Dear Steven Moffat: Closing Time

Dear Steven,

Our journey, much like The Doctor’s, is almost at an end, but before we slice open this series and conduct a hurried and slapdash post-mortem, missing the vital clues that might confer peace on an irritable and confused Whovian family, there’s the minor matter of Gareth Roberts’ Closing Time; penultimate jollies to calm the mind and prepare it for the membrane pounding concept pile-up, that is surely next week’s finale.

The Wedding of River Song, to which I wasn’t invited, is bound to be pregnant with pathos and melancholia and posturing and high-concept time babble, so our hope for Roberts’ Lodger sequel, was that it would be a pick me up, a breather, a banterthon, and consequently we’d all have the opportunity to enjoy a few jokes and nothing too intense before life as we know it comes to a halt, and reality is turned upside down. Well, you may congratulate Mr R, Steven; this episode wasn’t as good as The Lodger but it was a ball tickle; good clean fun.

It’s strange how Doctor Who can take something familiar and change it utterly. I’m not talking about lifts becoming teleport pads or department stores made sinister, they were already sinister, but James Corden, and the show’s knack, now shown twice over, of making him rather lovable, instead of the universal hate figure of legend.

Craig Owens is a fine character; not full time companion material, we all understand that – he’s a little too exasperated, not to mention domesticated for the life – but perfect for the occasional adventure. Roberts’ conceit, that Craig is an ordinary guy with modest aspirations, whose life is occasionally upended by the man with the 50s hair cut, is welcome, because we need not worry about the particulars. The adventure begins for us, as it does for Craig, the moment the poor sod opens his front door, and we know it’ll be over 40 minutes later. In the meantime we can sit back, minimise the porn window on our laptops and enjoy what the Celts refer to as “the craic”, though I wish they wouldn’t.

There’s a danger, naturally, that an episode built upon comic misunderstandings and japery, may becomes slight, perhaps disposable, but I think Closing Time just about dodged that bullet. Two things helped it along. One, with The Doctor’s demise imminent, there was an undercurrent of sadness to the whole thing, realised in lots of emotionally engaging snippets – The Doc reflecting on his age and past selfishness for example, a nice scene with the Timelord and Corden’s baby in which he turned the nursery into a planetarium and pondered the fact that he’d done everything he wanted with his life, while baby Alfie had it all ahead of him, etc – this was good stuff. Amy and Rory’s cameo was also a nice touch; what a relief to find that our favourite red head was fronting a perfume campaign and hadn’t slipped into a career as a lap dancer to pay off Rory’s gambling debts.

Two, the relationship between The Doctor and Craig is warm and dare I say, sweet. You can fully understand why people would mistake them for a homo-couplet; they look good together. Sure, the tone of the episode was jaunty, some would say farcical – you had to laugh as Craig wrestled with a mechanical rodent which, in true b-movie style, he seemed to be holding to his own throat, but this was the charm of the episode; it wasn’t heavy, just in turn touching and very funny, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. If I feel half as good following next week’s finale, I’ll consider that a lucky escape.

Still, this was the pre-finale appetiser and consequently the final five minutes were reserved for the arc. Craig gave The Doctor his Stetson, he went to the TARDIS and suddenly, BANG, we were in the future and back with River and her evil sponsors. After a minor struggle she was reactivated as a weaponised curly-pow, sunk into an astronauts suit, the significance of which I’d forgotten, and left at the bottom of Lake Silencio, ready to strike.

Steven, my one hope for next week’s episode is that it holds some surprises. I say this, because the final scene of Closing Time fed my fear, a fear that’s been building throughout this season, that the simplest explanation for each mystery, seeded by you in a series of early ejaculations, is the correct one.

From the beginning of this series, River was our prime suspect for The Doctor’s assassin, not just because she’s implied her guilt for two years, but also because she gave the game away by exclaiming “No, of course not”, when she failed to kill the shooter, following the assassination. ‘Right, so that’s River then’ thought we, but nevertheless hope remained that you were cleverer than your audience and you were going to wrongfoot us – yet you didn’t. River, we thought, following a series of monster sized hints, is Amy’s daughter, but no we said, NO, that’s too bleedin’ obvious – so obvious in fact, that it turned out to be correct.

