been made in some quarters that “Disney has reset the show”, and there’s some gnashing teeth that it’s “really” Series 14 of Doctor Who (2005) (or even Season 40 of Doctor Who (1963)).

From a production standpoint, it clearly is a new show; it’s being made at a new facility under the auspices of a new co-production company. From the view of the BBC’s internal paperwork, the 2023 show is as different an entity from the 2005–2022 show as that was from the 1963–1989 one. There’s still some churn, but the community seems to be coalescing on “Original era”, “Revival era”, and “Disney+ era” as the names you use in lists to organize the three iterations.

And it’s clear that from a branding perspective, Disney+—which is distributing the show outside of the UK and putting up a chunk of the budget for the privilege—would rather have the show page start with “Season 1” instead of the inexplicable-to-newcomers “Season 14.” And the contracts that cover the three interactions are clearly different too, with BritBox, Max (formerly HBO Max), and now Disney+ each having the rights to one of them. At worst, this seems like one of those moments where Amazing Spider-Man will declare a “bold new beginning!” and reset the issue numbering to #1. Sooner or later the original numbering sneaks back in to the inside cover, and then eventually it resets and issue 27 is followed by issue five hundred-something. It’s silly, but a decent branding exercise, a way to signal to new people “hey, here’s a safe place to jump on!” And, with the old business mostly concluded here, the Christmas episode seems like it’ll be a solid place to on-board.

But again, the subtext pulls up into the text.

By all reasonable measure, David Tennant is the revival show. He was by far the most popular, and Series 4 with him and Catherine Tate was the all-time ratings high.

So here, the two of them stand in for the entire revival era of the show. Bonnie Langford gets to represent the Original. This episode ends with the revival show and the new embracing, while the original show watches and approves. The revival show hands the keys to the new show, and then the revival and original shows retire to country, while the new show heads off to new adventures.

Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Doctor Who and the Wild Blue Yonder

My favorite moment was a little beat about a third of the way through the story. While working to reboot the spaceship they're trapped on, the Doctor quietly speculates to himself where the TARDIS has gone. The show always works better when it remembers to treat the TARDIS as a character instead of “just” the Doctor's car. It’s a perfect Doctor Who moment; simultaneously both explicitly mythic, with an undying space god invoking the image of an immortal, indestructible alien Time Machine outlasting whole civilizations, and quietly personal as the main character ruminates on where their oldest friend goes on vacation.

The TARDIS’s agency, and unique personality, have been intriguingly foregrounded; last week she dropped the Doctor right on top of Donna seemingly intentionally, and this week the ship delivers a warning via a the subtext of a song, runs off to repair herself, and then pops in to save everyone just at the nick of time. The return of the TARDIS’s personality from “The Edge of Destruction” was nowhere near my bingo card for this anniversary run, and I am here for it.

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Ahhh, the mysterious, all-secret, all-filmed-inside second one! The rumor mill was all over the place, the marketing for these specials went out of their way to avoid it, and by the last few days the internet had gone positively feral trying to guess what was going on.

So it starts, and the question is, what kind of story is this? All we knew for sure was that it was “scary”, except then it starts with a very self-contained comedy skit. There’s an unjustified tension to the first few minutes, as The Doctor and Donna open spaceship doors; is one going to reveal Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi or Carole Ann Ford or Ncuti Gatwa or someone? (Depending on which batch of rumors you believed.)

And then, about 15 minutes in, no—this is none of those things, this is RTD calling a do-over on “Midnight”.

RTD always liked having a sort of meta-structure to his Who seasons: start with the mostly-comedy opener, with a present-past-future triplet at the start, do the “funny” two-parter for kids, throw in a celebrity historical, the scary two-parter, a weird spiky and cheap one towards the end, and then a big blowout finale. And then a weirdly dark christmas episode as an epilogue.

The non-season of the 2009 specials was a stripped-down version of this—the fun opener of “Planet of the Dead”, the spooky two-parter of “Waters of Mars”, and then the grand finale of “The End of Time.”

