...then Davies went and produced two of his finest scripts in a row - 'Midnight' and 'Turn Left.' And, in what seems a little more than a coincidence, they both challenge the 'galactic saviour' thing head-on.
How
to do that? Once you've seen it done, it seems obvious. It's the
result of asking another question, what makes the King the King?
Crowns and robes, they're just accoutrements. What makes
the King is followers, a bunch of blokes treating him like he's the
King. In a similar way, what makes Jesus Jesus is disciples. Okay,
let's divorce the two... Donna from the Doctor... and see how well
they get on without each other.
'Midnight'
Resets the Clocks
We
start with the Doctor alone, or at least taking a shuttle trip with
people he's never met before, in the tellingly titled
'Midnight.' Early on, he short-circuits the
shuttle's cacophonous multi-entertainment system and the passengers
resort to talk. We could easily take that as a signifier for the
changes afoot, not an episode built on flurries of activity and
special effects, but on that old stand-by - dialogue.
The
subsequent reliance on 'tell not show' at times feels quite wilful.
The antagonist is an unseen, largely unexplained force with the power
to possess people. In it's native form it's only glimpsed once,
briefly, by a crew member - and we don't see what he sees. Later,
when it takes over it's first target, we see the victim head in
hands. Slowly she starts to turn, we assume we're in for some shock
prosthetics and we're wrong. Seeing the woman's own face, but with
some malevolently urecognisable expression, is much more effective.
In
short, the shuttered shuttle stuck on the planet Midnight was a
breath of fresh air. It took the New right out of 'New
Who' to take us back to classic drama. In contrast to
Davies' dreaded ticklists, the plot is tightly and quite neatly
packed around that one central concept. You'd never believe it was by
the same writer!
All
of which led some to speculate that this wasn't really
a 'Who' episode at all. No Donna, no Tardis? Plus,
in violation of everything said over 'Last of the Time
Lords', this time the antagonist pretty much is
pure evil. It's the malevolent outside force, trying to worm it's
way in – no further information considered necessary. (Which is of
course why it's such a smart move to leave it so mysterious and
ill-defined. Not only is the unknown spookier, but any attempt to
rationalise or analyse evil diminishes it, leaves it looking banal.)
True, some found comparisons with the early story 'Edge of
Destruction', but as that was another exception to the rule
of the 'Who' canon that didn't change things much.
And
in one sense, it wasn't like 'Doctor
Who'. We've got used to the Doctor winning friends and
influencing enemies by oratory and reputation alone. He carries with
him a sonic screwdriver and all but his real power is, as Martha
calls it in 'Last of the Time Lords', “just
words.” Yet now he's lost his companion, and with her his
connection with the human world. And the family group in particular
seem oddly normal and everyday, not 'Who' extras
so much as just plain extras, like they wanted a fortnight in
Marbella but ended up on another planet by misbooking. They don't
seem to cotton on that he's star of the show, but treat him like they
would any stranger – with mistrust. Before, the Master didn't know
what kind of show he was in. Now it's the Doctor's turn. The cosmic
saviour gets reacquainted with his fallibility.
…
all of which is what makes it
effective as 'Doctor Who'. We call them “just
words”, but of course those connected syllables are strong stuff.
They're not just the building blocks of drama, but also pretty
effective in our wider lives. As a small child it often seemed to me
that much of my parents' power over me lay in their power over words.
Not necessarily that they had a bigger vocabulary at their command,
but that they somehow always seemed to know what to say.
I can quite vividly remember wanting to marshall that sort of power.
But
actually that's not quite it. His power of speech isn't absent, it's
been quite literally stolen from him and used against him. And, in
possibly the episode's most audacious move, it's not the powerless
Doctor but the Hostess who spots this and has to save the day. Which
she does by dragging the possessed woman out of the airlock - the
very thing the Doctor had been so insistent could not be allowed to
happen. The ending is downbeat, even morose. The other passengers
have to face they nearly killed the wrong man, the Doctor that
nothing he wanted came to pass.
Of
course it's a
bottle episode, scrimping on sets and effects to ease
budgets. We later learnt Davies had rush-written it in a matter of
days. (Much as 'Edge of Destruction had been.)
But, as I'm always saying, in art restrictions often enable, and
bottle episodes often utilise the dramatic unities to become firm
favourites. This
was no exception, even those claiming it wasn't a true
'Who' episode normally conceding they liked
whatever it was. For me it wasn't just a surprise spike in quality,
or even the antithesis of much that went before - it was pretty much
the antidote. Just what the Doctor didn't want had become just what
the rest of us did.
 |
No
Right Turn
...and
then, if you'll forgive the term, Donna's back.
'Midnight'
and 'Turn Left' make for an intriguing comparison.
One that was never meant to be. Davies seems to have decided early on
to have a 'Doctor-lite' then a 'companion-lite' episode, but mostly
for production-oriented reasons. (Much as 'Blink'
was built to be 'both-lite'.) But the two got shunted together in
broadcast order relatively late in the day.
