Parallel Lines

Doctor Who Turn Left

It would be true to say that if I had decided not to go to watch Man City play Nottingham Forest in 2001, then I would never have ended up in Manchester, and ultimately would never have met Elaine, fell in love and got married. Now this is probably not as cataclysmic as the events that happened because Donna never met the Doctor, as seen in Turn Left, but I would say that it is pretty bloody cataclysmic as far as I am concerned, and my life is so much better for making that decision!

Turn Left was another great episode of Doctor Who from the pen of Russell T Davies. It is always interesting, and an old science fiction standby, to think about what might have happened if the Doctor had not been there to stop something and in this episode for the first time we see what could happen in a world without the Doctor and it turned out to be a rather desperate place where Martha, Sarah Jane, Ianto, Gwen, Sarah Jane, Clyde, Maria and Luke all perished off screen simply because the Doctor wasn’t there. I thought it was quite nice for them all to get a mention even if was saying that their characters were dead. In fact this episode must have the highest death count of any episode of Doctor Who ever, even if the majority of it was off screen.

Of course being as that universe was a parallel one created because Donna chose to turn right and not go to the job at HC Clements. It is amazing how one small decision can have such a catastrophic effect on the entire universe isn’t it? Especially for Donna who doesn’t even realise that this is all happening because she never met the Doctor and he got himself killed when drowning the Rachnoss with the Thames. The events of the episode happened as they happened in our universe except for the fact that Donna was able to talk the Doctor out of destroying himself.

It is likely that in that universe some other poor unsuspecting woman ended up in the TARDIS at the end of Doomsday and had that whole adventure with the Doctor but may not have made it. Next came the events at the hospital where the Judoon took it too the moon where Sarah Jane Smith who must have found out about the Doctor’s death was somehow there and perished along with Martha when the Judoon returned the hospital back to its original spot with only one survivor.

If you wanted to be picky then you could say that who was able to defeat the Carrionites in Elizabethan England or the Daleks in Manhattan? The whole Saxon thing would never have happened as the Doctor would never have traveled to utopia allowing the Master to return to the Earth to put the whole Saxon thing in motion so you could totally write off The Sound of Drums and Last of the Timelords as well as The Lazarus Experiment; Blink could have happened but perhaps with a totally different incarnation of the Doctor (perhaps the ninth like in the original story) and neither would have Human Nature/The Family of Blood.

In fact pretty much the entirety of the third and fourth series of Doctor Who wouldn’t have happened either. Voyage of the Damned would have happened but there would have no survivors and the whole of London would have been wiped off the face of the Earth; the adipose would still have come to Earth and probably would have escaped with the matron intact and the Sontaran’s would have tried to subjugate the Earth but luckily Torchwood came to the rescue. I wonder if, in that universe Tosh or Owen never died, and that Tosh remained in the hub, which being in Cardiff, would have not been affected by the Titanic crashing into Buckingham Palace. Personally I would like to think so.

The episode was a tour-de-force for Catherine Tate as Donna and if people continue to criticize her acting ability after this episode then people really do not know what they are talking about as in this episode she gave her best performance in the role ever. For a lot of the episode she was playing the Donna from The Runaway Bride, but she gradually morphed into the Donna we know and love by the end of the episode and I thought it was really sad when she sacrificed herself at the end of the episode to allow for time to rectify itself and for events to happen as they should have done.

I really hope that she doesn’t die at the end of the series because that was really affecting seeing Donna dying like that and if that does happen then I will not be best pleased. I bawled my eyes out when Tosh died in Torchwood and I reckon that it might happen again if Donna dies as well. I am hoping that Donna has a better exit and that. She certainly deserves it, but part of me does think that something will happen to her, I just hope it doesn’t mean that she has to die!

I am glad that the return of la Piper didn’t overshadow what was essentially Donna’s episode. It would have been very easy for that to be the case, but thankfully it didn’t. Billie was quite good in her return to the role and it was really nice to see her back in the titles and in the episode. You can tell her character has changed quite a bit from when we last saw her on the parallel world in Doomsday, for a start she looks a bit more weary than she used to, but I guess that living in a different universe takes its toll on you. I also reckon that she won’t be all over the Doctor when she meets him again, at least I hope she won’t be, as I am sure she has had plenty of time to get over him and, much like Martha did, move on.

