This week in Whovania: in Mashups We’d Like To See, here’s Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.
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A leaked promotional still from the BBC reveals what actually happened after the end of ‘Boom Town’.
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And here’s a never-before-seen publicity shot of Count Olaf, Robbie Rotten and the Master looking for disguises in a costume shop.
Well, even supervillains have to go shopping, right?
Population 51,201. Possibly not for much longer.
(If you missed Part One, it’s available here.)
Now, where were we…?
3. Resolutions are for wimps
It’s funny how the words “What year is this?” sound great at the beginning of a Doctor Who episode but were a notorious let-down for many fans when they dumped them at the end of the Twin Peaks finale. As Cooper and the resurrected Laura / Carrie / whoever the hell she was leave the Palmer residence and stand in the street outside, Cooper’s mute hesitancy returns: dumbstruck and unable to do anything, his final line of dialogue is an unhelpful question that addresses nothing at all. It’s left to Laura to have the last word, although said last word is a scream that could outdo Bonnie Langford. In a parallel universe where Doctor Who was made in America, she’d have made a hell of a companion.
It was frustrating as hell, but there was something glorious about it. Having spent the last few weeks gradually building up to Cooper’s triumphant return, Lynch grants us a final confrontation with BOB (who is dispatched, somewhat bizarrely, by a cockney geezer wearing a single glove who punches him to death). You could probably have left it there, and we’d have been happy, more or less. Instead Lynch retcons the last twenty-five years (the ramifications of which are glossed over in Cooper’s warning that “There are some things that will change”) and then sends Cooper and Diane off on a fool’s errand: to find Laura Palmer. They cross (we presume) to a parallel universe, have sex in a motel, whereupon Cooper wakes up somewhere else. None of it makes sense. Oh, there are fan theories. There inevitably are. Where no explanation is provided, it is human nature to find one. But when it comes to the entity formerly known as Judy, no answer is given beyond the vaguest of explanations: Lynch, it seems, is happy to leave things as they are, perhaps for good.
There is a scene at the end of episode 16 that caused collective jaws to drop. You know the one I mean. It’s the one with Audrey. There is a moment you realise something is up: it’s when the master of ceremonies announces ‘Audrey’s Dance’, whereupon Ms. Horne slides seductively across a deserted dance floor, surrounded by onlookers – until the moment we flash-cut to a scene in a white room, where she’s staring into a mirror. The implication is that Audrey is in some kind of hospital (one would assume psychiatric) and that the scenario in which she found herself – a rich, embittered woman searching for a missing family member – was taking place entirely in her head, with her pedantic, hopelessly mismatched husband quite possibly a real life doctor who’d managed to work his way into the delusion. It is then that you realise that every conversation Audrey has had – every scene, come to that – has taken place in the company of this man and this man alone, thus leading us to imagine that somewhere along the line (presumably after she slept with Cooper) she went completely off the rails, and that everything we thought she’d seen was strictly in her head.
Still, that’s as far as it goes. It’s an implication because we never visit or hear from Audrey again, her plot strand left tantalisingly dangling. As a potential framing device it’s devastatingly effective, calling to mind Buffy’s ‘Normal Again’: just how much of the story, besides the scenes we know about, took place inside Audrey’s head? That’s a question we’d perhaps be unable to ask ourselves had we been party to any sort of further glimpse into her mental state; the more abstract the resolution, the greater the scope for filling the gaps. Similarly, the frustrating / glorious thing about the finale is that it opens up a world of possibilities and leaves them there, the same way that series 2 left things on a cliffhanger back when Cooper was sat in that bathroom. There is something nice about being able to answer the question yourself. Besides, cliffhangers are eventually resolved, after a fashion, even if it takes twenty-five years. We may not yet be done with Carrie Page and whatever it was she was running from.
Curiously there’s one episode of Doctor Who that actually does this quite well, if only because the planned sequel to ‘Sleep No More’ has yet to materialise and indeed is now looking increasingly unlikely. It means there are frequent requests on social media for clarification. It sadly also means the episode sits near the bottom of people’s lists of favourite stories, simply because some people don’t like its unresolved state. Well, I guess you can’t have everything.
