Category: Doctor Who

I don’t know how I feel about this one. There is something wrong about it. Something hollow. Something artificial.

Actually, I feel watching this like the Doctor feels at the end of “Sleep No More”. I feel like I’ve been set up. I do not feel like I have been experiencing a story. Rather, I feel like I have been listening to a con-man wind me up so that he can steal my wallet.

I have felt like that a lot the past few seasons.

Other thoughts:

• In its way, this episode parallels “The Caves of Androzani”. In that story, the Doctor very early on stumbles into a pit and contracts a fatal disease. And really, from that point on, the Doctor has very little influence on the large motions of the story and mostly is just invested in staying alive until the end, when he dies. Similarly, Clara’s doomed from the midpoint of the episode and nothing else that happens in the story actually matters. Because this is not “the adventure which ends with Clara’s death”: it is “the story about Clara dying.” The point of this story is to kill Clara. Everything else is just window-dressing.
• There’s something a bit Friedberg and Seltzer about this story. Their shitty parody movies work by simply inserting allusions to things in a context that indicates they are ridiculous. But there’s no actual comedy. They don’t do anything with it. It’s just “Paris Hilton is a person you may have heard of. Laugh now!” Similarly, none of the elements of this story seem to amount to much. “There’s trap streets that you’re kept from perceiving unless you sort of happen onto one by accident while you’re not looking,” but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, it’s just there because it’s a neat piece of window-dressing for the Clara-killin’ we’ll get to in a bit. The alien refugee camp where Cybermen and Sontarans and a guy who kinda looks like Wolverine all live peacefully, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, it’s just there to be set-dressing as Clara snuffs it. The Doctor talks about a plan to get the refugees on his side, but it goes nowhere. The whole story of the Doctor trying to save and/or exonerate Rigsy is just a framing device for the real story, Clara dying.
• In its way, it also parallels “Day of the Doctor”. In that story, we are told that the War Doctor is the one who broke the vow, who became a warrior and thus was unworthy of the name “Doctor”. But not a single thing we are shown actually supports this and we are just to accept it on faith. Similarly, here, when the Doctor learns that Clara’s taken the black spot tattoo everyone instantly gives up, and never even considers trying to find a loophole or escape clause or defense. We’re just meant to take it on faith that there is absolutely nothing they could possibly do to save her and don’t even try, even though there is absolutely nothing we are shown that actually supports that this is a less-escapable “absolutely certain unavoidable death” than the absolutely certain unavoidable deaths the characters have faced approximately one hundred times thus far.
  • That, for example, no one even mentions “What if we stick her in the convenient stasis box that is right here.” Not, per se, that it should have worked, but why didn’t anyone even ask about it? Because this episode is not an adventure where Clara sacrifices her life. It is a story about Clara dying
  • I don’t know if this extends to the Doctor never even asking about taking the mark himself to save her. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the Doctor knows Clara well enough that he knows not to beg her to let him take it.
  • But it would be an interesting conundrum for Mayor Me if the Doctor outwits her trap by getting himself killed. Also, wouldn’t it have been a neat cliffhanger to have the Doctor take the mark, only to reveal that, right after we set up that no way no how you can’t possibly escape the Raven, whoever it is who she’s sold the Doctor to is powerful enough to just zap the Quantum Shade out of existence.
• That aspect also parallels the end of “Time of the Angels”, wherein we are simply told that there’s absolutely no way out for the Doctor to go rescue Rory and Amy because New York in the ’30s is absolutely verboten to the TARDIS, without showing us any indication in any way shape or form to justify why this problem can’t be solved by the Williamses taking the ferry to Hoboken.
• Of course, it also parallels “The Magician’s Apprentice” in that the Doctor hands over his confession disc to an old, old friend, gets teleported away to mysterious doom, and Clara gets absolutely for reals no backsies killed off.
• The alien refugee camp in Diagon Alley is an absolutely brilliant concept. Shame that the story wasn’t about it or really even had that much to do with it.
• Banksy Rigsy’s mystery is an interesting concept. Shame the story wasn’t about it
• They have really been laying it on thick this season that Clara is trying too hard to be like the Doctor and that she’s got an uppance-coming for her hubris. While it’s reminiscent of series 2, it’s very different: in that season, it was heavily telegraphed (most especially in “Tooth and Claw”,) that the Doctor and Rose were getting carried away with their own hubris and had their own comeuppance on the way. But there, the sin is laid equally on the Doctor and Rose, while here, there is an uncomfortable and hopefully unintentional sense of “Uppity b—- shouldn’t be trying to be like the Doctor! The name of the show is Doctor Who, not Clara Who! She needs to get ganked, put her in her place.”
  • Which, interestingly is exactly how a whole bunch of oldschool neckbeard fanboys felt about Rose. I will be in a very forgiving mood if the twist at the end is a saving throw that says, “No, actually Clara was totally right to be like the Doctor,” aside from the fact that everything else in the season was clearly set up to make us feel otherwise.
• Clara dies, however, not because she has acted like the Doctor. Even as she recites rules for being the Doctor, she’s clearly forgotten what she knew back in “The Magician’s Apprentice”. She takes the mark from Rigsy on the assumption that she can use the misdirect to play for time and manipulate Me into removing it. The Doctor would have taken the mark with absolutely no plan to weasel out of it, even if he knew the arbitrary rules change that was coming, and just assume everything would work out for the best. That is why Clara dies, and again, it’s because of her hubris in thinking she can be sneaky and plan and outmaneuver the situation rather than just running into it headlong and hoping for the best.
  • I mean, unless the whole season’s timey-wimey and this episode takes place before “The Magician’s Apprentice”, but that would just be stupid.