The last couple of minutes were certainly exciting. I actually didn’t even consider that the two words that Rose said to Donna would be Bad Wolf. I would have put money on Rose telling Donna who she was, knowing that the Doctor would discover that she was actually back, but Bad Wolf was a much better choice of words. It would have been a little boring if the words had just been Rose Tyler or Burnt Toast.

It certainly makes for an interesting finale which judging by the next week trailer will have a cast of thousands and about a five minute opening title sequence so they can fit all of the names of the returning actors in it! It is going to be more interesting working out who might not be in the finale rather than who will be in it judging from some of the things I have heard about the final two episodes.

Basically, this Saturday can’t come soon enough for me.

Thriller

Doctor Who: Midnight

I thought that this episode was pretty good. It was intense and claustrophobic like all good drama should be, it had a fine ensemble cast and it was well directed. True not a great deal happened, but I can’t say that it made any difference to me, as I felt like the episode flew by.

It was more like a theatre play, than an episode of Doctor Who and, as an experiment it worked. You couldn’t have 13 episodes all like this one or people would turn off in their droves but occasionally it is refereshing to have an episode like this one, or like Boomtown, or Love & Monsters which just don’t follow the usual rule book of a Doctor Who episode, and, in my opinion, are all the better for it.

It was a shame that Donna wasn’t in this episode more but then again we have the next episode which looks to feature Donna heavily so I can live with that and also it wouldn’t have worked the same way if she had of been there. If she had she would have slapped him about a bit and told him when he was being annoying smug or overbearing, which nobody did in this episode.

Was it just me or were there times when, if you closed your eyes and just listened to the
dialogue, that you could have sworn that Patrick Troughton was in this episode? How much does David Troughton sound like his father in parts of this episdoe. It is quite frightening how much he sounds like him, and if they ever did do an audio featuring the second Doctor then you could do no worse than to hire David Troughton to play the part made famous by his father. Not that they would ever do that, or that David Troughton would ever want to do that but boy do they sound similar at times! They even look a lot alike, more so now David is older, and if you looked at David Troughton discarding his bald head then he really is the spitting image of his dad, the same goes for David’s son Sam. He is basically a taller, thinner, balder version of his father.

I would have to say that the episodes threat was even scarier because we never saw it, we heard it but it was far far more scarier than it would have been had we seen some cgi creature or a prosthetic creation. Sometimes less is more and in this episode that is certainly the case.

A few Who friends of mine really didn’t like the episode, because in their words, hardly anything happened and it was a bit to talkie for their liking. What about two episodes ago where very little happened and a lot of the action took place in one room. They didn’t seem so perturbed by that but that was probably because as the first episode in a two part story that can be overlooked whereas this was just a single episdoe and they thought it lacked action. These are the same people who hated Boom Town, for pretty much the same reason.

This sort of episode is never going to be popular with a lot of people because it so far removed from what they percieve Doctor Who to be about, but I don’t see that at all. Having said that I do like that sort of dialogue driven drama which not everybody is, but as they say each to their own, and I thought that it worked very well indeed.

This episode did put you in mind of the two parters from the original run of the series with half of the episode just having the Doctor chatting to people and generaly having a good time, and then after twenty minutes or so we have something happen and it starts to get interesting.

Not that the first twenty minutes or so were boring, far from it. We got to know the characters of all of the other people travelling on the space bus, well apart from the hostess whom we never found out anything about, not even her name.

Kudos has to go to Lesley Sharp for her potrayal of Sky Sylvestry and when in DWM RTD made a comment that you couldn’t have cast simply anyone as Sky because she does carry a lot of the episode and she matches everyones performance remarkably well despite the fact that for a large portion of the episdoe she doesn’t even move! Rakie Ayola was great as the hostess who sacrificed herself in the end as she was the only person on that bus who believed that it was Sky who was possessed and the not the Doctor.

