Life on Mars: Season 2, Episode 4

 "So he pushed a bird out of a car. Don't make him a bad bloke."

It’s barely worth commenting on how inevitable it was that Life on Mars would do a swinging episode: what could be more 1973? What’s slightly more of a surprise is that an episode based around swingers could be so bloody good. And I’m not just saying that because of the magnificently done scenes of the greatest ‘70s soirée since Abigail’s Party or, indeed, the scene with the whip. A whip and handcuffs, after all, add a certain something to a house party that Blue Nun and vol-au-vents just can't provide.

There’s very little arc stuff here, other than Annie being rather standoffish, just an excellent hour of drama with a nice twist at the end as to the identity of the killers and a very ‘70s, very Reggie Perrin look at how bohemian ideals were starting to infiltrate the world of suburban middle class ennui. There’s also a lot of nice culture clash stuff, whether it’s Gene and Sam disagreeing on surveillance or the heavy explored sexism and, indeed, rather rapey attitudes of men like Ray, who continues to be a total arse. More subtle is the scene where Gene passionately exhorts his team to find the killer of these dead women, but not yet as it's "beer 'o' clock".

It's a solid whodunit, full of character, that exploits the format superbly, with Sam and Annie going  undercover as "Tony and Cherie Blair", which dates this as much as anything 1973. Let's hope the episodes to come will keep up this standard.

Life on Mars: Season 2, Episode 3

 "Why don't we bring in that well-known terrorist, Dana...?"

A stronger episode this time, as the inevitable happens and Life on Mars does an episode based around the Troubles. Sort of.

Inevitaby, given the sensibilities of 2007, in the wake of a Northern Ireland Peace Process not yet imperilled by Brexiteering insanity, as opposed to those of 1973, the twist is going to be that the bomber has nothing to do with the Irish. This leads to a rather good whodunit which is cleverly done and just about manages to hide the fact that, if we assume the bomber isn't Irish, there's only one possible suspect.

What the episode does, thogh, is shed a light on the discrimination and bigotry faced by Irish immigrant labourers at the time, through the eyes of Patrick O'Brien as example. Not only do we see police brutality and stereotyping (Gene Hunt, of course), but discrimination in terms of employment and housing. O'Brien may well have several chips on his shoulder, but those chips are well-fried.

There's also a nice culture clash as Ray returns to work too soon after having been caught in a bomb blast, with counselling for his PTSD being eschewed in favour of a round of drinks.

The meta-stuff about Sam's coma is really there to add suspense and drama rather than develop any kind of arc, as usual, but for the first time in a while we see the Test Card Girl, subtly recast but no less creepy. 

The overall effect is impressive. This is rather good and, I note, not written by one of the showrunners.

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

“Today, we’re answering a cry for help from the scariest place in the universe: a child’s bedroom.”

You might have noticed that my weekly Torchwood and Doctor Who reviews are somewhat late this weekend. This is because I spent yesterday at the rather splendid Whooverville convention in Derby. And after the excellent day’s entertainment had finished and some beer had been drunk, it was time to sit down at 7pm and watch Doctor Who, on a big screen, with my mates and loads of other fans- the best way to watch it! But fear not, my readers- I’ve just rewatched it with subtitles and written up my notes…

Richard Clark is a bloody brilliant director. The opening shots are amazing, and really looked magnificent on a big screen. The whole aesthetic is fascinating, too; taking a rather run-down 1960s housing block, complete with bin bags across a wall, and make it look both scary and beautiful. It succeeds at both brilliantly, and the direction really brings out the scariness right through the episode.

Living on the estate is a little boy called George, who seems to be afraid of everything, including, we’re told, pants. So scared, in fact, that his pleas for help against the “monsters” reach the TARDIS and the Doctor’s psychic paper.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory split up and, in some very funny intercut scenes in which Arthur Darvill shines in particular, get to meet the neighbours. We’re introduced to Mrs Rossiter, whom George thinks is a witch, and to the extremely nasty landlord, Jim Purcell, with his threatening pit-bull, Bernard. More about him later.

George, unfortunately, overhears Rory joking that “Maybe we should just let the monsters gobble him up?”. Seconds later, Rory and Amy find themselves taking a much faster and scarier trip in a lift than they had intended. Mrs Rossiter, meanwhile, is swallowed by some bin bags. I can think of no other TV series in which that could happen!

Amy and Rory discover themselves to be somewhere else, somewhere very dark and more than a little odd. They’re uncertain about where they are (I love Rory’s “We’re dead. Again.”). It seems to be a big but featureless house, with a massive glass eye in a drawer (urgh!), wooden pots and pans and electric candles. It’s all very mysterious, but the clues are there…

The Doctor tries to bond with George (I loved the fan-pleasing reference to “Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday”), and establishes that everything that scares George is put into the cupboard? The suspense is ramped up to unbearable levels, but just as the Doctor is about to open the door, he’s interrupted by some loud knocking.

