It Takes You Away
(Season 11, Dr 13 Graham Ryan and Yaz, 2/12/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Ed Hime, director: Jamie Childs)
Rank: 299
'Five little speckled frogs
Sat with their Korvanista Dog
On a most ordinary looking wooden chair
When in walked a grieving dad
Suffering loss really bad
And said yeah, sure, forget your duty of care
In walked a timelord
A cross between a toddler and Harrison Ford
And she said this is fake you have to jump out of this pool
So they all said goodbye
And the frog prepared to die
But the Doctor made a friend - so at least that's cool'
One of the things that ‘modern’ Who does that the old series didn’t is take time out to grieve. Not just the big deaths like ‘Adric’ or ‘Katarina’ but everyone who dies, even the baddies quite often; we’re a long way from the days when UNIT used to lose half their taskforce with no one batting an eye. A lot of the stories, especially in Steven Moffat’s run, made grieving the whole point of the episode, with extended metaphors like ‘Heaven Sent’ about how much the Doctor has lost and how he’s never properly had time to process the things that haunt him/her every day. ‘It Takes You Away’ is a second bite at that cherry from new showrunner Chris Chibnall and, for maybe half the episode, is a lot more up my street. Rather than the Doctor alone being trapped in a ‘confession dial’ and wandering round a castle for thousands of years punching through hard rock we get a parallel world all of us can share, a magical mirror-land that’s like the one we live in but without the uncomfortable truths, so that the people we miss are still there (even the title is a ‘mirror’ of one of the era’s best known sat=tins, ‘Let It Go’ courtesy of the ‘Frozen’ film – here grief never lets you go and you have to fight hard to be released). They say that grief is a foreign world, one that runs parallel to everyday life but with an absence that makes it feel a universe apart – so this is right up Dr Who’s street and in many ways it’s a surprise they hadn’t done this sort of thing before. A lot of people have had imaginary conversations n their head with someone they’ve lost, trust Dr Who to make them ‘real’ and invite the audience to ponder what they might say in similar situations. It’s natural drama they don’t have to stretch too far for us to imagine and stimulates all sorts of emotions automatically of anger, joy, fear and loss; no wonder so many people get lost here, in their denial and suffering and it’s a rare Dr Who story with no baddy at all (even the alien entity that causes it is trying to be kind and give Humans what they want, while the dad who gets trapped there is distraught): it’s so very nearly perfect, like a memory of everything that you once lost found. Only it isn’t real and memories and magic tricks are no substitute for really living, however painful. For all of my criticisms of the Chibnall era ‘It Takes You Away’ is maybe the second story in the era to finally get everything right: the big moral universal message, the foreign filming (we’d never been to Norway before and they use it well), the family dynamic where children viewers identify with the children and the parents with the parents. And then we end up passing through a cave (technically an antizone, a ‘buffer between two worlds’ but it looks like a cave to me), something that might have worked had they done it like ‘Heaven sent’ and made it a metaphor for grief and the scary impassable barrier you have to get through in order to regain your equilibrium after losing someone or something you care for, but instead is turned pink and inhabited with a troll. And then on into a world where the alien takes the form of a talking frog on a wooden chair and all hope at a subtle, emotional episode goes out the window as we end up in a cul-de-sac somewhere left of ‘bonkers’. Not even an alien frog, as per the Urbankans in ‘Four To Doomsday’, but an Earth frog. This is the reason a lot of people think the writers of Dr Who in the modern day, even more than they did in the 1960s when they wrote about the land of fiction and robot yetis in the underground, are on drugs.
