The Runaway Bride
'The Runaway Bride' is one of the first ideas Russell T Davies ever had for Doctor Who, according to the man himself. Which raises the question; what was that idea, exactly? I've just watched it, and I'm still none the wiser.
Perhaps it was a mystery? When discussing the teaser ending of 'Doomsday' with Tim, Tim opined that the appearance of the Bride was a wonderful conceit, as it meant we got to see the Doctor acting genuinely bewildered for the first time in far too long. The mystery of a human appearing in the apparently impregnable TARDIS is, it must be said, a good one. Unfortunately, it's sorted out about fifteen minutes in when the Doctor looks at a home movie and makes a pseudoscientific diagnosis. So it's a mystery where you're never more than fifteen minutes away from the solution, and when it comes, it won't be deduced through hard work and logic, it'll be deduced because Davies can't bear to have the omnipotent, all-powerful Doctor not know something.
This has happened a lot of times in the series, old and new, of course. But it seems that every time an interesting idea or set-piece crops up in 'The Runaway Bride', Davies or director Euros Lyn contrive to throw it away. Lyn is particularly poor on establishing a sense of space - even as it was flooded, I had no idea what size the Arachnos's lair was, or what was in it. It was just a collection of set walls, expanded by CGI, which may or may not be linked. And the Doctor's Heath Robinson contraption to work the TARDIS console while the door was open was wasted by being established in modish incomprehensible shaky-cam shots; the audience only got a sense of what it was when it was in use. (Imagine what Nick Park might have made of such an idea)
Moreover, there's a lack of confidence in the set-up that seems symptomatic of a lot of modern TV writing. No sooner have we been given the hook of the mystery than we're plunged into an utterly gratuitous car chase that advances the plot not one whit. It's there because someone, somewhere, thought that taking a bit of time to build up atmosphere and raise some good questions would bore the viewers. We are, after all, halfwits whose attention wanders every time there isn't a complex CGI effect on screen. What we really want is more robot Santas, apparently.
So 'The Runaway Bride' isn't a mystery. Perhaps it's horror? The notion of a giant blood-red spider from billions of years before humanity returning to eat us all is pretty scary, frankly - it would take a real effort to render that unscary. Well, I'm pleased to say that real effort has clearly been put in. I'm not asking for graphic details of anthropophagy in the Christmas supper-time slot, but Sarah Parish's monster queen is a woefully unchilling specimen, spending almost all of her screentime striking 'Vogue'-esque poses, giving the kind of lengthy villainous monologues that some of us thought The Incredibles had killed off forever, and making noises suggesting she has a serious phlegm problem. Directorially, again, it comes up short; are primary colours that scary? Would a bit of atmospheric shadow have hurt?
Perhaps it's science fiction? I've established before that I'd never want Doctor Who to become Asimov-style hard sci-fi, but at the same time it has to take its sci-fi concepts seriously, even if they are only a varnish for the horror and adventure ideas underneath. Unfortunately, the science fiction in 'The Runaway Bride' isn't just dismissive, it's actively contemptuous of the genre it's meant to be a part of. Russell getting the creation of the Earth wrong by several hundred trillion years is one symptom, but the thinly-imagined jargon used to explain the Doctor's weather device, among others, is a thumb in the audience's eye. "The Dark Times"? "Arachnos"? These things may as well come with a note saying "GOOD FOR FIRST DRAFT - MIGHT WANT TO THINK OF SOMETHING BETTER FOR THE SECOND PASS".
Now, it's worth pointing out here that there are plenty of Doctor Who episodes that aren't horror, aren't science fiction and aren't really mysteries, but which work perfectly well, stretching from 100,000 BC to 'Love & Monsters'. Certainly, in the revived show, what makes such episodes work is the emphasis on character. 'The Runaway Bride' was always going to have a hard time of it due to most of the show's regular cast having left in the preceding episode, and the Doctor is given a little space to grieve over the loss of the Tylers in scenes so awkwardly shoehorned-in that Murray Gold's music has to carry out the most outrageous stops and starts to accomodate them. Seriously, all they're missing is a comedy needle-dragging sound effect.
We're not told anything about the Doctor's character that we haven't heard about a thousand times before, but that's OK - I wouldn't want every episode to strain to reinvent the wheel, and part of the appeal of the Doctor's character is his moral constancy. The main event of the episode is, undoubtedly, the Bride herself, Donna.
