Review: Thin Ice

Warning: spoilers.

We’re three episodes in. In 2005, this would have been ‘The Unquiet Dead’ – a story which was received with far more excitement and appreciation than it arguably deserved, given that it was the first time New Who had attempted period drama, with the comparatively lavish production values and bombastic guest star glossing over the many problems in the script. The following week, we were back in London for the Slitheen, and a story which was unfairly maligned. Twelve years later, in this supposedly rebooted series, Doctor Who returns to the past, only this time Bill and the Doctor are strolling around ‘Regency’ London, where something nasty lurks beneath the Thames. Sadly the elephant from last week’s cliffhanger was nowhere to be seen, a money shot that had no bearing on the story, save an inconsequential line of dialogue.

Actually, the elephant is here. The fact of the matter is that even after twelve years, the stories are still rather less than brilliant. ‘The Pilot’ is twenty minutes of whimsy and fifteen minutes of planet hopping, with a less than thrilling denouement. ‘Smile’ ripped off every story in the canon, and the Doctor’s solution was so archaic it should have been in a museum. And ‘Thin Ice’ features an unnamed creature being bullied by a charmless, featureless villain who dies the most comedic of deaths. Oh, it looks lovely, but that’s kind of the point: it is far more about atmosphere than it is about narrative, and far more about relationships than it is about the story in which they grow and develop.

And perhaps – just perhaps – that’s why it succeeds. Because ‘Thin Ice’ is one of those episodes that might have been tedious had it occurred under the watch of another companion. Perhaps Clara would have managed – early Clara, travelling with the Eleventh, before the smugness kicked in. But this seems to be tailored for Bill, in the sense that it is its immediate predecessor’s binary opposite: cold, foggy and throbbing with life, as opposed to the warm, sterile whiteness of the off-world colony that was home to the Vardy. The Doctor spent some time in ‘The Pilot’ racing from one end of the universe to the other in order to throw off the advancing Heather; the two episodes that followed are a direct extension of that, establishing the same pattern that the show adopts for its new companions by quickly showing them both the future and the past, as well as opening their minds to the hidden layers of the contemporary world that they took for granted. “There is strangeness to be found, wherever you turn,” Sarah Jane Smith muses. “Life on Earth can be an adventure too… you just need to know where to look.”

Race plays a part in all this. Regency London is, as Bill describes it, “a bit more black than they show it in films”, and this was quite deliberate – Moffat stating that “History is always white washed…People all didn’t arrive in the twinkle of an eye. It is bending history slightly, but in a progressive and useful way.” There are times when the sense of worthiness becomes tiresome (it may be something the chief writer says he is anxious to avoid, but if you’re going to write about these things that’s how it’s going to come across, particularly if you give the Doctor a long speech about it). London – at least the microcosmic cross-section we’re allowed to see – is the gloomier side of BBC costume drama, all soft focus and poor lighting. The effect is rather like Witness For The Prosecution, which employed a similar conceit. None of this would count for anything were we not experiencing it through the eyes of an enthusiastic young woman of mixed race whose eyes widen at every wrestling match or local delicacy. We have fun, because Bill is having fun – and when she is upset, we cry with her.

But the genius in Mackie’s casting isn’t Bill’s layman accessibility, or her presence as a BBC box-ticking exercise in diversity – it’s the chemistry she has with the Doctor. She and Capaldi spark in a way that he never quite managed with Clara, even at her best. There is a scene a third of the way into ‘Thin Ice’ where the Doctor puts himself in jeopardy not to save a child whose number appears to be up, but rather to recover a screwdriver. Bill is furious, and cannot accept his apparent indifference. “I care, Bill, but I move on,” he assures her, quietly. “You know what happens if I don’t move on? More people die. Do you want to help me, or do you want to stand here stamping your foot? Because let me tell you something: I’m two thousand years old, and I have never had the time for the luxury of outrage.”

It’s an electric scene. The dialogue helps, as does the fact that the Doctor is dressed rather like a Victorian funeral director, but Capaldi has possibly never been better than he is in this single moment: here, at once, we get a fusion; the fierce authoritarian we saw in ‘Deep Breath’, combined with the world-weary traveller in ‘Hell Bent’. We get a Doctor who has got over the mid-life crisis of his ‘difficult second series’, accepted the darkness within him and learned to live with it. He is reconciled, the same way that Forrest Gump reconciles the two approaches to life that he learns from those close to him. That Bill accepts this and moves on so quickly will be the cause of scorn to many viewers who’ve not realised that this is a long game, and something that will inevitably return later in the series.