Now, a lot of Dr Who stories go a bit gonzo by the
end. It’s the nature of the beast: all those plot strands need to be tied up in
a big finale that rewards people’s patience for watching. The modern series has
to condense everything it had to say into 45 minutes (give or take the odd
two-parter) which makes things a hundred times worse and - with Russell T
Davies and Steven Moffat’s tastes both heading towards sudden shocking endings
– it soon became the norm for Who. But Chibnall stories don’t tend to do this,
the endings do tend to follow on from where we started – often predictably so,
which is one of the reasons why the 13th Doctor era feels a little
underwhelming and dull. ‘It Takes You Away’ though is the single biggest bit of
whiplash within a single episode of Dr Who. There we are in the log cabins of
Norway, pining by the fjords, wrestling with the sounds of monsters outside in
a grown-up film noir about a missing family. Then we end up in mirrorland, via
a pink cave with an ugly hobgoblin making oddly childish (it’s hard to imagine
any companion/monster team having the sort of banter about smelling of wee
Graham does with Ribbons here, except perhaps Dan and Korvanista in ‘Flux’).
And then we have both simultaneously, as we see Graham confront the loss he’s
been denying head on as he grieve for Grace (his wife who died in the series’
opening episode) alongside the Norwegian family torn about by loss in long
great passionate speeches…by the talking frog. I still can’t tell if writer Ed
Hime, who came up with this and ‘Orphan 55’ in quick succession, wrote this
story for a more adult show and found out he could ‘only’ pitch it to a kiddies
teatime show and felt he had to make it sillier, or whether he wrote a silly
show and was asked politely to make it a bit more grown-up.
Or, perhaps, the writer was asked to go away and
write a fairytale, one that fitted the rare bit of location filming the series
could afford, with our first trip to an actual Scandinavian forest, and like
all good fairytales this is one designed to sell adult concepts to young
audiences. Most Dr Who stories have other scifi shows as their chief influence
(nearly always H G Wells or Nigel Kneale’s ‘Quatermass’) although a few go for
Hanmer Horror films or surrealism or well, you name it really. ‘Away’ takes as
its source material ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. There’s a blind girl trapped in
the forest, scared of the sounds outside her cabin. She’s effectively an
orphan, after her dad abandoned her to spend more time with his ‘fake’ wife,
too lost in grief to do parenting properly (and so round the bend he actually
makes up scary tales of monsters and plays sound effects to keep daughter Hanne
inside the cabin ‘where she’ll be safe, which is an odd thing to do with a
young daughter whose blind and struggles to look after herself: truly she’d be
dead within a few days if this story was real). Hanne then has to travel
through a scary place inside (and you can’t get more ‘indoorsy’ than a mirror –
in this topsy turvy world the forest is actually the safe place and it’s the
interior of the mind that causes all the trouble) and then denounce the Solitract
wolf dressed up as not her Grandma, rejecting it for being an imposter.
Everything in this mirrorland (just like the one in ‘Buster’ comic where
everything is back to front) is subtly ‘wrong’ and in reverse so you feel it
isn’t quite right even before you know: just look at how the writing on the dad’s
heavy metal t-shirt is backwards (because, post Lordi’s success in the
Eurovision Song Contest. This is what everyone things the Scandinavians are
into, the way it was assumed they all used to be into Abbaesque pop fifty years
ago), as well as the Doctor’s fringe. It’s a trap, a test, a line you have to
pass in order to go from being a child to being grown-up, able to cope with
everything the real world has to throw at you outside the home and the
classroom (like the portal in German fairytale film ‘The Neverending Story’
that zaps you into smitheroons if you’re not ready for it), which is what
fairytales are all about. It’s perfectly in keeping with Dr Who that the
ten-year-old daughter passes when her adult dad can’t (and what Graham
struggles to do until the end). I don’t remember a mirror portal in ‘Red Riding
Hood’ but it is the sort of thing you get in fairytales as is the troll, whose
job seems to be nothing more than being grumpy.
