A Christmas Carol

Just how many ways are there to fit the festive season into a Doctor Who story? I became a little worried at one point that we would end up alternating year after year between modern day glitz and Victorian grime. What we needed was a proper alien, Christmas-in-space special and, despite the Dickensian title, this is wonderfully what we got in A Christmas Carol.

How do you do Christmas in space? Well, if you think about it, lots of planets have Christmas, just as lots of them have a North. The yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the plane of revolution is the reason for the season, you might say. Believe whatever you like, but the reason we have mid-winter festivals (and there have been loads: Hanukkah, Yule, Dongzhi, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, Yalda, Pancha Ganapati, Mōdraniht to name just a few I found on Wikipedia ten seconds ago) is because of the cultural effect upon humans of Earth's passage around the Sun. 

Or, as Moffat puts it with such poetry and economy, for people of all faiths and none, Christmas is the time when we are halfway out of the dark. 

Having freed himself from the shackles of Earthly festivities, Moffat sets about spinning a special that finally manages to conjure up some Christmas magic. In previous years, Christmas has been represented by baubles and shopping and food (or, in The Next Doctor by snow and urchins). It may be true, but it's soulless. A Christmas Carol is soaked, like a pudding in brandy, in a wonderful storybook feeling, from the shadows and firelight of Sardick's sitting room to the thick fog of the town that glitters with fish.

Best of all, Moffat is able to pinch draw upon a recognisable Christmas fable and use time travel to make it into a bona fide Doctor Who story.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

The longest and strongest of Sardick's hauntings is full of wonder but very little can trump the magical moment when the Doctor departs in the TARDIS only to materialise inside the old man's childhood, turning up on the very video he is watching projected on the wall. We've seen a similar trick before in The Beast Below, but whereas that felt like slight of hand, this, enormous and much more powerful, is nothing less than wizardry. It's astonishing to see the Doctor meddling in someone's memories (harking back to Moffat's first piece of Doctor Who writing, the short story Continuity Errors) and Michael Gambon - excellent throughout - effortlessly shows us a man who is changing and being rewritten before our eyes. The relationship between youngest Kasran (played by Laurence Belcher, the latest in a now long line of impressive and not at all annoying Doctor Who child actors) and the Doctor is fun and sincere, and that between Abigail and the middle Kasran scarcely stretches credulity either. Katherine Jenkins, despite misgivings in some quarters, does well as Abigail and I don't even mind her having a sing (it's not opera, which would be a different kettle of fish, and it is Christmas, so why not?). Plus all the business of whizzing from one Christmas Eve to the next is tremendous fun and makes very clear that time travel is an opportunity to experience lost wonders and crash very exclusive parties.

The Ghost of Christmas Present

A very short sequence, but so effective, and one that beautifully illustrates the oh-so-clever way in which a Victorian ghost story can be harnessed for a science-fiction adventure. Amy, thanks to hardlight holography or whatever, appears to Sardick like a phantom and delivers him a message that might as well be from the grave. The mournful singing combines the festive with the ghostly, connects us back to the seasonal setting, and allows Sardick to reject Christmas, humanity and goodwill to all one final time.

The Ghost of Christmas Future

What an ingenious twist. Once again, Moffat and the Doctor do something so clever, so unexpected that we would never have thought of it - and yet (with hindsight) so obvious that we understand it immediately; once again, a conventional narrative is revolutionised and revitalised by the application of transtemporal possibilities.

This show never used to really be about Time, but it has become a major element under Moffat's watch: Amy and Rory both have to wait and wait; River and the Doctor are crossing and missing each other, always out of synch. We've seen how memory is a kind of time travel, how the Angels make time a trap, and we'll see more of these ideas in Series Six. Here, brilliantly, Sardick is miser who hoards time and counts the seconds like pennies, only to realise that the only thing about Time that matters is how you spend it.

NEXT TIME...

