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Doctor Who Top 50 New Series

The 50 Best Doctor Who Stories – 45: Deep Breath

“There’s not a trace of the original you left. You probably can’t even remember where you got that face from.”

The new series of Doctor Who has had two mild reboots. The first, The Eleventh Hour, was an emphatic repositioning of Doctor Who, a new broom if you will. It paved the way for the next four years and was as successful a statement of intent as you could imagine. And then, in 2014 we had another – perhaps as radical a reboot as Christopher Eccleston’s debut had been nine years before. Beyond that, Deep Breath implies as significant a first episode as Spearhead From Space or iconic readjustments such as The Leisure Hive or Remembrance of the Daleks.

capaldi twelfth doctor deep breath

Perhaps the most obvious change that the series has undergone since Rose is that narrative structure doesn’t necessarily exist in Doctor Who any more. In Deep Breath we have a beginning and an end, but what goes on in the middle is basically character, humour, set pieces, direct appeals to the audience and stuff. This has both positives and negatives – the most jarring being that the pacing of Moffat’s episodes is confusing: They’re fast, compressed and sharp but by the end of nearly 80 minutes of Deep Breath, very little has actually happened.

But that’s alright, because in Deep Breath that stuff is absolutely wonderful. While the Twelfth Doctor is one of the more obvious Mary-Sues in current fiction, it does allow for some wonderful moments of insight – a 50-something-year-old man writing phrases that could have come straight from his own mouth. “Who frowned me this face?” is a beautiful line, while the new incarnation’s spikier instincts are on full view, demanding the coat of the London unfortunate played cannily by Brian Miller and reacting with anger or dismay at his features – a trope of most Doctors since Pertwee – particularly his “attack eyebrows”. People suggest that Moffat and Capaldi being notionally similar is a problem, as if a gruff middle-aged Scot writing lines for a 30-year-old hipster is the most ordinary thing imaginable.

brian miller peter capaldi deep breath

The highlight of Deep Breath – and the scene I consider pivotal in terms of what we could expect from the rest of the series – is the restaurant scene. Everything Capaldi does in this scene is sublime and Jenna Coleman does beautifully too. Seeing the Doctor arrive, unseen, like a gargoyle just staring at Clara and then watching his face and mannerisms as he describes how and where he found the coat, it’s hard to imagine too many of the other Doctors – all great in their own way – putting so much into it. The ten minutes or so as the Doctor and Clara bicker and slowly come to realise they’re in danger consist of a beautiful two-hander. This is no Sixth Doctor and Peri; it’s much more akin to the relationship between the Tenth Doctor and Donna. They’re mates; they’re believable – they annoy one another and their relationship evolves.

This restaurant scene – “You don’t want to eat do you?” and “No sausages?” – is a motif for how I expected Moffat’s new direction for Doctor Who would work out. It didn’t but for a few weeks I was under the impression the series had completely regenerated. It breathes; it has silence and stillness and periods where nothing much happens; people talk to one another – slowly, deliberately; there are pauses, inflections, softer sounds, whispers, mumbles and long, talky scenes. Frankly I loved it. The new series desperately needed to move away from the same tired, familiar old tropes – pretty young Doctors with floppy hair whirling around and shouting and pulling faces and doing stupid voices and telling everyone how brilliant they are. If there’s a broad problem with Season Eight it’s that it didn’t seem to have the courage of its conviction – the ambiance of the series was pulled back into its comfort zone more often that not.

deep breath restaurant

Not that Deep Breath makes a totally clean break from what’s gone before. Moffat tries to move away from that template that defined the series from 2005 through to 2014 – Murray Gold’s Harry Potter-lite music, clumsy romances, iconoclastic set-pieces and epic mythologising – but the same pieces of the jigsaw are still there. So we have to see a T-Rex parading up and down the Thames and the Doctor jumping out of a window, falling out of a tree and landing backwards on a horse. Not only that but the Twelfth Doctor is a modern-day Doctor Doolittle, talking to horses and pow-wowing with dinosaurs.

