The Girl in the Fireplace
No time to reply to everyone's comments - I'm going off to see Romance & Cigarettes in about half an hour - so here's a speedy review of last night's Doctor Who episode. Contains spoilers for episode four and the episode five trailer.
What was the moment when the original series of Doctor Who decisively stopped being a mass-appeal series and became a cult show - an excellent one, admittedly, and still capable of turning out pearls like The Two Doctors and The Curse of Fenric, but a show nonetheless that was having trouble justifying its budget? I think it was Attack of the Cybermen, the Colin Baker adventure where over nine million children turned on to watch the funny man and his pretty friend fight evil robots, and instead got a slow-moving adventure designed solely to reconcile plot points in twenty-year-old pieces of archive television. Watching it today, you can almost hear the nation thinking "I wonder what's on ITV?"
So it's a bit disquieting to note that, as it gets into its second series, the new Who is already showing signs of auto-cannibalism. David Tennant's Doctor is only five episodes old, but already he's met Harriet Jones PM and the Face of Boe again, fought Lady Cassandra one last time and - in last night's 'The Girl in the Fireplace' - gone through an entire adventure whose main function seemed to be to remind the viewer how much more enjoyable it would be if they turned the TV off and went to watch 'The Empty Child' and 'The Doctor Dances' again.
Well, maybe that wasn't hwo it was planned out, but it sure as hell was how it played out. Steven Moffat's comeback after his justly lauded Nine/Rose/Jack two-parter was littered with cute references to seemingly every single line of those previous episodes, which wouldn't have bothered so much if the new ideas he'd come up with weren't so lacklustre.
One of the many, many joys of the World War II episodes was the revelation that the writer of Press Gang, Chalk and Coupling knew how to 'do' scary, and this episode kicks off with probably the single most frightening scene the new series has put before us yet, as a young French girl finds that there really are monsters under the bed. Unfortunately, what happened immediately before it highlights one of the main limitations of the forty-five minute episode format; namely, that the Doctor has to know about everything the first time he sees it.
When Mark Gatiss was writing 'The Unquiet Dead', he's said he was startled by a note that came back to him after his first draft, saying that for pacing purposes the Doctor had to work out that the Gelth were made of gas the first time he saw them. That didn't bother me for two reasons; firstly that Gatiss, like Davies, is better at fitting things into forty-five minutes than Moffat apparently is, and secondly because there's not much mystery to be spun from the Doctor guessing which of the three states of matter his enemy belongs to ("And the Daleks are... liquid! No? Blast, this one will run and run!"). In 'The Girl in the Fireplace', the Doctor comes across a whole lot of fascinating and mysterious stuff straight off the bat, and knows exactly what every single bit of it is. It's a very unatmospheric way of solving a mystery, and one suspects that Moffat wrote the (admittedly funny) "cosmic hyperlink" joke as a way of atoning for it.
Even so - and I know that this review is starting to feel like a domino rally - it wouldn't have mattered so much had the space freed up by all this instant deduction been filled up with something interesting or memorable. But it wasn't. Murray Gold's soupy score worked overtime to persuade us that the romance between Madame de Pompadour and the Doctor was something intense and lasting, but all the emotional manipulation wasn't justified by what's on screen. Maybe it's a question of perspective; to Madame de Pompadour, it's understandable that the Doctor would be a romantic and incredible figure, but it's hard to see why the Doctor was so impressed by her, aside from her remarkably heaving bosom. Coupled with this was the almost magically lousy performance of Special Guest Star Sophia Myles, who, in the already embarrassing 'Vulcan Mind Meld' sequence, managed to get so many of her lines so perfectly wrong it sounded like Julianne Moore's porn acting in Boogie Nights. Except that was meant to be bad, and this wasn't.
The whole episode seemed to have been approached from the wrong angles; the final twist had a certain pathos to it, but it backfired because we couldn't feel anything for the show's monsters other than an amused contempt, being as they were so utterly easy to immobilize and kill. And why were they clockwork? Just because it looked cool? I'll grant the production team, they did look extremely cool, but that's about it. Steampunk needs more thought behind it than just "Hey, cool!" - ironically, the next (straight sci-fi) episode looks like a better example of the genre than this.
