The new Doctor and Rose
Saturday, October 07, 2006
WhoView: Christmas New Earth Werewolf Invasion
We’ve had the first three of the David Tennant Doctor Who episodes on the Sci-Fi Channel here in the U.S.-- the second season of the revived series, the first with Tennant as the tenth Doctor.
Tennant appeared for about 10 seconds at the end of the final first season episode, as the Doctor regenerated from Christopher Eccleston’s ninth doctor. It was immediately clear they were going to be different, and they are.
In his first episode, the 90 minute “Christmas Invasion,” somehow the only partly regenerated Doctor gets the TARDIS to Rose’s neighborhood for Christmas. This is the first time we’ve seen a regeneration in the new Who, and some of the traditional effects of regeneration, especially the Doctor’s disorientation and loss of identity, are not only repeated but extended and made into a suspenseful part of the narrative.
In the classic Whos, the new Doctor would act a little weird, but after selecting a new wardrobe, would settle down soon enough to begin the adventure. This time, the Doctor’s weakness (he’s unconscious for a lot of the story) and Rose’s uncertainty about whether he is going to come out of it, and if he is the real (or “proper”) Doctor at all, is the B story. It leads to a couple of neat scenes where the Doctor becomes the instant hero.
Tennant’s Doctor is more clearly heroic, as well as more the madcap Tom Baker-style, though he retains the 9th Doctor’s northern or working class accent rather than adopting the stage English that Tom Baker made famous in the role. But Tennant does have Baker’s background in Shakespeare (or more), which shows, and he is more fluid and mercurial than Eccelston. (We’re getting another major Tennant performance in the U.S. just now, when PBS begins broadcasting the acclaimed BBC “Casanova,” with Tennant and Peter O’Toole sharing the title role.)
Eccleston really grounded the new Doctor Who, and gave the character depth and mystery and melancholy as well as quirkiness and heroism. Tennant's first episodes have the Doctor flying again, but there are also echoes of the ninth Doctor in this tenth one. This is not to say one actor or one Doctor is better than the other. Eccelston's Doctor worked. So far, Tennant is off to a good start, and I look forward to more.
This first story involves an interstellar invasion of England at Christmas by some blustering space pirates in a very impressive space ship--Independence Day size, though looking more like enormous clumps of rock. The episode brings back Harriet Jones from the first season, now Prime Minister. In the climactic scene, the Doctor makes a dramatic entrance from the TARDIS, and champions the planet in a sword duel. The episode is full of wit, with a running joke (Jones showing her ID card and brightly announcing, “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister” after which everyone, including the space monster, replies, “Yes, I know.”) I didn’t catch a Trek reference but the Doctor—who does his derring-do in pjs and a bathrobe—mentions the similarly attired Arthur Dent, from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” (True Whovians will recall that Adams was writing a Tom Baker Doctor Who story at the same time he was writing the original Hitchhiker script for radio.)
The story is a romp with thrills and wit, and then just as it seems to end happily, it takes a strange dark turn when Jones decides to use the secret weapon she’d had activated to destroy the defeated and retreating spaceship. This act turns the Doctor on a dime, from champion of the human race to accuser—it’s aliens that should fear humans, he says, they are the monsters. Despite the PMs sensible reasons, the Doctor uses a power unseen before in quite this way: he whispers a few words to Jones’ aide that soon results in a rumor that apparently forces her from office. It's a fairly stunning and potentially troubling display of power--arguably arbitrary, as it places the Doctor's judgment above the people who presumably should elect their leaders.
This odd mixture of stagey adventure and dark drama is physicalized when Rose, her family and the Doctor leaves a happy Christmas dinner to go outside in the falling snow, with a skyrocket-like meteor show above. But it isn’t that innocent: the meteors are pieces of the spaceship Jones destroyed, falling back to Earth, and the snow is the ash of the spaceship, and presumably of the bodies of the invaders. They were played as grotesques and somewhat comical and primitive. The Prime Minister saw them as a danger to Earth, especially if they returned to the stars to spread the word of the Earth’s riches. But the Doctor saw them as persons, as life, and his response was quick, uncompromising, and in the role of the reigning authority.
The echoes of recent geopolitics were there. At first in Jones’ refusal to cede power to the President of the U.S. (“Tell him he’s not my boss and he’s not going to start a war”) when the aliens are overhead. But then in her own behavior, versus the aliens—strange-looking, uncompromising, somewhat comical but also deadly. Not like us. Like terrorists perhaps.
