Notes from the sofa

Second child and I are blazing our way through series three. Josh and I have already done it, of course, but it’s a different experience watching with Thomas. When he’s engaged, he won’t take his eyes from the screen. When he’s bored, I keep having to pull him back. It’s not his fault. It’s difficult for him to concentrate for long periods, and that goes with the territory. Too much dialogue and he loses interest. We have had to abandon several episodes because they simply didn’t work for him (which was a shame; I always did enjoy ‘The Impossible Planet’).

But he’s also surprised me. ‘The Girl in The Fireplace’, with all its ontological trickery and quiet, understated romance, had him glued to the screen. Conversely he didn’t want to know about ‘Gridlock’, which features flying cars, humanoid cats and an enormous crab. The other week we were watching ’42’, and he became visibly agitated during the finale, in which the Doctor is infected with a parasite that renders him makes him overact, Francine Jones deals with her daughter’s Electra complex, and Martha herself doesn’t quite fall into the sun (while a random actress from Eastenders does). Thomas sat there as the clock ticked down, his face hidden behind his hands, crying out “I can’t watch!”. (Neither can I, kid, but for entirely different reasons.)

Over the weekend, we went through the ‘Human Nature’ / ‘Family of Blood’ two-parter. It’s still one of my favourite post-2005 stories, if only because Tennant gets to act out of character and I don’t want to whack him over the head (because the last time we saw him really doing it was in ‘New Earth’ where he pretends to be Zoe Wanamaker, and that’s just an embarrassment). His chemistry with Jessica Hynes is lovely, the Edwardian locale is elegantly realised, and Harry Lloyd (Baines) is a revelation. Oh, and it has Thomas Sangster, who is wonderful, even if the war scenes don’t convince.

So it’s tremendous, but Thomas was struggling. The whole concept of John Smith being a person in his own right was confusing him. He enjoyed the scarecrows, but in the scenes where Smith debates the ethics of surrendering his life so that his counterpart may be restored, Thomas declared “The Doctor’s going to die!”.

“No, no, he isn’t,” I reassured him. “John Smith is going to die.”
“But he’s the Doctor.”
“He’s sort of like the Doctor. But he’s a person in his own right.”
“Is he the Doctor or not?”
“…Not. Not really.”
“But the Doctor’s going to die!”
“Right,” I said. “Come with me.”

I led him into the kitchen, and filled two plastic cups.

“This one,” I said, pointing to exhibit A, “is the Doctor. And the cup is the watch he’s hiding inside. OK?”
“OK.”
“Meanwhile, this one is John Smith, inside the Doctor. So this cup is the Doctor’s body. Now, can I pour the Doctor back into this cup?”
“No.”
“Precisely. It’s already full. If the Doctor is going to go back from the watch inside his body, the only way to do it – ” and I demonstrated, feeling inexplicably doleful about the whole thing – “is to pour John Smith down the drain.”

That seemed to satisfy him, and he was breathtakingly silent during Baines’s chilling voiceover explaining how the Doctor granted the Family their own twisted versions of immortality. I recalled a conversation we had a few months previously, where I’d taken him out of my nephew’s dedication service and we’d wandered around the churchyard for a while, looking at the graves and explaining about where things go. Children with autism often struggle with abstractions – that’s why we use visual timetables and why, when I’m offering him a sandwich, I’ll get jars out of the cupboard so he can see what he’s looking at – and I suppose the concept of a soul was going to be even trickier to grasp for someone whose comfort zone is the tangible. My fear is that he’ll now go to funerals believing that when people die all their inner orange squash leaks out, but I guess I can live with a different sort of theology.

This evening’s episode is ‘Blink’. At least that one isn’t complicated, right?

Night of the Living Doctor

OK, so they’re calling it ‘Day of the Doctor’, which works. And the official poster is a caption writer’s dream waiting to happen.

So here’s the first in a new series. I’ll add more as I think of them but I suspect that most people out there are funnier than I am and I’m happy to take suggestions, either below or by email, for future editions.

—

Who saves the day?

DAVROS: Already I have seen them sacrifice today, for their beloved Doctor. The Earth woman who fell opening the Subwave Network.

DOCTOR: Who was that?

ROSE: Harriet Jones. She gave her life to get you here.

DAVROS: How many more? Just think. How many have died in your name? The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame. This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you yourself.