4. You don’t have to make a point
I’ve just read a Tweet from Marie Claire that incensed me. They recently published an article in which they called out Taylor Swift for, among other things, remaining apolitical in the 2016 election. “Taylor is not required to be vocal about her politics,” they said, “…but it’s also fair to side-eye and question her decision to remain silent.”
No it bloody isn’t. When you’re thrust into the public eye you’re expected, up to a point, to be a role model for the impressionable young people who idolise you, but that only works so far. It is not the responsibility of any celebrity to state political allegiances, discuss social issues or make statements on abuse and feminism. That is a matter of personal choice, irrespective of how many people follow them on Twitter. They don’t have to say anything – and when they do, we inevitably tell them to shut up and keep recording music / making films / writing Harry Potter books, as if the creative process ought to be sufficiently fulfilling in itself. You can’t have it both ways. We lambast the political actors as much as we decry the ones who stay on the fence – or who are sensible enough to stay quiet on issues they don’t want to discuss. An apolitical outlook is not a mark of cowardice; it’s a sign of integrity.
Doctor Who is equally obsessed with Talking About Important Things. Actually, that’s not fair. It’s more that the BBC are equally obsessed. 300-word soundbite articles about social commentary are endemic. If it’s not the racism in ‘Thin Ice’ (a story which foreshadowed the Punch A Nazi phenomenon with uncanny precision) it’s the capitalism in ‘Oxygen’, or the gay thing in…oh, every sodding episode. Listen. ‘Oxygen’ is a great story because it is bloody scary. That’s it. It has space zombies and and that brilliant scene where they’re exposed to the vacuum. The air-as-commodity thing may be what drives the narrative but I don’t watch Doctor Who for its political content, astute (if somewhat heavy handed) as that may sometimes be. I watch it because it has monsters and because it makes me laugh, when it’s good. There’s plenty of political content in The Spectator; all futurism aside, why on earth would you look for it in a tinpot sci-fi show?
I’m not saying it’s wrong to use science fiction as a medium for this. That’s the joy of it; the detached setting allows you to say the things you can’t say about your contemporaries. There’s a reason ‘The Happiness Patrol’ is one of my favourites. But note the indefinite article there – a reason, not the reason. ‘Happiness’ is also great because it looks moody (on a shoestring) and it has a freakish Bertie Bassett monster. Do we remember ‘The Zygon Inversion’ because it frightens and occasionally surprises us, or because Harness uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut in that game-changing monologue? Would it have been improved with a closing fourth wall break to camera, the sort of thing they did in Masters of the Universe? Should the Doctor tell us to take care of ourselves, and each other?
What messages do you find in Lynch’s movies? Oh, there are plenty. The Straight Story was about family. The Elephant Man examines the Victorian freak show on two levels, both upstairs and downstairs. And there’s a heap of stuff about the darkness hidden beneath the surface of suburban respectability; that’s practically his entire output, although Blue Velvet was the archetype. Twin Peaks is about a man who rapes and murders his daughter but curiously that’s where it stops. There is no heavy-handed moral. Instead there is a quirky FBI agent with a caffeine addiction who rides into town admiring the trees, and the rapist father falls on top of his daughter’s coffin at the funeral.
Series 3 is even more abstract. Things happen because they happen: Richard is an irredeemable bastard simply because he is the offspring of Bob. Dougie Jones is a gambling addict in a bad way with the loan sharks, but the programme makes no comment on this beyond showing the impact it’s had on his marriage – a situation that is resolved, paradoxically, when Cooper wins big at the casino. Twin Peaks is a show about a good many things, but it has no real message to impart – merely a Rorschach collection of fragments, from which we may derive what we will. The only thing it has to say of any real substance, as it turns out, is death.
Speaking of which…
5. There is a right way and a wrong way to show death
My feelings on death in Doctor Who are complicated, but there’s a decent summary of them over at The Doctor Who Companion. Here’s the Cliff Notes: Doctor Who has it all wrong when it comes to death. Characters die and then show up again next episode. They’re given miracle cures, frozen hearts, parallel existences. Often, the word ‘death’ means something else entirely. You have seen all this and you do not need me to go through it again with you. In addressing its portrayal of the hereafter (or at least the end of the herebefore), the outgoing showrunner proclaims that “Doctor Who is a big-hearted, optimistic show that believes in kindness and love and that wisdom will triumph in the end. I don’t believe it’s the kind of show that says there are bitter, twisted, nasty endings because it’s not.”