 

So people liked when I had a lot to say about The Zygon Inv.+ so I figured I’d say the far less I have to say about Sleep No More:

• Nosir, didn’t like it
• Does it work better if you don’t notice the Clara POV shots the first time it happens, so there’s no actual reveal when the Doctor explains that it’s recording her eyes?
• The Doctor just happily rolling with the whole “Grunts” thing left a bad taste in my mouth especially in light of the Zygon thing with the Doctor easily accepting and in fact idealizing a minority being relegated to permanent second-class status. If the Doctor really did get his face to remind him of “The Fires of Pompeii”, it’s a shame he doesn’t also remember the episode that came right after that.
  • Bethany Black was great though. It’s a shame the character wasn’t more fully realized. It seemed like the story was content to just establish what the point of the character was and assume the audience has seen the Noble Warrior Grunt Who Turns Out To Be Awesome enough to just fill in the blanks. Which, in the context of this being Ramussen’s edit, is logically valid, but that does not actually make this a good episode.
• In fact, you know what this really feels like? One of those season 2 “Tardisodes” stretched out to full length. The implied actual story isn’t nearly as bad.
• It is just about possible that the elements of this story will get picked up in “Face the Raven” in a way that will recontextualize them in a way that makes them not suck. I can imagine that happening. This episode is framed not as a “natural” narrative, after all, but is instead a deliberately constructed version of events by Ramussen, and that implies the existence of additional story outside the scope of what was shown to us. I’m willing to reconsider this story’s merits if that happens. I’m not holding my breath.
• Clearly, this episode should have ended with the Doctor receiving a phone call from Sadako telling him that he’s going to die in seven days.

Part 1. Part 2.

All day long I’ve been mulling over one thing, and getting angrier and angrier about it. And honestly, getting angrier and angrier at myself for taking so long to notice it.

Look, like I said before, I’m sure Peter Harness means well. And I’m sure that Steven Moffat means well. And I know that, being American, I come from a background where the dynamics are radically different, and so stuff can end up meaning things over here that they should not be held responsible meanings that only exist on a different continent from where they wrote it.

But they set out to write a story centered around the idea that the dangerous radicalized members of the refugee minority aren’t representative of their race. They made a story which was unrepentant in the idea that the right to live your life in the skin you were born in is not worth fighting for. They made a story which was unrepentant in the idea that the right thing to do for a minority is to keep your head down, don’t spook the “ordinary” folks, hide who you are until the day you die, because otherwise, they’re going to hunt you down and murder you and it would be wrong for you to fight back. That the right to just not be murdered in the street is actually a privilege we may deign to confer on you if you’re good enough at “passing”.

It had a powerful white man, a literal lord preach about how bad war and fighting is, because he’s real sad about the great big war between his godlike people and a race of super-powered killing machines, and do it to a young woman who just wants to not spend every second of her life living a lie as if their situations were remotely similar. Don’t talk about revolution, that’s going a little bit too far.

To put it bluntly, the argument made by Truth Or Consequences was #ZygonLivesMatter, and The Doctor responded, #AllLivesMatter.

And you know what? Fuck this show for doing that. And fuck me for taking all day to notice it.

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Please do read Jack Graham’s excellent “The Zygon Invocation” for a response which covers similar ground, though not quite the same, and does it far more eloquently than I could.

Two Additional Thoughts That Came To Me Last Night:

 

1. Wouldn’t it have been nice if the Zygons had been depicted as being able to solve their own problems rather than reinforcing the idea that it is Objectively Right for an uninvolved third party from a distant land with a history of getting involved in local conflicts he doesn’t fully understand without regard for the consequences to come in and force his worldview on them? Nice of Bonnie to greet him as a liberator at the end.
2. I am deeply, deeply impressed by the show of restraint involved in going all the way through a two-parter about Zygon renegades fighting for the right to assume their natural form without even once having a Zygon rebel shout the slogan, “Let Zygons Be Zygons!”

