Watching Without Prejudice 1: 'Rose' (Davies, 2005)

After the disappointment of the 1996 ‘Doctor Who’ film (which remains culturally and historically interesting), the BBC’s relaunch of its most famous sf show was a source of considerable excitement amongst fans and followers of the old series. I watched the opening episode - 'Rose' - first amongst friends, all of whom had followed ‘Doctor Who’ from childhood and some of whom had been active in fandom, producing fanfic or video dramas. We watched ‘Rose’ in silence. The discussion which followed was surprisingly short (‘Doctor Who’ fans are nothing if not normally loquacious and opinionated – myself included). The consensus was that ‘Rose’ was disappointing; some declared it absolute rubbish (at least, that was the general gist of their comments). Only one firm, dissenting voice argued for its achievement. That voice wasn’t mine. ‘Rose’, to me, was not only bad ‘Doctor Who’, it was bad drama. Returning to it after a gap of almost four years (it was broadcast originally on 26th March 2005), I really didn’t know what to expect. I knew I would not be as disappointed as I had been on first viewing since we can never recapture the sense of betrayal we often feel when a filmmaker or writer fails to satisfy our expectations or to surprise us in ways we enjoy. Of course, ‘The Phantom Menace’ (Lucas, 1999) is the exception to this rule; whenever I watch that particular production I can still find unplumbed depths of disappointment and disillusionment to draw on. I fight the temptation to reach for my ‘George Lucas Sodomised My Childhood’ t-shirt. I also knew the direction Russell T. Davies had taken ‘Doctor Who’ after ‘Rose’ and had grown used to – if not entirely accepting of – the transformations he had worked over the show. Would this knowledge change my perspective on the episode? Would I like it anymore than I did in 2005? Could I really watch without prejudice as I had required of myself? Perhaps.

