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• Suw Charman-Anderson, Queen of the May (Chocolate and Vodka). A well-known analyst and journalist, she is also an interesting blogger and a very good author. As with her previous novella Argleton (which is great, go read it), Queen of the May starts by taking you to what might seem like a familiar journey and then slips sideways. Argleton took a very prosaic trek to find the eponymous copyright-trap shadow-town inserted in Google Maps (for real) and tipped into science fiction. Queen of the May starts with a English-Indian botanist taking a walk in a neighbourhood park but then marches in to Fairyland. Ultimately, this novella is about female autonomy and feminism. Loved it.

• Darren Naish, Cryptozoologicon: Volume I (Irregular Books). I like cryptozoology. It's amusing to me. All these creatures that some people want so much to exist, all the legends of both supernatural and pseudo-natural animals that live in our collective imaginings and traditional lore! I just love them. I love to read about them. So when a blog I read suggested this book would "change the way we look at cryptozoology" (and because the Kindle edition was very cheap), I bought it. I was very dissapointed. Not by the creatures and the lore, but by the tone. Naish claims to aim at presenting what is actually known about cryptids based on what is purported about them, and to do so in good humour. Unfortunately, the text quickly becomes a laughing fest at the expense of all those who believe in cryptids. Even the sections where Naish tries to construct hypotheses to support the possibility of each animal fall into nasty snark. Naish could have very easily kept a neutral tone (cryptozoologists' beliefs are ridiculous all on their own) and the book would have been better for it.

• Philip Reeve. The Roots of Evil. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). This, this! This is what classic Doctor Who was about! The Fourth Doctor and Leela (whose dress we don't have to see, because there are no images!) land on a Heligan Structure, a type of tree that grows in a planet's atmosphere to terraform it. But this one is different, for one it is enormous. Together, they must battle the tree's inhabitants hell bent on enacting generational vengance on him but also the tree itself, that has suddenly come to life and seems willing to kill everyone. Reeve writes in a style that echoes the campiness of Tom Baker-era DW. The tone is perfect.

• Patrick Ness. Tip of the Tongue. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrive in a small Massachussetts twon in 1945 when a new gadget has become all the rage. Truth Tellers are a device one attaches to one's mouth that always tells inconveniant and untold truths. The town is falling appart because of it. The Doctor, Nyssa and two of the town's most marginalized kids discover the sinister (and extra-terrestrial) plot behind what all the cool kids are doing. An interesting read, but it need not have been a Doctor Who story to make sense.

• Richelle Mead. Something Borrowed. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Sixth Doctor and Peri (whose accent we cannot hear, thankfully) land on the resort planet Koturia and are immidiately attacked by tiny pterodactyls. As expected, the Rani is involved. There is a wedding, double-crossing, Las Vegas-size hotels and a lot of running up and down stairs. Cute.

• Malorie Blackman. The Ripple Effect. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The entire universe has been completely rewritten. Hundreds of races that used to exist no longer do and hundreds that were once destroyed exist again. Oh, and the Daleks are a gentle, benevolent, philosopher race. The Doctor and Ace go to Skaro to visit the Dalek Academy and try to figure out what happened. An interesting conceit, even if Ace does not get to blow anything up. Yes, of course, it's all the Doctor's fault.

• Alex Scarrow. Spore. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Eighth Doctor, in action mode, lands in Nevada tracking a bio-engineered spore, designed to convert organic-matter to geo-form planets. Can he save Earth before everyone is turned into black goo? Of course he can, but it's the adventure that counts.

• Charlie Higson. The Beast of Babylon. (Doctor Who Digital, Puffin). The Ninth Doctor, in action mode, physically fights mysterious dual creature, while a young girl called Ali watches on. She decides that the big-eared stranger is her key to outer-space adventure. I particularly like how Higson introduces the fact this is not taking place on Earth.

I only have one of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary novella to read yet. After, on to something in French I think.

Long belated post: the 2013 Doctor Who Christmas Special

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This post has been in drafts since 26 December, but I have been so sick that I completely forgot to finish and post it! Better late than never.

I liked the Christmas special this year. I thought it was among the good ones. It's not as good as The Next Doctor, which I think is the best, but was is on par with A Christmas Carol. Let's face it, Doctor Who Christmas Specials tend to be underwhelming in general. The Runaway Bride was good because of Donna, who stole the show, but otherwise it was rather meh. And let us all forget the one with Kylie Minogue and the Titanic in space, shall we?