There are lots of giant frogs in fairytales however,
which is probably why it’s there. Only it feels added on: Hime, probably with
Chibnall breathing down his neck to make it ‘quirky’ and ‘more like Dr Who’,
has written himself into a corner. He needs a protagonist to explain what’s
going on in this story to us at home and how this is a parallel universe
created by a sentient being out of kindness, based on what Humans most want to
see (rather than what’s best for them). He can’t use the troll because, well,
trolls trick you. He can’t use the mum because she needs to be likeable and
recognisably the way her husband and daughter would remember her. And he can’t
use Grace because she needs to be how we remember her from ‘The Woman Who Fell
To Earth’ for his magic trick to work. But somebody needs to speak. Hey what if
an alien takes on a physical form to talk to us, one the Doctor secretly most
wants to see? And hey wouldn’t it be fun if it was something silly from a
fairytale like, I dunno, a frog? The thing is though…this story, like most
fairytales, is about seeing things for what they really are and not what you want
them to be (the basic moral of most fairtytales is to keep your wits about you
and either go with your gut instinct or look for the truth. Oh and don’t prick
your thumb on with spindles). All those stories about princes dressed up as
frogs are all about how the things you dream of having one day in your head
might not look the way you expect them to and how the real prince charmings
might not be the handsome rich good-looking one whose a bit up himself and
likely to treat you badly because he knows he can get another girl just like
that but the frogs who have to get by on personality and morals who are likely
to be loyal to you. Having the alien turn into a frog, an obvious delusion, is
such a horrific mis-reading of the rest of the story and the fairytale air you
just want to scream. And since when did the Doctor have a thing for frogs? If
it had been, say, an Ood or a cameo from any past Dr Who companion (or Doctor!)
that they really wanted to spend more time with but they knew was a con then it
would have made so much more sense. I mean, the frog’s cute for what he is.
Dare I say it he acts everyone off the screen. But there’s no reason at all for
him to be in this story. And I have an awful feeling it was written in mostly
as a really bad pun from the universe’ worst knock-knock jokebook (What happens
to you if you’re taken away? You’re toad/towed’ Or perhaps ‘where do you go
when you croak? An afterlife with frogs!’) So much for living happy ever after:
few endings to Dr Who stories have irritated me more than this one does. And
for everyone who says ‘oh it’s the sort of quirky eccentric thing we would all
lap up if it was Douglas Adams doing it: 1) there is only one talking animal in
the whole of Adams’ books – a sperm whale who gains sentience as a result of an
improbability drive, precisely because it’s such a very improbably thing to
happen and 2) Adams was enough of a storyteller to know that this was precisely
the last story to start putting talking animals into (although they could have
put a wolf into this story if they really wanted to instead of the troll who
serves no purpose whatsoever). This is
traditionally more Sapphire and Steel territory than Who. Which is a good
thing. Every series would benefit from being more like Sapphire and Steel, like
soap operas where people went missing because they were in photos or everyone
in 'Today In Parliament' losing their (2) faces. But the whole point of that
series was something surreal and extraordinary invading our ordinary world and
being scary simply for being weird, and unfathomable as to how our universe’s
rules work. In this story the alien world is trying to be like our world. And
even Sapphire and Steel knew not to push it with a talking frog (the closest
they get are the leftover ghosts of animals that have been eaten, which is
still creepier and more unsettling rather than just being plain weird).
In that scenario it makes the Doctor the
wood-huntsmen, the moral adjudicator who comes along and puts things right
after the youngster has passed the ‘test’. Except…this story doesn’t need one.