Which is not a bad way to think, but it sidesteps the question. We’re not talking about a show where people face death and then manage, against all odds, to survive. I could live with that. We’re talking about a programme which actively kills its leads and then resurrects them, or in which death is rendered meaningless because of parallel universes, or time travel, or causality – or something that happened six episodes back that we didn’t see. That’s the Marvel approach to death. That’s cheating. I’m fine with happy endings. But don’t give us a happy ending when you’ve already given us a sad one. All it does is undermine death, and at the risk of sounding all Mary Whitehouse, that’s not a healthy mindset to induce in a young and impressionable audience.
Twin Peaks was always going to be different, because it’s a show about a murder, and a number of people die. But the greatest and most profound moment in the third series occurs in part 15, where the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office gets its final phone call from Margaret Lanterman, known to most of us as The Log Lady. Having spent the entire series housebound, her cryptic announcements rendered in a series of conversations, the Log Lady admits in these final moments of her life that “There’s some fear…some fear of letting go”. Ultimately she embraces it, but not without trepidation, and as she signs off for the final occasion, the clouds cover the moon. There is a devastating poignancy in this elegy for a fallen mystic, both in the mournful tone of Lanterman’s final words and the the dignified silence they receive from Hawk. It is conducted more or less in silence, the gaps between dialogue forming a subtext that is almost Pinteresque. The fact that Catherine Coulson was herself dying when this scene was shot – passing away, if the urban legends have it correctly, a mere four days later – is the icing on a very rich, bitter cake.
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And there you have it. It’s not all-inclusive, nor is it definitive. And it may be wrong. I’m always happy for people to tell me I’m wrong. But it’s one way we might revive the hopes of a stagnant (if still enjoyable) programme: look at what other people are doing, and learn from them. Times change and so must I, says the Doctor. Perhaps the extent to which things need to change is greater than anyone realises. Perhaps not. But it can’t do any harm to be talking about it.
The best thing we saw on TV this year, incidentally, was Midnight Sun. But perhaps I’ll save that one for another day.
It was a revival twenty-five years in coming. It was the revival we thought we’d never actually get and could scarcely believe was actually happening until the moment the first trailers dropped onto YouTube. It was confusing, horrifying, hysterical, perplexing, frustrating. It was brilliant. It was obscene. It was the second-best thing we saw on TV this year.
It was Twin Peaks, and I can’t help thinking that while its very uniqueness made it special, other shows would benefit by copying at least some of its examples. Whatever your feelings on the dark, twisted return to Washington and the evil in those woods – on the questions answered and the others that sprung forth from nothingness like an emerging tulpa – there can be no arguing that it was a unique spectacle. Love or hate it, there was nothing like it on TV this year, nor is there likely to be again.
Let’s start with a disclaimer: the immediate response to a blog title like this one is that Doctor Who is a very different show and it would be risky, if not downright irresponsible, to emulate the sort of example that Twin Peaks set with its layers of enigmas and disturbing content. Doctor Who is a tinpot sci-fi show for Saturday evenings. It is enjoyed by millions precisely because it is accessible. Turning it into Twin Peaks Lite would be nothing short of monstrous. They are cut from very different cloths: it’s forming a handkerchief out of cow hide. It would kill the appeal of the original stone dead; it’s Gershwin seeking piano lessons from one of his idols, only to be told that he’d be better off serving as a first-rate Gershwin, rather than a second-rate Ravel.
Doctor Who should not try and be the new Twin Peaks, even if the new showrunner spent three years on Broadchurch attempting that very gambit (with some or no success, depending on who you ask). Simultaneously there were moments we watched it when I found myself seething in frustration. “If Doctor Who did this,” I remember saying, at least once, “it’d be a much better show.”
Today – and tomorrow, because this turned out to be longer than I’d expected – we’re going to explore just some of the things that might turn a fun show into a great one, provided they’re tackled in the right way.