This time, we had to say farewell to Matt Smith. It was not a heartbreaking experience for me, since I can't say I ever really liked his Doctor. Still it was well done. A lot of it did not make sense, but it's not really an issue on account that Doctor Who rarely does completely makes sense. This time, a lot of the muddled story line was due to needing to wrap up as many dangling plots as possible: the question about the Doctor's name, the Silence, the Fields of Transalore, The Fall of the Eleventh, the Church, River Song's existence, the numerous times all of the Doctor's enemies worked together to kill him, as well as the one new question raised by the The Day of the Doctor, where the hell are the Time Lords now?

We got answers to all of those, plus a town inexplicably called Christmas, snow, merriment and cheer, despite Weepings Angels, Wooden Cybermen and Daleks finding a way through the forcefield into the town. With the Doctor trapped on Transalore for a few hundred years, we saw him actually have a full life into old age (though, urgh, bad make-up on Matt Smith, oy) which allowed him to fully heal his emotional wounds from the Time War and find peace. He did not mind dying at Transalore, and this made his (miraculous, Deus ex machina to the tenth power) regeneration into Peter Capaldi a truly happy thing. He got to say good-bye to an imaginary Amy Pond (though no Rory, boo) and became Twelfth in the blink of an eye (which I believe is novel). All in all, it was a good end for Smith. Not heartbreaking like Tenth's, but rather full of glee. I do not think this Christmas Special will be memorable, but it should be notable at least for that.

Because I never really took a shine to Smith's Doctor (River was my thing), I am not sorry to let him go. I am super exited for Capaldi. He fits my idea of the Doctor better than Tennant or Smith ever did*. Eccleston was incredible, but he was supposed to be different from all his previous incarnations. Capaldi reminds me a bit of Pertwee, which if I am honest is really my Doctor. Pertwee was certainly my first Doctor in any case. So I look forward to seeing Capaldi remind me of "Snob Guy".


* Although, really, don't we all deserve a female Doctor by now? Really?

Also see previous DW posts:

50th Anniversary special and its prequels

An Adventure in Time and Space

All the other "Specials"

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Specials, part 3: the rest, not least.

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Part One: The Day of the Doctor and prequels

Part Two: An Adventure in Time and Space

 

There were two other specials, less official in nature, that were nevertheless absolutely delightful and I think my favorites overall. I'll write about the Peter Davison comedy short and move on to The Light at the End audio play.

Peter Davison, as 5th Doctor, was known to me as Celery Guy in my youth when I stole occasions to watch Doctor Who on PBS in English and usually never managed to watch an entire serial. It turned out in the end that Celery Guy was only slightly less insane as a person than Tom Baker, which gives us a nearly endless series of grumpy and/or funny and/or wacko quotes. His recent diatribe on why there should not be a female Doctor being a case in point, marrying illogic and entitlement beautifully. Suffice it to say that I find him hilarious. His history with Doctor Who also didn't end with his dismissal. His daughter Georgina Moffett played Ten's daughter in The Doctor's Daughter, fell in love with David Tennant and married him. They have a child and everything. With all this meta happening, and rumours going around that all the living Doctors would appear in The Day of the Doctor, something was bound to happen.

What happened was The 5(ish) Doctors Reboot. I do not want to spoil this short, but it is extraordinarily funny. It stars Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison, Paul McGann and Tom Baker (ish), in which they try to be a part of The Day of the Doctor. I will leave it there. Watch it. Moffett, Tennant, Smith, Moffat and others, also appear.

It would not have been a proper 50th Anniversary celebration without a proper Big Finish audio play. They were responsible for continuing the adventures of most of the Doctors after their dismissals from the show and from the 1980s on were, lets be frank, the only good source of Doctor Who material out there. Big Finish made Paul McGann as the 8th Doctor and The Night of the Doctor would simply not have been possible were it not for Eight's adventures (most of which were great and are now cannon!). Their contribution to the 50th Anniversary was The Light at the End, starring all first eight Doctors, though primarily the living ones, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison, Paul McGann and Tom Baker, and their (living) companions (i.e. no Sarah Jane). Something happens on 23 November 1963 to ordinary, everyman Bob Dovie that affects all the first eight doctors in a capital way. Time is collapsing unto itself around the Doctors and they must work together to solve the mystery, save Dovie's family and themselves. Of course, the Master is involved. If you are familiar with the voices of the classic Doctors, this thing is very fun. If you are only familiar with Nu Who, you might have a harder time sorting everyone out. This said, as with most Big Finish Doctor Who productions (and there are a gazillion of them) The Light at the End is a very good Doctor Who episode and the reunion many fans was hoping for.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary specials, part 2: An Adventure in Time and Space

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Previous: The Day of the Doctor and related prequels.

