The Rankings: Peter Capaldi Year 3, Doctor Who Reviews, 09/07/2017

Sad to see the Peter Capaldi Doctor on his way out, but as far as I’m concerned, the future looks bright. Soon, we’ll see the rumours truly swelling and the name of the next Doctor announced this Fall – I and many others have high hopes for her.

What's interesting is that, as I take stock of the last Capaldi season, I find myself in a bit of a contrarian attitude about it. Maybe it was just the hangover from fandom’s major public love with Clara Oswald, but my sense of the consensus was that the 2017 season was a little underwhelming.

You've all done amazing work, everyone. Applause all around.

But I thought it was fantastic. In my immediate experience of watching and in my critical evaluations in retrospect, it’s on par with Capaldi’s near-universally loved first year in quality.

Here’s how the rankings themselves worked out. Stories with the same letter grade are arranged according to small gradations of quality, complexity, and dynamic aesthetic harmony.

Quality: How well a story is executed technically, its craftsmanship from idea to script to set to editing suite to screen.

Complexity: How many creative ideas across setting, character, narrative, and theme fit together.

Harmony: How well all those complexities interact to produce a philosophically thick final product – a text which always rewards you with new dimensions every time.

The Doctor Falls A+
World Enough and Time A+
Thin Ice A+
Extremis A
Oxygen A
Eaters of Light A-
The Pilot / The Girl With a Star in Her Eye A-
Empress of Mars A-
The Pyramid at the End of the World B
Smile B
Knock Knock B-
The Return of Doctor Mysterio B-
The Lie of the Land F

Whithouse didn't even include the most superficial parallels of the
Monks Trilogy in "The Lie of the Land," like a third version of
Bill's date with Ronke Adekoluejo's Penny. It would have been
nicely bleak, as fits the story. But he couldn't even manage that!

As I said in my review of the episode itself, “The Lie of the Land” was a profound screw-up of the highest order. It’s rare when I see a writer so profoundly fail to understand any of the interesting or innovative aspects of a story he’s commissioned for.

The Monks Trilogy was, in my view, the single most ambitious Doctor Who story Steven Moffat ever conceived and actually got on screen. But the messy realities of production meant that the worst writer in his whole stable got stuck having to stick the landing. Whithouse is the only writer in the current stable who’s gotten worse as time went on.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Doctor Who story crash and burn as badly. I think it comes down to the need to have split the entire Monks Trilogy over three different writers. If the whole story could have relied on the one writer who conceived of it being in charge from beginning to end, we would have gotten at least a consistent script from the whole affair.

I count “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” as part of Capaldi’s last season for a few reasons. It’s established Nardole as a companion, foreshadows Bill’s arrival, and most importantly marked the return of Doctor Who since its gap year of 2016.

The show’s absence for an entire year was a strange period – it evoked echoes of the 1986 hiatus, even though the earlier gap was the function of a production and aesthetic catastrophe.

Doctor Who took on the superhero sci-fi genre for the first time with
"The Return of Doctor Mysterio," but couldn't figure out how to
overcome that genre's most ingrained problem, its deep sexism
and refusal to question the ego of the fragile male characters that
make up so many of its traditional protagonists.

Doctor Who was assured a comeback, of course – it was still one of Britain’s most popular television shows domestically, and its leading global export. The contrast was the most jarring aspect of the 2016 gap year.

Two years before, the BBC sent Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman did a round-the-world tour in a week to promote the premiere of “Deep Breath.” Now the show was going on break for a year?

So it was wonderful seeing a story as fresh and fun as “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” kick off the return of Doctor Who. And it was a straightforward story of Doctor Who riffing on a classic sci-fi genre it had never tackled before, with a few questionable sexual and romantic threads woven in without question. A fun story that left an icky feeling in me for a few days afterward.

Speaking of icky feelings, “Knock Knock.” Doctor Who goes full Freudian horrorshow with a script that dropped the ball on comprehensive characterization. Despite this, it had some fine camerawork that evoked the classic late 20th century aesthetic of Hammer horror, haunted house films, and a pre-watershed riff on the slasher genre.

“Smile” worked out the same way, but Frank Cottrell Boyce crafted a better story overall. The inventiveness of the setting and the nature of the Vardy robots were its best features.

Good work overall in a very creative story. Frank Cottrell Boyce is
becoming Doctor Who's go-to for the trippiest settings and kinds of
existence in the writers' stable.

The visual storytelling was wonderful as well, the contrast of the Vardy surface city and the human spaceship underground overflowing with thematic and conceptual meaning. Boyce seems to be one of the best in the current Doctor Who stable at developing radically different kinds of life.

It was also a great decision to make most of the story a two-hander that gives Pearl Mackie a chance to stretch Bill’s character – a fairly generic approach to the companion lets the actor find her own nuances in the performance. But the very ordinariness of the basic story and plot weighed “Smile” down a little bit.

Speaking of ordinary stories, “The Pyramid at the End of the World” suffered from that a fair bit. Peter Harness’ commission consisted of repeating all the general military action story styles of “The Zygon Inva/ersion” but in a thematic context so different that they’re all kind of empty. He even brought us back to Turmezistan.

That was the main problem of “The Pyramid at the End of the World.” The psychological terror at the heart of the Monks as a concept didn’t fit the story style and setting of the international military thriller. Other than that, Harness understood their core concepts very well.

With “The Empress of Mars,” we really get into the brilliance of this season. Mark Gatiss told a simple fable of the immoral, criminal, petty, chauvinist, cruel, hateful nature of the too-often romanticized British Empire. Not a word or even an image was wasted (even if Friday kind of disappeared from the story in the last act and he just gave up on integrating Nardole into the story).

I'm kind of glad Mark Gatiss will probably never get to play the Doctor
officially, but he's already made a significant historic contribution to
the franchise in so many different ways. His work has only improved
as his time with Doctor Who has gone on.

He did it while expanding the culture of the Ice Warriors in creative and fruitful directions, so future writers have plenty of new places to take these creatures so deeply embedded in Doctor Who. This and “Sleep No More” were his most creative and ambitious stories.

Whether or not he writes for Doctor Who in the future, his best work is probably in front of him, and that’s fantastic.

“The Pilot” was of similar quality – Steven Moffat can write tightly-structured, thematically-deep, characterization-rich companion introduction stories in his sleep by now.

“Eaters of Light” is the best of the stories of A- rank because it was the story that best-balanced the TARDIS team of the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole in an everyday setting. It was also another stellar contribution to the general theme of this season, Doctor Who’s rejection of Brexit morality.

Like “Empress of Mars,” “Eaters of Light” was fundamentally about the rejection of militarism, imperialism, and nationalism to embrace a plural society whose powers are stronger for their diversity and mutual respect.