This is an unqualified disaster.
I can see what Russell is aiming for with Donna - he wants to produce the Doctor Who equivalent of a classic screwball bickering picture like Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. That's a good idea - arguably it's never been done in Doctor Who before, and done right it could be a refreshing and exciting new flavour for the show. But it's done so badly here. Donna doesn't argue with the Doctor so much as bellow at him, never once stumbling on a witty one-liner or a sharp observation, and Catherine Tate is far too uncharismatic a performer to make the most of this material. Her Donna appears to be modelled on Patsy Palmer's stint in Eastenders, and succeeds in being so annoying you actually don't understand why the Doctor is trying to save her life. When the Doctor turns around at the end and says she could come with him, it feels like some sort of joke.
The human drama in this episode is so uninvolving and irritating that I resorted to picking holes in the narrative. How did Lance end up in cahoots with the Arachnos Queen, for example? The actor playing Lance didn't have much chemistry with Catherine Tate, but they still made a more plausible couple than an accountant and a giant red spider from Mars (OK, not from Mars, but I couldn't resist it). What were Torchwood doing under the Thames barrier? Do any of the writers know what Torchwood is, or what they do? I'm prepared to accept that these things were explained, but if they were, it was probably in a three-second burst of "they used a technoratic hyperchloric space meringue!" faux techno-babble in the middle of an action scene, so I didn't notice.
Were we told how the Queen had survived the destruction of her people, for example? I wondered about the Time Lords' destruction of the Arachnos race, too, something the Doctor seemed to be profoundly uninterested in. You know, once, if this show made mention of the Time Lords wiping out an entire race, it would be held up as a bad thing. But then, the Human Empire was once held up as being a bad thing, and the revival series has repeatedly shown the Doctor gushing over it with scarcely a thought for the races trampled underfoot by glorious hyoo-maniteeeee.
None of these issues were raised during the episode, of course, but I had to have something to think about while this predictable, poorly imagined, un-Christmassy mess played itself out. At the end of the episode, Donna says the Doctor needs someone to tell him to stop, and I'd have to restate my position that Russell needs someone to fulfil the same function in the BBC Wales offices. What are we promised next series, for example? More cat people? More Face of Boe? Joy.
Perhaps it was a mystery? When discussing the teaser ending of 'Doomsday' with Tim, Tim opined that the appearance of the Bride was a wonderful conceit, as it meant we got to see the Doctor acting genuinely bewildered for the first time in far too long. The mystery of a human appearing in the apparently impregnable TARDIS is, it must be said, a good one. Unfortunately, it's sorted out about fifteen minutes in when the Doctor looks at a home movie and makes a pseudoscientific diagnosis. So it's a mystery where you're never more than fifteen minutes away from the solution, and when it comes, it won't be deduced through hard work and logic, it'll be deduced because Davies can't bear to have the omnipotent, all-powerful Doctor not know something.
This has happened a lot of times in the series, old and new, of course. But it seems that every time an interesting idea or set-piece crops up in 'The Runaway Bride', Davies or director Euros Lyn contrive to throw it away. Lyn is particularly poor on establishing a sense of space - even as it was flooded, I had no idea what size the Arachnos's lair was, or what was in it. It was just a collection of set walls, expanded by CGI, which may or may not be linked. And the Doctor's Heath Robinson contraption to work the TARDIS console while the door was open was wasted by being established in modish incomprehensible shaky-cam shots; the audience only got a sense of what it was when it was in use. (Imagine what Nick Park might have made of such an idea)
Moreover, there's a lack of confidence in the set-up that seems symptomatic of a lot of modern TV writing. No sooner have we been given the hook of the mystery than we're plunged into an utterly gratuitous car chase that advances the plot not one whit. It's there because someone, somewhere, thought that taking a bit of time to build up atmosphere and raise some good questions would bore the viewers. We are, after all, halfwits whose attention wanders every time there isn't a complex CGI effect on screen. What we really want is more robot Santas, apparently.
