Categories
New Series

The Caretaker: People Being Horrible To One Another

It was OK. I liked the Skovox Blitzer – genuinely great name – and at least it didn’t get packed off with its mate and zoom off into the sunset. Chris Addison was good. The stuff with the young girl nicely raised two fingers to the appalling squits of Neil Gaiman’s episode. I could go on about how astonishingly derivative this series of Doctor Who is – how The Caretaker was a straight-down-the-middle retread of School Reunion and The Lodger – but I’d be getting as repetitive as Season 8.

There was a recurring motif in The Caretaker and it was people being horrible to one another. The Doctor makes constant disparaging remarks about Clara’s appearance that are sometimes funny and frequently not, so it’s not without precedent this season. Elsewhere the Doctor refused to believe that Danny Pink was a maths teacher because – as a soldier – he clearly can’t have much up top (forgetting that his bestest mate ever was a soldier, apparently).

Doctor-Who-The-Caretaker

There’s another incorrect but not-wholly-unreasonable reading of why the Doctor goes out of his way to insult Danny’s intelligence and preferred the unthreatening wavy-haired white guy – it’s not so unreasonable as the Doctor’s sudden and unexplained hatred of soldiers just comes from nowhere really. For his part Danny immediately locates an open wound – the Doctor’s self-doubt and even self-loathing over his own character – and sticks a fork into it, goading the Doctor as an authoritarian control freak. It’s hardly The Trout, Jamie and Victoria.

Throwing a traumatised soldier with emotional problems into a school environment is one thing, hoying him into the TARDIS crew might seem a little edgy but putting Danny Pink into a day-glo strawberry milkshake adventure such as The Caretaker seems rather jarring. That Pink – a trained soldier who is clearly intelligent, troubled and intense – should start burbling Mickey-and-Rory-esque stuff about Space Dads spelt it out in case no-one had spotted it earlier. That he defeats the universe’s most efficient killing machine by performing a 20-foot Mighty Morphin Power Ranger somersault over its head is similarly problematic. But there’s something even more problematic about Danny Pink.

Danny Pink strikes me as the kind of character who might tell Clara to wipe a particularly garish shade of lipstick off her face; encourage her to give up her job so she can stay at home and look after the kids; issue ultimatums to our heroine if she does not obey his commands. Actually, come to think of it, that’s exactly what he did in this episode in the latter case – already this feels like a troubling power dynamic. Throw him into an episode of Cracker as a spousal abuser and you wouldn’t have to change a stroke: a brooding, frowning, jealous control-freak with PTSD who gets handy with his fists from time-to-time only because he loves his missus so much.

Doctor-Who-The-Caretaker-Danny

I’ve little truck with the squadrons of lunatics who bay for Moffat’s blood or would accuse him of being an unreconstructed bigot, but there is a case to be answered as far his writing of female characters is concerned. Tonight’s episode had a good example where Clara – The Impossible Girl – mutely acceded to Danny’s demand that he tell her the truth (his repeatedly growling that he doesn’t like being lied to is similarly uncomfortable) or they were done as a couple.

Moffat’s Doctor Who has a habit of setting up strong, independent women who lose all their agency – and frequently knickers – when The Doctor turns up. In this case it’s Danny Pink who causes Clara to go all gooey. When strong female characters get all hot and bothered about the Doctor I don’t mind too much: the whole set-up of the show (in the last nine years anyway) is that he’s so remarkable anyone would follow him around the galaxy. But in that instant when Clara nuzzled into Danny’s chest she just melts away as the character we’ve known.

Moffat’s clumsiness at writing women, incidentally, is one of the one of the reasons why I was so against a female Doctor. But six episodes into the series I’m not sure Moffat is that great at writing for the Twelfth Doctor. This is odd, as Peter Capaldi is a middle-aged Scot with a love of Doctor Who. Sound familiar?

I started to question this while watching Time Heist last week. Just what is the Twelfth Doctor? He seems, in his worst moments, like an amalgam of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors – the NuWho archetypes – in a bad mood. Capaldi seems to be bringing everything there is to the character at the moment, with little clue as to what this new incarnation is all about from the scripts, bar Deep Breath.

The series opener feels like an ever-more-distant memory a month on. It has been the only episode – halfway through the series – that felt like a confident statement about what makes this Doctor and this season tick (no pun intended) and what makes them different. Ever since it’s felt like the show has been folding in on itself: rehashing old storylines, old monsters, old writers. The show, understandably and inexplicably at the same time, feels old.

