Heaven Sent

I think I spent the first 45 minutes of Saturday’s Doctor Who, Heaven Sent, trying to work out exactly what was going on. It looked fantastic, Capaldi was brilliant (even if he seemed to be morphing into Tom Baker at times) and I even liked the score (Murray Gold throwing a snippet of Beethoven’s Seventh at Prokofiev and catching the debris). I had fathomed some things out such as the Doctor somehow managing to leave clues to himself but it wasn’t until the last 10 minutes or so that the whole picture fell into place whilst stirring some sort of deeply buried memory from the back of my mind: "How long is a second in eternity?"

Now, initially, I thought this was some biblical reference. Possibly this was because I first heard the story in a Sunday school class but given that the young priest that ran it was more fond of magic tricks, Germanic folklore and Ray Harryhausen movies than anything as dull as the bible I should have throught better of it but the story of the bird pecking away at a mountain struck a chord with me. I looked it up and it is recorded as the Brothers’ Grim faery tale KHM 152: The Shepherd Boy (Das Hirtenbüblein) in which a king quizzes a shepherd boy, renowned for his wisdom. The passage comes from the king’s third question:

Sprach der König: "Die dritte Frage lautet: wie viel Sekunden hat die Ewigkeit?" Da sagte das Hirtenbüblein: "In Hinterpommern liegt der Demantberg, der hat eine Stunde in die Höhe, eine Stunde in die Breite und eine Stunde in die Tiefe; dahin kommt alle hundert Jahr ein Vöglein und wetzt sein Schnäbelein daran, und wenn der ganze Berg abgewetzt ist, dann ist die erste Sekunde von der Ewigkeit vorbei."

The King spoke: "The third question is: how many seconds are there in eternity?" Then the shepherd boy said: "In Lower Pomerania there is the Diamond Mountain, which is three miles high, three miles wide and three miles deep; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn, then the first second of eternity has passed. "

Actually, in the German it uses eine Stunde meaning an hour’s walk which will take me about three miles if I’m not in a rush. The bird, in the case of Heaven Sent, is the Doctor trying to punch his way through the diamond wall. Personally, I think he would have been better off hitting it with his shovel. Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor might have managed this a bit quicker as he was fairly handy in a fist fight but I suspect he would have just punched the Veil’s lights out and had done with it.

Thanks to the BBC managing to stick great big spoilers in the TV paper the big reveal of the Doctor getting back to Gallifrey wasn’t such a surprise but the Doctor announcing that “The Hybrid is Me” was a bit of a novelty. However, does he mean that he himself is the Hybrid or does he mean Ashildr who refers to herself as “Me”? Thanks to another bit of a spoiler in the Next Time trailer we also know that Maisie Williams is in the series finale.  I thought avoiding spoilers was a case of ignoring the internet, not the bleeding episodes themselves? Oh yes, the Doctor now says “Arse” – I’m sure that would have offended Patrick Troughton’s Giddy Aunt.

Anyway, having enjoyed the series so far I’m split between whether this one  or the Zygon story is my favourite. Heaven Sent is certainly the most original idea and also one that I think will still stand up to repeated viewing. Whether it will go down as well with the casual viewer (or at least those that are not as well versed in Grimm tales) is another matter. However, I’m going to call it as a classic.

Face The Raven

Alas poor Clara… Considering the Doctor Who production team are so secretive and tight lipped over their scripts it seems surprising that Peter Capaldi turned up on The Graham Norton Show on Friday and pretty much gave away the ending of the following day’s episode in one go. The odd thing is that it didn’t actually pan out as I expected it to. Doctor Who assistants don’t usually get killed off (Adric was the notable exception when he was blown up back in 1982) although they do sometimes have a less than rosy ending, for example Amy and Rory being zapped back in time to eventually die of old age or Donna losing her memory.

The episode itself was fantastically written. I checked out Sarah Dollard’s writing history and she started out on Neighbours. She has also done some good stuff too such as Merlin, Being Human and a Welsh language series called Cara Fi (which I haven’t seen since it’s years since I’ve been able to pick up S4C). In some ways this had a Harry Potter feel to it which is very much what Steven Moffat has tried to allude to since Matt Smith’s first episode. This worked well for this story, not least of which it was easy to suspend disbelief and enjoy the human drama that was central to the script.

One thing I wasn’t expecting is just how dark Maisie Williams’ Ashildr character has become. Since the last time we saw her she has become quite tyrannical – not just manipulative but now a megalomaniac control freak, ruling over her band of misfits with threats and malice. This does seem to rule out her becoming the next companion but I can see the character appearing again in the future.