So yes, pretty much nothing bar some good jokes worked in 'The Girl in the Fireplace'. What's really worrying about it is the continuing light it shines on the character of the Tenth Doctor. I'm hesitant about going overboard with my criticism of him after Mr. Finch in 'School Reunion' called him out on his God complex - who knows, maybe 'Rise of the Cybermen' will reveal that this episode was conceptually crap? (Also, as a side-note, is it deliberate foreshadowing that the episode before the Cyberman story also deals with robots from the future cannibalizing humans for spare parts? If not, what a terrible piece of scheduling)
But still, what we've got here is a Doctor who'll happily waste time when two of his friends are in mortal danger gooning about and pretending to be drunk, but will sacrifice his freedom of time travel for someone who he doesn't really know and just wants to get his leg over. That's totally wrong, and only shows up how the Tenth Doctor is young, sexy and cool in the absence of any other likeable characteristics. Hey, Five, Eight and Nine were young, sexy and cool too, but even Paul McGann, in his truncated, snog-filled tenure on TV, managed to get more likeable characteristics in here than Tennant has managed.
Oh, and one last thing. The horse. Yes, once again, it's possible to work it out afterwards (a horse must have charged through a plate-glass window and emerged completely unharmed - I mean, it's so obvious when you think about it), but one of the rules of the mystery genre (and Doctor Who is on some level a mystery show) is that the characters should work this out, rather than relying on the audience to cover up the plot holes on their own.
Miss Marple: ...which conclusively proves without any shadow of a doubt that George Bernard Shaw was the killer!
Sceptical Policeman: Well, it's a very good theory, Miss Marple, but how do you explain the gunpowder on the windowsill?
Miss Marple: Och, I can't be fucked with that bit. Only the fanboys will notice anyway.
Next week's looks amazing, though. It's by another No Angels writer, but writing pedigree is increasingly useless as a way of judging this series. As 'The Girl in the Fireplace' proved.
What was the moment when the original series of Doctor Who decisively stopped being a mass-appeal series and became a cult show - an excellent one, admittedly, and still capable of turning out pearls like The Two Doctors and The Curse of Fenric, but a show nonetheless that was having trouble justifying its budget? I think it was Attack of the Cybermen, the Colin Baker adventure where over nine million children turned on to watch the funny man and his pretty friend fight evil robots, and instead got a slow-moving adventure designed solely to reconcile plot points in twenty-year-old pieces of archive television. Watching it today, you can almost hear the nation thinking "I wonder what's on ITV?"
So it's a bit disquieting to note that, as it gets into its second series, the new Who is already showing signs of auto-cannibalism. David Tennant's Doctor is only five episodes old, but already he's met Harriet Jones PM and the Face of Boe again, fought Lady Cassandra one last time and - in last night's 'The Girl in the Fireplace' - gone through an entire adventure whose main function seemed to be to remind the viewer how much more enjoyable it would be if they turned the TV off and went to watch 'The Empty Child' and 'The Doctor Dances' again.
Well, maybe that wasn't hwo it was planned out, but it sure as hell was how it played out. Steven Moffat's comeback after his justly lauded Nine/Rose/Jack two-parter was littered with cute references to seemingly every single line of those previous episodes, which wouldn't have bothered so much if the new ideas he'd come up with weren't so lacklustre.
One of the many, many joys of the World War II episodes was the revelation that the writer of Press Gang, Chalk and Coupling knew how to 'do' scary, and this episode kicks off with probably the single most frightening scene the new series has put before us yet, as a young French girl finds that there really are monsters under the bed. Unfortunately, what happened immediately before it highlights one of the main limitations of the forty-five minute episode format; namely, that the Doctor has to know about everything the first time he sees it.
