Last Christmas

When I first watched Last Christmas it seemed fairly innocuous. Some stuff happened, there were some laughs, and Clara and the Doctor made friends after having a Grown-Up falling Out at the end of series eight. But after I'd finished watching it I couldn't remember anything specific about it. Since then I've watched it a further two times in an attempt to work out the specifics of the story, the "stuff" that happens.

It's a difficult task. When Christmas specials first hit Doctor Who then-showrunner Russell T Davies made the sensible decision to tailor them to an audience that was not paying attention. Because on Christmas Day kids have new toys to play with, adults have booze to drink, and a fair number of people are being subjected to Doctor Who rather than choosing to watch it. Even when a Christmas special coincided with a Doctor debuting or leaving RTD managed to keep things relatively light. He’d smuggle things in for the fans but the plot was always simple, the threat always obvious and the resolution always happy.

Steven Moffat doesn't use this approach. His Christmas specials are like any other episodes but with festive motifs and framing tossed in where possible. It’s because he and Davies view the programme in completely different ways. RTD wants it to be about people and their relationships. Moffat wants it to be about ideas.

Personally I don't think there are enough things on TV (particularly the publicly funded BBC) that focus on ideas over character. More things like Moffat's Who wouldn't go amiss. But saying that isn't the same as saying Moffat's approach is right for this show. It isn't. It obviously isn't, because a flagship BBC drama is not the place to focus on ideas over characters.

And Moffat just as obviously knows this. That's why he never fully commits to episodes about ideas. But he doesn't move away from his idea focus either. This leaves us with Christmas specials that are an awkward mix of Moffat's preferred approach, Big Ideas™, and what the BBC want from a big budget drama, characterisation. In trying to accomplish two things at once he doesn't manage either to a satisfying degree.

This episode seemed designed to mix the best of Alien and Inception. That’s an odd combination anyway but it’s particularly strange that it was chosen as the basis of a Christmas episode. But then, as I’ve already pointed out, Moffat doesn’t seem particularly bothered with differentiating his Christmas episodes from his regular episodes in anything beyond the most obvious ways possible.

Which neatly brings us to the inclusion of Father Christmas. It’s an obvious idea but that doesn’t make it a bad one. It’s the sort of things Doctor Who can do well: make Santa a living, breathing, real person. It’s surprising that someone as avowedly in favour of Christmas episodes being Charistmassy as Russell T Davies is didn’t get round to the idea when he was in charge. It’s a simple, easy-to-follow concept and it holds a particular interest for kids (of the right age).

Sadly Moffat didn’t really do much with Santa. He made some funnies, revealed a dark edge and then dropped out of the episode, reappearing sporadically whenever a plot device was needed. By the end it was left unclear whether he’d even been real or not. The air of mystery was welcome. The half-hearted way Moffat used the character for the majority of the episode was not. It was a misfire and spectacularly wasted opportunity to explore the modern concept of Christmas using a world renowned, public domain character.

The layered dream sequence approach is what really made this episode feel generic. Had it been stripped of Santa and the vaguely Christmas setting it could have been comfortably moved to the middle of a series without any problems.

This dream sequencing stuff is, of course, what led to one of the most awful scenes of the episode: Clara waking as an old woman and accepting that she was close to death. Except of course she wasn’t: she had a Dream Hugger attached to her face making her think she’d lived a full life without the Doctor and was near death. I suspect the scene was included to play into the rumours (which Moffat had helped fuel) that Jenna Coleman would be leaving the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d had two endings in mind, one for Coleman staying and another for her leaving, in which Clara did actually die of old age. The return of the wooden Samuel Anderson as Danny Pink (for the record I think this was his worst ever performance on the series) was practically welcome by comparison.

Basically there were a lot of things that were worth including here. Father Christmas, the dreams within dreams, and the creepy aliens all had something to offer. But, as I’ve written before about Moffat episodes, too much was crammed into too short a time. You have to wonder what exactly was “special” about this Christmas special.

Death in Heaven

 

I enjoyed last week’s opening half of this story (Dark Water). It did a good job of drawing various dangling plot strands together, reintroducing the Master, now Missy, in a fashion befitting the character, and making the Cybermen look better than they have in years. But it had the simple job. Setting things up is easy and can be done indefinitely. It’s paying things off in a satisfying manner that counts and takes the skill. Before it aired that was what it felt like Death in Heaven was going to struggle with. It did.

