Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead: Ranking - 11

 

Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna and River Song, 31/5/2008-7/6/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 11

   'At night, when the books on the library shelves come to life, there's one section the others are all a little scared of: the Dr Who shelf. They all tried to be polite. 'Would you like a marmalade sandwich?' asked Paddington but the Dalek shot a hole right through the middle. 'Don't go there' said a monster 'That's where the wild things are!' 'Curiouser and curiouser' said Alice as a white rabbit leapt out of her book crying 'This books' overdue: I'm late!' 'Absolutely' enthused Aslaz the Lion 'Fancy having a spac-etime machine, that's preposterous - not like a door to a magical realm hiding in a wardrobe'.  'Oh just tell them to get lost' said 'Where's Wally' 'I always do'. Admittedly not everyone was so rude: Dennis The Menace was having fun running round the motorbike section with Ace while Biggles took the Brigadier up for a joy-ride in his plane. As for the Drs, Dr 1 was having a chat with The Wizard of Oz, Dr2 was hanging round with The cat In The Hat ('I would like a hat like that' he said, trading his stovepipe), Dr 3 was studying karate moves, Dr 4 was checking the cross-knit section for how to extend his scarf, Dr 5 was lost in a Whittaker's cricket almanac, Dr 6 was poncing about talking about how he'd read every book in the library and could 'improve' them if only he had the timer, Dr 7 had his nose in a book on chess tactics, Dr 8 was looking up operas in the Groves dictionary of classical music, Dr 9 was chortling through a book on Big Brother, Dr 11 was reading a Beano annual, Dr 12 was trying to write his own pompous lecture on something important or other and Dr 13 had a book on the climate crisis open on her knee. And Dr 10? He had far far too many books to choose from. How could he possibly learn everything he wanted to know in one night?' 

 

Ah, the library. That nice quiet boring little place where nothing ever happens, stocked (hopefully) with DW books and Target novelisations, an escape into a place of safety when the real world gets too scary. Well not in DW it isn’t! In one of my favourite examples of the extraordinary world of DW crashing into our boring ordinary one, the tiny village library is a whole planet full of books rather boringly called ‘Library’ (and definitely my first port of call if I ever get the chance to travel in the Tardis for real) and a place that just happens to have been invaded by flesh-eating alien parasites known as the Vashta Nerada. Admittedly I think I got bed bugs from going to the library once (yet another reason to regret wasting eight hours of my life reading the novelisation of ‘The Monster Of Peladon’) but by and large trips to the library aren’t usually quite as, well, hazardous as this. What a simply brilliant idea: libraries are worlds to get lost in and so are most DW worlds, so to combine the two and make them a whole planet is one of my favourite inventions of the modern series. It’s a wonder we hadn’t had a story like this before (the closest is ‘The Space Museum’, places full of artefacts that make the past come alive being another place where DW fans tend to congregate). A lot of future DW writers fell in love with this series as much from reading the novels as they did watching the TV series and there’s a reason that the DW novelisations have outsold basically every TV franchise going, to the point where 151 of the 155 ‘classic Who’ stories were novelised up to 1991 to varying degrees of success – the worst ones make cliched DW B movie plots seem even more like cliched B movie plots, particularly some of the Peter Davison and Colin baker books which border on the unreadable, while the best ones such as ‘The Massacre’ ‘The Crusade’ ‘The Enemy Of the World’ and ‘The Myth Makers’ are classics of literature as worthy as anything by any great name – and probably a few others too given that even I never quite got through reading them all (in case you were wondering the four stragglers were the two Eric Saward-penned Dalek stories which Terry Nation delayed signing off in his own lifetime and the two ‘finished’ Douglas Adams scripts which he always meant to get round to writing himself one day but never did, all completed in the 21^st century after Nation and Adams’ deaths, along with the uncompleted Adams story ‘Shada’). The novelisations have continued scatter-gun, into the new series too: there are currently 23 of the things novelising stories from the 9^th to the 13^th Drs, although shockingly this story isn’t one of them – you’d think it would be an obvious choice reading a book about monsters that, erm, hide in books. Most DW fans are, like the Dr, curious – about everything. 

