Looking Forward: Doctor Who, Series 7

It's been a long wait, but the new series of Doctor Who is almost upon us. Since the cult sci-fi series' relaunch in 2005, it has aired in the spring, usually beginning around the Easter weekend, but this year Steven Moffat has kept us waiting until the end of summer. As the evenings begin to grow darker, the atmosphere intensifies, the monsters that keep viewers behind the sofas are that bit scarier, the nightmares a little bit more real. But what awaits the Doctor and his brave companions this time around?

Daleks again, for one thing. So often killed off for good, but they always return, bigger and more numerous and more imposing than before. Or, alternatively, brightly coloured and/or offering round cups of tea. This lot certainly look impressive - but I've started to tire of the question, "How do we improve on Daleks?" being answered with, "MORE Daleks!" It is, however, grand storyteller Moffat in charge, so I think we can count on some more plot than mere grandeur.

More monsters! Dinosaurs - on a spaceship! Weeping angels again, including a creepy, creepy weeping cherub. (Eep!) The Doctor getting out of control again, flipping back to his "vengeance!" setting. (He seems to flip between two settings - vengeance and mercy, which coincide with whether he thinks he is more dangerous travelling alone or with a friend.) America! And then the trailer ends with this image that the BBC have been plastering all over their marketing: the Doctor carrying a limp and lifeless Amy Pond in his arms.

But will they really do it? Come on, Moff. I dare you.

Time and time again, since the relaunched series, the question has been asked: will the Doctor's companion be killed off for real? First of all we had Rose's voiceover in her final episode: "This is the story of how I died." Well, I'm sure I don't have to point out the logical flaw in that. Two series later, Rose (who had been trapped in a parallel universe forever and ever, impossible to return or it would mean the end of the universe) returned, and warned Donna she was going to die. So did an insane Dalek.

Donna didn't die.

Both of those companions' departures were heartrending. Neither were ever going to leave the Doctor of their own free will. They got too attached, and I wonder if the head writer at the time, Russell T. Davies, felt that he had written himself into a corner. How was he ever going to let these characters go? But he found a way, and perhaps that way was more tragic than killing Rose or Donna outright. Perhaps.

At the end of series 6, I thought that Moffat and co had written Amy and her husband Rory out of the series quite neatly, with the Doctor realising that their travelling with him was too much of a risk, dropping them off at home to live happily ever after, a subdued but tidy tying up of their characters' journeys. So I was rather dismayed to read that their real ending was to be "heartbreaking." Now, I'm as big a fan of a good tragedy as anyone, but if every send-off is a tearjerker, does it diminish its power? Does that have to be the norm? (I know Martha's farewell wasn't a tissue-fest, but I think she was a weaker character anyway.)

But is Amy really going to die? We've been fooled too many times. Neither Rose nor Donna actually died when they were supposed to, nor - SPOILER ALERT - did the Doctor in 2011 and, if you want to include Moffat's other works, what about Sherlock? (Although that should have surprised no one familiar with the Holmes mythology.) Besides, if the BBC have put that image out so publicly, they've taken away any shock value of killing off Amy Pond. Haven't they?

But what if that's what they want you to think? Maybe they're double-bluffing. I dare you, Moffat! I dare you to actually kill off Amy. Who, by the way, is not the Doctor's only companion. I get so irritated when the TV magazines continue to show pictures of the Doctor and Amy posing together, as the Doctor has posed in publicity with all the other young, pretty girls he's taken for companions. Amy travels with her husband Rory, and their romance has been a key element of the last two seasons - so why must the publicists keep on leaving him out?

I'm ranting, sorry. The other part of Rory's story is that he is the man who keeps on cheating death. It's become quite an in-joke, in fact. How many times has he died since his character's introduction? He's lived for thousands of years - but perhaps, if Amy is really and truly killed off in this upcoming series, his fate will catch him up properly, and he will "greet death like an old friend."


Huh. That's rather a gloomy thought to dwell on, though. The other thing of interest is, of course, the new companion, Amy and Rory's replacement. Aside from the actress playing her, Jenna-Louise Coleman (young, pretty and female) the Moff has kept mum about this new character, not even revealing her name. This silence leads me to wonder what the big secret is. My theory is that she is not a modern Earthling. Perhaps she is from another planet, far in the past or far in the future, and that revealing her name as Gingledwina, Starshine or Aelfrida would spoil the surprise.