The tension isn’t all above ground either: the Doctor’s solution is to ‘get eaten’, and we are, for just a moment, back in ‘Beast Below’ territory (to which we will return at the episode’s climax, and about which nothing more needs to be said). But the river bed is dark and silent and inhabited by a colossal leviathan observing the two explorers with a single, unblinking eye. It is mildly reminiscent of SOMA, a game I played just recently, which features an extended sequence upon the ocean floor, a tropical storm raging around you as you fight through caves of spider crabs, evading poisonous angler fish and trying desperately to stay in the lights. It is intense, claustrophobic and frightening. The floor of the Thames is never quite going to compare to that, but it works.

It helps, also, that Moffat has seemingly abandoned the big overarching mysteries, or at least relegated them to the sidelines. The vault is still a Rorschach: it contains whatever you want it to contain, although we can at least now surmise that its contents are conscious and quite possibly humanoid, given that whatever is inside apparently has the ability to knock. But the story is not about that: it does not linger, the way the crack did, or the way the mystery of Clara permeated every series 7 episode in which she featured (and even some of the ones where she was nowhere to be seen). If anything, the narratives we’ve seen unfold occur in spite of the vault, rather than because of them: the Doctor seeks adventure purely as a means of escaping his responsibilities, almost as if he were tired of having to maintain the sense of continuity and just wanted to tell stories. It’s tempting to believe that Moffat is projecting here, but the road to hell is paved with second guesses.

Still: perhaps the best thing about ‘Thin Ice’ is the wink it makes at the audience. It is not a story that pretends to be grand or significant. It is a story in which the Doctor rewrites Dickens and gets all fanboyish over a con artist. (It is difficult to watch the scenes with the pie man and not imagine a similar exchange between Capaldi and a persistent, autograph-hunting enthusiast.) It is a story in which an unreconstructed Nicholas Burns does the splits as the ground cracks beneath him. It is a story in which you wonder whether the thing in the Vault is actually John Simm, and whether the final ‘boom’ that accompanies the words ‘NEXT TIME’ is a simple sting for the episode 4 trailer or that crucial fourth knock.

But at its heart, it’s a story about the necessity of exploration: to scratch and forage, to find both the joys and the darkness therein, the frozen river serving as metaphor for Bill’s discovery of her mentor’s darker side. The path to enlightenment, it is implied, lies not in the certainty of tradition but the willingness to think sideways, whatever the risk. “Only idiots know the answers,” the Doctor insists, in the episode’s latter third. “But if your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what’s your future worth?” Ultimately, ‘Thin Ice’ speaks to us of the dangers of venturing deeper – the perils that lurk in the darkness and the fear of the unknown – but also of the unexpected clarity that results when you come back up to the surface.

God is in the detail (10-02)

I’ve had a busy week, what with birthday parties and cleaning and the like. Only yesterday I chopped eight swimming noodles in half so we could fashion them into makeshift lightsabers. But I’m not going to let a silly little thing like the vacuuming stop me from delivering your regular dose of speculation and analysis. So here’s this week’s installment of VERY IMPORTANT CLUES AND SIGNS – this lot, as you’ve probably guessed, are from ‘Smile’. Buckle up, the sea’s a bit choppy this evening.

First of all, here’s a good old universally compatible incorruptible map.

Consider the subject matter of this episode, and the concept of robots destroying humanity for its own good. It’s a safe bet that the cowboys who programmed them have never even heard of Asimov, but I suspect that doesn’t necessarily apply to you, dear reader – and if you’re not familiar with Asimov’s robot stories, now’s a good time to get yourself acquainted. (Just avoid that Will Smith film. It’s rubbish.)

Asimov’s most famous AI-themed collection, of course, was I, Robot – and if you examine the map you will discover nine of them, all turned sideways. This refers to the first nine Doctors. But in order to reach each ‘I’ without retracing your steps – known as the Chinese Postman Problem – a curious shape emerges. To illustrate, I’ve prepared this graph, which highlights both the ‘I’s and the required route.

What’s that shape? Is it a tower, perhaps? Or an upside-down ‘T’? It’s the latter, of course, but it’s what it indicates that’s interesting. Because it indicates an inverted – or parallel – Tenth Doctor (or Tennant, if you prefer).

Unfortunately, it’s at this point that the theory falls apart, because as far as we know there are no inverted Doctors stuck in parallel universes.

Oh, wait – there are!!!

But that’s not all. Look closer and you’ll see that four of the ‘I’s are situated inside a hexagon: in other words this is a letter sitting inside a number. But if we transpose ‘I’ into its Roman numeral equivalent (and, lest we forget, Peter Capaldi made his Whovian debut playing a marble merchant in ancient Pompeii, before relocating to Rome) we have number 1 inside a 6-sided object: to put it another way, Six of One, which happens to be the name of the Prisoner Appreciation Society – A SHOW THAT IS CELEBRATING ITS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY NEXT YEAR. You know as well as I do what’s going to happen next, so there’s no need to go on about it.

Now: a familiar sight, but totally transformed.