Unlike every other scifi franchise you can think of, this is a series that was designed from the first to snare a general family audience rather than an already scifi-literate one and make them ask big questions about life, death and their place in the universe, originally was pitched as an educational series as much as an entertainment (that’s why a science and a history teacher were at the heart of the early days, so they could comment on the futuristic and historical stories). As much as the series changed pretty quickly DW never quite lost that ethos that geeky nerds who know everything are something to aspire to rather than fear (just compare with how poor Wesley Crusher gets treated as the butt of all the jokes in Star Trek); admittedly when we got our own boy whizzkid in Adric he wasn’t that popular either but, as a general rule, in DW learning in DW is a good thing. Just take the Dr: compared to all other super heroes and science-fiction protagonists you can think of he’s the one who travels through space and time in a box that happens to have a massive library (one which, judging by lines in ‘The TV Movie’ and ‘Tooth and Claw’ he’s spent as much time in as we have reading stories). To take away our ‘safe’ space then and fill it with monsters is, in many ways, the most DW thing any DW writer has possibly ever done. Steven Moffat is, of all the showrunners, producers and script-editors who’ve ‘run’ DW, one of the most happily bookish and nerdy going and with an enthusiasm for literature that’s spanned most of his other series (‘Sherlock’ and ‘Jerkyl’ are also based on books he probably started reading at the library, while ‘Press Gang’ is a series all about writers – though I suspect most of these delinquents probably got thrown out of their library at one time or another, with the exception of Sarah and Kenny who are the epitome of nerds who spent all their spare time there). As a regular reader of (probably mostly) secondhand books Moffat has surely experienced, as I have and no doubt most of you have, the curious problem of silverfish. Sadly they’re not actual fish (though I can’t speak for what happens to the ones that nest inside bath books) but insects that find books the perfect hiding places: they’re dark, tend to live on bookshelves that aren’t disturbed by humans all that often and unless you happen to have very quick eyes are tiny enough to hide away amongst the small print without you noticing, giving you a real jump-scare if one happens to move suddenly when you’re engrossed in a book. What a natural leap, then, to the Vashta Nerada who are some of the scariest of DW monsters (‘the piranhas of the air’ as the Dr memorably calls them), micro-organisms that live in every book, but in small enough numbers on Earth so as we’re not to notice them – left unchecked on the planet Library, though, gathering in colossal numbers they’ve swarmed into a huge flesh-eating monster. Perfect: every DW fan at home who owns a book (which, hopefully, is everyone) already has a pet monster of their own to love, even if its benign. 

Creating a true flesh eating monster would have been a bit far even for one of the scariest eras of the series, however, so what Moffat does is put the victims inside space-suits with tinted visors, exploring an apparently abandoned university, so that all we see are the end results when they’ve been eaten down to the skeleton. Even so this effect, with a skeleton suddenly appearing out of the darkness, is one of the single most terrifying images in all of DW (or so I presumed until I went online after the story was on and found half the people making fun of it and half terrified out of our tiny minds; never has an effect split the fanbase more – for the record, I say its scary). Moffat ups the ante by throwing in another more existentially scary threat, by having the space suits ‘trap’ a person’s dying thoughts in a brief timeloop before they fade out of existence, a whole tapestry of a person’s personality stripped away to a few stray words (Moffat is particularly good at creatures who don’t simply kill you outright but pose bigger questions about identity and who we are – the Weeping Angels, taking people out of time and away from the lives they’d built up for themselves, pose a similar threat). Why are people in spacesuits inside the library? Well, its kind of like the future equivalent of the Marie Celeste, only not caused by Daleks this time (see ‘The Chase’), with trillions of life-forms disappearing overnight in one sudden movement in what, we discover a lot later, is an event that happens hundreds of years before the explorers arrive. One person is particularly keen to understand what happened and (spoilers) he turns out to be the grandson of the library founder, who is now in late middle age himself and desperate to find out what happened to his family. Not least because, as it turns out, his aunt is responsible for most of it: she died as a little girl and was put into the library’s computers through technological jiggery pokery so that she could get the kind of afterlife all DW fans dream of: an existence running around in a library the size of a planet, with all those books from all those different civilisations to read (knowing my look my afterlife there would turn out like ‘The Mind Robber’). And she’s the one who turns out to have ‘saved’ all the visitors that day, keeping them safe from ending up fish food for the Vashta Nerada. Only we don’t find that out until right near the end – what’s so clever about this story is the way that mysteries and clues are dangled in front of us, luring us on, each explanation delayed by another question until we haven’t got a clue what’s going on but the plot all makes sense by the end credits: the opening shots of the story are a tiny electronic ball floating through space, quickly followed by a little girl being attended by her own ‘doctor’ who watches events on her television – we’re so used, by now, to 21^st century Who throwing lots of different plot-strands at us one after the other in the modern stories (perhaps the biggest change in storytelling from the ‘classic’ series) that it takes an agonisingly long time to work out that the two are actually one and the same. Charlotte Abigail Lux is one of the great DW characters even though we don’t see much of her: she’s kind of like ‘us’ at home, sitting down to watch an episode of DW and caring enough about the people she sees that she wants to ‘save’ them and give them life beyond their own short lifespan (pretty close to what happens whenever we read about a character in a book, including DW ones). 