And so now, it’s obvious we’re using the same basic format, except this middle is closer to “Midnight” or “Blink” or “Boom Town” than “The Empty Child” or “Impossible Planet” or “Silence in the Library.” I think that’s a good move! Those weird ones were always some of the best, and It’s fun to see him slip back into the “small and scary” mold this early in the return. And not only that, but one explicitly in the mold of a “let me prove I can still write” story.

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What made Tennant and Tate such a great pair of leads for Doctor Who? Their one year in 2008 remains the new show’s all-time ratings peak), and has the all-time highest AI scores for the entire 60-year run of the show. Not that it isn’t deserved, but why?

Partly, much like Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen, they had the good fortune to be on a show that was firing on all cylinders, operating at an absolute creative peak of the people behind the cameras.

You have one of the very few times where both leads are 1) at the same acting skill level, and 2) that level is very, very high. So you get this effect where not only are they both good, but they make each other better, if nothing else by virtue of that fact that neither one has to slow down to let the other one keep up. Here, they can go as hard as they can, and the other will stay right with them. I mean, Tennant was significantly better than his other co-leads, and on the other side, Karen Gillan was visibly dialing it back so Matt Smith could stay the lead. The only time you both leads pushing each other upwards like Tennant and Tate do was Capaldi and Coleman, and that was the other creative peak of the new show.

So here, Tate and Tennant put on an absolute clinic in how making tiny choices slightly different can flag “wrongness” without actually foregrounding anything as obviously wrong. And then, when they go full Evil Doppleganger Vampires, they manage to keep it as “the same characters, but scary”, and while still only nibbling the edges of the scenery rather than devouring it all-you-can—eat buffet–style.

(One almost gets the impression that Tennant especially is thinking back to John Sim’s moderately succesful take on the Master and thinking, “look, let me show you the right way to do Evil Doctor.”)

This is extra impressive considering neither of these two have played these characters in a decade and a half, and that this is only their second swing back at it.

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We havn’t talked much about the episode itself yet, and thats because it’s hard to know what to say. It’s utterly delightful that we’ve got an episode that looks and moves like “a cheap one”, but is blatantly incredibly expensive.

The core concept is incredibly solid; joking aside, this really does feel like “Midnight, but Donna comes along.” Take just the two main characters, strip away everything extraneous—no sonic, no guest cast, not even Tennant’s coat, and build the tension around how well these two actually know each other.

And then, fabulously, take two characters (and two actors) known for moving and talking fast, and put them in a situation where to win they have to be slow. Beautiful!

It might be a perfect example of Doctor Who running in “small and scary” mode.

And, the Doctor changing the subject away from Gallifrey with “well, then all that got complicated” is one of the best pieces of writing for telling a part of the audience “we’re not going to retcon anything, but we’re going to keep moving forward not looking back” that I’ve ever seen.

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Overall, it’s an interesting approach to an anniversary. We had a big messy “lots of past cast members show up” carnival last year with “Power of the Doctor”, and semi-wishful thinking aside it was unlikely that RTD was going to do something similar again.

Instead, the old gang got back back together and are effectively slotting a missing half-season between 2009 and 2010. Because despite what I said in the last paragraph, here we’ve got nothing but past cast members. Instead of a big cameo museum, we pick one specific point of the show and do a litte more of that. It’s an approach that I’d like to see more of, frankly. I’ve love a Cartmel-McCoy-Aldred special, or a Moffat-Capaldi-Coleman. And as fun as “The Two Doctors” was, they really should have just let Troughton and Hines have an episode to themselves.

There’s a faint hint in some corners of “is this all they’re doing?” But yes! Look at all they’re doing! Getting three extra episodes from one of the all-time great casts is a gift. Even better, they’re spending a whole third of their limited time making “real” Doctor Who, not just reunion grandstanding. Incredible.

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Finally, there’s a real glee in the way that between this week’s “hot Newton” and last week’s scream for Trans rights RTD is making “Doctor Who is woke now” old news long before Ncuti Gatwa has to absorb the brunt of it. It’s both delightful trolling of a group that deserves it, as well as an act of real kindness towards the new lead.

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And then it turns out the big surprise return of a past cast member was Bernard Cribbins. Perfect.