We’re operating in a universe where the extra-textual necessities dictate what is possible in the narrative, so the Doctor essentially becomes a conduit for magical stuff to happen on the basis that Steven Moffat thinks it might keep bums on seats. The phonecall from the Eleventh Doctor – another production consideration crashing into the story – is truly misjudged here. Perhaps a nervous Moffat thought it necessary to make a direct appeal to fans through Matt Smith: love him, help him, he’s me. Alas, the phonecall only serves to make the dissonance between viewing the two men as the same even more apparent and does something of a disservice to Capaldi.

peter capaldi deep breath

Nevertheless, this is a story full of little triumphs. Graham Duff’s little cameo as a parts-hungry waiter; the Paternoster gang getting lots of funny little moments and working to smooth over the jump from one idiom to another. And Jenna Coleman – who I never think is served particularly well as the wise-cracking, smart-arse, down-boy, mile-a-minute walking-cliche Clara is often required to be – does wonderfully in her rapport with Capaldi and selling the fright of being abandoned by the Doctor in this new relatable childhood nightmare: holding your breath, lest something find and kill you.

Peter Ferdinando as the Half-Face Man is a memorable creation, gruffly cockney yet apparently with a macabre wit – that or a gauche approach to sardonic humour: “I accept your gift,” and “The restaurant is closed!” – the latter complete with the understandably terrified reaction of the police as he brandishes his blow-torch hand. Ferdinando – equal parts Bill Sykes, Cyberman and Ripper as the Half-Face Man – turns what might have been a thankless role into something sinister, amusing and poignant by turn.

There’s a lovely pathos to the clockwork droids, regardless of the mayhem the wreak. They have urges and drives, like us, but no moral framework with which to cross-reference them. As a result they’re slightly sad characters; the literal whirring of the cogs in their brains as they process information and try to understand emotion giving them the mute incomprehension of a pet being scolded.

clara strax deep breath

It’s rare that there’s much to say about Doctor Who direction in the new series, presumably because there are less restrictions and less room (or need) for creative flair. Joe Ahearne is the only director since 2005 to have caught my eye with some unusual shots, but Deep Breath has several remarkable scenes that really buck the trend for the show’s visual style. This is surely no coincidence in a story whose mood is significant departure, setting the tone for a brand new series and new Doctor.

The scene where Clara holds her breath and talks for her life is frightening, very tense and utterly gripping – ho humour, no asides. Rarely, for Doctor Who, it’s played completely straight and conveys a real threat. Ben Wheatley brings a touch of the hallucinogenic oddness of A Field In England to the scenes of Clara succumbing to unconsciousness, with the Half-Face Man’s “Bring her!” overlaid on at least two other layers – as enigmatic a visual moment as there’s been in Nu Who. The climax of the story is particularly intriguing and surely exists as much to state the Twelfth Doctor’s character and the tone of the new series – or at least to force us to question it – as to present a dramatic conclusion to the episode. That glance straight down the barrel of the camera is without precedent in the new series and it’s a startling statement of intent for Peter Capaldi’s Doctor.

Ah, Capaldi. There are inflections of Davison’s vulnerability here, a little of the frustration of McCoy and the other-wordliness of Tom. Colin’s ability to be rude and Pertwee’s swagger can also be detected later on if you want to go down that route. But there is something new in the Twelfth Doctor – and an actor clearly thinking a lot about what he’s doing with it. Also in the post-credits scene, we get one of the best lines in Doctor Who: “Don’t look in that mirror; it’s absolutely furious!”

This is the Doctor that I wanted back in 2005 and almost got with Eccleston. A man who is superior in almost every way to the people he meets and not necessarily inclined to hide it – a man who doesn’t skirt around the fact that he’s in a business which occasionally calls for ruthlessness, danger and death. He’s alien – and he doesn’t observe our rules: “Sometimes you’re not…” “Human?”. “It’s a different kind of morality – get used to it or go home”. This has always been the Doctor, but it’s welcome that it’s made explicit simply because it’s such a change to what we’ve had since the Ninth Doctor departed.

The duality of the Doctor and the Clockwork Robots is instructive here. The self-aware Half-Face Man allows Moffat to reflect the Doctor on his millennia-long lifespan. Capaldi’s “You are a broom,” speech, in which the Doctor invokes the Ship of Theseus paradox, explains that there is nothing remaining of the original droid, the parts having been replaced so many times. Not only that, he follows it up with “You probably can’t even remember where you got that face from,” holding up a tray to reflect the Half-Face Man’s face while eyeing up his own visage. It’s an echo of the Eleventh Doctor’s last moments – the breath on a mirror; a series of interconnected moments.

eyebrows deep breath

If we hold to the old explanation that the Doctor perceives his others selves’ experiences as if recounted to him, we might also infer that each new Doctor come pre-programmed with a set of impulses – to do good, to protect the innocent and adopt a smattering of vague eccentricities. How disconcerting it must be for each new incarnation to follow that same path with the same sense of helplessness as a mayfly driven to procreate and die – or a droid simply repeating the same pattern of behaviour again and again, regardless of the consequences.