The episode ends with Rose’s doubts resolved and ready to resume her journey with the Doctor. The joy of the journey is more powerful than anything else, it seems, which is its attraction and its danger.
In this final scene, the Doctor keeps referring to being a new man, wanting to see the universe with his new eyes. He had told Harriet Jones that the Earth was in a new time—they knew that aliens exist, and aliens know that earth exists. It’s a new world, he said, and then said it again with scorn after Jones destroyed the spaceship. The "new" theme will carry over to the next story.
(continued after photo)
We’ve had the first three of the David Tennant Doctor Who episodes on the Sci-Fi Channel here in the U.S.-- the second season of the revived series, the first with Tennant as the tenth Doctor.
Tennant appeared for about 10 seconds at the end of the final first season episode, as the Doctor regenerated from Christopher Eccleston’s ninth doctor. It was immediately clear they were going to be different, and they are.
In his first episode, the 90 minute “Christmas Invasion,” somehow the only partly regenerated Doctor gets the TARDIS to Rose’s neighborhood for Christmas. This is the first time we’ve seen a regeneration in the new Who, and some of the traditional effects of regeneration, especially the Doctor’s disorientation and loss of identity, are not only repeated but extended and made into a suspenseful part of the narrative.
In the classic Whos, the new Doctor would act a little weird, but after selecting a new wardrobe, would settle down soon enough to begin the adventure. This time, the Doctor’s weakness (he’s unconscious for a lot of the story) and Rose’s uncertainty about whether he is going to come out of it, and if he is the real (or “proper”) Doctor at all, is the B story. It leads to a couple of neat scenes where the Doctor becomes the instant hero.
Tennant’s Doctor is more clearly heroic, as well as more the madcap Tom Baker-style, though he retains the 9th Doctor’s northern or working class accent rather than adopting the stage English that Tom Baker made famous in the role. But Tennant does have Baker’s background in Shakespeare (or more), which shows, and he is more fluid and mercurial than Eccelston. (We’re getting another major Tennant performance in the U.S. just now, when PBS begins broadcasting the acclaimed BBC “Casanova,” with Tennant and Peter O’Toole sharing the title role.)
Eccleston really grounded the new Doctor Who, and gave the character depth and mystery and melancholy as well as quirkiness and heroism. Tennant's first episodes have the Doctor flying again, but there are also echoes of the ninth Doctor in this tenth one. This is not to say one actor or one Doctor is better than the other. Eccelston's Doctor worked. So far, Tennant is off to a good start, and I look forward to more.
This first story involves an interstellar invasion of England at Christmas by some blustering space pirates in a very impressive space ship--Independence Day size, though looking more like enormous clumps of rock. The episode brings back Harriet Jones from the first season, now Prime Minister. In the climactic scene, the Doctor makes a dramatic entrance from the TARDIS, and champions the planet in a sword duel. The episode is full of wit, with a running joke (Jones showing her ID card and brightly announcing, “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister” after which everyone, including the space monster, replies, “Yes, I know.”) I didn’t catch a Trek reference but the Doctor—who does his derring-do in pjs and a bathrobe—mentions the similarly attired Arthur Dent, from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” (True Whovians will recall that Adams was writing a Tom Baker Doctor Who story at the same time he was writing the original Hitchhiker script for radio.)
The story is a romp with thrills and wit, and then just as it seems to end happily, it takes a strange dark turn when Jones decides to use the secret weapon she’d had activated to destroy the defeated and retreating spaceship. This act turns the Doctor on a dime, from champion of the human race to accuser—it’s aliens that should fear humans, he says, they are the monsters. Despite the PMs sensible reasons, the Doctor uses a power unseen before in quite this way: he whispers a few words to Jones’ aide that soon results in a rumor that apparently forces her from office. It's a fairly stunning and potentially troubling display of power--arguably arbitrary, as it places the Doctor's judgment above the people who presumably should elect their leaders.
This odd mixture of stagey adventure and dark drama is physicalized when Rose, her family and the Doctor leaves a happy Christmas dinner to go outside in the falling snow, with a skyrocket-like meteor show above. But it isn’t that innocent: the meteors are pieces of the spaceship Jones destroyed, falling back to Earth, and the snow is the ash of the spaceship, and presumably of the bodies of the invaders. They were played as grotesques and somewhat comical and primitive. The Prime Minister saw them as a danger to Earth, especially if they returned to the stars to spread the word of the Earth’s riches. But the Doctor saw them as persons, as life, and his response was quick, uncompromising, and in the role of the reigning authority.