Warning: this is spoiler-heavy. If you don’t want to know what happened in Twin Peaks: The Return, you would be advised not to read any further.
1. Not everything needs to be explained
There’s a thread on the Doctor Who Facebook group I just had to mute. It concerned ‘The Almost People’. “Why,” this person was asking, “did the Flesh solidify into real people when they walked into the TARDIS, but Amy was still a Ganger?” There is a perfectly simple explanation for this – Amy’s avatar is more advanced, thereby rendering the TARDIS technology obsolete – but it wasn’t enough to deter the usual crowd of Moffat-bashers. “Shit writing,” we were told. “Typical of this showrunner. Be glad when he leaves.”
It isn’t shit writing, nor is it quite as concrete as we’d like it to be. It is a partially resolved loophole, delivered in the same manner as Amy and Rory’s final story (which has a convenient get-out clause that’s disgracefully overlooked, in order to maximise the emotional pathos of their departure without actually killing them off). I was told a few weeks ago that there was no such thing as a plot hole – just a need to look elsewhere. If something happened that didn’t make any sense, you could usually find the answer by listening to a particular Big Finish audio, locating an obscure book, or scouring through 1800 words in a Reddit thread. “This,” I remember replying, “is just the sort of thing I find monumentally tiresome. I don’t mind the occasional mental workout, but I don’t want to go through Doctor Who with a notepad so I can write down all the things I need to research so that the episode will make sense.”
Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether I was wrong about that, and whether there might be any mileage in having stuff that doesn’t make sense, on any level. ‘Ghost Light’ is about the best Classic example, although ‘Warriors’ Gate’ comes a decent second. It’s not that they don’t make sense, it’s just that strange things happen for no apparent reason and we basically deal with it. There is no follow-up to ‘Warriors’ Gate’ that I know of, and thus much of the weirdness is endemic to the zen themes the story drifts around, not to mention its peculiar (and gloriously effective) directorial style. It’s fun because it’s about as abstract and indefinable as Who gets. Somewhere in a parallel universe there’s a director’s cut of ‘Heaven Sent’ that’s missing Capaldi’s voiceover, and it’s hailed as a masterpiece.
In one episode of Twin Peaks, Sarah Palmer is accosted by a man in a bar. The scene concludes when she opens up her face. It is nonsensical – and, in its own way, quietly horrifying. It has absolutely no bearing on anything that’s come before – a brief supermarket meltdown aside – and it’s not mentioned again. Sarah is a bereaved woman who has suffered much and who has, for whatever reason, got a monster living inside her. It reminded me of the ‘house-heads’ storyline from the 1991 Comic Relief graphic novel spin-off, which someone has (rejoice!) written up and reproduced here so that I don’t have to. What happens to Sarah is all the more horrifying given that it has no place in the story, and seems to have sprung into existence fully formed – King Lear may have told his youngest daughter that “Nothing will come from nothing”, but try telling David Lynch.
Elsewhere, there’s episode 8. No one understood episode 8. It is one of the most bizarre and disturbing things the director has ever committed to film, and that includes Eraserhead. There’s no denying that The Return was, in many ways, more pure Lynch than the original series – it felt like the show he’d always wanted to make, but couldn’t until he could find a way to get those nasty network executives off his back. It is unpleasant, grotesque, riddled with profanity and occasionally indecipherable (this is all a good thing, by the way, let me be clear on that) and episode 8 was arguably as indecipherable as it got. Beginning with an attempted murder, the episode’s centrepiece is a lengthy black and white segment which opens with the birth of BOB, seemingly from a mushroom cloud, blooming in slow motion from the force of the atomic explosion and accompanied, appropriately enough, by Penderecki’s Threnody. Then it gets weird. For those of you reading this without having seen it, I really can’t begin to explain. For the rest of you, anyone got a light?
Over in the Whoniverse, Rory Williams dies, and then gets erased from history. Come the series 5 finale, he’s back. When asked how this could happen, the Doctor says “Sometimes, impossible things happen, and we call them miracles.” And true to form, it’s eventually revealed that both Rory and the other Romans are a construct based on Amy’s school project (and, one assumes, a photo on the mantelpiece). But I like the first explanation better. I like the idea that it might be an unexplained miracle. Perhaps, sometimes, that’s all you need.