To interpret this we need only examine the letters over which Bill has placed each finger: the letters ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘A’ and ‘L’.

This works on two levels, and has numerous connections to past episodes. Notoriously, The Deal was a 2003 drama about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, starring David Morrisey and Michael Sheen. Sheen and Morrisey both appeared in Who as the characters House and Jackson Lake, respectively: a clear and ABSOLUTELY UNMISTAKABLE nod to The Lake House, Alejandro Agresti’s time travel themed romantic drama. If this needed any further qualification it should be noted that Keanu Reeves appeared in the Matrix trilogy (various episodes of Classic Who make references to the Matrix) and Sandra Bullock acted with former Torchwood star Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping.

However, you will note that Bill’s index finger (that’s Bill Potts, now, not Bill Pullman) rests not on a single letter but rather straddles an ambiguous path that connects the ‘N’ of ‘Respond’ with the ‘O’ of ‘Officers’, thus creating the words ‘NO DEAL’, a reference to Noel Edmonds, presenter of the inexplicably popular Deal Or No Deal. Edmonds – he of the dodgy jumpers and questionable relationship with Mr Blobby – is a well-known advocate of Cosmic Ordering, a vacuous wish-fulfillment fantasy, and we may therefore conclude that Chris Chibnall’s first series in charge will see the Thirteenth Doctor encountering an extraterrestrial con artist offering enlightenment, played by Christopher Plummer. Further proof, as if any were needed, may be found in the fact that ‘Noel Edmonds’ may be rearranged to form ‘End old me, son’ – and it is from this that we may conclude that THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR WILL BE PLAYED BY MICHAEL TROUGHTON.

Bit of scenery next. Ooh, look at all the little black dots.

There are two things going on here. The first is the appearance of the monolith from 2001: ANOTHER FILM CELEBRATING ITS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY NEXT YEAR, making a Who-related crossover an inevitability. But note also the indented panels running down either side: eleven on the left, fourteen on the right, with Capaldi – the thirteenth actor to play the Doctor on television – SAT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE. Also note that Capaldi is indicating the left column, and is indeed pointing to the furthest panel down, meaning that an Eleventh Doctor reunion is not just on the cards, it’s done and dusted and the ink is dry on the contract.

But there’s more to it than that, although in order to see it we’re going to have to do a little Photoshopping.

And you all know who that is, don’t you?

Our excursions into art don’t stop there, as we take a look at cubism.

Three cubes. Cubed: the power of three. There are three characters present in this scene, if you count the robot. The robot has three bolts across its front (just above the chin) and three on either side of its face (where the ears should be). And all this occurs in the third episode of Capaldi’s third series as the Doctor (assuming you count ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’ as part of the same block, which the BBC tend to do).

But consider a few things:

– ‘The Power Of Three’ featured a massive, global spate of cardiac arrests which also affected the Doctor, knocking out one of his hearts, thus recalling the Wham song ‘Where Did Your Heart Go?’

– The video of ‘Club Tropicana’, another song by Wham, was filmed in Ibiza, some 93 miles from the city of Valencia. Doctor Who celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1993

– While You Were Sleeping, a film we’ve already mentioned, can also be said to be the plot of ‘Last Christmas’ – also a song by Wham

– The cube layout on the plates reads 1+2, which can also be written as 12: the 12th Doctor’s 12th episode was entitled ‘Death In Heaven’ and was an encounter on the cusp of the afterlife, thus mirroring the song ‘The Edge of Heaven’ – also a Wham song

So what, you’re asking? Well –

That’s the City of Arts and Sciences in – yep, you guessed it, Valencia, the location of choice for the episode (and, I’m informed by an old friend with strong connections to the area, something of a local controversy, what with allegations of cronyism and the like).

And ‘SMILE WAS SHOT IN VALENCIA’ can be rearranged to form ‘WHAM IS SILENCE SALVATION’. And there it is in black and white, or at least black-on-off white, if you’re reading this on a PC. I think I need a lie down.

Review: Smile

I didn’t want to do a straight review this week. For some reason it felt wrong. What follows is a succession of jottings, ordered by mood, in a rough sort of chronological order. I don’t know why. It just makes me happy.

Warning: spoilers follow.

 

“Did we just jump-start a new civilisation?”

“Gaah,” said the random Facebook person. “Emojibots. Yeah, ‘cos it’s all about being down with the kids.”
“In fairness,” I said, “this is a Frank Cottrell-Boyce episode, and he’s arguably best known as a children’s writer.”
“Yeah, but they’re still doing it for the kids.”
“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing. As if the concept of a TV programme deliberately doing something that targets a significant part of its core demographic was some sort of cardinal sin. Doctor Who was always supposed to be a kids’ show – the fact that it appeals to families and bigger kids and grown-up kids on a nostalgia kick is a bonus. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional child-friendly episode and I don’t get why it has to be such a turn-off for the adults.”
“Yeah, well. It’s just trying too hard. Kids won’t like it.”
“Can we at least wait until the episode has aired before we come to conclusions like that?” I said. “Because my kids looked at the trailer and said ‘Ooh! Robots with emojis, great!'”