So 'The Runaway Bride' isn't a mystery. Perhaps it's horror? The notion of a giant blood-red spider from billions of years before humanity returning to eat us all is pretty scary, frankly - it would take a real effort to render that unscary. Well, I'm pleased to say that real effort has clearly been put in. I'm not asking for graphic details of anthropophagy in the Christmas supper-time slot, but Sarah Parish's monster queen is a woefully unchilling specimen, spending almost all of her screentime striking 'Vogue'-esque poses, giving the kind of lengthy villainous monologues that some of us thought The Incredibles had killed off forever, and making noises suggesting she has a serious phlegm problem. Directorially, again, it comes up short; are primary colours that scary? Would a bit of atmospheric shadow have hurt?
Perhaps it's science fiction? I've established before that I'd never want Doctor Who to become Asimov-style hard sci-fi, but at the same time it has to take its sci-fi concepts seriously, even if they are only a varnish for the horror and adventure ideas underneath. Unfortunately, the science fiction in 'The Runaway Bride' isn't just dismissive, it's actively contemptuous of the genre it's meant to be a part of. Russell getting the creation of the Earth wrong by several hundred trillion years is one symptom, but the thinly-imagined jargon used to explain the Doctor's weather device, among others, is a thumb in the audience's eye. "The Dark Times"? "Arachnos"? These things may as well come with a note saying "GOOD FOR FIRST DRAFT - MIGHT WANT TO THINK OF SOMETHING BETTER FOR THE SECOND PASS".
Now, it's worth pointing out here that there are plenty of Doctor Who episodes that aren't horror, aren't science fiction and aren't really mysteries, but which work perfectly well, stretching from 100,000 BC to 'Love & Monsters'. Certainly, in the revived show, what makes such episodes work is the emphasis on character. 'The Runaway Bride' was always going to have a hard time of it due to most of the show's regular cast having left in the preceding episode, and the Doctor is given a little space to grieve over the loss of the Tylers in scenes so awkwardly shoehorned-in that Murray Gold's music has to carry out the most outrageous stops and starts to accomodate them. Seriously, all they're missing is a comedy needle-dragging sound effect.
We're not told anything about the Doctor's character that we haven't heard about a thousand times before, but that's OK - I wouldn't want every episode to strain to reinvent the wheel, and part of the appeal of the Doctor's character is his moral constancy. The main event of the episode is, undoubtedly, the Bride herself, Donna.
This is an unqualified disaster.
I can see what Russell is aiming for with Donna - he wants to produce the Doctor Who equivalent of a classic screwball bickering picture like Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. That's a good idea - arguably it's never been done in Doctor Who before, and done right it could be a refreshing and exciting new flavour for the show. But it's done so badly here. Donna doesn't argue with the Doctor so much as bellow at him, never once stumbling on a witty one-liner or a sharp observation, and Catherine Tate is far too uncharismatic a performer to make the most of this material. Her Donna appears to be modelled on Patsy Palmer's stint in Eastenders, and succeeds in being so annoying you actually don't understand why the Doctor is trying to save her life. When the Doctor turns around at the end and says she could come with him, it feels like some sort of joke.
The human drama in this episode is so uninvolving and irritating that I resorted to picking holes in the narrative. How did Lance end up in cahoots with the Arachnos Queen, for example? The actor playing Lance didn't have much chemistry with Catherine Tate, but they still made a more plausible couple than an accountant and a giant red spider from Mars (OK, not from Mars, but I couldn't resist it). What were Torchwood doing under the Thames barrier? Do any of the writers know what Torchwood is, or what they do? I'm prepared to accept that these things were explained, but if they were, it was probably in a three-second burst of "they used a technoratic hyperchloric space meringue!" faux techno-babble in the middle of an action scene, so I didn't notice.
Were we told how the Queen had survived the destruction of her people, for example? I wondered about the Time Lords' destruction of the Arachnos race, too, something the Doctor seemed to be profoundly uninterested in. You know, once, if this show made mention of the Time Lords wiping out an entire race, it would be held up as a bad thing. But then, the Human Empire was once held up as being a bad thing, and the revival series has repeatedly shown the Doctor gushing over it with scarcely a thought for the races trampled underfoot by glorious hyoo-maniteeeee.
None of these issues were raised during the episode, of course, but I had to have something to think about while this predictable, poorly imagined, un-Christmassy mess played itself out. At the end of the episode, Donna says the Doctor needs someone to tell him to stop, and I'd have to restate my position that Russell needs someone to fulfil the same function in the BBC Wales offices. What are we promised next series, for example? More cat people? More Face of Boe? Joy.