A Story About Beep the Meep

Up until last weekend, Doctor Who’s “Beep the Meep” was an extremely deep cut. Especially for American fans who didn’t have access to Doctor Who Monthly back in the 80s, you had to be a vary particular kind of invested to know who The Meep was. And, you know, guilty as charged.

We bought our first car with a lock remote maybe fifteen years ago? And when we get home, I’ll frequently ask something like “did you beep the car?” And I always want to make the joke “did you beep the meep”. And I always stop myself, because look, my family already knows more about Doctor Who then they ever, ever wanted to, but the seminar required to explain that joke? “So, the meep is a cute little fuzzy guy, but he’s actually the galaxy’s most wanted war criminal, and so the Doctor gets it wrong at first, and the art is done by the watchmen guy before he teamed up with The Magus, and it’s a commentary on the show using ugly as a signifier of evil, and actually it came before ET and gremlins, and…”

And just, no. Nope, no deal. That’s beyond the pale. I could explain the joke, but not in a way where it would ever be close to funny. So instead, about once a month, I stop myself from asking if the meep got beeped.

Flash forward to this week.

We all piled out of the car after something or other. Bundling into the house. Like normal, the joke flashed through my mind and I was about to dismis it. But then it suddenly came to me: this was it. They all know who the Meep is now! Through the strangest of happenstances, a dumb joke I thought of in 2008 and haven’t been able to use finally, finally, became usable. This was my moment! A profound sense of satisfaction filled my body, the deep sense of fulfillment of checking off a box long un-checked.

“Hey!” I said, “Did you Beep the Meep?”

...

Turns out, even with context, still not that funny.

Pre-Friday Linkblog, not-that-kind-of-doctor edition

The always-fascinating Going Medieval has an enlightening article today on the history of the use of “Doctor” as a honorific: Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry.

The short, short version is that “Doctor” started off as a way to mean someone who had done all the school to acquire a PhD, and then slowly spread to other professionals, like Physicians. As Dr. Janega says towards the end:

The point of all this is that it is a historical fact that the term “doctor” is supposed to refer to people who have a PhD and teach, and we let medical practitioners start using it cuz we are not weirdo gate keepers.

That’s the most interesting thing for me is that historically, “doctor” really signified someone qualified to teach. The whole thing is worth reading, especially the origins of the other formal terms for various medical professionals, and they way all those terms got flattened out into just “doctor.”

Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects, that’s right, Doctor Who.

The old show, the 1963–1989 one, made it very clear that the main character was not a medical doctor, but the “other kind.” It’s never stated this bluntly, but the implication that means he’s a “real doctor”. The new show (2005–present), on the other hand, had much more leaned into the later definition; the healer, the fixer-of-things.

This is not a complaint, to be sure, but I think it’s funny that the was the use of the term has evolved over the course of the show has mirrored the way the term has evolved in real life.

60th Anniversary Bonuses: Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour! & An Adventure in Space and Time

While the first anniversary special proper had to wait for Doctor Who’s proper domain of Saturday night, the actual anniversary day itself—Thursday the 23rd, had a pair of bonus anniversary festivities: a “special edition” of “The Daleks”, and a re-airing of “An Adventure in Space and Time”.

Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour!

As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, the BBC debuted a new version of the shows’s second story from 1963 that introduced the Daleks. Cut down by from nearly three hours to 75 minutes, and colorized, clearly the intent was clearly to made a “more modern”–style version of the story for new viewers to use as a jumping-on point.

The result was not entirely successful, but interesting.

Let’s start with what does work: the color. (Sorry, Colour). It looked much, much better than I was expecting, echoing both the surviving behind-the-scenes photos as well as the Cushing movies. It has a very 60s overly-bold look, with set coloring that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of the original Star Trek (this is a complement).

As for the length? Well…

Let’s talk about the old show’s format for a second. It was a “Series of Serials”; roughly 25 minute weekly episodes that were grouped into multi-episode stories. The show mostly settled on four or six parts as the standard, for various reasons “The Daleks” was seven parts long.

