Thoughts on: Smile

I groaned when I heard the news that Frank Cottrell-Boyce had been invited back to pen another episode of Doctor Who. His last effort, In the Forest of the Night, was interesting for its uniqueness, but it was written by someone who clearly didn’t understand the show, and it could very well have ended up a burning, stinking flop. Many fans were of that school of thought. I thought it succeeded — barely — but perhaps more by fluke and exceptional direction than anything else. It didn’t inspire my confidence in Cottrell-Boyce as a Doctor Who writer. Hence my vocal indicia of complaint. I had never really been convinced of the wisdom of enlisting the man who scripted the surreal London Olympics opening ceremony to write for Doctor Who in the first place, anyway.

I think I needn’t necessarily have worried. This is a competent script. It’s vintage Who, and reads much more like a typical Doctor Who story than Cottrell-Boyce’s first attempt. There are invocations of tropes and ideas from a catalogue of other Doctor Who stories, and it looks like Cottrell-Boyce has been swotting up on his Who since last time: it feels a lot like The Ark in Space for the first 20 minutes as the Doctor and Bill amble about an empty space city alone puzzling aloud about where everyone is; the emojibots invoke the Handbots from The Girl Who Waited; the Vardy look a lot like the Vashta Nerada from Silence in the Library; and the whole “former slave race granted new agency” is straight from Planet of the Ood. None of this is heavy-handed, though. A new viewer who might have hopped aboard Doctor Who for the first time in The Pilot would never guess that this script is a pastiche of recycled ideas. That’s a good thing. Veteran fans will be able to identify the various homages in this episode, but in general you can’t see the seams, and it makes for an intriguing and fascinating story concept.

I think that’s the best that can be said of its virtues. It has an intriguing concept, and it sets itself up so well. The first 20 minutes, where the Doctor and Bill are exploring an increasingly suspicious-looking space city, are brilliant. Those first 20 minutes felt a lot like a Classic Who story in pacing and mood, where the story would spend a generous amount of time, often the entire first episode, setting the scene and worldbuilding — the resemblance to The Ark in Space has already been noted.

But at the same time, that’s its problem. This isn’t a Tom Baker story with four to six episodes over which to stretch itself out. It’s not even a two-parter. It’s a single, standard-length 45-minute episode, and for that timeframe it didn’t pace itself well. It was too slow at the beginning and too fast in the middle and at the end. The “rising action”, “conflict” and “resolution” parts of the story all happened too quickly, without adequate fleshing-out, to make up for an overlong setup. As a result much of the action felt lazily scrawled, many important details were dropped too quickly in verbal exposition, the climax was confusing and not nearly as nail-biting as it thought it was, and some ideas which really merited more than a few offhand lines of attention (the Vardy are sentient; they’re the new indigenous species (even though they’re robots); and they and the humans are establishing a new civilisation together) were skated over disappointingly. To say all that is to say that it could have worked much better as a two-parter. Its setup, which provided for some delightful interactions between the Doctor and Bill, proved that this was an episode and a concept better suited to the longer form of serial. More needed to happen in the middle of the story — it shouldn’t have transitioned from “Where is everyone?” to “We’re blowing up the city” to “Shit, we can’t blow up the city” as quickly as it did.

By far the Doctor and Bill were the most interesting things about this episode. This is a “companion’s first (proper) jaunt in the Tardis” episode, and the relationship and the dynamic between the Doctor and Bill is still being explored. It’s a bit different this time, though—previously the Doctor and his new companion had only met in the preceding episode, but in this case the Doctor and Bill have known each other for months (it seems). There’s little of the “getting to know you” dialogue that’s usually cycled through around this point, and the pair’s comfort with and understated affection for one another, the kind that comes from having a longstanding friendship, is palpable. I like that. I like that the Doctor and Bill are familiar enough and close enough at this point that there’s none of the awkwardness between them that we usually see in the early days of a new Doctor-Companion relationship. None of the Doctor’s embarrassing showing-off and none of the new companion’s shyness. They’re just two friends who decided to go travelling together.

And it’s an interesting dynamic. You can see what they’re going for here. They started with a concept: the Doctor as tutor and Bill as student. The Doctor is Bill’s enigmatic professor who takes her on field trips and invites her to broaden her mind. Bill is the Doctor’s wide-eyed pupil who’s enthused by the opportunity to explore the virgin pastures of a universe far bigger than she imagined. The Doctor is authoritative and experienced, cultivating in Bill the qualities and skills he thinks every good time travelling student should possess. Bill is the prototypical student, unabashed in vocalising every question that crosses her mind, and ravenous to learn as much as she can. The Doctor is cerebral and wily. Bill is exuberant and inquisitive. They’re shaping up to be a positively bewitching pair, and I can’t wait to see more of them.