(Davros, ‘Journey’s End’)

Recently, I watched the 2005 Doctor Who series again, from scratch, with Thomas keeping me company. It’s aged surprisingly well. It’s New Who before it got bogged down with needless homages to the past. At the time, Davies’ umbilical snipping annoyed me; it felt as if – through the Time War – he was stomping all over the legacy of the show and then turning it into a soap opera.

These days it’s more apparent than ever that this is exactly what he was doing, but it bothers me less. Instead, I concentrate on the good things: the actually-quite-reasonable special effects, the decently-paced storytelling, some pretty creepy aliens (if you don’t get a chill when that phone rings and Noah Johnson’s voice cries “Muuuummmy….”, or when Richard Wilson grows a gas mask through his face, there’s something wrong with you) and even John Barrowman. I know that ‘Jazz Hands Jack’ wore out his welcome long before the fourth series of Torchwood, yet I still love him. And I always will.

But there’s something about that Ninth Doctor, and it’s a recurring trend. Basically, he’s a bit crap.

Part of the problem is Eccleston’s brief tenure in the leather jacket. Davies’ first series as chief writer establishes the Doctor as a broken, violent figure whose ultimate redemption begins when he refuses to kill one Dalek and ends when he refuses to kill a million of them. It’s ironic that one of the final scenes in this first series features the Doctor not watching television in a London council estate but on the floor of a colossal space station, assembling things out of wires and circuit boards and arguably looking seriously Doctorish for the first time since Paul McGann got out his jelly babies. Had Eccleston not jumped ship when he did, the next series would have undoubtedly seen a more confident, self-assured Time Lord stomping around the universe with Rose and saving the day far more than he actually does in this series.

Not entirely useless, but too little and too late.

That notion of ‘saving the day’ is what drives today’s entry, because for a while now I’ve been compiling a list of every episode in the New Who TV canon, with the intent of determining each Doctor’s relative usefulness. Because if you actually look at Doctor Who in its post-revival years, what you find is a show that’s far less about an ageing Time Lord saving the universe, and far more about his companions doing it for him. There’s far less trickery with wires and exploding shuttles, and far more eleventh hour reprieves, conveniently placed Chekhov’s guns, and more than a few supreme sacrifices.

None of this is new to the show. One of my favourite Classic Who stories, ‘The Ark In Space’, ends with not one but two sacrificial suicides from members of the crew. ‘Earthshock’ saw Adric destroy the Cybermen at the cost of his own life. And then there’s poor old Katarina. But it’s telling that in the ‘Death of a Companion’ section in the companions Wikipedia entry, over half those listed are from New Who. Acts of self-sacrifice – as opposed to pointless deaths, which Classic Who had in abundance – abound in the post-revival era, whether permanent (supporting characters), temporary (Jack) or silly (anything involving Rory). It’s almost as if they’re put in on purpose with the intention of building to one last Montage of Demise, which is precisely what we see while Davros is monologuing during the scene I quoted at the beginning of this post. I could just about believe that, if I also believed that Davies was capable of thinking this far ahead.

But all this got me thinking. Besides the suicides, there are plenty of examples where the Doctor is in a fix and only his companion is able to save him, presumably as part of the now-milked-to-death “companion identification” ethos that the show has tried so hard to promote for decades, but particularly since 2005. We can’t identify with the Doctor, we’re told, so we must therefore identify with his companions. This means making them spirited, independent and likeable (well, one out of three, Martha). Oh, and feisty. Mustn’t forget feisty. They must appeal to the lowest common denominator by being young and pretty because that’s the only way that we’re going to like them. Again, none of this is exactly new (cf. Susan, Leela, Peri, Mel) but it’s fair to say that New Who has over-egged the pudding. It wouldn’t be a problem except that the show now works tremendously hard at building up audience identification for each companion before completely undoing it by turning them into blank-eyed gods, giving them Time Lord mindsets, reincarnating them across the entirety of time and space, or resurrecting them from the dead on a weekly basis. In other words, if you’re a companion and the universe has to revolve around you, it’s going to be hard for people to empathise.

The long and the short of it is that earlier this year, I went through every single story (note: story, not episode) of New Who and I gave each one a point allocation, depending on how the story finished. We may break it down thus:

The Doctor saves the day, more or less on his own – 2 points

The Doctor saves the day with help – 1 point

The Doctor has no real part in saving the day – 0 points

I then tallied up the total points that each Doctor accumulated, and divided that by the number of points they could have accumulated if they’d been on top form throughout the series, and from this we get a final ‘effectiveness rating’. So an unassisted, triumphant Doctor who’d starred in thirty stories would amass sixty points. And so on.