There was the usual grumping about “kids with short attention spans” when it was announced that they were going to do a version with roughly 60% of the content cut out. And look, I’m all for a round of “old men yelling at clouds”, but this isn’t the place. No one, and I mean literally no one, watched the whole thing at once when this was originally made; “The Daleks”wasn’t three hours long, it was two months long, 25 minutes of weirdness smack in the middle of Saturday evenings.

If anything, attention spans have lengthened—Who used to be 25 minutes a week, now it’s 45 or more.

And, watched all in one go, “The Daleks” is interminable. Not only is it designed to be watched one part a week, it’s designed for a world with no recording and no reruns, so something that long had to still make sense if you missed an episode or two. So, that means an awful lot of repetition, covering the same ground every week to keep everyone caught up. It’s a different format than today’s dramas, more like what we would think of as the style of a soap opera instead of a prime-time action-adventure show. And even given that, “The Daleks” specifically has very little happen over that run time.

So on the surface, yeah, you could pretty easily lose two thirds of the content. All the major plot beats are there. But the result is strange, though. It’s cut very tightly with new, very exciting music, over very languid scenes of actors walking and talking very slowly. The result is 75 minutes of a show that frantically presents nothing happening. The whole thing has the quality of a fever dream, not quite real, unfolding with its own strange logic.

It was a worthy experiment, and they made about the best possible attempt. I’m glad they did it, and I hope if they were planning on doing more that they spend that money on something else.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Meanwhile!

One of the highlights of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary ten years ago was Mark Gatiss’ An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama about the creation of Doctor Who, centered around William Hartnell, as played by David Bradley. It’s a great piece of work, nicely covering the start of the show and the challenges faced by original producer Verity Lambert, Hartnell, and the rest. One of the things it does extremely well is explore the fact that Hartnell stayed long past all the other people who started with him, and that he was finally forced to leave due to his ill health.

At the end, there’s a scene where Hartnell is getting ready to film his final scene as The Doctor, and looks up across the Tardis set and sees Matt Smith, the then-current incumbent Doctor, looking back at him. It’s a nice moment, Hartnell having a vision of how long this show of his would carry on.

At the time, Gatiss said they purposely filmed that scene so in the future they could swap in whomever was the incumbent Doctor at the time, strongly implying he was hoping that would become a standard practice for future actors in the role.

Well, they re-aired the movie for the 60th anniversary, and they actually did it, swapping in Ncuti Gatwa.

Delightfully, I think this is his first outing in character? He makes an immediate impression, and I’m even more excited about the future than I already was.

Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)

Beep the Meep on Disney+. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

Kicking off the 60th anniversary proper, we have first of 3 specials with Tennant back as the Tenth, excuse me Fourteenth Doctor.

It was great! Perfect execution of what it was there to do, put Tennant and Tate back on screen having a throwback adventure. It’s the big anniversary party! Let’s replay some of the greatest hits!

On paper, this is a classic Russell T Davies season opener; funny, exciting, big feelings, but mostly about setting the table for what comes next. It looks great, and Rachel Talalay directs the hell out of it, making sure every penny of that Disney money is up on the screen¹. And after the last couple of seasons (and disappointments like Loki), it was a breath of fresh air to watch something so confidently competent.

I’d love to know how this played to a new audience, which presumably the Disney+ deal brought in. The opening narration does, I think, about as good a job as you could of spinning up a new audience on what they missed. And I dearly love the juxtaposition of the gorgeous 4k shots of Tennant in space cutting back to the blatantly standard definition “previously on” clips. Let the new kids know that this is a show with more enthusiasm than budget and that’s whats so great about it right from the start.

Everyone slides back into their old roles immediately. In a lot of ways, it’s as if no time has passed at all, one could easily imagine a version of this kicking off season 5 in 2010.

But both Tennant and Tate have visibly spent some time thinking about how to play older versions of their characters, both the characters are slightly different, changed by the experiences of the last decade and a half. Tate especially does some really nice work with “Donna, but a mom now”, where all that energy now has a place to focus, and informed by her relationship with her own mom. Speaking of Donna’s mom, Jacqueline King’s Sylvia, who was the third and least interesting of RTD’s “companion’s moms as bad mother-n-laws” is a million miles better here than she ever was before; here her objections have merit rather than just being obstructionist or cruel, all that energy redirected into a woman desperately trying to keep her daughter safe. And in addition, she gets to be the voice of the audience, saying “wait a minute, you said if this happened it would be bad!”