Its only real flaw was that the story structure of splitting the main cast up to explore the world efficiently through parallel adventures doesn’t have room to breathe in a single 45 minute episode. It was well-suited to the classic series, where stories were 100-150 minutes long. But now, it’s too rushed.

"Oxygen" was one of the few stories this year to make good use of
the three-person TARDIS team, involving Nardole significantly in
the action as well as Bill. I think a lot of Doctor Who writers don't
have the skill to weave a TARDIS crew of more than two people
into a story effectively, simply because most of the show has
featured only a two-person TARDIS crew. Future writers of a
three-person main case should study this episode, "Eaters of Light,"
this season's finale, and the Pond family era.

“Oxygen” is a grade above because its story was perfectly in tune with the possibilities of the 45 minute episode. It was a simple setting – a base under siege – which the Doctor and Bill explored in a clear linear order, where each event revealed more about the central mystery of the story.

It carried another aspect of the anti-Brexit political message of this year’s Doctor Who with an intensely punk fire – a world that opens everything to be bought and sold as a commodity robs all dignity from people’s lives. Their own existences are only as good as their short-term profit margins – we aren’t lives, but assets to be managed or replaced.

“Extremis” was the only part of the Monks Trilogy that carried off its core themes and ideas without a hitch, because the person who conceived it is also the one who wrote it. Steven Moffat’s most ambitious story perfectly designed and executed.

“Thin Ice” was the clearest and best-executed story that carried Doctor Who’s opposition to Brexit ideology. It firmly punctured the Brexit myth that British isolation was a time of cultural, moral, and political greatness.

Bill visits a world where a petty, self-absorbed racist aristocrat has become an energy industry oligarch by enslaving an alien creature. Here’s a story where poor orphan children, a black lesbian, and an anarchist professor overthrow a repressive business leader and steal his fortune.

Most of the time in "The Doctor Falls," John Simm's Master is part of
the storyline focussing on that character. But it made for a fantastic
moment when he stepped into Bill's storyline to show, univocally,
what a wretched monster the Master is. His taunting her was a
collision that showed the high stakes and radical shift the current
Master was undergoing.

The finale was the pinnacle of this season’s success, however. “World Enough and Time” was a perfectly-made story that assembled a complex script built on a brilliant scientific conceit. Its time dilation narrative hook returned to the 54-year-old mandate of Doctor Who for popular children’s science education.

Meanwhile, that hook was also the lynchpin in a terrifying story of cybernetic body horror – the haunted hospital of living monstrosities, perversions of humanity, and manipulative villains in disguise.

But “The Doctor Falls” was where everything came together with such wonderful perfection.

Its three core stories – Nardole integrating with the Mondasian community, Bill adjusting to her existence as a mutilated Cyberman, and the Master’s ethical redemption – played in parallel with perfect balance. All the performances were at their A-game, perfectly fitting what was necessary for each of their central moments.

Pearl Mackie played her bombast at the epic scale it required – and Rachel Talalay shot it perfectly, cutting between Pearl and Cyber-Bill at just the right moments to maximize her story’s power. But Michelle Gomez gave the best performance of all, because of the subtlety and complexity of her own performance.

In the whole history of the Master's character, from 1971 to today,
46 years later, Michelle Gomez was the most epochal.

Pay close attention to her face and speech in the final confrontation between the Doctor and the two Masters. It tells you all you need to know about how radically the Master has transformed, all in the smallest details of facial expression and voice.

Ultimately, it was a tale of redemption, which is a narrative central to Doctor Who – there can always be a better way forward, even when there isn’t. There’s no better way to have ended the Capaldi years.

So this Xmas is going to have a lot to live up to.
• • •
How does all this stand up to previous Capaldi seasons? His second year was probably the most problematic. Several stories were excellent, particularly “The Zygon Inva/ersion” and “Face the Raven.”

“Heaven Sent” was a revolution for the show, a moment where Steven Moffat brought such talent and concentration to a story that it put an episode of Doctor Who on the same level as the best works of Philip K Dick or Ursula LeGuin.

But Capaldi’s second year suffered from Toby Whithouse’s worst (and now second-worst) script. Plus, there was a lack of thematic unity that led to a kind of scattershot unfolding.

At this point, the arc from "The Doctor Falls" to the Xmas Special is a
serious contender for the best regeneration story in the history of
Doctor Who. If you're going to go out, leave them wanting more.
Even after eight years.

Ashildir’s story was closest to supplying the unity that contemporary Doctor Who seasons need, but it often danced around the potential of her character, staying ultimately at a very superficial level.

The deepest she could explore her isolation was in the joke of naming herself Me, a few scenes of crying in “The Woman Who Lived,” and some bemused indifference in “Hell Bent.” It wasn’t due to Maisie Williams’ performance – she did very well with writing that had trouble grappling with the real existential depth of immortality’s horror.

“Heaven Sent” is where you go for that horror. But the season overall was a grab-bag of mostly disconnected stories with a few ideas – Clara’s recklessness, the experience of immortality – that recurred now and then. Would have been a brilliant construction in the classic era, or even the Davies years. But Moffat has raised the standards on season arcs too high for us to stay with this.

Capaldi’s first year was the tightest story – something of every episode contributed to developing the Clara-Danny love story and the Doctor’s role in it. Its conclusion in “Dark Water” and “Death in Heaven” was beautiful in its power.

But the season itself was so tightly bound to that story, even stories that had little to do with it like “Flatline” found themselves shoehorned in. So there are benefits and problems to that approach.

When it's all over, but not quite yet.

Where does the Capaldi era break down? What was the best season? Well, I can give two answers. One is just with math. Let’s count the number of A-level stories in each season and see what they are as a percentage of the whole.

I’m calculating Capaldi Year One simply as the main Fall run from “Deep Breath” to “Death in Heaven,” counting “Dark Water” and “Death in Heaven” as a single story. Both the Xmas specials “Last Christmas” and “The Husbands of River Song” are part of Capaldi Year Two because they serve as prologue and epilogue to that season’s main run.

Year Three is as I listed above, with a caveat that its score would change depending on the upcoming regeneration story. So the scores.

Year One: 7/11 64%
Year Two: 5/10 50%
Year Three: 8/13 62%

What’s my second answer? It’s about progress. How does each season innovate in what Doctor Who can do? Frankly, I think Capaldi Year Three did the most.

The show developed a strong, principled aesthetic and ethical response to the explosion of Brexit nationalism. In the Monks Trilogy, Moffat crafted his most ambitious piece of writing in a career in which he’s refused to stop pushing himself creatively (even if it did fall flat at the ending).

This season also completely rejuvenated and transformed the character of the Master, so that now the character will be defined by its pre-Gomez and post-Gomez nature. A snarling, cackling villain has now become a nuanced parallel to the Doctor’s own complexity.

That’s what we want Doctor Who (and all our storytelling) to do, right? Spin me a narrative that I haven’t quite heard before.