Is this what Moffat, Gareth Roberts and Peter Capaldi would have dreamed of when they imagined the chance to create new Doctor Who? For what it’s worth I expected far more riffing on the title of this week’s episode, but it doesn’t feel as if Moffat does care that much – what else can possibly explain the run of desperately unambitious retreads of former glories this season?

Yes, Clara and the Doctor look after one another; yes Danny wants to look after Clara and, yes, the Doctor looks after the planet. He’s the celestial caretaker. Everyone cares. Alas, increasingly, I don’t.

Categories
New Series

Time Heist: Don’t Think

Imitation, flattery. It’s almost possible to believe that Stephen Thompson doesn’t actually exist – he’s simply a pen name for Moffat. The former’s three scripts thus far – Curse of the Black Spot, Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS and Time Heist – have been marinaded in Steven Moffat, so much so that in this latest installment we saw an analogue of Moffat’s most identifiable trope: don’t *.

In identifying this relatable device – try doing something that is instinctively impossible – Moffat has created scary, understandable, impersonatable terrors that can turn the everyday into the horrifying: If you blink, you die; if you breathe, you die; if you forget, you die. This latest iteration is, in isolation, a cracker too. If you think of anything, you die. Where next for this notion where to do something that is instinctive and impossible to resist equals death? Don’t wee?

Of course, this was done 30 years ago in Ghostbusters but Moffat has shown no inclination to avoid past glories this season, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that we’re fairly openly lifting ideas from other genre material.

Thing is, like much of Thompson’s work, it feels too late to the party to be particularly successful. In The One With The Pirates we got a Moffatian technology-gone-wrong swerve; in The One With The TARDIS we got a Moffatian pre-destination paradox; in The One With The Soup we get a Moffatian ‘Don’t *’.

Time Heist – like Robot of Sherwood and arguably Deep Breath – owes a lot to the BBC’s favourite-bottom-drawer of reliable genre television too. With Deep Breath we take a trip back to Victorian / Edwardian Britain (The Mill, Peaky Blinders, Ripper Street); in Robot of Sherwood we head back to Merrie / Medieval England (Robin Hood, Merlin). In Time Heist we get to see Doctor Who Does Hustle.

doctor-who_series-8_time-heist

Viewers may welcome this as what I referred to as televisual shorthand in my article on Mark Gatiss’s effort – a recognisable setting and tone that means we don’t need 15 minutes setting up the narrative, assisted further by Murray Gold’s sledgehammer incidental music. But it also makes this series of Doctor Who hard to pin down tonally – from broad comedy to deep horror and flashy nothing, Series 8 is bemusing. Again, this feels like a series running of out creative steam: why else throw the Doctor Who ingredients into such cookie-cutter shapes?

This is a problem for Peter Capaldi. In my view he remains fascinating to watch, but who on Earth is the 12th Doctor? Perhaps this goes some way to re-introducing some mystery to the character but actually I find myself with the impression that the Doctor’s characteristics are coming pretty much entirely from the lead actor’s playing of the character. There are suggestions that there’s something going on here – why the compulsion to avoid physical contact? – but the series’ skittishness in nailing its colours to the mast makes it hard to get and maintain a grip on it.

As an episode I found Time Heist to be perhaps the least engaging yet. I’ve attempted to watch it twice and found myself just doing something else after 30 minutes or so – as a result I can’t really explain exactly what happened in the end. I liked the monster and the direction caught the eye a few times. Other than that I struggle to recall much, barring how many recurring Doctor Who motifs we saw here. Time travel yada-yada, a severe lady villainness (cf. Miss Hartigan, Ms Foster, Madam Kovarian, Miss Kizlet, Missy – see a trend?), monsters that aren’t really monsters, Clara back to being a dependable blank canvas.

All of this is kind of OK, because episodes such as Time Heist and Robot of Sherwood are pretty much designed to wash over you, the way a warm bath might. Pleasant enough for a while, but I’d suggest you’re unlikely to remember too many specifics about said bath in 12 months. In this regard it probably fulfilled its function and is likely destined to moulder away in the bottom 50 of Doctor Who Magazine reader polls in years to come.

Episodes like this are something to be vaguely admired for their efficiency and promptly forgotten. Don’t expect brilliance, don’t expect originality and, just like Time Heist’s protagonists, don’t think.