Doctor Who: Spyfall, Part Two

“By the way, I bring news from home...”

Wow. Ok, this blog post is going to be one of the longer ones.

Obviously, that was brilliant, and Chibnall has far outdone anything he did last season- and this two parter is not only superb but a statement of intent, giving us a new big story arc behind the spy stuff and giving us a story that, structurally, feels very much like a Virgin New Adventure novel in not only its use of cyberspace (or social media, as we call it these days) but the sheer number of elements in the story- alien Cold War type spies from another dimension using multiple time zones and figures from the history of computing, anyone? I don’t care if the plot doesn’t make sense; the sleight of hand works and that’s enough. The random timey-wimeyness and use of Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan and Charles Babbage.

In fact, the sheer number of elements in the plot felt very Steven Moffat. So did the way the second episode of a two-parter veered into very different territory from the first part, very reminiscent of Silence in the Library. All this shows Chibnall learning from his predecessor, and is a good thing. But I especially liked that it was about something- how we are all happily surrendering our privacy and intimate lives to unaccountable and unregulated tycoons very much like Daniel Barton (and Lenny Henry is utterly, utterly superb)- I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg.

But, of course, there’s the interplay between the Doctor and the Master at the heart of everything- and the chemistry between these incarnations is electric. It seems, pleasingly, that Chibnall is trying to recreate the Pertwee/Delgado dynamic where the Master doesn’t so much want to kill the Doctor as play games with her. We get a shoutout to the sound of drums. And Sacha Dhawan is absolutely a worthy Master, getting to do so many of  the Master’s signature tricks here, with a Wizard of Oz TARDIS to boot.

Incidentally, isn’t this the Master’s first explicit TARDIS of his own since Mark of the Rani?

And yet... there’s something behind this. All throughout the Master is dropping hints about both a massive retcon and what’s happened to Gallifrey- and so, once the Master is defeated in a satisfying and credible way- albeit one that owes a LOT to The Curse of the Fatal Death- we get a coda, as the Doctor visits Gallifrey and finds the Citadel empty and devastated. At first it looks as though Chibnall is doing another RTD, another “Last of the Time Lords”, but he quickly undercuts this with something deeper as the Master appears as a hologram in the TARDIS, just as the Doctor did to Rose in The Parting of the Ways, to admit that it was all his doing- and it was all an act of fury after discovering a massive lie in Gallifreyan history: “They lied to us, the founding fathers of Gallifrey”. And this is the “lie of the Timeless Child”, as mentioned in The Ghost Monument.

It’s also a very nice touch that Yasmin, Graham and Ryan get their own cool little James Bond adventure while all this is happening, complete with cool gadgets, but this is also the episode where they finally resolve to get the Doctor to tell them who she is... and she does. Up to a point. She has so much more to tell them and I’m sure we all have so much more to discover about Gallifrey’s last. I love me a good, epic arc.

A magnificent start to the season, then. Let’s hope Chibnall can keep it up.

Coalition

"I'm worried about Nick. He's in a bad place."

"Sheffield?"

I tend to write up my blog posts late these days, what with having become a father for the first time in February, but I just had to get this one out before the General Election and what looks like being a much more tortuous set of coalition negotiations over what could be a lot more than six days.

Also, cards on the table time: I'm on the left of the party, and some way to the left of all of the party's Cabinet ministers, with the possible exception of Vince Cable, but I've always voted Lib Dem until now. And the only reason I won't be voting Lib Dem on 7th May because I have now moved to a Tory/Labour marginal where a Lib Dem vote is fairly pointless under First Past the Post (why oh why is there not a site where I can swap my vote with a Labour supporter in a threatened Lib Dem seat?). I may not be a supporter of Nick Clegg (see below) or Orange Bookers generally, but I don't demonise him as many Labour tribalists do, but he hasn't been good leader since 2010 for various reasons, although he does have genuine achievements to his name and can, on the whole, be proud of his career. This one-off drama, with Clegg taking centre stage, is rather good at showing both his vices and his virtues.

Coalition is as good as this sort of thing tends to be, although you can never get a huge amount of dramatic depth out of a fairly straight reconstruction of recent political events. Obviously the standout cast member is Mark Gatiss who, as every review and preview has said, steals the show as a weary yet still dangerous Peter Mandelson, but all the portrayals ring true.

We begin not with the night of the election but with the leaders' debates, and those heady days of Cleggmania when everything seemed possible. This gives context for the slight deflation felt by many Lib Dems on election night, but the absurdity of election night is best portrayed by David Cameron receiving a call of misunderstanding congratulations from the Governor of California. Hasta la vista, baby. We also establish the relationship between Clegg and Donald Sumpter's elder statesman Paddy Ashdown, both a more left-wing and more substantial figure than Clegg, first shown consoling his protege on the mildly disappointing results, showing him to have rather more steel to him; it's not hard to see that the authorial voice sides with Ashdown rather than Clegg. So do I.

The morning after the night before sees Cameron make his big offer of coalition and Ashdown's prescient remark that "They'd string us up." The personal relationships are fascinating here; Camerpn subtly shows his dominance by insisting on immediate negotiations without sleep, and Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell puts pressure on both parties for a quick deal. Soon there are parallel negotiations going on with Labour, and the contrasts between Clegg's two suitors are fascinating; the Tories are hungry and devious, while Labour are half-hearted (sans Mandelson, a bit), unprepared and saddled by the fact that they simply haven't got the parliamentary arithmetic. Clegg's relationship with Gordon Brown is awkward, while Cameron runs rings round him; a Con-Lib coalition was inevitable, but a Blair clone like Clegg does not a good negotiator make and the script implies, not unfairly, that he was at least partly motivated by the prospect of power. He could have held out for a better deal, Brown leaving Number 10 prematurely notwithstanding. And, although a coalition of course makes it understandable that both sides have to compromise on their respective manifestos, that tuition fees pledge was different. It should have been inviolable.

Clegg's ultimatum to Brown- that he has to leave as PM for a coalition to happen- is both awkward and terrible, and Clegg is right to feel guilt. Brown deserved better, and Clegg cannot feel aggrieved if Labour were to make a similar demand in a week's time. Still, I have no doubt that all sides will be much better prepared. 

There's a nice cameo from Michael Crichton as an ancient Tory backbencher who remembers 1974, reminding us that Cameron too faces pressures, but the dramatic focus remains on a harried Clegg and a dignified Brown. We're reminded of how haphazard the final hours were, with Cameron becoming big PM, in the dark, before negotiations are complete. There will not, I suspect, be such chaos next time.

We end with the rose garden, and actual footage, bizarre in retrospect. Looking back the whole understanding of how coalitions were supposed to work looks extremely naive. I'm sure all parties are now much, much wiser.