Finally, I had some initial qualms with Tennant coming back as a new incarnation, as opposed to “just” reprising the Tenth. But a few minutes in, it becomes obvious why RTD made this choice. Both the Doctor and Donna are older now, and emotionally the same amount older; all “that” was years ago now, they’ve both moved on, done other things, lived their lives, and now both older characters have come back together to deal with unfinished business. You couldn’t make that work with a version of Tennant’s Doctor from somewhere in that gap between Ood Sigma’s warning and his arrival on the Ood Sphere. This is a version of the character who’s past River Song, who spent some time with a hole in his memory where² Clara should be, and was a woman for a while. They’re older, and like the author, has a very different take on what happened in the 2008 season finale than they had at the time.

On that point, though: More artists should get the chance to go back and revisit their previous work.6 As much as this was a big reunion special, this was also very much an older author in conversation with his younger self, and handling some unfinished business. Specifically: It’s pretty clear RTD has been thinking about Donna’s end ever since 2008.

RTD always enjoyed giving his companions tragic endings; nearly everyone who travled with the Doctor between 2005 and 2010 came away worse for the experience. Donna though—I’m not sure that was supposed to be as tragic as it landed. I suspect RTD was going for “the grownup in the room doing something unfortunate but necessary”, and then Tennant and Tate played it as the assault that it really was. It’s clear that stuck with him, and it’s also clear that the fairly stinging rebuke of the story from the end of “Hell Bent/Heaven Sent” also landed.

RTD is—obviously—a very strong, very talented writer, but in his time with Doctor Who he had a bad habit of writing very compelling characters with complex emotional journeys, and then at the climax of their story, taking all their agency away and making it a story about The Doctor’s lack of good choices. Very few characters ever got a say in what happened to them, they would get backed into a corner and then the Doctor would just choose which of their bad choices they would get.

It’s a mistake to read too much into this I think? I always suspected this was less of a statement of purpose and more a factor of the fact that they made a whole lot of Doctor Who very quickly. The production schedule didn’t leave a whole lot of room for “rethinking ideas”. “Lonely God” was a very successful note for the show to play, and it makes sense to focus a finale on the character who’ll still be around to deal with the fallout next year, so it makes sense that in a pinch they’d head towards “David Tennant crying in the rain” as fast as possible.³

With The Star Beast, RTD goes out of his way to fix both issues. The plot is carefully constructed to give Donna the choice she never got back in ’08 to either get her memories back and die or live as she has been. And then, having made the choice she would have made then, but for reasons that are new, the show lets her (and her daughter) figure out the solution themselves, reminding the Doctor that just because he can’t think of a solution, that doesn’t mean there is one. You can almost hear RTD muttering to himself “see, this was how you should have done it!”

But speaking of unfinished business, The Star Beast itself feels like one too. The comic story this special is based on was a very successful, well regarded entry from the 80s, and it’s on the obvious short-list of spin-off media that could be adapted for the Main Show. It’s impossible to believe that the RTD that was adapting or recycling Jubilee, Spare Parts, and Human Nature wasn’t thinking about Beep the Meep. Heck, _”Smith and Jones”, the opening of Series 3, has a seemingly friendly old woman being chased by alien troopers, only for it to turn out that the Judoon are really the police and the old woman a criminal. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t start as a Star Beast adaptation, just continually rounded down to something the show could afford until it was two rhino-men costumes in a hospital. But now, goosed by Disney’s investment and a decade of computer graphics advancements, we get the real article.

Anyway, I loved it. Perfect job resolving the left-over business, now on to things to come. As I write this, we still don’t know anything of substance about that second special, which they’ve kept almost totally under wraps. What are they hiding for next week? Can’t wait to find out.