I mentioned Steven Moffat’s history with two-parters last week and I’m going to do the same here. Because it’s worth highlighting that his payoff episodes are never as rewarding as his setup episodes. The only episodes of his that’s not true of are The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances because The Moffster wrote them as a ninety minute script and then lopped it in two with a flimsy cliffhanger. They’re a pair of episodes unlike any other two part story the series has done since. They were a learning experience for Moffat, as Aliens of London and World War Three had been earlier in 2005 for Russell T Davies. Note how Davies completely altered things for the resolving half of his Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways duo, the second two part story he scripted for the series.

Moffat learnt to switch things up in resolving halves, as noted last week. That’s shown in Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, where the first script ends in such a way as to set up an entirely fresh premise in the second. And while it was clear from those two episodes that Moffat had mastered that vital trick required to make modern day Doctor Who multi-part stories work it also showed that he’s not actually very good at resolving things.

Look back at that story and make note of how things stand at the halfway point. The Doctor is in a library that’s inside a girl’s TV, Donna’s dead, there are living shadows eating people, and there’s a mysterious woman knocking about who knows an awful lot about the Doctor and keeps making enigmatic references to his future. It’s good stuff, because there are so many questions we can ask and as an audience we enjoy a bit of mystery. There’s a joy to not knowing and trying to figure out how everything will tie together.

Coming up with puzzling scenarios and concepts is a strength of Moffat’s writing. Sadly, he isn’t as skilled when it comes to paying off these creations. There’s no way to watch the concluding part of the Library two-parter without feeling slightly deflated: the girl turns out to be malfunctioning computer software (and it was neither the first nor last time that particular trope turned up in a Moffat script), Donna ends up alive and well, the shadows are largely forgotten about, and the mysterious woman turns out to be River Song, a woman who would go on to become a walking continuity reference and a way for Moffat to substitute lazy writing for creativity.

Steven Moffat does not write satisfying conclusions. He writes enjoyable setups which he has no idea how to pay off. He also doesn’t think his ideas through sufficiently, resulting in holes and flaws in the show’s internal logic. This was something that certainly afflicted Death in Heaven. To wit…

Most graves on Earth would not contain a physical body (one grave was from 1748, for example, and wouldn’t have contained anything resembling a human since 1749 at best), so how were they used to produce Cybermen? How did rain turn into Cybermen suits? Was the dark water introduced in the episode of the same name intended as an explanation of how they were formed from bones? If so why was the focus on the water turning non-organic material invisible instead of hinting at its metal-creating abilities? Why were there bolts in Danny's face when the Cyberman suit had cascaded onto him? Wouldn’t bolts have been needed if Danny had been placed into the suit? Are we to take it that the Doctor has become fairly well known again, considering every country on the planet is okay with him being put in charge in times of great emergency? Why did Cyber-Danny take Clara to a graveyard? Why do Cybermen have to activate their own emotional inhibitors when lack of emotion has traditionally been one of their defining attributes? If Cyber-Danny had to turn off his emotions to become a Cyberman, which he wasn't able to do himself, then how did every other dead person become a fully converted Cyberman after standing around looking confused for a bit? Why would an upgrade which puts a form of the internet in humanity’s heads not include some sort of orientation programme to cut down on the levels of confusion the newly booted up Cybermen experience? Are we now to understand that human emotion is stronger than Cyber-programming? Could the Doctor really not work out that the Cybermen's plan was to use their magical clouds to turn all of humanity into Cybermen without Danny's help? Was Seb dying as he squee’d a reveal of Moffat's true feelings towards modern fandom? Could Danny’s mind or personality or whatever not have been uploaded back to the Nethersphere to gift him with the depressing afterlife that River Song was subjected to in The Library? 

Orson Pink?

None of these things were enough to make the story unwatchable. They were niggles and annoyances that could and should have been sorted out but they weren’t enough to ruin the story and make it bad. It was bad in its own right, with or without them.

Let’s start with the Clara and Danny stuff, because it’s clear with eleven previous episodes to look back on that that was intended as one of the episode’s key themes. I’ve said of most episodes that feature a focus on their relationship that it isn’t believable, and because of that it was hard for their climactic moments here to have the intended emotional impact. Jenna Coleman has improved with these scenes throughout the series and carried her side of things well here but the same can’t be said for Samuel Anderson. Had he been tasked with simply playing an emotionless Cyberman things probably would have been fine. He’s good at lacking emotion and he can stand still in a robotic suit pretty well. But treading the fine line of playing human emotions fighting to the fore of an emotionless droid was not something he was ever going to pull off.