The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang

We've had some marvellous episodes since the show came back, a haul of incontestable classics from different writers and different Doctors. Right now, I think this two-parter is the best of the lot. There isn't much to choose between the truly excellent stories, and I'm nervous about claiming that this is better than, say, The Empty Child, Silence in the Library or The Time of Angels. But as a season finale (and one that doesn't disappoint either), the delights of The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang have more impact: the jokes are funnier, the frights, scarier, the twists, even more brain-melty. I've suggested once or twice that Doctor Who might have achieved something of the epic during this run, but here for the first time, in these two episodes, it approaches legend.

One of the best pre-credits ever. Vincent van Gogh! Churchill! River Song! Liz 10! With the mystery of the painting threaded through them, these cameos are electrifying and draw the whole season together. By the time the Doctor and Amy find themselves in Cleopatra's tent, there's a palpable sense of doom.

Stonehenge! There's your legend right there. Those mysterious, seemingly impossible stones, alone on that plain for thousands of years. It seems astonishing that Doctor Who hasn't tried to shoehorn them in before, but thank goodness nobody did because this is the perfect moment for them to appear. And what a clever bit of writing:

AMY: How come it's not new?
RIVER: Because it's already old. It's been here thousands of years. No one knows exactly how long.

Ooh well, it almost certainly didn't look like this back in 102AD, but it was already old and that's the important thing. Moffat shows us a Roman and then stretches our sight back even further into unknowable, ancient pre-history. We end up with a perspective that we would never have had if the TARDIS had just arrived in the Bronze Age.

The Underhenge! Aha, there's no such thing of course, but what a great idea. Instantly Stonehenge is even more mysterious than it was already and our time travellers have an underground chamber to investigate. The music and direction here is especially excellent, with both Murray Gold and Toby Haynes consciously channelling Indiana Jones for maximum effect.

"There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world." Just one of many beautiful bits of dialogue, but ominous and full of (not so) hidden meaning. It's another great Moffat twist hidden in plain sight, but the fascinating thing is that the Doctor, keenly aware of his own inner monster, doesn't recognise himself from this description.

The Best Cyberman Ever. I mentioned before that we never seem to get any good Cybermen stories, but this lone, rusty, partially-dismembered sentry is scary and interesting in a way that we have never seen before. It's a short scene, but the attack is ingenious, relentless and full of images of the sort of body-horror that we should automatically associate with the Cybermen: the skull falling from the head, the arm moving by itself, the headless body marching towards us, unstoppable, murderous. It's excellent and, unfortunately, raised my expectations that a 'proper' Cyberman story would eventually arrive. I'm still waiting.

Rory. I think, looking back, that we all expected Rory to turn up again; we didn't expect him to come back as an Auton Roman centurion. How fantastic is that scene between Darvill and Smith? The Doctor, distracted, oblivious, even calling Rory by name before he realises what has happened. Then the moment of silent realisation, the long stare and that gorgeous exploratory poke in the chest, Rory rocking on his heels and springing back into place. And then, matter-of-fact, they exchange hellos and how've-you-beens, the Roman and the Time Lord, both beautifully British: polite and, understated. "Rory," says the Doctor eventually, "I'm not trying to be rude, but you died." Utter bliss.

The Big Speech. To be honest, of all the marvellous things in this story, this is the one I get excited about least. It seems to be wildly popular but it isn't really the grand oration people remember it as: it's excellent because it's a bluff, because its grandeur is illusory.

The Trap Closes. Having the Auton's turn up - pretty much out of nowhere - is very clever indeed and a lovely chilling moment, especially as the ramifications for Rory become apparent. But the odd collection of aliens that appear to imprison the Doctor, although visually satisfying, is rather too obviously comprised of all the costumes and prosthetics that could be pressed into service. To be honest, a Grand Alliance of Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans might be better. Still, what an incredible climax to this episode: the Doctor, defeated and dragged inside the Pandorica, Rory and Amy briefly reunited and then cruelly separated once again; River trapped inside the TARDIS doomed to explode. And then the stars start to go out.

"Okay kid, this is where it get's complicated." The best pre-credits, so far at least, and a brilliant opening to The Big Bang as the young Amelia, seemingly escaped from the grand canon of children's literature, part Paddington Bear, part Matilda, follows the clues to the mysterious stone cube in the museum. Only to find a grown-up, supposedly dead, version of herself sat inside.

