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All right, it's a Jammie Dodger, but I was promised tea!
Because I am a couple of weeks behind, the episode of Doctor Who I watched tonight was "Victory of the Daleks."1 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks has said that the first Doctor you see is always thereafter the Doctor for you; I'm not sure this is true, because Tom Baker isn't my ideal of the role—although as the owner of a seven-foot scarf, I may be disqualified from comment—but I actively like Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor in a way that I did not (pace) David Tennant's Tenth; I like Karen Gillan's Amy. And I was fascinated by this episode, because objectively it was a piece of complete silliness pulling most of its resonance from the enduring anchorage of World War II as the defining myth of modern Britain, and yet it contained a genuinely touching scene in which the Doctor and Amy must convince an alien bomb of its humanity.
The setup is that the Doctor is called to London by Winston Churchill shortly after the outbreak of World War II, except that thanks to the Doctor's freewheeling sense of time, they arrive at least a month after Churchill's call; London is under the Blitz. Fortunately, Churchill has a new secret weapon: they are called "Ironsides" and they seem to have been invented by a Professor Edwin Bracewell, a classically diffident, beaky, labcoat-and-spectacles boy from the back room. They're also Daleks. Clunky, camouflage-painted, Union-Jack-bedizened Daleks blaring "Would you care for some tea?" but nonetheless, the Doctor's oldest enemies. And while Churchill insists they could be instrumental in the defense of London and Bracewell is only too glad to discuss his research, the Doctor's suspicion and fury cannot be calmed and before you can spell exterminate he's whacking away at the nearest Dalek with a wrench, challenging it to reveal its true intentions. Which it does, of course, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a plot. They upload the Doctor's wrathful self-identification to their mothership, they fry the pair of Tommies who come charging into the room. "Stop!" Bracewell yells at his misbehaving Ironsides, "I created you!" In answer, a Dalek ray lances out and reduces the professor's left hand to ash and wiring that he stares at, aghast: "No. We created you."
Cue a merry minuet of aces up the sleeve as the Doctor threatens the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger—and the Daleks switch on all the lights in London just in time for the night's air raid—and Bracewell rigs their own technology against them—and the Daleks reveal that Bracewell is a bomb—and—look, at one point the plot turns on an alien saucer in geosynchronous orbit being attacked by anti-gravved Spitfires with laser cannons, okay? You don't go to Doctor Who for plausible deniability. But Bracewell's shaken horror at his situation is poignant and convincing, even if it only has a few minutes to happen in: "My life is a lie. And I choose to end it." And while there's no physics that would ever make it work, the idea that the bomb can be defused if Bracewell is able to believe himself human, truly, rather than an alien-made machine counting down to the destruction of the world he's always thought he belonged to, feels sentimentally right; a psychomachia. The Doctor tries to evoke memories of things that hurt him, because pain is a human feeling: the death of his beloved parents of scarlet fever, the men who died around him in the mud and misery of the Great War, but it doesn't work. The little red counters keep humming up. Then Amy kneels down beside him ("Hey. Paisley") and asks him about love instead: "Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't? Hurts, doesn't it? But—kind of a good hurt." And because he is able to remember a girl named Dorabella with such a smile and eyes so blue they were almost violet, like the last edge of afterglow at dusk, the red lights die down and whatever the hell an oblivion continuum is is deactivated and the Daleks time-jump off to plot their revenge, while the Doctor politely turns down a cigar from Winston Churchill and promises Bracewell he'll switch him off pronto in twenty minutes, half an hour, tops: "So don't go trying to find that little post office with the ash trees or that girl, what was her name, Dorabella? On no account go looking for her . . . Mind you, you can get a lot done in half an hour."
The result is that rather than thinking about how truly stupid it is to have the Doctor haunted through time by primary-colored pepper pots who all speak like a Kraftwerk broadcast with bad reception, I'm thinking that I should like to see more of Bill Paterson.2 It doesn't matter that the scaffolding for his scenes is scientific tosh. He is real and shattered and being human as best he can. It's amazing what you can get away with if you have the actors and just one right image for the audience to hang on to.
Either that, or it's an ironclad kink thing. Either way, goodnight.
1. I'm sure I could be streaming it all off my computer at this point, but I figure I'll watch the two-parter all at once next week. "The Vampires of Venice" doesn't air on BBC America until the week after that, but I can only pray it makes use of the sixteenth-century corpse with a brick in its mouth. If not, someone had better throw it into the fanfic.