She also has her own personal ‘Doctor’ come psychotherapist leading her on - a pretty good metaphor for our doctor, as he seems to have all the answers and all the knowledge but is also concerned with her safety and trying to get her to see the ‘truth’ (I’m sure I’m not the only fan to wonder if this was some future incarnation of the Dr we hadn’t met yet and so got fooled by River Song being a future companion we hadn’t met instead – not one from the past the Dr can’t remember because they had their memory wiped but secretly they’re the most important person on the whole of Gallifrey; a plot like that would be nonsense; Moffat is one of those writers whose always so good at guessing what I’m thinking and then laughing at me for it that it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s really a bit of computer software himself). Dr Moon turns out, though, to just be a hit of computer virus software designed by Charlotte’s family to keep her company and look after her. A pretty good metaphor for ‘our’ doctor too now that I think about it! 

The absolute first class twist is the idea that everyone in the library has been ‘saved’, the spooky message passed down for years as if its folklore, isn’t some evangelical cult but refers to the way Charlotte has uploaded all the visitors to the computer software alongside her for safe-keeping, transformed into library computer binary code until the threat of the Vashta Nerada can be solved. Moffat’s clearly been thinking about the changes to the library since his day and the biggest one is that almost all libraries have computers now (i.e. the ‘enemy’ of more than a few DW stories has now invaded his ‘safe place’); its a logical DWy leap from there, too, to having literal ‘human interfaces’ who are, well, human faces ‘borrowed’ from people who’ve died and had their bodies donated to the local library the way we do park benches today{perhaps the scariest thing in one of DW’s scariest stories, is the way these cod-librarians read out people’s last messages of terror and fright at being chased down by the Vashta Nerada in the same monotone voices as, say, a typical librarian or a cyberman (or a Librarian cybermen: now there’s a sequel I‘m dying to see!) Its easy to see how a writer as close to his inner child as Moffat always seems to be went back to remembering key moments from his childhood, sat in a library reading DW books, maybe slightly scared of the librarian who didn’t wish to be disturbed turning round to glare at him, frightened by the un-natural hush that descends in a library (the title about ‘silence’ in the library is so very clever!) wishing he could put the book down and become part of the action himself (by contrast Russell T Davies read his DW novels on long car journeys and made up DW stories of his own if he ran out of pages before he got to his destination - he gets his equivalent of this story in the mad rush through traffic in ‘The Runaway Bride’ and given that the two were firm friends its not inconceivable that Russell mentioned this to Steven as one of his biggest memories, setting Moffat off thinking how he used to read DW). And then, having honoured his past, Moffat throws forward to the future by introducing River Song as one of the archaeologists exploring the library – someone who already knows the Dr intimately even though he doesn’t know her at all yet. River is another brilliant creation, always living her life in reverse to the Dr so that one of them knows what’s going to happen to the other, only they’ve made a pact not to tell each other: a terrific idea and very much part of Moffat’s unique understanding of time in this series as something to explore every bit as much as space. By now towards the end of series 4 Russell T knows that he might not be long for this job and that he has to think about moving on one day so has quietly sounded Moffat out about taking over from him. 

