This post will be a highly critical review of Russell T Davies’ final two episodes of Doctor Who. I will try to be as balanced as possible, but it is still going to be negative: I believe that’s a fair judgment to arrive at, that the bad in the episodes outweighed the good by a considerable margin and that the problems arose solely from the scripts. But I want to put it in the context of two things.
The first of these is Russell T Davies’ enormous contribution to television drama generally and Doctor Who in particular. Focusing on the latter, it was his clear vision that prompted the BBC to bring it back at all, and probably only his vision that could have made such a colossal success of it. Could any other writer so deftly have taken the strengths of a much-loved but often creaky old programme and melded them with fast-moving modern story-telling and character development? It’s hard to say, but quite possibly not: it seems clear that Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who will involve tweaks to the RTD pattern, but not the wholesale reinvention and re-selling that Davies had to engineer. I’m quite content to say that Davies’ contribution to the show is greater than that of any other individual.
And secondly: who am I to say his last two episodes weren’t any good? Danny Stack wrote a blog post a little while ago arguing strongly against any writer or would-be writer criticising the efforts of those who have made it. And while I take the points he makes in their own context, it seems to me that those of us who like to think we might be able to write a bit (either now or with a few years’ practice) cannot be denied the same voice as any other viewer – when a work has been put into the public domain it’s entirely legitimate for anyone to express a view about it. And knowing what you like to watch, and why, is the prerequisite for knowing what you want to write. And, dare I say it, perhaps if you know a bit about the process of writing TV drama, your criticism might be a bit better-informed and worthwhile than that of those who don’t? So I’m not trying to claim I could write anything even as good as this (which wasn’t very good). Although I’d hope that if I had twenty years’ experience as a professional writer behind me I could indeed have done better.
And that leads me to a third thing: one of the reasons I most resent these episodes – and specifically these scripts, as that’s where the problems lie, not with any other aspect of the production – is that it’s turned me into one of the internet moaning minnies that RTD so rightly (usually) dismisses. I find myself cheek-by-jowl with the RTD haters, and it’s not company I much care for. But as a blogger and a viewer, all I have to offer is my opinion – and here’s what it is.
Part One was in many ways quite enjoyable, and I wouldn’t criticise it too heavily. The scenes between Tennant and Cribbins were beautifully played, and the brutal, feral Master was compelling. The climax of the Master turning humanity into himself was extremely funny – so much so, in fact, that the idea that it was somehow a calamity or atrocity didn’t really come across. And for all the “the human race ceased to exist” stuff, humanity was restored with the wave of an arm within half an hour of screen time, as it always looked like it would. Trouble was, this left the whole thing feeling a bit undramatic and insubstantial: where was the threat, the excitement? It was in the form of the Time Lords… who didn’t actually do anything. We were told about them at the end of the episode, and that was the cliffhanger. But there’s a reason why script readers and editors and teachers repeat the mantra “show, don’t tell”: by simply telling us of their existence via voice-over and cutaway, the script did not imbue them with any significance in the whole of Part One – as far as we could see, they had no bearing on the story, and the Doctor remained ignorant of their return for another half hour of the following episode. For such a momentous event, it was unforgivably uneventful, and the hour’s drama leading up to it seemed oddly meandering and pointless.
Now, a lot of this was redressed in Part Two: the drumbeat inside the Master’s head was quite cleverly used as the hook on which the Time Lords’ return was hung. Of course, it was all technobabble, and this is something RTD is often criticised for: meaningless unscientific plot devices. Now, science is always a double-edged sword for Doctor Who and all science fiction: if you get hung up on technicalities of real-life science it can quickly make your drama tedious and introverted, and striving for scientific realism in what is ultimately scientifically impossible fantasy fiction tends be a bit pointless and ridiculous; but giving up on any sort of realism and simply using blatant nonsense can risk the drama lacking any sort of rationale or sense of cause and effect. On this occasion, I would argue the use of this device to explain the whole of the Master’s character was extremely effective, and possibly the strongest aspect of the story – many elements of what we had seen before were bent to a new purpose. It also provided an excellent character-driven rationale for the Master’s decision to turn on the Time Lords at the end. RTD’s technical skill as a screenwriter was also evident in the presence of the Vinvotchi (sp?) – in Part One they were apparently there for some light relief, but their purpose as non-human allies for the Doctor and Wilf was vital to the story in Part Two.