Note that ‘saving the day’ is ambiguous. For one thing, the term itself may refer to the salvation of five or six people (or even fewer), or the entire universe – in each case I put in whatever the thrust of that week’s narrative happened to be. Furthermore, these narrative thrusts only apply to climactic events – cancelling the bomb, appeasing the wrathful deity, or destroying the Daleks. These may be events in which the Doctor plays only a small part, but it would be unfair to say that he is ever actually useless during a story, with the possible exception of ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’. Even in a tale like ‘Midnight’, in which the Doctor spends most of the narrative out of his depth and surrounded by people who fear and distrust him, he is able to use his influence (and another plant and payoff) to convince the steward to do the right thing, and the Doctor’s moral imprint upon events is felt long after she blows Lesley Sharp out of the airlock.

” It’s not like I’m an innocent. I’ve taken lives. I got worse. I got clever. Manipulated people into taking their own. Sometimes I think a Time Lord lives too long.”

(The Doctor, ‘The End of Time’)

It’s not a perfect system. For example, if the Doctor has an idea but gets someone else to do it, because he’s otherwise engaged (cf. ‘The Age of Steel’, below, he gets only one point. Some of you may find this unfair. I call it my system of scoring, and I’m the one who put this together, so tough. And with that in mind, I hope the scoring is at least relatively consistent. Let’s see how we get on, shall we? Ninth first. Oh, and important point: acts of sacrifice, excepting those of the Doctor himself, are highlighted in yellow.

Oh dear. It really doesn’t look good for poor Chris. But as I said earlier, I don’t think it’s his fault. The first series of New Who was very much about bringing the Doctor back from the brink, and I’m sure we’d have seen another side to him if Eccleston had lingered.

On to the Tenth.

Now, this is interesting, particularly when you compare it to the Eleventh (below). He’s a little more effective than his predecessor, but look at how many stories involved sacrifice – fourteen out of thirty-six, which is over a third. This is almost certainly connected to Tennant’s ability to look appalled and shout “NO!” to BAFTA-winning standards, but no wonder Davros was gloating.

Finally. Finally! Mr Smith.

Fewer sacrifices, but lots of ‘null points’. And yes, I’m aware that this will need updating again in December when he goes all golden and Christ-like, in another overt display of religious symbolism. Even with two more sets of full marks (unlikely given that November’s instalment also stars Tennant and will probably end with Hurt doing something redemptive and heroic) he’ll be hard pressed to leave any sort of real distinction.

Perhaps all this is grossly unfair. Part of the problem with nostalgia-craving fans like me is that we tend to misremember the past. I’m looking back at Classic Who under the impression that every story ended like ‘The Masque of Mandragora’, but that’s probably not the case. As much fun as it is to sneer at Davies’ and Moffat’s penchant for slow-motion dives into hot lava, it’s equally plausible that were to examine the ranks of Classic Who we’d find similar trends. Personally I don’t think we will. Nonetheless, the only way to be sure is to compile similar lists for every. Single. Doctor. And then expand them to include comics, novels, Big Finish productions, fan-fiction…

But that can wait. In the meantime I’m off to watch tonight’s episode: ‘Gridlock’, in which the Doctor witnesses the overdue demise of a character with a massive head. And for a change, I’m not talking about the chief writer.

Donna Noble says ‘Oi!’

—

Look. It was this or the ironing, OK? Seriously, it took me an hour. It came about because of a repeat viewing of ‘The Runaway Bride’, which Thomas wound up enjoying very much, although for me it merely served as a reminder of how bloody irritating Donna was in that first appearance. But amidst all the posturing and slapping and an accent that wouldn’t have been out of place on Eastenders (or perhaps that should have been ‘aaahhht of place’) there was one word that stuck out / aaaahhht, and it’s there in the title.

“I’m surprised and a little disappointed,” said Gareth, “that there weren’t more of them.” He’s got a point. I went through transcripts from every episode in that series (and ‘The End of Time’) and picked out every single occurrence, including a few that are borderline. The use of ‘Oi’ tails off mid-series when they’re making Donna very straight-laced, before building an entire scene around it in the meta-crisis sub-plot in the finale. Nonetheless, it’s the closest she got to a catchphrase, and by and large assistants aren’t around long enough to get catchphrases, and for that I suppose we should be grateful.

The bit at the very end, by the way, was put in exclusively for the benefit of my children, who found it hilarious, even if I don’t…

“And should I trust you, sir? You who change your voice so easily?”

