Season 9 wrap-up

As Season 9 comes to a close, let's have a little look back.

My scores

Episode 1 - The Magician's Apprentice 9/10
Episode 2 - The Witch's Familiar          7/10
Episode 3 - Under the Lake                   8/10
Episode 4 - Before the Flood                 6/10
Episode 5 - The Girl Who Died             9/10
Episode 6 - The Woman Who Lived     10/10
Episode 7 - The Zygon Invasion            9/10
Episode 8 - The Zygon Inversion         10/10
Episode 9 - Sleep No More                    9/10
Episode 10 - Face the Raven                 8/10
Episode 11 - Heaven Sent                    10/10
Episode 12 - Hell Bent                           8/10

                              Season Average =  8/10

This season started off quite strongly with The Magician's Apprentice, but then again, I'm a sucker for Davros. Sadly this story fell short in the conclusion, as dos the next one. After this little false start, the season was very solid. The introduction of Ashieldr was a breath of fresh air. It's always fun when someone can challenge The Doctor, and Maisie Williams was superb in the role.

The loss of Clara was probably about due. As I've said before though, its impact was considerably lessened by the addition of two more episodes with her appearing, and the knowledge that she had what was likely a considerable life after that. Her death went from a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris to essentially showing her being rewarded for her arrogant behaviour with effective immortality.

For all that though, I know I would love to watch at least a little bit of the Clara and Ashieldr show. The things those girls could get up to.

Have fun, you crazy kids!

Ongoing problems

Thinking about my pet peeves, Season 9 had:

• A whopping 6 episodes with In-Who-Endos
• 3 episodes that resorted to Deus Ex Screwdriver
• 2 episode with problems associated with Needlessly Recurring Monsters
• 1 instance of there being Too Many Monsters
• 1 episode that got a little bit Go, go, go, Geronimo!

I'm not sure, but this could be a record with regards to In-Who-Endos. Most of them added nothing as well, like Clara's couple of references to a lesbian fling with Jane Austin. It's so frustratingly unnecessary.

I thought with the early loss of the Sonic that we'd get less Deus Ex Screwdriver this season, but the immediate introduction of the seemingly even more powerful Sonic Sunglasses kept it relatively alive. Still not as bad as some seasons for actual usage, but as a concept, the sunglasses annoyed me no end. I'm glad to see them go, even if the new design of the sonic is a bit... elaborate.

Add more glowing bits!

The large number of two-parters has all but eliminated Go, go, go Geronimo! as an issue. That said, a couple of those two-parters were probably more like loosely related standalone episodes. The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived could easily have been split up with no loss of coherency. Similarly, Face The Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent were only technically the same story because each picked up immediately after the last and were steps in getting The Doctor to Gallifrey. The stories themselves were reasonably separate.

I'll also point out that most of the stories showed The Doctor in his new Rock and Roll guise, playing the electric guitar for no real reason. I'm categorising this as his Annoying Catch Phrase, and very much got to the More of the Same stage.

Season Arc

The Hybrid arc was one of the most blatant since the reboot. Davros fully explained the prophecy in the second part of the first story, so it was out there early. This meant we had to have several stories that attempted to pile confusion onto the situation by adding a bunch of things that could be referred to as Hybrids like Ashieldr and Osgood.

In some ways, I felt this arc didn't have enough time to play out. Perhaps this is the one drawback of having so many two-parters. It would have been nice to see this arc play out over a longer period. There are a bunch of other things that could possibly be considered Hybrids that could also have been referenced here. River Song is basically a Hybrid. Rose Tyler absorbed the Time Vortex, so maybe that counts. Then there's the Doctor Donna and even Cyber-Danny. References to these as possibilities of being the prophesied Hybrid would have allowed a greater tease and more confusion.