It’s one of the few stories (and the others are all Chibnall stories notably)
in which the Doctor’s presence makes practically no difference at all. I mean
Hanne might have taken a bit longer to find the mirror portal without the
Doctor realising what it was, but she’s blind – she’s got more chance of
accidentally stumbling across it than most people would, certainly her father
(why did he ever try walking through it? Even if he saw his wife, which isn’t
what happens to Hanne on screen, wouldn’t he be more likely to call a
counsellor or go for a walk to clear his head, or tell his daughter ‘that’s a
bit odd…I must be seeing things’ or at the very least cry out loud and gasp;
Hanne’s hearing is particularly acute given how much she relies on it to get
around). The entire end is unnecessary: sure it’s only right that dad Erik and
Graham come back through the portal rather than waste their lives stuck in
their heads in mirrorland grieving the past, but why does the Doctor have to
tear down this world and tick the big green frog off? By her own admission it
isn’t doing any real harm and is only trying to be calm; if she’d explained why
their world can’t possibly exist in parallel to ours and why giving us our
dream worlds we want to see isn’t how our universe works, can’t she at least
give it some co-ordinates for some other creatures who’d love to have a world
like this (there must be a planet out there somewhere full of either creatures
with stupidly short lifespans or eternals who have nothing better to do all day
and might stop harassing the rest of us if they could play with mirrors all day
long. Or what about the Isolus from ‘Fear Her’ – they could have a whole
universe of playthings). The Doctor doesn’t do much in this story except
lecture and meddle and then be insensitive to her companions, which is one up
from standing around doing nothing like some other weeks but, again, the story
would work just as well if not better without her there at all. I’m not sure
what I think about her revelation of having seven grandmothers and how one of
them was convinced another was a secret Zygon and reported her to authorities:
it fits with some of what we know about Gallifreyan childhoods (and a community
bringing each timelord up) but not much and it’s odd she’s never mentioned it
before. At least it helps tie her into the story’s secondary theme about split
families though, along with Ryan and Graham (Yaz, meanwhile, still acts as if
her family are the worst ever and she’d actually like them to split up so she
could ignore them; you know your parenting skills are bad if even Yaz is
criticising you as she does Erik in this episode).
Her companions aren’t much better. None of the
writers know what to do with Ryan, given that his dad’s both the comedy and
emotional one and Yaz is the reliable one but in this story particularly he’s
worse than useless. He admits that he’s not very good with children (an odd
thing to admit, given that he’s no better with adults) and he winds Hanne up the
wrong way from his opening lines to her. The Doctor leaving him behind to look
after her while the others go play is a really bad mistake: it’s obvious she’s
not going to get on with him and come running after her dad, while it really
looks as if the Doctor has realised that she can’t trust Ryan to do anything in
case he messes u big time. Even by his standards, though, locking a blind girl
up in her room in her own house and yelling at her is not helping matters any.
But then what else was he going to do? It’s Ryan, someone for whom everyone
else’s feelings are the biggest mystery of the universe. Utterly and completely
the wrong person to leave in charge of a traumatised girl (even if Hanne isn’t
as traumatised as by rights she ought to be). Nice one Doctor, that’ll really
help his confidence and her feeling of safety that will. Yaz is meant to be the
dependable one, a policewoman used to keeping calm in strange circumstances,
but she’s at her most irritating in this episode, walking around swapping big technical
jargon with the Doctor and looking smug, while subtly putting the boys down,
because, well, girl power innit? She talks to Hanne about liking good music
then mentions a cousin who adores the Arctic Monkeys: good lord, this is such
an adult’s idea of what the kids are into in 2018, bland soul-less predictable
pop that thinks it’s edgy and marketed as rock and roll – the sort of thing
that makes true music fans want to feed yaz to the nearest Abzorbaloff for
recommending. You perhaps notice this less now when the years go by but at the
time this was a detail so wrong and jarring it was on a par with the talking
frog: once again I ask if anyone I the production team know anyone under
thirty. Her patronising conversation with Ryan that all you need to do to talk
to children is ‘make them safe’ is patently wrong: adults want children to be
safe because they know where they are, but children love getting up to stuff –
it’s how they learn about the world when they’re not watching Dr Who or reading
fairytales. I mean, if all they wanted was to feel safe and cosy they would not
be watching an actually quite scary episode with killer moths right now and Dr
Who is in a lot of trouble.
