Incoherent ramblings concerning Hell Bent

[Oh, SPOILERS like you wouldn't believe (Sweetie). It's two days before I get to have a drink with the only other surviving Whovian in the group and I got to get this stuff out so here we are.]

Good few years since we've had one of these isn't it? A Doctor Who season finale with a happy ending, I mean. No one's dead, everyone gets out with their minds and souls more or less intact (yeah, the Doctor is lying about forgetting Clara, I'm certain).

And what a happy ending! I love that Clara and Lady Me get to swan off in their very own TARDIS to have adventures. This is the first time since Rose (arguably since Romana) that it felt like a companion has “graduated” to become their own sort of hero. Tumblr has already named them The Immortal Space Girlfriends. I expect epic fan fiction within the week and a Big Finish box set announced within a year (please, please, please...).

And speaking of Clara: that moment in the cloisters when she finds out how long the Doctor was trapped in the confession dial. You can see it in her eyes, she's ready to burn Gallifrey to the ground for what the Time Lords did to him.

Yay! Canon acknowledgement that Rassilon is actually the Rassilon and not just some schmuck using the name. (I have this head canon that the Kro'Ka is somewhere on Gallifrey during the Time War and is definitely piloting the shuttle when Rassilon goes into exile here). Oh, and I like this new Rassilon, pity there was no chance to have him meet Lady Me.

Lady Me got a “Winter Is Coming” joke. Cheeky Moff. Whilst we're on the subject, as good as she is in the show I'm starting to think that Maisie Williams is a little bit wasted on Game Of Thrones.

Speaking of the Moff writing cheeky women, that moment when the Sisterhood of Karn just wandering into the High Concil chamber and Ohila very nearly literally says “We heard the Doctor's come back, we brought popcorn and we're going to watch him fuck your shit up” was glorious. For the venomous looks between Ohila and Rassilon alone I almost want to accept that whole Other / Pythia business from the New Adventures since the context makes it all the sweeter. “Hey, Rass, remember when you exiled us for being too superstitious? Well, now we're going to sit back and watch your precious rationalist civilisation burn to ashes!”.

The General's regeneration. It doesn't get more undeniable than this: on screen, right in front of us we see a Time Lord change gender and ethnicity. Not off-screen like the Master or a joking aside like the Corsair, right in front of us. Plus an off-hand mention that that body (the General's tenth or eleventh, a line from The Five Doctors of all things makes it questionable) was their only male one. So, yeah, the sinister Moffat agenda to one day give us a Doctor who is something other than a white male has reached it's logical endgame (since it is very, very unlikely that he will be part of casting the part a third time). Plus, they emerge from their regeneration with eyeliner and without all that post-regenerative fannying about the series insists on for the Doctor. If there's one part of this masterplan I want more than a female Doctor or a Doctor of colour it is DROPPING THAT POST-REGENERATIVE TRAUMA BULLSHIT FOREVERMORE!

Shabogans. I don't care what anyone says, those people are the barn are Outsiders and we still don't actually know what the Shabogans are outside of Terrance Dicks being a bit classist in The Eight Doctors.

Anyone else read that line about the President's daughter to mean Susan and that the Doctor's son/daughter was Lord President?

My reaction to Clara's survival was, I shit ye not, “Well, now Jane Austen doesn't have to mourn her.”. Jane should definitely be at least a semi-regular in the Immortal Space Girlfriends audios. Rigsy, too.

The Cloister Wraiths were such a fantastically creepy thing. I'd love to see (or hear) them make another appearance down the line.

New sonic screwdriver. I'll admit, I never hated the sonic sunglasses but I will always prefer the screwdriver out of sheer, unbridled nostalgia and fannishness.

I love the acknowledgement that some day Clara will return to Trap Street to die and she isn't scared. That was a wonderful note to end things on. Ditto Lady Me's description of the death of stars as both sad and beautiful.

Better yet, the acknowledgement that what was done to Donna Noble was a horrifically immoral act that stripped away her consent and materially killed the person she was? That I have been waiting for ever since it happened. It was one thing with Jamie and Zoe when that was done without their consent by the uncaring technocrat Time Lords but to see the Doctor rob his best friend of her very sense of self was... awful in a way I don't think anyone making it really considered. To have the show express that after so long was a genuinely moving moment for me.

Aside from Christmas specials this is it until 2017 and it is a fantastic note to leave “proper” Doctor Who on. I honestly think this is my favourite Moffat finale and possibly the best of the series as I'm aware my feelings about Rose's departure are still complex and perhaps not entirely tied to the story's actual quality. 

Missy Hits

In which I'm finally starting to see the Master in Missy...

(Spoilers of the slightest variety for Doctor Who 9.2: The Witch's Familiar)

I've been going back and forth on this for a week. Again, I missed the back half of Series 8 so this was my first exposure to Missy as a character instead of something people on the internet were going bananas about because of... bleh.