If the name of the game was to tie everything up in a coherent fashion, then you’d be winning, but surely the pleasure inherent in a non-linear plot, is that you show the effect, tease several explanations for the possible cause and then lead the audience down the garden path before revealing a fiendishly cunning alternate that undercuts our expectations? Getting to the destination by an unexpected route is half the fun but this season, thus far, you’ve signposted the path to the climax at every turn.

Now there’s only one head-fucking question left, namely how does The Doctor survive death? To be fair to you, Steven, there’s no obvious explanation for this, other than he doesn’t, so you’ll understand my disappointment if that turns out to be the case. The series, we know, will continue, as will Matt Smith, so we know that ending can’t stand, yet you burnt his corpse and told us it was a fixed point in time that couldn’t be changed. Having lead us exactly where we expect to go all year Steven, I hope you’ve got an absolutely fantastic explanation for this one – a solution that’s going to confound all your critics. It’s a big episode, we’re told, one that will set out a new vision for the series. If that vision is a couple of companions travelling through time and space with an urn, I won’t be pleased.

One last thing y’bastard; why is the astronaut impossible? The answer to that, I expect, is the crux of it. Don’t fuck it up.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

Catch up before it’s too late:

Published in: on September 25, 2011 at 15:47  Comments (2)  
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Dear Steven Moffat: The God Complex

Dear Steven,

I suppose it’s common enough for the programme’s acolytes to see aspects of their own lives in the material; my friend Milton Schicks once told me a story about his now defunct girlfriend, who had such bouffant hair that her silhouette was almost identical to that of a classic Cyberman. Staying with her overnight, he told me, became impossible. She was shy, particularly when it came to sex, but Milton had to insist that the lights stayed on at all times. Naturally she thought he was mocking her, or eliciting some measure of sadistic glee from her discomfort and ultimately the relationship died. Milton’s luck didn’t improve. His next girlfriend looked like a Dalek with the light off, leading to serious concerns that he hadn’t asked the right questions on their first couple of dates.

Toby Whithouse’s God Complex made me think about my own experiences. I recalled my economy room at the Circus Circus, Las Vegas, and the call girl I’d invited there in the early hours of the morning. I thought about how I’d thrown green backs at her and made outrageous and degrading sexual demands, one of which ultilised the glow stick I’d acquired at the Barry Manilow gig the previous night.

I thought about my own God Complex in those uncertain hours; I’d felt so powerful, like my whole body was an erection. My thumping heartbeat drowned out her cries. The Jack Bauer role play, the Emilio Estivez marathon, puppetry of the breasts; when I look back on it now Steven, I feel ashamed. I’m not that man. Still, in a life where I’m frequently disempowered and feel a prolonged sense of listlessness and fear, this was a rare moment of being master of all dominions, a law unto myself. Candice didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to her that night, but I did take her for breakfast by way of an apology. I even settled the bill in full, meaning she only had to leave the tip.

In this episode, the titular complex turned out to be The Doctor’s; a welcome variant on the megalomaniac alien controls a group of space captives premise. Whithouse’s script was deceptively clever, thought I. There was every reason to suppose that it would be a generic tale; a hotel of room 101s with victims to match and a climax in which The Doctor, having tried a few things, would work out how to turn the tables on their captor and save the day. But Whithouse, showing the type of character-centric thinking that we like on this bastard, had a more interesting idea. The snare was fuelled not by fear, as we all supposed, but by faith, and this was a neat little device that allowed an exploration of the theme developed earlier in the series, of The Doctor’s hubris.

Amy had grown to see The Doctor as her saviour and this, we discovered, was just what the alien trap required in order to finish her off. The Timelord, realising that his arrogance was going to cost our beautiful Scottish thistle her life, was forced to admonish his companion of his shortcomings. ‘I took you with me because I was vain,’ he told her, ‘I’m not a hero.’ Well Steven, I thought that was a smashin’ little scene; a much needed corrective to The Doctor’s monolithic confidence, which occasionally robs the character of his third dimension. This showed his human side, the part we can truly believe in, because as Kirk once reminded Spock, everyone’s human, even if you’re not.