This story would have been the first Steven would have written knowing that some day, one day soon, the DW job might be his – and as things turn out, with Russell half-retiring through a run of ‘specials’ across 2009, its the last time Moffat gets to write for DW before becoming showrunner. River Song’s favourite catchphrase is ‘spoilers’, referring to all the things she can’t tell the Dr yet, but what many fans miss is that she’s a whacking great big spoiler herself, a tease for all the directions the series might go in when the new showrunner takes over one day. I would have laid money on the future mysterious 11^th Dr meeting River again in his first story and the pair going on adventures together, although that’s not how things turn out. However River’s hard character to write for, which might be why she’s used so sparingly: her three best stories by far (admittedly some of them multiparters) are the ones based round her: the mystery of who she is (‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and the four linked episodes that follow which are sort of signposted here with the astronaut suits, her ‘first’ adventure from her point of view and ‘last’ from ours ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ and her ‘first’ adventure from the Dr’s point of view and last from hers, as per here). Stick her in a story about something else and she never quite fits, if only because one of them knows how the story is going to turn out. As much as we come to think of River as being a companion of the 11^th Dr, the Mrs Robinson whose both older and younger than his impossibly youthful looking yet impossibly old alien, I think River works best with the 10^th Dr. Her playful teasing and flirting is very much the sort of thing he’s used to doing to other people, usually when knowing a lot more than they do, so to see the tables turned and have that passed down to him, while David Tennant gets to use his best perplexed look, is delicious (I wonder, too, if this is Moffat realising he has to deliver a very different kind of Dr when he takes over, but not wanting to throw out what made the revival of the show so successful decides to move a lot of the character into River as a sort of substitute 10^th Dr; note that her archaeological team refer to her as ‘The Professor’ which is what Ace used to call Dr 7). Honestly River’s never as interesting again as she is here, when she’s a whacking big mystery and as genius as the later bit of writing that reveals who River is might be, the mystery is never as interesting when its unravelled. For now she’s one of the best surprises DW has ever delivered and all the more so because, like the Dr, we had no idea she was coming with, ironically enough, no ‘spoilers’ anywhere until she burst onto our screens. The fact that she saves the Dr, who in turn saves her, thus cementing their entire relationship to come on first meeting, is also so clever: the Dr can never tell her how close she comes to death, yet in true Moffat style he gives her the gift of an eternal afterlife where she never truly dies (and, when we come to know her as a sort of Dr substitute with multiple interests and careers, there’s no better place or her to end up than in a library). Alex Kingston is an inspired bit of casting and is never more comfortable in the role than when playing River as a sort of futuristic Indiana Jones (its a real shame they drop the archaeological professorial angle after this as its one of the most interesting things about her). David Tennant, too, is clearly enjoying having a new character with as much depth as his own to bounce off and gets to show off his full range from manic running around to sympathetic sullen silences to sheer bafflement rather than just being smugly confident and in control. As brilliant as Russell is at writing for the Dr he created and as brilliant as Drs 11 and 12 that Moffat goes on to create too, I’ve always felt that Moffat ‘got’ the 10^th Dr better than anyone and that he ‘got’ him better even than his own creations: this is an enthusiastic doctor who thinks life is one great big adventure but whose secretly running away from himself the whole time, trying to get lost in other things as a distraction from the weight he carries on his shoulders (something finally made explicit in ‘Day Of the Doctor’ but is entirely in keeping with how Moffat always wrote for him). 

Other writers, even Russell occasionally, make this Dr all light or all dark, but Moffat knows you can’t have light without shade so makes him both simultaneously (and shadows are a key feature of this story thanks to the Vashta Narada living in the shadows). Above all else, though, this is a great story for Donna. Moffat needs to get her out the way so he can have fun with the Dr-River action but the sub-plot he gives to Donna, having her ‘saved’ (which for the longest time we think means ‘dead’) is an inspired way of giving her something separate to do. As well as giving us a chilling cliffhanger back in the days when we only had a handful of them a year so they had to be good(Donna’s face being picked by the computer to relay messages of warning) the sub-plot of Donna’s parallel life in an alternate reality does all sorts of things: it explains without explaining the mystery of where all the people has gone, it sets up the finale for what happens to River Song and best of all it gives Donna more character than she’s had in any story so far, giving her the perfect life she’s always dreamed of before snatching it away again in such a heartbreaking way (again, Moffat ‘got’ Donna better than anyone outside her creator Russell too – he sees the desperate longing for an ordinary family life and stability underneath all the shouting off, picking up from ‘The Runaway Bride’ that Donna craves marriage and a supportive family more than anything else in the universe). It’s so sweet seeing Donna fall in love (with her ‘dream husband’ – a man with a stutter who won’t interrupt her!), before it isn’t, Donna slowly and angrily learning to see the cracks in her (literal) computer simulation world. Especially when one of the archaeological team, Evangelista, comes back to tell her all about it (a superb turn from Talulah Riley, Elon Musk’s ex, who in two separate episodes triggers our prejudices against her as a blonde bimbo we find as irritating as the rest of her archaeological team who all find her irritating, then she earns our sympathy as Donna talks to her, then she earns our respect as the computer ‘shifts a point in her IQ’ and she’s brave enough to show Donna what’s going on (not like most computers then – I swear mine’s lost me a few IQ points down the years). I love the fact that Moffat writers for Donna’s softer, gentler, sweeter side, making her the only person sympathetic to Talulah when everyone else is shouting at her, because Donna is more than just her caricature (even more than the Dr. whose too busy rushing round saving lives to care for the ones he’s lost) – which is why Evangalista comes to Donna first. As great as Catherine Tate is in her other stories she’s at her best playing this more vulnerable caring Donna than the shouty version, with the look of glee on her face as she tucks her children in at night and her horror when she finds out they aren’t ‘real’ the highlight of her time in the Tardis (so far). 

