DOCTOR WHO: THE WOMAN WHO LIVED review

THE COMPANION WHO WASN'T

New writer Catherine Tregenna delivers a poetic, amusing and haunting tour de force for Peter Capaldi and Maisie Williams.

Stand and deliver etc. etc. (Image copyright: BBC)

It’s very rare that the Doctor’s has to deal with the consequences of his actions. As was strongly hinted in ‘The Girl Who Died’, this week he would have to do so, facing up to the double-edged gift of immortality that he granted Ashilda (Maisie Williams). Inheriting the Viking girl’s story, Catherine Tregenna delivered a mature, philosophical consideration of responsibility, the cruel curse of living forever and the concurrent importance of making the most of the life you’re given. (Not bad for a series that began as an innocuous tea-time serial).

As one of Doctor Who’s few female writers (so far), it’s perhaps appropriate that Tregenna reinvented Ashilda as a proto-feminist heroine based on the legend of the Hertfordshire aristocrat Katherine Ferrers, who might, or might not, have taken on the guise of a highwayman at the time of Oliver Cromwell – the same period in which Ashilda, now Lady Me, is at large doing the same. While the historical setting gave the story a colourful flavour, what was essentially a two-hander between Capaldi and Williams really took flight in the exchanges between their two characters.

It was an uncomfortable, absorbing and bitter-sweet watch. The transformation of the naïve young Ashilda into the confident, intelligent, resourceful but deeply bitter and lonely Lady Me shows just why Williams is currently such a feted actress. The lyrical barbs she fired at the Doctor, among them the harsh ‘You’re the man who runs away’ and ‘You’re not my Dad’, forced the Time Lord, in one of Capaldi’s more subdued and sensitive performances, to face up to what he’d done to her. Although not her biological father, he’s obviously an absent and guilty surrogate one, secretly watching her progress throughout history.

As the story focused so much on the two’s relationship, the episode felt like it was set up to introduce a new companion – particularly as Clara was absent for most of the running time – but the ironic point was that Lady Me was too like the Doctor to travel with him. The resolution to their mutual issues therefore became the theme of the story, so it was satisfying to see that they both seemed to have learned from and come to terms with each other by the end. The one false note in Lady Me’s character, though, was how someone so apparently worldly wise and cynical fell so easily for the lies of the passing alien Leandro (Ariyon Bakare).

Another dandy highwayman.
(Image copyright: BBC)

Part of the Doctor and Lady Me’s conciliation came from Clara and Sam Swift the Quick (Rufus Hound, left) being the short-lived but vibrant ‘mayflies’ that gave the immortals’ lives meaning: Clara brightening the ‘emptiness’ of the Doctor’s 2,000 plus years, Sam’s mortality reawakening Ashilda’s humanity and sense of responsibility. Hound was great in a necessarily abbreviated part, particularly in the hanging scene when Sam was clearly putting a brave, laddish face on how terrified he was.  

One or two minor caveats: in a script that took pains to make sure Lady Me didn’t know what a burglar alarm or newspaper headline was, and offered such nuanced dialogue as ‘I didn’t know your heart would rust because I kept it beating’, ‘bullet’ and ‘Dad’ stood out as particularly anachronistic terms. It’s also hard to believe that Sam, a 17th century Englishman, would have known what an anteater is, considering their habitat is Central America.

And as much as I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, I couldn’t help thinking what the children watching made of it all. There was the requisite fun for kids – a highway robbery, comedy burgling of a country house at night, a lion-like alien breathing fire and the semi-customary explosions at the climax – but, really, they were secondary to an eloquent, adult tale with a very dark heart; in a neat visual touch, the Doctor and Lady Me’s relationship literally began in darkness and ended in (day)light.

If children were underwhelmed by ‘The Woman Who Lived’ on Saturday, happily it’ll be one of the black gems of Doctor Who they’ll rediscover as they grow up.

Bit to rewind: the Doctor reading Lady Me's journals.

PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED, Norwich UEA, 29 September. Review

TURN UP THE BASS

John Lydon and PiL: real music for real people.

You gotta love John's sense of humour. (Image copyright: PiL)

Picture, if you will, a musically naïve 13 year-old sitting in front of Top of the Pops in 1977. He doesn’t know much about pop but he knows what likes, namely Boney M and Clout. On this particular night, his eyes widen, his mouth drops open, it feels like his hair really does stand on end and his perception of music – and, yes, his life – instantly change: it’s a genuine Road to Damascus moment. Blasting out of the screen and transforming him forever in its sonic maelstrom is ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols.

