Flatline: Ranking - 188

 Flatline

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 18/10/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Jamie Mathieson, directed by; Douglas MacKinnon) 

'You know how 30^th anniversary special 'Dimensions In Time’ and 50^th anniversary special ‘Day Of The Doctor’ were both in 3D? Well for this year’s 51^st anniversary there have been some cut backs. Yes that’s right, this year our monsters are going to be two dimensional!'

Ranking: 188

One of the things the 2000-era Dr Who stories have in common with the 1960s and not the years in between is that most years the lead actor gets to take a holiday and is written out the series. The show has come up with some really good variations on this over the years (The Doctor sulking in his Tardis for an episode during the exploits of Marco Polo; Is Steven trapped on the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve because the Doctor really is dead?, ‘Blink’ having the Doctor be the centre of events despite only having three scenes the entire story; ‘Turn Left’ being an entire story about what would happen to the universe if the Doctor wasn’t around to save it) and some really bad ones (‘Doctor, you’re back!’ says Ian at a cliffhanger in ‘The Space Museum’ without actually seeing him; The Celestial Toymaker making him mute and invisible on a whim). ‘Flatline’ though makes possibly the best use going of the fact that Peter Capaldi needs a break and Clara has to carry most of the story, setting up the arc of her turning into the Doctor and taking on all of his own responsibility without the get out of jail free card of regeneration that he’s got. For now Clara is successful but close sequel ‘Face The Raven’ is proof of why the Doctor should be so worried about her. Where’s the Doctor? Well, they’ve tucked him away in a box this week. Only that box happens to be a malfunctioning Tardis. It turns out that the dimensionally transcendental circuits have picked up a virus created by the local invading monster that causes it to become unstable, so for a lot of the story the Doctor is reduced to a waving arm or a leg or sticking his head out of a tiny Tardis model that Clara has to carry around. It is, if you will, a pun on the idea (in a phrase that seems to have originated with Christopher Eccleston talking about ‘Father’s Day’, an episode in which he didn’t appear much either) that these sorts of stories are always ‘Doctor-Lite’ – because for one episode he is. To date this is the last time Dr Who has tried this idea: the schedule is slowed down to give the actors room to breathe and the production team enough time to catch up. That seems to be especially true now that Russell T Davies has taken over again: at the time of writing the production team is over a year ahead of transmission dates and at eight episodes a year down from thirteen there’s less rush all round. That’s a shame in many ways: the I can’t-believe-there’s-no-Doctor frill-free episodes are some of the most inventive as the writers are pushed to think outside the box, not least because this story got it right more than most, thinking outside the box by, erm, putting the Doctor inside a box and leaving him there for most of the story. Oh and if you’re wondering why Jenna Coleman can’t have a day off writer Jamie Mathieson wrote ‘Mummy On The Orient Express’ first as a companion piece, a Clara-lite episode that sees her separated in a railway carriage for a good proportion of the story. 

 That in itself is quite something: the last time a writer wrote back-to-back stories who wasn’t the showrunner or a script editor it was Chris Boucher writing for Tom Baker back in 1977. Steven Moffat really enjoyed working with Jamie, a writer who’d been steeped on the fringes of the Whoniverse for years without actually writing any Who before this pair of stories: he’d written for the TV adaptation of one-time script editor Douglas Adams prematurely cancelled oddball series ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ (which did for crime fiction what ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy’ had once done for sci-fi, making it weirder and funnier) and wrote most of the series that Who-writer didn’t for ‘Being Human’, a series made by many of the same production personnel who’d once worked on Who. Like Douglas he has a gift for writing in impossible situations that turn the usual conventions of the series on its head and like Toby manages to make the most unlikely and unlikeable people seem real and sympathetic. What he doesn’t have necessarily is a love for Dr Who and an encyclopaedic knowledge the way a lot of the other writers for the modern era do. That might be why this story skirts so close to ‘Fear Her’, being about creatures from another world that only exists in two dimensions and based around drawings coming alive, which given the fan reaction to that story seemed inevitably the one story we would never ever get a sequel to. ‘Flatline’ is a less clumsy version of that story in many ways, with the drawings much more unsettling and creepy which might be why this later one tends to get a much better reaction from fans. It’s certainly a story that’s easier to watch without blushing or having to make compensations for low acting or weird effects, but at the same time I’ve never been sure why the fanbase does the one and not the other. After all, ‘Fear Her’ is by far the braver of the two scripts with its themes of child abuse and neglect and loneliness: ‘Flatline’ is one of those rare stories that doesn’t really have that much of a message, being more of a story that’s about watching the Doctor try to solve a problem he doesn’t understand. 

