Doctor Who, if one lets it, can consume you. It’s a happy
consummation, blissful even, but it can leave one spoiled, specifically when it
comes to programmes which on a surface level may appear similar. I’m often
asked if I enjoy The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars
or Star Trek on the understanding
that “you like all that sci-fi stuff” to which – depending on how much I know
the person - I often respond, “No, I like the good sci-fi stuff and lots of what you’ve mentioned isn’t sci-fi at
all.” In my mind, the good sci-fi
stuff includes Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s
Guide, The X Files, 1984 and A
Clockwork Orange, with a sprinkle of Heroes,
Dennis Kelly’s Utopia, The Outer Limits and if I’m feeling
lucky, The Matrix. One might notice
that the list is avoidant of Babylon 5,
Thunderbirds, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and other programmes
one might more immediately bring to mind when they consider science-fiction as
a genre. Bluntly, a spaceship is a spaceship but as Douglas Adams said, “To
design an invisible spaceship, that
takes genius.” My list, I like to imagine includes much richer examples of the
genre in question. To my mind, The Lord
of the Rings (I’m talking the film franchise here) is an incessantly dull
New Zealand travelogue during which our characters refuse to develop over nine
hours of screen-time and Elijah Wood refuses vehemently to stop looking as if
he is suffering an extreme attack of constipation. If it were a Doctor Who
story, Tom Baker would be at the top of the dark tower grinning and juggling to
the bafflement of Saruman, his imagination bringing the wizard down. The film
enjoys many, many minutes of Gandalf and Saruman issuing bolts of lightning from
their enormous wands in each other’s direction. I wonder if they’re
compensating for their lack of wit. After all, it’s usually the intellectually-wounded
dickheads who sport the biggest cars.
What Doctor Who has more than any of these other programmes
is imagination. It is only ever in danger of failure when it forgets that.
Compare, for example City of Death
and Arc of Infinity. The first is
hailed as a universal classic (agreed) and the other usually festers away at
the bottom of the polls like an unwelcome fart (agreed). Both are filmed in
foreign cities and both involve lots and lots of running around the streets of
those foreign cities. But one story is about the theft of seven identical Mona
Lisas by a man splintered in time and culminates with the most important punch
in history at the birth of the human race. The other is about Time Lord protocol
and some lost passports and culminates in the Doctor shooting his old,
ineffective adversary limply on a small quayside. One is forward looking; the
other backward. For the most part, Doctor Who has been successful in its abject
avoidance of its own mythos, with Arc of
Infinity being an unusual example of the show, rather than its norm. The Lord of the Rings is so up itself,
it works on the assumption that we’re already greatly invested in its mythos
before we’ve even met people properly and audaciously pulls a slow-motion
characters-crying sequence a couple of hours into its nine-hour stretch when
Gandalf doesn’t die. Doctor Who
doesn’t need to be this po-faced and earnest. It just needs to be imaginatively
relevant. The closest slow-mo, aren’t-we-important montage I can think of in
Doctor Who is the death of Astrid in Voyage
of the Damned. Although it feels earned, given the length of the programme
and how we’ve come to adore Astrid, even that has a gurning Mark Costigan with
sparkling tooth shot thrown into the mix.
What Doctor Who has more than any of its contemporaries is
an ability to take the piss out of itself and wallow in its own ridiculousness.
At the end of The Day of the Doctor,
David Tennant again declares: “I don’t want to go.” Matt Smith’s Doctor
observes that “he’s always saying that.” In The
End of Time almost four years earlier, when arguably the programme was at
its very height of popularity, those five words were desperately moving and
shook a nation of fans. Here, the programme itself is able to toss them aside
like yesterday’s news and point and laugh at them sneeringly. Similarly, in Twice Upon a Time, as Testimony shows
the Doctor precisely who he is (The Destroyer of Skaro, the Shadow of the
Valeyard, etc) he is able to follow it up with “To be fair, you cut out all the
jokes.” This is a programme which stubbornly refuses to be taken seriously
except when it matters. It has its cake and eats it. It is able to have us weep
for David Tennant’s demise before laughing at ourselves a few years down the
line. We can appreciate the Doctor’s mythic status whilst acknowledging that he
has always been a bit of a joker. Doctor Who, unlike The Lord of the Rings, has an innate sense of humour and a wise,
old, Shakespearean fool in the lead.