‘Library’ then is a superb story, with some brilliant plot twists that’s perfectly cast (no space to talk about the rest of the archaeological team but they’re all good and memorable too, with the clever gag of having two Daves who need to explain why they’re Dave 1 and Dave 2 even in the middle of running for their life): the library might be the most unusual place to have a ‘base under siege’ type DW story but its one of the best examples of the genre, the script is emotional and scary and full of great lines and big themes. The one big problem is that so much of this story revolves around mysteries – that of the Library and River’s – so, as brilliant as it is watching this story the first time, you can never again feel quite as involved with it when you know all the answers. This is a rare DW story that gets worse on re-watches, where instead you get to notice more of the story’s faults (the repetition of the astronauts getting caught in the shadows and speaking their last thoughts over and over, the uneven length it takes people to die depending on how much plot is going on, the weird way that Charlotte is painted out to be a curious child who loves reading who spends all her time watching TV, the way Dr Moon is super cryptic even when he doesn’t need to be). In that sense its weirdly enough the opposite of the Target DW novelisations that inspired it, that re-made DW stories in a new format and made them worth experiencing all over again in a different format - and one that’s even more frustrating in the DVD and Blu-Ray age when we can re-watch as many times as we want. Instead this is a story to be savoured, to be seen intermittently (unlike other favourite stories which you can go back to over and over). First time round, though, this is one of the greatest DW stories of them all: smart, funny, with more surprises and plot twists per minute than any other story and full of action and horror and terror and emotions and characters and mystery. If there’s a single better more creative and imaginative story than this one in the entire Library Planet, well, I’ll be amazed. One thought though: does the ‘Library’ planet have a science fiction section? And if so what could possibly be in it when the science fact of this world is so wonderfully weird and imaginative yet plausible as this one?

+Moffat loves giving his two part stories a different ‘feel’ per episode, resolving a cliffhanger in such a way that we’re still kept guessing what’s going on all the way through the rest of the episode. with more answers. In time it will become ridiculous (particularly his Peter Capaldi stories) but this one is a classic: we see the opening shot of the first episode again at the start of the second, but from the point of view of the Dr not the ‘unknown narrator’ with all the extra information we’ve gained. In one move we find out that the girl is related to the computer ball in some way and the Doctor’s response (sympathy and more of his typical ‘oh so sorrys’) before we’ve quite caught up with him only pushes the mystery further.

- Trillions of life forms were apparently ‘saved’ and return back to life but we only see the merest smattering of them on screen, all of them humans which seems odd (this is an intergalactic library visited by everyone after all and surely we can’t be the only species to read books. I’m sure there’s a corner of the library filled with Oods and Sensorites somewhere at the very least, with Androgums browsing the cookery shelves, while I reckon The Master has spent a long time in the ‘crime’ section too). The story could have really played up the existential horror of people who just popped out for the day to read a book waking up to find out that its hundreds of years later and everyone they knew and loved is dead (a sort of ‘Weeping Angels’ trick in reverse) but annoyingly Moffat never pulls that lever, instead being too concerned with River Song’s story. Yeah that story’s a good one too, but there are so many other lives changed in an instant that day and the Dr doesn’t even pause to think about them or help them navigate their new lives in the future. Shocking – I’m surprised they don’t take away his library card!