Mindless Ones

One of the reasons I was asked to join the Mindless Ones last month is that we’re expanding our range of topics somewhat. We’re still going to concentrate on comics, of course, but we’re going to be venturing into other waters – expect the occasional post about TV, films or video games. And one of the things we’re going to do is a weekly look at Doctor Who.

Yes, it’s going to be a week after the broadcast. But it’s a programme about time travel, after all. More to the point, there’s a good reason for the delay – Moffat-era Doctor Who, more than any other era of the programme, takes time to sink in. Often what appeared at first glance to be a hugely impressive rip-roaring adventure will, on a rewatch, prove very problematic. Sometimes, less often, the reverse will be true, and an initially unimpressive story will reveal hidden depths.

I have a very strange relationship with Moffat-era Doctor Who. While Russel Davies’ period running the show was simple for me to dismiss – if you’re not going to bother with a coherent plot, or a moral centre for the show, and you make your lead actor do a terrible gurning mockney Kenneth Williams impersonation all the time, then there’s no point paying attention.

Moffat, on the other hand, can actually write, and Let’s Kill Hitler has more of both the good and bad points of his tenure so far than any other story.

Moffat is very, very good at plot, and at stringing together effective set-pieces. In this story we move from creating a crop circle to a kidnapping to a shape-changing robot to an encounter with Hitler to a shock reveal about one character’s identity in the first few minutes of the show, and yet unlike Davies’ stories, it all holds together. People have comprehensible motivations, and act on them. Everything follows neatly from everything before. The plot works, and it works even though the number of ideas in it really demands a whole series to itself.

And Smith is revelatory as the Doctor. The Eleventh Doctor has been very badly characterised on the writing side of the show, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if Lawrence Miles is right about Moffat. The Sixth Doctor has rather unfairly been described as ‘a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is like’. The Eleventh Doctor, with his casual massacres but intense focus on individuals, could easily be described as an unpleasant person’s idea of what a nice person is like. However, unlike Miles, I’m willing to accept that this is just an occasional failure in Moffat’s writing ability (mostly because, coming from sitcom, he can’t resist going for a good line even if it destroys the character) rather than a permanent failure in his moral compass.

But Smith has managed to hold this characterisation together and still make it convincing as a portrayal of a hero. Just look at the scene where he meets Hitler, the micro-changes to his expression from puzzlement to horror to anger to triumph. Smith’s Doctor will probably never be considered one of the great Doctors, but he’s easily one of the two or three best actors to play the role, up there with Peter Davison (another great actor cast too young and let down by weak scripts) and Patrick Troughton.

Even the single biggest criticism I’ve seen made of the episode, that it introduces a hitherto-unseen closest friend of Amy and Rory who just happens to have huge importance to the overall story, is something I can forgive, because I strongly suspect Moffat will provide an explanation for this further down the road. Moffat is normally so good at placing Chekov’s gun that there simply has to be a reason he didn’t place this one earlier.

So on to the bad.

Firstly, the character of River Song (and that name, to a Beach Boys fan like myself, will always irritate, conjuring up as it does other, rather better, associations) is a strong female character. Unfortunately, she is one in the Kate Beaton sense.

A lot of people have been saying they were surprised by the big reveal that Mels is River Song, because they found Mels irritating. But River Song herself, for all that we’re meant to find her charming, sexy, funny and so on (and we do, to an extent, thanks largely to Alex Kingston’s performance), is a gun-obsessed, violent, criminally reckless narcissist, just like Mels. Hearing the line “I’m a psychopath, I’m not rude” was a huge relief for me, at least, because it showed that Moffat is at least aware of this. But that psychopathy is not limited to this episode, but has been there in every appearance of the character I’ve seen.

Song’s characterisation seems to be symptomatic of a deeper misogyny in Moffat’s writing (as opposed, one presumes, to the man himself, who appears to be a perfectly nice man). Not only do we have the Doctor ‘explaining’ her behaviour with ‘she’s a woman’, but later she gives up her lives for the male lead of the show and, as Strange Complex points out, makes her whole career choice not out of intellectual engagement with the subject but simply as a way to track down the Doctor again.

However, the reaction of the Numskull Wiesenthals to her was still a little harsh. These are people going through time and space hunting down the worst war criminals of history, they’re in a room with Adolf Hitler, and they decide instead to go after River Song. Now, admittedly, her habit of saying “Spoilers, sweetie” is irritating, but I do think they need to sort their priorities out.

Of course, they also reveal in an aside what everyone had already guessed four months ago, that Song was the person who killed the Doctor in the first episode, but still, to actually say that one murder is worse than Hitler’s is to utterly trivialise several of the most appaling events in the whole of human history, and events that are within living memory, at that.

And it’s not as if the story needed Hitler, except as a way to have a big tease at the end of the first half of the series. The story, rather surprisingly, doesn’t deal at all with the consequences of trying to interfere with history – there’s no “Have I the right?” or “You cannot change history, not one line” here, they just push Hitler into a cupboard and leave him there, because they’re bored with that now and want to get on with the rest of the story. I can understand the reasoning behind treating Hitler in this way, if you need to have Hitler in the story at all, but the story wouldn’t have lost anything without him, and the removal of that element would have given the rest of the story room to breathe.

And finally there’s the fact that the Doctor gets killed again – for the third time in the last ten episodes. Between this, Rory’s repeated deaths (I think he’s died at least five times, but I stopped counting) and Amy’s death (I think she’s only died the once, so she’s due another any time now), new Who is making 90s X-Men seem like a very model of restraint. Everyone knows that the only characters who seemingly die and then come back again (without regenerating) are Davros and the Master.

At this point, the show is no longer dealing with suspension of disbelief, or with actions that even have the possibility of consequences, or with believable characters. Rather what Moffat is doing is somewhere between Duck Amuck and a game of chess, using the cartoony violence to reveal to us some aspects of his overall plan (a plan which we can’t be sure even exists in his head, rather than being improvised), with the characters being his pawns. He seems, for the most part, to be playing fair with the audience – other than the magic wand ‘sonic screwdriver’ he uses very few unfair solutions, so it can be a fun intellectual exercise to try and work things out before the reveal.

But increasingly, these stories are about nothing other than themselves, and there’s a very real danger that the lack of consequences for anything will not only eventually drive away the audience, but break the character for further writers. One of the strengths of ‘classic’ Doctor Who was that characters could, and did, die at quite an alarming rate, and even the Doctor himself was not invulnerable – regeneration might not quite be death, but the character Sylvester McCoy played was very different from Colin Baker was very different from Peter Davison, so in some sense that version of the Doctor did ‘die’ permanently. This refusal to actually let death mean anything may, in the end, be the death of the show.