— Because I couldn’t help myself, I went and checked the tops of the waves of the reactions on the ‘net. And, as you might imagine, all the folks that were hoping for the end of “Woke Dr. Who” are all losing their minds, and: good.

But, one of the other criticisms I saw was that The Star Beast wasn’t very subtle. As if subtlety automatically meant high-quality! And look, subtle is great when it’s Hemmingway dancing around what really happened to Jake in the margins of The Sun Also Rises, but not when you have something to say. Subtle isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes “Subtle” is just “Cowardice.” Whispering when you should be shouting.

When it was announced that RTD was coming back to do more Doctor Who, the obvious question was: why? He already had a tremendously successul run, he can clearly do whatever he wants, why come back? What’s the upside?

In interviews, he always says something like he’s always been a fan, and never stopped thinking up ideas, and was excited to do more when given the chance—and I think that’s true. It also seems likely that the show wasn’t doing as well as anyone wanted, and with the transition to being make by Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s Bad Wolf productions that there was some strong desire to get RTD back to relaunch the show the same way he did in ’05.

But I think there was something else. He’s been a busy guy the last couple of years, between Years and Years and It’s a Sin, and he’s had plenty of time to be out talking into microphones, and it’s been clear that he’s angry. The last decade or so have provided plenty to be angry about! It seemed to me the reason to come back and do a show like Who now, on top of those other things, was the size of platform. A man with nothing left to prove but plenty to say.

I was going to bury this in a link, but no: go watch this acceptance speech he gave for one of the awards won by It’s a Sin. That’s not a guy who’s coming back to Doctor Who to do a series of interchangeable Base-Under-Siege stories. He’s got things to say.

And after The Star Beast, I’m pretty sure I was right. It’s a very angry show, but focused. It’s determined to show a world where diversity is a good thing, where UNIT officers wear turbans, where wheelchairs are an advantage5, where the secret to saving the day is being Trans, where surface readings based on appearance are wrong. It’s perfect that they waited until now to use The Star Beast—at the time it was calling out the parent show for constantly using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil, and now they get to use the same story to do the same thing again.

It’s a bold, brave statement of what progressive Doctor Who should actually look like (as opposed to what we’ve been getting the last half-decade.)

There’s always a portion of the audience—any audience—that would rather “whatever this is about” be stuffed down under the covers, hidden far enough away that they don’t have to notice or think about it. The kind of people who think art should “soothe, not distract.”

But fundamentally, art is about things. If you have things to say, subtle isn’t the way to go.

We’re in an age where we don’t need “subtle”, we need people to stand up and speak clearly. And if you can use Disney’s money to do it to a wide audience on BBC One, so much the better.

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1. There were a couple of beats that seemed specifically built around the team giggling “look what we can do with this extra cash!” The holographic UI on the sonic screwdriver was one. But I thought the biggest was the opening credits, that had real “we always wanted to do it like this but couldn’t afford it” energy. Those drone shots of the battle between the Wraith Warriors and UNIT! And, of course, that new Console Room.

2. That is what happened at the end of Twice Upon a Time, right? Twelve got his memory back?

3. There’s a quote from RTD somewhere⁴ bemoaning that it’s the Doctor in balloon at the end of “The Next Doctor” instead of David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake. And he’s right, it’s Lake’s story, and Lake should be the one to resolve it. But this plays into what we’re talking about—in a pinch, go with a closeup of Tennant looking serious.

4. I could have sworn this was in The The Writer’s Tale, but a cursory exam didn’t turn it up. Maybe one of the DVD commentaries that used to be on the BBC website?

5. Ruth Madeley’s characer—the wheelchair using UNIT scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham—is a great character on their own, but represents something extra coming a week or two after RTD refused to keep Davros in a wheelchair.

6. The thing I kept thinking of while watching this was Fury Road. Very different content, obviously, but the same air of a creator looking back at his past work and disagreeing with his past self.

Doctor Who @ 60

And, squeaking in just before midnight, the best show of all time turned 60 years old today.

There’s a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming up, very much looking forward to seeing what this next iteration of the show is going to be like. There’s probably going to be a real spike of Doctor Who related content around these parts over the next few weeks?

