Watching New Who
- in conversation with David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Tehani Wessely

David is coming to New Who for the first time, having loved Classic Who as a kid. Tehani is a recent convert, and ploughed through Seasons 1 to 6 (so far) in just a few weeks after becoming addicted thanks to Matt Smith – she’s rewatching to keep up with David! Tansy is the expert in the team, with a history in Doctor Who fandom that goes WAY back, and a passion for Doctor Who that inspires us all (plus a six-year-old daughter who is finding her own Doctors for the first time). We’re going to work our way through New Who, using season openers and closers, and Hugo shortlisted episodes, as our blogging points. Just for fun!

ROSE – Season one, episode one
The Doctor – Christopher Eccleston
Rose Tyler – Billie Piper

DAVID:
So, as you know I have been waiting long time to start watching the “New” Who, and it was with a mix of excitement and trepidation I sat down and pressed play. It is always dicey going back to something that you grew up with, in case it turns out that it isn’t as good as you remembered (that evil Suck Fairy!) but this was even more fraught with potential problems as this was an attempt to bring Doctor Who to a more modern audience, which could have gone terribly wrong if they had tried to make it too “cool”.

TEHANI:
I have been listening to friends talk about New Who for years, and it never really occurred to me to try to watch it, until Neil Gaiman went and wrote an episode. Well I couldn’t just watch THAT one, and so started on Season 5 (on the plane back from the Aurealis Awards!) and was pretty much instantly hooked. I remember watching Doctor Who as a kid (frequently from behind the couch with my hands over my eyes!), when Tom Baker was THE Doctor, but really have few memories of actual episodes. Daleks and the Tardis, the curly-haired Doctor – extent of my knowledge!

TANSY: Whereas I watched “Rose” right back at the beginning, when the episode was leaked on to the internet a little while before its actual release – and that was when Australians had to wait months and months and MONTHS to get a terrestrial showing, so I had to wait a very long time to see the rest of this season. For nearly half a year, New Who was basically “Rose” – and it didn’t disappoint.

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3.9 – Warrior, Priestess, Tramp

The small gene pool of the ancient world has struck gold again, with yet another perfect replica of Xena running around impersonating her. Princess Diana has been retired due to being a bit dull, and instead we have the British, lisping Hestian virgin Leah.

Actually, I want to know how come there are so many sets of Xena’s armour lying around, available for purchase… she should totally be getting a royalty for all sales.

Leah’s rather cute in a judgemental kind of way – I rather love the way she calls Xena and Gabrielle wanton strumpets and replies to Gabrielle’s defense that she was married at the time with “well, we all have our little excuses, don’t we?”

And of course we get Meg again, the raunchy lush who is always up to something dodgy. In this case, we have a mystery surrounding the Hestian virgins and a conspiracy against the head priestess. It’s a pretty slight mystery, though, and mostly there as an excuse for lots of bawdy jokes and an entertaining musical number when we see Joxer being greeted as a regular in Meg’s tavern.

When I say ‘tavern’ of course, it’s blatantly a brothel, though the usual Xena Curtain of Subtext is lowered so that the transactions are referred to quite obliquely, the working girls are all terribly jolly and adore their work, and the whole thing is there largely so we can laugh at the prudish priestess’s reactions.

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Sorry, this is a long one! I might have to start doing one post per episode if they get any longer…

3.5 – Gabrielle’s Hope.

Yes, it’s been a long time between drinks. I think I put this one off because it’s a very emotionally tough episode, and one I never particularly enjoyed. Apart from anything, there are – violence and pregnancy and baby themes in this one. When it comes to SF/fantasy TV, that’s rarely a good thing.

The episode opens with a moment of deep hurt/comfort. Gabrielle is disturbed by dreams of her first kill from the previous episode – and has turned the whole thing around in her head so her victim was a sweet, innocent flower as opposed to a calculating religious obsessive who tricked Gabrielle into taking her life. Gab’s reaction is not just emotional, but physical – she keeps feeling nauseated. Xena is certain this is a normal part of the healing process.

But then things start getting screwy. Banshees attack them, only to profess worship of Gabrielle. Villagers gather, determined to burn Gabrielle as a witch… and, oh yes. She has food cravings. Weird, icky food cravings.

Can anyone else see where this is going?

Yes, Gabrielle is great with child – one of those speedy demon babies who whips through the system in under 24 hours (oh, the STRETCH MARKS) and isn’t going to stick around long. Unlike Deanna Troi in Star Trek: Next Gen though, this one is going to have long, long ramifications.

[Note to all, the review for this ep was written a million years ago, or possibly about six months, but it ties in beautifully with the discussion we had on the last Galactic Suburbia about mystical pregnancy, so yay!]

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I ordered the DVD of Doctor Who: Battlefield recently in a wave of nostalgia about the late Nicholas Courtney. His ‘I just do the best I can’ speech had been a big part of many reminiscence post about the Brigadier as an iconic character, and it was ages since I’d seen the story. It was one of my favourites when I was a teenager, and forms part of one of my favourite Doctor Who eras: the Seventh Doctor and Ace.