Another way to fix this would be to reorder the episodes. Having Davros' story coming after initial teases of the Hybrid would allow more subtle references to possibly go over audiences heads, only to have Davros reveal the truth around mid-season. A good reordering of the season would be:

Episode 1 - The Zygon Invasion
Episode 2 - The Zygon Inversion
Episode 3 - The Girl Who Died
Episode 4 - Under the Lake
Episode 5 - Before the Flood
Episode 6 - The Woman Who Lived
Episode 7 - The Magician's Apprentice
Episode 8 - The Witch's Familiar
Episode 9 - Sleep No More
Episode 10 - Face the Raven
Episode 11 - Heaven Sent
Episode 12 - Hell Bent

There would of course need to be a couple of minor re-writes, but I feel like this would work quite well. We'd start with the very strong Zygon story which ends with The Doctor looking all shifty when Osgood refers to herself as a Hybrid (rather than him using the term). This wouldn't mean anything to audiences yet, but The Doctor's reaction would show it's important. I'd then downplay the reference to Ashieldr as a Hybrid at the end of The Girl Who Died by not actually using the term. Saying she is part Human, part Mire would be enough. By splitting up the Ashieldr stories, you give audiences time to forget about the Hybrid. Sticking the Fisher King story in there would add confusion by referencing the Minister of War, which I originally took as the season arc, coming as it did straight after the Hybrid thing seemed to be resolved.

After the events of The Woman Who Lived, The Doctor gets depressed about the Hybrid, because he has realised (wrongly) that Ashieldr is it, so he goes on his bender, and we get the Davros story. A quick break from that whole thing with Sleep No More, then into the three-part finale to wrap the season up.

Another small benefit of putting the Davros story mid-season is that The Doctor doesn't lose his sonic, and therefore the Glasses don't need to exist for most of the episodes!

More of the same

Something I've been thinking about for a while now is the concept that the writers of Doctor Who are concentrating more on elements of fan service than writing good episodes. This can rear its head in several different ways, and although it doesn't automatically mean the episode will be bad, it can certainly limit the potential.

A few of the things that I would classify as fan service have broader implications and I have discussed or will discuss in greater detail. Things like the sexualisation of The Doctor and forced inclusion of certain fan-favourite monsters where they don’t really fit. Others are minor quibbles, but when stacked together indicate to me there is a strong desire to pander to the fandom.

"And why not?" you may ask. The fans are the audience. Who are you writing for if not them? Yes, the fans are the audience, but a writer should never let the nebulous "them" dictate direction. Just ask George R R Martin. Fans may love a particular aspect, story or monster, but forcing in more of it doesn't automatically make things better. More often than not it retroactively makes the original thing seem worse.

Sexy Doctor

During Season 2 the relationship between The Doctor and Rose was edging towards platonic. Around this time we got The Girl in the Fireplace, which showed The Doctor's sexual side. This episode was very well received critically and by fans, which may have opened the door to more of these sexual antics from The Doctor, particularly under Moffat's tenure as show runner. He did write that episode, after all.

The beginning of the end.

This all came to a head for me during the 2013 Christmas Special and Matt Smith swan song, The Time of The Doctor. We open that episode with The Doctor prancing about naked and offering to be Clara's boyfriend for realsies, and progress to hyper-sexual innuendos with the leader of the Space Catholics whilst sitting on an alter-shaped bed.

I won't go on about this one, as I've covered it more thoroughly in my article about Hunka hunka burning Doc.

Steampunk Tendencies

I've noticed that Steampunk / Doctor Who mash-ups are a strikingly abundant cosplay theme out there. The crossover between the two subcultures of Steampunks and Whovians is significant. I don't know why it exists, but I'm sure it is the reason for the seeming increase in Steampunk influences in the show of late. Seasons 1-6 each saw a single episode that could fall under the broadest banner of Steampunk, either due to the time period, or the general style. The only season in this time that didn't was Season 4, where the closest is The Unicorn and the Wasp set in 1926.

At the same time, some people may be tempted to include Season 2's The Girl in the Fireplace because clockwork also features heavily in Steampunk. Add to that the three Christmas Specials across this time with Steampunk influences, and you've got eight or nine Steampunky episodes across six seasons. Season 7 then added half that number again with a total of three Steampunky episodes and the 2012 Christmas Special. Of course, it's entirely possible that this is purely coincidental, but I don't think so.

Possibly the Steampunkiest picture you can get without cog wheels.

With the advent of Season 8, however, we saw only one Steampunk episode, which combines the not-quite-Steampunk Clockwork Men with the definitely Steampunk Victorian London setting and, yet again, the Paternoster Gang. Perhaps this was the last hurrah for this particular theme. Time will tell, I suppose.

Another explanation lies in the fact that the Paternoster Gang appear in the last four Steampunk-themed episodes. In that case, it's not so much playing the Steampunk angle as it is trotting out Vastra and company at every opportunity. I've said before, I love the Paternoster Gang and if they had a spin-off, I'd watch the crap out of it, but much like the Needlessly Recurring Monsters, pulling these sorts of supporting characters out too much does lessen their impact.