No opening episode or pilot can be easy to write. The scriptwriter has to introduce at least some of the main characters, establish key contexts and conceits, and provide a storyline dramatic enough not only to keep the viewers enthralled for the duration of the show but also to gain sufficient audience loyalty to make them tune in the following week. In addition, Davies had to resurrect a show that had been dead on television since 1989 (although the 1996 tv movie had drawn an audience of 9.08 million – a 36% audience share – in the UK) whilst breathing new life into a fondly remembered pop culture hero. To ensure its success, new ‘Doctor Who’ would have to be very different in style from the old BBC production. Contemporary audiences would not tolerate the pantomimic style or the cheap sets of the original series, nor would they be likely to engage with superficially developed characters. Nor could the new show appeal solely to old fans; the tv movie had already indicated that any rejuvenated (I’m deliberately avoiding ‘regenerated’) show would have to be directed towards a wider audience. Indeed, the lesson of old ‘Who’ had been that fans were an insufficient audience to maintain viability. In new ‘Who’ continuity with old ‘Who’ would need to be kept to a minimum – an acknowledgement also characterising the tv movie. The new audience would need induction. And that brings us to ‘Rose’.
As I suspected, the level of disappointment I felt on first watching the episode has been muted by time and the intervention of four seasons of new ‘Doctor Who’. Nevertheless, I am still impressed by, and disappointed in, many of the same aspects of ‘Rose’ as I was in 2005. It opens vividly. Moving from an establishing shot of the moon in space to the Earth to a spiralling descent toward London, the camera crashes into a chiming alarm clock whose bright red LEDs declare: 7:30. It is a brilliantly conceived shot in which we travel, in a matter of seconds, from the sublime depths of space, from the realm of the marvellous, into the mundane, emblematised by the nagging, digital cockcrow that reminds us to get up and go to work. This fall into the mundane is precisely the direction Rose (Billie Piper) will reverse when she joins the Doctor at the end of the episode. Hers is a flight from the humdrum into the fantastic. Piper’s Rose remains the most accomplished element of the episode and it seems clear that Davies spent much more time developing her than the Doctor or the plot.
Answering the clock’s call, Rose lurches out of bed and leaves for work. Edited energetically, and accompanied by a pulsing soundtrack, the camera follows Rose to work through a bustling London, bright with buses and shots of famous landmarks (recorded, presumably, for the overseas market). We learn that she’s a departmental shop-worker with a boyfriend in a montage that circumscribes with remarkable economy the parameters of her life. Her occasional bored looks, the sighs of dissatisfaction, all contribute to the viewer’s sense of her entrapment in an average existence. All of this is communicated with minimal dialogue through Piper’s subtle performance and Keith Boak’s thoughtful direction in less than two minutes. The density of the information conveyed is impressive. We understand that Rose is not narrow-minded as her boyfriend is black; we know she has a sense of humour and that her spirit has not been crushed by the repetitive life she leads; we appreciate her predicament. In short, we have identified with her; she has become our viewpoint character and her journey has now become ours.
As her shop closes for the day, she is sent to the basement with lottery money for another employee. An unsettling high-pitched whine, noises off-screen and a lighting arrangement that suggests ominous events about to unfold mark a shift in tone. The bright, flashy everyday world seems little more than a veneer now, a thin membrane laid over a threatening underworld. Symbolically, we are in Rose’s subconscious. The animated plastic shop dummies (they are Autons from ‘Spearhead from Space’ (1970) and ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971)) that lurch from the shadows can be interpreted as a physical manifestation of the potential for Rose to be overwhelmed by her job, of being psychically destroyed by her lowly position in the commercial world. Her literal entrapment in the basement emphasises her economic and social entrapment. In several scenes, Boak alludes to this by establishing the omnipresence of the dummies; they tower over Rose from shop displays; they stare at her from store windows. Their attack on Rose signifies much of what threatens her growth as a human being. She has the potential to become like them, through the process of reification – a plastic person functioning as the agent of a distant, guiding intelligence. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the climax of the episode sees the Nestene Consciousness – an amorphous blob that controls the animate plastic – destroyed by Rose. She not only saves the Earth, she saves herself from returning to a life of banal capitalist servitude.
The first time I watched ‘Rose’, this possible interpretation eluded me completely, largely because I was bemoaning Davies’ treatment of the Doctor. As Rose is backed into a corner by the dummies, a hand grabs hers: ‘Run!’ says a leather-jacketed stranger, later revealed as the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston). The Doctor explodes into Rose’s life, snatching her away from danger, wild eyed and frenzied. As they hurtle through the bowels of the store, his breathless synopsis describes creatures of ‘living plastic’ and a rooftop relay device that must be destroyed. It is impossible not to be caught up in the thrill of the chase. Unfortunately, despite his exciting, mysterious qualities, Eccleston overplays the role. Smiling manically and self-consciously hurling himself into danger, he lacks restraint. While his antics may appeal to younger viewers, they are symptomatic of the inconsistencies that plague his characterisation throughout the episode.
In contrast, Piper’s character, fresh-faced and unremarkable but possessing tremendous potential, is altogether charming and her appeal is highlighted by her charmless mother Jackie (Camille Coduri) and feckless boyfriend Mickey (Noel Clarke). Indeed, when Rose returns home after the Doctor blows up the department store, her mother obsesses over how recent events have aged Rose while she pursues interview possibilities and the likelihood of compensation; Mickey offers to take Rose for a drink to steady her nerves, but only because he wants to watch a football match at the pub. Rose’s life appears particularly bleak at this point, filled as it is by self-obsessed characters that scarcely connect with her on a human level.
Having saved her, the Doctor later appears at her home. He pays her little attention, being absorbed with avoiding her mother’s sexual advances, passing ironic comments on trashy magazines, speed-reading a novel, bemoaning the size of his new regeneration’s ears and mishandling a card trick. Part genius, part goon, part omnipotent alien, part awkward child, Eccleston’s Doctor is a muddled aggregation of characteristics that simply does not work. Too many clashing qualities expose him as a scripted agent of the plot. Whilst his eccentricity sets him apart from the rather dull humans that surround him, it seems that Davies and/or Boak are striving too hard to emphasise his difference. Indeed, Eccleston’s performance is precisely that, the bald performance of eccentricity rather than the embodiment of an eccentric character. Once a severed plastic arm seizes him by the throat, his performance is pure pantomime. Being fair, his struggles, framed comically in the serving hatch of Rose’s kitchen, are likely to make children laugh (just like the belching wheelie-bin that swallows Mickey later in the episode) but the frame-within-frame device exposes, perhaps unwittingly, the constructed nature of Eccleston’s Doctor. His maniacal grinning, constant mugging and predictable quips continue to detract from Piper’s commendable performance. Rose is played absolutely straight and with an integrity lacking in Eccleston’s delivery. Of course, apologists might make the point that this is Eccleston playing the Doctor playing at being an eccentric to disguise the deep sense of loss and isolation he feels following the death of his entire race. There is some validity to this. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies in his characterisation detract from our acceptance of him as a credible character. Even the speech in which he explains how he is attuned to the cosmos and the world’s movement within it fails to impress, though this is largely due to the swelling hyperbole of the non-diegetic music.