Amidst the news that Peter Capaldi will retain his natural accent for his run as the Twelfth Doctor, Emily suggested this:

—

—

(We’re not the first, of course. But it had to be done.)

Kismet, Hardy

Well, close enough.

—

The Twelfth of Neverwhere

The most popular arguments I’ve heard against the casting of Peter Capaldi:

1. Too old.

2. Too white.

3. Too male.

4. Too ugly.

5. Never heard of him.

6. He’s already been in it.

To which I believe we may appropriately respond with this –

I was going to leave it there, but that would be silly.

Being out of the loop has its benefits. It was only thanks to a chance encounter in a Pembrokeshire swimming pool that I found out about the half-hour special. And I’m glad I was away, partly because I had next to no time to work myself into a frenzy of excitement that would have inevitably led to a colossal letdown even if they’d cast, say, Rik Mayall (who I’ve always felt deserved a shot), and partly because if I’d been here I’d have watched it, and been bored stiff by the interviews and soundbites and Zoe Ball’s second-rate master of ceremonies skills. Instead I followed a real-time newspaper feed, and then panicked when it looked like it really might be Aneurin Barnard (no offence, Aneurin, I just don’t think you’re ripe enough), and then breathed a huge sigh of relief.

As far as I am aware there is no comprehensive poll as to whether the casting of Capaldi (who emerged as a late favourite) was ‘approved’ or not. As such any press ramblings you read will tip the balance either in his favour (the Mirror) or against him (the Mail). Certainly I’ve read as many anti-Capaldi comments as I have pro-ones, typically from those who are appalled at the transition from dashing thirty-something to dashing twenty-something to middle aged voice of experience. A friend of mine commented on her Facebook timeline that she hoped he didn’t last too long, as “he ain’t too easy on the eyes”. Others remark that he’s too old – at fifty-five, the oldest casting since Hartnell. Other commentators, such as the Guardian’s Jenny Colgan, have damned the show’s creators with faint praise, begrudgingly accepting that “if we must have a white male, I’m glad it’s him”, in an article that gets so many other things wrong I don’t know where to start deconstructing it.

It would be very easy to sneer at the younger fans, but to single them out is to apply the same standard of generalisation that some of them apply to Doctor Who. It’s probably fair to say that most of the age remarks come from younger fans of the show, and most of the aesthetic critique from women, or gay men. But just because those who complain about the new Doctor’s appearance are young fans, it does not follow that all young fans behave in this way, and we should be wary of tarring them all with the same brush. There are people in their twenties who know more about the show and its history than I could ever hope to, and there are people in their sixties who experienced it for the first time in 2005. Age does not automatically beget experience; it merely allows for its potential accumulation.

Those who complain about Capaldi’s previous role in the show, of course, entirely miss the point. (Gareth mentioned that in ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ he tried to buy the TARDIS, which was a nifty piece of presumably unintentional foreshadowing.) The act of bringing back previous actors to play different (sometimes related) roles is hardly new to New Who; Karen Gillan (in this very same episode), Bernard Cribbins and Freema Agyeman have all landed regular spots on the show after earlier, smaller parts. Bringing back a previously appearing actor to play the titular role is unusual but not unheard of: Colin Baker did it back in the 1980s, and in a less obvious example, a 2003 Big Finish drama stars David Warner as an alternative incarnation of the Third Doctor, encountering the Master in 1997 Hong Kong and crossing swords with an antagonistic UNIT colonel who sounds an awful lot like David Tennant.

As for me? I’m thrilled. I have already written about why I felt the Doctor should remain a white male, so we won’t go into that. The casting of Capaldi was a masterstroke, but then I never expected the production team to let me down. I have ranted about Moffat in here more times than I’d care to admit, but if there’s one thing I’ll say for the man it’s that he knows how to cast a lead. Coleman, Smith, Gillan and Darvill have all impressed me – at least before two of them descended into bland caricatures of their previous selves, and even then that’s hardly the fault of the actors – and I’ve been burned before when it comes to making predictions about who’s going to work in the title role. Suffice to say that there have been eleven official Doctors, and every one of them has their merits. You may enjoy the stories of one more than others, but the Doctor who is not to your taste will be the firm favourite of someone else (with the possible exception of Colin Baker, but again that’s hardly his fault, as the audio dramas – in which he excels – later proved).