 

Leah and I finally got around to watching these two today, and I decided, what the hell, I’d write down my thoughts.

The Good:

• The Doctor playing the guitar
• Jenna Coleman shooting a rocket launcher
• Basically everything with Osgood and Kate
• The two teenagers witnessing the transforming Zygon having absolutely no reaction
• Clara manipulating Bonnie to send a text message
• The Doctor referring to “The Imbecile’s Gas”
• The Osgood Boxes being deliberately modeled after The Moment.
• Before I even watched this episode, I caught wind of the mention of Harry Sullivan’s Magic Zygon-Killin’ Gas which would Invert Zygons. It instantly occurred to me that the stupidest possible outcome, and therefore a very likely one, would be that the Zygon extremists would be tricked into releasing what they thought was a turn-all-Zygons-back-to-their-natural-form gas, but it would turn out to be The Imbicile’s Gas instead, but it would turn out that the gas didn’t really kill the Zygons but instead turned them permanently human, thus ironically defeating the renegades and conveniently removing the whole “There are still Zygons living on Earth in secret permanently” thing. It turned out not that not only did they not use this stupid reset button resolution, but they did use the concept as the fake-out.

The Bad:

• It would have been a lot funnier if the Doctor had declined to specify what article of clothing he wore the question marks on.
• It would have been nice if it had not been obvious that Clara was a Zygon duplicate from even before she got grabbed. Seriously, the second the Doctor calls her and gets her voice mail, we already know what’s going to happen.
• Ditto Kate Stewart, only the other way around.
• Okay, so yeah. The Doctor forgives Bonnie, and is cool with her becoming an Osgood. The story’s written itself into a bit of a corner here where that is the only possible “right” answer for the story. But… Bonnie was responsible for the murder of dozens of UNIT soldiers, all the people killed in the shopping mall, that one civilian Zygon she zapped back to his natural form, and the entire population of Truth or Consequences, NM. But that’s okay because she’s learned an important lesson? I’m sure that will be a great comfort Jac’s family.
• The Doctor keeps asking Osgood which one she is, even after she makes it clear that she rejects the question. Now, I am cool with the way that this gives Osgood moral superiority to the Doctor, but there is no point where I got any sense that the Doctor actually had a valid reason to keep asking her. The obvious “good twist” would be to reveal that the Doctor keeps asking because he wants to be sure she won’t pick a side, but he never does. He just keeps on asserting that it’s really important that he know which one she is, and she just keeps on asserting that, no, it’s really not, and he just keeps not getting it.
• Will you shut up about the fucking “hybrid”? We get it.

The Excellent:

• The Zygon the Doctor interrogates on the plane doesn’t even seem to understand the concept of having a name.
• But Bonnie does. Bonnie makes a point of saying it, of differentiating herself from Clara and making others acknowledge her identity.
• Osgood’s utter refusal to identify as human or Zygon. And even though they keep asking, everyone who matters, even Kate Stewart, accepts that. You know, I think this is the most trans-positive message this show has ever had. I’m guessing they didn’t know they’d done it.
• You know who doesn’t ask Osgood which one she is? Clara.
• That Kate’s escape from the Zygons involved the simple expedient of shooting them.

The basically unforgivably bad:

• Episode 1 is a 45 minute runaround whose only purpose is to say “It takes basically zero effort to defeat UNIT.” Ooh, UNIT’s so suspicious and so quick to solve problems by killing, but they fall for the same trick three times in a row.
• For all the work they do to reinforce the idea that Truth or Consequences is a splinter group not representative of the majority of peaceful Zygons, we see exactly one civilian Zygon (And it’s implied that he goes on a murder spree when unmasked). We see approximately two non-radicalized Zygons, and they’re the Unhelpful, Ineffectual and Probably Corrupt government.
  • I notice that this pair of episodes was written by Peter Harness, who also gave us last year’s “Kill the Moon”, the story that half of viewers thought was a pro-choice parable and half of viewers thought was a forced-birth screed, since it’s all about it being the obviously right choice to not terminate the moon’s pregnancy. But the choice is ultimately made by one woman in spite of being pressured by literally everyone in the world, and the choice takes the form of pushing a big red button literally labeled “ABORT”. I get the feeling Peter Harness means really, really well, but has a blind spot for the implications.
• That fucking CGI title sequence. Yes, it was a brilliant and wonderful fan-made sequence that inspired it, but a bunch of professionals making a television show in high definition for international consumption as a flagship of BBC drama should be able to produce something that doesn’t look like it was made for the Playstation 2. At the least, they should be able to make something that looks as good as the fanart that inspired it.