Alex opens the door to the bullying Purcell, and we get a glimpse of a parallel and perhaps worse terror. Alex, we learn, is unemployed, and Claire’s wages are not enough to pay the rent. None of this is resolved by the end; Purcell is still their landlord. It seems to be implied that the family may be in the early stages of a Cathy Come Home-style spiral of descent into poverty and eventual homelessness. If this is even partly correct, then the apparent happy ending we eventually see may well be illusory, and George may end up being taken away after all.

Back to fears of a more fantastic kind, though, the Doctor scans the cupboard, and discovers that George’s monsters are real. Things are getting creepy for Amy and Rory, too; children’s laughter has never seemed so scary. There’s something very Sapphire and Steel about this thread of the story.

Alex eventually asks the Doctor to leave, but is unable to. For all that these scenes are played for laughs, it’s clear that Alex is rather a weak personality- and so, from what we see of her, is Claire. None of this bodes well for the family’s future.

Amy and Rory are perhaps too eager to open their cupboard downstairs, but all they find is a horrible old doll. At first, it seems to be eerie but harmless. The cupboard, upstairs, though, after some further scenes of tension, turns out to be empty. But then the Doctor discovers something odd about the family photos; Claire photographed a fortnight before giving birth to George, is clearly not pregnant. This confuses Alex, and he blurts out that “Claire can’t have kids.” we realise two things: firstly, George is not what we thought, and secondly, he has been there all the time, listening. The room starts to shake, and the Doctor and Alex are pulled into the cupboard.

Purcell gets a hard time, too; George has heard him being nasty to his Dad, and he is pulled under the ground to the doll’s house. Amy and Rory see him there, being chased by dolls and, in a horribly memorable scene, see him being turned into one of them. These dolls are one of the best Doctor Who monsters ever, in both concept and execution. They’re simply terrifying. It’s not just the faceless, decayed appearance of the faces, but the slow advance, the childish voices and the nursery rhymes.

Amy and Rory are trapped in a room by advancing dolls, but Amy works out that the only solution is to open the door and push past. This sort of works, but Amy is caught, and turned into one of them: a terrifying moment.

The Doctor works out that the cupboard is a repository for all of George’s fears; everything that terrifies George is in there with them. It’s odd that there should be a doll’s house in the house, mind- George is a boy- but there we are. It seems that George is a Tenza (why not re-use the concept of an Isolus from Fear Her? Perhaps that’s an episode the production team would like to forget…), an alien “cuckoo” who has instinctively created a perception filter around the circumstances of his birth. The Doctor shouts to George to try and stop it, and the advancing dolls stop. And then start again, because George fears rejection. Alex soon sorts this out by running to his son, and the episode seems to end happily. But does it? What happens if the family get evicted and bad things keep following on…?

At last, a truly first class script from Mark Gatiss and probably the scariest story since The Time of Angels.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

“Did you wish really hard?”

No more Don’t Scare the Hare! Oh no… what are we Doctor Who fans going to talk about now? Never mind: this is utterly superlative stuff. It’s a one-off, of course. It would become quite tiresome if Doctor Who was like this all the time. But this is right up there with the very best. Neil Gaiman may be oh-so-slightly overrated in my book, but “overrated is a relative concept. He’s no Alan Moore (we long-haired blokes from the East Midlands rule!), but he’s head and shoulders above most writers.

It all looks great, too, and the visual style is very… well, Sandman. Just the opening scene, with the junkyard planet (an obvious nod to 76 Totters Lane- Gaiman, like all right-thinking people, appreciates ‘60s Who). The characters of Uncle, Auntie, Nephew and Idris come across as very endless-like, too. It’s a very atmospheric, dark, funny and, well, Gaimanesque scene. Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the name “Idris” on the ever-faithful and in all ways reliable Wikipedia. Apparently Idris was a (male) prophet and philosopher sometimes identified with the Biblical Enoch. Not sure if there’s any actual allusion there…

Anyway, on a slightly less pretentious note, we get a quick scene in the TARDIS- and another arc-related “We saw him die,” from Amy to Rory- and there’s a knock on the door. In mid-flight. It turns out to be one of those box thingies, as used by the Doctor to summon the Time Lords in part nine of The War Games. How very fannish.

So, there is at least one Time Lord still alive, it seems: the Corsair. In just a few lines, Gaiman gives us a fantastic sketch of the character, who keeps the same tattoo in all of his (or her!) regenerations. The Corsair is apparently outside the universe, though; for the first time since Castrovalva the Doctor has to burn up some TARDIS rooms to “give it some welly”. After all these years of travelling between universes being nearly impossible, it happens in two stories in a row.