The Highest Nobility Is Our Virtue, Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls, Reviews, 02/07/2017

How much is going on in “The Doctor Falls,” really? Was I right to save the entire entry on this two-part story for the second week? Honestly, I think I was.

Was this also a scheme to boost a little visibility on Patreon once I start promoting my upcoming book of Capaldi Doctor Who essays? Honestly, I’ll openly tell you that of course it is.

The next few months of 2017, leading up to Peter Capaldi’s actual regeneration in the Xmas Special, will see me actually paying some attention to my Patreon page. I’ll be posting old Doctor Who philosophical reviews a couple of times each week, just to encourage some attention, and driving some social media attention to the page as well.

"The Doctor Falls" provides the narrative gravity of the beginning of a
(21st century Doctor Who style of a) regeneration story by bringing
powerful ideas out of a small setting. The Doctor's greatest nobility is
in the utterly innocuous, a setting without spectacle. Not the whole
Earth at risk, but just a small community of people.

Each of these old posts will be reposted through my Facebook fan page, and through Patreon too. The goal will be attracting a larger audience than my current small set of patrons to fund a larger project – re-editing the old essays, expanding some ideas, and ultimately launching my own book on Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

What more significant place to splash the first step of that promotional campaign than in my review of “World Enough and Time,” and “The Doctor Falls.”

The Weight of the Occasion

“The Doctor Falls,” as an episode of Doctor Who, was written so carefully that almost every line was maximally portentous. Steven Moffat has written eleven season finales or stories with the same symbolic importance.* What do I mean here, when I talk about the symbolic importance of a story.

* I'm counting “A Good Man Goes to War,” “Angels Take Manhattan,” all three “X of the Doctor” stories, and “The Husbands of River Song,” as having the same symbolic importance as a season finale. You’ll see why when I answer the above question.

Let’s start from a common theme that tends to occur in a lot of Doctor Who stories these days. Quite often – but especially so under Moffat’s tenure as creative director and in his stories – 21st century Doctor Who stories tend to include ethics statements for the character.

There's no more epic, intense moment in Doctor Who like a regeneration
story. It's when the entire show literally transforms.

There’ll be some moment in the story where the Doctor or some other character will make a big, powerful statement, highlighted by the narrative and the cinematic emphasis,** about why the Doctor does what he does.

** Big, rousing theme music. An arresting change in camera technique, often focussing more on close-ups to showcase emotionally evocative and powerful performances. Usually occurs at a turning point or a climax in the narrative.

This statement may be in the form of a speech, or an event. Here, it reiterates the point that Moffat made in “Time of the Doctor,” that you take a stand to protect people because the gesture of kindness itself justifies who you are. To be fundamentally kind is to put yourself entirely on the line to protect innocent people under siege.

An Improved Second Draft

Matt Smith’s regeneration story was a wonderfully epic statement of that theme, though the experimental format of “Time of the Doctor” kind of obscured the statement itself.

The extended time frame of that story – an entire community of people growing around the Doctor for centuries as he protected them from an intergalactic siege – kept us from building an emotional connection with any characters.

“The Doctor Falls,” makes, as well as excellent

SPOILERS!!

I loved the madness of the structural complexity that Steven Moffat
achieved in "Time of the Doctor," but I did find that it made the
Doctor into more of a fairy-tale himself than a character. That
fit the imagery Moffat was bringing to the Matt Smith era, but
it also showed a limit of where those images could work.

an excellent contrast. Where “Time of the Doctor” revelled in its jerking, piecemeal, patchwork of a narrative, “The Doctor Falls” keeps things simple. There’s one community, and we’re in it for a mere few weeks. We’re introduced to this community first, a whimsical solar farm under regular siege from the primitive Cyber army.

The cast from “World Enough and Time” breaks into this story and change everything. It’s an excellent example of one type of story – a rural horror story with a few BBC-copyright elements – being smashed into by a crew of sci-fi immortals.

We’re allowed to focus on a few key characters of this rural horror story, the girl Alit and the community matriarch Hazran. We get to know them well enough as an hour-long story can for a couple of supporting characters.

But they carry through to the end of the story, and provide a grace point for Nardole leaving the TARDIS crew. It’s a nice return to the old Doctor Who tradition of companions leaving for a new home, as does Bill.

We follow the same five main characters through the episode. Nardole grows closer to the community. Bill comes to grips with her cybernetic zombification. The Doctor and the Masters battle over whether the villain will ultimately turn.

What I loved best about Michelle Gomez's Master was the stealthy
coldness she kept under her quirky, smirking social personality.

Master of Her Domain

I saw some initial reviews of the episode that called it, “the battle for Missy’s soul.” I mean, that rather missed the point of who Missy actually is. Michelle Gomez and John Simm aren’t playing different characters – they are both the same person.

This is why I think it was a mistake to keep referring to Gomez’s Master as Missy. It implies that she’s actually someone other than the Master. It was brilliant move introduce so casually transgender regeneration.*** It was typical to undercut it with the irreverent playfulness of a Steven Moffat who’s so overjoyed with his own jokes that he’ll throw out exactly the wrong number too many.

*** And tease it in a so-not-really-a-throwaway line.

Understanding the true nature of the Master’s storyline in this episode means knowing all the way through that John Simm is Michelle Gomez for the same reason David Bradley is Peter Capaldi. Gomez and Simm are the Master.

This is a battle, of sorts, between the Doctor and the Master over what kind of person the Master will eventually be. It’s the story of a man seeing his own future and doing everything he can to reject it, and the older one has a few last doubts that this change in life is the right one.

John Simm's Master was – aside from being the only credible one
available – the best contrast for Gomez's most empathetic Master
ever. He was, of all of the major Masters, the one more thoroughly
consumed with hate and rage.

It’s an absolutely beautiful Time Lord story to tell, but one that you could never play with the Doctor. There’s been a constancy to the Doctor pretty much since the Daleks, which prevents you from thinking about the character like this.

For one thing, we see so much of the Doctor as a character – it’s their show, after all – that you don’t really get a big enough gap in our knowledge of him to get such a radical break as Simm to Gomez. Simm’s Master is literally from a totally different era – the Davies era.

Simm’s Master is solidly a Davies creation as well. That frenetic, feverish energy – the sheer giddy delight in the possibilities of the universe.**** Gomez’s Master is speaking of Davies just as much as she is of Simm when she whispers how she so loved the flaming power of being him.*****

**** Contrasting Moffat’s era to Davies’, especially being able to take in the entire Moffat era in memory, truly does show how very rooted in the theatrical gay aesthetic the previous era was.

*****Clearly, Moffat also knows that theatrical aesthetic just as well as Davies. He can see it – he just can’t write it.

This is a fitting end to Gomez's Master. Of course, as soon as two
Masters got together, it could only end with the two betraying
each other at the same moment. Betraying their ostensible allies
is an essential part of the Master's character. But maybe not
anymore.