Such hyperbole is also present in Rose’s encounter with Clive (Mark Benton). After Googling ‘the Doctor’, Rose meets Clive, a conspiracy theorist gathering evidence of the Doctor’s activities on Earth. His wife’s surprise at a woman being interested in the Doctor is the first of many jibes Davies will make at ‘Doctor Who’ fandom. Clive situates the Doctor at the assassination of Kennedy, the sailing of the Titanic, and the eruption of Krakatoa. He explains: ‘The Doctor is a legend, woven throughout history. When disaster comes, he is there. He brings the storm in his wake, and has one constant companion…Death.’ The grumbling non-diegetic sound effects underscore Benton’s theatrical delivery as the episode lurches from realist dialogue to portentous melodrama. Nowhere in ‘Rose’ is it more apparent that Davies is on comparatively unfamiliar territory as a writer. Whilst he excels at writing convincing natural dialogue, he consistently mishandles the more science fictional , dramatic elements of his story. Like his treatment of the alien Doctor, Davies’ scripting of Benton’s speech indicates how he is simply striving too hard for effect; equally, he is badly served by the soundtrack, which over- dramatises his already overemphatic script.
There are, however, rare occasions when Davies understands the value of understatement. When Rose flees into the TARDIS for the first time, we discover the marvellously redesigned console room. It is a breath-taking moment and one that estranges anyone already familiar from the cheap-and-cheerful poverty of the original console room. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that it draws significant inspiration from the tv movie. Its greater significance, however, lies in how it emphasises the Doctor’s alienness. It is in this setting, surrounded by otherworldly technology, that Rose realises he is both non-human and, more importantly, inhuman. In a key exchange, she asks whether Mickey is dead. ‘I didn’t think of that,’ he replies. At this point, Davies emphasises the character’s dangerousness more effectively than he does by having other characters tell Rose that the Doctor is dangerous. The threat the Doctor poses derives from his inability to see the microcosm, the fine details, of what he does. Concentrating on saving the world blinds him to individual deaths because ‘he’s busy, trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering about on top of this planet.’ His cynicism is much sharper here than his earlier critique of humanity’s behaviour: ‘All you do is eat chips, go to bed and watch telly while all the time underneath you there’s a war going on.’ When compared with his comments to the Nestene Consciousness regarding the human race - ‘These stupid little people have only just learnt how to walk, but they can achieve so much more’ – the Doctor’s attitude towards our species is clear. He is a self-appointed guardian, a shepherd, for ‘stupid apes’ and ‘stupid little people’. He respects our potential whilst recognising our childishness and our technological myopia. The Nestene Consciousness has come to Earth because humans have ‘got such a good planet, lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air – just what the Nestene Consciousness needs. It’s foodstock was destroyed in the War, all its protein planets rotted. So. Earth. Dinner.’ The criticism is clear (and echoes that found in ‘The Terror of the Zygons’ (1975)) and continues the tradition of the liberal critique of excess found in the original series.
Unfortunately, his role as a critical figure is soon abandoned. With an unevenness that defines his character, the Doctor is required to be stupid and overlook the Nestene’s broadcasting device. He explains that, it must be ‘Round. And massive…A huge, metal, circular structure, like a dish, like a wheel, radial, close to where we’re standing, it must be completely invisible.’ He is stood in front of the London eye but Rose has to point him in the right direction. Even then it takes several seconds for the reality to register. The tension between the genius and the fool reaches breaking point here as Davies opts for a cheap laugh rather than consistency. The Doctor, who knows precisely what is going on, would not miss an object as big unless he was required to by the script. This scene remains one of the low points of the entire episode.
The climax, too, is a mixture of high and low points. The animation of the shop dummies is impressively staged as plastic children, adults and even a trio of brides wreak havoc in the city streets. In his encounter with the Nestene Consciousness, the Doctor is shown to favour arbitration over confrontation, although his strategy fails. Identifying the alien as an unreasonable creature, Davies relies on a plot-resolving deus ex machina (an unconvincing conceit used to resolve a complex situation quickly) in the form of the Doctor’s anti-plastic. Clearly, the substance has huge potential for future episodes. One can envision anti-Dalek, anti-Cyberman, anti-Slitheen; indeed, an anti-anything for all occasions. There is no intelligence behind the resolution, no thought beyond a quick and easy solution to a difficult problem: the animation and rebellion of all plastic products. At this point, it is clear that Davies cared little for his plot or, one might add, for the characterisation of the Doctor. Rose is his focus and, as she runs in painfully mawkish slow motion to the Doctor and his TARDIS, I cannot help but think that he cares little for his audience either, or else he recognises that contemporary audiences are so narcissistically enchanted by characters with ‘issues’ that he doesn’t have to work hard at the other narrative basics: plot, character consistency and, in the case of sf, passably credible denouements.
And so I leave ‘Rose’ pretty much as I found it. I have a greater appreciation of Boak’s direction and Piper’s well-scripted performance. The Ninth Doctor’s character still seems a mess (rather than messed-up, as some might argue). And the presence of soap opera conventions strikes a discord with the sf-adventure narrative. The deus ex machina is still glaringly obvious and the plot is half-formulated.
At Redemption there was an extended debate over whether ‘Doctor Who’ was sf or fantasy. I still believe it is sf. The TARDIS is a ‘magic door’, as several people argued, but the discourse of science, or pseudo-science, accounts for its operation. However, the Doctor’s anti-plastic moves the programme closer to fantasy. It may have a science-fictional ring to it (anti-plastic / anti-matter) but it is neither convincing nor thoughtful; it is, ultimately, a magic wand that Rose can wave at the Nestene to make it go away. When I first saw the episode, I would have liked my own anti-‘Doctor Who’ formula that removed unsightly drama. That is no longer the case. Now I would settle for better plotting and some indication that Davies credited me with intelligence.