The echoes of recent geopolitics were there. At first in Jones’ refusal to cede power to the President of the U.S. (“Tell him he’s not my boss and he’s not going to start a war”) when the aliens are overhead. But then in her own behavior, versus the aliens—strange-looking, uncompromising, somewhat comical but also deadly. Not like us. Like terrorists perhaps.
The episode ends with Rose’s doubts resolved and ready to resume her journey with the Doctor. The joy of the journey is more powerful than anything else, it seems, which is its attraction and its danger.
In this final scene, the Doctor keeps referring to being a new man, wanting to see the universe with his new eyes. He had told Harriet Jones that the Earth was in a new time—they knew that aliens exist, and aliens know that earth exists. It’s a new world, he said, and then said it again with scorn after Jones destroyed the spaceship. The "new" theme will carry over to the next story.
(continued after photo)
Everything New is Old Again?
In the next story, the first regular one-hour episode, the Doctor and Rose travel into the far future to the literal “New Earth.” It’s a period shortly after the time Rose visited in her first TARDIS journey with the 9th Doctor. Earth had been abandoned and was destroyed as the sun went nova in that story, and in this one, the far-flung human race decides to build a New Earth in a distant galaxy. (There is something of a Trek reference here, although it is really repeating a line from the old “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” TV show, when the Doctor says they are “going further than we’ve ever gone before.” “Farther” might be the correct word, but since they are traveling in both space and time, maybe not.)
But they are soon reunited with some characters from that story, and some similar characters—instead of human-type beings speaking perfect English but evolved from trees and made of wood, here there are nurse-nuns evolved from cats. Not an extrapolation I'd make from the cats I've known, although cats are often kept in hospices and give great comfort to the dying. They seem to know who needs them, so maybe there's the potential for nursing. For nuns, is a stretch. Anyway, the great cat makeup is excuse enough.
There is an ethical dilemma at the heart of this story that should be familiar to Trek fans--artificial beings, clones in this case I believe, who are treated as experimental animals to benefit humans--the Treklike question of means and ends and what constitutes inviolable life.
There's also a chance for this Doctor to repeat the joy of the 9th when he brings people back to life (“Everybody lives!”),or in this case, cures them: he really is the Doctor this time. There’s the “last human” from that first season episode, still just eyes and a mouth on stretched skin, but this time with the ability to transfer herself into other bodies. She moves from Rose to the Doctor and back again, providing Tennant the opportunity to camp it up as having a female inside (something it’s hard to imagine Eccelston doing); before that, when Rose is possessed, she and the Doctor share a steamy kiss—though of course it doesn’t quite count as it isn’t really Rose. (Tennant is 34, about a decade younger than Eccelston, and looks even younger, so it seems the producers thought they could get away with a more sexually charged relationship between the Doctor and his companion.)
It’s an elegant episode, with the same mood of a romp and an adventure. We see some change in Rose—she’s more assured, more experienced and capable. (And so is Billie Piper, not only in some fine acting moments, but in how she plays her expressions to the camera.) But apart from personality differences and Tennant’s acting and physical presence, the writing is emphasizing a new authority for the Doctor. In this episode, reference is made to a legend about “a lonely god” who is obviously the Doctor. And the Doctor tells the errant nurses not to appeal to a higher authority than him, because there is none. Those are very striking assertions, and may indicate a new interpretation of who the Doctor is and what his role is; a new meaning for what "Time Lord" means, maybe. All in all, these new stories show that the new Doctor Who can be very entertaining and also quite edgy and a little dangerous.
[continued after photo]
In the next story, the first regular one-hour episode, the Doctor and Rose travel into the far future to the literal “New Earth.” It’s a period shortly after the time Rose visited in her first TARDIS journey with the 9th Doctor. Earth had been abandoned and was destroyed as the sun went nova in that story, and in this one, the far-flung human race decides to build a New Earth in a distant galaxy. (There is something of a Trek reference here, although it is really repeating a line from the old “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” TV show, when the Doctor says they are “going further than we’ve ever gone before.” “Farther” might be the correct word, but since they are traveling in both space and time, maybe not.)