It was only after the link to the Master had brought the Time Lords back that the script really disintegrated. It was simply unclear what was happening, or indeed whether the events depicted made any sort of coherent sense at all. Worse still, it seems quite possible that they did not. What exactly were the Time Lords going to do to ‘end time’? What did this mean, what would it entail? OK, it explained the Doctor’s decision to annihilate them at the end of the Time War, but for the purposes of this episode, what exactly was the threat? If the viewer can’t understand the threat, why should the viewer care about whether it is averted, or how?
And how was the threat averted? The Doctor shooting the Master would have done it, but he chose not to. The Doctor shooting the President wouldn’t have made any difference (would it?) but he threateneed to do it… for no readily apparent reason. And in the end he shot… some machinery? Or something. And it did… something? And then the Master got all vengeful and drove the Time Lords back into the Time War and oblivion… somehow. It simply made no sense.
Now, I’m not demanding a coherent scientific explanation for any of that – of course not, that would be preposterous. But it should have been explained in terms that at least made sense in the context of the Doctor Who universe and the rules it operates by. The Doctor’s fall from the spacecraft also fell foul of this: how the hell did the Doctor survive that? His regeneration from Tom Baker into Peter Davison was triggered by a much shorter fall than that, after all. And it’s not as if it’s impossible to find a way for the Doctor to survive a fall from great height: see Lance Parkin’s marvellous depiction of just such an event in the mid-90s novel The Dying Days (pages 15 to 19 of this extract). So why does this script simply not bother to depict events in a way that makes any sort of sense?
As an aside, the Time Lords’ return was disappointing: they actually did very little other than stand there (we were told they posed a threat, but not shown it by anything that actually happened), and it seems to have closed off any easy storytelling route to bringing them back in the future, should Moffat or a subsequent producer wish to do so. The Master’s apparent demise at the end is similarly problematic: any return for the character will require him to perform another escape from certain death like he used to do in his 1980s appearances. How tiresome. And who was the woman who appeared to Wilf? It’s fortunate I don’t really care, I suppose – but if the script had been doing its job properly, not only would I care but I would be able to tell you.
The saving grace of this horrific mess of a script was that it was at least exciting up to that point: we knew the Doctor’s regeneration was on its way, and that at some point he would somehow fail. With that possibility in the viewer’s mind, the confrontation between the various Time Lords was extremely exciting, and I’ll happily admit my heart was pounding throughout.
But what came next was awful. In some ways, the Doctor’s self-sacrifice for Wilf was perfect: the numerous scenes between them up to that point made it deeply poignant; of course the Doctor would sacrifice himself to save a single human life – it’s deeply indicative of his character (the fifth Doctor made exactly the same sacrifice for his companion at the end of his life, as RTD no doubt had in mind; and of course, the ninth did the same for Rose); the Doctor’s raging at the unfairness of it all was wonderful. The nature of the one-in-one-out booth had been set up in the previous episode (though the nuclear threat was thrown in very quickly in Part Two), and although you could argue it was another Davies Ex Machina, the point about it was the Doctor’s choice, not the precise mechanics of how he had to come to make it. The fact that it was Wilf who knocked four times – for something as trivial as to be let out – was ultimately rather delightful and sad.
But the subsequent twenty minutes had no place in the script and simply should not have been made. My criticism is not simply that they were self-indulgence by RTD: it is that they were fundamentally undramatic. The jeopardy was over: there was no threat, there was no conflict and therefore there was no drama. The whole sequence was fundamentally boring. The Doctor’s ‘reward’ was to see the same people he had seen only three episodes previously: I had thought that the ‘RTD’s greatest hits’ bit had been got out of the way at the end of series four, but no – we had to see it all again. The vignettes themselves were a mixed bag: the Rose one was pleasant, and if it had been the only one could have worked quite well; the scene with Jessica Hynes was lovely; the one with Martha and Mickey was stupid (Martha and Mickey make a living going round shooting things, and the Doctor wishes them well – oh, and they’re married despite Martha’s earlier engagement to someone else); the one with Luke and Sarah-Jane made Luke look like an idiot who can’t cross the road.