I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight mainly because it was different and it was brave.

Here’s to diversity.

Save As

Doctor Who The Forest of the Dead

After watching the first episode a couple of times it did seem important that when it said that there were 4022 people saved, but no survivors, and also the fact that the planet was basically one giant computer than it did sort of make sense when in the second episode of the story we discovered that the world where the little girl lived was, in fact, a giant hard drive where all of those people had been saved to because that is all that a computer can do.

So in this episode there wasn’t any major revelations as once you had watched the first episode a couple of times you could have seen it coming. What I didn’t see coming was the fact that Dr Moon was a kind of anti-virus program protecting the hard drive from outside influences which is odd when if it was all a giant computer program then there were very little other things that he could be, but I still wasn’t entirely sure until the moment when Dr Moon faded out to be replaced by the Doctor for a split second and then when it said that was what he was it all made sense.

It also did seem obvious that Cal would have been the name of the little girl in the other sequences. I kind of worked out that she was in fact something to do with the computer but I didn’t think that she would actually be a little girl inside the computer, well kind off. I loved the idea that it was the books in the library itself that had caused the vashta nerada to be in the library in the first place and that wasn’t something that I actually thought of, well, till the Doctor said it when, like the Doctor you cannot believe that you hadn’t though of that yourself either.

That showcases the brilliance of the Moff’s writing that you don’t always notice the obvious until much later than you probably should have thought hang on a moment doesn’t that mean. He does it all the time, in all of his shows even in Coupling. I think Steven Moffat would get a bit bored if he had to write linear plots all of the time, so expect a couple of episodes a year at least not told in linear time, because that is always a hallmark of anything by the Moff and we shouldn’t expect any less of the next series of Doctor Who.

After this episode I am still convinced that River Song knows a different Doctor to the tenth. There is no reason to suggest that it is this incarnation that she met even though there was the whole bit with the Doctor opening the TARDIS door with a click of his fingers, which she said the Doctor that she knew could do and I still maintain that she knew a different Doctor than the one we currently know despite what everybody else seems to tell me otherwise.

As for who she actually is, well there is one reason for believing that she may be his wife as the whole there would only be one time when he would tell someone his real name, which as most people know is when you get married. That is where a lot of people find out that their other half has some really embarrassing middle name that they never knew about. They never actually came out and said that she was his wife in the future, it was only implied so it there if you want to believe it, and if you hate the idea you can just discard that theory. I am in the former camp and I do believe that she is his wife from the future, but there is room for maneouver if you don’t want to believe that.

A friend, and fellow Who fan, said that was the one thing that spoiled the episode for him was the intimation that the Doctor and River were husband and wife and he also said that apart from that particular line he also said that there was more concrete evidence of their marriage when she was seen in the other word at the end where she was wearing her wedding dress.

Now personally I will give him the fact that she is wearing a white dress but there is no proof that it is a wedding dress on show, it is simply a white dress. All of the other astronauts were wearing white after all. You could argue that that they were all wearing white because they were all dead, rather than the fact that it was something to with a wedding.

If only River were wearing white then you could argue that because the only person at a wedding allowed to wear white is the bride but there were other people wearing white as well, so I just don’t buy that explanation.

It does seem strange that in this two parter that everybody who had died in the episode appeared to be alive and well by the end of the episode but as they were only copies of themselves are they really alive? You could argue either way, but if it is taken to be some version of heaven then they are dead.

It does have to be said that in these pair of episodes we do have Steven Moffat presenting us with all the best bits of his previous stories: we have the riff on the fact that everybody lives and the repetition of phrases from The Emtpy Child/The Doctor Dances; we have the intimation of the Doctor having a physical relationship with a woman who dies at the end as in The Girl in the Fireplace and we have the twisty turny timey-whimey narrative that we had in Blink.

There was really nothing new in these episodes but Moffat does is so well that we don’t really notice that we have seen it all before and the sign of a good writer is being able to recycle the same ideas over and over again whilst still making them feel fresh.

