Vincent and The Doctor: Ranking - 157

  Vincent and The Doctor

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 5/6/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Richard Curtis, director: Jonny Campbell)

Rank: 157

'Well, that was an odd exhibition. Silurians in Monet's 'Lilypads'. Turner's 'Burning Houses Of parliament' with Terrileptil lurking in the background. Multiple Mona Lisas with 'this is a fake' written on the back. 'The Scream' featuring Bonnie Langford as Mel. Whistler's 'Are You My Mummy?' Actually 'Church At Auvers With Krafayis Alien Waving In Window' is the most normal painting here! 

 

 This is one of those stories that generally rates highly in modern episode polls and deservedly so – its a real risk of an episode, bringing to life a person from the past whose maybe not as immediately known to a family audience as one of the people on a banknote whose seen entirely different now to how they were viewed in their lifetime and, what’s more, dealing with their history of mental illness in a suitably scifi type way all in a family programme on at Saturday teatime. However the risks pay off handsomely and its easily the best thing Richard Curtis ever wrote, funny and poignant without falling into the syrup of so many of his film scripts (Interesting in itself that. When this story was first announced I thought Curtis’ saccharine combined with showrunner Steven Moffat’s love of fairytales and happy-ever-afters would make something teeth-shatteringly saccharine and instead its one of the darker stories of the 11^th Dr’s era). Vincent Van Gogh is the latest celebrity historical figure we meet through the Tardis keyhole and rather than toning down his eccentricity the production team play it up, making the entire story ‘about’ mental illness in a way that’s utterly new for ‘Who’, wondering openly how someone so talented can be so troubled and how someone so respected to us today could be seen as something of a nuisance nobody in his own time, who never sold a painting. It ends up a story not just about one man’s struggles to make his mark but gives all of us, struggling with the idea of failure in our lifetimes, hope that the future might be kinder than the present. Tony Curran is so good in the part, instantly getting this troubled soul as well as looking so like Can Gogh’s self-portraits its creepy (most films about paintings and painters hide the real things, to help us ‘forget’ how wrong the actors and actresses look – thinking of you ‘Mr Turner’ and ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ - but this one keeps chucking them into the plot). The ending – when the Doctor breaks his own rules to take Vincent into the future and show him how loved he is via Richard Curtis’ usual standby actor Bill Nighy in a surprisingly lowkey performance – is exquisite and has rightly become one of the most famous of modern DW moments. This is an episode that brought a lot of hope to a lot of people struggling to find their way and there aren’t many episodes of a TV series, even this TV series, that can do that. All of that is wonderful and very much what DW is for, more than deserving of a place mid-tier in this list. It’s just the rest of this story, the bits between that first meeting and joyous ending, are in truth pretty poor and make no sense if you stop to think about them. The story goes to great lengths to say that Vincent isn’t mad, just depressed and is frustrated that no one around him seems to realise that. The thing is though...he can see aliens. Aliens that no one else can see. At a time when people didn’t speak about aliens, but demons. Not only that, he adds them to the windows of his paintings so other people can see them as well. Frankly anyone around in 1890 who didn’t see that as madness was probably mad themselves. The closest explanation we get is ‘because he’s a good painter’ but being a great artists doesn’t give you super-powers of alien detection however observant you are. I like to think there’s a parallel adventure going on round the corner, only the guy or gal who painted aliens couldn’t draw them for toffee and everyone thought they were a bowl of fruit or something. Or even better a surrealist or cubist or pop-artist (we like your tins of soup Mr Warhol, but why is there a Krafayis tucking into one of them?!) especially as the aliens turn out to be of the conveniently invisible for most of the story types. It looks for a moment as if the plot is going to explain why and show to Van Gogh how important he is to the universe, but no – the one alien we see is not the explaining type. The idea that the Krafayis got separated from the others of their kind and is blind (well, somebody had to lose a body part in a story about Van Gogh, which was set before he chopped off his ear) is a neat twist on the usual sort of Who monsters but why they’ve chosen the outskirts of 19^th century Paris to land in or how they can track down humans at all when blind is never explained. If ever a DW monster were perfunctory its the Krafayis, which is odd given that the Doctor recognises them ‘from the dark times’ and