The Business with the Mop, the Fez, and the Vortex Manipulator. Proper hi-jinks. Dirty time-travel shenanigans. Intoxicating, exhilarating, joy-to-be-alive tomfoolery. Has Doctor Who ever been more fun? From the blistering and bizarre appearance of the Doctor to the despairing Rory, to the moment that River blasts the fez to smithereens over the rooftops of Cardiff  London, this is just one long extraordinary giggle.

Rory's Apotheosis. Glorious, beautiful, and deeply-romantic, Rory's transformation from feeble no-hoper to kick-ass, two-thousand year old, sort-of-Auton and legendary centurion is one of the most satisfying character arcs in Doctor Who, and his quiet and dignified resolution to stay and watch over Amy is a very grand romantic gesture indeed. If he doesn't quite sustain this glory in future episodes (he's fairly ordinary again in The Impossible Astronaut), he continues to have outstanding moments (for example in A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler and The Girl Who Waited.)

"Mercy!" River versus the Dalek is cool, unnerving and completely bad-ass.

The Doctor's Plan. Astonishing writing here that again shows how desperately clever the Doctor is. At every point in this episode, the Doctor knows more than we do, more than his companions do, and he never tells us everything. As a result, we are never sure that he knows what he's doing, until the last moment when it becomes obvious that he planned this all along, or at least since the Dalek turned up. "Okay Doctor," says Amy, very satisfied with herself, "did I surprise you this time." The Doctor appears in the TARDIS door, impeccable in white tie and tails, complete with top hat. Only a little sheepishly, he lies. "Er yeah. Completely astonished. Never expected that. How lucky I happened to be wearing this old thing." Before that, there are hints. The ingenious conversation from Flesh and Stone, replayed and revealed here, implies that he is working on something, chancing his arm at an outside bet. More importantly it is clear evidence of Moffat's own long-term scheming. In the final conversation with Amelia, both Moffat and Doctor contrive an air of resignation, as if this really was the end, all the while carefully and invisibly arranging their eventual triumph.

And that's Series Five, immensely satisfying and surely the best so far. By my reckoning seven of the thirteen episodes are impregnable, incontestable all-time classics and none of the other six are anything less than very good either. The show has never looked or sounded better and Smith, in just these few stories, has laid a good claim on being the best Doctor of them all. I can't wait to see if the next two series can match it.


NEXT TIME...

The Lodger

This is the wonderful strength of Doctor Who, one that no other show has. Straight after Vincent and the Doctor, The Lodger is completely different, almost another programme altogether. But it is just as brilliant. This week Doctor Who does sit-com, and serves up a lovely little flat-share comedy.

In the world of comedy pilots it has become a dreadful cliché for odd characters to find themselves moving in together, but this is obviously where Doctor Who, operating in the sit-com genre, must begin. Luckily for us, what writer Gareth Roberts delivers isn't just a one-off, but a whole six part series in microcosm.

1: The One Where the Doctor Moves In.
2. The One Where the Doctor Takes a Shower.
3. The One With the Football Match.
4. The One Where Craig and Sophie (and The Doctor) have a Date.
5. The One Where the Doctor Goes to Work.
6. The One Where They Go Upstairs.

The key to the success of The Lodger is that even if it was unpacked over six half-hour episodes, even if it wasn't Doctor Who, we would all still watch that sit-com. Why does it work so superbly?

Firstly, casting. I know James Corden isn't for everyone but he is a brilliant comedy actor, and he is perfect for Craig, a character who is perhaps a little more restrained and likeable than some of Corden's other sit-com roles. Daisy Haggard, with various comedy series behind her, is an excellent choice as Sophie and together they convincingly portray friends who both secretly wish their relationship could go further. Excellent as Smith's Doctor has already been this series, it is here that he begins to coruscate: truly alien, charming yet socially awkward, incomparable and mercurial, he sets the screen alight here.