Rockin' Doctor

And now we enter the Capaldi Age, and we are seeing these kind of things drop off a bit. Twelve is not the heart-throb Ten and Eleven were, and as noted, the Steampunk thing seems to have run its course. But now we are seeing something I can only think of as "Fan Bait", giving the fans something else tangible to focus on as a defining feature, rather than the already different and, in my opinion much more interesting, coldness and moral ambiguity he's been displaying since regenerating.

They are setting The Doctor up with some kind of rock and roll image, complete with electric guitar and those damned Sonic Sunglasses. Now it was fun to see The Doctor ride into that scene on a tank with his sunglasses and guitar. It worked in the context of his strange state of mind at the time. But now it seems we will get treated to a bit of a riff every other episode. And those glasses. I can't say enough how much I hate those glasses. They are probably going to be the equivalent of his Annoying catchphrase.

How did playing the guitar add to his explanation of a Bootstrap Paradox?

The main bit of evidence I have to suggest this is planned comes from the regular feedback surveys the BBC sends out to their Doctor Who Consumer Panel members. Each survey this season has asked respondents to pick two words from a list that describe The Doctor in the episode. One of the listed words is "Rock and Roll." I suppose it could have been there because of the scene in the first episode, but it has remained there in the ensuing three episodes, even the ones where he did not play the guitar. The Marketer in my kinda understands the need to have consistent survey structure, but it also knows that including it as an option was very leading. I feel like any results they get with that ticked will somehow support the Sunglasses, and I can't accept that.

Same Ol' Same Ol'

The thing to remember is that there is a law of diminishing returns at play here. What is awesome the first time becomes good the second time, okay the third and so on. To maintain the same reaction, you need to keep making the thing bigger and better until eventually you get so ridiculous that it becomes a bit of a joke. First we get The Doctor letting a woman into his hearts, but before long he has a list of conquests a mile long. Fans lock into a particular character or monster enough for them to see significant representation amongst cosplayers and BAM! Weeping Angels everywhere!

As the saying goes, "All things in moderation." The Doctor blasting out a couple of songs on an electric guitar whilst wearing sunglasses and riding a freaking tank it pretty awesome. By the end of the season it's just going to be boring.

So essentially, what I'm getting at is that the show has been bogged down in this regurgitation of the same old stuff over and over in an attempt to please the fans, but in the case of this fan, all it is doing is making the show feel stale. Whilst the Capaldi Era appears to be trying to shake things up, it also seems to be falling immediately into the same traps. I hope we can find the balance of keeping things fresh without just turning the show into a procession of memes.

The "Steampunk" episodes

For reference, here's a list of the episodes I was including in my count of Steampunk influenced episodes:

• Season 1 - The Unquiet Dead (1869)
• Season 2 - Tooth and Claw (1879)
• Season 3 - Human Nature/The Family of Blood (1913)
• Christmas 2007 - Voyage of the Damned (retro-futurist steam liner)
• Christmas 2008 - The Next Doctor (1851)
• Season 5 - Vincent and the Doctor - (1890)
• Christmas 2010 - A Christmas Carol - (retro-futurist Dickensian)
• Season 6 - A Good Man Goes to War - (Madame Vastra and Jenny)
• Season 7 - A Town Called Mercy (Wild West, late 1800s); The Snowmen (1892); The Crimson Horror (1893); The Name of the Doctor (some time in 1893, plus the look of the Whispermen)
• Season 8 - Deep Breath (Victorian London and the Paternoster Gang)

Review - Deep Breath

The Doctor suffers the usual regeneration confusion in the first episode of Peter Capaldi's run, Deep Breath.

Series 8, Episode 1 - Deep Breath

Sorry for the delay on this one, but I've posted some initial thoughts over on Geek-O-Rama.net. Below is the same review, with my suggested fixes as always.

Much like previous regeneration episodes of the New Who, we spend most of the time seeing the doctor getting his head around who he is now. He spends much of the first half of the episode being confused and forgetful. At the same time Clara spends the first half of the episode not knowing how to handle The Doctor's change to an older form.

We touch again on the theme of Companion abandonment, both physical and emotional, as Clara comes to terms with The Doctor's wholesale change and later when he runs off, gets a taste of that "what now" feeling we've seen companions deal with before.