 That said there’s nothing childish about ‘Flatline’: these aren’t children’s drawings coming to life but people being sucked inside out and being turned into drawings, with the only evidence that they’d ever existed a shape on a wall that’s assumed by the people who walk past them to be a mural. Which leads to the one message of ‘Flatline’: the need of all sentient beings to leave a mark on the world they live in, no differently to a dog. Humans particularly lead short and transient lives which means we tend to be forgotten not long after we’re dead and even when we’re still alive in some cases: Rigsy sees Clara staring at what they both take to be a mural and explains how she died alone, unloved and un-mourned. His graffiti, for which him and half of Bristol seem to be doing community service after being caught, is another aspect of this need to make a mark: Rigsy leaves his handle behind because, in a dilapidated poverty-stricken city like this one, it’s his only way of ever being noticed by anyone or leave any mark that he was really there at all (‘Face The Raven’, will sort-of carry on this obsession with markings, when Rigsy ends up with an alien tattoo). The Boneless are this story’s monster with the unique twist that they’re the first the Doctor’s ever met who only exist in two dimensions, coming into our world to learn more about how three-dimensional people think. But all they’re really doing is speeding up the human process anyway, reducing the people they take to being mere outlines, a shadow of their real selves. 

 All modern writers for the show have their own favourite era of the show; to date all three showrunners have said they love the Phillip Hinchcliffe 4th Doctor era the best even if they pick up on very different aspects of it as inspiration for their work (Davies goes for the importance of Sarah Jane and Leela to the plots and the big emotional drama, Moffat the horror and the occasional non-linear structure and Chibnall the big moral messaging). Mathieson is unusual in that he did watch the Tom Baker era but, by his own admission stopped watching by the end of his run and was always more interested in ‘Sapphire and Steel’ anyway. Which is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that, more by coincidence than inspiration, he hones in on the short era when Christopher H Bidmead was script editor, writing a story where the Tardis malfunctions and gets smaller (like ‘Logopolis’), with aliens working out of a completely different dimension (like ‘Warrior’s Gate’) and where the baddy kills people by sucking through the ground (just like ‘Frontios’). All this story needed was a mathematical genius working in block computation and we’d have had the set (Rigsy is very much under-rated by the Doctor, who calls him all sorts of names in this story, but a genius is a stretch too far I think). This story also resembles ‘The Man Who Never Was’, the nicknamed fans have given to what was officially named ‘Assignment Four’ in Sapphire and Steel, about a crossover between dimensions that means a being can escape from photographs and put people from our world inside them, burning them to get rid of the evidence. ‘Flatline’ does resemble Sapphire and Steel far more so than Who at times: the idea of other dimensions and objects coming to life isn’t something Who has ever really done before and while other stories have gone up to the line of having something ‘out there’ that even the Doctor doesn’t understand ‘Flatline’ is the first story that really crosses that line, as it were. Again, more by coincidence than design, ‘Flatline’ has another connection with Sapphire and Steel, with Christopher Fairbanks (appearing here as gruff overseer Fenton) started his acting career in the last deeply bonkers episode of that series and is to date surprisingly the only actor to have appeared in both scifi series.

 Mathieson had three other influences for this story too: one is the children’s story ‘Flat Stanley’ by Jeff Brown about a boy squashed flat in an accident with a bulletin board who can be squidged into different shapes: one of the community workers killed by the Boneless is named ‘Stan’ as a homage. Another is the famous painting by Hans Holbein the Younger named ‘The Ambassadors’ but which most Whovians can’t help but re-name ‘The Ambassadors…Of Death’, given that it has a whacking great skull in it that can only be seen from a certain angle. An early play with perspectives, it very much taps into this story’s feelings of people wanting to make their mark, as from the front it’s a typical 16th century drawing of two aristocrats with more money than sense (they look as if they’ve just walked out of the Bullingdon Club with David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s ancestors) – however death and extinction is waiting for them just like everybody else from another view, with history not recording who the pair are or much caring. The third influence is the 1884 novella ‘Flatland: A Romance In Many Dimensions’ by Edwin Abbott Abbott (you might have noticed that this story is set around the fictional ‘Abbott Estate’). In this metaphorical tale about prejudice and wanting more from life a square from Flatland dreams of visiting Lineland but finds the reason no one from his part of the world ever seems to go there is because he comes in two dimensions and they live in one. When he does visit no one can see him because they can’t comprehend another dimension. He in turn has ghostly hallucinations where he’s visited by a being known as Sphere who doesn’t have any dimensions at all. 

