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BBC The Night of the Doctor |
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| Dates | November 14, 2013 | 
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With Paul McGann, John Hurt
Written by Steven Moffat Directed by John Hayes Executive Producer: Steven Moffat |
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BBC The Night of the Doctor |
|
| Dates | November 14, 2013 |
|
|
With Paul McGann, John Hurt
Written by Steven Moffat Directed by John Hayes Executive Producer: Steven Moffat |
| Synopsis: The Doctor is back. But probably not the Doctor you were expecting. |
A review of The Night of the Doctor, and unfeasibly more besides by Mike Morris 29/1/14
I know it's a bit silly to review a seven-minute mini-episode, and more than a bit churlish to tear into something so inconsequential. All of that is a sort of disclaimer, since that's exactly what I'm about to do. My issue isn't with The Night of the Doctor so much as what it represents. I've liked quite a lot of the series lately, but there are a few things that I dislike intensely; I guess I have a few of those "tiresome complaints and naysayings of fanboys who still wanted their precious RTD back" (copyright Thomas Cookson, who you may recall has often wished the series ended in 1980, but aside from that detail never complains about anything) - and The Night of the Doctor is almost exclusively made up of them. This review probably takes longer to read than it will to watch the actual short, but rest assured that I'm being deliberately disproportionate. If I pour all my annoyance in here, I might be able to talk about the good recent episodes without complaining. I might even enjoy the finale, if I'm lucky.
So, what is this? It's not a story in its own right, and it's not intended to be. It's a dramatic introduction into a new corner of the Doctor's mythology, and in the purely functional sense it does what it's intended to. Paul McGann gets the farewell he never got in any medium. In the 90s you could easily imagine that they would have tried to reboot the series with an opening scene like this, and that - in its way - tells you exactly why the climate in television of 1996 ensured that McGann never became the Doctor he could have been (increasingly, one of the most impressive facets of Rose is the all the things RTD didn't do). This little short is designed to leave the viewer shouting for more, and it does that in one way only: I really, really want them to do a mini-series starring the McGann Doctor. He's great.
As for the rest... well, there's not a great deal to say. It's nice for fans that people like Charley Pollard et al are written into official existence (although it seems that Sam, Fitz and Trix really don't count, so screw you if you liked the novels). The return of the Sisterhood of Karn, though, is interesting for precisely one reason: the question of who they were introduced for. Casual viewers will almost certainly find them baffling, alienating and cliched, while fans who've seen The Brain of Morbius will be nonplussed by their perfunctory appearance. So they really only appeal to people who've read about The Brain of Morbius, but never actually seen it. Doctor Who is beginning to resemble its 80s self in one of the worst possible ways but, as the links to the past tends to be introduced with - let's be fair - a rarely wavering accuracy and competence, many fans find this exciting rather than derivative and tired. It's the twenty-first century, and we're all JNT now.
One of the odd things about Steven Moffat is how determined he is to style himself as some sort of antifanboy. He's happy to send up parts of the series' mythology, ranging from the talk about dancing in his earlier stories, to the TARDIS dematerialisation noise being ascribed to the handbrake being left on. All of that might seem like the actions of a self-styled enfant terrible, except that demythologising elements of the series always seems to goes along with an emphasis on absurdly mythologising the Doctor. Moffat's not the first writer to do this, but he's certainly the most relentless; he's pulled the trick of the Doctor resolving a situation by saying "don't you know who I am" more times than most of us can count at this stage (lest we forget, Matt Smith's very first episode finishes up with him frightening off the bad guys by showing them a highlights reel). It reaches its apex in A Good Man Goes To War, really; that's a story where the Doctor spends twenty minutes showing up and frightening people just by being there, but - beneath all that sound and fury - doesn't actually do anything on-screen. He performs two meaningful acts (that's literally correct, I'm not being sarcastic), and we don't see him doing either. Between blowing up a Cyberfleet to show how double-hard he is (which gets the story off to a crass start from which it never recovers) and somehow impersonating a headless monk as if we're not even supposed to even ask "how" or "why" any more, we get repeated scenes of people talking about him. Look at how important he is! Look, look!