(And, Beep the Meep is in the “Coming Soon” section of Disney+. What a time to be alive.)

(late) Friday Linkblog, cool-projects-by-cool-people edition

Doctor Who is back!. Absolutely delightful amuse-bouche to Davies & Tennant’s return. It’s perfect that the new run is starting with a Children in Need sketch, which is both very silly and is done with way more effort & care than required. You’ve got Tennant in his sweet spot of doing very silly things with complete seriousness. You’ve got a perfect example of Who’s whimsical attitude to it’s on continuity (“Did this really happen?” “Well, would it be more fun if it did? Then yes.”) And you have a gorgeous shot at the start of the Tardis approaching Skaro with bombs going off in the atmosphere, which is far too cool (and expensive) a visual to “waste” on a comedy sketch for a charity telethon, and yet there it is.

A great sign of things to come.

James Burke’s Connections is back!. The original was a core formative experience for me as a kid, still one of my favorite documentaries of all time, of any kind. There was a stretch in my approximation of a “career” where I was giving a lot of talks and presentations; doing one in the style of an episode of Connections was the White Whale I never caught.

I’m pleased as punch to report that Shirt.woot apparently still exists?!!? And, at some point they switched to print-on-demand, so the entire back catalog is available? I vaguely feel like I must have known this, but it was a pleasant surprise to discover. Shirt.woot was a regular destination in the late 00s, and I still wear this shirt on a pretty regular basis. Even better, the raven shirt is still the all-time bestseller, all these years later. Guess I should finally buy one? It feels like there so little of the Heroic Age of the web left, rediscovering part that still exists is such a delight.

I haven’t had a chance to watch the movie yet, but I very much enjoyed Max Read’s piece David Fincher's new movie 'The Killer' is sigma cinema. The pull quote is “…throughout his career Fincher has been in dialogue with the concerns of 4chan and the rest of Loser Internet…” I have a lot of time for Fincher’s non-website movies, but never once did I think any of his main characters were supposed to be asperational. Fincher’s whole oeuvre is pointing at a deeply damaged person and going “look at this sad weirdo.”

Holy crap, Aliens and the Abyss are (finally) coming out on 4k. For the Abyss, this is also the first release on Blu-Ray. I guess Jim Cameron finally had the time to lock down the 4k masters; True Lies and the two Avatar movies are coming too. Thats gonna be a hell of a movie marathon weekend.

And finally, Bobby fingers has a new video. I don’t know how to set this up beyond saying he turned Jeff Bezos into a rowboat. And previously, he made a diorama out of the time Steven Segal got choked out, and the time Michael Jackson caught on fire. It’s 20-something minutes, trust me, click it. (See also Andy Baio’s piece from back in May The Unhinged Miniature World of Bobby Fingers, which I apparently completely failed to link to at the time.)

Tales from the Tardis

Now that we’re getting close to the actual event, it’s been fun watching the BBC reveal what they’re doing as part of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. (Other than bringing back David Tennant and Catherine Tate, doing an adaptation of an 80s comic book and bringing back a mid-60s villain, I mean.)

As part of this, they’ve wrangled nearly the entire run of the old show onto the BBC iPlayer for the first time, and as part of that, they’ve made something called “Tales from the Tardis.” On paper, it’s a pretty straightforward “greatest hits” collection—a selection of stories from six of the first eight doctors with new wraparounds starring the classic casts. This is a totally sane thing to do during a big anniversary to onboard new viewers to the back catalog. They’re very charming, and exactly the sort of schmaltz you can get away with during a self-congratulatory party year. The choices of stories are all entirely reasonable for the purpose, and as anAamerican who grew up on PBS airings of the omnibus edits of the show, editing them into a single movie doesn’t bother me.

The Doctor Who difference is that the new wrapper scenes are done with the old cast members in character. It’s not Peter Davison and Janet Fielding talking about how much fun Earthshock was to film, this is an older 5th Doctor and older Tegan talking about old times and mourning the death of Adric in the Memory Tardis, and explicitly acknowledging that this takes place after last year’s Power of the Doctor.