That he still saw the Doctor as a detached officer unwilling to get his hands dirty was a nice moment for the character but was something else let down by Anderson’s performance. In fairness this wasn’t all his fault (although he didn’t do an especially good job). It would have made far more sense for Danny to rail against the Doctor before dying and waking up a Cyberman. That would have allowed him to put some anger into his words, as opposed to delivering them with the abject blandness the script necessitated. But even then Anderson probably would have let the side down so it really doesn’t matter too much. 

The only thing I felt worked with regards to Danny in the entire episode was his final sacrifice, giving the innocent boy he’d killed a second chance at life. It showed him as the hero Moffat’s haphazardly attempted to portray him as all season and allowed him to go out showing that he really is the good man we were all meant to see him as. That said it was a rather blind gesture on his part: the kid has presumably not aged while trapped in the Nethersphere and his parents will have presumably come to terms with his death (assuming they were left alive to do so). Dumping him on a grieving Clara and expecting her to reunite an Afghanistani family was not the nicest thing he could have done to her.

Better than Samuel Anderson was Michelle Gomez. But not by as great a margin as I’d expected or wanted. She played the part fine, but was fine really appropriate? She didn’t throw herself into the moments of maliciousness or madness or gloating with the passion they deserved. Missy was more subdued than any incarnation of the Master we’ve seen before and worked as proof, not that it were needed, that a subdued take on the character does not really work. It’s best as an over the top psychopathic panto villain.

Moffat’s writing of Missy was actually something of a highlight for the episode. She was built up efficiently as a threat throughout the episode, most notably with her murder of Osgood (a sacrifice Moffat may have had planned for a while considering she didn’t make her first appearance until Day of the Doctor, by which point Moff had begun seeding his Missy arc). That a character who seemed as though she were going to become a recurring role was offed made Missy seem that much more a threat, demonstrating that she can waltz into an episode and instantly kill anyone the audience presumes is safe. That’s a great strength for a Doctor Who villain to have, particularly one as historically inefficient as the Master.

Her plan was suitably daft and convoluted. She’d been travelling up and down the history of the planet trapping spirits of the dead in a Christmas bauble so that she could raise an army of Cybermen that she could gift the Doctor an army to conquer the universe and show everyone he’s always right. It’s worthy of the Saward-penned Ainley Master. If nothing else it fits with the character’s history, makes sense in its own right, and works well with RTD’s “the Master is stark-staring mad” approach. As did the unsubtle depiction of Missy as an evil Mary Poppins. The episode didn’t really do anything much for the Cybermen, reducing them to particularly well-kitted out foot soldiers but in a story where the Master and the Cybermen team up it has to be the Master that took centre stage. The only bad point of the team-up was that the Cybermen didn’t become the latest villainous race to double-cross her.

There were things to like in the episode. My token comment for series eight, that Peter Capaldi was very good, was as true as it’s ever been. He was never less than watchable and consistently raised the quality of every scene he was in. Particularly good was his selling of frustration at being duped about Gallifrey’s location, uncontrollably smashing away at the TARDIS console. Were he to pull an Eccleston and leave now (or after the Christmas episode) he’d leave people wanting more. The season’s scripts have been a bit mixed, but the performance from Twelfth Doctor has been unwaveringly excellent.

The idea of the Doctor visiting the afterlife was a good one, something it’s surprising the series hasn’t done before. It’s something that I could imagine sitting quite well in the Pertwee, Hinchcliffe or Cartmel eras of the show, although Moffat trumped them on having a reason to do it. Admittedly it was more a focus of Dark Water than Death in Heaven but I refrained from commenting on it last week because I wanted to see how it was resolved (unsurprisingly the answer was: not well). My other token note that the set designs were good can be applied, although to be fair there weren’t actually that many.

Jenna Coleman gave one of her best performances in the part. If she does end up leaving, as seems likely, it will be nice that her final or penultimate performance (she may be in the Christmas special) was one of her best. For the record she was billed over Peter Capaldi and it was her eyes in the credits, although I’m not entirely sure why. It was possibly to play into her pre-credits cliffhanger claim that she was the Doctor. If so it as ill-judged because nothing about the direction or her delivery of the line made that seem plausible. If it was a gesture of respect for the actress Jenna Coleman then fair enough, although it was somewhat pointless.

And if nothing else Moffat has at least left us with the possibility that the Brigadier goes on living as a Cyberman for thousands of years and ends up as Handles. For that alone it’s impossible to completely hate Death in Heaven.

