Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"

• This is a Massive, “Everything including the kitchen sink” episode that takes a ton of disparate elements – Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, An Egyptian queen, A big Game Hunter, Rory’s Dad, The Indian Space Agency, multiple big name guest stars (Mark Williams, David Bradley, Mitchell and Webb, Rupert Graves) – and throws them into 45 minutes of television. To its credit, it makes these elements work together in an impressively condensed piece of storytelling.
• The approach to the episode isn’t without its faults, however. There is an uncomfortable edge to the story, that I suspect comes from the way disparate elements – Doctor being friends with a game hunter isn’t something I particularly like– yes, Riddel’s profession is questioned by Amy, but he’s mostly played as a charming jerk and why is the Doctor friends with him in the first place? More significantly, the episode’s villain is a greedy, money loving trader with a Jewish name – who also happens to be disabled (although this is hardly the first Doctor Who story to code disability as evil). And then there are moments like Solomon threatening to rape Nefertiti which is less problematic (although it does, as critics have pointed out, further code Solomon as a Jewish stereotype and push the anti-Semitic thread of the episode further by having his threats be directed at an Egyptian queen), as depiction does not equal endorsement, and the episode makes space to give Nefertiti agency in her capture and her rescue, and is more a case of pushing the wild swings in tone – which mostly work for the episode – a little too far. 
• This does lead us to the aspects that are meant to be uncomfortable, and do, in their own way, work. Solomon’s genuinely loathesome nature, seen in moments like his casual description of his callous massacre of the Silurians, or the moment where he orders the Robots to hurt Brian, is carefully built into his initial confrontation with the Doctor (some of Matt Smith’s best acting), and steadily escalates to point where the Doctor killing Solomon in cold blood feeling like a natural culmination of the episode’s storyline. It’s a wonderfully perverse take on the “wacky romp” genre of Doctor Who.
• Once again, Chibnall does an excellent job with the TARDIS team. Rory gets a storyline where he learns to connect with his father, Amy gets to have her own go at being Doctor-like with flirting companions (and Karen Gillan is visibly having a ton of fun with her material in this episode), fangirl over Nefertiti, and confront the Doctor about the gaps between his visits, and the Doctor sways between the most eccentric and the darkest sides of his nature in a very natural way. In his last script, Chibnall wrote good material for all the regulars, but it felt like there were gaps in that, such as Amy’s extended period of being captured in “The Hungry Earth”. Here, he balances their material out with aplomb, such that no one is lacking a good scene for long.
• Also significant is the way Chibnall continues to mediate the return of the everyday aesthetic to Doctor Who, bringing in the tension between Amy and Rory’s Domestic life and their Doctor life, which will come to the fore in his next script. This tension is explored first through this exchange between the Doctor and Amy:
“AMY: What are you doing? 
DOCTOR: Mixing my messages. How's the job? 
AMY: We're about to be hit by missiles and you're asking me that? 
DOCTOR: I work best when I'm multitasking. Keep talking. How's the job? 
AMY: I gave it up. 
DOCTOR: You gave the last one up. 
AMY: Yeah, well, I can't settle. Every minute I'm listening out for that stupid Tardis sound. 
DOCTOR: Right, so it's my fault now, is it? 
AMY: I can't not wait for you, even now. And they're getting longer, you know, the gaps between your visits. I think you're weaning us off you. 
DOCTOR: I'm not, I promise. Really promise. The others, yeah, but not you. Rory and you, you have lives, have each other. I thought that's what we agreed. 
AMY: I know. I just worry there'll come a time when you never turn up. That something will have happened to you and I'll still be waiting, never knowing.” 
Complaints about Amy’s job changing throughout series seven being a sign of the show not paying attention to Amy’s characterisation do seem to miss the point of Amy’s job changing, a point that is addressed directly in text, right here. She’s struggling to settle in her home life because of her continued ties to her Doctor life, and resolving the tension between the two lives will be key to the rest of her character arc.
• But perhaps the biggest representative of the domestic in Series 7A is Brian. It’s worth unpacking why this is the case, from a thematic perspective instead of the more obvious Doylist reason: the production team saw a chance to have Mark Williams play Rory’s Dad, a perfect piece of casting that wasn’t feasible for a longer period of time due to Williams’ busy schedule, so he was brought in to play the role late on in Amy and Rory’s time on the show. But why bring him in so late on, instead of bringing back, say, Amy’s parents? It’s worth considering what role Brian plays in Amy and Rory's story, and comparing that to Amy’s parents. Amy’s lost parents were symbolic of the trauma represented by the crack in her wall, and their restoration was representative of her healing and restoration from that trauma. In Series five, Rory was representative of the domestic side of Amy’s life, but that is less simplistically the case now, as Rory is a settled part of the TARDIS crew who also enjoys adventures in Space and Time. But as the discussion between Amy and the Doctor addresses, there is still a tension between the domestic and fairy tale aspects of Amy’s life. Enter Brian, whose basic character description is “Rory, but less adaptable to Doctor Who’s narrative”. His role in the script is to embody “real life”. And the script visibly sympathises with and values the life Brian represents: this is not a simplistic “Doctor life frees companions from the drudgery of real life” narrative. And Brian isn’t simplistically hostile to what the Doctor’s world represents: he embraces the adventure provided after the initial culture shock provided by spaceships and teleports, being exhilarated riding round a spaceship on a triceratops, and choosing to go and see the world at the end of the episode. This episode is not suggesting that real life and Doctor life are antithetical to one another, but is establishing the season as being about negotiating the tensions between these two worlds. 
• By the end of the episode, the most striking thing is its sheer bizarreness, as we switch between tones with an impressive rapidity, even for Doctor Who. We thrill at dinosaurs on a spaceship, then grieve for the death of an adorable triceratops, are disgusted by Solomon, but feel unnerved by the Doctor’s response to him, and are then moved by the image of Brian drinking a cup of tea while looking at Earth from afar as his legs dangle over the edge of the TARDIS. It is to the episode’s credit that all these elements carry such potency, and that most of these switches in tone work effectively, cohering to create an episode that has a lot going on for an “early season romp”.

Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Asylum of the Daleks"

·      I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this episode as much as I did. But it’s a visible step up from Moffat’s last three scripts, as he manages to put together, an efficient and skilfully constructed episode, after the hot messes of “Let’s Kill Hitler”, “The Wedding of River Song”, and The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe”. “Asylum” isn’t quite Moffat back to his best, but it is a strong episode that dares to try something new, confidently setting out the new style for the new season.

·      But first up, it seems worth addressing the episode’s biggest weakness, as it is a significant one. Amy and Rory’s divorce subplot doesn’t quite work, not being set up enough for the viewer to be prepared for what’s coming, and not getting enough focus for the resolution to feel satisfying. Trying to explore the lingering hurt Amy feels from Demon’s run is commendable, and her and Rory’s failure to communicate is true to the trouble Amy has opening up to people to discuss her hurt. But there’s a lingering sense that this storyline could have been done better, and with more sensitivity.

·      However, Amy and Rory’s subplot does have some benefits, as we see a return of the everyday to Doctor Who’s aesthetic, which has disappeared from the show over the course of series six, which is not an inherently bad thing, but is nice to see back after an absence. The pre credits scenes at Amy’s workplace, with Top 40 chart music playing over Amy’s photoshoot, feel grounded in the contemporary in a way that Doctor Who hasn’t in the whole Moffat Era. While the “everyday life” aspects of the episode don’t quite work here, they will do good things for Doctor Who over the course of this season, and will be the source of some of the show’s high points come the Capaldi era.