If we subscribe to another theory – that we’re essentially reborn every ten years or so with the gradual replacement of the cells in our body – then we practice the same behaviour. Year after year we watch Doctor Who, out of habit – regardless of whether it’s a a triumph such as Deep Breath or a howler like Rose. Like The Doctor and the droids, it’s just another pattern of behaviour.

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New Series

Last Christmas: Five Ways To Improve Doctor Who

All I see is when I tune it to Doctor Who on Christmas Day is Steven Moffat grabbing a handful of ingredients – a horror film here, a Christmas cliche there, a sprinkle of character actor – like a chef surveying a bunch of random ingredients in Ready, Steady, Cook and knowing that he can fashion something that gurgling, turkey-stuffed, sherry-sodden viewers will receive in the same way as they receive undesired gifts over the course of the day, because it’s Christmas and goodwill is prevalent.

Most Christmas Day episodes of Doctor Who – incredibly there are ten of the buggers now – have come and gone in this way and virtually every one of them is rubbish. While Russell T Davies confined himself to Christmassy cliches such as Victoriana, disaster movies and episodes that happened to be set around the festive period, Moffat appears determined to make Christmas a pivotal element in his Yuletide efforts. We should be grateful, I suppose, that there has never been a Doctor Who episode broadcast on Valentine’s Day.

Steven Moffat's actual prep for Last Christmas
Steven Moffat’s actual prep for Last Christmas

This reaches a nadir in The Widow and the a Wardrobe, which even the alcohol and impacted protein seemed unable to offset a couple of years ago, and the last two years have seen the show runner slip back into old habits.

The appearance of Nick Frost as ‘Santa Claus’ may be justifiable in terms of the narrative, but you know it was simply one of those pieces of jigsaw to be hammered into the wider picture. That we were then subjected to some comedic dancing to Slade and then an incredibly long sleigh ride over a snowy London seemed inevitable from the second we saw an actual red-nosed reindeer. How long before we get 60 minutes of Capaldi simply eating mince pies with Bing Crosby?

Doctor Who just becomes a vehicle for jokes, winks to the camera and diverting set-pieces in this context. For many that seems to be enough, but the acid test for these episodes is watching them in Summer, or simply in daylight. In the way that later examples of The Simpsons and Family Guy have got stuck in a similarly lazy rut, Christmas episodes of Doctor Who have been increasingly reduced to pop-culture pastiches and self-reflexive smart-arsery.

Maybe this is in keeping with the modern Christmas – colossal, guilt-free over-indulgence – but it’s as fundamentally unsatisfying as eating a load of bone-dry turkey.

What we did get, as we increasingly get at the end of a series these days, in Last Christmas was a big reset switch. Danny Pink turned himself off and Clara basically rebooted herself. It’s back to the ‘all-of-time-and-space’ ‘anything-can-happen’ dynamic, but it’s unclear what else there is for Clara to do, given that Moffat is unable to tolerate any companion’s existence without a ponderous story arc.

Predictable, familiar and a little nauseating – but we’re back every year for more. In that regard the annual Doctor Who episode is at least verisimilitudinous. But it smacks not of the freedom to do anything you want with the show, but the belief that you can’t move away from a proscribed template without alienating casual viewers.

Well poppycock I say. Look back at the show’s history and it thrives in reinventing itself, bucking trends and throwing out the bath water – baby too occasionally. And only when it hasn’t done this has it runaground. With that in mind, here are five suggestions for how Doctor Who can be successfully reengineered, with the caveat that Moffat spending more time with his awards doesn’t appear likely any time soon, or ever for that matter.

Five ways to make Doctor Who better

Strand the Doctor on Earth

When Derek Sherwin was told to reinvent Doctor Who with a reduced budget, (and when the BBC EDA publishers realised they had to do something to address how, y’know, awful the series was) what did he do? He stranded the show on a modern-day Earth and surrounded the new Doctor with a support network of recognisable characters (for what it’s worth the Eighth Doctor got stranded in Victorian Britain).