 

The short of it: An Adventure in Time and Space was pretty darn good. There were problems, but it was good.

Bringing back the very beginnings of the series for the Nu Who fans who are generally ignorant of what was what back in the old days was a marvellous idea. Mind you, I don't blame the Nu Who fans for their ignorance, I just don't understand why so many of them have not even tried to get informed about it. Anywho.

For the most part, the movie was sweet and emotional, without being sappy and the performances were excellent. David Bradley was extraordinary as Hartnell. He did something with his face muscles that made him look nearly indistinguishable from Hartnell. Lesley Manville as Heather Hartnell was as sweet and subtly smart as she was rumoured to be. Sasha Dhawan as Waris Hussein was endearing, but having never seen him in interview ever, I cannot judge the performance. Jessica Raine as Verity Lambert was a little but too tame for me. Lambert was known for being a marvellous bitch of a woman, but Raine played her as almost meek at times, which did not gel with what I remember seeing and hearing of her. Simply stating in dialogue she was "piss and vinegar" is not enough. As for Brian Cox as Sydney Newman, he was all wrong. Newman was Canadian and cultured. Cox played him with a grotesque American drawl and a wet cigar (though he did smoke cigars). Reece Shearsmith as Patrick Troughton, for all the five seconds we see him, was all wrong as well and the wig was inexcusable. The other characters were generally fine, not notable in any way, positively or negatively. 

Mark Gatiss's scenario was generally strong. The difficulty was to show the birth of DW in context, while making it an engaging story and not a docudrama. The challenge was to make a movie about a show, but to have that story carried by the people around the show, not the show itself. This was generally a success. Using the Tardis chronometer as a means to indicate the passage of time was a good conceit. Using the cast photo shoots to indicate the changes in the series over time was also smart. Overall, where it not for Bradley, though, An Adventure in Time and space would have been much less interesting. He carries the whole thing. His presence makes the movie less disjointed than it inevitably would be. To stop the movie when Hartnell leaves DW was the only way to go. The movie also manages not to glorify the original Doctor Who creators; they are likeable but they are all very flawed, except for Hussein, who is shown as perfect. Being a gay, Iranian man in 1963, it would have been bad form to vilify him in any way considering he is shown as being discriminated against. This is also probably why Lambert is shown as more likeable than she actually was.

In short, An Adventure in Time and Space was touching and a good homage to the artisans that created Doctor Who all those years ago. Were is not for the extremely tacky silent appearance of Matt Smith as Eleven smiling knowingly at Hartnell (a barftastic scene if you ask me), I have rather little negative to say overall. Even the wrong bits felt right in the context of the movie, within the limits of what good movie making demands.

I will watch it again.

Next: The 5(ish) Doctors Reboot and The Light at the End

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Specials, part one.

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Now that the 23rd of November is past, it's time for a spoilery recapitulation of my impressions of all the specials. I want to look at not only The Day of the Doctor itself, but also its two short prequels (I hate that word), An Adventure in Time and Space, the Big Finish audio play The Light at the End and the (kind of) spoof The 5(ish) Doctors Reunion. That is a lot to look at (and to write about) so I'll take two posts at least to go through everything.

In this post, I'd like to tackle The Day of the Doctor and the two prequels first. That way, if you don't want to read about all the other stuff, you can just ignore the other entries.

Spoilers beyond this point.

 

 

I am not going to talk about the thirty-second promotions for the Anniversary celebrations, most of who features Strax, because I did not see them all and those I saw were inconsequential and, frankly, unnecessary.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter remember that The Night of the Doctor left me in quite a state. I was reduced to onomatopoeias for a couple of hours. I do believe I watched it about ten times on that day. First of all, McGann. McGann! Bringing back the 8th Doctor during the heart of the Time War, in the last moments before he chooses to get involved in the conflict, was brilliant of Moffat. Naming all his Big Finish companions, therefore making them canon, was nothing short of wonderful. In many ways, it was all fan service, but what appreciated fan service. It was making McGann a proper Doctor finally, not just the unfortunate victim of the godawful Fox tv movie that so many of us are trying to remember differently than the swill that it was. On top of that, The Night of the Doctor is very well constructed. For a film coming just short of seven minutes, it packs a punch. It brings together Classic Who and Nu Who beautifully, linking The Brain of Morbius, a couple of Big Finish adventures and the Time War right quick. Having Eight come back to Karn (I don't remember the title of the Big Finish where Eight was there), choose to become something else than the Doctor, allows the story to flow, ties up loose ends and introduces the War Doctor. This way, even if Eccleston is not there to be the 9th Doctor, we get a satisfactory explanation of his transition from Eight. Plus, McGann!