·      And there is stuff genuinely good stuff going on with Amy in this episode, it’s just not related to her and Rory’s marital issues. The subplot surrounding the nanogenes taking over Amy and nearly converting her into a Dalek slave produce a threat that is very specific to the things that are important to Amy. Amy has been established as a character whose identity and sense of self are structured around fairy tales and stories, and the threat posed by the nanogenes is that she will be “unwritten”, as the Daleks hijack her memories and stories, rewriting her to become their puppet. The Daleks pose a direct threat to her identity as a storyteller, threatening to take away her ability to care about the stories that make Amy who she is, just like Darla, who is able to consult files and gain academic knowledge about the person she was, but is unable to feel loss for the Daughter she once knew, unless the Daleks choose to reactivate those feelings. For all the complaints about the Daleks not exterminating anybody in this story, I think they are as unsettling here as they’ve ever been. Between the threat they pose to Amy, and the fates of Darla and Oswin, the Daleks pose an existential threat they don’t get just by shooting extras and secondary characters (who, on the whole, are the only kind of characters the Daleks ever exterminate anyway).

·      One of the episode’s biggest strengths comes in the form of Nick Hurran’s direction: “The God Complex” and “The Day of the Doctor” are better episodes, and are also tremendously accomplished pieces of visual storytelling, but this might be his best achievement directing Doctor Who, as he takes a packed script and gives it clarity through clearly conveyed visual information, and gives us some wonderfully striking shots and visual sequences. We get a focus on bright and primary colours: a vast white snowscape, the brightly lit expanse of the Dalek Parliament, and Oswin’s bright red dress standing out as as the immediate images that come to mind, all held in contrast to the grimy underbelly of the Asylum, with its dank corridors and broken, dying inhabitants. We get sweeping pans across the wreckage of Skaro, that capture the sheer scale of the Dalek shaped towers, and a moving overhead shot as the Doctor, Amy, and Rory ascend on a platform from their cell into the Dalek Parliament. The episode has a wonderful variety of visuals that still cohere neatly, establishing “blockbuster” visual tone for the season with aplomb.

·      Particularly striking are the dream-like visuals when Amy hallucinates, seeing Daleks as people. There are seven people in the room: a woman in a dark dress, kissing a man on the cheek, a man who makes a gesture of welcome to Amy, a man and a woman talking and laughing, a man swaying unsteadily on the spot, and a ballerina, much younger than the other people, who the sequence dwells on. The ballerina is positioned at the centre of the shot, where all the other people are positioned to the left or the right, and wearing a white costume where they wear dark clothes. The sequence slowly focuses in on her, as she starts in the distance, at the back of the shot, but the camera continues to move towards her, pushing the other characters out of the shot or to its margins, until we cut to a closer, overhead shot of her spinning on the spot. Her vibrant red hair, which the viewer is led to focus on as she spins in slow motion, links her to Amy, but she is also linked to Oswin, whose voice we first hear while we look at a shot of a model ballerina spinning on a music box, and who is wearing a red dress, which we see her wearing seconds after cutting away from the ballerina. As a result, Amy and Oswin are tacitly linked by their connection to the Daleks. But what is this link? This sequence is a piece of foreshadowing: we know Amy is being converted by the Daleks, and by tacitly linking her to Oswin, the sequence prepares the viewer for Oswin being subject to a similar fate. This sequence is perhaps the best example of the way Hurran’s packed visual symbolism is perfectly tailored to the ton of information packed into Moffat’s script.

·      And then we get to thing giving the script much needed focus: the surprise of Jenna Coleman’s appearance. It’s a great way to showcase her talent ahead of her proper first appearance in “The Snowmen”, and she’s very good here, hinting at a deeper character beneath Oswin’s wisecracking nature that is presented over the course of the episode, and taking any opportunity to hint at Oswin’s subconscious awareness of her conversion such as the scene where she deflects the Doctor’s question about his inability to see her, even though she can see him. 

