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No one move a muscle when the dead come home
The ironic aftereffect of viewing The Night of the Doctor (2013) last thing before bed is that I woke up wanting a time machine. The Doctor who sold his soul, sacrificed his name, gave away everything he stood for and became a monster to fight monsters? Of course I want him played by John Hurt. And then I want a series of that nameless Warrior seen for just one stinger moment in that fire-polished ripple of metal: Doctor no more . . . I have always thought John Hurt was beautiful, especially in his dark, watchful younger years. He always looked a little bruised around the eyes, even when the rest of him was boyish; he's a good face for someone I suspect of deploying the Gallifreyan equivalent of the Deplorable Word to end the Time War. I imagine we'll find out the full story in "The Day of the Doctor," but it will still be just a flicker, like this glimpse of Paul McGann. Thirty-year-old John Hurt is not happening without serious technology. (Neither is more onscreen McGann, I am afraid, although at least in his case there's years of radio drama to catch up on.) It's still probably most I've enjoyed a script by Steven Moffat since "Blink." And I can write wistfully about the rest.
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And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes. Of the half-season I saw, I liked "Hide" best: it slingshots the ending, but until then it's a very classic '70's BBC ghost story with a fragile romance that actually convinces me. As long as Caliburn House has existed, it's been haunted by the "Witch of the Well," a whitely screaming apparition with one hand outstretched, always appearing in the same pose—and from the same angle—no matter where in the house it's sighted. The place has become one of those daunting ruins approached only by ghost hunters or debunkers or exorcists, of which the latest pair are Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling: she's the mental medium and he handles the technical end of things and they are visibly, painfully in love with each other, but she's so skinlessly sensitive to emotions (and understandably withdrawn because of it) that she's convinced herself that all she's picking up from him are her own hopeless feelings, bouncing endlessly in a cage of mirrors, while he has an entire history with the SOE that he doesn't let anyone know because it sounds tricky and glamorous when recited out rapid-fire like a magician's patter (thanks, Doctor), but to him it just recalls all the young men and women he ran as agents until they died. He'd love to be proven wrong, to know there are ghosts after all; then he'd have someone to apologize to. And halfway through this plot that would make an entirely reasonable story all by itself (ghost of Nigel Kneale on the line, please hold), Clara and the Doctor drop in from the cold rainy night and it isn't that I object to the resolution of the mystery, I just didn't like how suddenly we hurtled into it. "The Crimson Horror" was even more frustrating, because it would have been brilliant as a two-parter. As presented, the mystery of Mrs. Gillyflower's Sweetville and its millenarian model community is half penny dreadful and half real horror, but none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks. The relationship between a scarred blind woman and a mute monster is a staple of the genre and reframing it between the daughter of a mad scientist and the half-paralyzed Doctor she has to hide from her mother is very clever, but it's over as soon as it's onscreen. (Points for casting Diana Rigg and Rachel Stirling as mother and daughter, but they don't get enough time to themselves, either.) The late-breaking revelation raises more questions than it answers, because it wasn't at all clear there was a question there to begin with. And I like Madam Vastra, Jenny, and Strax as an irregular gang of crime-fighters, observing just enough of Victorian custom to set off their casual queer alien comfort all the more, but they too vanish into the need to tie everything up by the forty-five-minute mark. It was a crowded sketch of something that should have been a classic. Yes, every episode we got little hints and whispers about Clara and the universe and Trenzalore and the Doctor's destiny, but that didn't excuse for me how insubstantial everything else around them appeared to be. It made for a very strange viewing experience. "Nightmare in Silver" was a great showcase for Matt Smith persona-switching at the slap of a face, but otherwise? Something? I couldn't find it.
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And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes.
[...]
none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks.
Which is all the more disappointing because we know, from the episodes Moffat did when Davies was running the show, that he's really good at building that kind of mood, when he's only writing a one-shot or a two-parter. The man is a walking font of Nightmare Fuel. But it seems that when he got put in charge, his focus shifted to the bigger picture, and he doesn't seem to have the knack for building that bigger picture out of smaller, self-contained blocks.
I mean, he does some excellent larger-scale metaplot. The Pandorica business looped around to an earlier episode in a way that made my jaw drop, because at the time nothing about that earlier episode seemed odd, but the later bit slotted into place seamlessly and recontextualized the whole thing. The tangled knot of the River Song storyline is really impressive, and led up to the closing lines of series 6, which I thought were just brilliant. But he's so busy juggling the pieces of those things, he drops other stuff.
I had heard that the BBC smacked him for being too metaplot-focused, and told him to go back to things being more monster-of-the-week. Either that wasn't true, or it didn't take?
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Y HALO THAR WEEPING ANGELS.
I had heard that the BBC smacked him for being too metaplot-focused, and told him to go back to things being more monster-of-the-week. Either that wasn't true, or it didn't take?
I don't know. If so, I feel kind of like the second half of the latest season got the worst of both worlds.