Gomez’s Master is a cerebral eccentric, a seether. The differences between Gomez and Simm as characters power their story. It’s a story that still, despite the younger man’s intentions, profoundly transformed the Master as a character.

Don’t think that “You won’t regenerate” line is at all sincere. Doctor Who will technobabble its way to a new Master in a few years, whenever Chibnall or some future writer thinks of a good story for her. No, this is the end of Gomez’s Master, and Moffat has given the next writers of Doctor Who a wonderful gift.

What Is a Hero?

Gomez’s Master ended in a moment of genuine goodness – she was at the beginning of an act of kindness, of becoming genuinely heroic. She was already there, and it was utterly justified because she did do it without recognition, as the ethical standard of her season arc said.

To be good without any prospect of recognition or reward is an act of the supreme virtue – kindness. That’s exactly what the Doctor says as the two Masters are leaving the village. Kindness is a good life in itself because of the nobility of kindness – it’s a life without ulterior motive, at its most profound.

You can tell lies, have some hidden motives, because these are petty hypocrisies. It is most profoundly noble to do what you can for others in need with no expectation of your own aggrandizement because you don’t need reputation for the sake of your own self-worth.

The Xmas Special is clearly going to be extremely entertaining, and
the collision of these two Doctors will make for remarkable new
story possibilities. It'll probably be the happiest regeneration
story that we've ever gotten since at least John Hurt's Doctor.

The Doctor has always been this kind of character – pretty much since the second-last episode of “The Daleks.” That’s why such a complex multiple-Doctor story as what the Master went through here ever happen? No matter what can happen with a multiple-Doctor story, the Doctor never stops being a decent person.

The Master has chosen that kind of nobility. From now on, she can no longer be a villain because she has been kind. The Master always had kind of a limited act before now – the same kind of cartoonish villainy Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts thought of. Doctor Who’s very own scenery-chewing Snidely Whiplash.

Overcomplicated evil schemes, the quest for power over the universe, the ruthless embrace of destruction, the gloating obsession with the Doctor. It was as reliable as Daleks shouting “Exterminate!” while they conquer and destroy.

The Master is something different now. An ex-villain in Doctor Who. Someone who has the capacity to commit horrifying acts, who has a history of doing so, but has now turned against it.

The next Master doesn’t have to be a villain. She can be a chaotic, devious sage. A demented and depressed blend of Kali and St. Francis of Assisi. A mad inventor tearing worlds apart in absent-minded enthusiasm. A dedicated revolutionary in too much love with her own violent zealotry.

Michelle Gomez is probably the most significant actor to play the
Master in the character's entire history, simply for incubating so much
more possibility for the character than has ever existed before.

All those are possible directions for the Master’s character that I could think of in a minute’s thinking three hours after seeing where Moffat’s story and Gomez’s performance took her in “The Doctor Falls.” Chris Chibnall is being handed a beautiful present to play with in his era – a Master with more potential than the character’s ever had!

The Weight of the World

Season finales, companion departures, and regenerations are stories that, in the 21st century era of Doctor Who, are moments where the entire ethic of Doctor Who as a show and the Doctor as a character are summed up.

That format gets a slightly different mix every time, depending on what kind of event is the primary reason to maximize symbolic weight. Most sensibly, symbolic power gets its maximum hit from regenerations or companion departures.

The entire show has anchored itself around these characters, so the departure of a lead actor requires a moment of thematic summation. Their story climaxes, giving us the perfect moment to hear what Doctor Who is for this moment, for this companion, for this Doctor.

I could say many wonderful things about Bill. Pearl Mackie is
brilliant when she plays maximum soul-shattering emotional
intensity. Those moments were essential to Bill's story arc
throughout the season. Her transformation into an interstellar
proteus alongside a same-sex life partner already sounds like
the most awesome ending for a companion in the history of
Doctor Who. More about this arc in the book version, I think.
Bill's transformations will be the focus of my "World Enough
and Time" essay.

It wasn’t always this way. But our era of television has viewers that watch it with a special eye toward thematic resonance and meaning. Television literacy understands ideas and symbols with the same ease as plot, performance, and music. We’re pretty much all critics now, in the very good sense of the term.

What does the Doctor say? Not just those words about kindness, but a very existentialist version of them. Where you stand is also where you fall. Stake the possibility of your life or death on one moment.

What kind of person will you be in that moment when you face the possibility of death? That’s the core question of nobility. What is the most impressive and awesome character to embrace at such a critical moment?

Such a character is most inspirational to us ethically – in terms of our virtues – what makes us the best kind of people we can be. What kind of character uses all of humanity’s capacities in their optimal arrangement?

The kind person. That’s the entire ethical message of Doctor Who.
• • •
Read the full set of essays on this year's season of Doctor Who.
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land
The Monks Trilogy
Empress of Mars
Eaters of Light

Yet You Fail Me Again! Doctor Who: The Lie of the Land, Reviews, 05/06/2017

So let me begin with a simple point. “The Lie of the Land” is a pretty terrible episode of Doctor Who. Phil Sandifer has written in just the right amount of detail a bunch of reasons why it’s terrible, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

This shot of the Doctor and friends lined up looking down a corridor
has been a running gag on Doctor Who since its earliest years. This
shot is from the official publicity photos of "The Lie of the Land,"
but it's such a dully simplistic story, it may as well have been.
Actually it couldn't have been in the actual episode, because we
can only do those shots ironically now, and Toby Whithouse can't
figure out how to write irony. Or anything complex.

They aren't my reasons, though. I agree with them, and think they’re quite right. But I think there are other reasons why “The Lie of the Land” is terrible, which I hope can at least take to a more interesting train of thinking than banging your head against the table.

Is it really worth warning you of spoilers for such a mediocre story? I suppose I should out of politeness. But I’m not going to make a big stink of it. Not today, anyway.

Purely and Only Utility

You see, I think Toby Whithouse’s main problem as a writer is that he doesn’t know how to do anything subtly. He can’t suggest. He can’t develop an evocative image. He can’t write dialogue with deeper, implicit meanings.

He only writes words that move the plot. They’re the kind of scripts you might be able to get away with in Patrick Troughton’s middle year, when the producers thought all the show was about was humans in some sci-fi base under siege from evil monsters.

I think that’s really Whithouse’s core problem, in terms of the craft of writing. Though I think Sandifer has written much more profound essays examining the many dimensions of his flaws. I thank him for that, because now I don’t have to.

Because I only want to focus on his problem as a writing craftsperson at the micro-level of his dialogue. Sandifer called Whithouse’s bomb of a big-budget showcase series The Game his failed audition piece to take over from Steven Moffat as Doctor Who’s central creative producer. He failed when he produced such a clichéd, conceptually empty, ripoff of a spy thriller.

Whithouse is one of the longest-running veterans of the writers'
stable in 21st century Doctor Who. I've come to think that today,
it amounts to something of a pity commission.