You see, I have two conflicting emotions where it comes to the Master as a holistic entity. The first is that I love Roger Delgado's version: he's amazing, he saves more than one of the scripts he appears in, his chemistry with Pertwee is absolutely fantastic since it absolutely forced Pertwee to raise his game.

So maybe the problem I have with Missy (and with the Simm incarnation) is that I prefer the Delgado version?

Well, that brings us to emotion #2: I hate that Anthony Ainley spent so much of his time in the role just being a lame Delgado impersonation. Ainley wasn't the most versatile actor in the series (but by no means the least, either) but on the one or two occasions when he was given something unique to do with the role (by my count Planet of Fire and Survival) he absolutely shone.

My outright stated preference for the Master is for him to be recast whenever the Doctor is. As much as Ainley doesn't work as a Delgado impersonation, he works worse with Colin Baker than he did with Peter Davison and I honestly can't imagine Delgado working opposite Tom Baker. The “dark mirror” aspect of the character means they're probably best being redesigned every time the Doctor is because the dark version of Pertwee is not the dark version of Tom Baker.

What this is coming around to is me saying I'm starting to feel my two views on Michelle Gomez's Missy, that I like Missy but don't see her as the Master, are actually two sides of the same coin.

I like Missy. I enjoy Missy. Gomez has fantastic chemistry with Jenna Coleman and she's fantastic fun. I don't see Delgado or Ainley or Beevers in there but that's actually something I can appreciate now I'm more used to her. I think perhaps my reluctance here where I've never been reluctant to accept a markedly different version of the Doctor is because the Master's presence isn't constant. Since they only turn up every now and again there's perhaps an unreasonable demand for the character to be more consistent than we demand the Doctor be between incarnations.

Just a thought.

And I love the joke about the chair. 

Davros, Missy and Queerbaiting

In which Davros is useful for the first time since 1985, Michelle Gomez has me double-checking my pronouns, and Clara's sexuality gives me pause...

(Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who's ninth series première The Magician's Apprentice.)

I still haven't finished watching the back half of series eight so this is the first time I've seen Michelle Gomez as Missy. I'm... conflicted. You see, I like Missy just fine, she works well as a villainous presence, but what has me raising an eyebrow is how hard it is to see her as the Master.

This isn't a gender thing. I've wanted to see a woman play the Doctor for years and I'd be willing to bet this is as close as we'll be getting any time soon. There are moments when I see the Master there: when she disintegrates two men to prove she hasn't “turned good” and, of course, the glorious moment towards the end of the episode where she realises where they've ended up and how bad things are. There really is nothing more “Master” than the whole plan collapsing around them. And that little scheme with the planes is as convoluted and pointless as anything Delgado or Ainley's incarnations ever pulled.

So what's the problem? Well, for a start, I want to admit that it is probably my problem and less to do with the writing, it might even be something utterly necessary to selling this character as the Master to a general audience who have never seen Delgado or Ainley.

You see, I just never liked the Simm version of the Master and Missy is very much written to match his zaniness. The Master to me swings between detached cool and homicidal rage, I can't quite buy comedy accents from the character.

Davros, meanwhile, is the best he's been since Revelation Of The Daleks in 1985. What this story has over The Stolen Earth/Journey's End (and Remembrance, for that matter) is that it remembers Davros is a scientist. He has a cool non-Dalek henchman who is clearly one of his genetic experiments and we get another in the long list of chatty confrontations between the Doctor and Davros. “Did you miss our conversations?” Davros asks and, in all honesty, I did. I also like that throughout this episode he's kept separate from the Daleks which is how he's always worked best. These two, polar opposites in morality but united by their profession as scientists act as great foils for one another, arguably better than the Doctor and the Master.

So, effusive praise for a good episode mired only by some personal issues with the series' ongoing use of the Master?

Well, no, there's one other issue. It's an issue that's been hanging over Clara in particular and the Moffat era in general for a while now and one that this episode probably imagines it's helping to solve.

You see, Clara has a line here pretty much confirming her bisexuality. Now, this isn't out of the blue and that's been a problem in some quarters. The first duplicate Clara, Oswin Oswald, was bi (or possibly just forgetful) and whether that was a trait inherited from the original has been an open question since Clara's introduction proper. Here she mentions how good a kisser Jane Austen was and, yes, we have a canon bisexual companion. Yay?

Ish...

You see, something that has dogged Moffat's Doctor Who is that when he took over from Russell T. Davies there were suddenly a lot fewer queer characters in the series. I'm not personally inclined to interpret malice on Moffat's part since he and Davies have different creative obsessions and, yes, one of Davies' is sexuality. Once the problem was pointed out to Moffat we got Jenny and Vastra and now canon bisexual Clara.