If ‘Pompeii’ saw Capaldi provide a competent rendering of a generally rather dull character, it was his role in Torchwood the following year that saw his finest brush with the Whoniverse. I’ve written about that elsewhere, but if nothing else it cements his role as a versatile performer – John Frobisher is a world away from the sneering, foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker, the role for which he will arguably be most remembered besides the Doctor. I’ve not seen The Thick of It (and yes, I know I’m missing out), but I gather it foreshadowed the Levinson report with uncanny precision. And I did see him in The Nativity, and he was quite good in that. Still, he’s not acting here:

—

It’s lovely, really. The look on his face is tentative and hesitant, as if he’s really not sure whether the audience will approve. You can almost see the relief seeping in.

When I mentioned Malcolm Tucker to Gareth, I added that he “swears a lot”. “This is all I ever hear about that role,” came the response. “That he’s foul-mouthed, swears a lot, etc, etc.  Nothing else – nothing about whether he’s any good at acting, or what that character is apart from that.” This is a fair comment – Tucker’s use of language is the talking point in every article that mentions him, with jokes about making the TARDIS ‘bluer than ever’ providing convenient headlines, and providing the source material for several YouTube videos and a Guardian article. On the other hand, you don’t amass a CV like Capaldi’s – over thirty years of work, including an Academy Award – without it being taken as read that you have some kind of thespian talent. It’s far easier to question the acting abilities of, say, Harry Styles, who is young and pretty. Wrinkly older people, it seems, can act just fine, unless they’re Marlon Brando (who could act, but frequently chose to simply mumble).

There’s also the question of the Doctor’s relationship with River, whom it seems we must have back in some capacity, because she’s Moffat’s creation and he loves her even if I do not. (And if you thought we’d seen the last of Professor Song in the series finale, I fear you may have a lot to learn about the Whoniverse’s tendency to bring people back from the dead.) But if nothing else, the casting of Capaldi has the potential to throw a whole new dynamic on the Doctor’s are-they / aren’t-they / do-we-really-want-to-be-talking-about-this-anyway implied romance with the curly-haired man-eater. Part (although only a small part) of the problem with River is that the Kingston / Smith pairing has never worked – they simply don’t gel. He looks (and I’ve probably said this) like he’s trying to chat up his best mate’s mum. I know it sounds horribly ageist, but there it is.

Bad timing was part of it: Kingston was originally hired to work with Tennant, and then Moffat took over and wanted to bring her back, and then they cast Smith (presumably without doing a screen test), and they were stuck with that dynamic. A recurring Kingston / Tennant pairing would have been interesting to watch, insofar as I have ever found River interesting, and it certainly would have seemed less awkward. Similarly, pairing her against an actor who’s closer to her physical age might improve the onscreen chemistry (any chemistry at all would be a step up). It doesn’t solve the other problems like River being generally irritating and her stories mind-numbingly tedious, but it would be a marginal improvement, and I’ll take what I can get.

‘Take what you can get’ seems to be a recurring theme when it comes to Who these days. There is still the question of Capaldi’s accent, which will probably be English with an Oxford lilt, as opposed to Tennant’s estuary English. (I imagine him sounding like a deputy headmaster, insofar as it’s possible to ever really imagine what a deputy headmaster sounds like.) Then there’s the question of what he actually does with the role – or more specifically, what he’s allowed to do. As a Facebook friend of mine put it, “I think they really need to embrace a change of tone here. Moffat wasn’t a very sure hand on the head writing last time around and poor Matt’s character seemed to change from episode to episode and even scene to scene. A more dashing and driven Prof Quatermass / Pertwee kind of Doctor against a somewhat less wacky world(s) could become the kind of action adventure show that might refresh the falling audiences and still make the kids happy. But if PC ends up clowning and talking in non-sequiteurs…”

I share his concerns, but it’s early days; we’ve not even had the regeneration scene yet. Nonetheless, good news all round, especially for Capaldi. I couldn’t be happier. Well, except if they’d cast Rik Mayall. But you can’t have everything.

K-1

Years before the events of ‘The Invisible Enemy’, Professor Marius’s early prototype for K-9 was a resounding failure.

—

 

I went to the shops and I bought

The local toy emporium were having a better-than-half-price day. Marked up RRP is always something to worry about (yes, those chocolates are fifty per cent off the RRP, but who would have sold them at £12 anyway?!?) – still, at £3.99 a pop these were reasonably priced. So…

Now, can I justify £48 on that set of classic figures…?