They’re a lot of fun! Everyone slips back into their parts easily, but then again most of them have been reprising these roles in audio for the better part of two decades now, and some, like Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, have basically never stopped playing those parts since they were on the show originally in the late 80s. Everyone seems to be having a good time, and genuinely enjoying getting to do the old parts “for real” instead of one more DVD interview or convention panel.

And that’s the the thing that’s weird about the Tales from the Tardis, though, is they all feel like exactly the wrong level of effort. The one set is clearly small and inexpensive, but it’s a whole lot more expensive and complex than putting the actors in chairs in front of a green screen. They actually designed costumes for everyone. They even designed Colin Baker’s 6th Doctor a new costume. That’s not his street clothes, someone put some actual thought into “what would a non-clown 6Th Doctor outfit look like?”

By comparison, if Star Trek did something similar in a few years for its 60th anniversary, you can easily imagine Paramount+ having a “Tales from the Federation” greatest hits collection with a single episode from each show, and there would be, say, Frakes and Stewart introducing Best of Both Worlds in front of a green-screened Enterprise D bridge. Actually, I take that back, they’d use the Ready Room set, and there would be Wil Wheaton interviewing them about it, and then the next show he’s talking to Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman about tricking the Romulans into the dominion war. I can’t imagine a world where they’d build a new set, put those actors back in costume and makeup, and then have them reminisce in character about past adventures. I mean, it would be pretty great if they did, and the holodeck even gives them a better built-in excuse than the “memory Tardis”. But Trek certainly wouldn’t use the opportunity to resolve 30-year old character lose ends, or semi-officialize a 41-year old fan ship.

“Canon” isn’t a concept with Who the same way it is with something like Star Trek, but there’s still a continuity, and these land in the same liminal space as the increasingly elaborate Blu-Ray trailers. This isn’t Tom Baker hamming it up in a museum on the VHS for Shada, or even the low-energy 30th anniversary gruel of “Dimensions in Time”; these have a more “intended-to-be-legitimate” quality. You’re left with a strange sense of “wait, is this supposed to fit in somewhere? Did this ‘really’ happen? Are Tegan and Nyssa really a thing now?”

It has the feel that this is teeing something up for later, like maybe part of the plans for “the Whoniverse” include rolling out new stories with old Doctors, with some multiverse-flavored explanations papering over why the actors are all 30 years older.

Its also worth noting who isn’t represented: the 8th and 4th Doctors.

Eight makes sense in the context of the mission here: Paul McGann has only a single mediocre TV movie and a web minisode in live action, and neither of those would be on anyone’s list of greatest hits to introduce a new viewer to pre-2005 Doctor Who.

The absense of Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor is a little harder to swallow. Arguably the most iconic run of the old show is just skipped over for the greatest hits compilation? But—who else would you get for those scenes? The pattern for all of the new material are old friends reuniting after years apart and reminiscing about old adventures, but of Tom’s costars who are still living, I can’t imagine either Luise Jamison or Lalla Ward being willing to act happy to see him, or vise-vera for that matter. They’re all too old and none of them need the money enough to fake their way through something like that. If Lis Sladen were still alive you can bet we’d have gotten a killer scene with the two of them working out that he didn’t drop her off in the right place, and then remembering Mummies or Zygons or some such. You could have Tom ham it up on his own, or maybe sitting next to a powered-down K9 prop, but there’s also the quality that at his age he was only up for a little bit of filming, and this wasn’t what they wanted to spend that time on. (Here’s hoping he makes a final appearance in a couple of weeks, say, in that second of three specials we still don’t know anything about.)

The new credits for “Tales of the Tardis” have a slice of all 8 doctor’s opening credits running side-by-side. Maybe that was easier and less potentially controversial than leaving out two of them, or building a different credit sequence for each based on the titles for that particular doctor. But—seeing the Tom Baker time tunnel, and the 90s TV movie titles sitting there next to the others sure does seem to imply there’s going to be more.

Look, I’ve been hoping they’d bring back back Paul McGann for the occasional one-off side story for years, and if we can finally get that I’ll accept whatever multi-timeline explanation you need to get that out the door.