It's made clear fairly early on that there will be no hanky-panky with this Doctor, leading to the final scene in which he makes it emphatically clear that he is not Clara's boyfriend. Early on, Vastra lays it down wonderfully, putting Clara, and by proxy certain segments of the audience, in their place.

For all her protestations, much of Clara's issue with The Doctor's regeneration does seem to relate to physical looks, so that whole scene is quite gratifying in many ways. On the other hand, Clara's implication that she's into older blokes could be a worrying indication that we've not seen the end of Hunka Hunka Burning Doc.

But how could he possibly have adventures in space and time when he's so... grey?

Bringing the Clockwork Men back was an odd choice and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I always thought more could have been done with them, but this felt a bit ham-fisted. Why did they need to be from a sister ship? In The Girl In The Fireplace it was established that it was the destruction of the mission computer that caused the maintenance droids to start cannibalising the crew. Are we to believe this happened twice? I'd have rather seen this as the same group of droids that had all come through a time window and become trapped. I'd hesitate to file this under Needlessly Recurring Monsters as this was only their second outing, but they were clumsily brought back, which is a characteristic of that particular problem.

Sure, I could have harvested a whole face, but where's the fun in that?

The dinosaur was a bit of a nothingness though. It served almost no purpose in furthering the story, apart from a very public immolation. I suppose it did bring the Paternoster Gang there, but I suspect a blue box crashing into the middle of Victorian London would probably have done the same thing. Not exactly a Too Many Monsters type situation, but more of a red herring.

Don't look at me. I'm irrelevant.

This episode went to great lengths to show the parallels between The Doctor with his multiple regenerations and the Clockwork Man with the constant replacing of its own parts. The broom analogy was a good one, which coincidentally I had seen used only recently as I read Terry Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight. I'm not sure if the silver tray scene was taking this too far or not. I think I liked it though. I do worry that this "who am I" business will become a sub-plot that takes up too much of this season.

There are a few choice In-Who-Endos between Vastra and Jenny, but nothing excessively crude. I even chuckled at a few points. Sadly, by involving Clara in these, Vastra and Jenny's relationship is somehow marginalised. The cool thing about Vastra and Jenny's relationship was not that is was a cross-species same-sex one, but that it was seemingly strongly monogamous. By showing that Vastra is into other girls too, really ruins what was a lovely duo.

Please ignore my wife and get nekkid.

And finally The Doctor thinks to ask the question he should have done in The Bells of Saint John. Who gave Clara his number? This really is all the tease for the season arc that we need. Unfortunately that's not spoon-feeding us enough, so they elected to have an entire epilogue scene introducing Missy, the Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere. In a far more tragic turn of events, she refers to The Doctor as her boyfriend. Goddamnit!

A couple of other minor concerns, I noticed The Doctor said "that's not the question" a couple of times. I'm not sure if that's just a one-off for this episode, or if it will become his Annoying Catchphrase. If it does, it's not as bad as it could be, although I'll reserve judgement until I've seen it used a few more times. There was also a touch of Deus Ex Screwdriver with the revelation the sonic is voice activated now.

And I just need to take a second to comment on the new opening credits. Do. Not. Like. There's a hint of something interesting there, but all the cogs and clocks is just a bit too clichéd for me. There's nothing wrong with the good old time vortex with flying names. It's a classic for a reason.

As nice as it was to see Capaldi take on the mantle of The Doctor (and I think he did it well), this episode was just too riddled with issues to score particularly highly from me.

6/10

Can we fix it?

First up, some easy fixes. We dial back the innuendos from Vastra and Jenny a bit, and remove any hint that Vastra is hot for Clara. There's enough comedy in this episode without it. Also, completely remove the final scene with Missy. It was unnecessary and the episode was already significantly over time.

I've already alluded to some of the changes I'd make to the whole Clockwork Men thing. Replace the reference to them being from a sister ship of the SS Madame De Pompadour. It didn't help The Doctor to learn this, and was only there to explain their reappearance to the audience. I'd make them from the same ship, but they got caught outside a time window (or even halfway through) when The Doctor shut things down. This would mean they were hanging around, not for thousands of years, but only a century or so. Enough time to wear out and begin the process of replacing their own systems with human parts, but still retain some clockwork.

Their origin could be revealed during The Doctor's dialogue with the Control Node, removing the need for the naming of any ships. If it was scripted well enough, things could be relatively obscure, whilst at the same time making the audience aware of the link to the previous episode.