·      Which leads us to the character Coleman plays in this story. Oswin’s character arc centres around the divide between dreams and reality. The first thing she asks the Doctor is “are you real? Are you really real?”, hinting at just how deep she has buried herself in her dream world of soufflé baking and messages to her mother: she can no longer be certain of what is real and what is not. This dream breaks down when the Doctor reveals the truth to her, but her death sees her reclaim her own reality, and identity: “I fought the Daleks, and I am human”, she tells the Doctor. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, she sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, beat the Daleks, and reclaim the self she had lost, ascending to a higher narrative plane as she looks into the camera and, for the first time, starts the meme that is tied to her character this season, in and out of universe: “Run you clever boy, and remember me”.

·      And here, I want to address a common criticism of the episode: the claim that the regulars hear Oswin’s human voice over the intercom even though she has been converted to being a dalek is accused of cheating the viewer for the sake of a twist. It’s a criticism I agreed with, until I realised on this rewatch that there’s actually a perfectly reasonable explanation. As Jane Campbell points out in the comments for El Sandifer’s essay on this episode: “There's no microphone in the white room [where Oswin is imprisoned]. Oswin's patched directly into the pathweb and presumably any communications servers. She can dial up the opera Carmen – it's not like she's really got an iPhone to play it. It's not actually a stretch that if she can fill the comm lines with music that only exists in her head, she can fill it with the voice in her head as well.” What is often cited as major plot hole actually isn’t, for my money. This isn’t to suggest that the episode doesn’t have its flaws, but its plot holds together better, and is less superficial, than its detractors would suggest.

·      We end a story with the Daleks forgetting the Doctor, erased by Oswin, who reclaims her reality and caps it off by altering the Daleks’. This also neatly continues the “stepping into the shadows” arc, as the Doctor has now disappeared from all of the universe, including the memories of his greatest enemies. And it hints at the true nature of the “Question” arc: “Doctor Who?” Isn’t a question about the Doctor’s true name, but his identity, his true nature. The real answer to the arc is hidden in plain sight from the very beginning.

Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe"