 Put all those disparate sources together and you have ‘Flatline’, a story that’s not like any other Who episode at all (barring ‘Fear Her’). It is, however, exactly the sort of thing the series should have been making. You see, I think there’s a great political message buried within ‘Flatline’ that’s so, well, flat that few fans even notice it. The only part of Bristol we see in this story is a group of community workers who are in trouble for various petty crimes and a railway line that looks near-abandoned (even though trains apparently run from it). These people are so working class they make the likes of Ace and Rose look posh: at least they had jobs to go to (even if they were both menial jobs that wasted their respective talents): the people in this story don’t even have that. They’re certainly very different to the comparatively affluent children seen at Coal Hill School, our ‘home’ location in this era of the series. No wonder they’re sat around graffiting buildings: what else do they have to do? There’s nothing to aspire to, no great plan, no sniff of a career: they’ve given up already and been left behind. After four years of austerity from The Coalition they weren’t the only ones: there were whole great pockets of society like this. How did society respond? By kicking them further. No prime minister in our history has ever been as clever at manipulating the media as David Cameron and he fed the papers all sorts of stories about the ‘have-nots’ that made the ‘haves’ treat them as if they were aliens from a different planet. If you were here in those years then you might remember his ridiculous claims of ‘hugging hoodies’ to make them ‘feel better’ as if their probems could all be solved so easily and on the other hand his petty policies to come down hard on petty crimes (like graffiti) by having law-abiding (i.e. rich) citizens complaining and getting Asbos (Anti-Social Behavioural Orders) handed out like they were sweets. They weren’t serious enough to go to court but they did stay on your record and meant you were even less likely to mix with people who had money and the vast majority of people given them were young: the generation hit the worst by austerity because employers were more likely to hang on to workers with experience than school-leavers. As a result Britain had never been more divided: the much-mocked 2011 London Riots, dismissed in the media as an indulged youth getting things they hadn’t earned, which was really a cry about the unfairness of a system rigged against them. This was an era when the people at the bottom of the food chain might as well have been living in another dimension for all the understanding and empathy they got from the other half. The Boneless, then, are really the Spineless: the rich who could have helped end this suffering but chose instead to eat these people up and spit them back out, dissecting them in the papers while trying to ‘work out’ how they got by. Fenton is a ‘Boneless’ in Human form, scowling at the people under his charge without recognising their desperation or frustration, treating them as criminals from the position of an older self-made man who got a job so why can’t they? The Doctor points out that only people like him that can’t ‘see’ the psychic paper have no imagination whatsoever and it’s true; more to the point he has no empathy either because he can’t imagine what another person’s life might be like and why it might not be like his. It’s the train that’s the key. The Boneless have no reason to go to a railway station particularly – in the script it’s just the place they go next – but it’s the only means of escape for the people who live here. The train represents going up in the world, of changing stations in life of escaping the place you were meant to remain. And the Boneless just eat that up too to prevent anyone from this broken down end of society escaping too. After such a gap it’s great to have Dr Who the ‘family’ show actually offering different perspectives for the audience at home again, just like the 1960s (when the ‘younger’ generation watching then are the ‘older’ generation watching now and harrumphing about kids not being like in their day all over again). 

