New Who 4.10, Midnight
I'm up in Birmingham for the weekend, making sure that Mum's OK while Dad spends a weekend in Cambridge at his annual college reunion event. Mum continues to make good progress, but she's very tired out all the time. So, while she's sleeping, I hope you'll forgive me if I take the chance to catch up on a bit of Who blogging. There may be some spam - but I'm sure you're all very adept with the scroll function!
First up, Midnight (yes, you remember - from nearly two weeks ago...)
This episode had a head start with me in the first place simply because of the type of story it was. I'm not sure what the technical term for it is, but I call it a 'cabin fever' story, and some of my favourite examples of the genre are Night of the Living Dead, The Thing and Cube. The key elements are a small group of people trapped in a closed environment and facing an Unknown Terror - but the real focus of the story is not the terror itself, but the personality clashes which emerge between the core characters in the face of the extreme situation.
Put the Doctor in this situation with a group of (future) humans, and, fairly inevitably, the biggest division that's going to emerge is between them and the time-travelling alien. And that's really why I liked this episode so much. It's not just a reworking of a type of story I happen to like anyway, purely for the sake of it. It uses that setting to put the Doctor up for scrutiny, expose his flaws, and ask some of the fundamental questions about his interactions with humanity: the very sorts of questions, in fact, which Ian and Barbara asked right in the very first story. Like who actually is he; what qualifications or authority does he have; what makes him think he's so bloody clever; and above all, why should anyone listen to him or trust him? And with this at the heart of the episode, what absolute genius to leave Donna out of it. Because as the companion character, had she been there she would inevitably have acted as a bridge between the Doctor and the other passengers: again, much as Susan did for Ian and Barbara. Her behaviour towards him would have acted as a cue to the other passengers that he was worth trusting; and that would have robbed us of the chance to see the Doctor wriggling uncomfortably as he is grilled and found wanting by a group of angry humans.
That alone would have made for a pretty good episode. But it wasn't all we got. Because this episode was also about one of the key weapons in the Doctor's arsenal - speech. And this was batted about, and played with, and inverted and upturned throughout the entire episode, and I thought it was brilliantly done and again really addressed some of the unwritten 'rules' of the Whoniverse. Early on, we see the Doctor using speech as he normally does: to forge connections, build the trust he needs to operate, and learn about the people he's with and the situation he is in. Once he's turned the 'entertainment' system off, it's the Doctor who gleefully takes the opportunity to get people talking, and he is also the only one who sits down and has a chat with lone traveller Sky before she becomes possessed.
Interestingly, and much to his credit too, it's made pretty clear in these sequences that he is very much aware not only of the power of his own speech (as a means of persuasion), but of others' too. He (and we as viewers) learns a great deal about both his fellow passengers and the planet they're on from their conversations during the early 'chat montage' sequence, all of which helps him to understand them and the danger they are facing later on. Similarly, when disaster first strikes, and everyone is panicking about not having enough oxygen, he calls for silence not so that he can explain why they have nothing to fear, but so that he can give the stage to Dee Dee, whom he knows the other passengers will believe. This is the Doctor as an enabler, empowering the people around him - and I thought it cast an interesting light on his otherwise rather obnoxious habit of going round telling everybody how fantastically clever he is. It's not that he wants everyone to bow down in admiration, because if he did then he would have explained about the oxygen recycling - and besides, it is a long-established character trait, through all his regenerations, that he prefers to save planets and move on, rather than hang around for thanks. The "Because I'm clever" protestations are more about him being an alien - from his perspective, that should be all that's needed to establish his authority, and he's visibly frustrated when, in human terms, it's not.
Anyway, in this episode, the nature of the danger he's facing means that speech itself becomes a double-edged sword. Not only is it failing him as a means of winning trust in the absence of his companion, but it's also, of course, the means by which the Alien Menace of the week grows stronger. And so, this character who so often sails his way through situations via the gift of the gab, gradually turns to the power of silence instead. When the Unknown Terror starts banging on the outside of the ship, he several times calls for silence from the other passengers, so that he can hear properly to investigate what is going on. He does the same once the copying and then the synchronous speaking begin, so that he can use clear, directed speech (rather than a panicked babble) to test what is happening. And finally, he realises that silence itself is not just a necessary condition for further investigation here - it's also a containment device. That, in fact, is his plan for dealing with whatever has possessed Sky - to cut off the mechanism it is using to learn and develop, until it can be dealt with properly in less hostile circumstances. And we are given no reason to believe it wouldn't have worked - if only the other people on the ship had trusted him enough to follow his plan.
Which is what it all turns on in the end. The logical conclusion is that his ultimate weapon is not speech, or silence, but trust. Without that, neither speech nor silence can save him, and he's literally robbed of all control over both, while someone else has to avert the crisis (and in a way that causes the loss of two, arguably three, lives). Clearly, the trust which a legion of his former companions already have in him is going to save both the Doctor and the Universe in the final few episodes. And to me, that makes this exploration of the issue a very powerful contribution at this stage in the season.