I suppose that leaves Clara’s exit which I had imagined would happen as some sort of timey-wimey, happily-ever-after way but instead we got to see her stoically facing up to her imminent demise. It made for genuinely moving drama – as my wife put it: they now warn against sex, violence and bad language before programmes but they never seem to have a box of hankies warning. The only thing I am wondering is whether this really is the last we will see of Jenna Coleman – I caught a glimpse of the cover of Doctor Who magazine in Asda and… well, spoilers anyway!

This is the first part of a three part finale. The last time they did this was with Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last Of The Timelords which struck me as being one of the best build-ups with a grossly unsatisfying climax. I hope they don’t make the same mistake again but from what I can tell, the three episodes this time will be very different from each other. Next week will see Peter Capaldi’s Doctor on his own. I’m looking forward to it.

Sleep No More

How do you make an original show with an idea that has been done to death. We found out this was with Sleep No More, the latest episode of Doctor Who, that uses as its basis the concept of the “found footage” film – the supposed journals of a lost soul who perished whilst documenting some unknown supernatural peril.

It’s surprising that Doctor Who hasn’t done this before as the big advantage of this style of production is that it costs sod-all to make. At least, traditionally it has done with films like Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project; it has also been used on more recent films such as Cloverfield which had a more substantial budget with fancy CGI effects and no excuse whatsoever for the wobbly camerawork (one of my bugbears in modern film making is the lack of a tripod).

Sleep No More shouldn’t work. One of the main criteria of “found footage” is that the suspension of disbelief should hang on the fact that the film is of real events and I’m pretty sure that footage of a 38th Century space station orbiting Neptune doesn’t fit that narrative. However, this does come from the pen of Mark Gatiss who as well as being one of the most consistent Doctor Who writers (never a bad episode but probably never a classic either) is also so steeped in the horror genre that if anyone could pull it off, he should be able to.

What is a delight here is to see how many references from other films, and other Who episodes, can be packed into a single episode. There is an obvious Alien reference (via Ark in Space) and a big nod to Event Horizon (passing 42 alone the way). The standard found footage claustrophobia and muddled viewpoints are straight from the likes of Cloverfield (it certainly never feels at the budget end of the genre). It is also sneaky that Reece Shearsmith  has starred in the 9th episode of the 9th series of the revived Doctor Who which nods nicely towards his own, excellent, Inside No 9 series – in fact the whole episode could fit more easily in that series than Doctor Who itself. But the clever thing here is that Gatiss has seemingly offered up one thing (a found footage film) and actually produced something that is more in the mould of Japanese horror, notably the original Ring film.

Every so often Doctor Who goes off on a tangent and produces something unconventional. On occasion, these are lauded as masterpieces (such as Blink) or derided as missteps (such as Love and Monsters – although I personally liked that one). I’ve only watched this the once, so far, at broadcast and I have to admit that I was a bit tired at the time I watched it (it is really is on at an arse of a time at the moment). I’m going to re-watch it in the week but I suspect that this is one that will either become revelatory or fall apart on repeated viewing. Sleep No More is certainly unique but at the moment it feels like most of Gatiss’ work: another good, solid episode but probably not a classic.

The Zygon Metaphor

The whole Science Fiction and Fantasy genre works best when, at its core, it is asking fundamentally human questions. On the face of it, it may be about fantastical worlds, bizarre aliens, space-ships and lasers, gods and monsters; but this is a façade for the more intriguing questions of what makes the world tick. The Zygon two-parter (Invasion/Inversion) harks back to the shows 1970s heyday with a strong, allegorical, political message only slightly masked by the fancy effects and monster-of-the-week conventions.

I was a little anxious about this story as it was written by Peter Harness who’s previous episode, Kill The Moon, was the only one from last year’s run that I didn’t particularly like. In fact there was much to like about that story and a great deal has been made of its metaphorical take on the abortion debate but it did niggle with me in a way I could quite articulate. Someone pointed out on a Sci-Fi Forum that they couldn’t quite connect with it as it required such a large suspension of disbelief from a plausible alternative universe that they couldn’t accept it at face value and I think that is how I felt. However, with the Zygons, Harness has created a world that is not only believable but so close to current anxieties about refugees, extremism and fear of “the other” that making his world any closer to reality would have detracted from the themes being examined.