 A quick word about the in-jokes on the train. You might have spotted two sings on the front of them as they run through the tunnel. One reads ‘A113’ , a longstanding joke in animation studios that turns up in loads of Pixar films in particular. Back in the 1990s, when computer animation was new and nobody wanted to spend money on it, every employed digital artists worked out of a tiny room in Disney’s empire which had the number A113 on the door. Though nobody at Disney knew it at the time the only reason their company would stay afloat in the 21st century is thanks to the money the Pixar animators made for them in a run of box office successes starting with ‘Toy Story’. The reference is a joke to computer animators that once their profession was considered very very small but has since become very very big, to the point where they have more floors at Disney tan the traditional 2D animators. Given the theme of what Flatline is all about this reference might just be the most apt out of all the hundreds of films its been in! The other, ‘2M65’, is a lot more obscure and might simply be a coincidence (although as the other train number clearly isn’t it made me keep searching long past the point where normally I’d have given up with something like this).2M65 is the name given by scientsists to the tiny block of DNA that accounts for ‘human restriction’ – it’s the thing in ‘Lazaurs Experiment’ basically that helps us keep our human shape rather than morphing into, say, a pat or a squirrel. It’s as if something in our past decided that the human form was the best need for our uses so ‘locked’ it in place in ‘our’ dimension, as a three-dimensional property in a three-dimensional world. Most species have a version of it: probably all of them do but I confess I rather nodded off trying to understand the scientific journals that mentioned it. Is this the thing that the Boneless are lacking that everything in ‘our’ dimension has? Although of course it could just be a reference to the Manchester to Leeds train, which is indeed ‘2M65’ (though if it is goodness only knows what it’s doing in Bristol! And no they didn’t film it in Bristol. They didn’t film it in Manchester either though: this is Barry Train Station and Wenvoe Tunnel, both in North Wales). Rigsy Moorhouse, by the way, is named for Jamie’s best friend who turned him onto Dr Who and urged him to send in a script to Steven Moffat. For a time another friend, Bill, was the name of the train driver who told Jamie everything he needed to know about trains for his script (but whose lines got cut: he’ll end up the Frank Skinner part in ‘Mummy From The Orient Express’ instead). 

 Of course to most people this is just a jokey script about the Tardis going wrong and it works on that dimension too. We’d had the Tardis shrunk before, in not just ‘Logopolis’ but ‘Planet Of Giants’ and ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ but it’s new for the ‘comeback’ era and none of those earlier stories had quite played around with dimensions like this, with the scene of the Doctor sticking his limbs out of the tiny doors and walking across the floor with his hand, ‘Addams Family’ style. The 12th Doctor is often painted as a grump but this story gives him more reasons to be than most and his exasperations at being trapped and having to leave all the Doctoring up to Clara results in one of Capaldi’s best performances, despite being missing for half the story (he’s a lot more comfortable with comedy than drama despite drama being his background). This is a great little story for Jenna Coleman too, who becomes what all companions dream of being – the Doctor for an episode, right down to adding ‘Doctor’ to her pseudonym. So far the bulk of series eight has been about the Doctor’s newly regenerated doubts as to what sort of man he is and whether he’s a good one after all those people he’s killed and who have died because of his actions. At least though he an comfort himself that he shoulders all that responsibility alone so no one else has to. Suddenly his best friend is running around in danger trying to find a way to set him free and he’s effectively paralysed. Clara shows how much attention she’s been paying to the Doctor in this story, lying to everyone up to and including the Doctor, pretending to Danny that she’s given up her travels in the Tardis and pretending to her boyfriend that she’s in no danger even when she’s hanging from a lightshade surrounded by alien monsters from another dimension. For Clara this story is a lot of fun: yes she’s in danger but she’s been in danger lots of times and she’s always survived. The Doctor knows from past harsh experience though that pride often comes before a fall (especially from on top of radio telescopes: seriously Mathieson must have seen ‘Logopolis’ at least). The big moment in this story comes, unusually, at the end when everything has been solced and Clara beams to the Doctor about what a great version of him she was today. The Doctor looks horrified and she thinks he’s jealous, but really he’s afraid that she’s turning into him and that one day her luck will run out (as it does in ‘Face The Raven’). 