But they are soon reunited with some characters from that story, and some similar characters—instead of human-type beings speaking perfect English but evolved from trees and made of wood, here there are nurse-nuns evolved from cats. Not an extrapolation I'd make from the cats I've known, although cats are often kept in hospices and give great comfort to the dying. They seem to know who needs them, so maybe there's the potential for nursing. For nuns, is a stretch. Anyway, the great cat makeup is excuse enough.
There is an ethical dilemma at the heart of this story that should be familiar to Trek fans--artificial beings, clones in this case I believe, who are treated as experimental animals to benefit humans--the Treklike question of means and ends and what constitutes inviolable life.
There's also a chance for this Doctor to repeat the joy of the 9th when he brings people back to life (“Everybody lives!”),or in this case, cures them: he really is the Doctor this time. There’s the “last human” from that first season episode, still just eyes and a mouth on stretched skin, but this time with the ability to transfer herself into other bodies. She moves from Rose to the Doctor and back again, providing Tennant the opportunity to camp it up as having a female inside (something it’s hard to imagine Eccelston doing); before that, when Rose is possessed, she and the Doctor share a steamy kiss—though of course it doesn’t quite count as it isn’t really Rose. (Tennant is 34, about a decade younger than Eccelston, and looks even younger, so it seems the producers thought they could get away with a more sexually charged relationship between the Doctor and his companion.)
It’s an elegant episode, with the same mood of a romp and an adventure. We see some change in Rose—she’s more assured, more experienced and capable. (And so is Billie Piper, not only in some fine acting moments, but in how she plays her expressions to the camera.) But apart from personality differences and Tennant’s acting and physical presence, the writing is emphasizing a new authority for the Doctor. In this episode, reference is made to a legend about “a lonely god” who is obviously the Doctor. And the Doctor tells the errant nurses not to appeal to a higher authority than him, because there is none. Those are very striking assertions, and may indicate a new interpretation of who the Doctor is and what his role is; a new meaning for what "Time Lord" means, maybe. All in all, these new stories show that the new Doctor Who can be very entertaining and also quite edgy and a little dangerous.
[continued after photo]
Empire of the Wolf
“Tooth and Claw” is an odd episode indeed. It starts out like a Kung Fu movie, but it’s in Scotland at the end of the 19th century. It’s a werewolf story, but it stars Queen Victoria.
As the last time the Doctor and Rose visited 19th century Earth (when they met Charles Dickens), the TARDIS is there by mistake. (They think they are going to 1979 and wind up in 1879. But Rose's description of the Doctor as a punk rocker with a touch of rockabilly is right on, especially if she means the 9th and 10th Doctors together.)
Besides the Crouching Hidden monks, there are the Queen’s guards in their red regalia, who soon keel over like the Queen’s guards in the Beatles movie, “Help!” Such topics as werewolves are sources of comedy as much as horror these days, and in this story there’s both. A very good looking CGI werewolf, too.
Tennant gets to use his Scottish accent, which is his own regular accent, and there is lots of running around and up and down in a big house. The werewolf is a bit of an alien, of course, and there are the anachronisms we’ve become accustomed to in tales of Victorian times ( Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc.)-- turns out, Victoria’s Albert has apparently helped construct a werewolf-destroying laser, powered partially by full moonlight. (It was a full moon here the night I saw this, actually.)
At one point when it is still in human form, the werewolf/alien tells Rose he likes this planet because it has lots of war and industry, and his goal is to seize the throne and make this the Empire of the Wolf. No one mentions it in this episode, but in the first season, the Doctor and Rose were dogged by repetition of a phrase that including the word "wolf.” (Though there is some cryptic dialogue from the werewolf man who recognizes some familiarity with wolfishness in Rose.) I thought for sure this episode would relate to that.
Eventually it might, because the implication is that Victoria might have been bitten, and the werewolf within her might emerge in the early 21st century to work on that rapacious, predatory Empire of the Wolf. (The Doctor and Rose discuss this in a lighthearted manner—the royal family as werewolves—but it also has a sinister potential.) But it turns out that this episode relates most directly to the first, the Christmas Invasion.
Like that story, there is a running gag—Rose trying to get Queen Victoria to say she is not amused. (When she finally does, she says “I” rather than the royal “we,” which is what makes the well-known expression funny and unique: “We are not amused.”) And just as the first story, everything seems happily resolved in the end, until the leader of England does something hostile. After knighting Sir Doctor of Tardis and honoring Dame Rose, she banishes them both. She considers them aliens on the side of evil, not part of “my world.” She castigates them for cavorting with stars and magic, and “think it fun.” Though she has previously spoken in favor of "imagination" she sees alien threats as beyond imagination.