thus they’re one of the few deeply powerful creatures he knew about in childhood before leaving Gallifrey. As fun as it is to watch Tony Curran, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan chasing an invisible monster wreaking havoc around an empty French villa, it also feels like a bad comedic fit for an episode that otherwise has so many serious things to say. The attempts to make the alien a ‘metaphor’ for mental illness really don’t work either; few people suffering from mental health would compare it to a dinosaur/bird hybrid that does physical damage to objects, that’s just silly; if that’s really what people were going for – rather than what they decided after the event – they’d have done better to make it a shadow, like the Vashta Nerada or Churchill’s ever-present black dog, like the Garm or Karnavista but less benign. One other point too: Van Gogh doesn’t alter his painting ‘The Church At Auvers’, so why can’t we see the Krafayis in the painting today? Only of course if he did alter it then how come the Doctor sees it? (And it’s not there in ‘our’ version of history, I’ve looked). Still, that’s non-scifi writers doing scifi I suppose and really the monster is just an excuse to make this feel like a ‘DW’ story. Honestly it would have been so much stronger had they dispensed with the scifi trappings altogether and made this a pure DW historical like the early days, the ones where the real monsters are humans whose motivation is ignorance not corruption and the people attacking Van Gogh because they don’t understand or appreciate him. Goodness knows the bits around the alien, of character setting from not just Van Gogh but the Doctor and Amy, are strong enough on their own for that to have worked. Vincent’s breakdown, when he gives in to depression and refuses to see anyone, is well handled, as on the edges as they dare go for what’s mostly a children’s show on a Saturday teatime and handled a lot kinder than other series would do too, even if his ‘recovery’ is more than a little sudden (the general theory is that he was delusional, not manic-depressive the way he’s portrayed here, but then that’s seeing Van Gogh through modern eyes, a person who was so unknown in his lifetime not many people were keeping detailed notes). Amy particularly comes on leaps and bounds in this story, adding a Rose/Martha/Donna style empathy to her usual feistiness and she’s notably a lot more ‘normal’ and understanding with the supposedly un-normal Vincent than she ever is with Rory and their ‘love’ weirdly feels far more natural, with all the jokes about red haired children and sunflowers (you wonder what Amy thought about this fling once the timelines came back together again and she remembered Rory, but I guess you can’t get into trouble for double dating when you’ve had your memory of the first love wiped). The 11^th Doctor, too, is at his best when championing the under-dog and bringing hope to people and Curtis gets Matt Smith’s sense of polite eccentricity better than most writers (perhaps because its not that far removed from his standard English leading men anyway – its no coincidence that of his two favourite leading men Bill Nighy is always listed as a potential Doctor and Hugh Grant actually was one, in a comic relief skit). It’s Van Gogh who steals the show though, both in character and acting and its him you remember long after the story ends. The filming in Croatia is excellent too (with a setting as near as dammit to the real Van Gogh painting ‘Cafe Terrace At Night’ at the start), as good a match for Paris as you can get without actually going to Paris and the lighting is particularly strong, making everything look, fittingly, like a painting and adding to the subtle fairytale vibe of series 5. A much loved story for so many reasons then, but one that’s something of a missed opportunity in so many others too.

+ The art department excel themselves with the re-creations of Van Gogh’s paintings, from the Krafayis perched at the top of the painting ‘The Church Of Auvers’ to the depiction of the broken Tardis in Van Gogh’s style to come in season finale ‘Big Bang’, which has deservedly become a popular picture amongst Who followers, on everything from tote bags to mobile phone cases. ‘Sunflowers’ and ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’ are also brilliantly re-created s real props too while the dialogue makes good use of ‘A Starry Night’ (a much more obvious painting for a scifi plot than ‘Church At Auvers’ - wouldn’t it have been better for Van Gogh to have drawn a ufo in that panting instead?)

- Van Gogh kills the invisible blind Krayfayis by accident with his easel acting like a stake in a scene that’s pure farce, the sort of low budget wave-the-camera-at-nothing-and-fall-over DW nonsense we thought we’d never have to sit through again in the new big(ish) budget series. Coming between the strong, heart-tugging scenes it does it seems even more out of place than it otherwise would and is everything DW is at its worst, all the more puzzling for coming in the middle of such a brave original story that’s DW at its best.