Donna’s return, both in the final sequence and in the main body of the episode, was pointless and disappointing. She did not do anything that advanced the story: her flight from the legion of Masters ultimately made no difference at all. I had thought maybe she would be reunited with the Doctor and Wilf, and that somehow this would trigger the regeneration – but no. The final sequence was very odd: it seems out of character for the Doctor’s gift to Donna to be millions of pounds. I had thought perhaps it was going to be a letter to her from her late father – a nice nod to the late Howard Attfield, whose death ultimately led to Bernard Cribbins’ expanded role in the series. But for the un-materialistic Doctor to give a gift of a winning lottery ticket seems wrong somehow. The performances of Tennant and Cribbins gave a fig-leaf of watchability to it all, but overall I was bored and uninvolved for the final twenty minutes; when the regeneration finally came, I felt like I was being put out of my misery. There was absolutely no dramatic reason why it could not have happened immediately after the Doctor was doused in radiation.
I will be interested to read the expanded version of RTD’s excellent book The Writer’s Tale, to see how he was allowed to produce three mediocre-to-poor scripts for the four specials without someone stepping in and insisting on some sort of quality control. There is a deep irony in Davies, who insisted that Doctor Who adventures could be told in only 45 minutes (in the face of the BBC initially insisting that all stories should consist of two episodes), having produced a finale that had roughly the same duration as one of the old series’ serials of six twenty-five minute episodes. Even back in 1980, then-producer John Nathan-Turner made the decision not to do six-parters any more, on the basis that they were usually over-long, slow and flabby. JNT made a lot of poor decisions as producer of Doctor Who in the 1980s; how bizarre that his more sure-footed successor should ultimately have proved him right about at least one thing.
For this was a flabby and messy script. Joss Whedon once memorably advised new writers that if they felt their script wasn’t working, they should cut their favourite thing in it – they would probably then find it worked much better. One can’t help but think that The End of Time could have been rendered as a flawed but effective 90-minute, or even 60-minute, single episode by taking this approach. Cutting Donna (bar her initial cameo outside the cafe, which was fair enough), the Ood, the Silver Web and the final twenty minutes, and tightening some of the talky scenes, could have produced a decent enough story. The problems around the Time Lords’ return and defeat would have remained, but perhaps would have been less obvious as they would at least have seemed less peripheral. But how such a bloated mess of a script was allowed into production should surely be a matter for examination within the BBC. Davies’ habit of producing his scripts very late, too close to production to allow significant re-writes, must surely be a large part of the explanation.
If I was a studio boss, having read The Writer’s Tale and seen these episodes, I probably wouldn’t hire Russell T Davies to write for me: I could not feel confident that he would deliver the scripts either remotely on time or to a high standard. And for a writer as brilliant as RTD, who has such a wonderful body of work behind him, that’s a terrible indictment. I hope, for his sake, that he has not diminished his reputation in others’ eyes as much as he has in mine. [Edit: that sounds rather pompous, sorry - his standing in my eyes doesn't matter, after all. But you see my point - these scripts reflect badly on RTD, which is a tremendous shame.]
Blair, Chilcot, the Establishment and God
January 30, 2010 — John KellFollowing the total non-shock of Tony Blair’s non-apology at the Chilcot Inquiry, some of the volumes of comment made beforehand look a little odd. It seems certain that the spectacle of the evidence sessions, and the attention they have generated, will mean that even if Chilcot’s panel produce a whitewashed report, people will be able to make their own minds up – much of the evidence has been dynamite. In that sense, the final report, and Blair’s steadfastness in his views, are irrelevant.