If I had to pick out quite why I found the whole thing so brilliant, it’s that it seems to stand an entire genre on its head. We are used to seeing stories and characters built up over an hour or so only to have the whole thing quickly brushed aside in a blaze of CGI enhanced special effects but here the build-up used all the SFX budget up to give way to the real on-screen fireworks: the Doctor, and essentially a role-defining moment for Peter Capaldi, to deliver a breath-taking 10 minutes of single-scene, dialogue-driven action in which he not only resolves the situation but also dismantles the futility of war, the infantilism of radicalism and the eternal cyclical nature of the struggle between civilisations to boot.

Aside from the finale there was much to like about the rest of the episodes. Jenna Coleman actually had something to do this series and her dual role as both Clara and her evil Zygon clone is probably one of her best performances to date. Ingrid Oliver managed to upgrade her character of Osgood from being merely a fangirl to a fully-fledged character with ideas and motivations of her own and Jemma Redgrave managed channel the late great Nicholas Courtney with his famous “5 rounds rapid fire” line. In fact looking closer at the episode it looks more and more like an early 70s Who adventure but with 21st century budgets: the best of both worlds if there ever was.

So, overall I would put this as close to a 10/10 as could reasonably be expected. The only one criticism I would make would be in regard to the Zygon costumes themselves. They are very Nu-Who, which is to say that the prosthetics and makeup are excellent but this is still, most definitely, a bloke in a costume whereas the original 1975 Zygons really did look truly alien: humanoid, yet obviously not of  this world. It’s a minor point but it does show that the mid-70s series was not just the wobbly sets and bubble wrap that it is often accused of (OK – I’ll not mention the Loch Ness Monster…)

The Road From Hell

Last week I had the utter misfortune to work in Hampshire for the week. I’m sure it is a lovely place really but all I saw of it was the inside of a high tech datacentre, surrounded by razor-wire and with the sort of high tech security gubbins that would give a Bond villain a wet dream. Well, it would have done if any of it actually worked in the appropriate manner but mostly it just served to lock people in or out of wherever they didn’t want to be. At one point I even had to rescue a somewhat pissed-off dwarf that was trapped inside a security cubicle.

Anyway, aside from the horrible working environment I also had a long and mercilessly tedious drive from Scotland to the South of England and back. According to the route planner this should have been straight forward enough and, travelling down, it was. On the way back it should have been a case of sticking on the Rammstein albums, aiming the car Northwards and trundling up the motorway for just over six hours. However, it is never that easy as I discovered when I came across the misery that is the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester. It is a journey that should have taken about an hour. In fact it took over four.

The odd thing is that I had already had to drive through various roadworks which one would have thought would cause some traffic congestion, but on the stretches of road where the traffic kept grinding to a halt there was nothing obvious that had caused it: no road works, no accidents, no breakdowns or other blockages. This is actually a well-known phenomenon: the phantom traffic jam. These are caused when vehicles are travelling too close together and something causes one car to brake (for example, an inconsiderate lane change). This may only be a very slight change of speed but the effect is that the vehicle behind must brake at least as hard and the vehicle behind them at least as hard again. The end result is that the vehicles at the end of the line of too-close vehicles brake to a standstill and the phantom traffic jam snakes its way down the motorway until the number of cars leaving the stoppage exceeds the number of new cars arriving. Last Friday, this was in Birmingham.

There have been various attempts to try to stop these phantoms occurring: variable speed limits, chevrons on the road or traffic lights to restrict the number of vehicles that can join the motorway. Around Birmingham they have even pressed the hard shoulder into use as an extra lane thus downgrading the motorway into a particularly wide dual-carriageway. Presumably, these schemes have had some effect but they don’t appear to be effective enough. This is not surprising as the motorway system around Birmingham was designed for traffic levels in the 1960s and precious little has been done to improve the situation (aside from the comically ill-conceived toll road which sits as a folly to the idea of privately run infrastructure).

What I am wondering is whether the real answer is staring road planners in the face. I had to drive through a few roadworks which had a reduced number of narrowed lanes. In all these places the traffic was dense but free flowing. What appeared to make the difference was that they had 50 mph speed limits enforced by average speed cameras. The traffic, whether restricted HGVs or over-powered executive cars, all travelled at a steady 50 mph. They didn’t (for the most part) change lane and didn’t attempt to exceed the limits for fear of incurring the wrath of the digital average speed cameras. I’m probably like everyone else in that I dislike these things as they follow the counter-intuitive “less haste, more speed” mantra but it could have saved 3 hours off my journey last week. If that is what it takes to make the road system work then it must be worth considering.