If that was a good moment then the episode’s coda was better yet. The Doctor, realising that he’d become a bit of a liability to Amy and Rory, bless ‘em, made the sudden and unexpected decision to end their travels together. He bought them off with a house and a car, explaining to a tearful Pond, that he’d rather the happy couple lived a long life of dull domesticity, than a short exciting one in which one of them ended up grieving for the other, or worse, sharing a cemetery plot. ‘He’s saving us’ Amy told Rory, as the newly liberated couple returned to their house to open an Ocado account. I felt sad, Steven, I’d grown to like this pair, even Rory, but my tears dried quickly, safe in the knowledge that they’d be back in a couple of episode’s time.

The Doctor’s concern for his companions’ safety was touching but I did wonder why he’d got through so many before deciding to take this course of action. Still, Amy and Rory were his first married pair. He’d had a greater impact on their lives than most I suppose. He’d groomed Amy as a companion from childhood, he’d given her a lunatic bent that only a guy like Rory would find endearing, he’d been instrumental in the conception of their child, creating the pre-conditions for the baby’s very unique character, and he’d even been a guest at their wedding. In other words, these two were less disposable than most; he’d let them in. Maybe that’s why this departure mattered.

I did wonder why Amy was quite so casual about the fact that her baby was still missing in the time stream but maybe she thought, ‘ah fuck it, I know she’s alright and this way I miss all the nonsense like toilet training, sleepless nights, school fees, puberty and having to explain away Rory’s porn collection.’ This, of course, was why we couldn’t get too sad; we knew this story was not yet done. For one thing Amy and Rory were present at The Doctor’s death, which although firmly in their past, would mean we’d see them again very soon. That episode, we know, features River, after all she’s in the title, so it’s fair to assume that the couple’s baby blues may also be dealt with, meaning we’ll have to travel to the couple’s present. Will you conclude the story, Steven? That’s not really your style is it? Do advance it a bit though, won’t you? We’re not watching this shit for our health.

Looking ahead to next week, and the return of Craig from The Lodger, a character I like and am happy to be used as an occasional companion, I was reminded of the missing two centuries that were discussed in The Impossible Astronaut. Now The Doctor has abandoned A and R, can we assume that this is the beginning of that lost period? It’s interesting that when the Gallifreyian ganglinoid next sees the happy couple he’ll have had several seasons’ worth of adventures. I’m glad we’ll get to see at least one of them, though I wonder if, given the non-linear nature of the series, we’ll get to see a few more in future? Why not make next season a “lost season”; delay The Doctor’s death solution by a year? That’ll piss your critics off, won’t it? In any event, it makes next week an adventure in its own right, rather than pre-climax filler and that, Steven, is a smart move.

I must go. Milton has just e-mailed me. He wants me to come down The Buckshot and Backside, and meet his new girlfriend, Veronica Greene-Deth. Apparently she’s a beauty.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

A bit of previous:

Published in: on September 18, 2011 at 17:26  Comments (1)  
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Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited

Dear Steven,

The day is coming when a parcel will arrive at your office. Inside, you’ll find my Doctor Who script; forty five perfect pages of mystery, intrigue, gut wrenching emotion, suspense, heartbreak, soaring imagination, wit, wonder and family friendly eroticism. The working title, Mungo’s Mongos, will initially make you uneasy but curiosity will consume you like Koch’s disease, and you’ll read on. When you reach the foot of the final page you’ll snap back to reality, as though waking from a dream, to find your long abandoned cigarette no more than a worm of ash hanging from a filter and your mug hanging from your other hand, the contents now a drying stain on the rug.

Yes, you’ll love that script Steven, and you’ll declare there and then, to the Gods of Television, that not so much as a letter will be changed. What you’re holding, you’ll realise, is a BAFTA, an EMMY, a future piece of Television history. To mark it would be tantamount to cultural vandalism.

Your respect for my work will of course be appropriate and show great taste on your part, but your reluctance to interfere with submissions from young writers should not extend to everybody. I’m a special case. Instead, let’s consider the work of Tom MacRae, the wordsmith responsible for tonight’s Pond-a-thon, The Girl Who Waited.

MacRae included much in his script that a young buck might think of as fun, and may be to younger viewers, but was, to my eyes and ears, poison – an irritant that caused spluttering and fits of uncontrollable rage. First and foremost you should know that serious Whovians associate pop culture references with kitsch and consider it to be a symptom of laziness; the sort of idiotic grab for the attention of young viewers that both instantly dates episodes and punctures the unreality bubble of this sensational fairytale with unwanted reminders of the world we hoped to leave behind.