Graham fares best. Ed clearly likes him much more
than the rest of the Tardis crew and he gets all the best lines, both funny and
sad: I love the fact that a companion has finally noticed that the Tardis never
stops for meals so he’s brought along sandwiches to stop his blood sugar levels
getting low and being ‘hangry’, while the story finally tackles head on the
fact that Graham has been in denial this whole series now about losing wife
Grace in ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’. I’m always glad to see Grace back in
her cameos – Sharon D Clarke acts everyone else off the screen and this is one
of her better cameos as at it makes perfect sense in the context of the episode,
Grace’s very down to earth persona completely at odds with the weird
circumstances the story puts her in. It’s been a unique idea having a companion
travel in the Tardis out of denial because they can’t cope with their real life
(which is going to be topsy-turvy anyway so why not throw in space and time
travel too and make it truly weird?) and ‘It Takes You Away’ makes good use of
it; Graham never feels more rounded as a character than when he’s torn between
the Grace he loves and the Doctor he respects (although, equally, Ryan never
feels less of a character than when he hears about his dead Grandma, whom he’s
known so much longer than Graham, and doesn’t react in anyway whatsoever).I
really like the fact that Graham finally sees through the illusion because he
knows that Grace would never ever put herself before her grandson’s welfare – something
very ‘Human’ than the Solifract could never understand just by glancing at
humans and creating fake AI version (although equally it could also be the
moment when Grace mentions Ryan being a ‘smart lad’ that convinced Graham she
must be a fake, because y’know, it’s Ryan we’re talking about here!) The
closing scene between Ryan and Graham, which softens their relationship from
enemies to family and is covered into series nine to come, is well overdue too
and handled the way two boys not good at talking about their feelings would
handle it, less patronising than the usual Chibnall way. Really, though,
Graham’s story runs in parallel too rather than being involved in the plot;
without him this would still be a story about breaking up the family home and
he doesn’t exactly help Hanne or give the old’ I know what you’re going through
but you have to live on for the children’ speech to the dad. The Doctor,
meanwhile, has been through more grief than anybody but she’s oddly impatient
with everyone here, confused as to why these big emotional monkeys she loves
hanging round with so much precisely because they are so emotional and get so
attached to things and keep her ‘alive’ want to hang on to people from the
past. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago the Doctor spent a whole year mourning
Rose: she knows what heartbreak is as well as anyone.
They could have gotten away with this story had they
set it somewhere bit like Earth but not quite, or set it in the deep distant
past when either The Brothers Grimm were around or better still the dim and
distant half-forgotten past they wrote about was. IN fact some viewers weho
half remember this story think that’s exactly what they did and don’t remember
the shocking attempts to make it modern, like the ‘Slayer’ band t-shirt the dad
is wearing or the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ bit.
Having such a surreal story set on contemporary Earth is the reason it doesn’t
quite work. We’ve had a lot of weird, surreal and unlikely things in this
series but they tend to be confined either to other worlds or universes (such
as this story’s close cousin ‘Warrior’s Gate’ that also has a time portal as a
mirror and a world that works to a different set of rules) or they’re explained
properly as part of the plot. This story has neither. I mean, an alien that
isn’t a being as such but an entire universe, with the power to create things
from scratch, is such an unlikely thing based on everything else we see in this
series: no way could something that powerful keep out the way for all the other
stories in the Dr Whoniverse. It would change everything, if only because all
the bad guys in the universe would keep taking it over and manipulating it in
return for a little of the warmth they want here. Honestly, if the Doctor had
her thinking head on, she’d take every Human about to die, send them through
the portal mirror (which really isn’t that different to the parallel world people
were ‘uploaded’ to in that ‘other’ forest story ‘Silence In The Library/Forest
Of The Dead’) and then disguise it so no one else could get through it – at
least she’d know where it was and everyone would be happy. But of course one
episode, not by the showrunner, can’t change everything that much so we get the
usual re-set button, albeit with Graham and Ryan slightly more at ease with
each other. It’s not the fairytale aspect that lets this story down, it’s the
Dr Who one, the need to make these stories easy to follow out of sequence.