The Last Day, in opposition, is much less grandiose and less important for the Doctor himself, though it is very important for the Time Lords. In those short four-some minutes, we see the horrific lengths to which the Time Lords went to fight the Daleks, as well as their sheer arrogance, their sense of superiority. We see the first minutes of the Fall of Arcadia, Gallifrey's second city. This introduces the sets for the planet that well be seen in The Day of the Doctor, as well as important details about this day necessary to understanding a key element of the special.

And what a special! Let's be frank, most Doctor Who Christmas specials and all of the anniversary specials so far have been at best meh (A Christmas Carol, the Three Doctors) or at worst horrifically bad (the 25th anniversary special crossover with Eastenders). Among the specials, I only have love the The Next Doctor, which I find simple but totally delightful (the Red Nose Day's Doctor parody with Rowan Atkinson The Curse of the Final Death was funny, but does it count as a special?). I don't know that I love The Day of the Doctor, but I was bowled over by it. As I have read a lot online: "So many feels!"

The story is again one mostly based on time travel as a story vector rather than a conceit, which is typical of Moffat's doctor. It plays with what time travel does to time in order to drive the story and without time travel, much would simply not be resolved. The Three Doctors present at the heart of the narrative, the War Doctor (an extraordinary John Hurt -- is he ever bad?), Ten and Eleven, find solutions to the issues at hand because they have time-based technologies. The Moment, the weapon used by the Doctor to burn Gallifrey and the Daleks is too a time-based technology, so advanced, it's developed a conscience, which takes the form of the Bad Wolf, i.e. Rose Tyler. Still a little bit of fan service there, but clever enough not to be tacky. it is clear from the script and dialogues that the War Doctor was supposed to be Nine and that Eccleston's refusal to participate (his rightful choice) forced Moffat to work even more on the script to make everything work. How do you have thirteen doctors and yet sill have Matt Smith's Doctor be Eleven and Capaldi's still Twelve? It's a little stretch of logic, but he makes it work. The War Doctor is still Eight, but not quite, and becomes Nine at the very end of the special.

Most importantly, how do you reconcile the fact that the Doctor burned Gallifrey to end the war, that he was irreparably hurt by his actions, but that the planet and the war were time locked in The End of Time and accessible enough to emerge in Earth's sky? If the Time Lords has been destroyed, how could they have been there to haunt the Master for so long and emerge from the broken time lock? And how come Nine, no matter how hurt, does not chose to die, but rather live with the pain of having destroyed his people.

Because he did not destroy them. He time locked them and does not remember that what he did. So their reappearance in The End of Time, however illogical, makes sense to him, because he believes this illogical reality. That is a smart way to reconcile everything, even this blatant paradox in the canon.

Another quite interesting thing about the special is how it treats the three Doctors present in most of the story. The War Doctor is war scarred, but not yet plagued by the actions he thinks he will have to take. Ten is still dealing with the pain, defined by his regret of both the Time War and of having left Donna behind. On the other hand, Eleven is four hundred years older, he admits he readily, and has managed to move on, mostly by forgetting, but still. It makes their interaction even more poignant than the three actors already make it by their on-screen chemistry.

There are lots of fine touches, some fan service, sprinkled in there as well. That all thirteen doctors (One to Twelve, plus the War Doctor) come to Gallifrey to time-lock it is a nice touch; we see them all, though from stock film, except for Capaldi's eyes. That a mysterious British Museum custodian, who may or may not be Four, appears at the end would be unbelievably tacky were it not for the fact that Tom Baker chews the screen like there is no tomorrow. Anyone else would not have been able to carry this otherwise ridiculous scene.

Everything else is fine and cute. Opening the special with the original opening credits was brilliant. I still don't like Clara, but that she's become a teacher in the school built beside the junk yard from The Unearthly Child was great. Plus, she saves the day, which is what companions do and should continue to do. The B plot with the Zygons is fine, though we never do find out how they negotiate a final peace in the end. It's all clever but not profound. This allows the War Doctor's A plot to carry relatively without distraction.

See Part Two, An Adventure in Time and Space.

See Part Three, The 5(ish) Doctors Reboot and The Light at the End.