Head writer Steven Moffat and new companion Jenna
image taken from the Guardian website

Like last year, it appears that series 7 will be split in two, and, because of the unusual scheduling, the annual Christmas episode will actually come part-way through the series. How will that work, I wonder, if they leave part 1 on a massive cliffhanger as they did last year? The Christmas Special tends to be a stand-alone episode, but will they work it into the overall series storyline this year?

All these questions, and more, leave me shivering with anticip...

TV: Sherlock

I'm the first to admit it: sometimes I can be a real literary snob. When I find out about a new TV or film adaptation of a favourite book, I find myself excited and apprehensive in equal measure. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to leap on every use of artistic license in the FilmOfTheBook, but I do notice if someone acts in a way that is inconsistant with their character, (for example, Faramir in The Lord of the Rings) or if new events are inserted into the story that are noticeably out of place (such as the Death Eaters at the Burrow in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) if a really significant, character-defining line is omitted, ("DON'T - CALL - ME - COWARD!" in the aforementioned Harry Potter) or if it just "feels wrong." (ITV's recent Wuthering Heights, though accurate, just didn't live up to the pictures in my head.)


When I saw the trailer for last year's film entitled Sherlock Holmes, I recoiled in horror. I am loath to repeat my exact snooty remarks about it, but I did not like the look of it in the slightest. It looked to my mind like a mock-James Bond action film which was trying to be funny. However, I never actually saw the film, and my friends who did, unanimously declared it a lot better, a lot truer, than the trailer implied. Also, except for The Hound of the Baskervilles I haven't actually read any of Conan Doyle's novels since I was about twelve, and am undoubtably influenced by my impressions of the time: very clever, but a bit old-fashioned and stuffy.

And then another version of the famous detective popped up, months after the last. I was alerted to this through micro-blogging site Twitter, when a rather successful TV writer named Steven Moffat opened an account to talk about his latest project. Mr Moffat's writing skills burst into the public consciousness in 2005 when he sent Great Britain diving for cover behind the nearest sofa with four words: "Are you my mummy?" Over the next four years Moffat wrote one Doctor Who story per series, awakening the nation's terrors of Things Under The Bed, Things That Move When You're Not Looking and Things In The Shadows, before making fans shudder and cheer when he took on the job full-time. It is this blogger's opinion that Moffat's first series was the most consistently good since Doctor Who was revived.

So when I heard he was working on a series about Sherlock Holmes, I determined to watch it, without knowing a thing about it other than its writer. When the Radio Times came in, I turned straight to the Sherlock feature and looked at the picture: Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) outside 221B Baker Street. And they looked good. Cumberbatch looked younger than the usual Holmes but even from the picture, I could tell he had the right air. Watson, well, I never could quite picture him. TV and film Watsons never quite looked right to me, though I wasn't sure what he should look like. But Freeman has the right sort of everyman manner about him. It helped that he was Arthur Dent in a recent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Then I read the first paragraph of the article, which pointed out the thing I'd somehow managed to miss. His Sherlock was set in the 21st century. Oh, the heresy. And I didn't mind. More, I was embarrassed not to have noticed the characters were in modern dress. I read on, and, possibly hypnotised by the Moff's supernatural power of the pen, found myself agreeing with every word he wrote: Conan Doyle didn't write stuffy period drama, but fast-paced detective thrillers. TV and film adaptations formerly were in danger of forgetting this, and viewers certainly were, building up an idea of Holmes that wasn't actually there. At this point I became aware of an uncomfortable recognition of this in myself and resolved to go down to blockbuster and check out the recent film and examine it on its own merits.

Watching the TV series, it became clear that Holmes and Watson translated well into the twenty-first century, if in fact Conan Doyle didn't have a time machine and wrote it for this very purpose. Holmes' first line to Watson: "How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

I was hooked on Sherlock from the first minutes. The police are giving a press conference about their investigations into a string of "serial suicides," and every so often everyone in the room's mobile phones ring in unison. All have the same text message, a single word. "Wrong." This Sherlock is well at home with technology and the modern world, a fact that is shown through his deductions throughout the episode, which are truly astounding: being able to track down the killer from one scratched word: "Rache." The original story: A Study in Scarlet reveals this to be the German for Revenge, but knowledge of the book won't help with that detail in A Study in Pink.

To help us mere mortals, snatches of Holmes' thought-processes flash up on the screen, such as a map of London complete with traffic directions and short cuts during a chase.

Holmes is brilliant, arrogant, deeply unsettling, (seemingly) clueless when it comes to personal interaction, wonderfully, perfectly Sherlock Holmes. Only one person could call himself a "high-functioning sociopath" as a put-down to someone else. Also, his voice is perfect: a bit posh, deep and rather disdainful but somehow reassuring. I'm in control, his voice says.