Mummy on the Orient Express

Mummy on the Orient Express saw the current series of Doctor Who revert to the title first, content second approach that had been the its approach last year, as it had with Kill the Moon. It hadn’t really worked with Kill the Moon, mostly because too much was attempted. It had also failed for much of the last series in general. But with Mummy on the Orient Express it worked nicely. In fact, I’d say that Mummy on the Orient Express is the best episode of series eight so far.

The biggest thing it had in its favour was the presence of a clear, well-defined threat. Those have been a surprising rarity during the Moffat era¹. The threat itself benefited from the interesting quirk of the sixty-six second countdown and a particularly impressive outfit being. The countdown is the sort of thing Doctor Who as a programme does very well and writer Jamie Mathieson made good use of it, feeding in new information every time it was employed. Even the enemy’s name, the Foretold, was well chosen.

The cast was great too, Frank Skinner’s hammy performance aside². By this point it can just be assumed Capaldi’s going to put in a worthwhile performance but the same can’t be said of his co-star. Jenna Coleman has been fantastically unreliable as a companion actress. Here she gave what was probably her best performance in the role. She was everything from happy to angry to bright to betrayed, a range I’ve not seen from her in a single episode before, and she was convincing doing it. Daisy Beaumont was particularly good too. For that matter I thought John Sessions was entertaining as a silkily voiced maniacal train.

Which (clunkily) brings me to the next point. The concept of a villainous train is a very Doctor Who one. It’s not something that could support a script by itself but when blended with other small ideas it worked very nicely. That’s where Kill the Moon went wrong: too many big ideas were crammed into too short a time and nothing had the chance to satisfyingly develop. The combination of an evil space train, a mummy, and general Agatha Christie trappings (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a murder mystery because nothing beyond a token attempt was made at the mystery part) complimented each other nicely.

It was nice not to have to deal with Danny Pink too. Although when he did appear he seemed more tolerable than he has previously. Perhaps it was Anderson entering an above average performance or that the part was written better. More likely it was just that he didn’t get enough screen time to become a chore. Whatever it was there was nothing to complain about with him. If only he were like that every week.

If this were the average Moffat era offering (Moffering?) I think it would be a more enjoyable period of the show. That Mummy on the Orient Express was so enjoyable bodes well for next week’s offering. It’s written by the same author and seems to have a bit more money behind it. I won’t get my hopes up though. That’s never a good idea with The Moff.

Oh... and that chat about broken soldiers being fixed towards the end of the episode? I'm sure that definitely won't turn out to be foreshadowing for something that happens to Danny at all.

***

¹ I’m not sure what he has against them. Most of the standard Doctor Who plots feature the Doctor figuring out a way to stop a monster. Perhaps Moffat really does think all of that nonsense with time loops and River Song was a suitable replacement. If so he was wrong.

² I can’t think of a worse actor to appear in such a significant role since the show returned nine years ago.

The Caretaker

In 2006 there was an episode of Doctor Who in which David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor went undercover in a school in an effort to flush out a band of alien shapechangers. Featuring the return of Sarah Jane Smith and K9, as well as a guest appearance from Anthony Head and a straightforward, enjoyable plot, the episode was met with praise from pretty much everyone. Fans, newcomers and critics all seemed to like it a great deal.

In 2014 the premise was deemed worthy of repeating. Only this time the Doctor was being played by Peter Capaldi and he wouldn’t be going undercover as a teacher but as a caretaker. Also, he would mention that he was going undercover quite a bit. Because that’s funny, apparently.

Going back to the premise of the Doctor trying to work inconspicuously in a school wasn’t a bad idea. It’s a setup that presents opportunities for situational comedy and, specific to this season, gentle nudging of the Danny Pink and Clara Oswald relationship. Let’s not forget that situational comedy revolving around adult relationships is where co-writer Steven Moffat made his name in the nineties, and that Gareth Roberts had previously had success writing Matt Smith’s Doctor in an environment where he had to pass himself off as a standard human and that he has previously striven to mark himself as the funny Doctor Who writer. They seemed like the ideal combo for this scenario.

And for the first fifteen minutes they were. We started with the always popular montage of unseen adventures. Capaldi was funny and odd and detached while being easy to watch. Coleman did some of her best work and finally made it seem as though Clara actually enjoys the time she spends with the Doctor, something her usual sarcasm and eye-rolling doesn’t achieve. The idea of the Doctor working at the school was introduced well, as was a well-made monster prop (shot effectively too, for the record).