Secondly, it is properly funny, making the most of the 'fish-out-of-water' set-up without ever turning into Mork & Mindy. "I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!"; "Pub league: a drinking competition?"; "Where are you strongest?" "My arms." Plus so many more beautiful moments: the Doctor stopping his phone call to eat a biscuit, stealing Craig's free kick, or cooking an omelette. Almost every word Smith says is funny. When Craig suggests the Doctor take a look at his room, Smith rolls the word "room" around his mouth like fine brandy, bemused, amused, delighted, intrigued.

Thirdly, and most impressive of all, The Lodger seamlessly melds the personal/domestic comedy with the requisite SF elements. Very gently, throughout the episode, we and the Doctor are shown how Craig and Sophie's relationship relates to the disturbing events upstairs: "You've got two sets of keys to somebody else's house?" the Doctor says to Sophie. "You must like it here too..." In the final crisis, it is only the conviction of Craig, knowing he has a reason to stay, that saves the day when the Doctor's endless wandering has become a liability.

This really is one of the boys' favourites - they both cried "Craig!" with delight when he appeared on screen - and who can blame them. Funny, lovely, and with an extraordinary performance from Matt Smith, The Lodger is, in it's own way, just as much a triumph as Vincent and the Doctor.


NEXT TIME...

Vincent and the Doctor

Forget Blink. This is the episode you show to people who have never seen Doctor Who before. The name of Richard Curtis, let alone Vincent van Gogh, should be enough to encourage even the most ambivalent to give this one a go, and, within ten seconds Bill Nighy turns up. By the end only the stoniest of hearts, could fail to have become entranced.

Vincent and the Doctor truly deserves to stand alone: an astonishing forty-odd minutes of television that takes the premise of Doctor Who and uses it, TARDIS-like, to travel into new territory. This is the purest piece of time travel tourism in the new series, as we, the Doctor and Amy, simply get to hang out with van Gogh and even see the world through his eyes. There almost doesn't need to be an alien monster hanging around at all. In fact, given that the Krafayis plot is a bit feeble, you'd be forgiven for thinking it might be better to have just got shot of it all together. But, of course, this episode needs those moments of jeopardy to inject some adrenalin into proceedings and to reassure the regular family audience that this still is Doctor Who that they're watching.

Long ongoing series have the right to depart from their normal template for the odd episode, but the results are rarely as wonderful as this. The joy of Vincent and the Doctor is the chance to spend some time with a great artist, seeing the subjects of successive paintings brought to life, or, in the case of Starry Night, watching the world melt into swirling magical brushstrokes. In amongst the beauty we get a brief but serious glimpse of van Gogh's mental illness - a modern taboo discussed compassionately and without judgment in the middle of a Saturday tea-time family adventure serial - and a simply wonderful ending that packs a truly eye-watering emotional punch.

Dr Black's paean to the deeply troubled man he calls "not only world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived" lays it on a little thick perhaps, but this is surely the point: to hammer home the moment, so that we feel its crushing effects, just as van Gogh does, dizzy with camera work, impossible beautiful words in our mind.

Afterwards William sat still, unusually silent, as something heavy had landed on him. He was obviously deeply moved, struggling to accommodate this cocktail of feelings.

"How do you feel? I asked him.

"Happy I guess?" he said. "And sad. I don't know. It's just so much to take in."

Yes, it is. Being stunned, broken open, by other people, by their joy and suffering, by stories, by great art, that's called being alive. Given the chance to see the light of the sunflowers, or the dancing of the stars - that's amazing. Doctor Who took all that and poured into the heart and mind of a ten year old boy watching primetime Saturday night telly, because Doctor Who is the best television programme ever.


NEXT TIME...

The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood

"I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up!"

That's a wonderful, and very Doctorish, line that allows Smith once again to demonstrate his irresistible authority in the role, and it's one of the highlights of this story.

Mid-season two-parters can, if they are not aggressively marketed as 'event' episodes, sometimes feel like a digression, a longueur in which progress towards the conclusion of the series' arc becomes stalled. But while there is a slowness to The Hungry Earth, it is thoughtful rather than ponderous. The situation is established with much care and attention to character, and the tension builds as we wait for the Silurian's to rise from the ground and attack. Things slide a little in the remainder of part one. I can only roll my eyes when the Doctor takes Nasreen away - she's the only competent human available and her removal from the surface makes it painfully obvious and inevitable what will happen. Still, things pick up nicely in Cold Blood, just in time to be dashed all over the floor by the return of The Crack and the loss of Rory.