Watson is a well-rounded character, brave and intelligent (as an army doctor should be) and ordinary, but holds his own against the rather other-worldly, impossible Holmes. The interaction between them is wonderful (more than one character in the first episode is convinced they are a couple, much to Watson's bemusement.)

There's so much more I could say about this series, but I don't want to give away plot spoilers, so all I will say for the time being is, if you haven't seen the first two episodes, go to BBC iplayer and watch them now. If you have: go anyway. Watch them again.

Alas, it is a British series, and only three episodes long. The last one is on Sunday night, 9PM. Watch it.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor: First impressions. Here be spoilers.

Just a short post, this time, but I thought it only fair to state for the record my first thoughts on Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, and the first episode of the new series. Warning - Spoilers!

If I were to summarise it in one sentence, I would say "I enjoyed it, but it doesn't feel like Doctor Who." There wasn't very much to link this series to the last one, which I think was intentional to mark Steven Moffat taking over the job as Big Boss Man, making a break from the old and starting with a clean canvas. When Ecclestone regenerated into Tennant, he still had Rose, and, essentially could just carry on where he left off. Tennant regenerated alone, and it was definitely the end of one story and the beginning of another, and it feels that way. The titles are different. The Doctor is different. He's meeting a new companion. The TARDIS itself regenerates, and he even gets a new sonic screwdriver. He doesn't even wind up in London, which was featured in so many of the first 4 1/2 series that it became the main setting. This was a new series, and it will take a while to think of it as Doctor Who. No doubt when the 2005 Series One came out, older fans felt the same, but as I said in a previous post, I don't remember it enough to feel that very much.

I can't say a lot about the characters, yet, having spent only an hour with them. The Eleventh Doctor (who I can't yet think of without the number) seems like a big child - he's a new person and doesn't seem quite sure what to do with himself, very clumsy. He seems to be a mild-mannered, understated sort of man with this crazy, adventurous, carefree side just beneath the surface. And he seems very innocent - a pre-time-war version of the Doctor, without all the pain that his previous two incarnations suffered. This makes me wonder if the series is going back into a smaller scale of story. The last series just got bigger and bigger, darker and more dangerous, week by week, and now it seems to have switched back to the olden days, where the Doctor is travelling just for the fun of it. With the Tenth Doctor, though it was for the fun of it, you got the impression he was always running away from something, trying to run away from himself.

Amelia/Amy Pond was an interesting character, though, again, we don't know much about her yet. She met the Doctor when she was seven years old, and he crashed into her back garden. After trying out half of the contents of her kitchen (and spitting them out again, reminding me and mum very much of Tigger) investigating a crack in her bedroom wall, the Doctor nipped back into the Tardis to check it was regenerating properly, promised to see her in five minutes - and vanished. For twelve years.

Amelia seems to be a very lonely, unhappy little girl. She has no parents, no siblings, has moved to England from her beloved Scotland, and it's implied she's at least a bit neglected, as her aunt leaves her alone in the house when she is seven years old, and has no qualms about using the stove. I wrote in my last post that she seemed too young, but although she looks young, even as a small girl she's had to grow up fast. And the Doctor makes such an impression on her at a young age because he actually notices her and shows interest in her. (Or maybe, just maybe, because he crashlands a time machine into her back garden, opens up a crack in her bedroom wall which is also a crack in the universe, exposing a giant eyeball, then runs off again.) The adult Amy, as she now calls herself, is an independent woman, but still seems to be searching for something, possibly unable to believe it when "something" returns.

Wasn't quite sure of the aliens this time around, but certainly there were a few creepy moments: the voices through the crack in the wall, the room hidden in plain view in Amy's house that she never even knew was there, and the alien disguised as a man walking his dog... but that went a bit wrong, giving the man the dog's voice. I even found those - what were they? - little models of "the raggedy doctor" a bit creepy, but I think that was because I felt I was missing something. The TV had cut out for a moment when Amy was explaining what was meant by "the raggedy doctor." Having said that, even that name has the potential to cause nightmares.

When at the end of the episode, the Doctor confronted the aliens, telling them of all the aliens that had attempted to invade the earth before, and of what happened to them (he happened to them) he spoke so matter-of-factly. I don't think I found his way of warning them away frightening like Ecclestone's rage or Tennant's cold, quiet, fury, but there was a moment when there was a montage of all of the previous incarnations of the Doctor, and then he walked out and just said, "Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically... run." They didn't need to be told twice. That was pretty glorious.