Very briefly I wondered if Deep Breath was a trial run for a series that worked along these lines. But it wasn’t and two episodes later we got Robot of Sherwood, an episode that could have been written and broadcast at any time over the last ten years. Ho hum.

No Christmas episodes

Personally I’m all for scrapping this tradition altogether – the production team certainly give the impression they can’t quite manage it, with only The Snowmen interrupting a run of duffers stretching back to 2005.

If there must be a Christmas episode, then what’s wrong with an ordinary episode held back to fill the void – an episode that isn’t as cloyingly clogged with festive references. 12 episodes a year plus a non-Christmas special would suit me fine if it meant an incremental rise in quality across the board. Which leads me to…

Less episodes

Ian Levine’s judgment of the health at any given time seems to depend on how many minutes of television BBC1 devotes to Doctor Who year upon year. I take a rather different view, in that I’d prefer less if the quality were to rise accordingly.

Arguably Moffat can still rise to the occasion, with the excellent Day of the Doctor showing what he’s capable of when he puts his mind to it. But he still managed to OK the likes of The Rings of Akhaten, The Power of Three and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS during that production block. Does anyone, even Moffat himself, really believe it’s possible to oversee virtually every element of the series, script edit the lot and write around 40% of all the episodes, every year? Surely not.

People would argue that series need time to breathe, change pace and tone. To them I’d say this: New Earth, Fear Her, 42, The Doctor’s Daughter, The Long Game, Night Terrors, Closing Time, Curse of the Black Spot, The Caretaker … and many more.

Why not lop a third of the annual episodes and invest everything into making eight knockout episodes every year? It might annoy BBC Worldwide, not to mention Ian Levine, but I bet those eight would be better as a result.

Murray Gold

JN-T rightly gets a lot of stick, but I think he went into the job with some good ideas (his casting of Peter Davison remaining one of the single bet moves in the show’s history). And while I think Dudley Simpson did not deserve the way he was treated I do believe that if Season 18 was going to get an overhaul – and by God it needed one – then Dud’s patented woodwinds, dominant over the previous six years, had to make way for the bleeps and tinkles of Roger Limb, Paddy Kingsland, Peter Howell and Malcolm Clarke.

This is not to suggest that I think the Radiophonic Workshop’s output of the time was beyond reproach, nor that there was anything wrong with Dudley Simpson’s work – simply that the fabric of the show could not be meaningfully changed otherwise.

I’m not really a fan of Murray Gold’s scores but even if I were I’d advocate for a change in the incidental music. Imagine if the series had used only one director during that time, or one writer. Alternatively imagine if Keff McCulloch had scored the TV Movie, or if Paddy Kingsland had simply scored every story between The Leisure Hive and Survival.

Imagine how it would have derailed Andrew Cartmel’s successful attempts to recreate the series. Imagine not having some of the wonderful scores from other composers during the 80s. No Survival, no Caves of Androzani, no Enlightenment. Imagine the lack of diversity, progression, evolution. Murray Gold’s incidental music in 2014 is interchangeable with his music in 2005; it’s like a millstone around the show.

No doubt people would complain that television has changed; that the function of incidental music has changed, merely to signal which emotion is the correct one on the coming scene. That production schedules mean five composers across 14 episodes would be impossible now. Whether that’s true or not, a different composer would be the one change – assuming leading man and head writer aren’t going anywhere – that would give the show a tonal overhaul that it really needs right now.

Ditch the companion

I suspect it would make the writing of the show too difficult to dispense with a companion completely, but changing the role of the modern companion – asking questions, getting captured, solving mysteries, season-wide plot device and love interest – needs a rethink.

The elevation of the companion reached its apotheosis with the Clara Who narrative of season eight but it feels like its run its course. Every time a companion appears now the audience starts trying to second-guess what the real story is. Rose was Bad Wolf, Martha was a globe-trotting Jehova’s Witness, Donna was the Doctor, Amy was the centre of the universe and Clara – well, Clara is whatever McGuffin she’s required to be from one week to the next.

Imagine how amazing it would be if the next companion wasn’t a fast-talking fuckable smart-arse who can take on The Doctor at his own game and didn’t turn out to be utterly pivotal in the end-of-season blowout. I’d like to. And, given how shagged-out companions become the second their inevitable arcs grind to a halt, I reckon I’m not the only one.