So the other night, when my honey was away for work and the kids were in bed and no one was being wrong on the internet, I settled down with some sewing to watch it. I was a bit worried that the suck fairy might have visited since I last inhaled this one, especially as I have heard so much fan dismissal of it as a story, but my worried were unfounded.

Battlefield is AWESOME.

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The weird thing about having a subscription to Bigpond Movies (similar to Netflix in the US I think, only with discs posted to you instead of downloads cos we don’t have the broadband speeds yet) is that I add movies to our list when I think about it and then, a year later, I find movies have been posted to me by my past self, and I have no idea what they are or why I thought they would be interesting.

It really doesn’t help that they turn up in a plain white envelope with no COVER.

This was the case with Stranger Than Fiction. Was that the one that was a bit like Adaptation? I couldn’t remember. But for once we actually felt like watching a movie together, and put the disc in, and that was when it hit me. This is the movie with Emma Thompson as the personification of writer crazy. AWESOME.

Writer crazy, for those of you not aware of the technical term, is all those weird things that writers do and no one else does, like googling methods for how to dispose of a body, or leaping on NASA astronauts at parties in order to check key plot/character details with them, or sobbing uncontrollably for hours because we just had to kill that character and we miss them already.

Stranger than Fiction is way better than I thought it was going to be, especially for a film that has Will Ferrell at the centre of it. It’s about a tax auditor whose life is being narrated by a plummy British accent (Emma Thompson) and who starts to become aware of that narrative voice, and understandably freaks out when it foretells his death.

(some SPOILERS follow for the film though not the ending)
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Summary: After the mixed reactions to Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, and viewing figures continuing to hemorrhage, you would think the most important thing about the Seventh Doctor was that he be likeable. This at least was achieved with the casting of stage actor Sylvester McCoy, who presented an entertaining and harmless figure at the beginning of his run. Producer JNT was still handcuffed to the sinking ship, and rather than learning from past mistakes, he fell back on old habits when launching a new Doctor: a bright, gimmicky costume featuring less-than-subtle question marks, and a personality that could be summed up in sound bytes.

The Seventh Doctor began less than promisingly, with a truly awful regeneration sequence. Colin Baker quite reasonably refused to come back to the show he had loved to film a two minute getting-killed sequence and so the viewers were treated to the sight of the TARDIS under attack by the Rani, a renegade Time Lady introduced in a previous story, and a man in a curly Sixth-Doctor wig falling over in the console room, and immediately regenerating.

Yes, all of you who complain that Ten fell off a long drop in End of Time and didn’t die like Four did, take note! Every time the Doctor FALLS OVER without regenerating, he is having a good day.

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Summary: The concept of regeneration, now one of the most iconic features of Doctor Who, allowed for a new lead actor to create a very different interpretation of the role.  Troughton’s Doctor left aside the grumpy anti-heroics of William Hartnell to be a far more emotional, vulnerable Doctor, capable of high dramatics and physical comedy as well as something of a cunning streak.  With only one early exception, the Second Doctor stories moved away from historicals, sticking with science fiction adventure for the most part.  When it did utilise historical elements or settings, they were combined with alien or other science fictional concepts, a tradition which has continued into New Who. This is an era of monsters and mad science, with occasional moments of batty genius.

More so even than the Hartnell Years, the Troughton Years suffered from the BBC film destruction, so very few whole stories are archived.  For this reason perhaps even more so than the First Doctor, the Second Doctor is often remembered more by fans for his later appearances in the show (The Three Doctors in the 1970’s, The Five Doctors & The Two Doctors in the 1980’s).

Things You Need To Know: The sonic screwdriver and jelly babies both made their first appearances in Second Doctor serials.  And he still can’t steer the TARDIS.  Colonel (later Brigadier) Lethbridge Stewart and Benton both make their first appearance in this era, as do the Ice Warriors and the Yeti. Yes, Yeti!

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2.20 The Price

This is an episode I remember hugely disliking and being bored by on my first run through season 2, and never watching again. All I remember is it being one of those that’s all peril and no humour, but looking at it now I can see other reasons that would have turned me off, even if I wasn’t alert to the reason why.

The Horde are basically voiceless savages, and while I enjoy Xena facing her past and a bit of grim backstory, I much prefer it when she has to face antagonists with personality to them. And, you know, dialogue. I am a fiend for awesome dialogue and I have a tendency to bounce completely off stories that have none. This is a very male-heavy action story which has nothing about it that feels especially ‘Xena’ and offers nothing to our female leads other than the opportunity to act tough or look horrified.

Also there’s something grotesque and pretty damned offensive about the racial stereotype of the growling, murderous savage, and little is done to mitigate the using of this antiquated trope. (this is I think later addressed in the far better episode Daughter of Pomira though I didn’t love that one either) I found it interesting that the use of Maori costume and iconography with the all-male Horde is used to emphasise them as being violent, ugly and terrifying – the contrast being the way that the costume and iconography were used to add to the mystique of the Amazons, who also have a scary, dramatic appearance but are shown to have complex characters, a history and society rather than just being “monsters”.