First up, Midnight (yes, you remember - from nearly two weeks ago...)
This episode had a head start with me in the first place simply because of the type of story it was. I'm not sure what the technical term for it is, but I call it a 'cabin fever' story, and some of my favourite examples of the genre are Night of the Living Dead, The Thing and Cube. The key elements are a small group of people trapped in a closed environment and facing an Unknown Terror - but the real focus of the story is not the terror itself, but the personality clashes which emerge between the core characters in the face of the extreme situation.
Put the Doctor in this situation with a group of (future) humans, and, fairly inevitably, the biggest division that's going to emerge is between them and the time-travelling alien. And that's really why I liked this episode so much. It's not just a reworking of a type of story I happen to like anyway, purely for the sake of it. It uses that setting to put the Doctor up for scrutiny, expose his flaws, and ask some of the fundamental questions about his interactions with humanity: the very sorts of questions, in fact, which Ian and Barbara asked right in the very first story. Like who actually is he; what qualifications or authority does he have; what makes him think he's so bloody clever; and above all, why should anyone listen to him or trust him? And with this at the heart of the episode, what absolute genius to leave Donna out of it. Because as the companion character, had she been there she would inevitably have acted as a bridge between the Doctor and the other passengers: again, much as Susan did for Ian and Barbara. Her behaviour towards him would have acted as a cue to the other passengers that he was worth trusting; and that would have robbed us of the chance to see the Doctor wriggling uncomfortably as he is grilled and found wanting by a group of angry humans.
That alone would have made for a pretty good episode. But it wasn't all we got. Because this episode was also about one of the key weapons in the Doctor's arsenal - speech. And this was batted about, and played with, and inverted and upturned throughout the entire episode, and I thought it was brilliantly done and again really addressed some of the unwritten 'rules' of the Whoniverse. Early on, we see the Doctor using speech as he normally does: to forge connections, build the trust he needs to operate, and learn about the people he's with and the situation he is in. Once he's turned the 'entertainment' system off, it's the Doctor who gleefully takes the opportunity to get people talking, and he is also the only one who sits down and has a chat with lone traveller Sky before she becomes possessed.
Interestingly, and much to his credit too, it's made pretty clear in these sequences that he is very much aware not only of the power of his own speech (as a means of persuasion), but of others' too. He (and we as viewers) learns a great deal about both his fellow passengers and the planet they're on from their conversations during the early 'chat montage' sequence, all of which helps him to understand them and the danger they are facing later on. Similarly, when disaster first strikes, and everyone is panicking about not having enough oxygen, he calls for silence not so that he can explain why they have nothing to fear, but so that he can give the stage to Dee Dee, whom he knows the other passengers will believe. This is the Doctor as an enabler, empowering the people around him - and I thought it cast an interesting light on his otherwise rather obnoxious habit of going round telling everybody how fantastically clever he is. It's not that he wants everyone to bow down in admiration, because if he did then he would have explained about the oxygen recycling - and besides, it is a long-established character trait, through all his regenerations, that he prefers to save planets and move on, rather than hang around for thanks. The "Because I'm clever" protestations are more about him being an alien - from his perspective, that should be all that's needed to establish his authority, and he's visibly frustrated when, in human terms, it's not.
Anyway, in this episode, the nature of the danger he's facing means that speech itself becomes a double-edged sword. Not only is it failing him as a means of winning trust in the absence of his companion, but it's also, of course, the means by which the Alien Menace of the week grows stronger. And so, this character who so often sails his way through situations via the gift of the gab, gradually turns to the power of silence instead. When the Unknown Terror starts banging on the outside of the ship, he several times calls for silence from the other passengers, so that he can hear properly to investigate what is going on. He does the same once the copying and then the synchronous speaking begin, so that he can use clear, directed speech (rather than a panicked babble) to test what is happening. And finally, he realises that silence itself is not just a necessary condition for further investigation here - it's also a containment device. That, in fact, is his plan for dealing with whatever has possessed Sky - to cut off the mechanism it is using to learn and develop, until it can be dealt with properly in less hostile circumstances. And we are given no reason to believe it wouldn't have worked - if only the other people on the ship had trusted him enough to follow his plan.
Which is what it all turns on in the end. The logical conclusion is that his ultimate weapon is not speech, or silence, but trust. Without that, neither speech nor silence can save him, and he's literally robbed of all control over both, while someone else has to avert the crisis (and in a way that causes the loss of two, arguably three, lives). Clearly, the trust which a legion of his former companions already have in him is going to save both the Doctor and the Universe in the final few episodes. And to me, that makes this exploration of the issue a very powerful contribution at this stage in the season.