Redemption through Redemption?

I always find Conventions inspiring and this year's Redemption was certainly no exception. It offered, however, a different form of inspiration. Usually, when I return home, I'm promising myself vaguely that I will read and/or watch more sf, more fantasy, more tie-in fiction and even read a little slash (largely because the practitioners are always interesting people). Naturally, other things get in the way and I end up reading less rather than more and watching stuff for work rather than pursuing new tv series or films that interest me particularly. This year, though, Redemption directed me towards two specific activities. Firstly, it encouraged me to go away and read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. I read 'Shards of Honor' a few years ago and somehow never got around to reading any others despite enjoying the novel a great deal. When I sat on in a panel discussing the novels, it was very difficult to remain aloof from the enthusiasm inspired by Bujold's books. It made a refreshing change to sit in a room of twenty-odd people all engaged in a variety of debates about the books they had been enchanted by. Given that I'm an academic who teaches literature, that's a pretty sharp indictment of the levels of engagement we often experience from students who don't like reading and have nothing to say about the novels they were supposed to have read. Such was the enthusiasm for Bujold that I found myself digging out my (unread) Bujold collection as soon as I got home and adding it to the top of my 'must-read' pile. This bumped down a couple of Dan Simmons, which shows how keen I am to explore the Vorkosigan books.