John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) changed my life. From that Top of the Pops onwards it was Rat Scabies, Jet Black and Joe Strummer rather than Jeff Lynne, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Freddy Mercury (although, if you think about it, Freddy is the John Rotten of pomp rock, and, oddly, I love him as much as I love Mr Lydon… which is worth a blog post all of its own). I was so excited about seeing bands that when I got to 1980 and the Sixth Form, I began organising coach trips to gigs at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, the nearest venue where groups I liked played. Seeing The Skids, The Teardrop Explodes, Wall of Voodoo, The Stranglers and many more over the years was all down to John. He was the punk rock progenitor.

29 September 2015 and I’m back at the UEA. It’s been a nostalgic week, showing the lady friend around my old haunts, but this PiL show has nothing to do with nostalgia, as indicated by a stripped-down, brick wall backdrop with that ingenious, timeless ‘PiL’ logo. There’s no support band, and John’s four piece play for nearly two hours, with a set of half new songs and half old – particularly ‘Poptones’ and a spine-jarring, terrifying ‘Religion’ – that sound like they were written yesterday. So what if John uses a lyric stand these days? Mark E Smith has for years, and it’s only for tracks from the latest album. Besides, it gives Mr Lydon the demeanour of a particularly volatile hellfire preacher, which couldn’t be a better image for him.

He’s a man who’s never given in and never given up. From the Bill Grundy Incident on, this was a boy that lived his life his own way. John’s said what he liked, even it’s sometimes been uncomfortable to hear – he does it tonight, snarling at some over-enthusiastic fans, ‘Get off my fucking stage. Show some respect: I’ve earned it’ – and, against the odds, has made music the way he wanted. OK, John did some adverts for a well-known brand of butter; but he did it to finance a new PiL album when no-one would sign them, which strikes me as a very punk rock thing to do. Since 1976, he’s been the unofficial spokesman for anyone who’s felt marginalised, victimised, ignored or alienated from the mainstream. Over thirty years on, John Lydon is the alternative Queen Mum – a national treasure.

His life and attitude is all there in the songs. ‘Death Disco’ is about the passing of John’s mother and, stretched out to nearly 10 hypnotic minutes, is as full of pulsing, primal rage as ever. Effortlessly switching styles from the avant garde dub of Metal Box to the soft metal of PiL’s 1980s incarnation, ‘Disappointed’ (a personal favourite) is the defiant anthem to being let down by someone close – something we’ve all experienced – while ‘Warrior’ is about the best kind of nationalism. ‘Public Image’ is still a floor-filling call to arms (and, mindful of the old ticker, my only mosh of the night). ‘Rise’, the last song, throws self-belief against self-doubt to produce something truly inspiring, summed up in the line ‘Anger is an energy’ which we bellow at the top of our voices back at the stage.

A couple of history punks were standing next to us, beginning the evening with an air of ‘Alright, old man, impress us.’ By the end, they were clapping and shouting for more along with the rest of the crowd. At 59, John can still take on unbelievers and win.

PiL didn’t play any Sex Pistols numbers. They didn’t need to. As the man said, ‘Real music for real people – that’s why we do it.’

Long may that be the case.

DOCTOR WHO: THE GIRL WHO DIED review

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

Vikings, alien warriors, The Benny Hill Show and reflections on the power of storytelling. New scriptwriter Jamie Mathieson delivers a hat-trick.

Ashilda: a blessing or a curse? (Image copyright: BBC)

My God, this is how to do it. ‘The Girl Who Died’ is proof positive that Jamie Mathieson's double whammy of ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’ and ‘Flatline’ wasn’t a creative flash in the pan. More than those, it shows how expertly he can blend comedy and drama into a fizzy, enjoyable, blood-and-thunder fantasy cocktail. The episode also had the first big surprise of this series, as everything appeared to be wrapped up in 45 minutes.

For long term Doctor Who fans, there was something of late 1970s producer Graham Williams’ style to this story, when pseudo-historical and comic elements were high in the mix, while the idea of a mythical god, in this case Odin (David Schofield, doing his best Brian Blessed), concealing an alien intelligence has its roots in the tenure of Williams’ predecessor Philip Hinchcliffe. The skewed plot, with Viking civilians left to fight the alien Mire, and the comedy which ensued, was very Williams; the Doctor’s haunted ruminations on abandoning the village as it wasn’t important enough to the timeline, meanwhile, alluded to the Doctor’s ‘Olympian detachment’ under Hinchcliffe.