• I’m not quite sure where I’m going to land on this one, as I have decidedly mixed feelings upon rewatching for this. I had thought I was going to defend the story as a sweet enough bit of Christmas fluff, but upon rewatching the episode, I have a few more problems with it than I remembered.
• The first 20 minutes are, for my money, pretty much perfect. People who complain about the silliness of the Doctor catching up to spacesuit, or the concept of the impact suit are, as far as I’m concerned, going into Doctor Who with the unreasonable expectation that it should be a scientifically accurate show. The episode is going for the same kind of tone and genre as the Harry Hill starring “Professor Branestrawm” Christmas specials, and the first act of the episodes (everything before Cyril goes through the portal in the box) works perfectly.
• Also nice is the Doctor taking on the new name of the Caretaker: it’s a nice follow up to his decision stepping back into the shadows, now trying to be “the man who takes care of people”, a kinder alternative to the dark legends that have built up around him. Instead, he chooses to help a family through a difficult Christmas, helping them through a hard time with the joy of silliness, as a way of thanking a woman who did him a kindness when he was in need. It’s genuinely lovely, and ties the tone that episode is aiming for to the Doctor’s ongoing character arc very neatly.
• Which takes us to the “Because they’re going to be sad later” sequence, a beautiful scene: the idea that it is vital to embrace happiness while it lasts being one of the wisest moments in any era of Doctor Who. But the bit that gets me every time, and doesn’t seem to be that commented on, is Claire Skinner’s broken delivery of “I don’t know why I keep shouting at them”, a moment that is utterly heartbreaking, and gets at the core of Madge’s characterisation in this episode: she is a woman desperately trying to carry on and keep her family together, even as her grief threatens to reach the surface.
• But then we reach the Christmas forest, a nice idea in and of itself, and the plot sits still for the second half of the episode. This is best exemplified by the scenes in the tower, which are far too slow, and fail to really capture a sense of the stakes escalating in any meaningful sense.
• And then we come to the ideological critiques of this episode, which I think ring true. For me, Moffat does pretty well from a feminist perspective on the whole, in spite of the critique he faces from some parts of fandom. But in this instance, a major problem that runs through his writing – his gender essentialism (which I think he has curbed over the years, without completely getting rid of) – derails a script with well intentioned goals (because intent, sadly, isn’t magic). I don’t think Moffat actually thinks women who are unable to biologically have children are weaker or worth less than women who can (indeed, I think Amy’s plotline in the next episode was an attempt to rectify the flaws of this episode), but the implication is there, largely because Moffat hasn’t, in this instance, questioned the essentialist assumptions underpinning the script. This is then followed up with a background for Madge and Reg that comes across as uncomfortably stalkerish: Reg “following Madge home” was clearly conceived as set up for the script’s resolution, once again, without thought for the implications. I think the women at Verity Podcast put it best: Moffat has an old fashioned Romantic streak, that at (relatively rare) times leads to some unfortunate subtext. This is one of those occasions. 
• And the followed her home aspect also leads us to the episode’s refusal to kill off Reg, another controversial part of the conclusion. On the one hand, it seems harsh to object to the desire to give a Christmas special a sentimental happy ending. But on the other hand, the episode handles the story of death at Christmas in a genuinely sensitive way, capturing Madge’s desire not to ruin Christmas for her children beautifully, only to then decides to bring him back, which is ultimately more than a little crass: real families who lose a loved one over the festive period don’t get that easy happy ending. On the whole, I appreciate the Moffat era’s approach to death: he doesn’t kill off characters cheaply, and still generally addresses mortality in an intelligent and mature way (see the last Christmas special as an example of this). But here, his lack of willingness to kill off characters has some unfortunate implications that don’t benefit the script.
• The ending is perfect, though: Madge’s scolding of the Doctor and pushing of him to come clean to Amy and Rory is a lovely way to pick up on the lingering moral issue of the Doctor’s actions in the season finale: his attempt to deceive his best friends. The reconciliation between the Doctor and Amy is beautifully written and played, and the callback to the Doctor’s comment to Lily about happy tears is a genuinely moving emotional beat on which to end the episode.
• So overall, this is an episode that is best watched knowing that it is Moffat in “Christmas special autopilot” mode, which for all that he talks about Christmas episodes needing to be Doctor Who for a tipsier and larger audience, is only something he does for this episode. It’s perfectly enjoyable if you accept that and watch out for the good bits, which are genuinely brilliant. But it’s also important to acknowledge the more problematic aspects underpinning the episode, rather than to give them a free pass just because it's, ultimately, paper thin Christmas nonsense. They're still problems.

Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Wedding of River Song"