But there’s another, smaller audition that Whithouse failed as well. “Under the Lake” and “Before the Flood,” the worst story in Peter Capaldi’s second season, back in 2015. I wouldn’t be surprised if this story turns out to be an audition of whether he’ll ever write in Doctor Who again.

One Man’s Undeserved Prominence

Remember, Toby Whithouse is one of the longest-running veteran writers of contemporary Doctor Who. His first story was “School Reunion,” more than a decade ago. He wrote regularly in the Moffat era, but his stories in the Matt Smith years were always quite unremarkable.

“Vampires in Venice” was an ordinary monster runaround plot with barely dimensional supporting characters and terribly generic post Time War villains of a sort Russell T Davies got much more interesting mileage from.

It was only a good episode because it was the first time we saw the team of Smith’s Doctor with both Amy and Rory through a whole story. Even the beloved “School Reunion” was similar – a low-rent world-conquering monster plot enlivened more than it deserved by brilliant performances from all four leads. We only thought he was good because the actors made his stories much more interesting than his scripts.

“The God Complex” and “A Town Called Mercy” were terribly generic ‘brooding male protagonist’ stories, which mistook a central male character’s feeling conflicted about his moral compromises for an entire story’s worth of drama. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan tried to make these stories more than what they were, but it was too much for them.

The biggest challenge Whithouse had in this episode was his most
subtle one. In the scene with the Doctor, Bill, and the Master, he
had to write the Master as someone who could still think as
ruthlessly as a supervillain, but who was developing a sort of
conscience. He came very close here, but bombed the last, most
important moment she had in the entire Monks trilogy. More
on that sedentary cock-up tomorrow.

Early Whithouse Doctor Who plots were vintage for 40 years before they were written. The best he could do in his middle period was muster some Frank Miller inspired male brooding. It’s just plain boring.

Can You Force a Seed to Blossom?

“Under the Lake” / “Before the Flood” were different. Steven Moffat gave him a brief with a genuinely fascinating idea in it. A magic word that turns your mind into a signal amplifier on death.

Riff on the moral terror of murder to defile the corpse! The visual effects department has promised to make the ghosts as horrifying as possible, with skull-like empty eyes. It could be a fascinating and cerebral engagement with the macabre!

Whithouse bombed the job pathetically. He wrote a generic evil monster story that ignored everything most interesting about the narrative, and reduced the entire guest cast to generic base-under-siege fodder. That was a throwback to the worst of the Troughton years – Whithouse’s original Doctor Who plot comfort zone – with a squishy character moment of unspoken love as stalking behaviour.

But with “The Lie of the Land,” Moffat gave Whithouse one more chance. Maybe he was being kind. Maybe he couldn’t get anyone else because the other good ones were already on Chris Chibnall’s team working on their head-start scripts for 2018.

Whithouse was given a corker. 1) “The Lie of the Land” concludes the Monks trilogy, a multi-level metafictional arc. 2) That metafiction narrative was a complex and subtle meditation on how truth and knowledge destabilize the world we accept as real.

I genuinely think Steven Moffat’s brief consisted of giving Whithouse a literal scene-by-scene walkthrough of the story, a full treatment, just as it appeared on screen. Only the dialogue and general movements like “Bill takes a sip of coffee” were up to Whithouse.

He still fucks up. I’ll say how tomorrow, because it will create a post much too long.

How to Fake Being a Lord of Time, Jamming, 30/05/2017

So I said last time that I wasn't quite done with my thoughts on The Pyramid at the End of the World. That's true. I spent the first entry talking about the story’s narrative structure, Peter Harness’ recurring template for his Doctor Who stories.

But there were philosophically fascinating ideas throughout the episode, all surrounding the Monks. Look at what their central power is. They can simulate a world’s entire timeline so profoundly that the simulations can discover their true nature.

After you read this post, you may think to yourself that the Monks'
violence to time's creativity make them a profound villain for the
Doctor. They're literally fearsome mirror images of the Time Lords.

The simulation is so comprehensive that they can identify the precise minor accident – breaking a pair of reading glasses in a door – that’s the vital condition for a potentially world-ending mistake. They can use their simulation to affect the real world in that pivotal, almost-imperceptible way.

The imagery of their simulation machine is thousands of threads in a massive, loose rope formation – orderly tangles. The Monks interact with the threads by stroking and caressing them, manipulating where they appear in the bundle.

This way, the Monks appear designed as fearsome mirror-images of the Greek Fates, the Moirai gods, depicted as the daughters of necessity. The Monks understand the infinitesimally granular details of every timeline, every possibility.

Monks take the form of walking corpses because they see humanity themselves as corpses. As a mortal, caught in the processes of time, humans are always already corpses.

Mortals are bodies, moving according to a web of possibilities so dense that no one can move without shifting the entire pattern. This is a vision of time and process that preserves freedom and necessity at once.

The Monks don’t manipulate the universe as block time. Block time, the vision of time that Einstein thought relativity mathematics implied, is the universe as a single four-dimensional block of necessary movement. It’s a popular image, and it often appears in time travel fiction. But nothing in Doctor Who can consistently hold this view of time.

Here's a limitation of the Monks' power. They seem to depend, somehow,
on the consent of those they're manipulating. When they're going to
change the world radically, in a way that people will see, they need
permission. Somehow. But they have the ability to make minor changes
that people won't necessarily see at the time, which means they can
still destroy whole worlds, thanks to the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things. But I'd like to see how other writers play with these
villains in the future, how much they can do.

The Monks operate as gods of freedom in necessity. They understand that we each have real, material power to act in the world, that we aren’t moving entirely to a determinate path through our history. That power belongs to all objects in the world that change and move at all, like a pair of reading glasses.

Problem is, just as we have the power to create new states of affairs in the world, each of those changes has a tremendous gravity. One movement affects all the other relationships in the whole. One thread moves, and all the threads must move in kind.

Most of the time, a change makes little perceptible difference. As for a change at a critical point to cause increasingly high-magnitude affects? Like a pair of reading glasses getting smashed on the same day Erica’s co-worker shows up to work too hung over to see straight.

Chaos. That’s the time of the Monks. They’re beings that can manipulate chaos.

Yet to do so, they have to bring a external, alien determinism to chaos. The chaos of our profoundly interconnected and interdependent world is that all actions affect each other, whether directly, indirectly, conditionally, or systematically. But those actions themselves are free – the product of active movement.

The changes that a particular action causes don’t pre-exist the action. An action is a change in one body’s movement that affects all the surrounding processes, creating an all-encompassing chain of change. An action is the creative power of material.

But when the Monks measure and simulate all the different chaotic possibilities of a world, they manifest each of those changes in their strings – all at once, altogether. They turn chaos’ dynamic necessity of mutual affectivity into the ordinary block time where no active change is truly possible.