 Which is all pretty deep for what’s otherwise a silly story about an alien who lives in scribbled lines. It’s that aspect that lets the story down: on the page, in the layers behind the words, ‘Flatline’ is as great a story as any in the modern Who era, particularly the uneven Capaldi years; on the screen? Meh, not so much. The Boneless is one of those Who monsters that can’t talk so we never learn much about it and once its one big scare is let out of the box there’s nothing else for it to do: there’s only so many times the same special effect can look creepy. Similarly once the Doctor has stuck his arms out of the Tardis and been a big ol’ face peering out the Tardis eyebrows behind stern eyebrows that plot element has worn out its welcome too. A lot of what is really quite a thoughtful story ends up being a one-dimensional runaround with that lengthy sequence in the train station that feels padded to the extreme. They play around with the idea of the Tardis being destroyed, wiped out by an incoming train and the lingering silence over the radio where the Doctor should be, but the Doctor’s already explained how low the power is and his escape and then silence fools absolutely no one (though the fact that the powerless Tardis ends up looking just like one of the timelord ‘message’ cubes from ‘The War Games’ is a neat trick and quite possibly the inspiration for Moffat’s future series finale Hell Bent/Heaven Sent). A lot of the comedy misses this week by a lot: the slapstick scenes of Clara trying to juggle her work-life-Doctor balance is too broad and slapstick and there are only so many jokes about the Tardis being tiny you can make before the jokes start seeming smaller too. Danny is becoming a bit of a pest this series, slowing the action down every time it gets moving and here more than most. For the life of me I don’t know why Clara doesn’t just say she’ll call him back because she’s ‘a bit busy’ (well I do: the script wants a comedy scene but it s a very false one). I do have to praise Rigsy’s comment that the model Tardis is ‘bigger on the inside’ and the Doctor’s response that ‘the phrase has never been more apt; though, which is a clever bit of writing. 

 Worse the local community dropouts, the key to this story’s ‘real’ message are treated one-dimensionally themselves just when the story needs them to be heroes (or at any rate real and complex people just like the people at home who can actually afford a TV license). Fenton is a real waste of Fairbanks’ talents, with no comedy to get his teeth into and juyst being written as a gruff and bitter man (it makes a change: in years gone by Christopher would have been cast as Rigsy, which is more or less the part he plays in ‘Auf Wiedersehn, Pet’). No mention is ever made, by the way, of how such a broad Scouser ended up in Bristol (another sign, perhaps, of how unfamiliar with this down and out world the people making this story were). Even Rigsy, the character we spend most time with, is weakly drawn: we have no idea of his aspirations, his goals, his dreams, his wishes. We don’t even hear firsthand why he adds his graffiti tag to so many soulless buildings: we’re meant to infer that he’s the person here with a heart of gold but all we really see him do is talk to Clara next to a mural and from how its written and played by actor Joivan Wade it feels more like an awkward attempt to chat her up. This story needs Rigsy to be an artful dodger type, cheekily trying to push the law to see what he can get away with; wade plays it more with a nonchalant shrug, as if this a fun thing to brighten up his lunch hour rather than the single weirdest thing that’s likely to happen to him this lifetime. His colleagues are worse, being rude and arrogant and everything David Cameron told us to fear. It all smacks a bit desperately of getting on down wi da kids yeah innit? Without understanding that kids change with every generation: adults are meant to be left behind and confused, that’s the point. Rather than get the feeling that Dr Who is going back to basics amongst the dirt and the grime of the cities after dark the way it should this episode feels like the series at its most middle-class, not understanding the characters they live in or the world they live in at all, a classical music lover writing about punk. What a lost opportunity: had we explored this underworld and shown it to be as three-dimensions as all the posh worlds seen in Dr Who and other series this story could have defeated a few Bonelesses of its own. In the end, despite the great concept and the neat metaphors, we’re left with a story that barely features the Doctor, that has Clara deliberately acting against type and a supporting cast who don’t do much supporting. That leaves us with some jokes with a tiny Tardis, some dodgy CGI effects and not a lot else to be honest. For much of the time it’s on ‘Flatline’ falls a bit, well, flat. 