—

 

“I’m not Scottish, I’m just cross.”

It’s not so much that Bill is a mystery, it’s more that people are determined to make her so. There is an issue with the photograph of Susan: “I noticed you,” the Doctor says last week, regarding Bill with one eye and the photograph with the other. It does not follow from this that Bill is a regenerated amnesiac time-travelled version of the Doctor’s granddaughter: such a pursuit seems laughable and there is nothing in this week’s episode to indicate that this is the way she’s headed. I write such theories as satire; it is both comic and disturbing that others are prepared to take them seriously.

This week the two of them have abandoned the vault, and thus the series arc is fully established. The vault is a Rorschach (a Room of Requirement, if you’re under thirty): you see what you want to see. It has the Rani. It has the Master. It has the masters for ‘Fury From The Deep’. It will be far less interesting than it currently is in my head. The Doctor has the travel bug; Nardole is evidently taking this more seriously than he is, which is something that will have repercussions later and lead to lecturing from Matt Lucas while Bill bites her lip. In the meantime, it is a thing of intrigue, to be dissected or ignored at will. There’s an old piano and they play it hot behind the green door.

—

“I’m having this really childish impulse to blow it up.”

Opening with a two-hander was risky. Following it with another was riskier still. Cold open aside, only two of the supporting characters have speaking parts, and neither are particularly interesting: thankfully their roles are minimised to allow plenty of time for the Doctor to chat to Bill. They do so in Spanish wheatfields; in the deserted halls of a deserted museum; in the bowels of a buried spacecraft, nestled at the centre of the colony like the one in ‘The Face of Evil’, only without the scene where the Doctor walks inside his own mouth. Bill asks to see the future because she wants ‘to see if it’s happy’. Be careful what you wish for, Bill.

I’ve still not worked out whether the Doctor’s “I don’t interfere” maxim is an exercise in retaining an air of mystery for his companions to unpack later, or classic denial. Either way, Bill has him sussed. “You don’t call the helpline,” she says. “You are the helpline.”

—

“Do you know what it means when someone chases you very slowly?”

That’s the wrong emoji, really. Awkwardly, there is nothing even remotely frightening about this week’s monster, which is too small and clumsy to pose any real threat; it is like an offshoot from a Ninja Turtles episode. The Doctor faces off against one in the engine room and dispatches it with almost clinical ease: it would have been more fun, perhaps, if they’d had rotatable implements built into their hands, or perhaps a deadly groin attachment like the ones Kryten used to wear when he was vacuuming. The rabid flesh-eating particles of doom are altogether more deadly, of course, but we hardly actually see them, bar the obligatory cannon fodder scenes.

All in all the threat level is low, and it’s odd that Cottrell-Boyce makes such a meal out of it. The McGuffin takes a while to find, giving time for the leads to chat, but the delays are head-scratching. The impression you get is of a Doctor who is getting back into the swing of things: it’s like series 1 all over again, which I suppose is part of the point. “I can’t stop it,” he grumbles to Bill, “because I don’t know what started it last time”. Meanwhile it is Bill herself who is poking around and discovering withering corpses and eulogy-laden iPads while the Doctor is getting himself into trouble. Tennant would have had this one licked in a couple of minutes flat, and if there’s one thing that comes across this week it’s that fifty years of lectures and formal dinners have slowed the Doctor’s mind.

—

 

“You don’t steer the TARDIS. You negotiate with it.”

Caress those panels all you want. Land on the head of a pin. Manoeuvre a short hop so it materialises around you. If the TARDIS doesn’t want you to go back to Bristol the moment you left, she won’t. Perhaps there was a road closure and she had to take a diversion via Chippenham; that sort of thing happens a lot when the tax year’s winding up and they still have a budget surplus.

But it’s strange that the episode concludes on a not-quite cliffhanger, almost as if they ran out of story. Certainly after half a series of the Doctor picking up and dropping off Clara it catches you off guard. It would have been very easy to turn this into several episodes of the two of them sneaking back into the Doctor’s study like errant schoolchildren, only to find Nardole looking at his watch: that would be a predictable sub-arc, although it echoes Clara’s duplicitous treatment of Danny Pink and it is to be hoped that it’s something they don’t explore further. Ultimately this is about deflating Bill’s adulation of her tutor by exploring one of his core fallibilities: the notion of a machine he can’t always fly as well as he’d like to believe. It’s not quite Tegan throwing a hissy fit over stopped clocks, but having spent most of the last decade building up the image of a skilled pilot – particularly after last week’s spot of planet hopping – it’s nice to see they can still sweep away the rug, like Patricia Arquette does in the closing scenes of Lost Highway.