The episode was barely a couple of minutes old when The Doctor put his foot in it, making a reference to Twitter – a nod that MacRae will have included in an act of cynical calculation to make those tweeting during transmission very excited but only succeeded in making me let out a loud groan, a sound similar to an grizzly bear’s orgasm.

He followed that up with a declaration that the TARDIS contains a set of DVDs. This seemed to me nonsensical for two reasons. If The Doctor were into films and box sets of old TV programmes, surely the man who can visit any point in history would enjoy a format more advanced that one that’s already obsolete in the present day? He’d have a fully immersive four dimensional neuro-plug in, no? If the DVDs are Amy’s and Rory’s, then are we to infer he wasted hours transferring the contents of their shelves to the TARDIS’s film library? Why would you take a couple who, offered the chance to explore any point in time and space, insist on taking The Complete House Season 6 with them? Y’know, maybe this trip of a lifetime thing isn’t for them. I once went on holiday with a girl who insisted on staying in her chalet all day, reading. The sort of people who go away to do what they do at home, only in different surroundings, aren’t the sort of people we need in the TARDIS. They’re idiots.

MacRae followed up these unwanted intruders from real life with The Doctor making a Sat Nav analogy and the revelation that Clom has a Disneyland. Steven, please, I’m begging you, use your red pencil and start deleting this shit. Insist your writers take their science fiction seriously, else what’s the point, huh? If I want kitsch I’ll fire up my copy of Rocky Horror, knowhattamean?

So, that aside, let’s talk about the meat of the episode. Two things disturbed me. The site of Rory wandering around Apalapucia with the Time Glass, a lens so large that he looked like a borrower trying to handle Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass, and those irritating hand bots that repeated the now well worn device of being intimidating by repeating a simple statement with underlying menace. Could you veto this too please? It’s beginning to get on my Rorys.

This was, despite some lapses in presentation, an engaging story. I was confounded by the science-babble and immediately suspected that even Tom MacRae wasn’t sure how the temporal physics of the waiting room worked, but Amy spending decades in isolation, imagining herself to be abandoned, was a solid idea, and one greatly enhanced by Karen Gillan’s convincing performance as the embittered middle aged version. Her body may have looked the same but her facial prosthetics were credible and I liked the way she modulated her voice to sound older, making a good fist of portraying a much more senior individual.

The episode also brought out the best in Rory, who irritatingly, grows on me week by week. We don’t see Amy develop much these days, she seems content to hang around her husband and exchange quips but Arthur Darvill, perhaps sensing a gap opening up in the companion market, is maturing nicely. His character is deepening before our very eyes. One day I may even stop wishing him dead but Rory, we’re not there yet.

Rory’s concern for his wife felt sincere, as did Amy’s love for her man, but one thing that MacRae forgot about was the couple’s missing baby, Melody. Last week she went unmentioned but as that episode was shown out of sequence, that was hardly a surprise. In The Girl Who Waited it was an odd omission, not least because Amy spent 36 years, or one late nineties Oasis Album, in solitude, contemplating her wasted life. You’d think that in addition to Rory and The Doctor, she might have thought about missing out on motherhood and the child she’d never see again but no, she didn’t consider Melody once, not even in her final moments. The Doctor can, it seems, call off the search – Mummy couldn’t give a Sontaran’s dick.

Still, there were touching moments and there would have been many more had Amy spent 36 years trapped with me. The sentiment at the close was fine, if a little obvious, but Amy talking about how Rory grew on her and that lovely little scene in which the couple shared a joke, Amy’s first for four decades, was welcome. A little more of that might have made it a very moving episode. As it stood, it flirted with being moving, occasionally reminding you of what that might feel like.

One thing I did wonder about was the show’s ongoing vendetta against alternate Amys. You’ll recall that her ganger was brutally murdered back in The Almost People, because The Doctor, despite wittering on about their sentient nature and right to life, saw the duplicate as a problem. Tonight, true to form, he killed another one, ostensibly because the TARDIS couldn’t manage the paradox, but actually because The Doctor HATES Amy duplicates of whatever stripe. I knew he’d shut the door on her Steven, I could see it in his sunken eyes. Is he just attached to the original for sentimental reasons or, as I strongly suspect, and the nation is beginning to suspect, he’s determined to kill Rory’s chances of that sensational threesome out of sheer unbridled jealously?