Rating: 7/10.

Thoughts on: In the Forest of the Night

A contributor in a Doctor Who fan forum I occasionally frequent, with whom I disagree about virtually everything, once made a penetrating observation about fan opinion, and, for once, I actually agreed with them. They (I know not their gender) postulated that unconventional stories like Love & Monsters that fall short of fans’ standards will provoke a far more intense backlash, merely for straying from standard tropes, than equally bad stories that nevertheless follow standard Doctor Who formulas, like The Idiot’s Lantern. Notwithstanding that Love & Monsters really was a terrible, positively retch-inducing episode, the memory of which I’ve done my utmost to repress, there’s more than a grain of truth in that observation. For fans of a show that premises itself on the literally boundless concept of “anywhere, any time, any thing”, we can be surprisingly conservative and sceptical towards the show straying from the accepted storytelling tropes it uses over and over again.

I feel that much of the fan hostility towards Frank Cottrell Boyce’s divisive script has much to do with that conservative attitude towards the kinds of storytelling the show should employ. What distinguished In the Forest of the Night from “normal” Doctor Who was that, as was revealed in this episode’s denouement, there was no actual threat. It was basically an episode following the Doctor, Clara and a gaggle of schoolkids around as they became bewildered over a freak, but entirely harmless, natural occurrence. The viewer was waiting for the moment when the Doctor would be struck by a brainwave and figure out how to save everyone from the… inconvenient trees. Expecting that, the viewer is disoriented when the brainwave finally does come, but it’s in the Doctor realising that, actually, there’s nothing to save anyone from — there was no need to worry at all in the first place.

This is different; for once, the story isn’t about the Doctor beating the monsters, or the Doctor and Clara getting themselves out of a dangerous situation. It was about everyone learning a heartwarming and joyous lesson: nature is our friend, not our enemy — trust it. The Doctor has no real role to play other than being the one who realises what it’s all about. This is certainly a departure from what we’re used to, but it’s also a return to the show’s origins. In the first Doctor Who serials, the Doctor was no more the hero of the piece than the (usually captured) companions were; the show was more about following the Doctor and his friends on their adventures than about the Doctor saving the day. It was only later that the Doctor became a pseudo-superhero who saved the world every week. Many of the earliest Doctor Who serials, like Marco Polo and The Edge of Destruction, would be considered very experimental in modern Who. This episode probably wasn’t the best exemplar of non-traditional storytelling, but perhaps the show would actually benefit from expanding beyond the present narrative confines that the script-writers impose on themselves?

So, in general, despite its very visible faults, I rather liked it. It’s inoffensive, charming, enchanting, cute and heartwarming. It was different. I mean, the idea of invincible trees springing up overnight and carpeting the Earth was a bit silly, I admit, but, gosh, wasn’t it intriguing? Wasn’t it just magical? Wasn’t it at least more interesting than the constant alien invasions of London we were subjected to in Russell T Davies’ era? I actually found the idea that the Doctor was helpless to combat the green, wooden scourge to be a fantastic narrative device. We don’t see it happen enough. I thought the characters really enhanced this story, too. The children were amusing, and brought a smile to face, especially the mouthy ginger girl, Ruby. This was actually one of the few times I’ve liked the child actors in Doctor Who. Danny is the most likable and sympathetic he’s been all series, in his grounded, down-to-earth, responsible attitude towards everything, contrasting effectively with Clara’s reckless wanderlust and thrill-seeking. And wasn’t the episode just visually stunning? If nothing else, this episode was surely one of the most aesthetically beautiful the show has ever produced.

There were a few things that annoyed me, but they’re not really significant enough to unduly diminish my enjoyment of the episode. For one, the episode felt slow. With not all that much to actually do, it indulges in a lot of filler material involving escaped zoo animals and other flotsam and jetsam. There was one scene in particular where Clara and the Doctor stood around having a conversation in which they just repeated things we already knew. I felt the urge at that moment to channel Monty Python in admonishing them both to get on with it! Secondly, the scene where the tree spirits (or whatever they were) were speaking through Maebh would have been so much more effective if I could actually hear what they were saying. All I heard was a resonant rumbling in a frequency too low for even my young ears to pick up. Finally, I hate to be a grouch, but I cringed over that final scene, where Maebh discovers her lost sister hiding in the bushes. I don’t usually hate on things like this, but this time I did; I found it unnecessary and emotionally dishonest. Nevertheless, as I said, these gripes don’t overtly diminish my enjoyment of the episode, which I found, for the most part, engaging viewing.

Rating: 7/10.