The second thing the con inspired me to do was revisit new 'Doctor Who'. From my experiences at the con, it is clear that I'm one of the few people sceptical about the quality and content of new 'Who', particularly the work of writer-producer Russell T. Davies. Now, I could be arrogant and satisfy myself with the thought that only I am right and almost everyone else is wrong about the new show (tempting, if you're lazy or a philosopher) or I could actually do some work and try to reason out why I tend to dislike much of new 'Who'. The latter seemed more interesting as an exercise. I suspect part of this reasoning is influenced by the fact that many people I met at the con, and whose opinions I respect, are quite partisan about Davies' reworking, finding in it some brilliance that has eluded me. I began to feel that, over the last three days, I had missed something - or indeed many somethings - about the series that I should have noted. Hence, what I intend to do is re-view all of the new episodes on an irregular basis and write a short blog about each of them. I've set myself a number of criteria for each blog, however. These are:

1. Each episode will be evaluated on its own merit. I will not be reading around it. I believe that any narrative text should stand independent of comments by the writer, the producer, whoever.
2. Comparisons between 'classic' 'Doctor Who' and 'New Who' will be avoided unless there are productive similarities or contrasts. The new show, to me at least, is so radically different in visual style, direction, content and the treatment of its main characters that such an approach is unlikely to be very illuminating.
3. Each episode will be viewed without conscious prejudice. That is, even though I may have loathed a particular episode in the past, I will try to approach it with an open mind and not pre-judge what my own observations might be. This will be a challenge given my feelings towards 'Love and Monsters'.

In short, what I'm trying to do is discover whether there are foundations for my dislike of the series or whether I am reacting viscerally, emotionally. Of course, the blogs will all be subjective but at least there will be a reasoned justification for my subjective perceptions.

Next episode: Rose

Bookish bereavements

Having just finished reading Dan Simmons' remarkable The Terror, I've found myself experiencing a not unfamiliar sense of loss that can't be attributed simply to reaching the end of a 900 page novel. This sensation got me thinking about the other occasions on which I have felt similarly - clearly a sign that I'm between research projects and have too much time on my brain. On reflection, it seems there are at least three types of 'literary bereavement'.

First, and perhaps the most simple, is that felt on completing an inordinately good novel. Stepping out of a world that has captivated us, leaving behind characters that have seemed more interesting and rounded than some of the people encountered in the real world, and concluding an engaging plot, inevitably result in a sense of dislocation - or perhaps relocation. We move back into a world often more mundane than that we leave behind. A little magic seems to have been leached from the world. We exchange gold for brass. Often the disappointment is compounded when we fail to find a new and equally engaging book. Nevertheless, this is usually only a passing condition, a brief melancholy of the intellect perhaps.

A more complex and affecting loss occurs when I try to reread a book I enjoyed as a child. We open the covers and instead of being transported to some otherworldly realm that enthralls us, we find awkward prose, thin characterisation, plot holes and an inventiveness that appears undisciplined and ill-considered. In this case, we do not mourn the completion of a good book, but the loss of the child we were, the untutored innocent who took delight in pure invention before education intervened and we became discerning readers. Our nostalgia for the reading the experience we once enjoyed is taken from us; our new perspective steals the sense of wonder we obtained from the book. We are reminded of our youthful excitement and enthusiasm, which are lost to us forever. We might rage against the dying of the light, but we are forced to recognise the light has become a little dimmer.

The third and most complex manifestation of this sense of loss followed my completion of The Terror. Simmons' novel is an unusual synthesis of historical narrative and mythic supernaturalism. In 1845, arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 128 men sailed from Greenland in two ships - Terror and Erebus - on a quest to discover the North West passage. Two days later, they were spied by whaling ships in Baffin Bay. The ships and their crews were never seen again. On a search mission in 1859, Royal Navy Lieutenant William Hobson found some of the crews' remains together with a number of artefacts, on King William Island. The disarticulated skeletons showed signs of cannibalism whilst 'the boat place' posed the most peculiar mystery of them all. Taking his inspiration from the story, and conducting fairly solid historical research (and incurring a significant debt to Scott Cookman's Ice Blink in the process), Simmons crafts a darkly fantastical account of the crews' fate. The novel is arctic gothic rarely matched since Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Its resolution is entirely satisfying, the characterisation rich and consistent, the structure of plot and story handled intelligently. None of these literary accomplishments account, however, for the sensation of loss experienced at the final page. The human suffering, the ultimate futility of the crews' struggle, their descent into cannibalism and delusion, are all affecting but are still insufficient to explain why I experienced such an emotional wrench. It was only a couple of days later that I realised that one aspect of the book was metaphorically haunting me. It was not the creature hunting the icy wastes that troubled me, nor the abject situation of the men, nor their turn to cannibalism. It was the landscape: frozen, blank, near lifeless - an alien realm wholly inhospitable to Europeans. And yet, this tumbled waste of seracs, bergs, and growlers, the gravelled flatland of King William Island, strewn still with bones and Victorian detritus, I found neither disturbing nor repellant. Rather, it haunted me with its appeal, with an unsettling attractiveness. I wanted to see it for myself. For the first time, I experienced that indefinable force that impelled human beings to venture into danger and risk destruction. I was mourning not for the end of a book, but for the passing of something in me, a part of my contentment. It was strangely exciting.

