Every Doctor Has Their Day

Based on his writing for television, one imagines that Steven Moffat's enjoys puzzles in whatever spare time his professional commitments allow. On the sitcom Coupling, Moffat showed a great affinity for making seemingly disparate pieces come together into a satisfying whole, often by playing around with time. Not surprisingly, this approach has been even more thoroughly explored in his writing for Doctor Who.

Following his relatively straightforward first story* with the "empty child", Moffat has taken the time travel aspect of the show and run with it like no other writer in Doctor Who's 50 year history. From his first script for David Tennant's Doctor to the overarching story-lines of his time as the show's lead writer, time has been a key element of the narrative puzzles he's assembled. This was true even of the 2007 mini-episode "Time Crash", produced for the BBC's Children in Need charity event, which presented a brief interlude with David Tennant's Doctor and his 1980s predecessor, Peter Davison.

In some ways that brief vignette was good practice for yesterday's special episode for the show's 50th anniversary, "Day of the Doctor". Having the current Doctor meet his former selves was done to mark both the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the show and, despite the show not being on TV at the time, the 30th and 40th as well^. This precedent of celebrating the past in a way virtually no other show can added a particularly tricky piece to the puzzle, because while these stories had their moments none could be classified as Doctor Who's finest hour. 

Following an uneven run of stories that culminated in "The Name of the Doctor", I had my doubts as to how well Moffat would succeed at crafting a puzzle whose pieces included...

-celebrating Doctor Who's past in a way longtime fans would appreciate but didn't require decades worth of background knowledge for everyone else to enjoy.

-displaying the fun parts of multi-Doctor stories without succumbing to the pitfalls that made previous ones less than great.

-fostering optimism about a 60th anniversary (and beyond).

My doubts gave way to anticipation a little over a week before "Day of the Doctor" aired, thanks to one of two prequels that had been announced for the story. What made "Night of the Doctor" so good was not that it gave longtime fans like myself what we wanted, particularly a return appearance as the Doctor by Paul McGann, but rather that it did so in unexpected ways. In a little under seven minutes, Moffat managed to subvert our assumptions about some key elements of the show's mythology while also telling a sharply written story about gut-wrenching choices. It also helped explain how John Hurt as the mysterious "War Doctor" fits into the larger story.

The idea of a missing incarnation seemed to annoy a lot of hardcore fans, especially when it was announced that none of the show's pre-2005 Doctors would be in the anniversary episode. Despite three of those actors being dead and none of the others except McGann looking like they did when they were the current Doctor, an awful lot of "fans" seem to have prejudged the story as a disappointment solely based on Tennant being the only established past Doctor in it. This is amusing in retrospect because it was having John Hurt as this newly revealed Doctor that made the multi-Doctor element work in a way that I can't envision any of Tennant's and Smith's predecessors doing. 

Because he represented a shadowy period in the Doctor's story before the one that started with Christopher Eccleston's Doctor in "Rose", Hurt was able to embody the Doctor's entire past. On the one hand, his jabs at Tennant and Smith harkened back to William Hartnell putting his successors in line in "The Three Doctors", but he also personified the tension between who the Doctor was and who he's become. More to the point, having an actor of Hurt's calibre seemed to push Tennant and especially Smith out of their comfort zones. The end result is that a story that could have been an overblown mess feels believable on a character level, which enabled me to enjoy the icing on the cake all the more.

Admittedly, not all of the icing was to my taste. The war scenes on Gallifrey felt a bit too "Star Wars" for my liking, presumably intended to give more 3-D bang for the buck (or rather quid), but the return of the Zygons and seeing UNIT led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart was great fun, as were other nods to the past like a return to the scene of the very first episode. Needless to say, it was also fantastic to see that the line about no pre-2005 Doctors appearing wasn't quite true either, and seeing a glimpse of incoming Doctor Peter Capaldi was a terrific touch. And then there's an element that's simply beyond objective assessment for a fan of my generation, Tom Baker.

Baker declined to appear in the 20th anniversary story "The Five Doctors", in which he was only seen in footage from an unfinished story by Douglas Adams. Coming just two years after the end of his seven year run as the Doctor, that decision wasn't surprising, though, Baker later said he regretted it and in recent years seems to have re-embraced Doctor Who. Seeing him as the museum curator who may or may not be another version of the Doctor may not have made total sense but here again on the level of character it worked, providing that elusive piece of the puzzle whose final form looks even cooler than I imagined.

*Technically, Moffat's first script for Doctor Who was a 1999 charity sketch called "The Curse of the Fatal Death" starring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor and Jonathan Pryce as the Master. Like all the best parodies, it also worked as a good example of the thing it was spoofing.

^There a lot I could write about both the 1993 Doctor Who/Eastenders crossover "Dimensions in Time" and the audio drama "Zagreus", but I'll leave it at saying that both were done in good spirit but neither is especially good.

The Law of Averages - Marvel Style

At some point, the law of averages dictates that one of the current run of interlinked Marvel Comics movies will be terrible. By this, I mean not just something disappointing but rather truly awful. For now, though, the people running these shows have displayed an amazing aptitude for translating 50+ years of comic book continuity into crowd-pleasing spectacles that blur the line between art and commerce as well as any movies since the original Star Wars trilogy.

Though the new Thor movie The Dark World is not that inevitable dud, I nonetheless have mixed feelings about it. Usually, sequels are clearly better or worse than their predecessors, but this one managed the neat trick of being a bit of both. Ultimately, I prefer the tone of Shakespearean grandeur that Kenneth Branagh brought to the first one, but The Dark World probably fits better into the post-Avengers scheme of things, even if it is a bit uneven.

The most striking thing about the current run of Marvel movies, aside from how faithful they've managed to be to the comics, is the extent to which the actors are the key. Not surprisingly, the actors reflect the slightly uneven nature of the movie. In the plus column, we have Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston and especially Stellan Skarsgård, the last of whom magnificently depicted the continuing repercussions from the events of The Avengers. On the negative side, Christopher Eccleston wasn't used quite enough, Natalie Portman was used a bit too much and we didn't see nearly enough of Kat Dennings' cleavage. 

After re-reading the above, I realize that it might not be clear that I really did enjoy the movie. Thor was never a favorite of mine in the comics, but the first movie made me a believer, and the second has done nothing to dampen that faith. With a nice balance of action, humor and heart, it felt like a good storyline from the comics, one that I would have enjoyed reading month or sitting down to read in one go as a "graphic novel". As it stands, though, it'll be an 18 month wait to see what he's been up to since the (now inevitable with Marvel's movies) post-credits scene. I'm not looking forward to the wait, but I suspect it will be worth it.

The Lou or the John?

I once believed we lived in a world that if not fully fair was at least touched by the hand of justice. Then, I realized that this is the same world in which John Lennon and Lou Reed are both dead but John Mayer and Lou Bega are alive. As the veil lifted, I simultaneously wept and vomited. It wasn't pretty, but it was still more pleasant than listening to either "Your Body Is a Wonderland" or "Mambo #5". As of this writing, neither Mayer nor Bega has offered an apology, but they clearly owe us one.