The Idiot's Lantern
Spoilers for tonight's episode of Doctor Who, the trailer for next week's episode of Doctor Who, and - weirdly - tonight's episode of Casualty.
Dutch, Dutch, Dutch, Dutch, Dutchy Dutch Dutch Dutch. Euros Lyn really likes his Dutched angles, doesn't he? There are areas of Holland that are less Dutch than this episode, which appeared in parts to be an experimental attempt to replicate the feeling of being drunk. It worked for 'Tooth and Claw', with its pulpy comic-book ambience, and it worked in the more film noiry, shadowy Government (well, police) agents in trenchcoats bits this week, but in scenes set in a 1950s working-class household it looked... well, weird.
Thankfully, Mark Gatiss's script was English enough to counteract the Dutchness elsewhere, never more so than in Maureen Lipman's spellbinding performance as the Wire. She really was amazing in that role; I'm tempted to say the best new villain this revival has given us so far. As with The League of Gentlemen, Gatiss fully understands that the really scary things for a horror writer to play with is something so mundane that we've stopped really thinking about it - the added frisson of childhood fears brought by lines like "Good night, children. Everywhere" didn't hurt either. It was a triumph of writing and performance.
So was the rest of the episode, actually. Writing-wise, it was nice to see an episode that didn't hit the ground in a flurry of effects and exposition; it moved forward at a gentle and measured pace, earning its big action finale. Gatiss also provided the single most disturbing image in who history, ever; the faceless people beginning to move freaked me out, so God knows what it's just done to the nation's children.
Acting-wise, well... I know that a lot of critics thought Jamie Foreman's Bill Sikes in Polanski's Oliver Twist was over-the-top, and I doubt his performance here did much to assuage their concerns. I generally didn't mind it - there really are people like that character out there, little small-time dictators who never got anywhere in life so they take it out on their family instead, and they often do act like that. What a lovely touch, too, to have him offered the chance of redemption at the end - reminiscent in a lot of ways of 'The Doctor Dances'. The Doctor faces death every day, but he's always in his element at a party. The real discovery was the actor playing the family's son (didn't catch his name) - he was perfect, and I hope he does more stuff in the future.
Given such a nicely worked-out script to work from, David Tennant gave his second-best performance as the Doctor yet (after 'Rise of the Cybermen'), wisely choosing to play the flirty, steely Doctor of 'The Christmas Invasion' or 'Tooth and Claw', rather than the shouty, irritating Doctor of 'The Age of Steel' and 'New Earth'. When he bothers, he has a wonderful rapport with Billie Piper, and after their lovely, convincing interplay at the start of the episode his anger over Rose's 'wiping' by the Wire felt merited and genuine, rather than attention-seeking and overplayed like in 'New Earth'. He still has a tendency to stand around shouting about how tough he is rather than demonstrating it, though. Poor soul's evidently compensating for not having Eccleston's Stare of Doom.
'The Idiot's Lantern' wasn't quite a masterpiece - it wasn't as good as 'The Unquiet Dead', for example - and it wasn't the best episode of the season so far (I'd still nominate 'School Reunion' for that award). But it was a very good episode, that missed out on many of the pitfalls that this series has exhibited so far. It wasn't overstuffed with more plot than forty-five minutes can handle, it had a good performance from its lead actor and it wasn't full of cutesy in-references to Eccleston-starring episodes.
(About that last point - am I the only person who's getting a weird sense of deja vu about how this series is panning out? I can almost picture Russell sitting down at the first script meeting and saying "Right, lads. Episode One, we meet some old monsters. Episode Four, that's a big emotional one. Episode Seven, perils of broadcasting. Episode Six is where we meet some old monsters then kill them with emotion." I can't wait to see what they have planned for the third series. Weepy Sontarans? Heartbroken Yetis? A Gastropod whose father just didn't love him enough?)