That wouldn’t matter so much had they not gone out
their way to make this world seem so real. The opening shots are so determined
(understandably) to scream: look at this we’re actually in Norway - not a green
screen, not a set, not Cardiff standing in for another country as per normal
and not even an actor double being the Doctor’s legs, we actually shipped
everyone over to film – that where we start feels more at odd with the
fairytale surrealism of where we end up than it normally would. This is a real
log cabin, those are real trees that you just don’t see in Britain the
companions interact with the objects and stone me if the set they use for the
log cabin doesn’t feel like the real thing too. There really is a point early
on, with the sound of scary monsters whistling through the trees and the sort
of film noir blankness you only get from the real thing, that makes us think we
really are going to get a Dr Who twist on those subtitled Scandinavian crime
dramas that were all the rage circa 2018 (not least because Chibnall’s
breakthrough success ‘Broadchurch’, was in many ways an oh so very English
version of one, with a community closely huddled together built on a hierarchy
of class where everyone moaned about the weather, rather than the Scandinavian
wilderness where you lived on your own against the elements).Honestly that’s a
story most of us would rather have seen, one that’s sparse on emotions (even
compared to British dramas) and which has big empty spaces and a hard cold edge
to it, but instead we’re taken kicking and screaming through the mirror. Not
least because the monsters turn out to be a cheat. I mean, why does the dad go
to such lengths to keep his daughter inside the cabin rather than just, say,
locking the doors or talking about the awful snowdrift outside (it’s not as if
she can see it or that they are expecting visitors to tell her otherwise).
Honestly the dad’s the weakest link here and no one
has seriously thought his character through: Christian Rubeck doesn’t get many
scenes to get into character but you think the script would make him anything
other than the oddly neutral portrayal we get here. We have a man whose broken,
who can’t face living without his darling wife, whose so attached to her he would
risk a mirror travel and a troll and putting their daughter in real harm rather
than let her go. He ought to be crying his eyes out, overjoyed to be reunited
with his darling wife. He’s clearly unhinged in his thinking, scaring his child
rather than comforting her through her grief – he could have been played as a
madman about to break. He’s clearly impractical, utterly clueless as to how to
cope with being a single parent bringing up a daughter in the real world, with
only a blind daughter to help hi round the house: you’d think it would be
dirtier, fuller, smellier than this, the
sort of claustrophobic space you’d want to escape through a mirror to avoid
dealing with but everyone seems to have missed that trick. They could have also
played him as someone in denial, viciously adamant he’s coping even when he’s
not. Instead they make him oddly neutral. So much of this story relies on his
rejection of his wife o the Doctor’s say so and going back to lie in the real
world, but Erik barely fights back and doesn’t seem at all upset to be going
home. Equally Hanne ought to be either in denial herself, super loyal and
viciously defending her father from accusations that he can’t cope because
she’s desperate not to lose her other parent or angry, hurt at being betrayed
in the living by the mother those dead.
Instead she’s just happy to get her dad back and if anything is more
concerned for Ryan, a boy who she was bickering with no more than a few minutes
ago and who keeps insulting her by accident. The one thing this family wouldn’t
do, based on everything else this episode, is hug the Doctor and companions
goodbye. Of all the things in this episode that don’t feel quite real their
relationship is honestly a bigger problem than the talking frog on a wooden
chair.