The TARDIS power drains away; it’s “soul” has gone. The TARDIS crew seem to be stuck on this little asteroid in this pocket universe with no stars in the sky. And then, Idris, with her new soul (and we’ve already guessed what this “soul” is) comes running to her “thief” and kisses him, among other things (“Oh, biting’s excellent! It’s like kissing, only there’s a winner”). Idris is great, and Suranne Jones does a perfect job of making her exactly the right kind of eccentric while still being sympathetic. I love the timey-wimeyness of her speech, which gives the sense that she doesn’t quite exist in the same three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we do.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are taken to meet the “House”, an extremely large sea anemone creature surrounded by a massive, world-size shell. Right from the start we get the impression that House isn’t very nice. He “mends people” when they “break”, and lots of TARDISes have landed on him in the past. Already this is wonderfully fantastical and, well, Gaimanesque, always a much better fit for Doctor Who than hard sci-fi.

It seems there are lots of Time Lords here, and there’s an interesting conversation between Amy and the Doctor; he’ll have to tell the Time Lords what he did in the Time War. But that’s just it; he wants to be forgiven.

Incidentally, the Doctor seems to have told Amy an awful lot of intensely personal things about himself off-screen. He isn’t usually so open with his travelling companions. But some things about Doctor / companion relationships are timeless, and one of these is the classic “Doctor sends companions back to TARDIS when things get a bit scary” trope.

The little boxes make the Doctor angry: Time Lord have been lured here, exploited, and eventually killed, many, many times over. His confrontation with Auntie and Uncle reveals a lot; they’re patchwork people, like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of bits of other people, Auntie has the Corsair’s arm.

The Doctor finds Idris, and they start the wonderful conversation that lasts for most of the rest of the episode. The dialogue sings, and the relationship between them is so heartwarming. They’re like an old married couple, but they obviously love each other. There are so many great things here. When the Doctor first touched the TARDIS console, he said that it was “the most beautiful thing I’d ever known”. Wonderfully, he didn’t just steal her; she stole him because she wanted to see the universe and he was “the only one mad enough”!

It seems that House feeds on TARDISes, deleting the matrixes first to make them edible. As just destroying the matrixes would cause lots of unpleasantness, he simply dumps them into a convenient receptacle (or body) and feeds off the residual Artron energy once they die, usually quite quickly. This is really quite nasty when you think about it.

The nastiness continues to rack up during the middle of the episode. The moment Rory says to Amy that “We’re in the TARDIS, so we’re safe”, it turns out that they so aren’t. While they’re aboard the soulless Ship, House had an absolute godlike ability to do any sadistic thing to them that he wants to. As many people have said, House can be seen as an analogy of the power of the writer.

Just as nasty, if blackly and Gaiman-esquely humorous, is the scene in which Auntie and Uncle “pop off”. Oh, and Idris has eighteen minutes to live. But one thing that Neil Gaiman is very, very good at is mixing nastiness, humour and beautifully poignant feelings, all with a real lightness of touch (“I think you call me…sexy.” / “Only when we’re alone…”- it’s funny but it says a lot).

There’s a lot of fanwank at this point, all in the best possible way. For the first time in decades we get to see the corridors of the TARDIS. And they have old-fashioned roundels. Yay! And it seems the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for “seven hundred years”, meaning that he spent his first two hundred years on Gallifrey, unless it’s more complicated than that. I’ve recently read the latest version of Timelink and it has some very interesting, and quite complicated, theories about that sort of thing. Most of it flew right over my head, but it’s a fascinating read.

The relationship between the Doctor and Idris / the TARDIS is great here- they argue like happily married couples do, in a way which is actually quite sweet and affectionate (“No, but I always took you where you needed to go.”). It’s actually quite romantic.

The scenes between our other married couple are not nearly as nice. House plays cruel games on Amy, exploiting her guilt over Rory waiting two thousand years for her. Back in The Impossible Astronaut, Moffat dealt with the psychological impact of this on Rory- his memories of all that time are quarantined away behind a door in his brain, hence his not being completely insane- but what must it be like for Amy to have the overwhelming knowledge that her husband did all that for her?

The Doctor and Idris set to building a functional TARDIS out of all the old dead ones (with old-fashioned roundels, again!), Idris communicates with “the pretty one”, and the plot chugs along. We get to see the old control room again- well, the oldest one that can reasonably survived in an HD-friendly condition- as they’re all archived. I love the fact that the TARDIS has archived “desktop themes” from the Doctor’s personal future!

The Doctor and Idris manage to outwit House rather cleverly, and the Doctor and Idris have a completely wonderful final conversation. The Doctor cries, and the Doctor never cries. It’s the end of a wonderful love story. And we end, of course, with the Doctor asking the TARDIS to take them “wherever we need to go.”