Has it been easier to think of the TARDIS as a person – or at least a metaphysical presence – since The Doctor’s Wife? Or did all this start with Parting of the Ways, where we’re never entirely sure whether we’re addressing Rose or the TARDIS core, or something that somehow combines them both? Perhaps it doesn’t matter: perhaps it’s simply about the disestablishment of patriarchy. The Doctor is not exploring the universe in the TARDIS: she is exploring the universe and taking him along for the fun of it, and there’s something sweet about the fact that even after all these years, he still thinks he can control her.

—

“They’re the skeleton crew.”

Cottrell-Boyce has been brushing up on his Who since the last time. The emancipation of a former slave race given newfound sentience echoes both ‘Planet of the Ood’ and ‘New Earth’, while the memory wipe the Doctor implements in order to do it has echoes of the Zygon gambit in ‘Day of the Doctor’. The human compost is a throwback to Hinchcliffe-era Tom Baker, and the Vardy are to all intents and purposes the nanobots from ‘The Doctor Dances’, with the appetite of the Vashta Nerada. And look, the whole thing is basically ‘The Happiness Patrol’ without the social commentary. It’s curious that this came from a writer who produced a story which – for better or worse – was unlike just about anything else in the canon; if there’s one thing ‘Smile’ could potentially have suffered from, it’s a tendency to stick a little too closely to the deserted base formula.

But niggles aside this is brilliant. Who by numbers – and that’s what it is, truth be told – isn’t always a bad thing, particularly if you precede it with an episode that can theoretically be watched by just about anyone, whether they were a seasoned veteran or a complete novice. It is what the show does; it is comfortable, and comfortable comes packaged with its own set of dangers. It is only a few letters away from complacent. But it says something when an established writer can load his episode with so many homages without losing the essence of a story, and without producing something that feels like a shameless rip-off. This new approach works for me: this Doctor who is given room to breathe and this companion who asks the right questions. It feels like good stories told with a freshness that hasn’t been here since Matt Smith first stepped out of his TARDIS demanding an apple. The smugness is gone – and, at least for the moment, Doctor Who is fun again.

Although it is disappointing that no one says “MY GOD, THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!” Seriously. Not once.

 

God is in the detail (10-01)

Greetings, fellow Whovians! Welcome to Conspiracy Theory 101. This week, we’re taking a look at ‘The Pilot’ – superficially a thoughtful, crowd-pleasing character piece that wasn’t about anything except getting a couple of people together and giving them a chance to get to know each other.

But you and I both know that’s not what’s really going on.

Because the indisputed fact is that contemporary Doctor Who is absolutely loaded with hidden signs and clues and seemingly insignificant moments that will turn out to be VERY IMPORTANT LATER ON. We know this because the chief writer has designed it this way and because the internet says so. Still, collecting all these nuggets of information and analysing them and finding the hidden truths is a soul-crushingly lengthy process. Honestly, who has the time?

Me, as it turns out. So pull up a chair, open the Kool-Aid and let’s unpack it together, baby. Just make sure you don’t knock over anything fragile because all breakages must be paid for.

First, let’s take a look at those essay scores. Here they are stacked up for ease of reference.

88 and 92 first, because they both feature Daleks: 1988 marks, as everyone knows, the inaugural broadcast of ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ – and 1992, some four years later, saw the release of Dalek Attack, the side-scrolling platform game featuring several Doctors taking on a horde of Daleks. Hence we must conclude that the contractual obligation Dalek scene in ‘The Pilot’ WILL NOT BE THE LAST TIME WE SEE THEM THIS YEAR and that the Doctor is RETURNING TO TOTTERS LANE TO RETURN HIS LIBRARY BOOK.

But what of 1997? Does it refer to Destiny of the Doctors, the first-person game released in December of that year? Yes, it does. But not just that. To understand why, we must first unpack some of the episode’s other gems – basically, I’ll explain later.

Moving on for the moment: Christmas dinner.

Oh, there’s so much in this one it practically deserves its own entry. I mean look at those bookshelves. Look carefully. You see it, don’t you? It’s a stroke of genius, and I can’t believe the Radio Times didn’t spot it.

I thought it best to annotate this, rather than pick it apart in the text, so here we are.

Exhausted? Well, tough. Come on, we’ve got so much time and so little to examine. No, strike that. Reverse it.

Right, onwards.

Yeah, you spotted that too, didn’t you? The Doctor’s history with the Mary Celeste is well-documented, of course, with various incarnations encountering the ship – whether carrying passengers or bereft as the legend suggests – at different times. There’s probably even fan fiction, and I bet it includes Jamie and Zoe having a snog up in the crow’s nest.

