Bigger on the Inside
Just finished watching the Doctor Who episode "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS".
This isn't really a review. It's just some thoughts, about environment and imagination. But be warned:
SPOILERS FOLLOW
This really isn't a review. But before we get started, can I just say that there have been some great ideas in this season of Doctor Who, but some of the scripts feel like they need one more pass.
Like this one. Gregor deceived his injured brother Tricky into thinking he was a robot? For fun? That's either absurd or it's psychotic. And it's a wasted opportunity to give the salvagers some motivation beyond making money. What if they were stripping ships to raise funds to pay for an operation to replace Tricky's cheap cybernetics with organic parts? That would at least create a dilemma.
That's an aside. On to my main argument.
One of the things I love about Doctor Who is it's ability to sit in a broom closet, but conjure whole universes with throwaway lines. Russell T. Davies was great at this. He'd toss in a casual aside about the Time War or the Shadow Proclamation or the Face of Bo, and your imagination would run riot. These tiny, casual hints made the show's universe feel vast.
Sadly, towards the end of his run, Davies felt the need to explain more and more, and the Doctor Who universe felt diminished because of it. (The Shadow Proclamation are just some Judoon? The Face of Bo is Jack Harkness?)
The TARDIS is like that too.
We've rarely seen beyond the console room. But it's size has been hinted at. If there's a library, and a swimming pool, and bunk beds, what else is in there, down the ends of those corridors leading away from the console room?
Some bits have been shown: the Zero Room, the wardrobe room. I remember seeing Leila swimming in the pool. Fragments, again. Teases. Morsels to whet our appetites and fire our imaginations.
"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" was not a tease. It was designed to finally give us a good, proper look around the rest of the TARDIS.
I was both excited and concerned.
The TARDIS has been part of my mental landscape since I was 5 years old. Ever since then, a tiny portion of my brain has been dedicated to wondering what's in there. And now, as an adult, and as someone making a serious attempt to establish myself as a writer, I think a lot about how that tiny portion of my brain relates has shaped the rest of my life. The book I'm writing now, about a teenager who finds a wizard's tower in the back streets of Box Hill, is transparently an attempt to examine and express this.
I have skin in this game, is what I'm saying.
And so... the episode.
Things I loved: the store room with Amy Pond's toys. The liquid encyclopedias in the library. The suitably weird and tree-like architectural reconfiguration system.
Things I liked less: The Doctor saying the TARDIS was infinite inside, and that the architectural reconfiguration system could produce anything. Somehow that made things less interesting. Part of the fun of the TARDIS is trying to map the borders of it in your mind. Saying it doesn't have any rather ruins that game. (It also raises plot issues: why doesn't the Doctor pull the solution to this week's problems out of his ARS?)
(Sorry. Terrible pun. Couldn't resist.)
And what we did see of the interior felt... lacking.
Writer Stephen Thompson was trying for the sort of timey-wimey paradox games that Moffat does so effortlessly, but Thompson's attempts lacked Moffat's snappiness. This was no Blink. It wasn't even Space and Time. And consequently, the TARDIS felt less like the alien lovechild of M. C Escher's House of Stairs and Jorge Louis Borges's Library of Babel, and more like, well, a series of rooms.
Missing too were those hints of something bigger and stranger beyond what we were shown. I've linked to it before, but I really do love A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change). Not because I think that's what the TARDIS should actually be like, but because it evokes that desire to dream.
That's what I'm hoping to achieve, with my suburban wizard's tower. Maybe I'll succeed. Maybe I won't. The lessons I'm taking from "Journey.." are:
I'll rewatch this episode tomorrow, and see if I'm being too harsh.
Crossposted from sharplittleteeth.dreamwidth.org
You can comment here, or over there using OpenID.
comments there.
This isn't really a review. It's just some thoughts, about environment and imagination. But be warned:
SPOILERS FOLLOW
This really isn't a review. But before we get started, can I just say that there have been some great ideas in this season of Doctor Who, but some of the scripts feel like they need one more pass.
Like this one. Gregor deceived his injured brother Tricky into thinking he was a robot? For fun? That's either absurd or it's psychotic. And it's a wasted opportunity to give the salvagers some motivation beyond making money. What if they were stripping ships to raise funds to pay for an operation to replace Tricky's cheap cybernetics with organic parts? That would at least create a dilemma.
That's an aside. On to my main argument.
One of the things I love about Doctor Who is it's ability to sit in a broom closet, but conjure whole universes with throwaway lines. Russell T. Davies was great at this. He'd toss in a casual aside about the Time War or the Shadow Proclamation or the Face of Bo, and your imagination would run riot. These tiny, casual hints made the show's universe feel vast.
Sadly, towards the end of his run, Davies felt the need to explain more and more, and the Doctor Who universe felt diminished because of it. (The Shadow Proclamation are just some Judoon? The Face of Bo is Jack Harkness?)
The TARDIS is like that too.
We've rarely seen beyond the console room. But it's size has been hinted at. If there's a library, and a swimming pool, and bunk beds, what else is in there, down the ends of those corridors leading away from the console room?
Some bits have been shown: the Zero Room, the wardrobe room. I remember seeing Leila swimming in the pool. Fragments, again. Teases. Morsels to whet our appetites and fire our imaginations.
"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" was not a tease. It was designed to finally give us a good, proper look around the rest of the TARDIS.
I was both excited and concerned.
The TARDIS has been part of my mental landscape since I was 5 years old. Ever since then, a tiny portion of my brain has been dedicated to wondering what's in there. And now, as an adult, and as someone making a serious attempt to establish myself as a writer, I think a lot about how that tiny portion of my brain relates has shaped the rest of my life. The book I'm writing now, about a teenager who finds a wizard's tower in the back streets of Box Hill, is transparently an attempt to examine and express this.
I have skin in this game, is what I'm saying.
And so... the episode.
Things I loved: the store room with Amy Pond's toys. The liquid encyclopedias in the library. The suitably weird and tree-like architectural reconfiguration system.
Things I liked less: The Doctor saying the TARDIS was infinite inside, and that the architectural reconfiguration system could produce anything. Somehow that made things less interesting. Part of the fun of the TARDIS is trying to map the borders of it in your mind. Saying it doesn't have any rather ruins that game. (It also raises plot issues: why doesn't the Doctor pull the solution to this week's problems out of his ARS?)
(Sorry. Terrible pun. Couldn't resist.)
And what we did see of the interior felt... lacking.
Writer Stephen Thompson was trying for the sort of timey-wimey paradox games that Moffat does so effortlessly, but Thompson's attempts lacked Moffat's snappiness. This was no Blink. It wasn't even Space and Time. And consequently, the TARDIS felt less like the alien lovechild of M. C Escher's House of Stairs and Jorge Louis Borges's Library of Babel, and more like, well, a series of rooms.
Missing too were those hints of something bigger and stranger beyond what we were shown. I've linked to it before, but I really do love A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change). Not because I think that's what the TARDIS should actually be like, but because it evokes that desire to dream.
That's what I'm hoping to achieve, with my suburban wizard's tower. Maybe I'll succeed. Maybe I won't. The lessons I'm taking from "Journey.." are:
- Your bad guys should have motivations that are sympathetic, or create a moral dilemma, or at least make sense.
- If you want something to feel vast and magical, hinting is more evocative than showing.
I'll rewatch this episode tomorrow, and see if I'm being too harsh.
Crossposted from sharplittleteeth.dreamwidth.org
You can comment here, or over there using OpenID.
comments there.