School Reunion
A review of 'School Reunion', guest starring some speculation about Series Three's newly-announced writing staff. Not your deal? Don't click on the cut.
A couple of weeks back, some people on my flist were saying that a few years ago they would never have expected to type the sentence "Billie Piper's talents were wasted on this script". I feel that today I must type my own equivalent, namely "Toby Whithouse really hit this one out of the park."
Let me put my TV historian's hat on. Former actor Toby Whithouse's big writing break came on Attatchments, a show about a dot-com company that aired just as the first high-profile dot-com bankruptcies were coming through. It starred David Walliams, Amelia Bullmore and Indira Varma and I've already made it sound better than it actually was. It was borne from the BBC's desire to commission another This Life - a show which, both in quality and its influence on the medium, must stand tall as one of the worst television series ever made, but it did prove that there was a big audience out there for smug coke-snorting yuppies having sex. That audience did not turn up for Attatchments - in fact, it's said that amongst television critics, the joke was that you had to watch Attatchments now because it would never get a second series.
Somehow, it did, much like Whithouse's other shrill, irritating show, No Angels, a medical comedy-drama that I tuned in to the first episode of expecting another Cardiac Arrest. What I got was Carry On Bringing Out The Dead, a truly inexplicable mishmash of seaside-postcard-level 'humour' about horny nurses and medical malpractice which I'm proud to say I have never watched so much as another minute of. Russell T Davies seems to like it, though, judging by his continual poaching of cast members (Jo Joyner in Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, Derek Riddell in Tooth and Claw) and writing staff (Toby Whithouse, Tom MacRae) for Doctor Who. If he really wants to strip-mine a recent Channel 4 drama series for writing staff, one would have thought he'd plump for one of the good ones, like Shameless or Sex Traffic. But the ways of Russell are strange.
All this is a lengthy preamble to try and justify the fact that I adored 'School Reunion'. It wasn't without its flaws - there was an odd narrative ellipsis as the Doctor worked out that the Krillianites were allergic to their own oil (and how does that work, again?) based on... well, nothing. You could work it out on your own later, but surely the point of the scene was that the Doctor did the detective work there, not the viewer? And it's going to be a point of contention that the Krillianite's invasion plan was so simple - I myself found that the relative lack of narrative twists made it easier to focus on the characters, but some may feel short-changed. (It did include one nice twist regarding their true intentions towards the end, though; one which should remind older viewers of The Armageddon Factor.)
Otherwise, everything slotted together here. The main assett was the guest cast, including a performance by Anthony Stewart Head that managed to be both icy and hammy at the same time, therefore I assume it would stay fresh for longer than a merely hammy performance. Bravo! His contorted, screaming 'Krillianite face' towards the end managed to be genuinely unsettling. And then you've got the reunion of the title; I was a little worried about the initial 'catfight' angle, largely through dreading what the writer of No Angels would do with such a plot thread, but it was quickly smoothed away for some pitch-perfect bonding between Rose and Sarah. Sarah's initial realization that "Doctor John Smith" was that Doctor John Smith was particularly well-played, directed and paced. And K9! Lovely to see him back, even lovelier to see him save the day, although his voice was a bit weird.
It was the ensemble feel that really distinguished this episode, and I'm not just saying that because it meant there was less David Tennant - slowly but surely, week after week, he's clawing back some of the respect I lost for him after the disaster of 'New Earth'. Interesting, too, that Mr Finch called him out for his arrogance - perhaps this "lonely God" stuff is more than just an embarrassingly didactic misjudgement. I was a bit surprised when the Doctor mentioned the children's souls, but the moral of the tale was staunchly atheist - that we all get old and we all die, and the only comfort is not that there's some magic sky creature up there waiting to reward us, but that this is how nature should work.
I know that some new fans are still wary of Mickey and Jackie. Slowly, I think, they're becoming one of my favourite aspects of the new show. They remind me of the golden days of UNIT - the Doctor is free to go off somewhere else and leave them behind for a week if he wants to, but they'll still be there for him, grounding him, when he comes back. Except now he can't leave them behind, as Mickey's a fully paid-up companion now! I can't imagine it'll be long before he asks to be returned to London: Mickey isn't exactly a coward, he just has a strong self-preservation instict that can only survive so many alien death blasters being pointed in his face. It should be fun while it lasts, though, and his anxiety over being "the tin dog" was a clever way of setting it all up. A ticklingly irresponsible ram-raiding scene and the school nerd saving the day proved to be nice cherries on top of the best episode of this new season so far.
But enough of all this sickening praise! Let's get senselessly nasty! The new writing staff for Series Three/Twenty-Nine (even Steven Moffat isn't sure, apparently) has been announced, and it's nowhere near as bad as the staff for this series! Not that that's going to stop me!
Expressly Bad Things: No Mark Gatiss episode for 2007. I assume he'll be back some day, but it still chafes. And they do seem to have lost Robert Shearman's phone number; I do hope that they don't value him as lowly as they seem to. Remember, Russell, Shearman understands that moral issues are at the heart of every truly great Doctor Who story. They are not just something for the Doctor to bellow about when he's feeling superior.
Things That Really Could Go Either Way: Paul Cornell is writing a two-parter. Helen Raynor, the script editor, is writing an episode; I haven't seen any of her work, so I'll reserve judgement, but there is a large part of me that thinks back to 'Boom Town' and 'New Earth' and wonders what exactly it is that she does.
Expressly Good Things: Moffat is back! Stephen Fry is This Series' Very Special Writing Guest! Gareth Roberts is making his TV Who-writing debut proper and, as much of a raving lib as I am in my personal life, part of me wants him to smuggle an impassioned defence of Keynesian economics past Russell T Davies's staunchly right-on eyes, just for a bit of fun.