I await your confirmation on that last point.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

The posts waiting for you to rescue them from obscurity:

Published in: on September 11, 2011 at 01:41  Comments (2)  
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Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors

Dear Steven,

With Whovianism comes many burdens. Chief amongst them is the defence known as “The Fry Riposte”, a tried and tested strategy for justifying fandom, in which life long viewers attack the notion that Who is programme for children.

Any self-respecting fan of science fiction has had to use the riposte, named in honour of genre illiterate opineatron Stephen Fry, at some point in their lives. Sci-fi, to those that know nothing about it, is short hand for an infantile thirst for fantasy. Childhood after all, is the time when our imaginations are supposed to be at their strongest. Then, so the thinking goes, we grow up, get bogged down by responsibility and the mental muscles we use to facilitate escapism wither from lack of use and eventually waste away to nothing. This, apparently, is normal and, er, healthy.

Human nature dictates that once wide eyes start to narrow, becoming sunk in their sockets and bookended by crow’s feet, we start to resent those that refuse to join us in the fucking awful real world. The accusation is that such refusniks are childish, an insult that implies underdeveloped, mentally stunted, when in fact they may have retained the creativity long dormant in their detractors.

Yet, it’s interesting isn’t it, that when Who scribes get stuck for a story hook they reach for childhood fears. You know the kind of episode, Steven, it’s the Fear Her school of Who, written using the IOCDE (Iconography of Childhood Defamiliarisation Engine) plug-in to your LBF, or Low Budget Filler, software. I suppose this implies that deep down, users like Gatiss, who “penned” last night’s episode, agree with Fry. Whatever they say publically, they think it’s really for the kids and consequently, when the production can’t afford to blow up a planet or CG a fleet of starships to encircle the Earth, they reach for the core audience, a little like politicians preaching to their core vote when they want to play it safe, having run out of ideas.

So once again Who got all domestic and whereas the results were fine, I couldn’t quite enjoy it. You see, Steven, I’m just too old for this shit. Fear of being abandoned by my parents? Monsters in the cupboard? Dolls coming to life? Seven year olds will remember this one alright, probably mark it down as a firm favourite, but I’m 34 old fruit, and childless. What’s in it for me? I can watch any Star Trek episode without feeling like I’ve walked into the wrong room. Is it too much to ask that this could be my Doctor Who experience too?

Anyway, I don’t want to make too much of it Steven, in fact I’d like to compliment Gatiss on creating what might have been a nigh on perfect average episode. The degree of calibration required to get this exactly right is quite difficult, so it’s high praise indeed. It wasn’t bad in any way, it wasn’t stupid, yet nor was it too exciting or in any way unique. I enjoyed the care taken in making it familiar and low key, while keeping it moving so I never felt completely bored. It also had a neat line in predictability; I was never surprised and sometimes, late at night, when your brain is just too tired to do any work, that kind of banality is just what the Doctor ordered.

There was good stuff in it, of course there was, there had to be to balance out Amy and Rory’s lack of involvement, the slightly mawkish ending and so on. I liked the idea of the Doll’s House running amok – that had something, even if it felt old hat, and The Doctor’s awkward house call routine is always a joy to watch; his argument, essentially with himself, about whether or not to open the cupboard, was very funny indeed. Still, does season filler have to be this disposable, Steven? Last year’s The Lodger did the same job much more effectively, I thought. It had something extra.

That’s it for this week. You may be interested to know that I’m thinking of adopting a child in an attempt to cultivate some strong kiddy-fears. It’s to be my new project. I thought about giving it a cat complex by starving the animals and letting them into the child’s room late at night, ravenous. They’d smell the dead mice I’d stuffed into the kid’s mattress, which should make for unbearable evenings.

I’m also having furniture designed that looks like a naked old man with his hand extended, once the light’s off. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts on those ideas.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

Previously, on Dear Steven Moffat:

Published in: on September 4, 2011 at 16:17  Comments (5)  
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