At the very end, after the Doctor and Rose have gone, Victoria decides to start an institute to investigate and defend against aliens, and specifically against the Doctor. She names it after the house where the story took place, called Torchwood.
When more than a century later Harriet Jones unleashed the weapon against the aliens in the Christmas Invasion, it came from the Torchwood Institute.
The writing, the characters, the stories, the language, everything about this series is keeping me fascinated as I haven’t been since the first run of the Next Generation. I’m planning to see the first season again on DVD, and only wish I could see the second season that way now, not only for the quality and the minutes we don’t get, but to avoid the incessant promos for “Battlestar Gallactica.” They come directly after scenes so not even the fastest fast-forward move can obliterate them. And the only thing worse than hearing the same tag lines repeated so many times that they become clichés, is when they are war movie/TV clichés to begin with.
Coming Soon: this coming week (I hope), my account of the 40th anniversary Star Trek celebration in Seattle.
“Tooth and Claw” is an odd episode indeed. It starts out like a Kung Fu movie, but it’s in Scotland at the end of the 19th century. It’s a werewolf story, but it stars Queen Victoria.
As the last time the Doctor and Rose visited 19th century Earth (when they met Charles Dickens), the TARDIS is there by mistake. (They think they are going to 1979 and wind up in 1879. But Rose's description of the Doctor as a punk rocker with a touch of rockabilly is right on, especially if she means the 9th and 10th Doctors together.)
Besides the Crouching Hidden monks, there are the Queen’s guards in their red regalia, who soon keel over like the Queen’s guards in the Beatles movie, “Help!” Such topics as werewolves are sources of comedy as much as horror these days, and in this story there’s both. A very good looking CGI werewolf, too.
Tennant gets to use his Scottish accent, which is his own regular accent, and there is lots of running around and up and down in a big house. The werewolf is a bit of an alien, of course, and there are the anachronisms we’ve become accustomed to in tales of Victorian times ( Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc.)-- turns out, Victoria’s Albert has apparently helped construct a werewolf-destroying laser, powered partially by full moonlight. (It was a full moon here the night I saw this, actually.)
At one point when it is still in human form, the werewolf/alien tells Rose he likes this planet because it has lots of war and industry, and his goal is to seize the throne and make this the Empire of the Wolf. No one mentions it in this episode, but in the first season, the Doctor and Rose were dogged by repetition of a phrase that including the word "wolf.” (Though there is some cryptic dialogue from the werewolf man who recognizes some familiarity with wolfishness in Rose.) I thought for sure this episode would relate to that.
Eventually it might, because the implication is that Victoria might have been bitten, and the werewolf within her might emerge in the early 21st century to work on that rapacious, predatory Empire of the Wolf. (The Doctor and Rose discuss this in a lighthearted manner—the royal family as werewolves—but it also has a sinister potential.) But it turns out that this episode relates most directly to the first, the Christmas Invasion.
Like that story, there is a running gag—Rose trying to get Queen Victoria to say she is not amused. (When she finally does, she says “I” rather than the royal “we,” which is what makes the well-known expression funny and unique: “We are not amused.”) And just as the first story, everything seems happily resolved in the end, until the leader of England does something hostile. After knighting Sir Doctor of Tardis and honoring Dame Rose, she banishes them both. She considers them aliens on the side of evil, not part of “my world.” She castigates them for cavorting with stars and magic, and “think it fun.” Though she has previously spoken in favor of "imagination" she sees alien threats as beyond imagination.
At the very end, after the Doctor and Rose have gone, Victoria decides to start an institute to investigate and defend against aliens, and specifically against the Doctor. She names it after the house where the story took place, called Torchwood.
When more than a century later Harriet Jones unleashed the weapon against the aliens in the Christmas Invasion, it came from the Torchwood Institute.
The writing, the characters, the stories, the language, everything about this series is keeping me fascinated as I haven’t been since the first run of the Next Generation. I’m planning to see the first season again on DVD, and only wish I could see the second season that way now, not only for the quality and the minutes we don’t get, but to avoid the incessant promos for “Battlestar Gallactica.” They come directly after scenes so not even the fastest fast-forward move can obliterate them. And the only thing worse than hearing the same tag lines repeated so many times that they become clichés, is when they are war movie/TV clichés to begin with.
Coming Soon: this coming week (I hope), my account of the 40th anniversary Star Trek celebration in Seattle.
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