Doctor Who has many influences and often wears them on its
sleeve. Amazingly, however, it manages to better them most of the time. I’d
much rather watch Last Christmas
again than Miracle on 34th
Street, Alien or Inception. That
might sound scandalous but that nifty little hour of Doctor Who is so much
better than all those try-hards. For one thing, it’s funnier. (It includes the line,
“I will mark you, Santa.”) And perhaps more strikingly, it refuses to be one
thing. Miracle is about the existence
of Santa. Alien is about… well,
guess. And Inception is dreams within
dreams. Doctor Who does all of that at once and makes it look easy. Perversely,
it’ll never win any awards for that script (it’s only Doctor Who after all,
those well-informed judges will tut humourlessly) but it is so much cleverer,
more accessible and more fun than all its influences, namely because there’s an
eccentric and wonderful man dressed like a magician with a couple of huge
hearts at the centre of it all – and he’s pratting about.
The climax of Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a terrifically well-directed battle
between Daniel (“I’m Harry Potter even though I can’t act.”) Radcliffe and
Ralph (“I can act but I’m lowering
myself to this bleeding awful make-up thanks to a colossal pay cheque.”)
Fiennes. Bolts and magic sparks fly. It is an epic battle. Glass shatters,
colours flash, eyebrows quiver. It is utterly hollow. There is nothing quite so
boring as a fight with neither geography nor emotional resonance. The final
film finishes in much the same way: a loud, brash battle with no heart. The
films have taken for granted that we really love these characters without doing
anything at all to give us a reason to. Harry is a horrible, little brat, so
into himself that he forgets how to sympathise with absolutely everyone. Ron is
the thick, ginger, Cockney one. We’re supposed to feel for Hermione because
she’s a “half-blood” but she behaves like a stuck-up irritant. When Rowling
simply expects us to like Hermione because of her bloodline, we can’t. These
are facts about characters rather than an indication of what sort of person
they might be. So Harry has no parents, right? No and it doesn’t stop him being
a right wazzok. We can’t feel sorry for every orphan. Interestingly, Doctor Who
fans were up in arms at the time of the Paul McGann TV movie when it was
revealed that the Doctor was half-human. I can understand why: it’s a cheap,
“now you’ll care about him” shorthand which absolutely doesn’t work because
it’s got nothing to do with the plot, pisses over what has come before and
chiefly, doesn’t make us care about the Doctor any more or raise the stakes any higher. Ironically, casual viewers
are probably less inclined to sympathise with someone only half human. When the show looks into itself, it usually fails.
I say usually: The
Deadly Assassin is perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told in my
view, despite its truly rubbish title. One could argue that it epitomises a
backwards looking show in its exploration of the Doctor’s origins. However,
it’s easy to forget that this version of Gallifrey at the time was completely and
radically new. It still remains the best depiction of the planet. Because it’s
not a story about the Doctor’s homeworld; it’s a story about the workings of an
alien society. It’s why it works so much better than Hell Bent or The Three
Doctors or Arc of Bloody Infinity. Assassin understands that we’re not very interested in the Doctor’s
origins so it goes out of its way to make this new and exciting world
interesting in much the same way Holmes would make the worlds of Ribos, Androzani
and even Ravalox interesting. It’s the politics of the planet and the nefarious
scheme of the Master’s complete with its dreamlike APC net, as well as the
beautifully literate language, that fill the story with life. Appropriately
enough, the Doctor treats the place with distain. After all, what is
interesting about a place? He’s interested in people. Hell Bent would seem to prove the point: it only truly comes to
life when it’s about Clara and the Doctor. When it’s about conversations in a
Council Chamber, it’s dull as dishwater. Lord
of the Rings is based on a map and its characters inherit the map and are
products of it. Doctor Who can never be based on a star-chart, which is why
books like John Peel’s Gallifrey
Chronicles always left me cold. When Doctor Who is working supremely well,
it’s about the people of these strange worlds (be they historical or
futuristic) and the strangeness of those places comes hand in hand with
character. It’s not about an orphan troll who lives in a mountain cave by a
stream overlooking the tower of a dark wizard. Because who gives a toss?
So yes, I’m spoiled. Doctor Who has completely spoiled any
love of other more map-based examples of the genre (Hello Game of Thrones) I could care to think about. There are vast
swathes of sci-fi that I will never enjoy because Doctor Who does it better.
There are spaceships and wonders that will bore me rigid because I’ve seen them
before but with a curly-haired maniac grinning his way through them and
offering philosophies on teaspoons and open minds. Doctor Who’s imagination is
boundless compared to scribblers like Tolkien or Rowling. Names like Holmes,
Moffat and Dicks and Davies are the ones to really conjure with. Doctor Who
Versus the World? No contest.
JH
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