Still, it is only a mention and part of me raises an eyebrow and wonders if I'm being queerbaited here. Now, I'm the last person to look at a bisexual character and say they're imperfect for not sleeping with anything in sight, truth be told that trope bugged me long before I had reason to find it personally offensive. Still, I wonder how much latitude there would be for Clara to be shown in a relationship with a woman. Would the BBC ever allow the series to show her making sloppy kisses with Jane Austen (get those fan fictions beta'd by Friday AO3!)? She kissed Danny Pink plenty of times but the idea of her with a woman has to remain an idea.

Perhaps I'm just being ornery but this tiny mention smacks of fanservice more than character development. When Clara's character is actively informed by her bisexuality then I'll be cheering it on. Not necessarily a relationship or anything sexual, just some evidence that this is more than a bit of sly titillation. 

Is Peter Capaldi working from the Colin Baker playbook?

SPOILERS FOR SATURDAY'S DOCTOR WHO EPISODE “DEEP BREATH”.

There's a lot to be said about Peter Capaldi's début episode, amongst them the fact that I'm finally starting to like Clara and that Vastra and Jenny are finally gaining some layers, both as characters and as a couple. What I want to concentrate on is that Capaldi seems to be playing a Doctor, and Moffat seems to be writing a Doctor, who calls back to the series' least popular period.

So it was the mid-Eighties, Colin Baker was the Doctor and I'm sort of reading tea leaves after that because every first hand account of this period wildly contradicts every other first hand account. As far as anyone can tell there was a plan or an idea or a vague, vague notion of running a story arc where the Sixth Doctor would start out unsympathetic and the audience would warm to him over years. It didn't work: Colin Baker started off his era by trying to strangle his (female and heavily sexualised) companion, an act for which he never apologises and she just sort of passively forgives him for even as he continues to be genuinely unpleasant to her.

Once all the feminists in the audience have stopped vomiting, we'll continue.

Anyway, the plan failed. During Colin Baker's second story, a dreadful act of continuity porn called Attack Of The Cybermen, a quarter of the audience just up and left and Doctor Who pretty much died there and then. It was put on hiatus after that season, brought back for a significantly shorter run after which Baker was fired and then generally lurched about the TV schedules for three more years during which it improved immensely but no one was paying attention anymore. From there its cancellation, the Wilderness Years and then the 2005 revival.

It went wrong then, can it work now?

Well, for one thing Capaldi's moment of betraying Clara is almost instantly redeemed. He might be unpredictable but he isn't acting totally against the Doctor's moral code (like, oh, for instance: strangling a defenceless woman!). There's an ambiguous moment with the bad guy of the week where either he kills himself or is killed by the Doctor but the villain is a genuine threat whose survival would have meant the deaths of Clara and the Paternoster Gang. “Would you kill to save your friends' lives?” is a moral ambiguity people can get behind and debate.

There's also the fact Moffat is working with a greater level of audience trust than John Nathan-Turner had in the 1980s. 1980s Who was past its heyday and trying to hold onto an audience that still sort of missed Tom Baker. Modern Who gets more than ten million viewers an episode opposed to the about seven million JNT had in the era we're discussing.

There's more goodwill these days, is what I'm saying. Most of the last seven seasons have been good quality, quite a bit has been fantastic whilst Colin Baker came in after quite a few years of... shall we say “problematic” production values on the series?

I must admit, love Matt Smith's Doctor as I did I was getting a bit fatigued on the series last year, especially as Clara never clicked with me (she's doing better now) so I'm very much looking forward to seeing where this is going. 

The 12th Doctor revealed...

… and he's British, white and male. Scots, in point of fact. Ho hum, better luck next time or maybe the time after that (anyone who seriously believes the BBC will allow a throwaway line written in 1976 to cancel one of their most popular series can go sit in the corner and play with their crayons).

Anyway, Peter Capaldi. I have to admit I haven't watched The Thick Of It but friends I usually trust about these things tell me it was good. I did go into HMV this afternoon looking for a copy but, in the words of the charming young woman on the checkout, “Some other Doctor Who fans got here first, honey.”. What I do have, of course, is his previous Doctor Who appearance: The Fires Of Pompeii.

(As an aside, I think The Fires Of Pompeii now has the highest density of future Doctor Who regulars playing other parts. It's got the Twelfth Doctor as a senator, Amy Pond as a prophetess and Klein from the Big Finish audios as Mrs Senator.)

First impressions? Honestly, I was pretty much sold on the idea the moment Capaldi's Senator lauded the TARDIS as “Modern art!”.

Don't get me wrong, I'm going to miss Matt Smith like nobody's business but the future seems bright. I'm looking forward to the traditional set pieces: the wardrobe scene, convincing Clara he's still the same man; first encounter with the Daleks; first speech about the wonders of the universe.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, dear Mister Smith has a while to go yet and we still have to sort out the whole John Hurt situation before we move on to the Peter Capaldi era.