Bookworm

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library

Silence in the Library was the episode that we were all waiting for the Steven Moffat episode, where we are normally treated to something very good and often the best episode of that particular series. Of course with the news that Moffat is to take over as the showrunner after the 2009 specials this episode has become even more anticipated that any episode of Doctor Who since Rose. People are going to be viewing this episode as a template of how Doctor Who will be when Moffat takes over, but how on Earth can you do that because each and every episode that Moffat has written of the modern version of Doctor Who has been totally different to every other episode he has written, so that is what we can expect from series 5 of Doctor Who not a series where every episode is like The Empty Child or Silence in the Library, which is what most Doctor Who fans think is what they want, but I am not sure if they do, or even if that would be popular with the mainstream audience who have got used to this new version of the show.

What struck me at the close of the episode was that really bugger all had happened. It didn’t matter really as it was well written and well acted bugger all but the pace in this episode was like that of an asthmatic snail compared to the usual pace of episode of new Who, and even most of the two parters that we have seen to date, with the possible exception of The Impossible Planet. Not that this is a bad thing either, because we do get to know all of the main players in the drama but Moffat is as cryptic as ever, and at the close episode I feel that I knew no more than I did when the episode began. I loved all of the reference to spoilers and of not know more than you need to know. Boy, does Moffat know how to play us?

What we do actually know (or quite possibly think that we know – this is a Steven Moffat script after all and often nothing is what it seems in a Moffat script, at least not till the very, very end) is that reality is the vents happening in the library, and events happening with the little girl are a dream, rather than the other way round which was suggested at the start of the episode.

This did seem to be more likely as what are the chances of the TARDIS landing inside somebody elses sub consciouness. Of course being Steven Moffat this should not be taken literally and there is definitely more to it than that just the library being real and the life of the little girl being the dream.

There are lots of questions here begging to be answered such as who is the little girl? What has she got to do with library? Who is Doctor Moon and why did he tell the little girl that her dreams are reality and the library was real? I think there is a lot more to his character than meets the eye also.

The single most interesting character in this story has to be River Song and there is so much to learn about her in the next episode. She is obviously a time traveller and obviously knows the Doctor and judging by the way she was with him, and the way she spoke to him and, more obviously, stroked his face she knew the Doctor in a far more than platonic way.

Rumour has it that she may be his wife from the future, and juding by her actions in this episode I could well believe it, she is definitely in love with the Doctor and seems quite hurt that he doesn’t even recognise her, but is also canny enough to know that it was in his future that she met him so there is no reason why he should recognise her at the moment. In many ways River is a female version of Captain Jack. She is from the 51st century but is also a time traveller and is not shocked by anything, and has been round the block several times as well!

My pet theory is that the tenth Doctor will regenerate at the end of this series and I refuse to accept anything different until the last moments of episode 13 when I have no choice but to accept it. A friend of mine said that my theory has been shot out of the water with some of the things that River Song said but I don’t buy it. I still believe it is possible that she met a different regeneration of the Doctor, who is older than Tennant, but River, like Captain Jack before her, is able to know the Doctor no matter what body he is in. Her main comment was that his eyes look much younger, and as they say that your eyes are the windows to your soul, perhaps a Time Lords can always be recognised when you look into their eyes, after all Timelords themselves have no problem recognising each other when meeting different incarnations, so why not people from the 51st century? After all there are much more sophisticated than us and would probably not blink an eyelid at the possibility of a person having more than one face.

The cliffhanger was a bit of a shock. I certainly wasn’t expecting that to happen. I mean we know that Donna can’t bet dead because we have seen her in the trailer and we know that she meets Rose in a couple of episode so it will be interesting to see how in the hell they get out of this one. Knowing Steven Moffat it will certainly be an interesting explanation and will probably either be very clever, or very obvious. I am personally hoping that it will be very, very clever.

There is the fact that the library computer said that there were more than 4000 people saved in the library, but that there were no survivors. What the hell can that mean. I don’t know how they are going to get out of this cliffhanger, but it is sure going to be fun finding out how they do it.

Roll on Saturday!