That ending is the giant frog in the room though:
till then this was a nicely adult episode on an important theme but, like most
of ‘Torchwood’ (which Chibnall was showrunner for across the first two series)
this story can’t decide if it wants to play with genuine adult themes or appeal
to juveniles with adult themes that are just plain stupid and most of the
audience grew out of in their childhood, despite the fact they couldn’t legally
watch the parade of sex and drugs and sexy aliens on drugs. With the frog at
the end this is just another stupid episode in a particularly stupid episode in
a stupid era, the way the ‘Cyberwoman’ turned an intelligent story about loss
and grieving and conversion into a sexy story about a woman in a cyber-bikini
and the way the first thing Torchwood’s Owen did on waking up from being reborn
again and thinking his life was over was to go down a nightclub and get sexy
and drink. You had all that room to explore, all those big themes so central to
what it means to be Human, and you wasted it for a talking frog? If there’s one
thing regular viewers are going to turn off from it’s a franchise that they
once believed wholeheartedly in that has now become daft and if there’s one
thing that’s going to put off newcomers it’s a series that seems to think
talking frogs are usual things to show on screen. There’s just no reason for
it: this is a being of such power it could create anything, yet not only does
it create the frog it also creates the plain chair to sit on. A storyline like
this needs something ambiguous, to fit the surreal fairytale aspect, not
something amphibious. And that’s not even as bad as the troll who does
absolutely nothing except use up the CGI budget and insult everyone – not just
the people in the room with it but the intelligence of the people watching
(what is it with Chibnall aliens being so determinedly childish? Even when the
human characters are more adult than usual?) I did wonder if this was Chibnall
making a cruel comment on criticism of his era, of the trolls who view his
stories so differently to the way they look in his head and his continued
arrogance that his way is the best way long after it became clear most of the
fanbase didn’t agree. Except…we’re still in series eleven, too early for him to
have had any feedback about his time as showrunner whole making this story and
his 10th and 11th Doctor stories were very well received
(oddly well received, most of them, though ‘Power Of Three’ is one of the most
unfairly under-rated stories of them all in my opinion).
Bah! So close to brilliance. I don’t know where that
leaves me with ‘It Takes You Away’ – no other Chibnall script, bar the twin
highs of ‘Rose’ and ‘Eve Of The Daleks’, had such promise or had so many great
inventive ideas that the series had genuinely never done before. And no other
script threw it away in such a clumsy way for a story that positively insulted
its audience, so shortly after trusting them to cope with these bigger themes.
The problem with the Chibnall era, as we keep saying, is that unlike Davies and Moffat he could
never find a way to cater for both the child and adult audience and seemed to
think of them as being poles apart (rather than just an inexperienced and
experienced version of the same person) so he caters to both extremes at
different times. In stories next to each other that patently don’t belong
together that comes a cropper - when
placed side by side overlapping, as here and with ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’ or
Himes’ other story ‘Orphan 55’, it’s a disaster: a clash of styles that’s
tonally completely deaf. I don’t hate all of this story the way I hate some
others but boy do I hate the parts that prevent this story from being the
sparse Nordic emotional thriller it’s crying out to be and the British
quirkiness that pulls it crashing down to Earth for no good reason. The result
is a powerful message really badly told, at least three stories stapled loosely
together, one of which is really really promising and two of which are madder
than a box of frogs and amongst the biggest letdowns in all of Who. No, no *sniff*
I’m fine really, its just a frog in my throat. That and the fact I’m grieving
the episode this could have been and finding it really hard to let go. Finally,
remember the seven years bad luck rule? What happened seven years after we
smashed the mirrorland in ‘Warrior’s Gate?’ in 1981? the series got cancelled.
What happened seven years after this story? It’s 20235, the year when I fear
that, if the company keeps losing money and the Dr Who ratings remain low, we
might well see Dr Who cancelled again by Disney. Maybe it’s time to stop playing
with mirrors guys…
+ POSITIVES
I love the feel of the opening few minutes a forest with the remnants of a
blizzard still on the ground and as
bases under siege go a log cabin, isolated in the middle of the words, is the
right sort of place to go. We don’t get enough forests in Dr Who and
they’re very in keeping with the series:
something ordinary and everyday where extraordinary things are said to happen
and places that look so different in the day and in the dark. Only ‘Hide’ uses a forest this well and then
only in the big finale (in another parallel dimension as it happens). We
usually only get snow in Christmas specials (and then it turns out to be
something alien) but here the snow is normal. It’s such a fairytale look even
before the faitytale creatures arrive and is perfectly in keeping with the
theme of the story: snow covers up the familiar and makes it look the same yet
strange, not quite right (or at least it does somewhere like Britain where it
only general snows once every few years). Nothing covers up the tracks of time
in a physical sense like snow either, covering our footsteps of where we’ve
been and covering the rounds with sheets of newness where we’ve never dared
step foot before. The poetic side of me is all here for this episode.
Previous ‘The Witchfinders’ next
‘The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolos’
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