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http://parma-violets.livejournal.com/196868.html
billie piper,
darkplace,
smith and jones,
radio times,
animatronic puppetry,
judoon,
news 24,
garth marenghi,
rose,
doctor who,
race,
eastenders,
the unquiet dead,
russell t davies,
time travel,
ace,
big brother,
emily pankhurst,
martha jones,
vampires,
59th street bridge song,
david tennant,
bbc,
liz shaw,
doctor who magazine,
the runaway bride,
iran,
simon and garfunkel,
freema aygeman,
sonic screwdriver,
anne reid,
star trek,
autons
Well, the third year of the new Doctor von Wer began last night, and I think we're all starting to notice the signs that the BBC is gearing up for thirteen more episodes. There's the broad stuff, like the Radio Times cover, or the astonishing fact that, on Saturday morning, the new series of Doctor Who was the lead story on BBC News 24 - Auntie having apparently decided that the looming threat of war with Iran is less of a concern than the invasion of the moon by alien rhinoceri.
Doctor Who Magazine has its own little rituals, too. Every year seems to bring a message from Russell T Davies asking us not to apply any critical standards to the show - just sit back with your jaw hanging open and blindly love everything, you guys, it's so much easier than thinking about whether something works or not - and a preview which invariably notes that the first episode of the new series could be categorized as "zany", "fast-paced", "a romp", "never pausing for breath" and so on, so forth.
These are both annoying, so it's a happy duty to report that this year they're both utterly unnecessary. You don't have to be in an uncritical frame of mind to enjoy 'Smith and Jones' - frankly, I was so far from an uncritical frame of mind that I was more or less adopting the crash position, yet I really, genuinely enjoyed it. Secondly, 'Smith and Jones' was not a breathless, fast-paced romp. It was gentle, sweet-hearted, contemplative and slightly melancholy, yet it still left me with a big grin on my face. If it was a song, it would be 'The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy)' by Simon and Garfunkel.
It odesn't get off to the best start - I was irked that new companion Martha Jones had to be introduced with a soul song on the soundtrack, because she's, you know, urban, the word of choice for people who are too nervous to say "black". And the appearance of a spatial vortex above a hospital can't help but remind viewers with a keen appreciation of sci-fi and horror history of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. But if the early evening timeslot means 'Smith and Jones' can't be as raw, as terrifying, as damn real as that masterpiece of horror, it has a winning mood all of its own.
The signature scene comes when Martha and the Doctor step out on the balcony of the hospital, now transported in a bubble of air to the surface of the moon, and Martha tries to get her head round the idea of standing in her place of work, outside her home planet, watching the Earth rise. It doesn't really have any plot purpose other than to help us understand what sort of person Martha is, and in a previous season it would have been ruthlessly scissored out. It's essentially a two-or-three-minute expansion of the already delightful moment in 'The Unquiet Dead' where Rose experimentally stepped into the Victorian snow, and the fact that it's there at all is a very positive sign for the direction that the series is going in.
If Rose - lovely, headstrong, troubled family background, occasionally overemotional but with a good intuitive mind - was often reminiscent of a 21st-century Ace, Martha Jones seems to have a more unusual, intriguing source of inspiration; she's the new Liz Shaw. It's quite refreshing, not just for Doctor Who but for modern British drama as a whole, to be introduced to a character telling us things they know; modern dramatists seem petrified that this sort of thing will make the audience feel stupid, but here's Martha going through her medical training with Mr Stoker within the first five minutes of the episode. The Doctor makes it clear that he's as impressed with her smarts as we are. By the end of the episode she works out, without saying a word, that her resuscitation attempt on the Doctor is failing because she isn't applying pressure to both his hearts, becoming an expert on alien physiognomy in an enviably short space of time.
This smartening up is extended to the viewer, as well. The Doctor is allowed to say, with authority and apparent sincerity, that he's not looking for a companion, and the viewer is allowed to deduce from his actions earlier on in the episode that he's lying - the sort of character beat that would have been spelt out in the previous two seasons, but is left unspoken here. A small gag early on in the episode represents Davies's first real examination of the non-linear storytelling possibilities offered by time travel. It's a little moment, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it might have been included to prepare us for more of this kind of storytelling later on in the series.