So. Mythologising the Doctor is what this mini-episode is about, and all it's about. It's not as obnoxious as A Good Man Goes To War, thank goodness - the Doctor doesn't wind up giggling like a sociopath in front of two traumatised parents who've just had their child kidnapped - but it's still the work of a writer who thinks he doesn't have to even try to impress his audience, he just has to tell them to be impressed and that'll do. The Night of the Doctor expects us to be awestruck because the Sisterhood keep going on about the Doctor like he's important, and that's it. There's nothing on-screen to even tell casual viewers why the Sisterhood matter, bar some opaque stuff about their potions; we're meant to wowed because they foretell vague things in a cave, and - y'know - soothsayer types are always important, right?
Similarly, Cass is scared of the Doctor just because of who he is. In a way that's appropriate, in fairness, but it still means the interaction between her and the Doctor is just jotted in like dramatic shorthand. We don't get know her or care about her, really; we get less insight into her than we've got into fairly minor characters like (say) the doomed consultant in Smith And Jones, and her death is treated with less importance than that of fairly minor characters like (say) Lynda's doomed housemate in Bad Wolf. Some people might retort that the story's not really about her, but it still means that none of the impact on the Doctor feels meaningful. Cass is supposed to be a catalyst for the Doctor doing something momentous but, prior to the arrival on Karn, all we get is two ciphers jumping through character hoops to set up The Doctor's Big Decision. Get beyond the artifice and look at how these scenes really work: this Doctor's swansong is terrifyingly similar to Colin Baker's, except people make Big Important Speeches and the effects are better.
And there's the second problem: the only way this show seems to know how to up the stakes is to be more portentous than last week. It reminds me Rob Matthews' old maxim that the most interesting Doctor Who story is always the next one. This was a wise observation in the days of Gary Russell "novels", but these days I'd modify it to say it's the one that's on right now. Why? Because under Moffat it feels like the focus is always on what's going to happen, and telling us about big things to come is increasingly what this show does instead of - well - actual drama. Moffat was promising us things from the start - Silence will fall, the Pandorica will open, the Doctor will die, his name will be revealed - and it was intriguing initially, but it's resulted in a version of Doctor Who where the form is more predictable than ever before. It's like the way that trailers for the show might display different things... but you know they're going to open with moody close-ups and a voiceover, and then feature fast-cut action sequences and a one-liner before the screen goes black and the music goes thud at the end.
So: we always know there's going to be an overarching plot for the season, and we know the big questions won't be answered until the end. Moffat didn't start this trend (hello Russell!) but, more than ever before, the stories themselves aren't as important as reaching the Next Big Revelation. It makes the series into an extended trailer, essentially, with all the predictability that implies. To pick the most recent example: there's no reason that The Name Of The Doctor couldn't have aired immediately after The Rings of Akhaten or Hide, and just allowed the remaining stories to be interesting in their own right. Unfortunately this just wouldn't occur to anyone involved, because the stories themselves aren't as important as disembodied heads shouting portentous infodumps about the oldest question in the universe. Many people described the end of The Almost People as "shocking" because of its plot-twist, but I'd rather have been shocked by an episode that didn't exclusively feature a load of white knockoffs from Alien, didn't have shadows and people shining blue lights at things (again), didn't conveniently make sure there was only one surviving iteration of everyone by pure coincidence, and didn't provide a quasi-cliffhanger to a finale regardless of whether it was appropriate or not.