"We were seeking replacement parts to repair damage to our ship. Our time windows were destroyed, but our ship still awaits us. We determined to wait."

It makes little sense for the clockwork robots to harvest human parts to make anything when they are trapped in a resource-rich environment. It worked when they were trapped in space, but on Earth in any timeframe they would have access to raw materials they could fashion parts out of. By highlighting that they are attempting to remain hidden until such a time as they can return to their ship, they sort of justify this behaviour again.

This would also mean the Control Node would have to have a whole face. If he absolutely needed to have half a face to show his mechanical nature, he should have a reason for that such as damage to the skin, as well as try to conceal it. To this end, I'd have his first on-screen victim be shown to claw at his face tearing some of the skin off. After that he would be seen wearing a Phantom of the Opera style half mask, which would harken back to the original appearance in Season 2.

With some further explanation from the Control Node about how over time they found their systems began failing. They originally manufactured mechanical replacements but started using human parts in order to blend in. Stories had begun to circulate amongst the lower classes about murderous and ghoulish nobles who would steal your flesh and couldn't be killed. At this point they fled France, but it didn't stop the revolutionaries cutting the heads off of a lot of nobles. But the human bits have a short lifespan, and need more regular replacement., leading to the harvest restaurant.

Everything else could play out the same way, even the flying escape pod and the cheesy impalement on Big Ben.

Honestly though, these guys better not show up again. They are supposed to be unique enough to make The Doctor geek out over them. Let's keep them that way.

Needlessly Recurring Monsters

Doctor Who is no stranger to the return of existing monsters. There have been quite a few monsters and enemies that have appeared multiple times, but when you've been running for as long as Doctor Who has, you need to expect to re-tread old ground at some point. How it is done, however, is a fine art. Sadly, to me it seems many recurrences of monsters are rather ham-fisted, ranging from simple fan service to forced inclusion that requires changes to established canon.

If a particular monster resonates with the fandom, there's a very good chance it will return, even if that means changing the background of the monster. The big danger here is diluting what was a great one-off monster by making it essentially over stay its welcome.

The prime example of this is the Weeping Angels. They were great in Blink, but continual appearances made them boring. Their nature also needed to be expanded, because we already knew how to counter the threat, meaning some of what made them scary was diminished. So the Angels get new and increasingly silly powers in each appearance until they are every statue on earth and can throw people back in time, as well as be colossal, hollow, and made of copper rather than stone.

No. Just no.

Asylum of the Daleks is another example of this one. Daleks were changed from hugely xenophobic creatures so certain of their genetic superiority that they simply exterminate anything non-Dalek, to suddenly being cool with using alien corpses to make pseudo Daleks. This simultaneously flies in the face of established Dalek background and steals one of the scariest aspects of the Cybermen, all for some new monster type that is essentially a person with a Dalek eyestalk.

Seriously now?

If you have to change or add to the established rules for a monster to make it fit or make it threatening, why are you using that monster? Could you not create some new monster that has the powers or motivation you require? On the other side of the coin, if you've been asked to do a story featuring a specific monster, can you not (aside from asking why) stick to the established canon for that monster?

This is also a rather selfish act, as it often strikes me that an attempt is being made to build a pantheon of New Who monsters over the old classics like Cybermen and Daleks. It's clear from the marketing materials that the focus is on these new monsters that often appear more than they should. Angels, Ood, Silence, all could have been left at a single appearance without subsequent outings.

I include the Ood tentatively, as out of all the returned monsters their subsequent appearances were best integrated without feeling too forced or piling on additional powers. What is helpful in that case is that the Ood in their natural state aren't threatening. They are just a fairly normal alien race that requires external forces to make them malicious.

Luckily they're easy to spot

Sometimes monsters reappear as nothing more than a self-referential nod to previous episodes. This can work well, such as some of the brief appearances of Judoon after their introduction in Smith and Jones. If it’s just a subtle “remember these things exist in a wider universe” kind of reference, it works, but it can easily turn into a farce, such as much of The Time of The Doctor.

It's a big universe out there, and unless a monster is part of some kind of galaxy-spanning empire out for conquest such as the Daleks, Sontarans or Cybermen, bringing them back every season limits the scope of the Whoniverse with the only benefit the fleeting feeling of familiarity for fans to find... felicitous.