Review: ‘The Name of the Doctor’ (spoilers)

I was teasing the boys on Saturday. “Of course, the Doctor might regenerate,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t. “We might see the Twelfth Doctor.” Thomas then proceeded to ask what he looked like, and of course I didn’t know. After lunch, he fetched the customisable sonic screwdriver set that Emily got me for Christmas and assembled his own version, calling it “the Twelfth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, and I’m the Twelfth Doctor”. I nodded and smiled and took his photo, whilst working out what I’d say to him when it got to the end of the evening with no sign of a new Doctor.

Then we saw the episode.

The appearance of John Hurt – who, I confess, I’d entirely forgotten was going to appear – threw in a complete curveball at the very end. It wasn’t so much a cliffhanger as a game-changer, a reassessment of who the Doctor was and how we got here. It was also a shameless bit of stunt-casting. It was the First Doctor before he took on the appearance of Hartnell. It was an obvious reference to the Time War. It was the Other before he threw himself into the Looms. It was the final Doctor, who will not live to regenerate. It was brilliant. It was terrible. It was all of the above and none of the above, depending on what you read and what you want to believe. I think we’re beyond the stage now where it matters. This has either been the worst series since the revival or a dazzling return to form, and if you’re on one side then nothing the other can say is going to influence you. Perhaps we should stop arguing about it, stop polluting the pages of the web with our ramblings, and accept that we see things differently.

But this will fall on deaf ears. The enigma of Hurt’s Doctor and who he is will be shoved back and forth across blogs, Facebook groups, sycophantic Dan Martin Guardian columns, bitch-fests from Lawrence Miles and rambling fan videos from incoherent YouTube pundits, and it will long outlast its expected sell-by date. We’re all going to be horribly sick of it by November, and it’ll lead to a glorious anti-climax where you’ll be told something crushingly disappointing. Because ultimately, that’s what Moffat does. He asks you to guess what he’s thinking, but these days it’s seldom interesting or satisfying.

If nothing else, the “bit with Doctor Hurt” (as Thomas referred to it) puts an older actor in the role – something I’ve longed for, and something we’ve not had since Pertwee, who took over the role at 51. Of course, Pertwee embodied a dynamic, action-driven side to the Doctor, gleefully bringing down foes with skilfully choreographed martial arts courtesy of the stunt directors. It was something capitalised on by the relatively youthful Baker when he adopted the role some four years later, to the extent that the dashing sidekick who’d been brought in to do all the stunts was written out after several stories, having been used mostly to provide bumbling comic relief with occasional moments of brilliance. Still, the physical, action-orientated stance of the new incarnation of the programme has prevented the BBC from casting anyone who’s likely to get a heart attack from running along a corridor in a disused steelworks being chased by a monster that isn’t there.

This has meant a spate of younger Doctors; a trend that looks set to continue. Because let’s be clear on this: Hurt’s casting is atypical in that whoever it is, it is not a Doctor who is going to stay the course. He hasn’t said more than two dozen words yet and already we have established that he is a Doctor who either should not exist, a wibbly wobbly anomaly, or an incarnation who has been assigned to a crumbly CG-generated hell (filmed on location in urban Glasgow) because he did or will do something terrible. He is the Doctor’s dirty little secret, along with his secret stash of Sontaran pornography and what he and River really get up to with those handcuffs. (I suspect these two things probably aren’t mutually exclusive. There, that’s put images in your head, hasn’t it?)

It’s a shame that in establishing this fact, Moffat resorted to the laziest, lamest trick in the writer’s book, which is to end an episode (and indeed a series) with that episode’s title. Some weeks ago, Gareth suggested to me that there would be a feint of some sort and that you’d have a bunch of characters charging into battle, dying in slow motion, bellowing “IN THE NAME OF THE DOCTOR!”. He was joking, but that’s only slightly more silly than what actually happened. I was so busy reeling from this that I didn’t even notice that Moffat also fulfilled Dorium’s “Fall of the Eleventh” prophecy by having the Doctor say “We don’t jump; we fall”.

I mean, honestly. This isn’t a clever reversal. It’s just bad writing. Confounding the expectations of your audience by deflating the balloon because it’s the last thing they were expecting is inexcusable. Making a joke out of a foreshadowing comment that is supposed to allude to the Doctor’s death doesn’t make you look clever or a master of your craft. It makes you look like a smug drama student. It’s like Bilbo Baggins getting Gollum to guess what’s in his pocket – a riddle he asked by accident and then exploited to get out of a life-or-death situation, but to the best of my knowledge no one is approaching Moffat across a slimy rock, threatening to eat him if he can’t guess what’s alive without breath and cold as death.