Idris has some final words for Rory:”The only water in the forest is the river”. What could that possibly mean, he asked, pretending he hasn’t yet seen A Good Man Goes to War?

Doctor Who: The Lazarus Experiment

“People will sell their souls to be transformed like that…”

The TARDIS arrives in Martha’s bedroom, and it seems her journey is over. The Doctor seems to ostentatiously ignore Martha’s unhappiness at being dumped, and off he goes in the TARDIS before an unpleasant scene can happen. Then he suddenly comes back on the flimsiest of excuses. Yep, those messages are just a little bit mixed there.

It’s an odd one, this. There are lots of great things about it, not least Mark Gatiss’ extraordinarily brilliant performance, but also a lot of naff things, not least Mark Gatiss’ extraordinarily unconvincing age make-up. Worst of all, the whole thing plays out by the numbers, telling you early on that it’s a riff on Frankenstein and then pretty much having things unfold exactly as you expect them to. Still, at least we definitely know that Gatiss would make the perfect Victor Frankenstein if Hammer or someone were to make it into a film in the future. It’s just that his brilliant performance tends to distract from the fact that all the guest characters here are pretty much just a load of stock character types- the callous mad scientist dreaming of fame, the gold-digging wife, and… well, that’s pretty much the whole guest cast. And who’d have thunk it- a chap called Lazarus turns out to have the secret of eternal life?

One thing that’s great, though- and probably by RTD rather than new writer Stephen Greenhorn- is the plot strand with Martha’s mother (brrr!). Brilliantly, as much as the audience might not like her she’s being perfectly rational from her own perspective. The situation, and the way the Doctor says exactly the wrong things to her, make it more than believable that she acts as she does and believes what she’s told by that mysterious man. I like the Eliot references too.

I’m a bit on the fence about the two long philosophical chats between the Doctor and Lazarus, on the roof and in the cathedral, which are undeniably cool but hardly possible, happening not because of the characters’ motivations but because that’s the sort of scene that seems to be expected. Still, I love the Doctor’s speech about long life and the tiredness, pain and loneliness it leads to.

Nice final scene, though. Martha finally gets the Doctor to accept her as a permanent TARDISeer and not just someone who’s there on sufferance. Again it’s interesting what’s motivating the Doctor’s ambiguous behaviour here. And then we get the answerphone message from Martha’s mother, and a mention of the mysterious Harold Saxon…

3/5.

Doctor Who: Gridlock

“This Martha- she must mean a lot to you.”

“Hardly know her. I was too busy showing off. And I lied to her.”

We’ve had the introductory story for the new companion, we’ve had the celebrity historical- must be time for a story set in the year five billion then. The RTD era has been around long enough now to have established their own traditions, and in this case that’s a significant part of the narrative; Martha notices that the Doctor’s taking her to places where he took Rose.

This is where the Doctor’s cavalier treatment of Martha goes horribly wrong; after a few minutes in rather grotty surroundings she’s quickly kidnapped, ultimately ending up in great danger, and the Doctor spends the rest of the episode trying to hide her and regretting his behaviour.

This is another example of RTD’s 2000 AD style aesthetic for the more futuristic stories, this time even with an appearance by Max Normal from Judge Dredd. But it’s more than the aesthetic that’s taken from 2000 AD, it’s also the blackly humorous political allegory elevated above realism. If you try to analyse this world in realistic terms it doesn’t make sense- how can a traffic jam possibly continue spontaneously for 24 years? But realism isn’t the point; this is absurdist punk sci-fi, Mega City One style. And I love it.

There’s real thematic depth, too; at the very moment the Doctor suggests to Brannigan and Valerie that they may be on their own, there could be no one in charge, and the hopes they’ve been clinging to are deluded, the whole motorway stops to sing a hymn. This is a nice moment to showcase the power of faith (not necessarily of the religious kind), and hope, and togetherness.

Bizarrely, 39 years after The Macra Terror was shown and probably about 35 years after the prints were destroyed, it gets a sequel. It’s a nice touch, although I hate the line about their having “devolved”. Even I know that’s not how evolution works!

There’s a nice scene where Martha, waiting in the car without power, stops to reflect on the enormity of her decision to travel with this total stranger to times and places so very far away. But crucially she doesn’t fall to pieces, keeps her confidence in the Doctor, and takes charge of the situation. And even the story’s big moment- the dying Face of Boe telling the Doctor that “You are not alone” is as much about her as it is about him; she hears that the Doctor is the last of his people, which isn’t what he told her earlier.

The final scene is wonderful. At last the Doctor opens himself to Martha instead of showing off, talking movingly about the world he grew up on in similar words to Susan back in The Sensorites when the Marathon was young.

Well, that’ll be the third consecutive 5/5 of the season then.