2. Remember what peace there may be found in silence
Regular readers will know that this is a particular bugbear of mine. Number one on my laundry list of Things Doctor Who Ought To Do is turn it down a bit. Murray Gold’s score has its moments, but the effect of them is diluted by a series of droning incidental tracks that don’t go anywhere, and merely serve to dampen the dialogue. Watch some of the scenes unscored and the sheer power of the acting shines through – and there is a goodness in Doctor Who’s acting, however much it may be drowned by an unwanted undercurrent of strings and pianos. There is a bravery in presenting your material naked and raw, allowing the audience to form its own emotional bond without the crutch of a score (used, at least in Doctor Who, in a similar manner to a laugh track) that tells you what you ought to be feeling and when.
Twin Peaks has a scene in its series 3 opener where Dr. Jacoby is spray-painting shovels. It takes place in more or less complete silence, with nothing but the wind, the ambient noise of the forest and the quiet hiss of the spray can accompanying the psychiatrist’s diligent work. The effect is calming, contemplative, meditative even. It appears at first glance to bear absolutely no relation to the plot: as was typical with The Return, many seeds that were sown earlier bore fruit many weeks later.
Even some of the musical scenes are quiet. Fairly early on in series 3 there’s a scene in which a man sweeps the floor of the Bang Bang Bar, accompanied by ‘Green Onions’. All of it, more or less. These scenes hold up as interludes, like the 1950s interludes the BBC used to show when they needed to fill an extra couple of minutes before the next broadcast. The effect – a series of seemingly unrelated sequences, built up over a number of weeks into a brightly covered but loosely strung patchwork – is startling. This is a programme that takes its time with just about everything, and that turns out to work in its favour.
When it comes to dialogue, Lynch sticks to his guns: the bulk of TP dialogue takes place with little or no soundtrack, save the occasional ambient drone. The effect this has is that when music does show up, it’s all the more memorable: there are a number of examples we could draw upon, but things perhaps reach a zenith in episode 16 when Cooper revives in the hospital. As he rises and dresses and makes phone calls, suddenly all business and more himself again than he’s been all season, the Twin Peaks theme plays quietly in the background, rising in volume as Cooper finally gets to say all the things he’s clearly been wanting to say since first being trapped in the stunted, almost catatonic state that defined much of the third series. “You’re a fine man, Bushnell Mullins,” he says, shaking the insurance mogul by the hand. “I will not soon forget your kindness and decency.”
As he turns to leave, the dumbstruck Mullins finds his voice. “What about the FBI?” Whereupon Cooper turns in the doorway, offers one of those reassuring smiles, stares directly through the fourth wall and says “I am the FBI.”
As the Man From Another Place might have said, “ELECTRICITY.”
Part Two available here.
I’m not sitting here idle, you know. I’ve got something quite special planned for later in the week, but owing to a bunch of other stuff that’s happening right now it’s going to have to be later in the week, instead of today. To tide you over until then, here’s this week’s news roundup.
First, a spot of subliminal advertising lands John Lewis with a copyright lawsuit, as a precise freeze-frame shows what was really hiding under that kid’s bed.
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In related news, abandoned concept artwork shows the spin-off that never was.
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And after a bit of internet research, the inspiration for the Thirteenth Doctor’s promotional outfit becomes all too apparent.
See you at the weekend. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.
Posted without comment.
Bump. Bump. Bump. Can you hear that? That is the sound of the bandwagon, travelling along the rickety road. I was going to say it takes its time, but actually I’d be wrong. It speeds along in a frenzy, its wheels afire with Facebook trends and retweets and Buzzfeed mentions, and jumping upon it – as I am endeavouring to do, crouched here in the bushes – is not as easy as it looks. You run the risk of wobbling, losing your footing and falling off entirely, and even if you do manage to secure a hold and climb aboard, you’ll find the wagon already crowded with other poor souls who had similar ideas. The wagon may be mighty and fast, but it is full.