The Monks have robbed time and material themselves of agency. They’ve turned reality into a distinct and always-existing set of possibilities, chosen like a thread in a massive rope. Chaos, in contrast, is the free creation of futures through affectivity and change.

The villainy of the Monks lies in their destruction of the universe’s chaos.

Dialectic of the MRA: The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Reviews, 29/12/2016

Steven Moffat is the second-longest-running producer in the history of Doctor Who. He’s been in the role since 2010, and when he steps down at the end of 2017, he will have served as the primary creative producer of the show and franchise for eight years.

With The Return of Doctor Mysterio, he’s wrapping up his seventh year. The episode makes me think that the next year may see Moffat’s style running out of steam. Or at least looking for avenues of originality.

The Doctor and Nardole actually make a pretty decent team. Matt Lucas
is appropriately restrained but present in his weirdness, and has fine
chemistry with Capaldi. It looks like we'll be seeing more of him
throughout the next season, thanks to the trailer.

Small moments – bits of conversation with Nardole in the TARDIS, the final confession at the end – put this story in the aftermath of The Husbands of River Song. This whole coming season takes place in that shadow of that story – Moffat himself thought Husbands would be his last Doctor Who story as producer, but the production needed him for one more year before Chris Chibnall could get his crew together.

So it's quite fitting that Doctor Mysterio would return to a set of images that have haunted the Moffat era since pretty much the beginning of his tenure – the appearance of sexism.

Now, I don’t actually think Moffat is as sexist and misogynistic as his greatest detractors have argued. I consider him very feminist in his character construction and his narrative priorities. But I can understand how people can see sexism in his stories.

In Phil Sandifer’s review of Doctor Mysterio, he even mentions the interpretation of Grant’s character as a stalker, but only to say that it isn’t realistic. Sandifer himself wrote a definitive account of Moffat’s style and approach as feminist. But any critical viewer has to admit that the tendency to unfortunate imagery exists.

And Doctor Mysterio features some of the most unfortunate of all. To discuss it, there will inevitably be

The Ghost is a pitch-perfect homage to the transparently virtuous spirit
of traditional superhero comics. And it comes with all the positives and
terror of that tradition.

SPOILERS

because that cringe-worthy imagery lies in the relationship of Grant and Lucy. I call it the dialectic of the MRA because Grant and Lucy’s literally lifelong relationship conforms – I can only presume unintentionally – to the most horrible narrative of Men’s Rights misogyny.

I’ll present it literally as a dialectic. A few quick passes back and forth between a surface reading, and then a new angle that brings the problem to a deeper level. I hope it ends up with a moment of redemption. And I hope it will work.

A – The Sitcom Story

This is the classic farce of the secret identity love triangle. It’s as old as superheroes themselves – Lois Lane falls in love with Superman, without realizing he’s Clark Kent and that Clark is in love with Lois.

It’s a perfect story for Moffat, who achieved national mainstream success with a sex comedy sitcom all about these farces of missed understanding.

The central plots of most episodes of Coupling were just such farces – one set of characters understands a situation in one way, another understands it another way, mayhem ensures when they try to act all at once on how they see the world.

In his effort to be close to Lucy, Grant has made himself her servant, a
position which many of the most disgusting misogynist activists
denounce as turning away from manhood itself. Really, he should be
just negging her constantly.

Doctor Mysterio's central character dynamic is a textbook example. Grant is in love with Lucy, which Lucy doesn’t notice, as she gets a serious crush on The Ghost after her rescue from the Harmony Shoals New York office.

B – To Be Nice Is to Be Persecuted

Ask yourself why Lucy gets a crush on The Ghost. Try to figure out why, based on her character’s history.

Grant once had a friend named Lombard, who married Lucy but ran out on her when she had their baby Jennifer. If he’s the type of guy who’d leave a woman from fear of having a baby with her, it’s safe to conclude that he’s a stereotypically manly man.

Grant has always been a reserved, sensitive person. His superpowers, difficult to control in puberty, kept him socially awkward. Moffat’s script makes it a joke, but it’s actually a heightened version of what a lot of emotionally sensitive young men experience as teenagers.

He’s so overcome by his feelings that he becomes too nervous and embarrassed to act on them. The Doctor even jokes about it – “Finally, I’ve met someone who’s worse at this than me.”

That lifelong social awkwardness probably kept Grant from dating much as an adult. Maybe he’s even still a virgin well into his 30s. Since Doctor Mysterio adopts the mid-20th century aesthetics of Hays Code superhero comics, the characters quite possibly live in the same sexual milieu too.

Lucy clearly intended to seduce The Ghost during their interview, and
it's only when Grant begins to show the mannerisms he developed for
his Ghost persona that Lucy starts to show the same erotic drive
toward him that she did for the masked man. Yeah, he's keeping the
suit, alright.

Grant has a natural sense of empathy so strong that he works in child care. He kept his relationship with Lucy and cut off Lombard after the divorce because he’s a naturally sensitive soul. Grant cares, while Lombard never did.

If Lucy had really been attracted to the strength of caring men, she never would have gotten involved with Lombard in the first place.

C – She’s Nothing But a Whore

This is the point in the argument when the misogyny of the story becomes most stark. The Ghost is literally the most powerful man on Earth – Superman-like powers delivered with a stern, didactic morality. He’s a powerful man who gives orders.

In the light-hearted tones and contexts of the story, he says things like “Always have a working smoke detector!” But The Ghost is an authoritarian strongman. He dominates, takes control.

It’s implied that Lombard had that same aggression. Lombard was the alpha male to Grant’s gamma – the dominant, masculine sexuality that pushes Grant’s desires to the margins. He boasts his sexuality until Grant is completely overshadowed. In Lombard, Lucy found an outlet for her own sexuality – to be dominated.

But Lombard eventually abandoned his own dominant role. He ignored the responsibility that comes with power.

On another note, I'm interested to see how the Shoal will develop
through the 2017 season. They appeared in The Husbands of River
Song, and now are the primary villains of The Return of Doctor
Mysterio. They seem to be a return to some of the aesthetics of the
Slitheen (head-zipping mostly), but concentrating on bodyswap-
possession horror instead of camp.

And Lucy only embraces Grant when she realizes that he’s The Ghost – that he’s the Earth’s most powerful source of authority. She will only be with him once she realizes that he’s truly an alpha – a dominant, powerful man who will put her in her proper place as a female with his authority.

D – The Power of Ethics

But there’s more to the narrative of Lucy and Grant than this tawdry Elliot Roger fantasy of alphas and whores. It’s about the transformation of values.

The misogynist narrative wouldn’t hold the power it does if there wasn’t some truth to it. A horribly partial, inaccurate, incomplete truth. But it is a truth.

Confidence is attractive, no matter the gender. And some women are attracted to strong personalities, especially if they’re young and immature. But those immature relationships often self-destruct.