Presumably they couldn't afford Brian Blessed.
(Image copyright: BBC)

Something else that Mathieson has inherited from the Hinchcliffe oeuvre is the gift for brilliant dialogue that the producer’s script editor Robert Holmes had. A large part of the atmosphere of any setting – historical, future or otherwise – comes from the richness of the words the characters are given to say, and Mathieson slipped effortlessly into the right metre here. Ashilda’s mournful ‘We’ll be cut down like corn’ is a great image to describe an ancient battle, while Odin’s ‘What is Heaven but the gilded door of the abattoir?’ merits a whole article on its own. Particularly striking was the Doctor’s translation of baby talk. What could have come across as plain silly was presented as poetic and haunting, thanks to Capaldi’s committed performance. You can take your pick from the many other examples of how good the dialogue was.

Against the backdrop of comedy Vikings and ingeniously designed monsters, ‘The Girl Who Died’ belonged to three actors: Capaldi, Coleman and Maisie Williams (no relation). The Doctor/Clara relationship is going somewhere really interesting, as the Time Lord recognises his influence on her may not have been entirely beneficial; Clara, meanwhile, is becoming more and more of an adrenaline junkie. Their increasingly complex relationship is an effective contrast with the innocence, melancholy and righteous anger of the remarkable Maisie Williams, 18 but looking at least 5 years younger. I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, but, on her own, she carried Channel 4’s internet thriller Cyberbully earlier this year. Be great if she turned out to be the new companion, but I doubt it somehow.

The face of the Twelfth Doctor's conscience.
(Image copyright: BBC)

By the hammer of the gods, ‘The Girl Who Died’ showed how to do continuity (and I’m guessing this was Steven Moffat’s main input to the episode): the Doctor recognising his new face was set up as far back as his first episode ‘Deep Breath’. Here he realises that he wears it as a result of his survivor guilt, as shown in a jaw-dropping clip from ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ (now 8 years old), that explicitly linked the Doctor with Caecilius, Peter Capaldi’s first role in the series, whose family the Time Lord decided to go back for and save. Not only is it a neat way of explaining the casting of the lead actor in two different roles – not that they had to – but the idea was organic to the story and consistent with developments in the Doctor’s character since 2005.

Amid all the fun and drama was a literate subtext about the power of storytelling. The Vikings believed in Odin, but, as the Doctor astutely pointed out, you can tell a real god because ‘they never show up’, and the Mire’s Odin was subsequently revealed as a fraud. Ashilda made up stories, and it was the Mire’s belief in one of hers which was the threatened downfall of their status as unbeatable warriors on the intergalactic equivalent of YouTube. An apt reference, as where else can reputations – another form of storytelling – be so easily made and destroyed today? It’s obvious that this kind of parable was what they were trying for with last year’s ‘Robot of Sherwood’, but that didn’t quite come off.  

The by now customary pop culture references were present and correct: The Benny Hill Show theme (inspired), The Magnificent Seven and The Man Who Would Be King (the Doctor training the villagers to fight) and this year’s second reference to Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Odin in the clouds was a dead ringer for Terry Gilliam’s cartoon God).

Pleasingly, there are no easy answers here, something of a theme in Mathieson’s scripts. The Time Lord’s ‘I’m the Doctor! And I save people!’ declamation proved equivocal, as his saving of Ashilda’s life (reckless? Certainly. Selfish? Possibly) was shown as an act of compassion that he knew could have terrible consequences. Her immortality as result of a Mire implant could be as much of a curse as a blessing, something Ashilda’s chilling look into the camera (top) as time rolled by, leaving her unchanged, seemed to confirm. A superb ending, particularly as it contrasted the sham Odin at the beginning with an ordinary young woman who by the end had effectively become a god.

Yes, this is how to do it. Mind you, I still think the series is on far too late: if ever there was a great Saturday night treat for kids of all ages, it was ‘The Girl Who Died’.   

Bit to rewind: The Doctor realises where he got his new face from.

DOCTOR WHO: BEFORE THE FLOOD review

TIME IN ADVANCE

If you're going to make a series of two-part Doctor Who stories for the iplayer generation, this is how to do it.

Mediaeval imagery, the Cold War and time travel.
Where else on TV could you see this?  (Image copyright: BBC)

One friend turned off angrily after the opening titles, incensed about the electric guitar mixed into the theme music. Another, 54, reckoned he should have watched it with a 9 year-old so they could explain it to him. We’ll come back to this.

****

‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ rewards repeated viewings, like reading a good novel does, when you can unpick the subtleties at your leisure. There’s an incredible amount of detail packed into the story, performances and imagery.