But it couldn’t last. Around fifteen minutes into the episode the Doctor sent the monster he was there to fight into the future, leaving the episode to focus on Clara’s relationships with the Doctor and Danny and the initial reactions of the two men to one another until it returned for the Action Packed Final Sequence™. These relationship scenes were clearly what the episode existed for, and that was fine. The Clara and Danny relationship is clearly going to play a significant role in series eight as a whole and it was a good decision to dedicate the bulk of an episode to establishing that the Doctor and Danny do not initially like one another.

What let the episode down was… well, everything really. The writing, the performances and the direction all seemed off. The trouble with the latter is a straightforward complaint: too many shots looking up at people’s faces as they mooched along corridors and an overuse of slow motion effects. The writing and the performance troubles are broader. Clara spent the entire episode essentially worrying about pleasing two men. Not a very 2014 mentality. And Danny, well Danny requires a paragraph all his own.

Danny revealed a previously unhinted at loathing of the officer class (and some nifty acrobatics for that matter – seriously, what was his somersaulting all about?) and came across as a controlling, emotionally manipulative spouse in the scenes in which he and Clara were alone. Samuel Anderson didn’t have the ability to make Danny seem likeable during these scenes. They were unpleasant to watch and they shouldn’t have been. Unless, of course, Moffat’s taking the show in a bold new direction and actually intends to make Danny the controlling spouse he appeared to be here. If so then I’ll take back what I’ve written about Anderson here because he nailed it. But I’ll have a fresh batch of complaints about Moffat’s writing instead.

The saving grace was once again Capaldi. When his Doctor was given funny lines Capaldi was funny and he was nicely believable during his angry scenes with Danny. His Doctor is at his best when being given the chance to be flippant and angry, so he was in his element. I wouldn’t mind Gareth Roberts being given another episode next year, but ideally one without Moffat’s relationship scenes slipped into them.

Listen

Listen felt very much like Steven Moffat trying to accomplish a number of things.

Firstly, it felt as though he was trying to prove that he’s still got that much ballyhooed magic touch of his. You know, the one that produced the most acclaimed episodes of the first three seasons of the rebooted Doctor Who and a respectable two-parter in the fourth series. The one that earned him a bundle of prestigious awards for writing. The one that got the BBC to commission Sherlock. The one that made him a hotly anticipated showrunner.

He’s said in interviews that he wanted to show that he could still write the lower budget episodes as opposed to the Big Event episodes that begin and end each series. In fairness it’s understandable that he’d want to prove that and demonstrate that he still merits all his hype. It’s a challenge and, had he written a more interesting episode, it would have silenced many of the complaints sent his way. Based on the evidence of this episode Moff may have forgotten how to deliver an entertaining episode that can fit snugly in the middle of a series.

Secondly, it felt like he was trying to move beyond one of his most well-worn approaches: taking an stereotypical childhood fear and turning it into a scary episode of Doctor Who. It’s something he really perfected with Blink in 2007, after fumbling around the edges of the concept with The Empty Child-The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace. He’s used it in various forms since and this felt like its natural conclusion, making us think his chosen topic was going to be the latest in a line of secret monsters before revealing that it’s actually nothing. Literally nothing.

Third, he wanted to lavish more attention on the Danny and Clara plot. That seems to be one of his big things this series. With actors possessing a strong range it might be interesting, but unfortunately we have Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson. With them in place Clara comes across as a snarky narcissist and Danny comes across as… erm… well, nothing really, the combo of Moffat’s writing and Anderson’s hollow portrayal having done nothing for the Danny character. I’m left with an image of him thunking his wooden head against an equally wooden table. Nothing else comes to mind.

Fourth (and final), yet more exploration of the Doctor’s past. This has gradually become his favourite topic over the last four years. Delving into the Doctor’s past, especially his past before the starting point of the show, is something that should be done with care and great infrequency, revealing something momentous, or at least interesting, when it’s trotted out. All we discovered in Listen was that the Doctor slept in a barn and cried a bit when he was a young Bill Hartnell, hardly Game Changing™ stuff. It felt as though it was being included more so Moffat could say he’s the writer of the earliest chronological scene featuring the Doctor than because it would add to the character of the Doctor or be interesting for audiences to see. There was no point to it.

But then there was no point to the episode as a whole. The Doctor thought about imaginary, invisible monsters, investigated them, and found out that they were indeed imaginary. With a tighter focus (jettisoning the Clara and Danny stuff perhaps) that could have been an important lesson to kids watching. As it is it was fifty minutes of vain pomp, Moffles once again demonstrating that he can write perfectly competent primetime time travel. Unambitious, and the worst offering of series eight yet.