New Earth / Tooth and Claw
Can the best Doctor Who stories be summed up in
a question?
Can you guess the thing and the other thing
mentioned during the episode that will need to be united at the end in order to
defeat the monsters?
Best moment for Old School Who?
I’m combining reviews of two episodes here – the
first two of the second season. And here we were: with a new Doctor and a sense
that this was a series that was set to run for a long time. The thing we had
dreamed about for all those years! Through years of Next Gen, X-Files, Voyager,
Babylon 5, Buffy, Farscape and goodness knows how many other genre TV shows
that were here, week after week, season after season, boxset after boxset. We
longed for a Dr Who TV show that we could rely on just being there. And
here it was.
And by season two it’s providing us with
episodes which, on the face of it, are not cornerstone ones. They’re not
essential, nor contributing to the mythos in an earth-shattering way. They’re
kind of like The Sun Makers and The Horror of Fang Rock (in fact, they’re
almost remakes of those two.) They’re diversions. Burger and chips on a
Saturday teatime. The pressure almost feels like it’s off now and we can just
enjoy the trip.
For long-term viewers there are immense
incidental pleasures in seeing a) a far-flung future that looks like it belongs
in the Graham Williams era and b) a gothic monster romp that looks like it
belongs in the Philip Hinchcliffe era.
Best new thing?
The fact that – in this brave new world – the
inconsequential romp doesn’t last four whole Saturdays. These are one-night
stands with the bitchy trampoline and the CGI werewolf.
They’d never have got away with that in the 20th
century…
These are two quite old fashioned stories, in so
many ways. If they had a lot more padding they wouldn’t look out of place in
the Seventies. Perhaps the body horror of all those pustules on the cloned
humans and the gnashing of the hungry werewolf would have been a little tamer
in the past. Also, in the past, the werewolf would have been a man in a furry
suit. I wish it was now.
Also, I can’t see Tom Baker giving the Face of
Boe the time of day. None of this, ‘Hello, my old and gnomic friend! What
cryptic hints can you give me about my future, eh?’ Tom would have been like,
‘Oho! An awful giant face! Not today, thank you!’
Hurray for Jackie Tyler – best guest moment?
In both of these nothing tops Pauline Collins’
mischevious and surprisingly spry Queen Victoria. She’s not given a massive
amount to do – but she’s lovely in this. One minute she’s having a right old
laugh, then all of a sudden she turns nastily on the Doctor at the very end and
punishes him (and us all) by inventing ‘Torchwood’ off the top of her head.
The ‘I love me Nan…’ moment
All of a sudden I’m having trouble with Rose’s
naturalistic acting. She’s giggling and gurning and the running gag about
getting Victoria to say ‘We are not amused’ is just boring. Her casual, slangy,
Eastendery acting (Sharon Beale! That’s who reminds me of. Just realized, after
nine years) worked brilliantly in season one because we hadn’t seen it in Dr
Who before. Not to that extent. The 2005 season was more or less through Rose’s
eyes and the monsters and situations seemed all the more outlandish for that.
Now, in 2006, things have flipped round. The audience is au fait with the year
5 billion and fanged hairy beasties. The worlds of Doctor who are familiar to
us again, and Rose is the one who seems odd and out of place. When she does her
final lines in ‘Tooth and Claw’ about the Royal Family it really sounds like
she’s a bit pissed.
What?!?
We get to see how Torchwood came about – as a
much more paranoid, jingoistic version of UNIT. It’s one of those moments that
tell us we have to listen to every bit of the new show for the clues and
hints that point us to the way the overall story is heading (when the
incidental music allows to hear the nuances of the dialogue, that is.) The
things that the writers of the New Adventure novels used to string together
retrospectively through twentieth century Who, are now being seeded carefully
by RTD. It’s kind of pre-emptive fanwank.
Also, we get the promise of more mysterious
hints from the Face of Boe. It’s a brilliant way of getting money’s
worth out of old cossies, masks and sets.
Huh?!
I don’t think the little bags of coloured water
spraying about everywhere would be enough to cure every known disease in the
cosmos. That scene looks a bit like the water-carrying challenges that they
always used to do on ‘It’s a Knockout.’
These two episodes ‘rhyme’ in my head. They have
very different settings and atmospheres. It’s a cliché in Dr Who fandom to say
that Dr Who can tell a million different stories because the TARDIS can go
anywhere. I think that’s actually wrong – because it most often limits itself to
telling fairly straightforward adventure stories. These two episodes rhyme in
my head because they both have the characters fighting against creatures
infected by a nasty disease and unleashed within the close confines of a sealed
building. The Doctor has to take an element mentioned early in the episode (the
showers in the elevators / the giant telescope) with another he finds a little
later on (the bags of medicine / the giant diamond) and when he cleverly
combines them at the climax he solves everyone’s problems in a flash. The job
of a good story is to hide this easy arithmetic.
In 2005 the stories were very
traditionally-shaped Dr Who’s – and then we had the novelty of naturalistic
characters and modern world grounding to spice things up. RTD did clever
things, such as inverting ‘Spearhead from Space’ and having it happen in the
background of a human story. Or he took the big, splashy Dalek epic and told it
through the medium of pastiche. He wrote real characters and how they’d react
if they were caught up in the middle of silly old Doctor Who stories. By the
start of season 2 he’s already chafing at this. The Doctor and Rose don’t seem
so radical and new in these two very trad stories, and the stories are a little
formulaic. These shortcomings will be dressed up for a while through the rest
of the season with a host of flashy things to hold our attention – reunions; a
fully-fledged outer space story; a long-awaited clash between two monster races
of old. But underneath all of that, something is going to have to happen with
the shapes of these stories if the show isn’t going to become repetitive too
quickly.
Where was I?
I think in both cases we had friends visiting,
and watching Who with us. This was how sure I was that the Show was back and
here to stay. I could even watch it with other people around. I wasn’t watching
it like watching someone being given heart massage and the kiss of life. I
could watch it in quite a sociable atmosphere, with people even talking during
the transmission. I could pretend – almost – that it was like sitting round,
casually watching episodes of any old show. I do remember groaning out loud at
the comedy stuff to do with Cassandra swapping bodies, and I remember loving
the fact we had a Hinchcliffe-type episode. (It was like the new show was
making a run of homages through the old series…)
I did start to wonder for the first time,
however, whether the new series was going to produce episodes that were ones
that I would watch repeatedly and gradually come to know off by heart. In a
sense I was coming to see these new shows as too good, too slick, and not
(ineluctably) camp enough. These were the first seeds of ‘IS THIS SHOW REALLY
FOR ME..?’
Ideally, what I needed next was for there to be
an episode that would reassure me that this show and the show in my heart were
one and the same. Perhaps if there was the return of an old, dear friend in the
offing…
Singlemost fabulous thing
It has to be Tennant’s Doctor facing a werewolf
for the first time and saying: ‘You’re beautiful!’ It’s this Doctor’s zestiness
that keep these episodes bowling merrily along.
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