The Wedding of River Song

• ·      Like “Let’s Kill Hitler”, “The Wedding of River Song” is a hot mess of an episode, a fascinating but flawed finale to cap a fascinating but flawed season. However, it is terrific fun, a finale built on an exploration of perception and memory.
• ·      Let’s start at the beginning. After the title sequence, we start with the image of the Doctor, as seen through the eye of a Dalek: eyes are, not for the first time in this era, a running motif in this episode. The scene is constructed to show how terrifying the Doctor is to a lone Dalek: as in the Pandorica speech, he Doctor is relying on the legend built up around him to terrify his oldest enemy. The Doctor is framed as the monster, at least as seen through the eyes of a genocidal hate machine (this is something that will be picked up at the start of series Seven). The next scene sees the Doctor using the Dalek’s eyestalk as a tool for bartering: the tool through which the Dalek sees the Doctor is used as a means to get information on the Silence.
• ·      After a brief cameo from the Doctor’s oldest enemy, we move to the villains his most pressing threat. The Silence are obviously a Moffat perception monster, but what’s more interesting is the way they represent a convergence of two key themes in Steven Moffat’s writing: perception and memory: they are monsters you can only remember when you see them. With the silence, seeing believing: seeing is remembering. The eye motif continues, as the episode introduces the concept of the Eye Drives as a response to the powers of the silence, furthering the connection of the Silence to sight: an imprint in the eye is used to remember the Silence when the user isn’t looking at them.
• ·      Similarly, Amy is able to remember the Doctor, the universe before River created a new Timeline, due to her growing up with a crack in her bedroom wall. She uses drawings to help herself remember: Amy is at heart creative, a storyteller, and her she once again brings back her memories through the power of art and stories. And this is linked to the episode’s exploration of sight: the drawings recreations of things Amy has seen in alternate other life. For Amy, sight and art combine to help her pull back her memories, and perceive a different reality.
• ·      Also significant is the Doctor and River’s exchange at Lake Silencio:
• “RIVER: That's me. How can I be there?
• DOCTOR: That's you from the future, serving time for a murder you probably can't remember. My murder.
• RIVER: Why would you do that? Make me watch?
• DOCTOR: So that you know this is inevitable. And you are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven”
• The Doctor’s wrong: River does remember the events at Lake Silencio, she makes that clear to Amy at the end of the episode. So his consolation to her younger self is mistaken: River will remember the crime she hasn’t really commited. And that’s a problem, as it means the Doctor, at this point in the episode, is burdening River with guilt she doesn’t deserve.
• ·      The response to this scene comes in the scene at the top of the pyramid: as the Doctor whispers to River, telling her to “Look into [his] eye”: the eyes are the windows of the soul, and here, the Doctor admits an important emotional truth to River, and to himself. Seeing the Doctor in the eye of the Tesselecta, changes his plans for the way River will remember his “death”. When River confronts him with her love and grief, the Doctor is forced to recognise that hiding his plan to cheat death from River will hurt her, and accept that she has a right to know she won’t kill him. This scene is the emotional core of the episode, as the story becomes about his desire to be a lone, brooding hero being proved wrong, and him opening up to the people who love him, recognizing her right to be a part of his plans.
• ·      We then move to Amy and River, and their final scene together, in Amy’s garden. Here, they address Amy’s decision to kill Madame Kovarian in cold blood, with River suggesting the timeline being erased absolves Amy of any need to question her actions, only for Amy to respond by saying, “I remember it, so it happened”. It’s a moment that directly provides a sense of emotional fallout from what happened to Amy in the first half of the season, which as has been mentioned before, has seemed lacking in the second half of this season. But it is interesting to connect this lack of visible fallout to the role of the Silence as creatures of narrative corruption: the silence lurk just outside of the memory, a trauma that remains unknown until they appear explicitly, and so the damage they do to Amy and River disappears from the visible narrative, only lurking in the cracks of the narrative, until they reappear in the finale. It’s only once confronting the narrative wound they represent, and defeating them for good, as Amy does in her confrontation with Kovarian, that Amy and River are able to respond to, and start to process, the trauma they have been through, and take stock of the people they are now.
• ·      And as Amy and River take stock of their trauma, River realises that Amy needs to know the truth of the Doctor’s words at the top of the Pyramid too. It’s interesting to compare River’s confession to Doctor’s: the Doctor is forced to accept that River deserves to remember the truth of what happened at Lake Silencio, in spite of his reluctance, feeling he has to follow a “dark and brooding hero” narrative. River sees Amy’s need, and chooses to let her know the truth, share her memory of the Doctor’s whispered words with her mother, even though she shouldn’t. After going through terrible trauma together, Amy and River end the season united, and helping each other heal.
• ·      This journey through perception and memory leaves us with the Doctor’s faked death, and the way it is remembered. He can’t be seen as “the face of the Devil himself” anymore, as he was through the eye of the Dalek at the start of the episode: his worst enemy provide the episode’s moral critique of the path he has taken, and this critique causes him to “Step back into the shadows”, erase the universes’ memory of him, so that he can become less of a dangerous myth, and return to being an ordinary man who helps people. But to do that, he has to answer the question posed by the title of the show, to find his true identity beneath the legends that have been built up around him.