Lucy doesn’t change her mind about Grant on learning that he’s The Ghost. She changes her mind in a moment of understanding what’s actually important to her. The confidence of quiet devotion ultimately matters to her more. And her conversation with The Ghost helps awaken her to that.

E – Pining and Obsessed

Yet Grant himself occupies the mind-set that the most misogynist, predatory MRAs have preyed on for recruiting – the sensitive but awkward young man who’s habitually suffered from unrequited love.

Grant has spent years of his life pining for Lucy and finding ways to inject himself in her life. Even at the most intimate circle of becoming a central caregiver for her child. All this time, he’s harboured a deep feeling of love for her. But for literally decades, she’s never felt about him this way.

And the Shoal's plan to conquer the Earth by replacing humanity en
masse recalls the ideas animating the old Patrick Troughton era story
The Faceless Ones.

Except that she has – she just didn’t notice it, and needed to be awakened by just the right accidental words from The Ghost. She’s justified her years of devotion by having felt the same way – just never having been conscious of it.

But this narrative of the loved one who has loved her lover back all the time without knowing it is a filthy, violent, repugnant narrative. Grant himself may not technically be a stalker, but his story justifies stalking behaviour.

It’s the contention that, even though your target – sorry, loved one – says and believes that she doesn’t love you back, she really does, and all it will take is the right words or actions to make her realize that.

F – Falling Back

And this is where I’m stuck. I loved watching this episode for the spectacle, the cracking adventure storyline, and the comedy performances of Peter Capaldi and Matt Lucas as new companion Nardole. I think I’ll love this part of the story when I watch the episode with the GF later.

But the core relationship of the key guest characters can’t escape these horrifying implications. I think it appears as a function of Doctor Mysterio's nature as an homage-throwback to the classic superhero narratives of the 20th century.

Many of those stories were told from a very masculine perspective. Women were often marginalized characters, even when they had significant page time. It’s only recently that mainstream comics creators have had more freedom and come from more diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences.

This is far from the first time Doctor Who has been in a comic, you know.

The era of comics written by people like G. Willow Wilson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Mariko Tamaki will produce some very different narratives than those from the shadow of Stan Lee, which brought us the first, literal woman in a refrigerator.

But if Doctor Who draws on the old tradition of comics for inspiration in its stories, like The Return of Doctor Mysterio, it will end up falling back into the worst habits of that tradition.

When Doctor Who takes on too much fealty to a tradition – even its own traditions – it collapses. The Return of Doctor Mysterio might be a well-told story, but it’s hobbled by its fealty. I hope Capaldi’s third season will see a greater spirit of rebellion and rejuvenation once it properly begins in 2017.

That’s the real strength of Doctor Who.

“Well, Back to Work. Gotta Win the Pulitzer Prize,” Composing, 13/12/2016

So my project blogging through Class is finished. I feel like the posts themselves had the same anti-climactic, hollow ending as the series did. At the same time, I’ve also gotten pretty well-practiced at these kinds of philosophical reviews by now.

I started writing these three years ago, when I wrote a post about the philosophical themes and ideas in The Day of the Doctor. I’ve improved quite a lot as my blogging style has come along with practice. Following that, the two Peter Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who provoked some really insightful writing.

Introducing my new project as a critic.

Looking back at those series, I think I’ve got some decent material for a few small ebooks of television criticism. Just some self-published stuff through Amazon. Nothing too big. But something I could throw together that people could buy as a Kindle package or a softcover.

I’ll probably bundle the Class reviews first, simply because that show is most recent. And I want to supplement what I’ve already written on the blog – just some new content to bring out some more general ideas about Class and Doctor Who.

Here are some ideas and some provisional titles for what I’ll put together over the next while for my Class and Capaldi era Doctor Who indie books.

“In Your Face”
How Class, in its setup and its best episodes, was a confrontationally progressive show – practically trolling the Brexit set. Not just Quill’s joke about “Not another referendum!” in “The Lost.” Consider the show’s depiction of teenage homosexual sex, its frank discussions of religious beliefs with south Asian origins, and the major role of a character from a Polish immigrant family being the most virtuous member of the cast.

“Not That Shocking”
The legacy of Skins on all teen drama that attempts even gestures at realism. Including Class, its most weird heir.

“A Dark, Welsh Shadow”
How Patrick Ness’ attempt to emulate the kitchen-sink spectacle adventures of Davies era season finales ultimately hamstrung Class with a disappointing, empty ending. A sad way for a season with such interesting storylines to close.

“Hell Sent”
The last two episodes of Peter Capaldi’s second season as the Doctor presented two very different visions of the show. “Heaven Sent” was a high point of Doctor Who’s ability to present existential horror. “Hell Bent” was a celebration of Doctor Who’s mad creativity. How do these two modes of the show work together?

“Under the Lake / Before the Flood – Next Draft”
A treatment of what a better version of last season’s worst story would have looked like, at least as far as I’m concerned.

“And the Moral of the Story Is . . .”
The new era of Doctor Who has focussed on building season arcs. The Moffat years especially have constructed complex story arcs spread across the show’s anthology-like format. I’ll compare the season arcs of Capaldi’s first two years with what Class tried in its debut season to see which of the three approaches is more effective.

“If I Could Create a Virus . . .” Class: The Lost, Reviews, 06/12/2016

My full series of Class reviews is at these links.
1. For Tonight We Might Die
2. The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Nightvisiting
4. Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
5. Brave-ish Heart
6. Detained
7. The Metaphysical Engine
• • •
Well, in terms of episode quality, Sandifer’s review was on the money. A big ridiculous mess – some characters are gone prematurely, some storylines are thankfully ended, and the season-ending cliffhanger was completely ridiculous.

I’d actually rather like it if this was the only season of Class, even though I rather like the show. I simply think it would be hilarious for the show to end on such a batshit cliffhanger, though I can't discuss it without an inevitable warning about

If there is a second season of Class that has to deal with the frankly
insane situation of April's mind being trapped in Corakinus' body,
its nature will have radically changed. From a sci-fi story rooted in
the lives of realistic young people with human domestic melodrama,
it would become a sci-fi cartoon. Nothing wrong with that, but it's
quite a different program and appeal than the original pitch.

SPOILERS

because the spectacle of April transported into the body of Corakinus the Shadowkin is the kind of cliffhanger that completely changes what the show is supposed to be.

The Nature of Class

When Class was first announced, its governing concept was to be a youth-oriented sci-fi adventure show rooted in realism. The characters all had remarkably dramatic storylines, but their concerns were rooted through inevitably human situations and perspectives.

Sci-fi premises and storylines – and co-stars – would intrude into their lives. But ultimately, the human cast of Class were ordinary people thrust into extraordinary problems. And their ordinary backgrounds and histories actually supplied them with the emotional and ethical resources to handle their sci-fi stories.