One curious feature of many strands of comment have related to “the Establishent” and the idea that Chilcot is somehow an “Establishment figure” and therefore predisposed to find in favour of the Government. Armando Ianucci’s article in The Independent rests firmly on this proposition, for instance. Indeed, it seems to be a stock accusation to level at sometimes very balanced arguments: “that’s the Establishment view, of course…”
This construct of “the Establishment” is largely nonsensical, and a hindrance to clear insight. It is a phrase in which certain assumptions are bundled, as with “the Powers That Be” or, say, “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Those who wish to can, if they desire, play on the differences between those assumptions and the truth: for instance, the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” might be taken by the reader to mean nuclear bombs or inter-continental ballistic missiles, even if the actual weapons being referred to are, say, battlefield munitions such as artillery shells – someone misusing the phrase in this way might protest that even they are pretty massively destructive if you’re on the receiving end, and on a semantic level it’s hard to tell them they’re wrong… These phrases can be used to do the audience’s thinking for them: referring to Saddam Hussein as “Saddam” served to hide the real figure under a demonised persona created by his enemies for their own ends – it might not have been a wholly inaccurate persona, but it put the emphasis on the monstrous and morally offensive rather than on, say, his position at the head of a sovereign state of the sort that ought not to be invaded without the strongest possible justification. Any use of cliche or stock phrases should make the cautious reader alarmed.
And so it is with “the Establishment”. Who are these people? Generally well-educated and materially comfortable people, often those who have served at a high level in the public sector in some sort of influential role. At most, it can be extended to those who are materially wealthy or who are in some other way influential. But does that mean they are somehow a different breed of person? Of course not: among whatever definition of “the Establishment” you choose to settle on, you will find the good and the bad in more or less the same quantities as in any other arbitrarily-selected portion of the population. You will certainly find, among the “Establishment” likes of John Chilcot, people who have much the same concerns as any other human being and who will do their best to do the right thing as far as they are able. Writing such figures off as part of “the Establishment” is not only to do them an injustice, but likely to make the observer draw some deeply wonky conclusions.
But why is the “Establishment” view so appealing? It seems to be the same human instinct that drives people to see the world in terms of a quasi-mythical “Establishment” as drives them to believe in God. It’s an odd combination of the desire for an explanation and an unwillingness to accept that that explanation can truly be known to us. We often seem to need to believe that there is something more: more than we can see with our own eyes; more than we are ever told about; more than we can ever know. An all-embracing explanation that makes everything seem ordered, logical and sensible is appealing, but seemingly tantalisingly out of reach: if only we understood the mysteries of creation, everything would make rational sense, but alas God moves in mysterious ways; if only we were in on the machinations of the “Establishment” then the events that led us to invade Iraq would become readily explicable, but alas we’ll never get to the bottom of it all…
The allure of this idea of an unknowable explanation is especially potent when the real explanations are discernable, but only with difficulty. We are able to explain creation, up to a point, with the Big Bang theory, and science is taking us closer to even greater knowledge: while we might not have got there yet, it seems overwhelmingly likely that existence is susceptible of a scientific explanation. Snag is, such science is very difficult to understand. Similarly with Iraq: the exact reasons for why we went to war are hard to pin down. Was it just to do with oil? That doesn’t quite explain the timing (the US seemed to be driven by a post-9/11 momentum, which wouldn’t have mattered if oil had been the sole motive); was it simply a desire for revenge on Saddam Hussein following the restitution of the Republican regime under Bush II? Well, surely wars are not waged for such petty reasons? Indeed, it seems hard to accept that the UK’s involvement arose purely because one man had his head turned by proximity to power… yet it’s quite possible that Blair’s actions stemmed from no better cause than that. Either way, it seems that most of the facts needed to explain what happened are already known to us; but putting them together coherently is no more easy than understanding the finer points of the physics behind the Big Bang Theory. Most people cannot do it; of those who can, many have better things to do with their time than devote it to such a challenging and ultimately academic task.
So an explanation of unknowable magic still has some appeal: the impulse that drives people to believe in the “Establishment” as a meaningful way of understanding anything is the same impulse that leads some people to believe in God – on close inspection it makes very little sense and there’s very little evidence for it, but in the immediate term it provides a superficially attractive and neat explanation. And, I suppose, if you find that satisfying than good for you – it must make life feel a lot more comfortable.