Poor Rory hasn't really got the hang of this yet. He has more or less blundered his way through these three (four including The Eleventh Hour) adventures, albeit with flashes of bravery. It doesn't help that the Doctor hasn't really got the hang of Rory either - he basically abandons him for most of this two-parter, either oblivious to or uninterested in his new companion's learning curve. Never mind, things will change for both of them soon enough.

Overall, this is not so much New Who as Neo-Pertwee. The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood seems to have been deliberately constructed as an homage to the Third Doctor's tenure. The return of the Silurians is an obvious link back to the early Seventies, but then there's the Welsh setting which evokes The Green Death, the drilling project (Inferno), the dome over the village (The Daemons), and the Doctor brokering a peace deal (many stories, including Frontier in Space). We even get a weird unexplained time travel effect where Amy and Rory see their future selves, like that in Day of the Daleks. In short, it's extremely surprising that neither the Master or UNIT put in an appearance.

It's nice to honour the history of the show (I can't wait for the McCoy tribute episode: all straight-blowing jazz, liquorice allsorts and dark scheming) but this two-parter does rather end up feeling like a mere cover version. The 1970 original (called, wait for it, Doctor Who and the Silurians), in which the Doctor discovers a cell of Homo Reptilia has been discovered, tries to broker a deal which then founders due to aggression and suspicion on both sides. This adaptation doesn't progress things much further. The resolution this time is a little more optimistic, offering the hope of an eventual Human/Silurian compact, a thousand years down the line, but this hardly constitutes a twist.

There is one change. At the end of Doctor Who and the Silurians, the Brigadier, the original human belligerent, was unrepentant about having bombed the lizard men, trapping them underground. His thinking was, at least as he was concerned, pragmatic and militarily sound. His equivalent, Ambrose, similarly represents human aggression, but she is motivated by fear and maternal anxiety. They both get stern admonishments from the Doctor - but in Ambrose's case it is also an exhortation to do better, to be an example to her son Eliot. She does not argue. 

If nothing else, this story makes clear that the serving up past glories is done for the benefit of today's children, not those of the Seventies. There's clearly a lot of nostalgia built in to this two-parter, but really it is designed to be enjoyed best by those who don't remember the Pertwee era. The kids (rightly enough) don't care two figs that the Silurians have been redesigned or that this has all happened before. And I don't really mind either.



NEXT TIME...

Amy's Choice

What if Amy had to choose between the Doctor and Rory? That is the focus of this episode, and it will remain part of the ongoing triangular tension between the three leads for a long time to come.

Amy unambiguously makes her decision here - she chooses Rory, unable to live in a world without him. It is the same decision she will make in The Angels Take Manhattan. Her feelings don't change between these two episodes (apart from when Rory disappears from the Universe), but the audience will forever be teased into thinking that she can't possibly mean it.

When she finds the vanished Rory's engagement ring in The Lodger, we are (albeit briefly) asked to guess that she expects the Doctor to propose. When she halts her wedding reception (The Big Bang) to yank the Doctor back into the Universe, we are almost in The Graduate territory. In The Day of the Moon, Rory is dejected when he hears Amy apparently tell the Doctor that she loves him, while A Good Man Goes to War begins with an outrageous tease that the Doctor might actually be the father of Amy's baby. The implication is that, even if Amy doesn't doubt her decision, the audience is supposedly unable to seriously believe she really wants to be with Rory when the clearly superior Doctor is right there.

It almost doesn't matter what Amy, the Doctor, or the audience think, because of course Rory is the one person who can't shift these doubts. I have heard complaints that Moffat comes across as cock-sure, even arrogant, but one only has to glance at the male characters he has created in shows like Joking Apart and Coupling to see that he has a keen understanding of male insecurity. Rory is very much in the mould of Steve Taylor (Jack Davenport) in Coupling, a man who finds himself in a relationship with an incredible, beautiful woman and can't really understand what she sees in him.