This is important, as we're now over halfway through the new series and I have to say, I'm just not enjoying it as much as I did last year. I did wonder whether this was simple nostalgia, or whether I was just more forgiving about last year's run because I was still giddy at having the show back, but I've been rewatching last year's episodes and it's not that at all. They have their problems here and there, don't get me wrong, but they are overall better.
Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly that they had a better actor in the title role last year. I know the Tennant criticisms in this LJ are getting a bit repetitious, but... well, I'll stop repeating them once he learns to express emotions with something other than a clenched jaw and bulging eyes. The man appears to be constantly trying to pass a kidney stone, which is certainly an original interpretation of the character, but not necessarily a good one.
That's a big problem, but the bigger problem is that the production team appear to be getting drunk on their own success. Well, OK, not on the design, effects or direction side of things - this season consistently looks better than last year's - but certainly on the writing and creative direction side. There's an interview with Matthew Graham, whose 'Fear Her' episode airs in four weeks time, in the new Doctor Who Magazine where he talks about the positive influence Russell T Davies and Helen Raynor had on him. He makes an interesting allegation regarding Dennis Potter, to the effect that after The Singing Detective he started to believe his own hype and thought that every word he wrote was genius. He praises Davies and Raynor for curbing that instinct in writers working for this series.
Now, I don't think that every word Dennis Potter wrote was genius - I wasn't taken with Son of Man, for example - but really! Russell T Davies recently won the Dennis Potter Award for Excellence in Screenwriting at the BAFTAS, and a comparison is instructive; I shan't judge his work on Doctor Who by Potter's standards because it's meant to be a fun family show, and his best episodes capture what that should feel like. But nowhere in his 'adult' shows like Queer As Folk or Mine All Mine is there anything approaching the maturity and insight of even a lesser Potter work like Karaoke. Stuff like Blackeyes or Cold Lazarus, which at the time were felt to be unbearably smug and sneery, reveal themselves to be the excellent explorations of personal morality and the body politic that they always really were.
OK, OK, maybe it's a soft target pitting a comparatively green writer against one of television's all-time greats. Still, I'd be interested to know what guidance Graham feels he was given by the writing team. There didn't seem to be anyone around for 'The Girl in the Fireplace', for example, who would tell Steven Moffat to stop putting so many self-congratulatory references to his previous episodes in, or to have the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour actually demonstrate their deep connection with each other, rather than stand around saying that it existed over and over again. The recycling of old ideas and lines from the last series, coupled with the weaknesses of scripts like 'The Girl in the Fireplace', 'New Earth' and even 'The Age of Steel' makes me think that the staff aren't checking themselves and questioning themselves as much as they did last year.
To which they might respond; yeah, well, you can't even get a script produced. Which is true. And we've got nine million viewers a week - do you know what a victory that is? Well, yes, it's a hell of a victory in these splintered, multi-channel times to have something that so many people watch, let alone a 'genre' show. If you asked me "Is this show still better than more or less everything else on TV?" I'd say probably, yes. I mean, the episode of Casualty that followed it wrote a main character out by having him go to Sierra Leone to teach kids football! It made me profoundly grateful that my show writes characters out for sensible reasons, like they want to continue the work of their alternate selves in a robot-ruled London, or they got caught trying to smuggle information from the future using a little door in their head.
And yes, it still does feel like my show. We are still so far away from the "Fuck This For A Game Of Soldiers Event Horizon", that awful sixth season Buffy kind of moment when a show you've loved stops being worth the effort you're putting into watching it.
But it could be better. And I'm not just singing the old-fan hymn of "It's Not As Good As Pyramids of Mars" here, because truthfully? Not much of the old show was either. But it puzzles me as to why the production team who made 'Dalek' and 'The Unquiet Dead' can't pull something as good out of the hat this year. Maybe it's yet to come...
...though not, I fear, in 'The Satan Pit', which is written by Matt Jones. On the plus side, it has a good central concept and amazing-looking monsters, but on the down side, well, Matt Jones. And it has Will Thorpe in it, second only to Dominic Monaghan as the most gormless-looking actor in the world. A fiver says he turns out to be Jatt Mones.