 For all that, though, the concepts are still good enough to give this story a cautious thumbs up. I love Dr Who stories that are brave and try something a bit different and this one certainly has that ambition, even if the way its put over on screen sadly recalls the days of the 20th century when those great ideas often fall apart in execution. There are lots of little scenes from this story that live on long in the memory even if the linking bits are so unmemorable: the first time we see the Doctor stuck in the shrunken Tardis, the chilling moment the Boneless leave the policewoman’s nervous system hanging on the wall like a pattern and the second train in a row putting the Doctor in danger (Mathieson also seems to have a thing about railways). Even if they have nowhere to go with it our first sight of a Boneless is genuinely creepy and unsettling, the sort of monster you can’t even hide from behind the sofa because chances are the sofa is next to a wall and even the walls aren’t safe! They were even more gruesome before they were diluted though: in Mathieson’s script they were called the Boneless because they didn’t understand the concept of human bones and snapped them, with a great cracking sound effect that got taken out in post-production out of fears it was too grim and scary. Which to be fair it probably was. While it made more plot-sense in the original the point when the Tardis grows and shrinks are this generation’s ‘Logopolis’, the chilling moment when everything that once seemed safe and cosy about our travelling home turning in on itself and it looks great on screen, exactly the sort of life from the old series they should have been trying with a whole new generation of fans. The fact that these scenes manage to be so funny too despite the horror going on in the rest of the story is one of the deftest bits of writing in modern Who and the cast sell it superbly. The story only turns flat when it becomes, well, three-dimensional ironically, and moves away from the Doctor and Clara to an outside world that doesn’t feel real at all. Still, a great central concept, some strong lines and some excellent acting makes it more than worth 45 of your Earth minutes. 

 POSITIVES + The effects on Peter Capaldi’s big ol’ face appearing at the door of a model ‘2Dis’ that Clara can pick up and carry around in her pocket are really well done, as are the ones of the Tardis scurrying about on Capaldi’s hands like a hermit crab or the hand from Addams Family. That’s a very pat analogy actually: of all the Doctors so far the 12th is the crabbiest in many ways as well as the one who often looks at an issue ‘sideways’, waiting for other character to fix it before he gets fully invested or involved (one of the reasons Clara ends up filling in the vacuum where a fully heads-on Doctor would go). It’s also neat because the script goes out of its way to refer to the Tardis as the Doctor’s home’ (rather than his ‘car’, the metaphor most modern writers of the series tend to use): it’s very crab-like to carry your home on your back with you everywhere you go. You really believe that the Tardis has shrunk, even though we all know full well that the full-size Tardis proper has been replaced by the sort of models you can buy in the BBC shop. There are a lot of effects in this story though, more than usual, and it’s one of The Mill’s best because not one of them is shabby or obviously fake: that really does look like the Doctor’s hand, face and leg sticking out the Tardis model. It makes me want a sequel to ‘Planet Of the Giants’, with modern effects making insects huge and the everyday threatening, more than ever because this era of Dr Who could do it really really well. 

 NEGATIVES - By contrast, the effects used for The Boneless that make them shiver and shake like drawings never quite come off. In their ‘main’ phrase they’re bits of orange sparkly pixie pixel light, which is odd because everything in the comeback era is made out of orange sparkly light, including the Doctor’s regenerations. Except for a brief moment when they become the ‘other’ most popular Who alien colour, green. Surely there’s another colour in the special effects paintbox? They feel as childish and basic as the scribbles in ‘Fear Her’, even though everyone re-acts to them as if they’re the most horrible thing they’ve ever seen. No wonder they like hiding in the dark and undergrounds so much – it’s to hide their embarrassment from the host of other aliens who’ve tried to invade Earth over the years. 

 BEST QUOTE: Clara: ‘Go on, admit - I was a good Doctor wasn’t I?’ Dr: ‘You were an exceptional Doctor Clara – goodness had nothing to do with it’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Rigsy unexpectedly turns up again in ‘Face The Raven’. 

 ‘The Eye Of Torment’, a comic strip that ran in Dr Who magazine issues 477-480, isn’t a sequel in the strictest sense of the word but there are many parallels. Issue 477 came out the same week that ‘Flatline’ was on the TV and also features Clara in the fore of a story set in a more working environment than normal also in the present day in a plot about a largely invisible monster that makes the Doctor wonder about who she’s turning into. This story couldn’t be more different though: this one is very dark, with an alien influence that causes great depression in its host and causes people to commit suicide. The Doctor and Clara are stowaways on a rather beaten up old ‘sunship’, The Pollyanna, and saves the Doctor by getting the aliens and humans to start talking with each other. This is one of those comic strips that, like a lot of the Moffat era it has to be said, starts off very promising but kind of fizzles out by the time you reach the end. 

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