Such literary bereavements, the passing of imaginative worlds, the realisation of the loss of one's own childhood, the death of something in our self, drive us on to new literature, to new experiences and new challenges. Inevitably, these evoke further feelings of loss which will drive us on once more. And so we grow.

Blake's 7 - The Way Back

Confronted by the cheery, manic chipperness of Doctor Who, the compulsory bisexuality of the idiotic Torchwood, and the pulp action adventures of dinosaur-of-the-week Primeval, it's a real pleasure to escape back in time to when British tv science fiction was unrelentingly grim and thought provoking. Having spent some time talking to James Swallow at Orbital about the new Blake's 7 reimagination as audio drama, I was inspired to rewatch the original series (1978-81). The opening episode, 'The Way Back', is startlingly bleak. Drawing heavily on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and Huxley's Brave New World, writer Terry Nation evoked an impressively aseptic future in which design connotes the cold inhumanity of the administration, the Federation. Amongst rumours of a remake, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary production as bleak as the original. Roj Blake, a political dissident, has been brainwashed and tortured into breaking psychically with his old life. The episode opens with Blake being led outside his domed city by a couple insisting they are taking him to someone who has news of his family in the outer colonies. Once outside, he meets a rebel group, from whom he learns that his family are dead, that he denounced his co-conspirators, who were executed, and that he is only alive because the Federation refused to make him a martyr. Left alone with his thoughts, Blake wanders away, only to witness Federation troops slaughter the rebels. He escapes, but is captured and framed for child abuse to finally discredit him. Following a show trial, his curious attorney is murdered having discovered Blake's innocence. All of the children Blake was accused of abusing have been brainwashed into believing they were the subjects of Blake's paedophilia. The episode concludes with Blake's deportation to Cygnus Alpha.

It is a common belief that the overall pacing of 1970s British sftv is glacial and, while this may be true of Sapphire and Steel, 'The Way Back' has more plot than most seasons of 24 or other American series tied into a 24 episode run that spin out events to an excruciating length (the best example is Invasion, which took 22 episodes to achieve what Siegel's Invasion of the Bodysnatchers did in 90 minutes). It moves briskly and with the kind of low budget style the BBC seemed to reserve for its science fiction, particularly Doomwatch, Survivors and Philip Hinchcliffe-produced Doctor Who. Geometrical sets and the creative use of lighting all add atmosphere as does some otherworldly location work (before the series began to rely notoriously on gravel pits for alien worlds). Yet its true accomplishment lies in implication. The brutality, the cynical manipulation of the justice system, the state-sponsored murders, all form a grim veneer over the truly terrifying concept of a political system capable of convincing children they have been sexually abused to fulfil its own objectives.

Many commentators have pointed out that the Federation of Blake's 7 is a dark mirror image of that found in Star Trek but I think the relationship is more complex than this. There are similarities between Blake's Federation and that of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Both are assimilative, aggressive, and imperialist. Star Trek - at least in the original series and The Next Generation - disguise this largley behind their assumed liberalism and the Prime Directive. Blake's 7 is not so coy. Rather than being a reflection of Star Trek, it is a reflection on Star Trek. As such, it is a series that expresses the self-conscious meditation of a declining imperial power on the nature of that power and why it should be resisted. It is equally infused by the weary cynicism that typified the endgame of the 1970s. We might only hope that the new Star Trek film is possessed of an equal maturity, particularly in the light of the Iraq War.