2. Which is how I discovered TV Cream, a fiendish cross between TV Tropes and BFI Screenonline. It is exactly as much of a time sink as this likeness would lead you to fear, with analyses like "This is, you may have gathered, what Leslie Halliwell would have termed 'metaphysical codswallop', and rightly so. But this isn't just any old codswallop. This is pan-walloped breast of finest transatlantic cod, lovingly drowned in a portentous whimsy and herb jus" (Boom!) and tags that range from the only sensible (David Hare, stories all about spies) to the more thoughtful (vaguely symbolic stuff that sticks in the mind, toffs sitting in window seats looking flushed) to the ridiculously specialized = awesome (about half a dozen French infantrymen made to look like slightly more than half a dozen French infantrymen with cunning use of some mirrors, people taping Top of the Pops, Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold). Seriously, don't plan to do anything for the next two hours.
rushthatspeaks has said that the first Doctor you see is always thereafter the Doctor for you; I'm not sure this is true, because Tom Baker isn't my ideal of the role—although as the owner of a seven-foot scarf, I may be disqualified from comment—but I actively like Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor in a way that I did not (pace) David Tennant's Tenth; I like Karen Gillan's Amy. And I was fascinated by this episode, because objectively it was a piece of complete silliness pulling most of its resonance from the enduring anchorage of World War II as the defining myth of modern Britain, and yet it contained a genuinely touching scene in which the Doctor and Amy must convince an alien bomb of its humanity.The setup is that the Doctor is called to London by Winston Churchill shortly after the outbreak of World War II, except that thanks to the Doctor's freewheeling sense of time, they arrive at least a month after Churchill's call; London is under the Blitz. Fortunately, Churchill has a new secret weapon: they are called "Ironsides" and they seem to have been invented by a Professor Edwin Bracewell, a classically diffident, beaky, labcoat-and-spectacles boy from the back room. They're also Daleks. Clunky, camouflage-painted, Union-Jack-bedizened Daleks blaring "Would you care for some tea?" but nonetheless, the Doctor's oldest enemies. And while Churchill insists they could be instrumental in the defense of London and Bracewell is only too glad to discuss his research, the Doctor's suspicion and fury cannot be calmed and before you can spell exterminate he's whacking away at the nearest Dalek with a wrench, challenging it to reveal its true intentions. Which it does, of course, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a plot. They upload the Doctor's wrathful self-identification to their mothership, they fry the pair of Tommies who come charging into the room. "Stop!" Bracewell yells at his misbehaving Ironsides, "I created you!" In answer, a Dalek ray lances out and reduces the professor's left hand to ash and wiring that he stares at, aghast: "No. We created you."
Cue a merry minuet of aces up the sleeve as the Doctor threatens the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger—and the Daleks switch on all the lights in London just in time for the night's air raid—and Bracewell rigs their own technology against them—and the Daleks reveal that Bracewell is a bomb—and—look, at one point the plot turns on an alien saucer in geosynchronous orbit being attacked by anti-gravved Spitfires with laser cannons, okay? You don't go to Doctor Who for plausible deniability. But Bracewell's shaken horror at his situation is poignant and convincing, even if it only has a few minutes to happen in: "My life is a lie. And I choose to end it." And while there's no physics that would ever make it work, the idea that the bomb can be defused if Bracewell is able to believe himself human, truly, rather than an alien-made machine counting down to the destruction of the world he's always thought he belonged to, feels sentimentally right; a psychomachia. The Doctor tries to evoke memories of things that hurt him, because pain is a human feeling: the death of his beloved parents of scarlet fever, the men who died around him in the mud and misery of the Great War, but it doesn't work. The little red counters keep humming up. Then Amy kneels down beside him ("Hey. Paisley") and asks him about love instead: "Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't? Hurts, doesn't it? But—kind of a good hurt." And because he is able to remember a girl named Dorabella with such a smile and eyes so blue they were almost violet, like the last edge of afterglow at dusk, the red lights die down and whatever the hell an oblivion continuum is is deactivated and the Daleks time-jump off to plot their revenge, while the Doctor politely turns down a cigar from Winston Churchill and promises Bracewell he'll switch him off pronto in twenty minutes, half an hour, tops: "So don't go trying to find that little post office with the ash trees or that girl, what was her name, Dorabella? On no account go looking for her . . . Mind you, you can get a lot done in half an hour."
The result is that rather than thinking about how truly stupid it is to have the Doctor haunted through time by primary-colored pepper pots who all speak like a Kraftwerk broadcast with bad reception, I'm thinking that I should like to see more of Bill Paterson.2 It doesn't matter that the scaffolding for his scenes is scientific tosh. He is real and shattered and being human as best he can. It's amazing what you can get away with if you have the actors and just one right image for the audience to hang on to.
Either that, or it's an ironclad kink thing. Either way, goodnight.
1. I'm sure I could be streaming it all off my computer at this point, but I figure I'll watch the two-parter all at once next week. "The Vampires of Venice" doesn't air on BBC America until the week after that, but I can only pray it makes use of the sixteenth-century corpse with a brick in its mouth. If not, someone had better throw it into the fanfic.
2. Which is how I discovered TV Cream, a fiendish cross between TV Tropes and BFI Screenonline. It is exactly as much of a time sink as this likeness would lead you to fear, with analyses like "This is, you may have gathered, what Leslie Halliwell would have termed 'metaphysical codswallop', and rightly so. But this isn't just any old codswallop. This is pan-walloped breast of finest transatlantic cod, lovingly drowned in a portentous whimsy and herb jus" (Boom!) and tags that range from the only sensible (David Hare, stories all about spies) to the more thoughtful (vaguely symbolic stuff that sticks in the mind, toffs sitting in window seats looking flushed) to the ridiculously specialized = awesome (about half a dozen French infantrymen made to look like slightly more than half a dozen French infantrymen with cunning use of some mirrors, people taping Top of the Pops, Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold). Seriously, don't plan to do anything for the next two hours.