Two notable instances of the latter: the Fisher King’s co-ordinates are shown in close-up on various characters’ eyes. Not only is this showing what’s actually happening – the alien warlord’s signal being seared into a person’s life-force – but many cultures see the eyes as the windows of the soul. This makes the Fisher King’s plan neatly metaphorical, as the gaping eye sockets in the ghosts suggest that the alien has stolen their souls. Follow that line of reasoning, and you understand why the Fisher King looks like a mediaeval demon.

The Russian training ground neatly establishes the past is 1980 without the need for a lot of expensive crowd scenes, as well as delivering some remarkably surreal imagery, such as a mole-faced, top-hatted undertaker fussing around a spacecraft against a background of Soviet propaganda posters. The chilly Cold War setting also allows for the inclusion of unusually large Russian dolls, their model-inside-a-model construction neatly reflecting what’s going on in the time paradox at the heart of the story. In fact, as they fit the concept so well, I’d go as far as to say that Whithouse chose the Russian setting just so he could put the dolls in the story. If you think that’s taking attention to detail too far, look out for a certain clockwork squirrel that Clara mentions.

‘Before the Flood’ wasn’t some cold, intellectual exercise: Whithouse delivered a cast of characters at the heart of the warped physics that you cared about (more so than in the first episode, admittedly). The bolshiness of O’Donnell (Morven Christie) and her military intelligence past was offset by girlish, infectious enthusiasm at being inside the TARDIS, while the nerdish cowardice of Bennett (Arsher Ali) hardened into angry defiance when he suspected the Doctor might have callously used O’Donnell’s death to test a theory. It was a timely reminder of the more morally ambiguous nature of the Twelfth Doctor’s character, which I thought might have been softened for good under this year’s hoodies, t-shirts, rock star shades and more mischievous personality.

This moral angle also played out in Clara’s interactions with Cass and Lunn, with the former angrily questioning if Clara had learned from the Doctor how to put people’s lives in danger. It’s a believable reaction if you were dealing with people who suddenly appear from nowhere, claiming to know how to solve a terrifying situation. This authentic level of characterisation is also one of the benefits of the 90-minute running time – the length of an old 4-parter, significantly – as you could also see in Clara’s desperate, angry reaction to the realisation that someone else she (loves?) could be dead, as well as the Doctor’s world-weary slump onto the TARDIS console as she pleaded with him.

Don't look behind you... (Image copyright: BBC)

All the actors rose to the quality of the material. Sophie Leigh Stone, in particular, communicated so much through only facial expressions and hand gestures, while Paul Kaye was just as good as he was in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. OK, the ‘they all lived happily ever after’ denouement was a bit icky, but Stone, Ali, Zaqi Ismail (Lunn), Coleman and Capaldi were so good they just about got away with it. It was a necessary release too, after sequences like the tensely brilliant one where Cass was stalked by an axe-dragging ghost. Bit of a shame Peter Serafinowicz didn’t get more to do, but it’s a minor criticism. 

****

One friend turned off angrily after the opening titles, incensed about the electric guitar mixed into the theme music. Another, 54, reckoned he should have watched the episode with a 9 year-old so they could explain it to him. Well, Friend 1 should have stuck with it, as he’d have seen one of the most sophisticated and satisfying Capaldi stories so far. If Friend 2 had asked his 9 year-old what it all meant, the young fan would probably have told him to watch it again – ‘cos, y’know, you can – and delighted in a monster and ghosts that were ‘brilliant’ and ‘scary.’

That’s Doctor Who as it should be: clever, frightening, thrilling, stimulating, fun and, as befits the best examples of the 21st century version, something you can watch again and see more in every time. And that’s no paradox.

Roll on ‘The Girl Who Died’.

Bit to rewind: The fourth-wall breaking prologue. And the final shot.

DOCTOR WHO: THE WITCH'S FAMILIAR/UNDER THE LAKE review

HISTORY REPEATING

The opening stories of Doctor Who's 2015 series have drawn heavily on other sources, with varying results.

'SHH! Don't mention the viewing figures!' (Image copyright: BBC)

THE WITCH’S FAMILIAR

The performances were great, the visual effects impressive, the direction inventive, but…

‘The Witch’s Familiar’ didn’t work for me because it focused solely on the fate of the regular/recurring characters. Nine years into 21^st century Doctor Who, we know that the Doctor, the companion and the Master aren’t going to die, and that Davros probably won’t, so with the fate of no supporting characters at stake, the inevitable resolution of the regulars surviving wasn’t a surprise. The conclusion of Davros (inevitably) tricking the Doctor and the Doctor (inevitably) anticipating being tricked and outthinking Davros was also predictable and disappointing, too.