But that’s not what’s going on here. This is about words. Because ‘Mary Celeste’ can be rearranged to form ‘Mel Ace Tyres’. In other words, the Twelfth Doctor and Bill will shortly be encountering former companions Melanie Bush and Dorothy ‘Ace’ McShane, both of whom travelled (in succession) with the Seventh Doctor and who have now established a successful tyre company in Streatham. THIS CANNOT POSSIBLY BE ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

Now, here’s the girl in the puddle.

This is a 14-sided object (don’t believe me? Count for yourself), thus referring to the thirteen canonical Doctors, including the War Doctor. But who is the fourteenth? Does it refer to the Doctor’s imminent successor? As it turns out the answer is no – it refers instead to the Valeyard. We know this because the puddle is located in a yard, and ‘vale’ ought to be fairly obvious.

What do you mean it isn’t?

In order to explain this we must delve into the world of Scottish folk – in particular the song ‘Wild Mountain Thyme‘, also known as ‘Purple Heather’. The connections to Who are transparent: Heather is seen wearing a purple top encrusted with flowers in the scene where she first meets Bill, and Prince – whose T-shirt, it has oft been noted, Bill has been observed wearing – titled one of his songs ‘Purple Rain’.

But there’s more to it than that, and it all links to 1997 – a year we explored earlier without ever really explaining why.

Consider:

1. Thyme grows among the Heather.

2. Bill is given photos of her mum.

3. Comedian Tim Minchin has a daughter called Violet, a form of purple.

4. Bill meets Heather in a bar – or a pub, or an inn.

5. 1997 – a year we’ve already mentioned – saw the release of Shooting Fish, which features ‘Neighbourhood’, a song by Space, on its soundtrack.

Still not with me?

I swear; sometimes I impress even myself.

Have I Got Whos For You (part 400)

God Is In The Detail is returning! And it will be with you later in the week. But in the meantime, here are the headlines from across the Whoniverse.

First and foremost, the fallout from the forced removal of a doctor from an American flight has drastic repercussions.

—

Fan reaction to the imminent return of John Simm continues to ignite the internet.

—

In fact this is Steven Moffat’s week, generally.

—

And an artist’s rendition of Kris Marshall in the TARDIS goes somewhat awry.

He’s just on the wrong planet, that’s all.

Review: The Pilot

Warning: spoilers.

If you took ‘Terror of the Autons’, stirred in elements of ‘Shada’ and then sprinkled it with bits of Educating Rita, the gumbo you produced would probably be nothing like ‘The Pilot’.

But it’s a decent beginning. Because the keyword for this week is…well, not the much-anticipated ‘reboot’ that we’ve been going on about for months. You can see quite clearly what they were trying to do, but that oversells it. Have the BBC produced an episode that can be watched by someone experiencing the show for the first time? Perhaps, and by the skin of their teeth. Still, that’s not the vibe you take from it. This may be the most accessible companion-breaking story for some time, but it’s not ‘Rose’. Doctor Who has too much history – even within its last twelve years – to be able to pull a stunt like that.

No, the word you may be looking for is ‘grounded’. Because this is an episode that roots itself (to use Peter Capaldi’s own words) before you’re allowed to go anywhere. This is not a Doctor who turns up and comically integrates himself (or rather fails to) into a community, as we saw in ‘The Caretaker’ or ‘The Lodger’. This is a Doctor who’s already been on the scene a long time, who cannot possibly be as young as he looks, and who is visibly offended when people fail to point this out. But there’s more to it than that: this is not another ‘Snowmen’, in which the arriving companion breaks the Time Lord out of a funk overnight. It takes time. The Doctor’s tenure may be well-established but it still takes a good few months (read: minutes) for his new companion to discover what’s really going on.

It may interest you to know that they used to run teacher training courses in the same way. You would sit in the lecture theatre for six months of theory, and then at the halfway point they’d drop you into a classroom and leave you to get on with it. These days the process is far more integrated: practical experience begins on day one (all right, day thirteen) and is woven in with the theory as the year passes. But what happens in ‘The Pilot’ is that Bill spends a lot of time on the theory and finds her experience of the practical limited to the occasional tantalising glimpse, until the moment (a little over halfway through) that she peeks behind her shower curtain, whereupon the whole thing explodes. (That’s the plot, not the shower curtain.)

Not that this is in any way a bad thing. I was going to say that this was the most leisurely-paced episode of Doctor Who in years, but I was forgetting about ‘Face The Raven’ – a story in which nothing much happened for ages and which was horrifically boring as a result. In this instance what happens is a delicate dance between its two central characters – close and simultaneously at arm’s length – to the extent that by the time Bill finally sets foot in the TARDIS she knows the Doctor quite well, without actually knowing him at all. ‘You talk all the time,’ said Donna, one of the most perceptive of the NuWho companions, ‘but you don’t say anything’ – and while Capaldi’s Doctor is considerably less prone to the bouts of verbal diarrhoea for which Tennant’s incarnation was renowned, it’s not a bad comparison.