And
if 'Midnight' was a last-minute replacement for a
dropped script, 'Turn Left' was being seeded from
the second episode. (Where a soothsayer describes Donna as having
“something on your back.”) While one is a micro-episode, breaking
into the schedule and taking place almost in real time, the other
follows the length of the series right from 'Runaway
Bride'. In complete contrast, this
took Davies much longer than normal to write. And yet both
were designed as budget episodes. (Part of the rationale of 'Turn
Left' was it's ability to reuse existing special effects
footage rather than require new stuff.) And both replace a travelling
companion with an unseen, manipulating force, to end up exploring
humanity at both its best and worst.
The
conceit is that this alien entity has affixed itself to Donna's back,
and trapped her in a parallel universe where she never became the
Doctor's companion. Without her to save him, he dies during the
events of 'Runaway Bride' and the Earth is beset
by all the disasters he would have prevented. These are episodes
which successively came and went, and for each of them we naturally
assumed the Doctor would save the day. Piling them up on us like this
effectively pulls the rug from under genre conventions, and is almost
unsettling to watch.
Worse,
we in the human race do not react well to any of this, and Marshall
law falls over England. We don't just take the
worst, we become the worst. The scenes set in a
Leeds street may be designed to echo the Master's rule in 'Last
of the Time Lords'. But it's at it's most explicit as
immigrants are removed to labour camps, as Donna's grandfather
comments “that's what they called them last time.” All the
invocations of “wartime spirit” have come true, it's just that
we've fallen on the other side of the fence.
The
change is pivoted on a trivial-seeming moment, when Donna turns right
instead of left, taking up one office job instead of another. At
first she's the Donna of 'Runaway Bride', gobby
and smallminded, oblivious to events outside her tiny world. She
turns right at her Mother's instigation. But she receives another
voice over another shoulder, in visitations from Rose. Rose is not
the good fairy or the conscience voice. She explicitly tells her “I
used to be you,” and just as she 'died' through being trapped on a
parallel world, so must Donna suffer her own consequences.
“You
could still turn right” she's told at the beginning. And we follow
the results of that turn almost the whole way through, yet
significantly the episode's called 'Turn Left'.
Because ultimately what appears a coin-toss isn't at all. Donna
can't turn right. It's just not who she is. The
Doctor's episode explores his failings, while Donna's is about
finding things within her she had no idea were there.
In
'Who' the role of the companion is of course to
signify me or you. The Doctor does something brave or smart? Well
that's what he's for. Extraordinary people doing
extraordinary things, that's like being told ladders can be tall.
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that's
a story. Donna first fails to notice the world around her, then when
she does she decides to change it for another one. Through all the
bleak events, it's uplifting and empowering.
But
then again...
'Midnight'
was so neatly packed you're pretty much bound to accept or reject it
wholesale. 'Turn Left' has a wider lens, which
allows for problems to enter the frame. Notably, the focus on Donna
doesn't quite mean the Jesus fixation is through.
The series has never quite mastered the companion role, always making
fresh resolutions it has trouble keeping to, and perhaps this is no
exception. The focus is on Donna's bravery, but it
can only be done by bringing the Doctor back to
life. In a story whose central event is a woman sacrificing herself
for a man, it's notable how all the main characters in this fallen
world are women. It's even true of many of the minor ones, the UNIT
chief, the stroppy official who assigns them to Leeds. (The only real
exception being her Grandfather.)
There's
also an undertaste, a suggestion that Donna was never really
ordinary, never actually like you or me, but always somehow
'special'. What does this do to the the central message, that through
our actions we make the world? The problem with a 'special' Donna
isn't that her story no longer has a resonance for the rest of us.
The problem is that it redefines that 'us' in a narrow and regressive
way.
If
she's simply ordinary, that suggests that all us ordinary folks have
that capacity within us. But if she's 'special', if she's unlike the
herd, then doesn't that 'us' shrink to become the viewers of this
show? If she's special, we're special! After all, we're the smart
ones who get all that stuff about alternate realities and parallel
universes. Oh, we may work in the same offices as the norms who watch
'X Factor' and 'East Enders',
but we know inside we're really different from them. Donna's the new
temp who first looked like one of them, but turned out to be special
like us. (Those who continued following the show after Davies may
have noticed that the 'specialness' of the companion continued to be
a thorn.) It also sets things up for the successor storyline. The one
where Davies gave us his variant on the cosmic messiah schtick - the
companion as God. Again.
Still,
a parallel universe where everything went wrong... what better
metaphor for a parallel pair of episodes where everything went
right? The series didn't turn. These are just what might have
been. A dream, a hoax, an imaginary story. Some of us tend to think
the show was always an oddity, never quite fitting in either with the
rules of science fiction or the patterns of TV programming. And it
worked best when it played up to that oddity, taking its own
eccentric path. Davies was always at his worst with his specials and
big season finales. It may be he was at his best right here...
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