I guess that’s a case of being careful what you wish for: two weeks ago, I’d wanted ‘50 minutes of the Doctor debating morality and ethics with the Dalek’s creator,’ and when the script concentrated on that – with Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach at the top of their game – you forgot about the limitations of the set-up, and were swept up in the idea of Davros being given a redemptive death by the Doctor showing him some compassion. That’s a lovely blurring of the moral certainties around the characters that was completely flattened by the clichéd ‘I wasn’t fooled for a minute!’ ending.

(Image copyright: DC Comics, 1988)

When ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ established the idea that Davros and the Doctor are in many ways the same, as well as suggested this was because he’d been responsible for the creation of Davros as we’d previously seen him, I was reminded of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. In that, Batman is shown to have created the Joker when, trying to avoid the caped vigilante, he jumps into a vat of chemicals that transform his appearance and drive him insane. ‘Under the Lake’, the episode following ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, is full of obvious fantasy references, but the latter had a subtler form of homage, confirmed this week when the Doctor and Davros both laugh at the joke ‘You’re not a very good Doctor’; The Killing Joke ends with the Joker and Batman laughing at a joke his nemesis makes (above).

Moffat also snuck in another two pleasing references, one to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the other to Michael Caine’s ‘60s caper movie The Italian Job. (I’m not going to say what they are: you can have fun working it out). I’d also bet that the Doctor zooming around in Davros’s chair among the Daleks – a great image – was inspired by a 1960s TV Comic strip in which the Second Doctor commandeers the bottom half of a Dalek and does the same.

Those incidental pleasures aside, what concerned me most about the opening Dalek two-parter was the way it recycled a lot of previously used Doctor Who ideas: the Doctor missing/on the verge of death, the impossible girl imprisoned inside a Dalek – even if the psychology behind that was a clever touch – and Daleks turning on Daleks are all ideas that have been done before, some of them very recently. I can’t decide if the decrepit Daleks made of sewage rising up against the Dalek/Time Lord hybrids – the Daleks being defeated by their own crap, effectively – was an inspired concept or the most risible that Doctor Who’s ever come up with. The jokey line ‘Dalek Supreme, your sewers are revolting’ didn’t help.

You can have all the stunning production values and set pieces you want, but ‘Sorcerer’/’Witch’ relied too much on them, at the expense of what Doctor Who’s always done best – tell a good, well thought out story.

Bit to rewind: Missy pushing Clara into the sewer.

UNDER THE LAKE

Not telling a good story isn’t a criticism you could make of Toby Whithouse’s first script for Capaldi. A new take on the classic Doctor Who scenario of an isolated based under siege, it was genuinely creepy, atmospheric and strange. It might have been built from the science fiction films Solaris, Quatermass and the Pit, the Alien movies, The Abyss and Event Horizon, but Doctor Who has always borrowed from other fictions. It’s the flip side to filling a story with predictable series continuity – making something creatively new from external sources.

‘Under the Lake’ has what I like best about Doctor Who: a situation the Doctor hasn’t encountered before, so he has to work it out with the help of the new people he encounters, who in turn gradually come to trust him. That concept never gets old, as you can take it in so many directions. Ghosts under water? Terrific.

OK, there could have been bit more conflict and character among the base crew, but, for the first time in a very long time in Doctor Who, it was great to see someone who was disabled, the deaf Cass (played by the deaf actress Sophie Leigh Stone), in a position of authority. I had hoped she would be there as a virtue of her fitness for the job, so it was slightly disappointing her deafness became a plot point as she was able to lip read what the ghosts were saying. Still, a major step forward.

The pace was slow, but it needed to be, and I enjoyed the long, cerebral dialogue scenes. Sonic sunglasses? Not sure, although Capaldi looks good in them, but what I didn’t like was the cliffhanger that revealed the Doctor had apparently died – again! Is anyone paying attention to the order these stories are shown in?

So far, the opening two stories are the reverse of each other: Moffat’s full of recycled Doctor Who ideas with understated genre allusions, Whithouse’s a new take on a staple Doctor Who format with obvious, but cleverly reinterpreted, cinematic reference points.

I’m really looking forward to next week, but here’s a thing: can we please have a new Doctor Who story that doesn’t owe a huge creative debt to something else? We did last year.

Bit to rewind: The Doctor sorting through his ‘tactful’ prompt cards.

While I was typing this up in the library, a young boy from a visiting class was excitedly telling his teacher about the opening Dalek story.

What do I know?