The first half of ‘The Pilot’ sees Bill Potts – a canteen worker with an apparent interest in quantum mechanics – becoming the Doctor’s private student, working under his tutelage while she fends off her stepmother’s casual acidity and inadvertently afflicts an unnamed crush with a heart condition. There are awkward conversations over Christmas dinner – a scene which is both touching and, in its own way, desperately sad – and Bill wanders the campus of the university until we know it almost as well as she does. The Doctor’s office features heavily: the plush, distinguished opulence of established academics, right down to the TARDIS in the corner and the collection of screwdrivers on the desk. Through it all, Bill approaches the broadening of her mind with a sense of wonder. “When most people don’t understand something, they frown,” the Doctor says to her early on. “But you smile.”

What is to all intents and purposes a two-hander turns into a three-hander the minute Nardole arrives on the scene properly (he appears briefly at the beginning merely to establish that he has a screw loose, in a quite literal sense). We’re told that he has a reason for hanging around but that’s clearly a card that Moffat is playing close to his chest for the moment, presumably having decided to throw it on the table just before he reveals the three aces he’s got stashed in his underwear. At least it’s fun to watch. Matt Lucas may have spent half of his first episode stuck on top of a Power Rangers Megazord and half his second running around in search of a lavatory, but it is here – despite the reduced screen time engineered to favour Mackie – that he more or less shows his true colours, as a cowardly but largely competent valet, deviating between dry sarcasm and quivering cowardice; half Jeeves, half Penfold.

There is a plot, of sorts, but you know that by now. It concerns a girl named Heather, who finds herself trapped in her own reflection, reforming to become the monster of the week: a dripping, frightening thing capable of clearing small pockets of the universe in a single bound. ‘Water always wins’, as the Tenth Doctor might have said, and while Heather lacks the cracked, jagged appearance of the Flood she is still reasonably sinister, if only by being so quick on the draw. It calls to mind the first Droopy cartoon, ‘Dumb-Hounded‘, in which the titular dog is sent in pursuit of a deadly criminal, who races from Chicago to Hollywood to the North Pole only to find Droopy waiting for him everywhere he goes.

It takes a Dalek to bring down the reconstructed Heather, and it’s the episode’s dullest moment (although it follows a blink-and-you’ll-miss it shot of the Movellans, fumbling with laser guns in one hand and trying to play rock-paper-scissors with the other). It’s all very well surrounding Bill by images of the cosmos so that her mind is almost literally blown; it’s just a shame it had to be the story’s climax. Bringing up the pace only to immediately drop it to play mind games is seldom interesting, even when it’s closely linked to the idea of escape, and it makes for a tedious, lacklustre finale.

But that almost feels like a minor quibble. This is an episode that works, largely because by and large it doesn’t try to do too much. The cast are a big help – Capaldi is comfortable and self-assured as the Doctor, and his support make the most of what they have – but the strength of ‘The Pilot’ lies in its concept of space, in a strictly terrestrial sense. It introduces new characters and gives them breathing room – hence the Doctor and Bill are flung together not by impossible forces, but by a sense of mutual loneliness and the driving need to explore. By the time the Doctor has temporarily abandoned his plans to guard whatever it is he’s guarding in that vault and whisk Bill away to the stars (tellingly with a line that echoes Christopher Lloyd’s reckless abandonment of responsibility at the end of Back to the Future), it feels like an inevitability – and we cheer with her.

Cast your minds back a year, and it’s no great secret that I was one of Bill’s fiercest critics. To be fair, all I had to go on was that the introductory scene they used to showcase her arrival. You remember, the one where she’s rude about the Daleks. To call it slightly asinine is like saying that The X-Factor occasionally plays with the truth. Within the context of ‘The Pilot’, we might think of it as her ‘Runaway Bride’ moment: a few people will laugh, while many more will simply roll their eyes.

But it took seeing her in action to change my mind. Because it’s early days, but Bill really seems to fit. After the build-up, the preliminary interviews and a bunch of trailers that didn’t exactly do her any favours, I approached ‘The Pilot’ with a certain amount of dread, but it seems that I worried over nothing. She takes longer to get the hang of the TARDIS (“Is this a knock-through?”) than many companions, but I’m now convinced she’s absolutely the right person to be in it – and I can’t wait to see where it takes her, both geographically and emotionally, as the series plays out.

And if I can manage that, so can you.

The Child Left Behind – now available!

OK, I think it’s done.

 

If you want to skip the pre-amble, here’s the download link, but I’ll paste it again after the FAQ to save you having to scroll back up.

The Child Left Behind zip

(Contains PDF, EPUB and MOBI files. The link will take you to a new window where you should be able to right-click and save.)