The big example can't be avoided any longer. Ever since Clara made her appearance we've been repeatedly told she's impossible, and this is why we're supposed to be interested in her. But bar a backstory they can barely get out of the way quick enough (the Doctor guesses it and rattles it out in six seconds) and the honourable exception that is The Rings of Akhaten, we hardly know a thing about her. There's no sense that she even exists, really. What makes her tick? What does she do when she isn't babysitting? What are her interests? Did she go to uni? Did she have many boyfriends? If Clara were to reveal she's married, or a lesbian, or has an estranged heroin-addicted brother, or gave a daughter up for adoption... none of this could genuinely shock us, because she's nothing more than a walking MacGuffin. We know she's Important, because she's Impossible, and that's all that's really supposed to matter. When her impossibility is finally explained, it's actually pretty underwhelming, a good premise thrown away on a montage sequence that doesn't really tell us anything about how such an experience would feel, but we're not supposed to notice because the show's now expecting us to ask OMG OMG WHO'S JOHN HURT???
To summarise: if the COMING SOON looks momentous enough, this programme now thinks it doesn't matter how dramatically inert the rest is. Doctor Who is essentially a two-hander of a series, so having one of these as a shiny middle-class girl in her early twenties (yes, again!) with no discernible character traits beyond a Buffy-inspired hyperwit should be a non-starter - but Doctor Who isn't really about the drama right now, its about the iconography. The "movie poster" line has unwittingly become the raison d'etre of the whole experience.
And ultimately, that's what The Night of the Doctor is. It's a trailer, a movie poster, leading into another story promising us big revelations. Which is fine, really, except that its one big reveal just makes the show less dramatic. Part of the allure of the new series is the Doctor's struggle with what happened in the Time War - but now we're given a comfortably "rogue" figure into which we can just decant all that tension, and this immediately makes the Doctors of Smith, Tennant and (particularly) Eccleston into less interesting figures. So it goes. The more I'm told to quiver in anticipation at the coming spectacular, the more I just want it to be over and done with, get the decks cleared, and hope that Peter Capaldi knocks the self-indulgence out of what's becoming an alienating corporate behemoth.
Right, that's that off my chest. I must write a review of Series Seven now. I quite liked it, you know.
...No More by Noe Geric 11/1/24
Whatever people think about Paul McGann as the Doctor, whether they've listened to his audios adventures or not, it was really worth waiting nearly 20 years before seeing him again in the role for six minutes. It's watching this episode that reminds me it could've been fantastic to have some more episodes with him, even if they're only five minutes long! McGann came back for his regeneration story and, while it's the shortest yet, it's one of the most powerful. We haven't really seen the Time War on screen, and we never should. Big Finish is trying to do War Doctor/Master box-set about it, and it's hardly working (I've listened to The Agent of Chaos one, and it was definitely crap), so seeing the greatest war of all on TV would just detract the effect and consequences of it.
In this very short story, we see the 8th Doctor at the end of his life, in the middle of the Time War. First clever thing from Moffat: We don't see anything of the Time War. Just a spaceship crashing. We just get to imagine it with the use of words describing things we can only theorise on what it is: The Nightmare Child, the Crucible... But (second clever thing) from Cass's reaction, we know how the Time Lords are seen. How everyone thinks they're evil and dangerous. The 8th Doctor refuses to takes part in the war, and it's this little adventure that'll turn him into the War Doctor we know. We don't need to see the Time War, but we do need to feel the consequences of it! Coming back to Karn for his regeneration was a small continuity reference that managed to explain how he became a warrior (because of the elixir) and hearing TV McGann mentioning his audios companions is something I'll never be bored of (a bit sad that Izzy, Fitz, Kroton and all the other companions from the DWM and BBC books aren't mentioned).
The Night of the Doctor is the episode everyone (since 1996) was waiting for without knowing it. And while The Last Day was incredibly useless, it's this sort of short episode the 50th anniversary special needed! Paul McGann's performance is incredible, and Cass (even as a short-lived character) manages to have an impact on him. She reminds me of a mix between Compassion and the War Doctor friend Cinder. I just wish, like nearly every fanboy, that McGann had another TV adventure. Yeah, audio stories are ''good'' (I won't mention the crisis Big Finish is passing through with their obsessions with quantity), but we can't actually see McGann in his TARDIS. There's something missing from audios: visuals. Still, we get this short adventure, and I sincerely hope we'll see more of him in the future... it's one of these character-driven short stories I'm fond of! 9/10