When Mark Gatiss was writing 'The Unquiet Dead', he's said he was startled by a note that came back to him after his first draft, saying that for pacing purposes the Doctor had to work out that the Gelth were made of gas the first time he saw them. That didn't bother me for two reasons; firstly that Gatiss, like Davies, is better at fitting things into forty-five minutes than Moffat apparently is, and secondly because there's not much mystery to be spun from the Doctor guessing which of the three states of matter his enemy belongs to ("And the Daleks are... liquid! No? Blast, this one will run and run!"). In 'The Girl in the Fireplace', the Doctor comes across a whole lot of fascinating and mysterious stuff straight off the bat, and knows exactly what every single bit of it is. It's a very unatmospheric way of solving a mystery, and one suspects that Moffat wrote the (admittedly funny) "cosmic hyperlink" joke as a way of atoning for it.
Even so - and I know that this review is starting to feel like a domino rally - it wouldn't have mattered so much had the space freed up by all this instant deduction been filled up with something interesting or memorable. But it wasn't. Murray Gold's soupy score worked overtime to persuade us that the romance between Madame de Pompadour and the Doctor was something intense and lasting, but all the emotional manipulation wasn't justified by what's on screen. Maybe it's a question of perspective; to Madame de Pompadour, it's understandable that the Doctor would be a romantic and incredible figure, but it's hard to see why the Doctor was so impressed by her, aside from her remarkably heaving bosom. Coupled with this was the almost magically lousy performance of Special Guest Star Sophia Myles, who, in the already embarrassing 'Vulcan Mind Meld' sequence, managed to get so many of her lines so perfectly wrong it sounded like Julianne Moore's porn acting in Boogie Nights. Except that was meant to be bad, and this wasn't.
The whole episode seemed to have been approached from the wrong angles; the final twist had a certain pathos to it, but it backfired because we couldn't feel anything for the show's monsters other than an amused contempt, being as they were so utterly easy to immobilize and kill. And why were they clockwork? Just because it looked cool? I'll grant the production team, they did look extremely cool, but that's about it. Steampunk needs more thought behind it than just "Hey, cool!" - ironically, the next (straight sci-fi) episode looks like a better example of the genre than this.
So yes, pretty much nothing bar some good jokes worked in 'The Girl in the Fireplace'. What's really worrying about it is the continuing light it shines on the character of the Tenth Doctor. I'm hesitant about going overboard with my criticism of him after Mr. Finch in 'School Reunion' called him out on his God complex - who knows, maybe 'Rise of the Cybermen' will reveal that this episode was conceptually crap? (Also, as a side-note, is it deliberate foreshadowing that the episode before the Cyberman story also deals with robots from the future cannibalizing humans for spare parts? If not, what a terrible piece of scheduling)
But still, what we've got here is a Doctor who'll happily waste time when two of his friends are in mortal danger gooning about and pretending to be drunk, but will sacrifice his freedom of time travel for someone who he doesn't really know and just wants to get his leg over. That's totally wrong, and only shows up how the Tenth Doctor is young, sexy and cool in the absence of any other likeable characteristics. Hey, Five, Eight and Nine were young, sexy and cool too, but even Paul McGann, in his truncated, snog-filled tenure on TV, managed to get more likeable characteristics in here than Tennant has managed.
Oh, and one last thing. The horse. Yes, once again, it's possible to work it out afterwards (a horse must have charged through a plate-glass window and emerged completely unharmed - I mean, it's so obvious when you think about it), but one of the rules of the mystery genre (and Doctor Who is on some level a mystery show) is that the characters should work this out, rather than relying on the audience to cover up the plot holes on their own.
Miss Marple: ...which conclusively proves without any shadow of a doubt that George Bernard Shaw was the killer!
Sceptical Policeman: Well, it's a very good theory, Miss Marple, but how do you explain the gunpowder on the windowsill?
Miss Marple: Och, I can't be fucked with that bit. Only the fanboys will notice anyway.
Next week's looks amazing, though. It's by another No Angels writer, but writing pedigree is increasingly useless as a way of judging this series. As 'The Girl in the Fireplace' proved.