Mindless Ones

Doctor Who has always been primarily a TV show, but from very early on it became what we would now call multimedia. Very early on it stopped existing only on TV, and spread out into comics, books, theatre, records and more. I’ll be discussing these more once we get to the show’s cancellation in 1989 (and also in my book Bigger On The Outside, which I am currently slowly serialising on my own blog) but as we’ve reached 1965, we should start with the most important of these.

EX-TER-MIN-ATE!!!!

It might seem odd to viewers nowadays, but one of the rules Sydney Newman, the executive in charge of Doctor Who at its beginning, put into place was ‘no bug-eyed monsters’. This rule was, of course, broken as early as the second story, The Daleks, but it signified something about the intention of the show when it started – that it was to be at least partly an educational series.

“So let’s all learn about human sacrifice and enforced marriage, shall we, children?”

Yesterday was, as many of you will be aware, the forty-eighth anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. This means that next year, 2012, is the fiftieth year of Who’s existence.

Over the next year or so, on a roughly-weekly basis, I’ll look at one story from each of those fifty years, from 1963 to 2012. To start with, let’s travel back to that time just after the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky”

I suppose I should apologise for how late this post is, coming as it does nearly a fortnight after the final episode. Partly, this is because I’ve been ill recently and unable to write. But also, it’s because I couldn’t beat Illogical Volume’s summation:

Doctor Who? More like Doctor Poo!

So, after a dull opener, we’ve had three pretty decent stories in a row – for all their faults, they’ve been watchable, entertaining, and had some decent ideas and moments in them.

It looks like season 6B might turn out to be the most consistently decent series of Doctor Who since the 2005 return…

Oh wait…

What’s that?

Oh fuck, it’s James Sodding Corden

When I started doing these posts a few weeks ago, I titled the series ‘Season 6B’ as sort of a joke for Doctor Who fans. I say sort of a joke, because it’s a geek joke, which is to say something that isn’t actually funny but references something else.

In this case, I was referencing the idea in fan circles that there was an unseen-but-‘canonical’ ‘season 6B’ of Doctor Who, which came between series six (Patrick Troughton’s last) and seven (Jon Pertwee’s first), in which the Troughton Doctor had various adventures, including his parts of the multi-Doctor stories The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors.

So it was sort of a joke, in a way, because the current series of Doctor Who has been split into two halves, and it’s the sixth series of the revived show, and so I’m reviewing season 6B for real. Do you see?

But I’m increasingly of the opinion that Moffat made the joke himself…

We know it doesn’t matter,
Cause what you came to see
Is what we’d love to give you,
And give it one, two, three!

But there may come three, two, one, two
Or jump from nine to five,
And when you see the end in sight
The beginning may arrive!

For those who look for meaning,
And form as they do facts,
We might tell you one thing
But we’d only take it back

Not back like in a box back
Not back like in a race,
Not back so we can keep it,

But back in time and space!

Mark Gatis has, in the past, been the most infuriating of writers for new Doctor Who. While most of the ‘name’ writers on the series have done precisely what one would expect of them, with Neil Gaiman writing a Neil Gaiman story and Richard Curtis writing a Richard Curtis one, there’s always been the sense that Gatiss could do far better.

His first story for the new series, The Unquiet Dead, was, apart from a few dud lines, one of the better ones from the 2005 series, (though as Lawrence Miles pointed out, it had an entirely unintentional anti-immigration subtext that leaves a nasty aftertaste), but after that, every episode with any involvement from Gatiss either as writer or actor has been nearly universally regarded as the weakest of the year.

It’s very odd, because on paper, Gatiss is the perfect writer for the show. He’s clearly an imaginative, witty writer, as both his work for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and his novels have shown. He’s also a longtime fan of the show (his first professional filmed work was a direct-to-video series called P.R.O.B.E. which is required viewing for anyone who ever wondered what it would be like if The X-Files were made in Britain for a fiver, and had a middle-aged pipe-smoking woman who used to be The Doctor’s companion instead of Mulder and Scully), and seems hugely enthusiastic to be working on it. Yet a Gatiss episode is now always the one everyone knows to avoid.

This time though, he has done the best work of the series so far.

More after the evil disembodied eye stops looking at you…

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.

So we’re going to look at each episode a week late, and see what actually worked and what didn’t.