A lot of this is painfully clear in Rory's side of the dreamscape in Amy's Choice. The ponytail is an affectation, something he hopes will make him seem more exciting (c.f. "Bow ties are cool."), while he appears to have been promoted from (let's face it) the emasculated nurse he was before (remember the Psychic Paper called him a eunuch in The Vampires of Venice?) to a full on 'proper' doctor. It's all rather pathetic of course, but it's also rather adorable (and who better than Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye to describe the feeble yet lovable modern man?): despite all this insecurity Rory doesn't stop fighting for Amy and he never stops loving her.

What he never realises is that Amy's Choice is a false one. There is no need for her to decide between the Doctor and her boyfriend because, until New York, she can have both, and the Doctor makes a good deal of obvious fuss about keeping out of Rory's way. The really significant thing is where all these dodgy dreams come from: Toby Jones' wonderful turn as the scene-stealing Dream Lord, very much the trickster. Never has the Doctor's dark side seemed so murky (at least, presumably, until The Day of the Doctor). As it was the Doctor's mind that spawned this unhelpful dilemma, we must conclude that there is some part of him that desires Amy and wishes Rory to be gone. Well, we are all capable of dark thoughts and we don't expect to be judged because of them. And surely it's no surprise to find that the corners of the Doctor's mind are darker than most.


NEXT TIME...

The Vampires of Venice

I was caught off-guard here because the boys were convinced, once we had finished, that this was the best Doctor Who story of all time. It turns out that they say this quite often, but I think it is always sincerely spoken. It leads me to the conclusion that there are two kinds of Doctor Who story, as far as they are concerned: good ones, which might not actually elicit much response, and really good ones, which blow their tiny minds. So I was a little surprised to find this episode included in the second category but, having had a think about it, I've decided they are right.

For a start, it's Venice. Okay, it isn't, it's somewhere in Croatia - but it looks a hell of a lot more like Venice than Cardiff looked like New York in Daleks in Manhattan. The episode can't quite reproduce the astonishing and joyous complexity of Venice, the idea that time and space might even be folded in upon themselves as smokeblue canals and dark alleyways thread this way and that. But what it does evoke is the liminal sense of Venice existing between land and water. The lagoon is a pervasive presence.

The water infiltrates the city in the same way that the Saturnyns have crept into Venetian society, and the episode is full of reflections, shots from beneath the surface and the slow glide of boats. Add in some very nice effect shots like this one (right) and the reproduction of Venice must be considered a terrific success.

With such a wonderful setting it almost doesn't matter what the story is - but the one we get is certainly decent enough. The real strength of this episode is Helen McCrory's fantastic Rosanna, so noble and upright in her splendid Venetian gown, a nurturing mother to her many sons, an embittered refugee and a marvellous flirt. That scene, in which she and the Doctor get the measure of each other, is the highlight of the episode for me. McCrory is a joy, but Smith, with great economy, is extraordinary once more. It's scenes like this, again paired with a charismatic older woman, that should make this new Doctor look like a boy, but they only serve to demonstrate Smith's incredible ability to persuade us of the Doctor's age and natural authority. He doesn't rant or shout, he just eases through the exchanges, perfectly at ease, even mellifluous.

If Smith's Doctor is already the finished article, Rory still has some way to go. His presence here appears to mess up the tried and tested 'single-female-companion' template and I'm sure some members of the audience wondered why the TARDIS needed a wet third wheel. This is, of course, the point of Rory, and Moffat will play with ideas around his redundancy and inadequacy throughout the next two years, often using the Doctor's obvious superiority as a blunt instrument with which to smash in Rory's self-esteem. Here for example, Rory pulls out a pocket torch only for the Doctor to whip out an impossibly large UV lamp. "Yours is bigger than mine," Rory notes. "Let's not go there," mutters the Doctor. The relationship between these two men is absolutely crucial, I think (and more important than that between the Doctor and Amy), and the manner in which Rory slowly escapes from the Time Lord's shadow is one of the joys of this run of stories.


NEXT TIME...