 

So what’s all this, then?

The Child Left Behind is an original, entirely unsanctioned full length Doctor Who novel. By me.

So it’s basically fan fiction.

If you like. It’s not some episodic thing I churned out for A Teaspoon and an Open Mind and then cobbled together. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. I prefer to think of it as Fan Fiction, rather than fan fiction.

With the Eleventh Doctor? And Amy?

You noticed. It’s a series 5 story, taking place between ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ and ‘The Lodger’, although that much will become obvious when you read it.

How come you’re publishing it here?

As far as I’m aware, Doctor Who doesn’t accept unsolicited fiction. I’d dearly love to get it published one day, but in the meantime – and on the advice of another writer I met last year – I thought the best thing to do was just get it out there.

At no cost?

Of course not. That’s blatant copyright infringement. All I ask is that if you enjoy the book, you’ll tell your friends. And that if you don’t, you’ll tell me.

Fair enough. So what’s the story in Balamory?

Well, you’ll have to read it to find out.

Aww, come on. Not even a hint?

Oh, if you insist. Here’s the blurb from the back cover.

Hamelin was still reeling from an immeasurable tragedy. And then the murders began.

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Amy to thirteenth century Germany, and a community that is grieving for its lost children. The Doctor senses something is amiss, but how can he investigate in a town already suspicious of strangers? What really happened here six weeks ago? Is the forest on the hill really haunted? And what’s that glinting at the bottom of the river?

As the Doctor and Amy watch their lives become entwined with a dysfunctional family, a world-weary bartender and a watchful Constable, they must race to find the answers – before something unspeakable happens to the people of Hamelin…

Cryptic. So the title doesn’t refer to Amy?

No, it doesn’t, but now that you mention it, that’s something that had honestly never occurred to me until it was pointed out.

Cool cover art, by the way.

It’s great, isn’t it? It’s the work of Yvain Bon, an artist I met in a Facebook group who specialises in alternative covers for stories. I asked him if he’d do something for this, and he turned my vague ideas into the image you see above – quickly and brilliantly. In return I promised I’d interview him for The Doctor Who Companion – which reminds me, I really should email him.

This is about the Pied Piper, isn’t it? I seem to remember that’s been done before. 

It has, yes – in various places (although not on TV). Doctor Who has been around for a long time and there is nothing new under the sun. But to the best of my knowledge it’s never been done quite like this.

So who’s the monster?

Not saying.

Not even a hint?

Oh, you are WORSE THAN MY CHILDREN.

I want a biscuit.

Dinner’s in half an hour. If you’re hungry, have an apple.

So what’s in the zip?

Right, yes: there’s a PDF. There are also EPUB and MOBI files for Kindles and Kobos or whatever else you use. E-Readers have hundreds of different calibrations and settings and I’m not entirely sure what you’ll need, but there should be something in there you can use. I’m not, I’m afraid, an expert on how to transfer files to your device – I’d suggest Googling that if you find you have any difficulties.

One thing – I know that the cover for the MOBI files is a little on the small side. I’m working on it.

How much knowledge of the show should I have before reading?

It’s tricky. The story’s chronology gives context to the way certain characters are behaving (it’s set after ‘Cold Blood’ but before ‘The Pandorica Opens’, if you catch my drift). Basic knowledge is therefore enough. Of course, the more you know about the show’s history, the more you’ll appreciate certain gags and so on. But I aimed for this to be accessible on a number of levels, and if there are certain things that go over your head a little bit, that’s all the more reason to delve into the archives.

Anything else I should know?

Just that it’s never going to be perfect. I’ve proofread and proofread and have got rid of as many mistakes as I can but you can bet I’ve missed something. Please do let me know and I’ll amend it for a future edition. The same goes for technical problems with the EPUB and MOBI files – I’ve sanity checked as much as I can but if anyone has any feedback let me know and I’ll try and improve them.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re surprised by anything, please don’t spoil it for others!

Can I have that download link again?

Yep –

The Child Left Behind zip

(Contains PDF, EPUB and MOBI files. The link will take you to a new window where you should be able to right-click and save.)

Happy reading!

EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that the public link I posted yesterday didn’t work unless you had a Dropbox account, a change apparently made recently but which had escaped my notice. I’ve therefore re-uploaded the file to OneDrive and updated the link. Hope it’s now OK!

Have I got Whos for you (part 468)

This week in Whoverville: Peter Capaldi’s magazine collection.

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A new deleted scene emerges from The BFG.

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Speculation mounts as a new trailer for the upcoming series 10 appears to show footage from an upcoming regeneration.

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And there’s a lot of fuss over the identity of that woman in the photo the Doctor keeps on his desk.

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Enjoy your day. I’m off to London: I could tell you why, but I’d have to exterminate you.