I remember being eight years old, and sitting at the side of the school field playing I Spy with a couple of friends. They tried, for a good two or three minutes, to guess the ‘B’ I said I’d seen, and eventually gave up, pronouncing me the winner. “Bus,” I said. “I saw one go past a while ago.” It’s cheating, and it’s unfair. But it was technically accurate. And thus it was a plot twist in the story of the game, one that eerily echoed the style of our current chief writer. Which is why the endless praise and shouts of “brilliant” baffle me.

“Yesterday,” said Gareth, “I gave a brief summary of the bits I knew of the episode. Try it, and about halfway through you’ll find yourself thinking ‘This is just really bad fanfic – if anyone had written it last year it would have been ridiculed’.” And he’s right. It reads like bad fanfiction and Moffat gets away with it because we still know him as the writer of ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and we cannot quite wrench ourselves away from that image, or from the fact that a man capable of brilliance simply isn’t suited to a role like this.

Of course, the question of who the Doctor is turned out fairly early on to be fundamentally unimportant, when the words “It is discovered” turned out not to allude to the Doctor’s name at all, but rather the location of his grave. This needn’t mean that the end of the show is in sight. An eventual death does not mean an imminent death, and there was no sign of any corpse inside the Trenzelore TARDIS. One could, perhaps, nitpick over the fact that the interior echoes the current design, but in the grand scheme of things I think there are other aspects upon which I could waste my time. Like the rotten dialogue, or the fact that the design of the Whispermen was strangely familiar.

Certainly there were good things this week. When the Doctor is informed that his friends have been taken to Trenzelore, his reaction is to sit down on the sofa and burst into tears. It’s a mesmerising performance from Smith, so easy to forget in the blustery of what follows, but it’s arguably the most upset we’ve seen the Doctor since the revival of the show – a frail, fragile moment, and I wish we’d had a little more of that, and less of the angst-ridden silliness that followed.

In all seriousness, this was good.

Performances aside, Saul Metzstein directed this as well as he’s directed any of his other episodes, with the darkness of Trenzelore effectively realised in the few shots we saw of it. This seemed to be a finale that dealt with metaphysics as much as anything else, and as such sets were almost theatrically abstract, with atmospheric, moody lighting standing in for actual detail. This was an episode of dread, and Metzstein (and cinematographer Neville Kidd) evoked this by juxtaposing tight, claustrophobic shots with wide, angled ones, as if someone were being observed from not far off.

Similarly, the opening montage showed a certain visual panache, particularly if you didn’t know it was coming – as I didn’t. It was rough around the edges, for sure. The limitations of the BBC’s effects budget showed when Jenna-Louise Coleman was digitally pasted into old footage, standing looking confused in a park while someone who looks absolutely nothing like Patrick Troughton runs past her. But elsewhere, it worked. The tints and grains came out again as Clara jumped through different eras and went through costume changes at a rate that rivalled that of Madonna in Evita. This included a questionable CG-driven appearance from Jon Pertwee, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it encounters with the Eighth and Ninth. Davison was seen lying on a floor, presumably spouting dialogue from what I thought was ‘The Caves of Androzani’ (but which Gareth insists is probably from the beginning of his run), and Clara appeared to linger in the same corridor they used in ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ as a tall man in the Sixth Doctor’s frock coat and a blonde wig wanders past. (Presumably it was Sylvester McCoy.)

The fans’ reaction to this opening, I’m told, has been split: a mixture of yah-boo-sucks directed at the naysayers, while the cynical amongst us have pointed out that it was mostly a lot of smoke and mirrors. Still, it looked reasonably impressive, and there was one moment of apparent importance, with an eyebrow-raising encounter back on Gallifrey. Fans of ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ will recall that the Doctor did not steal the TARDIS; the TARDIS stole him. This always felt like unnecessary anthropomorphism to me – the sort of thing that people say about their cats when it simply isn’t true – but it was in this singular scene that the police box’s apparent love-hate relationship with Clara was reconciled: through Clara, the TARDIS is able to reach out to the Doctor and influence him. Clara thus becomes the equivalent of a surrogate, with all the complications that that relationship entails. And it’s still silly, because it doesn’t seem to fit. (“I thought from what I read,” said Gareth, “that her meeting the Doctor was trying to save him from the Great Intelligence’s interference somehow. Was the GI whispering ‘go on, take this TARDIS – it comes with its own baby dinosaur’?”.)