I had a go nonetheless, and for this you have my children to thank. I believe I’ve written before about the lunacy of some viral videos. I never understood ‘Charlie bit my finger’, for example, and yet apparently Osama bin Laden had it on his laptop. The Duck Song (I’m not linking; you can look it up) is tedious and cloying, as are its numerous follow-ups. And Thomas developed a rapt fascination with a ten-second clip of a singing dinosaur (and its related video, in which said dinosaur is the subject of a six hour loop), and a bizarre mashup that combines footage from He-Man with a badly produced cover of 4 Non Blondes’ ‘What’s Up?’. For the sake of posterity, both are embedded here.
What’s going on? I don’t know. Do you? To be fair, this is the sort of thing I do, although I wonder how much of it is apeing things the boys have shown me in the hope of creating something that’ll get more than a few dozen hits. Wandering in and out of the study and the bedroom and frequently catching something completely random has given me a window into a corner of the internet I didn’t know existed, and which serves a purpose I do not fully understand. And when it comes to LazyTown, things get even more bizarre. I think I’ve written about LazyTown once in here before – a while back, when we were talking about reversing that Fish Custard video. You may look there for further doses of randomness, should you experience the whim.
For the uninitiated: a young girl called Stephanie arrives in a brightly coloured small town where the lethargic inhabitants are under the thumb of local supervillain, the flamboyant Robbie Rotten, who spends most of his time slumped in his underground lair. Robbie’s posture is so poor it’s a wonder he hasn’t experienced serious back problems, but he’s paradoxically the most active citizen in the entire town, spending most of his free time dashing around its streets and gardens, in a variety of Shakespearean disguises, endeavouring to find ways to keep everyone else confined to the sofa. “I feel disgustingly healthy,” he grumbles at the end of the one episode where this is actually pointed out, and indeed, it’s a hallmark of the self-loathing that seems to drive his character.
Stephanie is aided in her efforts to revitalise the town’s energies by Sportacus – a tracksuited hyperactive sports nut who descends from his airship at the beginning of each episode, and with whom Stephanie establishes a strange, borderline inappropriate relationship. Mercifully, she also has her own peer group, all with their own foibles: Ziggy (sweets), Pixel (video games), and Trixie (no respect for authority; dresses like bad Iron Man cosplay). And then there’s Stingy, a haughty, selfish and deeply materialistic child who practically screams white male privilege; by no means irredeemable but known throughout the LazyTown cinematic universe as being an utter bastard.
It’s a curious fusion of techniques that hearkens back to Sesame Street. Stephanie, Sportacus and Robbie – being the most overtly physical people in LazyTown – are all played by live actors, while everyone else appears in puppet form. It’s the sort of thing that throws you when you’re visiting Butlins and catch the live show, in which the puppet characters appear as fully grown humans wearing character masks; the effect is rather like a freshly regenerated Matt Smith bellowing “LEGS! I’VE GOT LEGS!”. (Sesame Street Live is similarly disconcerting, although it’s partly because Elmo was so goddamned huge.)
Perhaps the saddest part about the whole thing is the news that Stefán Karl Stefánsson (extra credit: find me a more Icelandic name than that, if you can), who plays Robbie Rotten, is suffering from terminal cancer, although he’s apparently improved. Meanwhile Kim Jong-un is the picture of perfect health, and you wonder if there is a God.
LazyTown is replete with songs, most of which are downright irritating, but it’s two in particular that have made the viral rundown. There’s ‘We Are Number One’ – which you can see in the post linked above, although be aware that the version I embedded is backwards. And there’s the ‘Mine’ song – Stingy’s big solo, remixed and Photoshopped and warped beyond all measure all across the internet, whether it’s a ridiculous zooming effect or (a personal favourite) the coming of the apocalypse.
And there comes a point where you figure that joining them is better than failing to beat them, and that’s how we got here. This took about an hour and a half to put together, most of which was scouring transcripts for appropriate shouts of ‘mine’, not to mention ripping them from the Doctor Who episodes. And as a special prize, the first person to tell me every episode I used gets one of Ziggy’s sweets. And an apple. It’s what Sportacus would have wanted.
Brian of Morbius 