Dutch, Dutch, Dutch, Dutch, Dutchy Dutch Dutch Dutch. Euros Lyn really likes his Dutched angles, doesn't he? There are areas of Holland that are less Dutch than this episode, which appeared in parts to be an experimental attempt to replicate the feeling of being drunk. It worked for 'Tooth and Claw', with its pulpy comic-book ambience, and it worked in the more film noiry, shadowy Government (well, police) agents in trenchcoats bits this week, but in scenes set in a 1950s working-class household it looked... well, weird.
Thankfully, Mark Gatiss's script was English enough to counteract the Dutchness elsewhere, never more so than in Maureen Lipman's spellbinding performance as the Wire. She really was amazing in that role; I'm tempted to say the best new villain this revival has given us so far. As with The League of Gentlemen, Gatiss fully understands that the really scary things for a horror writer to play with is something so mundane that we've stopped really thinking about it - the added frisson of childhood fears brought by lines like "Good night, children. Everywhere" didn't hurt either. It was a triumph of writing and performance.
So was the rest of the episode, actually. Writing-wise, it was nice to see an episode that didn't hit the ground in a flurry of effects and exposition; it moved forward at a gentle and measured pace, earning its big action finale. Gatiss also provided the single most disturbing image in who history, ever; the faceless people beginning to move freaked me out, so God knows what it's just done to the nation's children.
Acting-wise, well... I know that a lot of critics thought Jamie Foreman's Bill Sikes in Polanski's Oliver Twist was over-the-top, and I doubt his performance here did much to assuage their concerns. I generally didn't mind it - there really are people like that character out there, little small-time dictators who never got anywhere in life so they take it out on their family instead, and they often do act like that. What a lovely touch, too, to have him offered the chance of redemption at the end - reminiscent in a lot of ways of 'The Doctor Dances'. The Doctor faces death every day, but he's always in his element at a party. The real discovery was the actor playing the family's son (didn't catch his name) - he was perfect, and I hope he does more stuff in the future.
Given such a nicely worked-out script to work from, David Tennant gave his second-best performance as the Doctor yet (after 'Rise of the Cybermen'), wisely choosing to play the flirty, steely Doctor of 'The Christmas Invasion' or 'Tooth and Claw', rather than the shouty, irritating Doctor of 'The Age of Steel' and 'New Earth'. When he bothers, he has a wonderful rapport with Billie Piper, and after their lovely, convincing interplay at the start of the episode his anger over Rose's 'wiping' by the Wire felt merited and genuine, rather than attention-seeking and overplayed like in 'New Earth'. He still has a tendency to stand around shouting about how tough he is rather than demonstrating it, though. Poor soul's evidently compensating for not having Eccleston's Stare of Doom.
'The Idiot's Lantern' wasn't quite a masterpiece - it wasn't as good as 'The Unquiet Dead', for example - and it wasn't the best episode of the season so far (I'd still nominate 'School Reunion' for that award). But it was a very good episode, that missed out on many of the pitfalls that this series has exhibited so far. It wasn't overstuffed with more plot than forty-five minutes can handle, it had a good performance from its lead actor and it wasn't full of cutesy in-references to Eccleston-starring episodes.
(About that last point - am I the only person who's getting a weird sense of deja vu about how this series is panning out? I can almost picture Russell sitting down at the first script meeting and saying "Right, lads. Episode One, we meet some old monsters. Episode Four, that's a big emotional one. Episode Seven, perils of broadcasting. Episode Six is where we meet some old monsters then kill them with emotion." I can't wait to see what they have planned for the third series. Weepy Sontarans? Heartbroken Yetis? A Gastropod whose father just didn't love him enough?)
This is important, as we're now over halfway through the new series and I have to say, I'm just not enjoying it as much as I did last year. I did wonder whether this was simple nostalgia, or whether I was just more forgiving about last year's run because I was still giddy at having the show back, but I've been rewatching last year's episodes and it's not that at all. They have their problems here and there, don't get me wrong, but they are overall better.
Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly that they had a better actor in the title role last year. I know the Tennant criticisms in this LJ are getting a bit repetitious, but... well, I'll stop repeating them once he learns to express emotions with something other than a clenched jaw and bulging eyes. The man appears to be constantly trying to pass a kidney stone, which is certainly an original interpretation of the character, but not necessarily a good one.
That's a big problem, but the bigger problem is that the production team appear to be getting drunk on their own success. Well, OK, not on the design, effects or direction side of things - this season consistently looks better than last year's - but certainly on the writing and creative direction side. There's an interview with Matthew Graham, whose 'Fear Her' episode airs in four weeks time, in the new Doctor Who Magazine where he talks about the positive influence Russell T Davies and Helen Raynor had on him. He makes an interesting allegation regarding Dennis Potter, to the effect that after The Singing Detective he started to believe his own hype and thought that every word he wrote was genius. He praises Davies and Raynor for curbing that instinct in writers working for this series.
Now, I don't think that every word Dennis Potter wrote was genius - I wasn't taken with Son of Man, for example - but really! Russell T Davies recently won the Dennis Potter Award for Excellence in Screenwriting at the BAFTAS, and a comparison is instructive; I shan't judge his work on Doctor Who by Potter's standards because it's meant to be a fun family show, and his best episodes capture what that should feel like. But nowhere in his 'adult' shows like Queer As Folk or Mine All Mine is there anything approaching the maturity and insight of even a lesser Potter work like Karaoke. Stuff like Blackeyes or Cold Lazarus, which at the time were felt to be unbearably smug and sneery, reveal themselves to be the excellent explorations of personal morality and the body politic that they always really were.
OK, OK, maybe it's a soft target pitting a comparatively green writer against one of television's all-time greats. Still, I'd be interested to know what guidance Graham feels he was given by the writing team. There didn't seem to be anyone around for 'The Girl in the Fireplace', for example, who would tell Steven Moffat to stop putting so many self-congratulatory references to his previous episodes in, or to have the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour actually demonstrate their deep connection with each other, rather than stand around saying that it existed over and over again. The recycling of old ideas and lines from the last series, coupled with the weaknesses of scripts like 'The Girl in the Fireplace', 'New Earth' and even 'The Age of Steel' makes me think that the staff aren't checking themselves and questioning themselves as much as they did last year.
To which they might respond; yeah, well, you can't even get a script produced. Which is true. And we've got nine million viewers a week - do you know what a victory that is? Well, yes, it's a hell of a victory in these splintered, multi-channel times to have something that so many people watch, let alone a 'genre' show. If you asked me "Is this show still better than more or less everything else on TV?" I'd say probably, yes. I mean, the episode of Casualty that followed it wrote a main character out by having him go to Sierra Leone to teach kids football! It made me profoundly grateful that my show writes characters out for sensible reasons, like they want to continue the work of their alternate selves in a robot-ruled London, or they got caught trying to smuggle information from the future using a little door in their head.
And yes, it still does feel like my show. We are still so far away from the "Fuck This For A Game Of Soldiers Event Horizon", that awful sixth season Buffy kind of moment when a show you've loved stops being worth the effort you're putting into watching it.
But it could be better. And I'm not just singing the old-fan hymn of "It's Not As Good As Pyramids of Mars" here, because truthfully? Not much of the old show was either. But it puzzles me as to why the production team who made 'Dalek' and 'The Unquiet Dead' can't pull something as good out of the hat this year. Maybe it's yet to come...
...though not, I fear, in 'The Satan Pit', which is written by Matt Jones. On the plus side, it has a good central concept and amazing-looking monsters, but on the down side, well, Matt Jones. And it has Will Thorpe in it, second only to Dominic Monaghan as the most gormless-looking actor in the world. A fiver says he turns out to be Jatt Mones.