While we’re on that, it’s also worth bearing in mind, of course, that the entire falling through time sequence was built on a colossal and quite unnecessarily complicated plotline: that of (the again under-used) Richard E Grant entering the Doctor’s time stream and changing everything he’s ever done. I know that time is supposed to be a non-linear ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff (I have left out the pause, but it was there) – nonetheless, wouldn’t it have made more sense for Grant to go back and kill the Doctor outright before he stole the TARDIS, while he was a frail and feeble old man, and save himself the trouble of having to dimension hop for millennia? But that would have been far too simple, and instead we’re faced with the supposedly Great Intelligence jumping through time, changing history for the worse, with Clara in hot pursuit, striving to put right what once went wrong. It’s like watching five series of Quantum Leap over the course of a few seconds, and we didn’t even get to see Dean Stockwell in a red suit.

And while I’m complaining, I would like to point out that River Song’s appearance in this was nothing short of a disaster. It’s not that Moffat can’t write love stories. He proved that he could with ‘Blink’ and ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, both of whom have touching, unresolved matters of the heart at their core. But the love scenes with River are turgid and unconvincing and riddled with shocking dialogue (I feel a top ten coming on, but I’ll leave that for another day when I don’t feel quite so cross). See for example:

River: There has to be another way. Use the TARDIS. Use something! Save her, yes, but for God’s sake, be sensible! [She goes to slap him and he catches her wrist] How are you even doing that? I’m not really here.

The Doctor: You’re always here to me. And I always listen. And I can always see you.

River: Then why didn’t you speak to me?

The Doctor: Because I thought it would hurt too much.

River: I believe I could have coped.

The Doctor: No. I thought it would hurt me. And I was right.

How, exactly, are we supposed to cope when confronted with this drivel? It doesn’t help that there’s no chemistry at all between Smith and Kingston, but even Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton couldn’t polish a turd. Still, we can’t just blame the dialogue – it’s the whole setup. The other part of the problem, you see, is the nature of the Doctor having any sort of lover, simply because it sexualises him and calls to mind the question of what he’s like in bed. It’s an elephant in the room, but that’s what you were all thinking about during that kiss, wasn’t it?

But there was, again, that feeling of smoke and mirrors during the finale: the sense of a beginning, and not an ending. Moffat has a tendency to open up a new mystery just as he’s resolving an older one, and while we now understand the mystery of Clara and no longer care about the identity of the Doctor, another enigma has cropped up to take its place. I wouldn’t mind this, except that some three years later, I’m still not entirely clear on how or why the TARDIS exploded.

This feels very much like the chief writer stretching out his run on the show to breaking point, and serving up mystery after mystery purely as a guarantee that they will extend his contract, until he can resolve that story arc and start up a new one at the end of the series. Seldom is there any real closure, the way there was even under Davies’ reign, because there is always a new puzzle to be debated and blogged. It’s a trick used in 24, which got away with it (just) on the grounds of being a show that was outlandishly silly. But Doctor Who is not supposed to be silly. It frequently is, and occasionally on purpose, but I seriously doubt that they sit down at tone meetings and say “Right: zany, off-the-wall looniness for that Dalek story, then”. It’s supposed to be a flagship of British family entertainment. It is a show that contains amusing moments and the occasional subtle fracturing of the fourth wall (mostly through a mockery of writer’s conventions that I will grant is done quite well), but it’s taken very seriously by everyone who produces it. Every episode is supposedly lovingly crafted to respect what has gone before and then build upon it for the future.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we expect the show to look too much to the past. Perhaps Davies’ first series in charge was overlooked. For better or worse, he rewrote the rule book and appeared to have little, if any consideration for what had happened before, inventing new monsters galore and cutting all ties with the Time Lords and Gallifrey with a view to building up a new fanbase from the ground up. At the time, we called this disrespectful. We called it dumbing down, and not mindful of the legacy of the programme and its perennial viewers. And then everything changed. Some eight years later, we have a show that is so steeped in its own sense of history and self-importance it has become its own Episode 1: tired, humourless, and far too pompous to actually achieve its aims. Doctor Who is struggling with the millstone of history that is affixed round its neck – racing back and forth through its own history, too concerned with continuity to think about story. It has become the Doctor himself, in that final sequence, submerged and suffocated and seemingly entrapped within his own timeline. We wanted more respect for tradition, and we got it, but the price tag was heavy – and if we may take anything from Saturday evening, and this series in general, it’s that you should be careful what you wish for.