Oh, and best of all; not one member of the writing staff for No Angels.
A couple of weeks back, some people on my flist were saying that a few years ago they would never have expected to type the sentence "Billie Piper's talents were wasted on this script". I feel that today I must type my own equivalent, namely "Toby Whithouse really hit this one out of the park."
Let me put my TV historian's hat on. Former actor Toby Whithouse's big writing break came on Attatchments, a show about a dot-com company that aired just as the first high-profile dot-com bankruptcies were coming through. It starred David Walliams, Amelia Bullmore and Indira Varma and I've already made it sound better than it actually was. It was borne from the BBC's desire to commission another This Life - a show which, both in quality and its influence on the medium, must stand tall as one of the worst television series ever made, but it did prove that there was a big audience out there for smug coke-snorting yuppies having sex. That audience did not turn up for Attatchments - in fact, it's said that amongst television critics, the joke was that you had to watch Attatchments now because it would never get a second series.
Somehow, it did, much like Whithouse's other shrill, irritating show, No Angels, a medical comedy-drama that I tuned in to the first episode of expecting another Cardiac Arrest. What I got was Carry On Bringing Out The Dead, a truly inexplicable mishmash of seaside-postcard-level 'humour' about horny nurses and medical malpractice which I'm proud to say I have never watched so much as another minute of. Russell T Davies seems to like it, though, judging by his continual poaching of cast members (Jo Joyner in Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, Derek Riddell in Tooth and Claw) and writing staff (Toby Whithouse, Tom MacRae) for Doctor Who. If he really wants to strip-mine a recent Channel 4 drama series for writing staff, one would have thought he'd plump for one of the good ones, like Shameless or Sex Traffic. But the ways of Russell are strange.
All this is a lengthy preamble to try and justify the fact that I adored 'School Reunion'. It wasn't without its flaws - there was an odd narrative ellipsis as the Doctor worked out that the Krillianites were allergic to their own oil (and how does that work, again?) based on... well, nothing. You could work it out on your own later, but surely the point of the scene was that the Doctor did the detective work there, not the viewer? And it's going to be a point of contention that the Krillianite's invasion plan was so simple - I myself found that the relative lack of narrative twists made it easier to focus on the characters, but some may feel short-changed. (It did include one nice twist regarding their true intentions towards the end, though; one which should remind older viewers of The Armageddon Factor.)
Otherwise, everything slotted together here. The main assett was the guest cast, including a performance by Anthony Stewart Head that managed to be both icy and hammy at the same time, therefore I assume it would stay fresh for longer than a merely hammy performance. Bravo! His contorted, screaming 'Krillianite face' towards the end managed to be genuinely unsettling. And then you've got the reunion of the title; I was a little worried about the initial 'catfight' angle, largely through dreading what the writer of No Angels would do with such a plot thread, but it was quickly smoothed away for some pitch-perfect bonding between Rose and Sarah. Sarah's initial realization that "Doctor John Smith" was that Doctor John Smith was particularly well-played, directed and paced. And K9! Lovely to see him back, even lovelier to see him save the day, although his voice was a bit weird.
It was the ensemble feel that really distinguished this episode, and I'm not just saying that because it meant there was less David Tennant - slowly but surely, week after week, he's clawing back some of the respect I lost for him after the disaster of 'New Earth'. Interesting, too, that Mr Finch called him out for his arrogance - perhaps this "lonely God" stuff is more than just an embarrassingly didactic misjudgement. I was a bit surprised when the Doctor mentioned the children's souls, but the moral of the tale was staunchly atheist - that we all get old and we all die, and the only comfort is not that there's some magic sky creature up there waiting to reward us, but that this is how nature should work.
I know that some new fans are still wary of Mickey and Jackie. Slowly, I think, they're becoming one of my favourite aspects of the new show. They remind me of the golden days of UNIT - the Doctor is free to go off somewhere else and leave them behind for a week if he wants to, but they'll still be there for him, grounding him, when he comes back. Except now he can't leave them behind, as Mickey's a fully paid-up companion now! I can't imagine it'll be long before he asks to be returned to London: Mickey isn't exactly a coward, he just has a strong self-preservation instict that can only survive so many alien death blasters being pointed in his face. It should be fun while it lasts, though, and his anxiety over being "the tin dog" was a clever way of setting it all up. A ticklingly irresponsible ram-raiding scene and the school nerd saving the day proved to be nice cherries on top of the best episode of this new season so far.
But enough of all this sickening praise! Let's get senselessly nasty! The new writing staff for Series Three/Twenty-Nine (even Steven Moffat isn't sure, apparently) has been announced, and it's nowhere near as bad as the staff for this series! Not that that's going to stop me!
Expressly Bad Things: No Mark Gatiss episode for 2007. I assume he'll be back some day, but it still chafes. And they do seem to have lost Robert Shearman's phone number; I do hope that they don't value him as lowly as they seem to. Remember, Russell, Shearman understands that moral issues are at the heart of every truly great Doctor Who story. They are not just something for the Doctor to bellow about when he's feeling superior.
Things That Really Could Go Either Way: Paul Cornell is writing a two-parter. Helen Raynor, the script editor, is writing an episode; I haven't seen any of her work, so I'll reserve judgement, but there is a large part of me that thinks back to 'Boom Town' and 'New Earth' and wonders what exactly it is that she does.
Expressly Good Things: Moffat is back! Stephen Fry is This Series' Very Special Writing Guest! Gareth Roberts is making his TV Who-writing debut proper and, as much of a raving lib as I am in my personal life, part of me wants him to smuggle an impassioned defence of Keynesian economics past Russell T Davies's staunchly right-on eyes, just for a bit of fun.
Oh, and best of all; not one member of the writing staff for No Angels.