Ram could summon the intense emotions and deep dedication to the things and people he loved to overcome the trauma of seeing his old girlfriend’s death and his injury. April’s personal strength came from her confrontation with her father’s crime. Tanya grows through the losses she experiences in her family, which we see best in “Nightvisiting.”

If we get a second season of Class, I hope we see more of the strange
relationship of Charlie and Quill. "The Loss" implied that they'd stay
associated, and possibly even become friends. They're now the last
survivors of their people – the culture and history that made them
enemies no longer exists, and they're bonding through their common
nature as stranded aliens on Earth.

Of course, Tanya also loses her mother in “The Lost,” just as Ram loses his father. The problem with this episode, aesthetically speaking, is that it’s just too much of an over-the-top spectacle for any of this tragedy to sink in.

“Nightvisiting” makes for a great contrast that can show us what this episode misses. The entire storyline of “Nightvisiting” was centred around Tanya’s confrontation with the emotional legacy of her father’s premature death. It wedded her progress in coming to terms with that event to the resolution of the sci-fi plot.

In “The Lost,” the murders of Varun and Vivian are treated as plot points. The characters don’t do much other than rage. They don’t really have time to do much more. Tanya gets some chance to complexify her performance through her relationship with Quill – she teaches the young girl the power of righteous spite.

But there’s just too much going on here. “The Lost” is Patrick Ness pulling a full Russell T Davies model Everything-Including-Six-Kitchen-Sinks season finale. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have nearly the skills that Davies did at assembling these sci-fi adventure carnivals.

If you read Davies’ book The Writer’s Tale, you see that creating these massively complicated kitchen-sink adventure stories had to send him almost literally into a kind of trance state.

We should and must ask just what these creatures are. Part of that isn't
just their physical nature, but what it is they do.

And even in such intense circumstances, Davies often had trouble sticking the landings. I’d say he really only did it flawlessly with “Doomsday.” Ness just kind of flails around.

Returning to the Genocide Question

If there’s one genuinely interesting element of “The Lost,” it’s the show’s return to the fundamental philosophical question of Charlie’s entire character arc this year. It’s that thorny question of what constitutes genocide.

Remember the question that I set up in my review of “For Tonight We May Die.” It’s whether it’s ultimately right to wipe out the Shadowkin. I worked through the argument implied by the episode, and it amounted to a conclusion that the act would be genocide.

It’s because the Shadowkin have individual personalities, self-consciousness, social relations and moralities. They’re self-conscious subjects, and to kill a self-conscious subject is a moral wrong. To wipe out an entire species or culture of self-conscious subjects is genocide.

But “The Lost” introduces a different twist on this argument. To state it sounds very disturbing – it introduces a situation where genocide is not only the right thing to do in a practical sense, but it’s also a virtuous act.

Total mass murder of the Shadowkin is a good act because of what the Shadowkin do. Remember how they invade a world and kill its inhabitants. They invade a world as a mass and simultaneously kill. They’re an indiscriminate force of death, and are unstoppable once they appear.

When I watched what the Shadowkin do, it reminded me of the
Doctor's dialogue in his legendary first long conversation with Davros
in "Genesis of the Daleks."

When they’re generally living in their mundane existence on their volcano world, Shadowkin are ordinary deranged people. When they’re attacking a world, they’re literally an infestation, a plague, a virus.

The Horrifying Power of Being Boring

For all the ways the Shadowkin are ridiculous, in one way, they’ve one-upped the Daleks. When the Doctor travelled to the origin of the Daleks, he confronted Davros with a thought experiment.

Imagine if you could make a virus. A virus that would be lethal to every other form of life. It would travel the entire universe destroying every form of life it touched, until the only thing left was itself. Would you release that virus into the world?

Davros would do it. Gladly. It would make him a god. Yet the Daleks never really become that vision. They’re too invested in actually being Doctor Who villains – taking part in stories, always being able to generate more adventures.

Daleks are evil forces of destruction, but they can’t literally have the power to destroy the world. They need the world so there are always stories about the Daleks.

Yet however bloodthirsty the Daleks might be, they were never the
nakedly efficient killers that the Shadowkin clearly are. They much
seem to prefer being at the centre of amazing stories.

It’s the very emptiness of the Shadowkin that make them able to fulfill Davros’ dream. They aren’t really interesting enough as creatures to have any more motivation than killing everything they see.

So they can actually lay claim to the power that prevents there from being any interesting stories about them at all. They don’t have the potential to exist at the centre of actually interesting narratives. They appear, they kill everything within minutes, they disappear again. That’s every Shadowkin story.

Could you imagine a “Power of the Shadowkin?” Or “Remembrance of the Shadowkin?” Hell, even a ridiculous carnival shit show of a story like “Shadowkin in Manhattan?” Of course not. They show up, kill everything in minutes, and disappear.

Without the Shadowkin, maybe Class will be able to tell more interesting stories. Like all the stories and moments within stories that didn’t feature Shadowkin.

Punishment and Crime

Yet the show maintains that Charlie has committed a heinous act in destroying the Shadowkin. He feels immense guilt that he wasn’t killed himself in the act of mass murder, and it’s clear that the Cabinet of Light itself keeps its user alive so that he can live with the act of genocide.

In all these ways, Class just couldn't get out fully from under the
shadow of Doctor Who. The heart of Charlie's pathos in any possible
second season of the show would be an inadequate repetition of the
Doctor's own character arc over eight years of the show.

It sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? Because it’s exactly the conclusion of “Day of the Doctor.” Rhodia’s morality is pure Kantianism – the intention alone of genocide is the same as its commission. And unlike what turned out to have happened to the Doctor, Charlie actually did kill all the Shadowkin.

The reason the Doctor, when he regenerated into Christopher Eccleston, believed that he had committed genocide to punish him for the intention. Charlie is now receiving a deeper, more authentic form of the same punishment. The Cabinet of Light made him live with the terror of his act for the rest of his life.

Yet there really was no other way to stop the impassive, immovable enormity of the Shadowkin. They’re narrative and mortal nothingness – death in the story and death to the story. They’re giant talking smallpox viruses.

The show itself demonstrated that there was nothing wrong in destroying them. Yet the words of the story demanded that an evil was committed. As if Class is afraid to stare its most intriguing, highest-potential concepts, and truly explore them.
• • •
Because ranking is a thing, here is a rank, from best to worst in my view.

With regard to episode quality, I think direction helps or hurts as much as script. Ed Bazalgette made decent episodes ("Nightvisiting," "For Tonight We Might Die") good and already good episodes fantastic. Wayne Che Yip did a great job on the bottle episode, and made the shit-show "Metaphysical Engine" marvellously fun. But I hope "The Lost" director Julian Holmes doesn't come back to the world of Doctor Who.

1. Detained
2. The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
4. Nightvisiting
5. For Tonight We Might Die
6. Brave-ish Heart
7. The Metaphysical Engine
8. The Lost