We're not told how many months - or even years - this is since the events of 'The Runaway Bride', but we do know that the Doctor's been taking some time off, holidaying in London, of all places. There's something subtly sad in this admission - it doesn't take much to imagine a miserable Doctor, banana daquiri in hand, wandering around the Powell Estate moping over Rose - but there's also something that connects with what's positive and wonderful about the series. Namely, there is no other science fiction show on Earth that glories so much in the mundane. The rather embarrassing Star Treky tumbling around that Martha and her colleagues do when the hospital is sucked through the vortex is less effective than the simple, eerie realisation that the rain is falling up.
The villains, as they often are in a Davies episode, have a Little Englander feel to them as well, though in this instance it works perfectly. The revelation that the Judoon - incarnated, incidentally, in beautiful latex animatronic form - just want to shine a funny light in the patients' faces and felt-tip a cross on their hands is weirdly funny but also quite uneasy; why would anyone travel to another world to do that? Likewise, the revelation that the sweet old lady diagnosed early on is actually an alien vampire is not only the sort of juxtaposition that no other show would dare, it also benefits immeasurably from guest star Anne Reid's refusal to play up her age to underline the joke.
The performances are uniformly good, in fact. David Tennant still bugs his eyes too much for my taste, but he has a new, restrained vocal cadence, suiting a sadder, more reflective Tenth Doctor. In fairness, he was showing signs of this in 'The Runaway Bride', but his restraint was rather overshadowed by the awful hamming of his co-stars. Here, he only seriously reverts back to manic form twice; once during an extraneous piece of slapstick involving a radioactive shoe, and once in a well-judged and timed comedy routine involving the Doctor extracting information by pretending to be a gormless patient.
I have expanded on my pretty much immediate fondness for Martha Jones already, and it can be taken as read that a large part of this fondness is down to Freema Aygeman's fresh, instantly confident performance. It's worth recording, however, that even the minor characters have a depth and believability to them that's quite rare. Poor Dr Stoker, his name a cheeky clue as to his eventual fate, is sketched in sympathetically with little grace notes like his fondness for salt and his dream of retiring to Florida. Martha's family, meanwhile, appear in two very short scenes, but seeing her father stamp his foot, impotently shouting "This is me putting my foot down!" immediately tells you all you really need to know about him.
Martha's situation is subtly different to Rose. Every companion needs a reason to escape - whereas Rose loved her family, despite their flaws, she was also trapped in a dead-end job with no chance of advancing herself. Martha, by contrast, is doing pretty well for herself - she's on course to pass her medical exams - but as soon as you see her painfully demanding, argumentative, embarrassing family it becomes wincingly obvious why she'd chuck it in for a life of danger. Put in such harsh terms it sounds mean-spirited, but making Martha's family less sympathetic than the Tylers at least reduces the risk of Davies writing any more of those gruesomely condescending hymns to Britain's upstanding peasant class, with their Big Brother and Eastenders and chimney-sweeping.
Any flaws? Well, yeah - all instances where the show's newfound sense of risk bottled out a bit. The Doctor inadvertently frying his sonic screwdriver could have been the start of a refreshing new era of our hero living off his wits for a change - and he did succeed on his wits and bravery here, rather than relying on others' willingness to sacrifice themselves or his enemies' stupidity, as he's been doing far too often recently. So it was disheartening when he produced a shiny new model at the end. Couldn't he have given that to Emily Pankhurst too? And the kiss - practically minded though it may have been - felt like emotional blackmail, as if Davies was so worried that the audience might be missing Rose he fast-forwarded the romantic subplot by a few months, to show that - look! - the Doctor loves Martha even more than he loves Rose! Why don't you, audience? The long-term viability of a format where the Doctor can seemingly only have quasi-romantic relationships with his companions - and where, despite being over nine hundred years old and non-human, he only finds pretty young human women attractive - is worth questioning at this point.
But not for long. For the first time in such a long while, there is a rightness at the core of Doctor Who, a sense of intelligence and quaintness to match the spectacle and pace that has defined the series since Autons terrorized Billie Piper. It's been a while, but I'm really looking forward to Saturdays again.
Published by :parma-violets 2007-04-01 14:58:50.0
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