Okay, it is kind of cool to see Xena taking on the responsibility of yelling at a bedraggled, heartsick Athenian troop of soldiers to shape them into a force capable of fighting the villainous Horde, and I can see the main point of the story is how easily Xena can slip into her own war-hungry maniac self when the threat is bad enough. Seeing Gabrielle’s calm competence in getting a sickbay organised, and later standing up against Badass Xena to be merciful to the wounded Horde, effectively shows how far she has come. But the whole thing is so shouty and violent, I still can’t love it.

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Something I’ve been thinking about through my Xena rewatch is the way that long-running TV shows occasionally use key episodes to define and redefine their own mythology. The ye olde clip show was one method used by comedies in particular to look back on their own history and remind the audience of key moments and character traits. Often in an SF drama series, it is the weird gimmicky or unexpectedly humorous episode that does the same job – and these are often the most beloved and/or divisive episodes as well as the most memorable. X-Files visiting the set of a TV show parodying their adventures, the boys of Supernatural finding a roleplay convention based on their life, the Buffy musical, the Farscape animated episode, any of the Star Trek “evil beard universe” stories, or Fringe’s “Brown Betty” take on film noir.

Old School and indeed New School Doctor Who never really did that sort of thing because, frankly, there was no formula to shake up. Every episode was different and odd and completely different to the one before. But there are several key stories throughout the classic run in particular which you can see are working to define the mythology of the show. During the Fifth and Sixth Doctors’ runs in particular, there were so many stories which looked backwards, or became self-referential, throwing in so many details from “canon” that it’s hard to keep them straight. There was even a whole Fifth Doctor season in which every episode featured a returning monster or character… Unsurprisingly, this was also a period responsible for many of the most head-scrambling canon inconsistencies of the show. The more references there were to the past lives of the Doctor, the more opportunities there were to get it wrong. More recently, episodes such as School Reunion and the many season finales of New Who have worked quite hard to cement a new mythology, bringing back beloved characters again and again for hero moments and dramatic ensembles, something which has caused much squee and much eyerolling among fans. Just like in the good old days.

But the stories which were most effective in defining and redefining the mythology of the show were the first two multiple Doctor stories, The Three Doctors (1973) and The Five Doctors (1983). In the days before VHS rentals of the show, and even in the repeat-heavy regions of the world such as Australia (which provided endless loops of 70′s Who for whole generations of children but mostly ignored the black and whites of the 60′s) The Three Doctors was the story which introduced and cemented the characters of the first two Doctors in the minds of many. This meant unfortunately that, regardless of any Target novelisations one might or might not have read, many of us ended up with a vague feeling that the First Doctor was a sickly, slighly cranky advisor floating in a scanner window, and the Second Doctor was basically a sidekick with a recorder. Needless to say, a re-examination of the 60′s stories reveals far more complex characters.

Far more dramatically, The Five Doctors (still just before the period when it was common to record, rewatch and purchase or hire old shows) was a major event story which not only served to redefine the characters of many previous Doctors, but also many of the companions. I could talk at length about the returning Doctors and how their characters come across in this story and whether or not they are served well (including the First Doctor now played by a different actor in a white wig) or are written as parodies of their former selves, but for the purposes of my own take on the Women in SF week, I want to discuss instead how the female companions are served by this story.

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2.16 For Him the Bell Tolls

This is the episode that really shows what Ted Raimi can do – a homage to Danny Kaye’s classic performance in The Court Jester, it sets up a situation where Joxer is charmed to become a Hero with a capital H every time a bell rings – and then returns to his own bumbling self when it rings again.

Ted Raimi carries the story off with aplomb, making it that bit more special than its Hercules-lite plot really deserves, and his ‘swashbuckling hero’ persona is both hilarious and weirdly convincing.

Also, damn that man can fence.

This episode also marks the first appearance in Xena of the goddess Aphrodite played by Alexandra Tydings, whose bubbly, bitchy surfer babe persona was one of the highlights of the Hercules series from quite early on, along with her cranky, who-oiled-those-chest-muscles, bleached blond son Cupid, played by… um, Karl Urban.

One of my favourite things about the Herc-and-Xenaverse is the way that the same actors appear over and over, often playing several different characters. It lends a certain theatre rep feel to the whole production, and there is great fun to be had in spotting the reappearance of a favourite performer. Sometimes an actor used in a minor role is cast later in a major or more iconic one (Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor, for example, both played less significant roles in the Hercverse before being cast as Xena and Gabrielle) and often it ends up that the same actor plays a different major roles in each “verse”. The actress who plays Gabrielle’s sister, for instance, has a recurring role as the daughter of one of Hercules’ Argonaut friends, and Gina Torres appears as Cleopatra in the Xenaverse, and pirate/Sumerian queen Nebula in the Hercverse.

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